High-Born: An Essay
Chester Layman
I am nothing, but I could be everything.
--Marx
I.
WHEN I WAS YOUNG I dreamed like many another child of being "high-born." Or at least a child of rich people -- one of my favorite books was the story of an Irish orphan in the Midwest who turns out to have well-to-do ancestry. Freud had taken note of this common childhood fantasy, which he called the family romance. (Hugh Haughton points out that Freud's German word was Roman, more accurately rendered "novel." Children invent their own family novels. But isn't the Novel, in its heart of hearts, a Romance?)
My father was a laborer, and I was one of eight children. To thicken the plot of my own family romance, when I was very young they told me I looked different (they -- these people with whom I was accidentally associated). I was the only one of the bunch who was not dark-haired, and my mother joked that it was a good thing I was born at home, otherwise they would have suspected a mix-up in the hospital. Now, had I been a more imaginative novelist, my mother's joke would have been suspicious, a sign of her nervous guilt, because actually she'd been involved with a mysterious gentleman, etc., an involvement of which my twin sister and I were the offspring! Unfortunately, this delicious thought came to me too late to include in my childhood fantasy. Or maybe it was unconsciously there all along, for my dream was that there had indeed been a mix-up, and I belonged somewhere else.
There is yet a further thickening of the plot: names. The name my parents gave my twin sister, who lived only a few months, was Esther, the biblical queen from lowly origins. And I was recently bemused to discover that my own middle name, Eugene, means “well-born.” (Hence "eugenics.")
II.
Some say that the playwright known as Shakespeare was not the man from Stratford, but an earl in the court of Queen Elizabeth. For their pains the revisionists stand accused of being snobs who prefer to believe that an aristocrat -- a nobleman -- authored the greatest works in English. Never mind that if Shakespeare was indeed the man from Stratford, he showed super-abundant evidence of snobbery. For the plays' leading roles nearly all go to aristocrats, the commoners generally supplying the broad comedy.
Freud was, as it happens, a partisan of this theory that the Earl of Oxford was the author of the Shakespeare plays. The idea was suggested in a book published in 1920; Freud went so far as to write a letter to its author. In his remarkable Moses and Monotheism he included a footnote which slyly alluded to the controversy. This late work of Freud's, to which we'll return, argued that Moses was not born into an enslaved people, but was the child of Egyptian royalty. . . .
Cymbeline, The Tempest, Winter's Tale -- these late Shakespeare plays all feature youths who have grown up as “rustics,” only to find they are the children of royalty. In the end the rustics, fairy-tale-like, turn into princes and princesses. Especially in Winter's Tale one has the impression of the healing of a wound, a mending of the separation between the classes, between the ruled and the rulers, the common and the royal, the poor and the rich, the peasant and the courtier.
In Proust also, with his narrator obsessed by the upper classes, there is a melting of class barriers, by way of erotic affiliation; Michael Sprinker has pointed this out. It is a recurring theme in most cultures; maybe the most famous example in modern English literature is Lady Chatterly's Lover, but we see it as early as, again, the biblical story of Esther; doubtless other cultures have similar tales. Such stories echo the old myths in which humans and gods intermingled.
Is it snobbish to prefer the figure of Shakespeare as an earl? Literature is a snobbish affair; the myths, the ancient epics are all about heroes, queens and kings, gods and goddesses. In the Christian story, the messiah is the descendant of a king, he is the King of the Jews, born, romantically enough, in a stable. Foreign kings come to pay him homage while another king plots his murder; the Nativity story is a story of royalty. (The premise of Robert Graves's fiction King Jesus was that Jesus was actually an illegitimate son of the house of King Herod.) In short, to be educated in most cultures is to be supplied with ample material for building your family romance. To read classic literature is to be a sort of snob, to identify with the higher-ups. When we read Shakespeare, do we not by turns become Hamlet and Cordelia, Orlando and Prince Hal, Macbeth and Julius Caesar?
Nor is it surprising that the oldest stories are about the higher-ups, so-called. For of what does human history since the Stone Age consist? Of a small elite who have been autonomous, who could be "self-determining." The others, that is most of us, toiled just to survive. It’s not surprising that the privilege of the few will be desired by the many. The author of Lady Chatterly has put it succinctly: This has been the cry of humanity since the world began. This is the glamour of kings, the glamour of men who had opportunity to be, who were not under compulsion to do, to serve. This is why kings were chosen heroes, because they were . . . the producers of new life, not servants of necessity, repeating old experiences.
The flip side of the romance is another kind of story, as Walter Benjamin recognized in his dictum about cultural treasures: “They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Was the author of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark a courtier to Queen Elizabeth, supported by the royal coffers? If true, it only puts Benjamin's claim more sharply into focus.
But there are other ancestral memories -- older, deeper than those of hierarchy; memories of the nomadic autonomy of the hunters and gatherers, of an age which lasted far longer than that of princes and priests. An influential wing of anthropology holds that Paleolithic peoples were more egalitarian than we are and worked less than we do: it’s difficult to pull rank on someone who can just leave and go forage elsewhere. This argument adds a new layer to the old notion that “phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny” -- in this case, the relative ease of the Paleolithic age is recapitulated by the play and leisure of childhood. And the childhood fantasy of being from a "higher" class is perhaps a manifestation of that Paleolithic heritage of a classless society. Another case of the return of the repressed.
Did Freud notice the subversive intent of the family romance, the wish of children to get back the autonomy that's rightfully theirs? If I had different parents I could do as I pleased. Born free, children are everywhere in chains. (Children, the last oppressed class.)
In other words, the fantasy of the family romance is a feature of hierarchical civilization -- that is, of class society.
If our distant ancestors lived in a more egalitarian age, we also, in symbiosis with our mothers, knew a golden age just after birth. The mother-infant dyad is the archetype of the Golden Age: surely this is why it’s image is at the heart of the Advent story, and of so much Christian iconography. Children are all high-born: it is what Wordsworth meant when he wrote that we come into the world trailing clouds of glory. And if humankind reverted, in the mists of ancient history, into domination and hierarchy, likewise in each life
shades of the prison house begin to close
upon the growing Boy.
Children are the last oppressed class. Jean-Luc Godard has claimed that children are political prisoners. Paul Goodman, a great defender of children, wrote in the 1960s that given the current family arrangements, "the children . . . are certainly crushed, thwarted, pushed, hurt, and misled by their hostile and doting grown-ups." Elsewhere he noted more tersely, “The inquisition of the elders is continuous and subtle.”
Elias Canetti has prophetically exposed the stings of command that every child undergoes, first at the hands of her parents. With the regal acquisition of speech comes almost simultaneously the injuries of speech-as-command, the stings of the obeyed order. When the child is inflicted with her first command, then the golden age of infancy is truly over, and Law has appeared. The child will grow up to command her own children, in an attempt to rid herself of the stings she carries: so the circle makes another vicious turn. The command, Canetti concluded, "is the most dangerous single element in the social life of mankind. We must have the courage to stand up against it and break it's tyranny."
III.
But the Romantics were working on a breakout plan. Romance, the realm of princelings and queens, heroes and high adventure --
the argent revelry
With plume, tiara, and all rich array
Numerous as shadows haunting faerily
The brain, new stuffed, in youth, with triumphs gay
Of old romance.
Thus Keats, his lines glittering like gems. But at the end of "Eve of St. Agnes," his lovers flee away, away from the argent revelry into the mists, as if into some primordial time -- into time immemorial -- time out of mind. . . .
Wordsworth, witness to the French Revolution. Byron, a freedom fighter in Greece. Hazlitt, partisan of the Good Old Cause of liberation. Blake, standing trial for striking an officer of the King. Shelley, expelled from Oxford for writing an atheist tract. The Romantics acted as if they were all high-born.
Byron: "The king-times are fast finishing; there will be blood shed like water and tears like mist, but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it."
Stendhal: defender in France of Romanticism and Shakespeare, Stendhal confessed that he had aristocratic tastes, though a republican in politics. There is a suggestion in The Red and the Black that the hero, Sorel, is not truly the son of a coarse mill-owner, but the illegitimate son of someone of “higher” birth. In Charterhouse of Parma, the suggestion is reversed (as Richard Howard has it): the hero is not the scion of an aristocratic house, but the bastard son of a French officer. But this reversal is only apparent, for the true aristocrats in Charterhouse are just those French soldiers; and Stendhal's own youthful romance was with that same Napoleonic army, in which he enlisted at seventeen. About that army Marx was to write, a few years after Stendhal's death, “The army was the point d'honneur of the peasants, it was they themselves transformed into heroes, defending their new possessions against the outer world. . . .” And in Stendhal's grand invention The Charterhouse of Parma it was precisely these peasants-turned-heroes who brought back Romance to the people of Italy -- to people who, in the words of the narrator, "had been bored for a hundred years"!
Darwin: there was a Romantic in Charles Darwin, cloaked in the robes of a sober and modest naturalist. What did his theory of evolution do but unite what had been divided by factitious hierarchy: he united humankind and the animal kingdom, fauna and flora, living things and mineral matter and the stars, into one Tree of Life. As if to give body to Wordsworth's vision --
roll’d round in earth's diurnal course
with rocks, and stones, and trees
or to prefigure Whitman’s --
Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.
For it the nebula cohered to an orb,
The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and
deposited it with care.
Darwin helped to heal the wounds of a hierarchical cosmos, so that now even the pebbles are bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh.
And he gave a new life to the ancient belief that our origins lie in the dust. Underlying Darwin's lifelong interest in earthworms, Adam Phillips has suggested in Darwin's Worms, was an interest in upending the old hierarchies, demonstrating that the lowliest of creatures are essential for human sustenance. “Never say higher” Darwin once wrote in the margins of a book, as Phillips notes. If there are no higher powers, then worms can be more worthy of esteem than high-class people; or as Frank Kermode put it: "This is the stuff of a new kind of epic, in which the gods and heroes have been leveled with worms."
These aspects of Darwin’s work are of course obscured by the bleak notions associated with Darwin, so fitting for the culture of capitalism -- “struggle for existence,” “survival of the fittest.” In this culture one can only buy the title to being high-born.
But Darwin still believed in natural laws, above or outside the human. The poets, however, reacted even against the dream of a law-abiding universe, against a world completely amenable to rational explanation and governed by unchanging rules. Prisons, said Blake, are built with stones of Law. For Shelley, "Law pretends to govern the undisciplinable wanderings of passion, to put fetters on the clearest deduction of reason. . . ." Wordsworth called science “a prop for our infirmity.” The Romantics were unimpressed by scientific laws, just as they fretted at rules of convention or the laws of monarchs.
Nowadays even the physicists suggest that the cosmic laws may be mutable. And biologist Rupert Sheldrake, a latter-day Romantic, has suggested that maybe scientists should call the regularities they observe habits of nature.
Late in life, Freud wrote the marvelous speculation, Moses and Monotheism. He suggested that Moses was not by birth a Hebrew, as the book of the Exodus narrates, but an Egyptian of the royal house and an intimate of the pharaoh; and that Moses taught Akhnaton's monotheism to the Hebrews and led them out of their captivity. It was Freud's late-life romance -- “my novel,” he called the book. Moses, liberator of the Hebrews: Freud, liberator of a sleeping humanity. (Maybe with some justice, Harold Bloom has intimated that Freud had hidden reasons for believing that the true Shakespeare was an aristocrat.)
Paul Goodman, in an essay titled “The Golden Age,” suggested that the writing of Moses and Monotheism was something of a return of the repressed, a flower of the relaxation of Freud's old age. For one notable characteristic of the royal house of Egypt, Goodman observed, was that the pharaoh took his sister for wife, setting at naught what Freud elsewhere called "that most maiming wound,” the incest taboo. Then to put Moses in that royal line, to make him a royal Egyptian unscarred by that taboo, was to hark back to a Golden Age. In the romance that is Moses and Monotheism, Freud perhaps tapped his own unconscious memory of an epoch that did not know the wounds of class civilization.
IV.
There are no higher powers. The powers are within us; or we are in power, like royalty. We are in Marx's words, "inhaling and exhaling all the powers of nature."
Who are the historical agents of the return of the lost primeval autonomy, of the “emancipatory narrative?” They are the free-thinkers, the utopians, the subversives, the rebels, the anarchists and communists, the romantic revolutionaries. The marching crowds, the shout in the the street, the poets and dreamers. The great modern romance, the family romance of humankind, is the romance of utopia, resonant with a deep ancestral wish to heal the maiming wounds of class civilization. We wait, bored for thousands of years, for deliverance.
Man petrifies and darkens in the distances he has created. He drags at the burden of them, but cannot move. He forgets that it is self-inflicted, and longs for liberation. But how, alone, can he free himself?
--Canetti
What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class . . . is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour.
--Badiou
Chester Layman lives and works in Brooklyn.
