#robert archambeau

From finding book titles to unearthing characters, author Robert Archambeau's humor zings in this interview with him!

The Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski once wrote with apparent sympathy of a group of people who believed fervently in their own ideals and disdained those of others, saying: A few years ago I visited the pre-Columbian monuments in Mexico and was lucky enough, while there, to find myself in the company of a well known Mexican writer, thoroughly versed in the history of the Indian peoples of the region. Often in the course of explaining to me the significance of many things I would not have understood without him, he stressed the barbarity of the Spanish soldiers who had ground the Aztec statues into dust and melted down the exquisite gold figurines to strike with the image of the Emperor. I said to him, “you think these people were barbarians; but were they not, perhaps, true Europeans, indeed the last true Europeans? They took their Christian and Latin civilization seriously; and it is because they took it seriously that they saw no reason to safeguard pagan idols; or to bring the curiosity and aesthetic detachment of archeologists into their consideration of things imbued with a different, and therefore hostile religious significance. If we are outraged at their behavior it is because we are indifferent, both to their civilization, and to our own.”

I don’t remember what I said, and that’s not what’s important anyway: what’s important is the aftermath. I was standing rather smugly before an audience at an academic conference where I’d just delivered a paper on a poet of some repute, fielding questions along with the other panelists, when I saw the formidable white mane of C rise above the crowd. A scholar whose elegant suits and forceful manner gave him an aura closer to that of a Mafioso than one would have thought possible for a professor of literature, C did not look happy, and he was looking at me. “I find your paper irritating,” he said. “Don’t misunderstand: I liked the other papers more, but didn’t find them interesting enough to be irritating. Come to think of it, I didn’t find your paper interesting either—it’s the nature of my irritation with it that’s interesting.” In the well-crafted spoken paragraphs that followed, C took my paper apart, but he did much more than that: he also disassembled his own reaction to my paper, pulled out the assumptions behind that reaction, held them up to the sunlight and saw what was beautiful and meaningful in those assumptions, and what was narrow and even cruel. It was magnificent. With the possible exception of the time an esteemed English editor took a cricket bat to some of my prose and beat it into a wet pulp from which he then formed a proper essay, C’s takedown of my paper remains my favorite literary chastening. It also showed me something one could do with a text that wasn’t advocacy (it was about as far from advocacy of what I’d said as one could get) and wasn’t simply condemnation either. Nor was it disinterested or neutral explanation, of the sort I’d tried to supply in my essay on Goldsmith, and it certainly wasn’t any sort of pluralistic live-and-let-live move, either. In the encounter with an irritating text, C had taken a step back and seen not only the irksome text in front of him, but seen himself looking at it. It was as if he stood behind himself, looking at the back of his own head. Ekstasis, the ancient Greeks called it—standing outside oneself. It was C’s interpretive ecstasy, and we watched in wonder.

No one’s been made a lord for poetry since Tennyson, and no one hoping for riches nowadays would present a poem to a head of state, as Edmund Spenser did—successfully—to Elizabeth I. Bourdieu tells us that when the practitioners of an art become the primary decision makers about who gets the (largely symbolic) rewards, we see a phenomenon called “the social aging of art.” This is a process in which one group—generally marginal, young, or both—seeks to discredit those who practice the art differently. One doesn’t compete for money in a commercial market, but for prestige in a symbolic market, and the way to do that isn’t to woo customers, but to discredit the other guys. It’s no accident that the proliferation of manifestos and aesthetic dogmas came about at the moment when complex developments in mass education, publishing, and communications rendered poetry unviable as a market commodity. Freed from external demands—another way of saying “left to fend for themselves”—the poets proliferated styles and frequently looked with disdain at those whose work took a different path than their own.