[ilds] the quartet & US politics

[Charles Sligh]

I am uncertain about the precise politics of the blogger. 

But his caveat regarding reductive and optimistic readings of the 
/Quartet/ seems valuable.  

If our listserv subscribers have other instances in which Durrell's 
writings have been borrowed for contemporary moralizing, please do share.

C&c.

***

>  Jim Leach's tension
>> http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/02/025662.php
>
> February 23, 2010 Posted by Scott at 6:32 AM
>
> While the National Endowment for the Arts has attracted attention as a 
> propaganda arm of the Obama administration, the National Endowment for 
> the Humanities has so far escaped such attention. The new chairman of 
> the NEH is Republican former Rep. Jim Leach. Leach supported Obama 
> during the campaign and must have had dreams of office higher than the 
> chairmanship of the NEH. The NEH itself is of course supposed to be 
> nonpartisan. In his capacity as chairman, however, Leach has become 
> something of an Obama mouthpiece .
>
> In a speech this past September titled "Bridging cultures: NEH and the 
> Muslim world," Leach explained his support for Obama during the 
> campaign: "[O]n a personal note, I chose as a Republican to endorse 
> Barack Obama for President because I was convinced that never in 
> American history was the case for a course change more compelling in 
> international relations and because I had become convinced that seldom 
> had a more natural humanist been chosen to represent his party for 
> national office." And that wasn't all!
>
> The anthropologist and National Association of Scholars president 
> Peter Wood raised a red flag concerning Leach's "Bridging cultures" 
> speech here. Professor Wood says just about everything that needs to 
> be said about it.
>
> Leach is making himself something of a schoolmarm, both pompous and 
> insipid, while continuing to curry favor with the Obama 
> administration. Earlier this month Leach returned to the themes of his 
> "Bridging cultures" speech in "The tension between speaking and 
> listening," at the Wayne State University Law School. Matthew Franck 
> concisely disposes of Leach's speech here.
>
> In the speech Leach opines at Castroite length on politics, civiilty, 
> the Supreme Court, and just about everything but the humanities. 
> Unlike any previous chairman of the NEH, Democrat or Republican, Leach 
> is turning the NEH into a political soapbox.
>
> Leach purports to advocate civility while instructing various 
> political actors in the deficiencies of their discourse, but Leach's 
> contribution has its own deficiencies. Like "Bridging cultures," the 
> speech is miserably written in a style that might characterized as 
> educated illiterate. The author of the speech badly needs a course in 
> remedial writing.
>
> One finds in both speeches Leach's praise of Lawrence Durrell's highly 
> literary Alexandria Quartet. Would someone who has actually read all 
> four novels of the Alexandria Quartet really say, as Leach did at 
> Wayne State, that "Certain frameworks of thought define rival ideas," 
> or instruct his audience that "The choice for leaders is whether to 
> opt for unifying statesmanship or opportunistic partisanship"? I would 
> like not to think so.
>
> Leach holds the Quartet almost as high in his esteem as he does Obama:
>
>     In a set of four books published half a century ago called the 
> Alexandria Quartet,the British author Lawrence Durrell describes urban 
> life in the ancient Egyptian city Alexandria between the first and 
> second World Wars. In the first book, Durrell spins a story from the 
> singular perspective of one individual. In each subsequent book, he 
> describes the same events from the perspective of others. While the 
> surrounding events are the same, the stories are profoundly different, 
> informed by each narrator's life and circumstances. The moral is that 
> to get a sense of reality it is illuminating to see things from more 
> than one set of eyes. This observation can apply to interactions in a 
> court room or town hall or to the international stage. What America 
> does may seem reasonable from our perspective, but look very different 
> to a European, African, Middle Easterner, or Asian.
>
> Leach's errors describing the Quartet suggest that he himself needs 
> another pair of eyes to get a good perspective on it. It seems to have 
> been a while since Leach actually read the novels, though he may be 
> the first of Durrell's readers to find a moral to the story.
>
> Leach deduces a serious relativism from the novels' experiment with 
> point of view. For a relativistic kind of guy, however, Leach seems 
> awfully sure of himself. One must wonder about Leach's relativistic 
> point of view. Is it exempt from the Leach uncertainty principle? How 
> can he be so sure that he is right, and the point of view of other 
> Americans (including a majority of the Supreme Court in the Citizens 
> United case) wrong? Or is the Leach uncertainty principle the final 
> revelation?
>
> Leach gives no hint of Durrell's exploration of geography, love and 
> sex in the novels. Describing Eve Cohen, the woman who inspired the 
> novels' enigmatic character Justine, Durrell wrote to Henry Miller. 
> Durrell described Cohen as serving up "experience raw - sex life of 
> Arabs, perversions, circumcision, hashish, sweetmeats, removal of the 
> clitoris, cruelty, murder." It's the kind of thing that tends to get 
> lost when you're busy instructing your fellow citizens in "public 
> manners."



-- 
********************************************
Charles L. Sligh
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
charles-sligh at utc.edu
********************************************