Dear Unknown Friends:

We have been serializing the lecture Imagination Has Emphasis, which Eli Siegel gave in 1971. Throughout it he speaks, greatly, about matters that are fundamental in art but which also have not before been well understood—for instance, character in fiction. He speaks about art definitively, yet with such freshness, vividness, depth, love. And as he does, we feel it has to do with us, our own personal, particular lives. The basis is that principle which he was the critic to discover and express: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” Life and art, literary criticism at its greatest and what we want for our lives, are inseparable in this talk.

Mr. Siegel uses as text G.K. Chesterton’s 1906 book Charles Dickens. And as he comments on Chesterton’s statements, we are in the midst of Mr. Siegel’s own wide, exact, warm seeing of Dickens, about whom he spoke often in his teaching of Aesthetic Realism.

Knowing & Excitement

As a prelude, I’ll speak a little about something ever so consequential that Mr. Siegel explains in this section of his talk. You’ll read the whole passage soon, but I give some of it here:

Two things are present in art; they’re present in poetry, present in fiction: excitement and knowledge. Dickens quite clearly…wants to know. But he wants excitement to be as strong as the knowledge. Excited knowledge…is present in a poem, and it’s present in fiction.

(Excitement, of course, has much to do with a principal word in the lecture’s title, emphasis.)

As to knowledge—there is no more famous sentence in the history of philosophy than the first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “All people by nature desire to know.” That statement is true; it’s at once thoughtful and emphatic. Yet it’s clear that people have also not been interested in knowing, have preferred other things to knowing. And that’s because people have mainly not felt that knowing as such—which means knowing with depth and width and continuity—was excitement too.

The huge alternative and opposition to the desire to know in people, Aesthetic Realism explains, is the desire for contempt. Contempt is “the addition to self through the lessening of something else,” and with it comes a certain kind of excitement: I don’t have to think about, work to understand, what’s not me—I’m simply superior! The having a victory over something or someone, the triumphant disparaging of him or her or it, has been felt as exciting. Having people do as oneself desires has been felt as exciting. Owning things—especially things others are not so able to own—has been felt as exciting. The finding contempt exciting, and knowing unexciting and unfruitful, is humanity’s greatest damager—in history; in nations; and in the days, weeks, years of individuals.

For example, the central cause of trouble in love, of resentment between two people who are close, is the desire to have a person be one’s own rather than wanting to know that person, understand him or her as richly and deeply as possible. Eli Siegel, in his Preface to “The Ordinary Doom,” writes—in some of the finest prose in English:

The large inward catastrophe of today is: We let ourselves be pleased by and do what we can to please a person we still want to hide from, we still do not fully respect. The one way we can fully respect a person is to feel that that person deserves wholly to know us and it would be good for us to know that person….

To know a person is to know the universe become throbbingly specific. It is always the universe on two feet, with two eyes, and an articulate mouth. It is the universe we want to skip.

The rift between knowing and excitement is a national matter too. America is in the midst of what has been called a crisis of democracy. And, looking at that crisis not politically but philosophically, it can be said that a central reason for it is: at the highest level of government there was a terrific seeing of knowledge as unexciting—the exciting thing was for oneself to be viewed as important, glorious. To see what was true and go by the real facts was felt as unexciting, humiliating, self-lessening; to change the facts, to lie, was exciting—power-giving.

Excitement Has an Opposite

Excitement has an opposite: calmness, composure. Along with our need to see knowing as exciting, we need to see knowing as that which will bring us repose, composition. This is in keeping with what Aesthetic Realism shows to be the deepest desire of every human being: to like the world through knowing it. To like anything truly—from a symphony to a sunset—is to feel at once stirred and composed. And as with excitement, unless we see wanting to know as the way to feel composed and sure, we’ll go after what Mr. Siegel called “the repose of contempt”: we’ll try to feel confident through superiority, attain calm through our ability to sneer.

Every person has gotten excitement and composure in some ways through knowing. When a child first learns that if she touches a faucet handle and turns it, water will flow, she is both more excited and more composed. When she learns that using her legs a certain way will have her go up the stairs; and when she learns that the word doggy means a furry being she likes so much—there is a brightness of excitement and also greater order in her, and it is deep and lovely.

The greatest persons are those who most see knowing as exciting and composing. And no one was more thorough and constant there than Eli Siegel himself. With every person I heard him speak to, with every subject he discussed—and those subjects took in the sciences, the arts, history, happenings, the world in its manyness—his desire to know was alive, looking, seeing. There was always, in what he said, a oneness of composition and electricity; grace and vividness. It was the greatest and kindest continuing human expression and seeing I know. And it brought out one’s own excitement in knowing.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Poetry, Fiction, Life

By Eli Siegel

What poetry is, is the hardest critical problem. But what a good character in fiction is, what makes a character live, is a poetic question, and it is mighty hard. One can say that the questions of art itself are hard. What makes music good? Why is this music more musical? Why does it matter more?

However, things can be said about a character. And in order to understand poetry, we should ask ourselves, What is a character in fiction? When does a character matter? When is a character everlasting and beautiful? What is the relation of salience to detail, or emphasis to the muted, in the character?

Chesterton is speaking about the way Dickens, in Pickwick Papers, sees character, and contrasting that to how Thackeray writes in The Newcomes:

Things in the Dickens story shift and change only in order to give us glimpses of great characters that do not change at all. If we had a sequel of Pickwick ten years afterwards, Pickwick would be exactly the same age. We know he would not have fallen into that strange and beautiful second childhood which soothed and simplified the end of Colonel Newcome. Newcome, throughout the book, is in an atmosphere of time: Pickwick, throughout the book, is not. This will probably be taken by most modern people as praise of Thackeray and dispraise of Dickens.

A problem in the novel, which has been much written of, is here: what is time in a novel? Time compared to timelessness is as the emphatic to the unemphatic. And the thing that time emphasizes, besides timelessness, is space. Just think of space without time—how dull it would be. And while Chesterton is writing about time in a certain sense, a large problem in music is how time is used, also in poetry, and, for that matter, in the play.

Another statement about the characters in Pickwick:

For they do not exist for the story; the story exists for them; and they know it.

That was bold—saying the characters know that the story exists for them.

We Come to Myth

Then, there is this sentence:

Dickens did not strictly make a literature; he made a mythology.

The word myth, after Chesterton, was used a great deal; the high time was in the 1940s. And What is myth? can still be asked. It is a mighty thing. But one can say that in a myth there is the universal; there is that which doesn’t have ordinary time in it. Also, myth uses beings or things that say a great deal about human beings while not looking like human beings or not behaving entirely like human beings. A myth is a way of showing what a human being feels by using something definitely different. There’s more to it—but a myth is a very fine thing. Despite all the false use of it, any person who doesn’t have a terrific respect for myth is crippled. There has been fakery in dealing with myth, but the idea itself is indispensable. It is gorgeous and true. The making myth important was done early by Chesterton.

He has the following, with its reference to elves:

But it is only slowly that the old elfin fire fades into the light of common realism.

The Grimm Brothers have a story called “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” Those elves seem, from one point of view, not mythological, because we think of a myth as about, say, Paul Bunyan or John Henry, about something larger than elves. And the Greeks and Romans didn’t have beings that were so small. Their beings are all fairly life-size, if not larger. Jupiter—we don’t know how big he was. Still, though they’re not mythical in the way the Furies are, the elves belong to myth; they belong to faerie, the supernatural, to legend, fantasy. And elves are in English poetry.

We can be pretty sure that every being in Greek mythology, in Norse mythology, in Japanese mythology, is necessary. Meanwhile, that exquisite usefulness and mischief that the elf represents, is something to look at. There is a touch of that—in fact, more than a touch—in Dickens. One can say that the “fat boy” in Pickwick has a touch of the elf. Even Pickwick himself has.

“But it is only slowly that the old elfin fire fades into the light of common realism”: there’s a rhythm in that sentence. It can be looked at and will stand up to being looked at.

Popularity, Excitement, Knowledge

A chapter that’s mighty important is “The Great Popularity.” When people are taken by something, everyone should want to see whether the interest arises from the thing itself. We know that publicity can do a great deal. But publicity cannot make a person really interested. That comes from something else. What has occurred is that Dickens, as much as any writer of fiction, stands for humanity as such. He has been, with Scott, the most noted writer of fiction in England and America, but he has affected every country, including Russia. We have the following sentence and phrases:

His raging and sleepless nights, his wild walks in the darkness, his note-books crowded, his nerves in rags, all this extraordinary output was but a fit sacrifice to the ordinary man.

We can see in Dickens, with his travels, the desire to say: This world is interesting. I have to note it down. I have to see how it can be. I have to see the kinds of persons that have never existed so far and still are like the persons one can see—I want to show they are too.

Two things are present in art; they’re present in poetry, present in fiction: excitement and knowledge. Dickens quite clearly, with his notebooks and his walkings around and his “nerves in rags,” wants to know. But he wants excitement to be as strong as the knowledge. Excited knowledge, which is accuracy too—that is present in a poem, and it’s present in fiction.

It happens that a feeling for poetry has not usually been made stronger by a feeling for fiction. The two are often read by the same person, but the reading of one does not cross into the territory of the other and help it, most often. One of the purposes in discussing Chesterton on Dickens is this: for the energy that excited that honest way of looking at the world which is in fiction, to be seen as commenting in a most friendly fashion on that excited and honest way of seeing the world which is in poetry.

In Fiction & Life

Terror and laughter are in fiction, and they are present in poetry, too. All art tries to be just to them, and certainly they’re present in Dickens. Chesterton says:

These two primary dispositions of Dickens, to make the flesh creep and to make the sides ache, were a sort of twins of his spirit; they were never far apart and the fact of their affinity is interestingly exhibited in the first two novels.

Shortly after Dickens presented Pickwick to the world—in fact, it was somewhat at the same time—he presented in Oliver Twist that keeper or superintendent of a workhouse or poorhouse of England, Mr. Bumble. What do they say of each other, Mr. Bumble and Mr. Pickwick? Also, what does Sykes say of Pickwick?

The word character brings together art and life: people we meet in fiction and people we meet in life. But most often persons interested in characters in fiction do not feel, because of that interest, that they have to know people in life any better. I cannot say that intense readers of fiction have been any kinder to people or have had any greater desire to know them. Still, it is possible for this to be. And what do characters in fiction say about characters we may meet?

Like of the World

We come to the chapter “Dickens and Christmas.” Chesterton says that A Christmas Carol has things Dickens’ Cricket on the Hearth and The Chimes and The Battle of Life do not have.

Those persons who want to find out what liking the world means have to see what Dickens is, what he’s saying. The need to like the world is tremendous in him. It’s insistent.

You can find it in every person. It works differently in every person. For instance, there’s a kind of liking of the world in Macaulay, in Thackeray, in Matthew Arnold, in Carlyle, in Ruskin—all the large Victorians. Browning, some people have felt, liked the world too easily, and there is nothing as silly, it is said, as that statement in Pippa Passes, except A Christmas Carol itself.*

Well, the tendency to like the world is in those writers, and writers who are not as well known, including Charles Kingsley. In Anthony Trollope there’s a desire to like the world, in Charles Reade, and Wilkie Collins. One can see it in the wanderings of that woman in white, in Collins’ The Woman in White. And there’s a desire to like the world through the adventures of the moonstone in the early mystery novel The Moonstone of Collins. That moonstone seems to stand for the wickedness and goodness of the world.

Chesterton says of A Christmas Carol:

The beauty and the real blessing of the story do not lie in the mechanical plot of it, the repentance of Scrooge, probable or improbable; they lie in the great furnace of real happiness that glows through Scrooge and everything around him; that great furnace, the heart of Dickens.

There are some important things that Chesterton helped to have seen. He wrote a defense of the detective story and saw the ethics in it. And he saw value in melodrama. The fight between the villain and the hero is like the fight in the world. There is a desire to have the happy ending and have the hero win. So when the door is broken in and the hero, with a few friends, is able to be stronger for a while and capture the villain, everyone feels that the world is being shown right—also, when the train does not hit the heroine.

This feeling is more seen: that there is an ethical quality in both the detective story and melodrama, an unconscious satisfaction of an ethical desire. And this feeling was made notable by Chesterton. He wrote:

The essence of melodrama is that it appeals to the moral sense in a highly simplified state.

People do want the right thing in the world to win. They don’t act that way, but they hope that way. Our actions and our hopes can be different, but our hopes are usually deeper and less known.