July 1, 2022
I was inspired to write this newsletter by Paul McCartney’s 80th birthday. It is not actually about him, much as I admire the way he continues to create, to grow, to perform long past the period of his initial fame. That is in fact the topic of the newsletter: fame. John Lennon caused a ruckus by saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. I suppose Jesus might reply, “I’m still famous after 2000 years. We’ll see if you’re still around after that long.” Actually, I can’t imagine the Beatles ever being forgotten, but my real interest is in the problematics of fame.
We are remarkably conflicted about fame, and in this case “we” includes me. Our mass media culture has turned fame into something remarkably toxic. Donald Trump was a crooked businessman who made himself a reality TV star, and used that fame to gain the presidency and come close to destroying the country. I am glad to see the news outlets withholding the names of school shooters, since mass murder is clearly a way for some unknown losers to turn themselves into stars. There are people who are famous for being famous, and people follow them by the millions. That is the point: to be followed, on Facebook and otherwise. There are the media stars, and there are their followers, who worship them in a very real way. Which sometimes includes martyring them—not because the deity has somehow disappointed, but because the quickest way to become a star, a media event, is to murder another star. As John Lennon tragically found out, martyred at close to the age of Jesus.
The mass media have democratized the machinery of stardom, which used to be an elite thing, confined to television and movie stars on the one hand, business and political leaders on the other. In both contexts, celebrity was reserved for those with connections, and breaking in to become one of the in-crowd was, and still is, difficult, with a great deal of dues-paying. Nowadays, you can become a center of attention by trying to explode your underwear on a plane (remember that guy?). And if there’s a video to go viral, your success is almost guaranteed. Stars have always depended on ritual events to dramatize their fame. The public attention span is small, and you have to have ways to keep yourself in the public eye, or the public will be distracted by the next new thing. Hence the Academy Awards ceremony, which is nevertheless becoming increasingly obsolescent in the face of TikTok and other methods of keeping up an image.
There has always been a synergetic relationship between the two contexts of stardom, the entertainment world and the political world. In Shakespeare’s day the monarchy and aristocracy dramatized themselves by traveling pageants that went from town to town, and in the court by the lavish spectacles called masques, whose plots always ended with a celebration of the monarch as God’s stand-in on the Chain of Being. Shakespeare is fascinated by rulers with a gift for the self-dramatization of “political theatre,” like Prince Hal, later Henry V, and those whose careers suffered because they were incapable of it, like Hal’s father, Henry IV. Shakespeare was himself part of the two-way osmosis between the entertainment and the political worlds. His theatre company eventually became the King’s Men, playing on opening night in front of the court itself and depending on its patronage. Nowadays we have actors who use their stardom as a vehicle to launch themselves in politics. And the audience loves the rituals, the pomp and circumstance. We now have, increasingly, businessmen who have learned the advantages of turning themselves into reality-TV stars without the TV, like Elon Musk.
Another type of celebrity is that of the ultra-rich, the Great Gatsby crowd, whose soap operas the population follows addictively. Lady Gaga seems to be conducting a study of the ways in which people with names like Stefani Germanotta can climb the ladder of fame, from wearing a meat dress to acting in House of Gucci. It was inevitable that she should act in the remake of A Star Is Born, whose theme is what you have to leave behind in order to make it. Anyone can play: some intellectuals will do their best to become hangers-on, to get invited to the best parties and advance their careers, as they did by hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein. Intellectuals with sufficient theatrical talent sometimes manage to become celebrities in their own right, as Camille Paglia did in the 90’s and Jordan Peterson is doing right now. Joseph Campbell too, but Campbell stopped at being interviewed on PBS by the eminent journalist Bill Moyers. He did not deliberately pick fights on talk shows like Paglia, or, like Peterson, call women ugly to delight the trolls.
This has been an epic catalogue of fame at its most repellent. Surely a desire for fame should be like a desire to contract Covid. It is indeed a plague for those who did not seek it but acquired it anyway. I learned that at first hand by being Northrop Frye’s research assistant for a decade. Frye did not need the usual type of research assistant. What I did for a decade was to be part of the screening system helping to protect him from the endless demands on his time and energy, not from friends and former students, who were not the problem, but from a wider general public that sent him their essays, novels, poems, nonfiction treatises, and occasionally stranger products. A few were genuinely interesting; a few were outright crazy. An older man sent Frye a packet of veiled would-be seductive letters he had written to teenage boys and wanted an opinion about whether they were literature. We did not venture an opinion. Frye was not quite famous enough to fear direct invasion of privacy, although once an ex-mental patient did come to his office to inform him that he had cracked the great code—Frye had written a book on the Bible and literature called The Great Code, after Blake’s saying that the Bible was the great code of art. Unfortunately, it was not the code that was cracked. Frye was a magnet for needy people. He was a generous man, but if he had tried to respond to all the demands for his attention he would have gotten nothing else done. My job was to evaluate the material and give my opinion, upon which Frye could choose to reply or not. I made it a point never to ask. It was an interesting job.
And yet, in olden times fame was not only an ideal worth striving for, but, in the case of heroic warrior cultures like those of the Iliad and Beowulf, the highest ideal of all, superseding the ideal of protecting one’s family and community. Achilles and Hector abide by the “heroic code,” as scholars call it, of “honor” or “glory,” though those words are misleading modern translations of kleos, which actually means “reputation” or “status.” Kleos conferred two things: one’s status in the peer group of aristocratic warriors and one’s real immortality after death—being a zombie-like shade in the underworld didn’t count. The old warrior code survived a long time. In Othello, Michael Cassio becomes a broken man after ruining his reputation by misbehaving while on duty because he was drunk. And the utmost depth of grief lies in Othello’s cry, “Othello’s reputation’s gone!”, gone in his own view because he believed a lie about the reputation of his wife. In what scholars call “shame cultures,” one’s identity is identical to one’s image in the peer group. If you are dishonored, you suffer the negative fame called “shame,” aidos.
Shame cultures are contrasted with the “guilt culture” that came in with Christianity, in which moral judgments are dictated not by an external peer group but by an internal conscience, which in turn is responsible to God. Theoretically, this rejects fame as a value: “I didn’t do it for praise or approval; I did it because it was right. And how do I know what’s right? The still, small voice within me.” Shame cultures are collective and conformist, and have no use for individualism and democracy, which is based on the choice of the free individual. We see this presently in the Republican party: what is right is what the group convinces itself is right, which is always whatever benefits those who belong, at the expense of those who are outsiders. In short, a shame culture readily devolves into a mob. Anyone who stands against it is a traitor, not because their beliefs are wrong but because the dissenter is disloyal to the group. Guilt cultures foster an individualism that may stand out against a whole society, but the connection with Christianity is almost broken, so many of the conservative Churches having gone over to the mob.
However, the best Christians have always struggled with fame as a value. On the surface, Milton’s Lycidas is an elegy for a drowned schoolmate of Milton’s named Edward King. But its deeper preoccupation is with the value of fame. Milton identifies with King as a gifted, aspiring poet cut off before he could realize his potential. In an extended passage of clearly autobiographical anguish, Milton asks whether all the discipline and renunciation of the poetic vocation are worth it if you can be wiped out by a senseless accident at any moment:
Alas! What boots it with uncessant care To tend the homely slighted Shepherd’s trade, And strictly meditate the thankless Muse? Were it not better done as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Naera’s hair? Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious days; But the fair Guerdon when we hope to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears, And slits the thin-spun life.
The sound effects of that tremendous last line drive home a bitter lesson. In a prose work called The Reason of Church Government, Milton openly admits that from a young age he dreamed that “I might,” as he says, “perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die” (668).
But Milton answers his own question, both in Lycidas and later in Paradise Regained, in which fame becomes one of the temptations of Jesus by Satan in the desert. Jesus’ answer is decisive:
For what is glory but the blaze of fame, The people’s praise, if always praise unmixt? And what the people but a herd confus’d, A miscellaneous rabble, who extol Things vulgar, and well weigh’d, scare worth the praise? They praise and they admire they know not what; And know not whom, but as one leads the other… Of whom to be disprais’d were no small praise? His lot who dares be singularly good. (3.47-53, 56-57)
Jesus goes on to mention Socrates as an example of the latter. In both poems, Milton is clear that the only kind of fame that means anything is approval in the eyes of God and heaven. But such fame is otherworldly, and depends on faith that there is an other world in which the good deeds of this life are remembered, and the good people celebrated although they might have been unknown while they were alive.
In any case, to ask the next deeper question, why do we care about fame anyhow? False fame is obviously worthless, but why should we care even about genuine fame, that which is based on real achievement? Why the impulse to make known the good deeds and the good people who performed them? Isn’t it enough that they existed? If you are a good person and do good deeds, why isn’t that enough in itself? Isn’t the desire to be recognized a kind of egotism? In fact, what about modesty? Norman Mailer published a book called Advertisements for Myself. Well, Norman Mailer was an obnoxious buffoon. The problem is that the business world now requires advertisements for oneself: if you are not self-promoting you are not competitive, and that ethos has spread to other areas of society, including academia, where one is advised that in job applications you should come off as confident and sure of your superior qualifications. If you are naturally self-deprecating, you are told you must change your habits. You must collect as many status markers as possible on your CV: articles published in the more high-reputation journals, committees served upon, conferences attended, and so on. These are your equivalent of Achilles’ “war prizes”: they signify that you are an alpha dog. It turns out that our culture pays lip service to guilt-culture values while often behaving otherwise. Whatever this implies about the Christian virtue of humility, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics makes clear that it is not only mistaken but ineffective. Aristotle defines two character types: the eiron or self-deprecator and the alazon or boaster. In comedy, he says, the eiron eventually wins against the alazon—in Biblical terms, David against Goliath.
I am a kind of extreme eiron, no doubt overly extreme. I am usually uncomfortable being praised, and I mention it because I know that I am not the only one who feels this way. The one good thing I will say about the pandemic is that it saved me from suffering through the ordeal of a retirement reception—or from refusing to attend, which would have hurt good people’s feelings. But we are not speaking of rationality here, because I feel in full force the moral imperative that other people should be recognized, that they should not be forgotten, that their achievements should be celebrated. Yet why? A funeral service has a religious rationale, but what of a memorial service? We had one for my mom when she died at the age of 91 a few years ago. She was an eiron if there ever was one, never one to call attention to herself. But for that reason, the memorial service was a recognition scene like that at the end of a comedy when all comes to light, as I learned how valued my mother was by so many people, and how many good things she had done that I never knew about. My dad, an alazon if there ever was one, designed his own funeral down to the last detail, including which hymns should be sung, and did it at least a decade before he actually died. Not only that, but he kept tinkering with it over those years: I would get the latest revision, a large packet, in the mail every year. I am not complaining or criticizing, not least because he spared me and my brother so much trouble, including addresses and phone numbers for people to be notified, and so on. I was glad that we were able to realize his plans more or less completely, for he too had done good things in life that deserved to be celebrated. It’s just that he was mindful of his own fame: no Egyptian Pharaoh paid more attention to the details of his going out.
The 18th century philosopher Berkeley is associated with the saying, “To be is to be perceived.” So his answer to the question of whether a tree falls in the forest if there is no one to perceive it is “no.” This goes against common sense: about four days ago there actually was a dead tree trunk that fell overnight partly across the drive, although I did not witness it or in fact even see the trunk until the next afternoon. But there it was when I went to drive out. It seemed to exist quite stubbornly. Nevertheless, on an emotional level, the aphorism means something different. It is emotionally true that when people are not remembered or their achievements recognized, they cease to exist. That includes ourselves: we make scrapbooks and Facebook pages, keep diaries, in order to keep ourselves in existence. We say nothing is written in stone, but we press children’s handprints into the wet cement of the sidewalk. Keats had inscribed on his gravestone, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” but two centuries later the average educated person knows that name.
I subscribe to Living Blues magazine, in which I read reviews, every single month, of projects that preserve, for example, the perhaps 20 or so songs recorded in 1927 by some bluesman whose name is totally unfamiliar to me and in fact to everyone. It is the same process that has been turning a living tradition into a permanent record since Alan Lomax drove around the country with primitive recording equipment in the early 20th century, capturing the people who are now regarded as blues legends. If not for a couple of lucky studio sessions, Robert Johnson would not be, because he would not be perceived. But actually, reading of the preservation of the minor figures, by such institutions as Smithsonian Folkways, gives me as much pleasure as the preservation of the greats. The same is true when I read interviews with musicians who have been playing in small venues for decades and who are finally being given respectful attention. Out of sight is out of mind: museums exist in order to keep the past in existence through having people continue to perceive it. Literature classrooms exist so that all the authors are still alive. It is understandable that people get upset when certain groups are excluded from the literary canon. When that happens, they cease to exist: they have been disappeared, as by the Mafia. To say they have been “marginalized” is a kind of hopeful rebelliousness, because it implies that the effort to achieve their non-existence has not completely succeeded. They still exist, though around the edges. My friend and former editor Mark Abley feels about nearly-extinct languages the way I do about minor blues figures. In Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages (2003) he recounts the efforts to save languages sometimes spoken by only a few people. Why the quixotic effort? Because it is a matter of life and death.
That is what it comes down to, a battle against death. Mark is also a gifted poet, and most of his poetry can be described as elegiac. Do our attempts at preservation do any more than slow the rate of entropy, the sliding of organized systems inexorably towards chaos? The ego is deeply, though not perhaps totally, conditioned by, indeed constructed by, the categories of time and space. Inside the ego’s subject-object perspective, stoic resignation to the inevitable seems the only recourse. But some people’s psyches seem to lie open to kinds of experience beyond the ego’s prison, and some people break through a barrier at moments of extremity. The ego dies, but another kind of self, inherent in every moment the ego has experienced, rises like a phoenix to some other mode of experience, traditionally called “eternity.” One of the natural visionaries was William Blake, who said that “The ruins of time build mansions in eternity.” You can live with certain expressions for a lifetime but then finally decide you need to figure out what they actually mean—so, I finally ask myself, what of these mansions in eternity? “Eternity” sounds so phony—a buzz word, a comfort word. But Blake had one of the most powerful intellects in the history of English literature, and he was not, to put it mildly, a fuzzy-headed, feel-good kind of guy.
In his last work, The Double Vision, written within months of his own death, in a chapter called “The Double Vision of Time,” Northrop Frye attempted to characterize an experience that is not endless time but beyond time:
But at a certain point the future is already here….One has glimpses of the immense foreshortening of time that can take place in the world of the spirit; we may speak of “inspiration,” a word that can hardly mean anything except the coming or the breaking through of the spirit from a world beyond time. One may, as I have done myself, spend the better part of seventy-eight years writing out the implications of insights that have taken up considerably less than an hour of all those years. (210)
In Fearful Symmetry, his book on Blake, Frye explains that the quest of life is to build an eternal identity out of the ruins of time. The quest is simultaneously individual and social: “Thus the imagination exists immortally not only as a
person but as part of a growing and consolidating city,” which Blake gave one of his typically loopy names, Golgonooza. It comprises, and Frye quotes from Blake’s poem Jerusalem (plates 13-14):
…All that has existed in the space of six thousand years, Permanent & not lost, not lost nor vanish’d, & every little act, Word, work & wish that has existed, all remaining still…. Shadowy to those who dwell not in them, meer possibilities, But to those who enter into them they seem the only substances; For every thing exists & not one sigh nor smile nor tear, One hair nor particle of dust, not one can pass away. (247)
Frye was not a natural visionary like Blake, and had, by his own description, only what most of us have of eternity, what T.S. Eliot called “hints and guesses, hints followed by guesses.” He speaks openly of the hard times when the prison of time and space verges upon solitary confinement:
In moments of despair or bereavement or horror, we find ourselves staring blankly into an unresponding emptiness, utterly frustrated by its indifference. We come from the unknown at birth, and we rejoin it at death with all our questions about it unanswered. Sometimes we wonder whether humanity is capable of living in any world at all where consciousness is really a function of life. (364)
The was written in 1986, when, although he does not say so, Frye had just lost his wife of over 50 years, Helen Kemp Frye, to Alzheimer’s. People with Alzheimer’s or dementia seem to have fallen away into the entropic abyss inside themselves, like a pebble into a dark well, leaving only an outer shell. And yet that is clearly not the whole truth, for certain capacities may remain, sometimes the ability to make music or dance, and sometimes the whole person suddenly comes back at least temporarily. What this says to me is that we really have no understanding of the nature of the human psyche, especially at its frontier where it interfaces with a mystery beyond itself. The attempts to explain it in mechanical terms as a computer program seem to me laughably crude and naïve. For years I held perfectly good conversations with my mother despite her dementia, which included some good laughs, for she never lost her characteristic sense of humor. My dad was shorter term, a few months, and stranger. He seemed lost in a kind of labyrinth that kept reminding me of the Bardo realm of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, although maybe that was just my association, since my dad was a tormented man. His dementia began explosively one night when he threw a chair through the front picture window, thinking people were trying to break in. Musing over these phenomena is a strange way to contemplate eternity, but my point is that we touch upon strangeness. We simply do not know what is outside the city limits.
Frye ventures again upon the question of what lies beyond the categories of time and space in the final paragraph of The Double Vision, his final book. I have quoted it in part before, but it is pertinent here:
But we are not continuous identities; we have had many identities, as babies, as boys and girls, and so on through life, and when we pass through or “outgrow” these identities they return to their source….There is nothing so unique about death as such, where we may be too distracted by illness or sunk in senility to have much identity at all. In the double vision of a spiritual and a physical world simultaneously present, every moment we have lived through we have also died out of into another order. (235)
What I like about this manner of conceiving eternity, in both Blake and Frye, is that it is not just some existence after: it includes all that we lived before, which is to say that it is immanent in life right now, Blake’s “world in a grain of sand” and “eternity in an hour.” That means it is particular, concrete. Ideas about surviving as part of some universal One or in a world of Platonic Forms are not appealing to me, as much of abstract art is not appealing to me. I recognize and respect the attempt to reach some kind of ultimate ground, but my honest reaction in viewing most abstract paintings is, “Where has the world gone?” The function of eternity would be to rescue the world and the people we love right now in all their varied, vivid particularity, although refined, by some decreative process, of all the suffering and the horrors, which will fade and be forgotten, no longer perceived. In eternity, we are all famous. We are known and remembered; therefore we are.
These are my own idiosyncratic musings, which I offer for what they are worth. They are not intended to be exhaustive or definitive. After all, if I could capture the relationship of eternity to time in a newsletter, I would surely be famous.
CORRECTION
Somehow I managed to get the name of medieval historian Caroline Walker Bynum wrong in the last newsletter—not once but twice. Her correct name is Caroline—not Christine, not Dorothy. My apologies to her and to my readers. Talk about metamorphosis!
References
Abley, Mark. Spoken Here: Travels among Threatened Languages. Harper Reprint, 2005. Originally published 2003.
Frye, Northrop. The Double Vision. In Northrop Frye on Religion, edited by Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady, 2000. Volume 4 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, University of Toronto Press.
Frye, Northrop, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, edited by Nicholas Halmi, 2004. Volume 14 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye.
Frye, Northrop. “To Come to Light.” In Northrop Frye on Religion, 360-66.
Milton, John. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. Odyssey Press, 1957.