The Left Hemisphere Ruins Literature
The Left Hemisphere Ruins Literature
D.H. Lawrence might have had the John Thomas of a degenerate, but he had the soul of an artist. I guess it’s no surprise. His father was an illiterate, hard-drinking coal miner. His mother was educated and refined. It made him earthy but reflective. He appreciated cutting-edge ideas but declined to let them ruin his art.
Nathaniel Hawthorne hated the Transcendentalists, once greeting Ralph Waldo Emerson with a growling, “How is your oversoul this morning?” The Transcendentalists were phony. They were about ideas, not reality. It’s no surprise an earthy fiction writer like Hawthorne despised them. Fiction is reality dressed up as unreality.
Flannery O’Connor was so real, she was surreal. Her first published story revolved around a potted geranium. “Gothic realism.” She told would-be fiction writers to ditch ideas and work on the earthy details. Those details provide the soil and pot where the story grows.
Socialist Realism
Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Turgenev. The Russian realist masters. We still read them today, nearly 200 years later.
And then a few decades later, in that same Russian soil and blood, we get Russian unrealism. “Socialist realism,” Stalin called it: literature (and art) in service to the Marxist ideal.
Quick: Name a Soviet-era author who didn’t end up in exile or the Gulag?
I couldn’t do it either.
There was Maxim Gorky, of course. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize and said “Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear,” but no one reads him today and most critics say he wasn’t great.1
Soviet literature didn’t suffer because it was Marxist. It suffered because it started with the Marxist ideal. If Soviet literature worked with real details that naturally flowed into a Marxist denouement, that would’ve been fine, but that couldn’t happen anymore vodka can naturally flow into sobriety.
The great critic Hugh Kenner showed that economic forces shape literature. It’s not surprising. Poverty is real and fiction writers have traditionally harvested it for more stories than immigrants have harvested grapes in central California. Few things are more real than finances.
Soviet writers were required to produce a Socialist harvest, which means they were told to use real details to produce an unreal message. It’s impossible to do it well. Reality can’t lead to unreality. A fiction writer who works with real details is going to reach a real conclusion. Whatever that conclusion is, it won’t be Marxist, unless the writer swindles his prose.2
Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur Sucked
Those are all things D.H. Lawrence understood, at least intuitively. He hated dishonest writing. Abstract ideas defeat honest writing. When an abstract idea collides with real details, the abstract idea wins every time.
Kindness should flavor everything we do, but when dealing with a fraud, we need to add a lot of spice. If you don’t hate where you ought to hate, you won’t love where you ought to love. Because dishonesty is the one thing that ought to be hated—it ignited the debris of primordial pride that set off the explosion of Original Sin—it’s alright to hate it.
And Lawrence did.
His Studies in American Literature is one of the great works of literary criticism that continues to receive praise a hundred years after its publication in 1923. His criticism bites, especially in his review of a series of essay-letters by an American-French farmer named “Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur.”
You’ve never heard of Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur? That’s alright, virtually nobody has. His Letters from an American Farmer made him a household name in Europe, where he was highly popular with the reforming classes. The Godwins and Shellies . . . those proponents of Thomas Sowell’s unconstrained vision . . . those folks who value their abstract ideas first and reality second.
It’s no wonder that you haven’t heard of Crèvecoeur. His essays didn’t stick in posterity because they sucked. They sucked because they didn’t start with reality,3 which is why Lawrence excoriated Crèvecoeur for prostituting that virgin soil he wrote about. He swindled his prose. If reality conflicted with his ideals—“the Noble Savage and Pristine Nature and Paradisal Simplicity” (Lawrence’s sarcasm capitalizes the words to emphasize that they are, for Crèvecoeur, gods)—reality lost.
This Primordial War Might Start in the Hemispheres of Our Brains
This mental war between folks who start with ideas and those who start with reality has been going on for centuries, but its root cause wasn’t understood until recently.
It was in the 1990s that scholars started to notice that an increasing amount of data pointed to the different ways the hemispheres did things. Such an idea went back further (much further if you count the ancient Greeks, who speculated that the right hemisphere specialized in perception and the left hemisphere in understanding). Still, it took until late-twentieth-century neuroscience for the big picture to emerge.
And it wasn’t until the early 21st century for the picture to fully emerge. That’s when Dr. McGilchrist took the neuroscience, combined it with his deep reading in history and the humanities, and came up with the hemisphere hypothesis.
I say “fully emerge.” That’s not accurate. The concept emerged but because McGilchrist has effected a Copernican revolution in metaphysics, we will be sorting through the full picture for centuries.
The hemisphere hypothesis’s first principle is that both hemispheres are great. Its second principle is that the right hemisphere is the mental maestro whose oversight gives our lives harmony. Its third principle is that the left hemisphere is liable to become a scoundrel that disrupts that harmony. Its fourth principle is that the scoundrel is in control of the modern world.
The war between the scoundrel (the “emissary” in the title of his bestseller) and the maestro (the “master”) is the war between Lawrence and Crèvecoeur.
The left hemisphere likes abstract ideas. It is, after all, the “down and dirty” hemisphere: It’s tasked with tasks. It’s supposed to get things done. “Paralysis by analysis” is death to its role on earth, so it avoids it by simplifying and reducing courses of action to a few principles, so it can skate through its projects more easily. The need for a few simple principles gives rise to a love of abstraction.
The problem is, those principles are not accurate. They don’t reflect full truth. They might be useful and they might even be necessary for day-to-day living, but they aren’t true and have a high probability of obscuring truth.
Writers like Crèvecoeur are dominated by abstraction. They like to set up a few ideas and let their prose flow from them, like the idea that the age of the proletariat will usher in a new era. If reality conflicts with the ideal, the reality must be suppressed.
The result: the quality of the prose gets suppressed because truth, goodness, and beauty rely on one another. If something isn’t true, it won’t be good and if it’s not good, it won’t be beautiful. At best, it’ll be cute or clever or romantic, but never true, good, and beautiful.
But people who share the writer’s left-hemispheric abstraction will love it. That’s why the reforming classes like Godwin and Shelley loved it. They, too, were left hemispherics (though the later Godwin might have let his right hemisphere intrude a bit . . . I’d love to explore that later). When they read prose that flowed from their ideals, they loved it, no matter if the prose was, in application, absurd.
Postscript
The link below takes you to a post at my personal blog where I gather quotes and other analyses to support this essay. You don’t need an account to view it.
He was apparently just repeating what many others were saying in the USSR at that time, but he agreed with it. The Nazis were well-known buggers, a point their gnostic enemies in the USSR liked to highlight.
There were a few great Soviet writers, I suppose, at least there was Victor Serge, but he spoke out against Stalin (truth will out, no matter how radicalized), was sent to the USSR’s central Asia region, and was eventually allowed to leave the USSR altogether in 1936. He ended up in Mexico City where he died in a taxi cab in 1947. Odd death? Not really. We now know there was a cell of Mexico City cab drivers under Soviet discipline who specialized in liquidations, and Serge was almost certainly one of its victims. [Humorous aside: The New York Review of Books, fellow traveler to the end, merely says he died in Mexico City.]
It would be more accurate to say that reality was secondary to abstraction. Lawrence points out that Crèvecœur could write good, even beautiful and true, prose when he focused on nature’s details (wrote with “blood-knowledge” . . . knowledge that is personal and embodied . . . not abstracted), but those details always ended up getting prostituted to Crèvecœur’s abstract ideal of Sweet and Pure Nature. That’s why Lawrence concludes that Crèvecœur’s letters are “all a swindle.”