INTELLIGENT DESIGN?

According to the online Medieval Bestiary, “In the Christian west, it was commonly believed that the natural world, the so-called "book of nature", had been arranged as it was by God to provide a source of instruction to humanity. This idea was based, at least in part, on biblical verses such as this one from the book of Job: "But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds of the air, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish of the sea inform you." (Job 12:7-10). Animals were said to have the characteristics they do not merely by accident; God created them with those characteristics to serve as examples for proper conduct and to reinforce the teachings of the Bible.”

            More recently, humans seem more inclined to follow the verse in Genesis about having dominion over all creatures. But as I discovered in a recent visit to the Maui Ocean Center, some creatures offer examples that humans are so far unable to follow. For example, in the wrasse and some other species of fish who congregate in harems, if the only male dies, the largest female undergoes a spontaneous hormonal change and becomes male. This adaptation would be very useful for any retirement community, especially Sun Lakes singles’ organizations like Cheers and the Sixty Plus Club, to redress current gender imbalance which is so marked that CoEd Singles has refused to admit new women members until someone leaves or dies to try to even the numbers. In this case, humans seem to be unable to learn from the beasts.

            Gender imbalance is only a temporary problem for the reef octopus. The male dies after mating, and the female dies after incubation is complete—often serving as food for her offspring. This may seem a cruel trick of nature, but at least this species does not have to deal with PTA, Little League, and, worst of all, teenagers.

            The Goldring Surgeonfish offers magical results rather than direct lessons, but pre-Christian Hawaiians found a spiritual and eminently practical use for it. They buried one of these fish with the house-posts on the east side of a house. If a priest entered the house and predicted trouble for the family, he would die. Should this actually work, one could make a fortune raising these fish—but only if their salutary effect could be extended beyond priests to include conservative talk-show hosts, talking heads on Sunday morning television, and televangelists who apparently have answered yes to the question posed by the song “Would Jesus Wear a Rolex on His Television Show?” And maybe everyone who appears in People Magazine. What a wonderful world this would be!

           

New Book

Levels of Incompetence: An Academic Life (Lamar University Press) follows the training and career of an English professor from the mid-1950s to and beyond retirement in 2000. Although the book is based on personal experience, that experience is placed in social, economic, and cultural contexts to provide a broader view of the profession and some explanation of the apparently irrevocable changes it has undergone.

The book may be ordered from the publisher or from the major on-line vendors, one of which is
http://www.booksamillion.com/p/Levels-Incompetence/Robert-Murray-Davis/9780991107438?id=5478420446073

BRAVE NEW WORLD SOURCES

            In Wandering into Brave New World (Rodopi, 2013), David Leon Higdon uses traditional scholarly methods to reveal the genesis of many elements in Aldous Huxley’s world tour of 1925-1926 that first resulted in Jesting Pilate (1926). Higdon persuasively argues that Huxley combined his experience of the caste system in India with his reading of utopian fiction to form the basis of the predetermined mental and physical divisions of AF 632. Henry Ford’s autobiography, which Huxley read aboard ship, combined with other sources to form the novel’s critique of industrialism, and Huxley’s general knowledge of Freud’s theories lay behind the abolition of monogamy and family structures as well as John Savage’s Oedipus complex, which extended past his mother to what Higdon calls surrogate parents, Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne.

            Huxley’s brief stay in Los Angeles, where he was more impressed by Hollywood’s special effects than by its banal scripts, is seen as the source for the depiction of media of the novel, and the desire for pleasurable sensation, embodied in the Flapper, pervades the novel and is especially important for the characterization of Lenina.

            Huxley did barely more than pass through New Mexico, never visiting a pueblo, but his reading, which Higdon examines thoroughly, supplemented by some conjectural sources, gave him details about the Hopi Snake Dance (absent D. H. Lawrence’s supposed influence) and Zuni tales, some of which deal with a boy cast out, like John, from his society.

            The final chapter deals with the novel’s onomastics, especially on names connected to the Russian, Italian, and Turkish revolutions but also extending to physical and social scientists, and with the ways in which Huxley avoided libel suits faced by Graham Greene and others.

            The result is an ingenious and convincing study of materials which went into Huxley’s best-known novel. Occasionally Higdon dives so deeply into the background, as in the history of the Santa Fe Railroad’s Indian tours, that the foreground is blurred. And his argument that Lenina is the real rebel in the novel seems a little forced, while the condemnation of Huxley’s misogynistic treatment of her, which “disastrously impeded characterization, theme, and intention” may owe as much to current standards of political correctness as to evidence from the novel. But this is one of the few really debatable points in Higdon’s admirable study of the novel, so old-fashioned that it is original.

 

Geary Hobson. Plain of Jars and

Other Stories. East Lansing. Michigan

State University Press. 2011. xiv + 245

pages. $29.95. isbn 978-0-87013-998-7

Geary Hobson’s thoughtful introduction

to Plain of Jars cites the influence

of Katherine Anne Porter, but

the collection seems more reminiscent

of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our

Time. Both collections portray “a

particular person . . . involved in

an episode of his or her life . . .

caught, for a moment in a manner

that signals a turning point.” A short

story, Hobson adds, “is a segment,

or chapter, of a person’s life that can

be rendered in one scene or several.”

Roughly two-thirds of the stories

in the collection conform to this

description, and almost all follow the

progress of a Marine from boot camp

until some forty years after the action

(in one case, the ex-Marine is a minor

figure in the background). Although

he has various names—Lawson,

Rollins, Darysaw, Wayne, Steve—

and the episodes are sometimes in

first person, sometimes in third, the

character is identified and identifies

himself as Indian, though as a

mixed-blood he doesn’t look it and

is questioned about why he doesn’t

act like everyone else. He feels the

call of home—usually Arkansas—

but knows, as at the end of “Shin

Splints,” that “it could never be the

same for him as it once was.”

Most of the time, the central

character reacts rather than acts: to

the thoughtless racism in an overheard

monologue that prompts his

decision to return home rather than

go to San Francisco and sample the

white world; to the insistent evangelist

in “The Odor of Dead Fish”

who leads him to abandon the last

vestiges of Christianity; to the martinet

lieutenant who orders the needless slaughter of

elephants, and, on a larger scale, to

the destruction of irreplaceable Laotian

artifacts by the U.S. military that

parallels the Corps of Engineers’

bulldozing of ceremonial mounds

in Arkansas. Both point to “typical

American wastefulness.”

Although the focal character

finds comfort in the rare presence

of other Natives, Hobson does not

further the myth of Indian nobility,

savage or not. In several stories, characters

destroy themselves and others.

One, “the Laguna prima donna,”

dogs the central character until his

new girlfriend backhands her,

“woman to woman.” Apparently this

gets her attention, for in a subsequent

story she is friendly and supportive.

Hobson is particularly critical of professional

Indians, like Wounded Knee

wannabes in “A Christmas Story”

and the drunken, wife-beating pseudopoet

in “Hollow Horn.”

But “Hollow Horn” and what

Hobson calls “fantasies”—all of them

satiric—seem less successful (some

based on premises whose conclusions

soon become apparent) than those

stories involving Marines. And they

lack the precision of language and

feeling of the great majority of the stories.

Those are distinguished at times

by close observation of the natural

world and most often by embodying

a psychological and social world that

exists, if not exactly in our time, in

a sharply rendered and deceptively

modest vision.

Robert Murray Davis

University of Oklahoma

Edward Hoagland. Sex and the River
Styx. Howard Frank Mosher, foreword.
White River Junction, Vermont.
Chelsea Green. 2011. xiv + 247 pages.
$17.95. isbn 978-1-60358-337-4
Those who agree with Edward Hoagland
that Emerson is the “cynosure
of American literature” and have a
taste for a writer who is “by temperament
a rhapsodist” will share
the general opinion that Hoagland
is a major essayist. An argument
can be made for such views. They
account for Hoagland’s undoubted
seriousness, his biophilic concern
for all of nature, including humans,
and the moral stance which mandates
that we “act purposefully but
minimally, and keep [our] reason
under wraps.”
But these premises also explain
the underlying current of self-satisfied
moral superiority exhibited
in batches of reader-nudging rhetorical
questions, often followed
by abstract assertions of principle
that allow no questioning, as in
“anybody winning more of life’s
rewards than we are is probably
selling out to some extent, don’t
you think?” He dislikes the spread
of technology but admits that some
of it has prolonged his life, and he
calls for seniors to make space for
new generations. (That’s rather like
the publisher’s note, which boasts
that 30 percent of the paper used is
postconsumer, saving all kinds of
resources and energy. The logical
conclusion is never reached.)
Hoagland’s Emersonian desire
to embrace “All”—he quotes “All
natural fact is an emanation”—may
account for his inability to end a
series in three elements or anything
near it. Some of his rhapsodies
about nature sound rather like William
Boot’s column “Lush Places” in
Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. The relative
absence of a sense of humor and
a marked irony deficiency may be
traced to Hoagland’s kinship with
what Philip Rahv called “Palefaces”
as opposed to “Redskins” like Mark
Twain. Twain and, later, Hemingway
were able to show us the wonder
of nature rather than (not quite
merely) insisting on it through generalizations
in a style that, in Cyril
Connolly’s terms, is mandarin rather
than plain.
Furthermore, the sense of the
interconnectedness of everything
may relieve Hoagland of the necessity
of imposing a structure on most
of the essays. For most of the book,
the prose is like water from an office
cooler—you can get more, but it
won’t ever have a different flavor,
and the only principle of organization
is provided by the cup.
The most coherent essays in
the book are the travel pieces about
India and China, since they deal
with movement from one place to
another. And to offset overwritten
passages like the one about “one’s
ability to marinate in the spices of
solitude,” there are quite sensible
observations like “Existentialism . . .
was kind of fun, when hedonism
and pessimism still boasted of their
novelty.” His views of his generation—
he was born in 1932—accord
with those of many of his contemporaries,
and his attempts to understand
what happens to us as we age
are often quite sensible, though he
may be wrong about older people’s
being kinder and more forgiving.
Robert Murray Davis
University of Oklahoma
world literature in review

Christopher Hitchens. Arguably:

Essays. New York. Twelve / Hachette.

2011. isbn 9781455502776

Ordinary book reviewers have three

tasks: to determine what the author

set out to do; how well that task was

accomplished; and whether it was

worth undertaking. Here the reviewer

is in a way subordinate to the book. Not

so reviewers given the space to show

their credentials as public intellectuals.

In their work, readers often find it

difficult to discover just what book is

being discussed because the reviewer

subsumes the discussion in a wider

consideration of the topic.

Christopher Hitchens is preeminently

in the second group. He seems

to be as widely read and traveled as he

is prolific—the publicity sheet for the

book notes that Arguably: Essays is his

first collection since 2004, not counting

the six other books he wrote or coedited

in the meantime. This output is

fueled (a word he detests) by consistent

and unvarying opinions. Though

he has a soft spot for the English Reformation

because it destroyed Catholic

power, he dislikes all religions in an

ascending intensity from Protestantism

to Catholicism to Islam.

He is particularly severe on religious

elements in the novels of Evelyn

Waugh and even more in those of

Graham Greene (he refers to the girl

in The Heart of the Matter as Scobie’s

“scrawny and tedious mistress”), giving

unqualified praise to the unreligious

vision of Anthony Powell, whose

clotted and stuffy prose he praises

for inexplicable and unexplained reasons.

But irreligion is not enough

to gain his approval: John Updike’s

“grueling homework” and Somerset

Maugham’s utter stylessness are

severely criticized, with some justice.

George Orwell sits understandably

high in his pantheon for his idiosyncratic

socialism and for the parallels

between Nineteen Eighty-Four and the

English Reformation, and he thinks

more highly of Upton Sinclair as a

social novelist than he does of Dickens

or Zola—a decision hardly based

on aesthetic grounds.

His political views are antiimperialist

and anti-totalitarian, and,

forced to choose, he would go with

the latter. He excoriates practitioners

of any form of jihad, and all regimes

or individuals from the wet Left who

support or excuse it, and almost gushes

about the Kurds.

In reviews and essays on political

subjects, he can be quite caustic,

but he also says that “the people

who must never have power are the

humorless. To impossible certainties

of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.”

To lack of humor one might

add the sin of sentimentality. Thus in

dealing with quite serious subjects,

like the near-collapse of the American

economy in 2008, Hitchens compares

Hank Paulson’s attitude of “prayer

and beseechment” to the end of Peter

Pan, “where the children are told that,

if they don’t shout out aloud that they

all believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell’s

gonna fucking die.” And the economy

76 | World Literature Today

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very nearly does. He also excoriates

“the moist, vapid effusion that greeted

the death of Diana Spencer” and

the unearned appropriation of grief at

the killings at Virginia Tech as “proof

of how utterly painless all this vicarious

‘pain’ really is.” And his view of the

British royal family can be summed

up in “This is what you get when you

found a political system on the family

values of Henry VIII.” But he is equally

sharp on the failings of JFK.

Although Hitchens can be snarky,

he makes interesting and often valid

points, mostly negative, about the

weakness of Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn

Mauberley,” and his analysis of

Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey

Falcon is both pointed and balanced.

Even when he condemns, as in his discussion

of Waugh, he can see virtues

to mitigate faults.

On the (very great) whole, the

chief impression one might take from

this massive collection is that, given

the willingness of outlets like Vanity

Fair, the Atlantic, and Slate to publish

extended and thoughtful material

like this, the condition of American

journalism and thought might not be

quite as bad as some have feared.

Robert Murray Davis

University of Oklahoma