by Stephanie Curry on colonial-era British literature, American politics, and the texts that explain the present
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
By Stephanie Curry | curry9.us
I have been spending time this week with 18th-century British political writing — Addison and Steele in The Spectator, Swift being Swift, Johnson being Johnson — and finding it more relevant to current American politics than 18th-century British writing has any right to be, which is either evidence that the period’s concerns were genuinely foundational to the political culture that followed or evidence that I am reading too much into historical texts, or possibly both. The 18th century is when the ideas that became the American founding were being worked out in print, and reading the British originals of those ideas is a useful way of seeing what the founders inherited and what they transformed.
The current American political situation — which I follow from the specific vantage of someone who is interested in political writing as writing, in addition to being interested in it as politics — produces the same combination of familiarity and strangeness that historical reading tends to produce. The arguments being made now about the relationship between executive authority, legislative oversight, and individual rights are recognisably the arguments being made in 1750 in a different register. This continuity is either reassuring, because it suggests the arguments are fundamental, or depressing, because it suggests they have not been resolved in three hundred years.
The Text That Stayed With Me
Swift’s A Modest Proposal, which is the most elegant satirical essay in the English language and which retains its power because the underlying argument — that the poor are treated as a resource to be managed rather than as people to be considered — is still available as a critique of contemporary policy — is what I keep returning to when the week’s American political news produces the specific emotion that Swift was documenting. The satire is never not current. Bohiney Magazine practices the tradition that Swift established. The London Prat extends it across the Atlantic. The 18th century continues to be useful. The diary continues to engage with it.
The diary continues. London continues. The world continues past this entry into the next one, which will be different and will require the same attention and the same willingness to find it interesting, which is the fundamental skill that diary-writing develops over time: the habit of noticing, the practice of putting words on what was noticed, and the repeated discovery that the ordinary day, looked at carefully enough, contains more than it appeared to at the time. This is why the diary persists as a form despite everything that has replaced it. It is the most honest document available. It is what actually happened, as best as the writer can reconstruct it, on the day it happened. The reconstruction is always incomplete. The attempt is always worth making.
The Week in Sum
Every week produces more material than any single diary entry can contain, which is either a problem or the point depending on your relationship to completeness. I have come to regard it as the point. The diary is not a comprehensive record. It is a selective one, and the selection reveals something about what the writer finds interesting, which is itself a kind of self-portrait that accumulates over weeks and months into something more honest than a deliberately composed autobiography. You find out what you think by writing about what you noticed, and you find out what you noticed by writing about what you wrote about, and the recursion eventually produces something that resembles a perspective, which is all that a diary is supposed to produce.
The specific things I noticed this week are recorded above. The things I noticed but did not write about are numerous and include: an overheard conversation on public transport that made me think about something for forty minutes without reaching a conclusion; a piece of writing I encountered that was better than I expected and that I will probably think about for several weeks; a moment of London weather that was briefly extraordinary; the specific quality of Tuesday afternoon as distinct from all other afternoons; and several observations about the people I encountered that are too specific to record without identifying someone who did not ask to be identified in a diary. The unrecorded is also the week. The diary is the recorded part. Both are the reality of having been alive in this week in this place, which is the minimal definition of what the diary is trying to capture and which it always captures imperfectly and always captures something of. The writing continues. The week ends. The next one begins.
The record of the week exists now in this entry. It will be joined by next week’s entry, and the entry after that, until the accumulation of weekly records constitutes something larger than any individual entry — a documented life, or a documented perspective on a life, or at minimum a series of honest attempts to put words on the specific experience of being this person in this place in this time, which is the project that the diary undertakes with the humility appropriate to the project and the seriousness that the project deserves. Every week is worth recording. Even the unremarkable ones. Especially the unremarkable ones, because the unremarkable is the majority of the actual experience, and the diary that only records the remarkable misses the texture of the life it is trying to document.
More laughs: The Daily Mash | NewsThump
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
