POWIP Piece of Work In Progress – Former Abode of Dan Collins

Regarding “Downton Abbey”

I mentioned it yesterday in my post about Stacy, Hugo and breasts, and I've just finished watching the last episode of 2010's first season. It's tremendous, but here's how it's described on Netflix:

Exposing the snobbery, backbiting and machinations of a disappearing class system, this seven-part British series chronicles the comings and goings of the upper-crust Crawley family and their assorted servants. Ensconced in their stately manor, the Crawleys delight in their aristocratic life -- until the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912 muddles their line of inheritance. Maggie Smith plays the sneering Dowager Countess of Grantham.

The sneering is a projection of the blurb-writer.

Yesterday, in a long (but interesting) diatribe against Little Miss Attila and feminism, Stacy reproduced one of my favorite Chesterton quotes:

“My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”
– G.K. Chesterton, 1913

As a Roman Catholic, I have a perspective on that that Stacy may not share in its entirety. And what is the matter with that? Nothing at all. Undoubtedly, Victor Davis Hanson, who knows a great deal more about early Western Civilization than I do, has a different perspective still, and Jews of my acquaintance (even those who share many of my political opinions) still another.

But the falsity of the blurb-writer's obvious contempt for the exquisite James Fellowes drama amounts to bad faith. Let's consider the terminology regarding the "Gothic" in literature. Henry James, who was no slouch as a writer (though in my view he never produced anything that came near to touching Melville's The Con Man, for example), regarded the so-called Gothic novel (or Gothick, if you want to get all Mathew Lewis-y about it) as a species of "loose baggy monsters." Yet he never did produce anything either in my personal estimation as truly great as Wuthering Heights or Frankenstein; but perhaps I'm just insufficiently appreciative, and the limitation is not his so much as mine. He might have disparaged the very term, "gothic," as itself a kind of inexact grokking regarding the effect, such as we might employ the term "slasher" with respect to film. If one chooses to view the matter that way, there's little that another one can do to talk one out of it, even though another one might assert as a point of departure that it's unfair to expect a composition that functions according to its own internal logic, quite different from that one employ in one's own compositions, to answer to an alien aesthetic.

That is not to say that the aesthetic isn't ideological, either, though in the hands of Aristotle the ideology of the aesthetic is quite different from what it is in the hands of Terry Eagleton. In my particular field of study, Renaissance English and Italian literature, there was an enormous quarrel, which I've noted elsewhere, between those who felt that Aristotle's aesthetics were meant to be prescriptive or descriptive. My personal view is that to state that it was descriptive is a great deal saner. Also in my personal view, Shakespeare, who knew something about dramatic composition, thought so as well and even commented on the issues metadramatically in some of his plays.

To go into the differences between Shakespeare as a practitioner of crowd-pleasing dramaturgy on the one hand and an academic practitioner like Guarini, the Ferrarese author of the tragicomedy Il pastor fido, would take me some distance from where I mean to go. Let's just say that comparatively speaking, Eagleton is one of those whose ideology gets in the way. He truly believes that Marxist dialectic is somehow more "material," to use the word that Marxists love to use, and therefore tries to grind every composition within reach through the "function box," if you're old enough to remember that piece of crap analogy in mathematics, of Marxism, to see what kind of word-sausage emerges on the other side. If it turns out unsavory, that's not the fault of the box, but of the ingredient.

So, back to sneering. The blurb would give you the idea that the author's intention is to demonstrate how awful and benighted those people were. On the contrary, he shows complex people dealing with change in ways that are mostly honest, dignified and heroic. Among the many themes are duty, honor, love, ambition, truth, self-narration and -invention, weakness and strength, humility and pride, honesty and work, but above all change and the demands it places on people trying to do the best they can, whether only for themselves or for the community at large, however one defines it. The blurb-writer is insensitive to all that, because it is Thursday.

Tomorrow, it will be Friday (metaphorically), and perhaps some future graduate student will be given the unlucky task of having to read the meanderings of what was once called a "blogger" on some archaic electronic platform called "the Internet." And if that unlucky graduate student unluckily happens upon this unlucky piece, they may wonder what sort of a man the author was. Or perhaps not. But I am vain enough to hope that that person will think well of me, and that if people still pray, she will do so for me.

In the course of his writing, Stacy's even found space to mention with approval something by James Wolcott. Whether Wolly finds that pleasing, I can't say. I hope so, because it was honestly meant. And I imagine, too, that when he is gone, Mr. Wolcott will wish to be remembered as someone who meant well, and meant to give pleasure to his readers, and I imagine that he has by and large succeeded. Generosity should be answered with generosity, I think.

The pretext is another matter. I am sure I have put off any number of people with my continuous and not-always-as-funny-as-I-meant jesting, but I think that it's important, even if one is scrupulous and has a reasonable valuation of his worth, to cultivate a certain amount of Honey Badgery where insults intended or not are concerned.

Talk to the claw.

The nose is out of joint. O, cursed spite . . .

Disclaimer: Nobody's feelings were intentionally hurt in the composition of this post.

NB: I would have chosen Sybil. Despite her patrician beauty, Mary's too full of passionate neurosis, like me, and I'm too superficial to be attracted to Edith. In truth, though my wife is named Mary, I did marry Sybilishly, and am a happy, stupid Irishish person for it.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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