Saints & Heroes
Here is Kenneth Burke, genius and author of a number of important books. The one that has heroic status for WCD is Language as Symbolic Action. Burke read about ten languages and loved Scholastic philosophy -- see St. Thomas Aquinas, just below -- and belonged to the Communist party for a while and knew Shakespeare by heart and had read everything in the world. He invented structuralism before there were structuralists, and symbolic anthropology before there were symbolic anthropologists, and "sociopoetics" before WCD had begun work on sociopoetics. He is also to be found on every page (so to speak) of WCD's The Epistolary Moment and Poetry and Ideology in Revolutionary Connecticut. The saint on the
right is Thomas Aquinas. The picture is a very bad reproduction,
which is grossly unfair to his friend Carpaccio, who painted
it. St. Thomas was in WCD's estimation one of the great ones, incredibly smart and subtle and also sensible. He was called the Angelic Doctor, because all his writings were dictated to him by the angel whom you may just glimpse in the lower right-hand corner of the picture. He was a bulky saint, doubtless due to his need to stoke up on carbohydrates after a day of subtle scholastic distinctions. When he was a student, the other students called him "the Bull." His teacher, Albertus Magnus, said "Be kind, my young friends. Some day the world will be filled with the roaring of this bull." And so, in a way, it was. This is, you
guessed it, Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the major formative influences
on WCD's thinking. The distinguished
person on the right is Paul Ricoeur, in WCD's estimation one
of the great philosophers of the 20th century. He absorbed Husserlian
phenomenology, the neo-Kantianism of Cassirer and his circle,
French structuralism, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy,
while proceeding with a single powerful
This caricature
is David Levine's wonderful caricature of Northrop Frye as Moses.
The occasion was Frye's publication of his last book, The
Great Code, which is about the Bible in Western Literature.
The book that WCD suggests that his students
This is Jean Mayer,
Master of Dudley House at Harvard when WCD was a member of its
Senior Common Room and administrator of its fellowship program.
Mayer led an amazing life, serving on the staff of Charles de
Gaulle's Free French in the North African and Italian campaigns,
going on to become
adistinguished scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health,
and presiding over Dudley House when it it reached its apogee
in the Harvard house system. He went on to become a truly great
WCD with Jean Mayer at Dudley House graduation, 1975 And finally, here
is Jerrold Katz, who during his indefatigable career as a major
philosopher of language marked out new territory with a theory
of semantic entailment the importance of which, in WCD's opinion,
is still drastically underestimated by those who have not yet
seen to the bottom of Quinean holism. Katz'sThe Metaphysics
of Meaning inspired WCD's The Senses of the Text,
a short book
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Carpaccio
is a true genius. Carpaccio painted the picture of St. George
and the dragon in that little chapel in Venice that WCD can never
remember the name of, but which he urges you not to miss the
next time you are in Venice. You just look pious and the
man at the door lets you in. It doesn't hurt to lay a few
lira on him while you are looking pious, however.
He is today looked
down on by all WCD's analytic philosopher friends, and too many
people are writing novels and making films about him instead
of reading the Blue and Brown books, but the wheel goes round
and eventually he will be recognized as one of the three major
philosophers of the twentieth century. His life was just amazing,
and so was his character and personality, but his way of doing
philosophy was better than either.
philosophical
project that has displayed extraordinary depth and originality
over a nearly 50-year period. When French thought was going through
its "Maoist" period, with the Tel Quel group sucking
up to whomever seemed the gauchist du jour, Ricoeur was virtually
ostracized in his own country. Recently, younger French thinkers
have rediscovered him, and what one recent account calls "la
consecration" of Ricoeur is well under way: "En 1988
sonne l'heure de la consecration lorsque toute une jeune generation
intellectuelle decouvre avec ravissment la force et la coherence
d'une pensee qui s'est constamment enrichie sans cesser de forer
dans la meme direction. Il devient alors pour beaucoup le modele
meme de l'intellectual toujours interpelle par l'evenement et
essayant d'y repondre non en maitre penseur main en maitre a
pense." The person you see talking to Paul Ricoeur
in the picture is the young WCD, sans barbe but full of intellectual
earnestness, for whom daily philosophical discussion with
Ricoeur was a life-changing experience.
This
is Northrop Frye, the Toronto literary theorist who was,
along with Wimsatt and Brooks at Yale and Poirier and Edwards
at Rutgers, the greatest influence on WCD's thinking about literature
and literary studies. He is in total disrepute right now, but
his theoretical thinking was worth whole shelves worth of the
stuff that now passes for "theory" in English departments.
He will come back, and when he does the discipline of literary
studies will have begun anew.
to start with is The Educated Imagination.
It is a "popular" version of Frye's great work The
Anatomy of Criticism -- it was originally a series of lectures
given over the CBC -- and is a good way to begin to understand
what he is doing in the Anatomy.
President of
Tufts University. He was a wise, learned, and altogether extraordinary
man. He left a deep impression on everyone who knew him.
aiming
to ground the theory of determinate meaning in literary interpretation
in Katz's work on semantic entailment.