Notes to Literature

Passionate love relentlessly twists a cord
under my heart and spreads deep mist on my eyes,
stealing the unguarded brains from my head.

— Archilocus (6BC), Aphrodite Is Censured

Was there a "Machiavellian moment”? And, if so, when or what was it?

The question invokes the hugely influential work of J.G.A. Pocock. He proposed such a moment while maintaining that it could only be selectively and thematically defined (across three centuries and three inter-related categories of thought — virtue, fortune and corruption). Essentially, Pocock points us to an “enduring pattern” of secular political self-consciousness and republicanism that oversees the transformation of medieval libertates (liberties) into the liberalism of early modern capitalism. As an ungentle alternative, we have Perry Anderson’s analysis: Machiavelli’s failure to grasp the actual socio-political characteristics of the new centralised States in Spain and France resulted in “unseeing empiricism” and the “banal recipes of deceit and ferocity,” which we now all know as Machiavellianism.

This, of course, is only the tail end of many centuries of disagreement over how to interpret Machiavelli's work; but I enjoy setting up the debate for new students in this way. I'm pleased to be doing so again this week with the NL Early Modern Political Theory course.

Why not join us??

She had not seen him since the day he stigmatised work as the end of them both, and now she came creeping upon him in the dark to execute a fake jossy's sixpenny writ to success and prosperity. He would be thinking of her as a Fury coming to carry him off, or even as a tipstaff with warrant to distrain. Yet it was not she, but Love, that was the bailiff. She was but the bumbailiff. This discrimination gave her such comfort that she sat down on the stair-head, in the pitch darkness excluding the usual auspices. How different it had been on the riverside, when the barges had waved, the funnel bowed, the tug and barge sung, yes to her. Or had they meant no? The distinction was so nice. What difference, for example, would it make now, whether she went on up the stairs to Murphy or back down them into the mew? The difference between her way of destroying them both, according to him, and his way, according to her. The gentle passion.

-- Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

Still there is a genuine mystery in art, and a real place for wonder. In Sartor Resartus Carlyle distinguishes extrinsic symbols, like the cross or the national flag, which are without value in themselves but are signs or indicators of something existential, from intrinsic symbols, which include works of art. On this basis we may distinguish two kinds of mystery. ... The mystery of the unknown or unknowable essence is an extrinsic mystery, which involves art only when art is made illustrative of something else, as religious art is to the person concerned primarily with worship. But the intrinsic mystery is that which remains a mystery in itself no matter how fully known it is, and hence is not a mystery separated from what is known. The mystery in the greatness of King Lear or Macbeth comes not from concealment but from revelations, not from something unknown or unknowable in the work, but from something unlimited in it.

-- From Northrop Frye, Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols