July 21, 2023
At a certain age, there are more and more obituaries of those you have known. A life is summed up in a few paragraphs, and we ask, is that all there was? The unfortunate effect of obituaries, at least to me, is to make each individual life seem transient and inconsequential, like snow that covers the lawn one day and disappears two days later. The gravestone of Keats bears the epitaph, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” ostensibly at his own request, although we only have a friend’s word for this. The famous speech of Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest says that “the great globe itself” shall dissolve and “leave not a wrack behind.” The speech is often taken to be Shakespeare, in his last play, contemplating both his own mortality and the transience of all things in time: critics point out that “tempest” is etymologically related to the Latin for time, tempus. But if we are as transient as autumn leaves, can we nevertheless continue to survive in another form, or at least leave some aspect of our identities behind? In other words, is there such a thing as a legacy, that which is handed down? Asking such a question leads at some point to asking the prior questions, “What is a human identity?” and “What is a life?”
There are two kinds of legacy, one that is self-perpetuating and one that is self-sacrificing. They are not mutually exclusive but form a sliding scale: many if not most legacies contain something of both. Self-perpetuating legacies are what Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death (1975) calls “immortality projects.” The simplest and most obvious way of achieving immortality is to turn yourself into a piece of monumental architecture, at least since the so-called higher civilizations invented monumental architecture. The pyramids of Egypt are perhaps the most famous example. They are monuments to the Pharaoh, containing the smaller immortality project of the Pharaoh’s mummy inside them. Shelley’s famous sonnet “Ozymandias” mocks this form of immortality as a kind of deluded megalomania: all that is left of Ozymandias is a sculpted head with the ironic inscription, “I am Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.” In fairness, we have to add that such monuments sometimes survive: the Pyramids are still very much with us. The real irony is that what awes and impresses people is the monument itself, not the name and fame of the Pharaoh, who is almost invariably forgotten. The fascination with “the ruins of time,” in Blake’s phrase, the subject of a previous newsletter, is really a fascination with the way that stone resists, or at least slows, the destructive power of time. The Pharaoh’s ego was merely a pretext, and is expendable.
But monumental immortality is by no means an outmoded superstition. The rich and famous give millions of dollars in order to have their names on public buildings of all sorts, from theaters to stadiums, the best immortality that money can buy. Almost every building of my university’s campus is named after some bygone official or some wealthy donor. No one has the slightest idea who any of these people are, but there are their names on the plaques. Names are affixed to institutions and foundations as well as to buildings: the Ford Foundation, Lincoln Center. Not to be cynical: those being honored are sometimes worthy of the honor, usually because they contributed something that is their real legacy, which the monument merely signifies, as with the two deep-space telescopes, the Hubble and the Webb. Comets are usually named after their discoverers, and a plethora of asteroids and lunar craters are named after all sorts of people. Wikipedia has enormous lists of these names—of course it does—though the average person will recognize maybe one in a hundred. Full disclosure: my name is on Mars somewhere, on a CD-ROM disk containing the names of members of the Planetary Society. I am sure that future generations will be very excited when they discover it: “Oh, look, it’s that newsletter guy from the last century.” A monument proves nothing about the ego whose name is attached to it. Abraham Lincoln’s true legacy is incalculable, and I am pleased that West Tuscarawas in Canton, Ohio, the major artery off which branches the street that I grew up upon, was once part of the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental highway, running from coast to coast. On the other hand, Henry Ford was a deplorable person. It is good to hear that commemorative statues of Confederate generals are slowly being removed, and, if you survive as a university building, you can lose your immortality: if some current rich person subsidizes its remodeling, the building will probably be renamed after the donor.
The second type of self-perpetuation is through fame. We live in an age where people are famous for being famous, an age of mere celebrity, but traditionally fame was won through achievement, through something you did rather than by the mere possession of power and wealth. In the Iliad, fame is kleos, usually translated “honor” or “glory,” although that is highly misleading, since Achilles’ fame is won through victory as a warrior. The cause for which he fought was unimportant. The abduction of Helen of Troy was hardly a glorious cause: it was only a pretext for a war whose real function was to provide an opportunity for members of a heroic warrior aristocracy to gain the glory, which really meant status, that they needed to maintain themselves in their culture. Such glory was dependent on the poets who preserved the warriors’ story, leading to a status for poets that later poets have never regained. Your immortality was to be celebrated in song, and it was no idle claim: 2700 years later, even people of average education know the name of Achilles. War is no longer regarded as glorious, except by contemptible idiots like Putin, yet we still have our warrior heroes, those whom we commemorate on days like Memorial Day, who gave their lives to preserve their country and their families. Exceptional heroism can be recognized by such things as the Congressional Medal of Honor, but it is deeply poignant that for the most part our recognition of heroes is anonymous. The photos of hundreds, thousands of white crosses in a cemetery like Arlington, as far as the eye can see, can leave the viewer shaken. Every one of them represents, not an elite warrior, but an ordinary person who paid the ultimate price and will never be individually recognized. But then, that is not why they did what they did. There are peacetime heroes of the same sort. Once, when I taught the myth of the hero and asked the students who our contemporary heroes are, I was gratified that the most frequent candidates were the heroes of 9/11, despite the fact that the students were not even born when those heroes died. We do not have a warrior aristocracy anymore, but we do have its peacetime equivalent, the athletes: the odes of Pindar celebrated the winners of the Greek athletic games. Our reverence for Olympic athletes directly continues the tradition.
Seeking fame was not regarded as ignoble: Milton called it the last infirmity of noble minds. But of course it depends on what you are famous for. It is terribly frustrating to think that the villains and monsters of history have achieved their immortality. Hitler will always be famous; so will Donald Trump. Meanwhile, so many quietly good people who did good things die unknown. It is enough to inspire a righteous rage. It is at least good that the media have begun to omit or minimize the names of mass shooters, losers whose motivation no doubt includes a desire for fame, or at least attention, that they are unable to achieve in any other way. Social media have turned the addiction to fame into a curse worse than opioids. There has always been “political theatre,” but social media and celebrity culture have bred a herd who are only in politics out of a need for attention. Without credentials, they manufacture a sham identity the way that some people do on Facebook: George Santos has taken this so far that every single thing he says about himself is false. Such people keep doing and saying outrageous things simply in order to keep the attention of the media, who play right along with them. The phenomenon is not confined to the far right: Kyrsten Sinema is a perfect example of it.
No one is more scathing in his condemnation of fame than Milton. When Satan tempts Jesus with fame in Paradise Regained, Jesus replies with a tirade:
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, scarce worth the praise? The 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. 46-53, 56-57)
He goes on to condemn the warlike conquerors,
who leave behind Nothing but ruin whereso’er they rove, And all the flourishing works of peace destroy. (3.78-80)
He goes on to contrast such menaces with the deservedly famous:
Who names not now with honor patient Job? Poor Socrates (who next more memorable?) By what he taught and suffered for so doing, For truth’s sake suffering death unjust, lives now Equal in fame to proudest Conquerors. (3.95-99)
There are critics who think that Paradise Regained is a cranky and elitist work (my, how he looks down upon the common people!), and its hero prickly and unsympathetic. I completely disagree. I think these passages are right on—they read as if Milton had been reading the latest news on the Internet. As for his supposed snobbery about the common people, that is the insecurity of intellectuals with elite educations who feel guilty about it, and have to humble themselves by respectfully interviewing Trump fans at a small-town diner.
Milton himself aspired to fame for what he hoped were the right reasons, admitting in a prose work of the 1640’s that he hoped someday to write a work that future ages would “not willingly let die,” twenty years before he actually did so. The idea of creative artists themselves becoming famous was a relatively new one. It was typically the poet’s task to make someone else famous: a warrior, an athlete, a patron, or, in the case of Shakespeare’s sonnets, a lover. Sonnet 55 is the most, well, famous of all poetic proclamations of art’s power to confer immortality:
Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.” The speaker tells the lover that when “wasteful war shall statues overturn” you shall survive. Sonnet 18 tells him that “thy eternal summer shall not fade,” for “in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: / So long as men can breathe or eyes can see / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” There is no way to say for certain that the sonnets are at all autobiographical, and therefore no way to be sure that they represent Shakespeare’s conviction about his art. That is especially true given that Shakespeare made no attempt to collect and preserve his plays, which are arguably a greater legacy bequeathed to the world. In Othello, Michael Cassio cries, “Reputation, reputation, reputation! Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial” (2.4.262-64). But Shakespeare was in fact the most anonymous of all great writers, a fact that many people find so unacceptable that they are driven to conspiracy theories to deny the fact that he seems to have been a throwback to the old medieval view of the artist as an impersonal craftsman. It is inconceivable to them that someone that brilliant should not have regarded his art as a monument to his own magnificence, to misquote Yeats—that he might resemble the reclusive Thomas Pynchon rather than the megalomaniacal Wagner who established Bayreuth to ensure his own posterity. Shakespeare is so self-effacing that he has no biography: almost nothing is known about him. Rather than considering this as the instinctive strategy of a certain type of creative temperament in order to avoid distraction, the conspiracy theorists assume that someone of a more properly towering genius really wrote the plays, not the middle-class nonentity of whom no biopic can be made without completely fabricating its protagonist.
But stealth, flying below the radar, can be a shrewd tactic, a way of avoiding unwanted attention. Someday we will be discussing Joe Biden’s legacy, which may well be greater than that of any other president of my lifetime. One way he has been able to accomplish so much is by his brilliant tactic of simply disappearing from the media. He governs covertly, which has the disadvantage of making the public feel his has done nothing, maybe because he’s old and sleepy, but the advantage of giving the media nothing to blow up into the usual scandals, speculations, allegations, controversies. He drives journalists crazy because he gives them nothing to turn into clickbait, nothing that demands damage control and thereby becomes more clickbait.
At any rate, rather than being a form of self-perpetuation, one’s legacy can be what one contributed. Here the idea is not to hold on to the self but to sacrifice it in order to contribute something to the world. Those who have no special artistic, intellectual, athletic, or martial talent may give something to the world through parenting. Mind you, there are parents who clearly regard their offspring as monuments to their own ego, little Mini-Me’s. Children can become projects for which parents claim credit. If the child does not become some kind of achiever in a socially acceptable way, the parents feel cheated because their investment has not paid off. This is especially true among the elite: the aristocracy are often obsessed with pedigree, with the family name, with family pride. Portraits are often monuments both to the individual subject and to the lineage that subject represents.
But achievers can be intolerable. If I had had children, I would rather they grew up to be the kind of people who quietly make life better where the movers and shakers so often make it worse.
Likewise, teachers who try to mold their students, usually into versions of themselves (this is especially true of creative writing teachers) betray their profession. Teaching is a self-sacrificing profession. The Great Teacher of Hollywood movies is mostly an illusion. In real life such teachers can become cult leaders, feeding on the adoration of students addicted to their charisma. Teachers can certainly inspire, but in fact they do so by sacrificing themselves for the sake of their subject. It is the subject that inspires, and the teacher tries to become a transparent medium for the subject. Rather than “molding young minds,” teachers try to give students faith in the possibility of their own intellectual and creative powers. Teachers attempt to become anonymous, to convey the idea that "It's not about me" but about something greater than students and teacher both. The very act of teaching may be a role model, an example of devotion to something greater than oneself, and so may further the sense of a vocation, a calling, that Abraham Maslow said was prerequisite to being a self-actualized person and which was the subject of a previous newsletter.
One of Northrop Frye’s profoundest ideas was that literature forms an “order of words” comparable to the order of nature studied by science. The order consists, not of “universal truths” but of repeated and interconnected patterns—genres, conventions, common images, narrative shapes. Contrary to a widespread misconception, they are not changeless, like Platonic Forms, but they do abide through constant change. Every oak tree is different, but no botanist uses that as an argument that there is no such thing as the species we call “oak.” We speak of “genetic inheritance”: the form of the oak is passed on in every acorn that sprouts. Nature is ceaseless process and change, yet there are legacies that survive, not despite change but because of it. However, literary theorists have been determined not to fall into naïve “idealism,” which really masks a will to power imposing sameness on what is really difference, for ideological purposes. Works of literature, they argue, are human constructs, and there is nothing comparable to DNA ensuring any kind of continuity. Continuity is not in fact what we want: it is a form of “violence,” of coercion. The dominant mode of literary theory from the 60’s through the 90’s was in fact determined to subvert the legacy of the past. Literary tradition, the legacy passed down through the centuries, was a conspiracy to perpetuate a patriarchal, sexist, homophobic, racist, and imperialist ideology, and the task of literary criticism was to “demystify” it. Frye’s order of words, the legacy of the literary imagination, was, and is, dismissed as “bourgeois humanism,” meaning the imposition of a benign-looking mask in order to disguise a ruthless social order system. Literature is anything but an order: it is a site of contention, a battlefield in the war of all against all. It is understandable that such an iconoclasm would seem convincing and justifiable to those who were marginalized by the tradition, both by exclusion and by the use of denigrating stereotypes. The result is that the idea of a literary tradition, of common patterns expressing a common vision passed down through time as the human legacy in verbal form, has been largely dismissed. No such legacy exists. Tradition is a lie.
It is regrettable that Frye has been so completely misunderstood, though some of the ignorance frankly seems willful. In fact, Frye’s rough sketch of the order of words, Anatomy of Criticism, was itself a subversion of the idea of an elite tradition. His order of words is not at all the same as the “literary canon,” the exclusive club of Great Works that are indeed intended to reinforce a prevailing ideology. The Polemical Introduction to the Anatomy created a furor by flatly denying that the purpose of literary tradition was “value judgments,” including those designed as votes to include or exclude a work or an author from the canon. Value judgments are always social judgments in disguise, even though they masquerade as “high standards.” Occasionally the mask drops and the ideological agenda becomes visible, as when Bret Easton Ellis called Alice Munro an overrated writer unworthy of winning the Nobel Prize for literature. Why is she unworthy? Because she writes in short forms rather than having the ambition to attempt the Great (American) Novel, and she writes in short forms because she is concerned with trivial topics like the lives of women rather than important topics like war, hunting, sports, business, and politics. Not to mention serial killers.
After the Anatomy, Frye spent much of the second half of his career trying to clarify this issue. Literature expresses human concern, but there are two types of concern, secondary and primary. Secondary concerns are those of ideology, and are thus the values of a particular society or social group at a particular moment; they are basically expressions of the will to power. All works of literature are informed by a particular ideology, although it is perfectly possible for a text to be the site of conflicting ideologies. As he says in Words with Power:
I should distinguish between primary and secondary concern, even though there is no real boundary line between them. Secondary concerns arise from the social contract, and include patriotic and other attachments of loyalty. They develop from the ideological aspect of myth, and consequently tend to be directly expressed in ideological prose language. (51)
On the other hand,
The general object of primary concern is expressed in the Biblical phrase “life more abundantly….The axioms of primary concern are the simplest and baldest platitudes it is possible to formulate: that life is better than death, happiness better than misery, health better than sickness, freedom better than bondage, for all people without significant exception. (51)
Thus:
Any work of fiction written during the last two centuries will reflect the secondary and ideological concerns of its time, but it will relate those concerns to the primary ones of making a living, making love, and struggling to stay alive and free. (52)
Secondary concerns are ephemeral. The real legacy preserved and passed on by the literary tradition, the order of words, is the expression of primary concern. Common language expresses this vaguely when it speaks of “universals” and “enduring truths.” We read literature in order to learn the answer to the question, “What was it like to be alive?” in other times and places, in various forms of gender, race, and class identity. So much of literature is a record of perception. Painters try to capture a landscape at a particular moment of time, the weather, the play of sunlight and shade of a particular instant that will never come again, simply because it is a moment of life, and life is precious. The impulse here is a long way from Great Works mentality, and is almost the opposite of the urge for the monumental. It is felt by people who are not at all “great writers,” or even creative writers at all. I have written of the fascination of the diary kept for half a century by the great-aunt of my first wife (see www.bonneybonney.com), the record of a hard, subsistence life in the first half of the 20th century. Historians dig through obscure documents, even trash heaps, in order to recreate something of the past. What survives is a legacy. The furniture made by my Italian grandfather, a cabinetmaker; the ruby and milk glass collection of my mother: these legacies signify primary concern, because they are what my ancestors made, what they loved.
Most of the human race has always been anonymous, billions of people whose lives will never be known. But the question of legacy leads, as I have said, to the question of the real nature of human identity. We think of identity as something we have, something permanent that abides through all the changes of our lives. Yes, our moods will swing, and we change our opinions, our careers, our partners, even our gender identity. We are as changeable as chameleons, yet we are sure that there is some core identity that remains stable. The leaves and fruit come and go, but the trunk remains. It is always interesting to teach Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, because beneath the witty and entertaining dialogue runs an anxiety about whether human identity is stable at all, whether it is in fact an illusion. “For man is a giddy thing, and that is my conclusion,” says the character Benedick close to the end, and we wonder how far his creator agreed with him. One of the thematic images of the play is masks: there is actually a masked ball early on, in which there is considerable confusion of identity. “All the world’s a stage” was not a clever cliché for Shakespeare, who saw that we are playing roles at all times. It becomes a real question whether the “real self” beneath all the masks is not just another mask, another role. Another running metaphor, in this and other Shakespearean comedies, is fashion. The human self changes as the social fashion changes. In class discussions, I find that students are not very fond of the idea that there is no core self.
That is quite understandable, and I do not think anyone can live without some sense of a stable self. Despite the popular injunction to “live in the moment,” we need to feel that we are more than a flux of sensory perceptions, moods, bodily sensations, a stream of consciousness. As Loren Eiseley says in his great essay “The Brown Wasps,” “We cling to a time and a place because without them man is lost, not only man but life….| It is as though all living creatures, and particularly the more intelligent, can survive only by fixing or transforming a bit of time into space or by securing a bit of space with its objects immortalized and made permanent in time” (229). It is true that we are more than our self-image, which is only the reflection of Narcissus in a mirror. A more expansive and adequate idea of our identity begins with the realization that, as Tennyson’s Ulysses says, “I am a part of all that I have met.” That moment of suddenly seeing the rabbit on the grass at evening, to mention an experience of my own—that becomes a part of who I am. Only I in all the world had that perception, and I am grateful for it. We are a product of everything that has ever happened to us—for better or worse. But it is what we do with such experiences that matters. In Eiseley’s words, we fix and immortalize them, sometimes deliberately, sometimes unthinkingly, in an act of imagination. This is what Blake meant by the ruins of time building mansions in eternity. Eiseley tells the story of remembering for a whole lifetime a tree that he and his father planted when he was a boy. When Eiseley in old age returned to his family home, he discovered that the tree was not there—it had never grown, or had been cut down. But it did survive—as an image in his mind, as a world tree or axis mundi that had anchored him all those years.
When Blake speaks of eternity, what does he mean? The images of the imagination, the images that may be personal and yet which are also somehow universal because they are rooted in primary concern, may not be entirely subject to the limits of time and space, to the world of ordinary experience. It may be that we are creating a legacy in a reality invisible because hidden by the world of the “reality principle,” the ordinary subject-object world that is ultimately a transient illusion. The monuments of the ordinary world end as ruins, but, in Jerusalem, Blake says that “All things acted on Earth are seen in the bright Sculptures of Los’s Halls & every Age renews its powers from these works,” Los being Blake’s personification of the creative imagination. Nothing is harder to believe in than the reality of a condition beyond the space and time of ordinary experience, and yet, once in a while, we realize that we are already living in it, and that it is the only true legacy.
References
Eiseley, Loren. The Night Country. University of Nebraska Press, 1971.
Frye, Northrop. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature. Edited by Michael Dolzani. Volume 26 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2008.
Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. Odyssey Press, 1957.