Category: Item

From the American Studies program’s George Blaustein, an essay on Joe Biden and the currents of modern grief, in the New Republic:

“I grieve that grief can teach me nothing.” The sentence is Emerson’s, from “Experience,” an essay written in 1844, two years after his own son’s death. How cold it seems, at least at first, as if the primary grief is canceled mathematically out by the secondary grief: Grief has no utility, let us dispense with it. A terrible thought. But this is a misreading, for that secondary grief about grief’s failure is, after all, still its own kind of grief. This is also terrible, but not cold. One feels in it a quiet, spiraling sorrow.

Biden, Emersonian recitations in his childhood mirror notwithstanding, is the un-Emerson: Grief has been central to his education. It has taught him a manner of communion, something like a pre-political or supra-political language. It is esoteric but crosses political divides. What that grief should teach us, as a polity, is harder to say. Biden’s 2020 campaign marshals grief anew, in a manner distinct from the secret, salutary mourning he performed as vice president. Sad ironies abound in this. Grief—unmastered, unprocessed—kept him from running in 2016, though he may very well have won. But now, grief has been refined into purpose (we might call it Biden’s sixth stage of grief) and propels him toward the presidency again.

“The Audacity of Grief,” New Republic, May 16, 2019

Long a monument of 20th-century German literature, Uwe Johnson’s *Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl* has finally been translated into English by Damion Searls, for New York Review Books. Each chapter is a day in the life of Gesine Cresspahl, a German woman living in New York. Running to 1700 pages, the novel tacks between the New York of 1968 and the Germany of the 30s, 40s, and 50s. It is of interest to Americanists, the American Studies program’s George Blaustein writes, not only for its setting but because the novel is a product of transatlantic cultural exchange:

‘‘Like many a modern European writer, Johnson saw America in fiction before he saw it in fact. He translated Herman Melville in East Germany, but Faulkner stirred him most. Jerichow, Mecklenburg, is Johnson’s answer to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County: a setting, both mythic and mundane, for interlocking novels that aspire to a historical reckoning but finally find history unreckonable.”

From fascism through the American and Soviet occupations of Germany, through the upheavals of the 1960s, Johnson’s subject was, ultimately, the West. Anniversaries “is a novel of transatlantic communion: agonized, probably doomed, and yet intimate.”

Read the full essay here: “A New Translation of an Anti-Heroic German Doorstopper of 1968,” New Yorker (November 26, 2018).

 

From our own George Blaustein’s essay in n+1 on the mythologies of John McCain, from the captivity narrative to imperial adventure tale to the hard-boiled prose of Ernest Hemingway:

The interesting thing about McCain was not his politics, which were, by and large, predictably Republican. His sanctimony masked nepotism, self-interest, and political expediency. His concrete political legacy is not the timeless virtue of sacrifice, but catastrophic war. Yet for decades he has remained interesting as a figure of myth, and that mythology invites something like a literary analysis. One is speaking here less of McCain himself than of McCainology. It is a slippery subject; McCainology usually says as much about the McCainologist as it does about McCain. The aura of a unique ordeal followed him from his captivity in Vietnam into politics, and McCain himself (the first and most devoted McCainologist) cultivated that aura. The question of authenticity has been McCainology’s main preoccupation, but it is a red herring. I am asking other questions: if McCain were a fictional character, which he kind of was, then what is his story about? And when was it written? And why did we read it?

Read the essay here: https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/my-fellow-prisoners/