Politics, Literature, and Film in Conversation

Politics, Literature, and Film in Conversation. Matthew Dinan, Paul E. Kirkland, Denise Schaeffer, and Natalie Fuehrer Taylor. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021.

Dialogue, even if contrived and clunky, involves partners who freely, though not necessarily wittingly, enter and exit a discussion. The effects of one or even prolonged dialogues on a person or character are somewhat unpredictable. It could not be otherwise as dialogue is a space of human freedom, one in which the very proof of that freedom is the characters’ ability to make a deliberate decision to err, harm him- or herself, or become a pariah. Dostoevsky reveals this truth within the typically solipsistic whine of the impeccably designed Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky who refuses to accept the undeniable truth of the utterly banal comment that we are not wiser than all other people because doing so would suppose that those who are more wise are more “right” (correct) and  “suppose I am mistaken, but do I not have my all-human, all-time, and supreme right of free conscience? Do I not have the right not to be a bigot and a fanatic if I choose? …” (Demons, I, 2, IV, 61). A similar freedom is on display in the Platonic oeuvre as a multiplicity of characters appear briefly, all too briefly, or not at all, to understand the various things that Socrates attempts to reveal. Plato’s dialogues and Socrates’ attempts would hardly have captured attention and provoked thought over millennia if it was predetermined that Alcibiades, Menexenus, Glaucon, and Adeimantus would learn the correct lesson from the dialogic encounter. Their encounters are characterized by freedom which extends even to Socrates who tells Alcibiades that a proposed dialogic course for Alcibiades and him will benefit them both (Symposium 127e). Dialogues with Alcibiades (yes, that Alcibiades!) will render Socrates better off!

Political theorists are more likely than other students of politics to find, develop, and be satisfied with the articulation of difficult questions and, although there is no paucity of questions that can be asked about Plato and his writings, most teachers of Plato will at some point ask themselves, why there was so little learning evidenced by those who seem to have come together (synousia– see Theages) with Socrates (Plato offers some responses in the Seventh Letter). Such a question is fair game in the case of other theorists (Marx from Hegel, Arendt from Heidegger, or even Aristotle from Plato). A Festschrift offers an opportunity to demonstrate what people in a field, usually former students, have learned as a result of the person, teaching, and scholarship of a notable professor.  Matthew D. Dinan, Paul E. Kirkland, Denise Schaeffer, and Natlai Fuehrer Taylor’s Politics, Literature, and Film in Conversation, organized by the former students of Mary Pollingue Nichols, is an enjoyable read, an excellent collection of essays, and a tribute to the import of Nichols’ contributions to political theory and theoretical engagement with literature. Although many Festschrift directly engage with the work of the scholar honored (X’s theory and Y, A’s interpretation of the role of free will in B, why P’s critique of Q is still relevant or must be applied today), it may also do so less directly and this is the path taken by the twelve substantive chapters in this volume. In fact, the decision not to make explicit the influence of Nichols demonstrates the contributors’ respect for her appreciation of dialogue and freedom.

Political Theory and Literature

In his contribution to the volume, Kenneth DeLuca writes“[h]owever, given the conventional character of political life, given its necessary dependence on institutions and laws as well as habits and opinions and the myriad ways these intermingle, in political life an aggrieved citizen can always trace an effect to a cause. The difficulty lies in determining intentionality” (97-98). The two sentences are remarkable in their synoptic and searching character and ruminating upon them, it is hard not to recoil against professionalizing forces which encourage reading for the purpose of knowing what DeLuca argues and why, instead of enjoying and understanding the work that DeLuca has produced (how he got there, what afterlife such thoughts will bring). Scott (2016)^[1] argues that the study of literature in politics allows political scientists to move away from an excessively mechanistic understanding of social science, a concern that remained a driving force in the lifelong academic project of Eric Voegelin. While social science approaches aim to systematize and de-personalize or de-particularize in their nomotheticism, humanities-based approached fill and draw out the personal and particular of events, in the process drawing understanding of the events and contributing to a different sort of universality.

Amato^[2] offers an apologia for her reading of American literature because “American novelists have offered us insights about the prospects for happiness in a liberal regime and the difficulties we face in attaining it” (Amato 2018, 2) and Scott, among other things, explores how literature shows the very limits of politics, how rationality is not enough, and the importance of imagination, particularly imagination in conversation (Scott 2016, xiv). If literature, or good literature, aims at understanding some form of beauty, good, and truth, or the inability to arrive at such, its exploration can ill be ignored by students of politics, something that was lost neither on Plato or so many contributors to the canon, something to which the life work of Mary Nichols makes very clear.

Chapters 1—12

Stephen Block and Patrick Cain (chapter 1) note that it is curious that Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics identifies phylia (translated as ‘friendship,’ though the word conveys ‘fellowship’ and ‘love’ as well) as a virtue (Book II) and does not even give it a proper name in his descriptive catalogue of other virtues (courage, liberality, great-souledness, and so on, Book IV) only to dedicate two books (VIII and IX) to phylia (one more than justice), and insist that phylia is greater than justice (1155a23-27). Block and Cain argue that the survey of other virtues was a necessary detour to show how the good makes people aware of their need for others and their need to stand outside themselves in order to develop phylia. Daniel J. Mahoney takes up the relationship between solitude and unexpected friendship in Charles de Gaulle as a case of a man caught “between greatness and the requirements of civility” (35), tempered with a Christian vision of human dignity. Lisa Pace Vatter (Chapter 3) examines love and friendship in the relationships between the principal characters in Henry James’ The Bostonians. She employs Aristotle’s famous categories of pleasure, utility, and virtue friendship and finds, perhaps unexpectedly, that there was indeed promise for virtue friendship in the relationships between Olive and Verena and between Basil and Verena. Ann Ward and Lee Ward (Chapter 4) also look at love and friendship but here it is through two films (Whit Stillman’s Barcelona and Woody Allen’s Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona) which are depicted as male/Cold War and female/post-Cold War explorations of themes of love and friendship in which the political history and transitions in Catalonia loom large.

DeLuca’s aforementioned contribution (Chapter 5) shows how Socrates attempted to accommodate Glaucon’s primacy of courage and Adeimantus’ preference for moderation as a lead into an analysis of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Julius Caesar where the inability to bring together these two themes proves disastrous. Echoing Mahoney’s earlier linkage of DeGaulle to classical and Christian themes, Paul E. Kirkland (Chapter 6) shows how the dream sequence in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is an attempt at “founding a new Rome, one that displaces the ancient Rome and the Church’s Rome with something that appears to be ‘altogether new’” (105). In Chapter 7, Germaine Paulo Walsh provides a fascinating and far-ranging analysis of J.R.R. Tolkien’s sense of the role of art, the author, and the role of progress viewed through analytical categories set up by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, primarily in his Nobel Lecture. The two authors display suspicion of the assumption of the possibility of progress and perfection in the modern age, while also highlighting the seriousness and consequences of an author’s responsibility and content (that faerie stories, for example, are not escapist but necessary expressions of a necessary erotic turn towards the transcendental).

Carl Eric Scott (Chapter 8) perceptively examines how Metropolitan, Last Days of Disco, and Barcelona offer an historical lens of changes in America from a culture where social dances were prevalent, to their decline and failed revival, to similarly failed effort to revive social dances once more. Like Walsh, Denise Schaeffer (Chapter 9) reads one artist through another, this time examining themes of history, tragedy, and rebellion in Camus’ adaptation for stage of William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun. This sets up a particularly interesting exploration of Camus thoughts on a range of subjects and prepares the readers for Natalie Fuehrer Taylor’s brilliantly titled “A Vindication of Novels: Jane Austen’s Conversation with Mary Wollstonecraft’ (Chapter 10). In this essay, Taylor sets out some of the reasons for Wollstonecraft’s contempt for novels, particularly in terms of how they treat women (their desires, expectations, and so on), and then demonstrates how Austen’s Persuasion not only raises these very issues but offers, through the rise of the naval officer and changes in the aristocracy, the very possibility for the kind of relationship in freedom and equality that Wollstonecraft had imagined. Like Amato (2018), Taylor uses literary characters and plots to show that which was politically desirable but perhaps largely discounted as impossible. If Taylor problematizes the problematique Wollstonecraft identified of love and friendship between husband and wife, Sara MacDonald (Chapter 11) examines the shift from classical towards Christian accounts of love focusing on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and its lead, Leontes. Stephen Sims’ Chapter 12 returns the reader to the classical world and Aristotle in particular. Sims highlights Aristotle’s apologia of poetry in the Poetics as contributing to his teaching of “equity and prudence, deliberation and choice” (211) which are so central in his Ethics and, of course, living an eudaemonic life.

But Where is Nichols?

It is hard for a student of political thought not to imagine that the eudaemonic life, in some way, involves the reading of the very type of essays contained in this volume. They raise interesting questions about the text and society, examine a diverse body of authors (and directors) and texts, and do so through thought-provoking explorations. But if this is a Festschrift, where is Nichols? There is, of course, an introduction in which Dinan and Schaeffer warmly discuss Nichols and her scholarship. But if the reader assumed that after introducing Nichols’ major publications, future chapters would directly engage with them, the reader would certainly be disappointed. Of the 12 chapters, only six reference her directly, and only two include more than one reference to her scholarship. Dinan and Schaeffer comment on Nichols’ Citizens and Statesmen, that “we find an Aristotle whose claims are invitations to thought, not dogmatic assertions… Nichols demonstrates that Aristotle’s Politics is itself a work of statesmanship, designed to gently loosen strong assumptions about the inferiority of women and slaves” (3). In this volume, Nichols’ students have followed her in presenting tempting invitations which challenge some of the most traditional assumptions of what political science is and what political scientists do. Rather than having a failsafe system and model which explains everything (where the author takes “total responsibility” in Solzhenitsyn’s terms), the authors have followed Solzhenitsyn’s preferred mode, which involves less control, more humility, and, ultimately, is “graver and more demanding still” (from the Harvard Address, cited in Walsh 123). The reader is left to discover the many ways in which Nichols’ is honored. That the editors and authors trust the reader to do so seems a proper way of honoring Nichols’ scholarship and career.

Notes

^[1] Scott, Kyle, 2016. The Limits of Politics: Making the Case for Literature in Political Analysis, Lanham: Lexington Books.

^[2] Amato, Elizabeth S. 2018. The Pursuit of Happiness and the American Regime: Political Theory in Literature. Lanham: Lexington Books.

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