Arguments

Sorry about that detour to the U.S. That's one of the hardest tricks to manage in this writing business -- sticking to the subject, in this case Cambridge, without getting distracted by the meltdown of the democratic experiment.

So, that anonymous letter^[1] objecting to my "Downside"^[2]: I did tell the go-between, a young student called Chris, to convey to the author that I'd be happy to have a conversation with him (or her). And when that produced nothing, I spoke again to Chris to ask him to encourage the author to come forward, because his objection was based on a misreading. Chris asked me to explain and I did. I assume Chris passed it along, but I never heard anything more from the author.

Anyway, that author -- just like Sarah Ormrod, Fred Parker, and everyone else who read the essay -- had made no attempt to take issue with any of the specific criticisms I'd made of the plenary lectures. What had mainly stirred my anonymous correspondent's passion was the tiny portion of the essay which, in his faulty reading, reflected negatively on himself; namely, the parenthetical remark in this passage:

This is generally supposed to be a non-credit program (although it turns out, nevertheless, that some students are in class for no other purpose than credentials). Most of us, presumably, have been drawn to Cambridge by the promise of literature, which gives pleasure. Does it make sense that LitCrit, which never gives pleasure, is being dispensed to us?

My anonymous correspondent's error was one I often ran into at Cambridge -- the confusion between what in math is called the universal quantifier (All mice are white) and the existential quantifier (Some mice are white).

It was plain as day that some mice at Cambridge were white. I can picture one young man I'd always see slouching around with a group of his friends. He had a very happy disposition: his laughter was often heard, even from a distance, and he invariably had a big, wide smile on his face. But when I'd catch sight of him in Alex Lindsay's rather interesting course on the poet John Donne, in the back corner of the classroom where he sat, I could scarcely recognize the glum, blank visage I saw.

It was very hard to overcome the all-versus-some fallacy, even when I had the opportunity to try. In a dinner conversation I had on the topic one night with Eibhlin Murray, our Resident Tutor at St. Catharine's, and Hannah Thronicker, a summer office employee (both just graduated from Cambridge), they both got somewhat peeved and insisted adamantly that some mice were not the least bit white.

I'd simply been trying to convey to them that I hadn't expected, before arriving at Cambridge, that some students would be obtaining academic credit from the program. (Possibly this had been discernible from the program materials and I hadn't read them carefully enough to see it.) In fact, a substantial portion of the students (half?) were undergraduates from other universities, mainly American, that awarded them credit for the Cambridge summer program.

From my point of view, this diminished our program. I'd thought the program was adult "continuing education," where the sole motive for attending was an interest in literature. What I found instead.... Well, I don't want to shock anyone, but it's not always an unadulterated craving for knowledge that drives undergraduates to subject themselves to the rigors of university education (though sometimes it is).

The same all-versus-some fallacy repeatedly manifested itself in discussions of the unreliability of memory, beginning with the lecture by Paton-Walsh in which the issue first arose. How, after all, had she argued that all mice were white? By producing one white mouse: A single uncertain memory from her childhood. In subsequent discussions I had with various people, I was constantly assailed with unassailable examples of questionable memories -- memories from early childhood, memories involving trauma. But even multiple sightings of white mice don't prove that all mice are white. (Nonetheless, as I inquired, everyone did seem to think that all memories of substantial experiences are unreliable, and to be comfortable with Paton-Walsh's assertion that all autobiography is deceit.)

My "Downside" had concluded with the request:

Agree? disagree? I'd like to know what you think. Please tell me in person or email me at the address above.

Besides my anonymous correspondent, exactly two people offered written replies, both of them fellow students in the program.

Motoko wrote "Disagree," offered her personal reasons for studying literature, and concluded:

Therefore basically you must find the answer to your questions by yourself and for yourself. First of all, all you have to do is reading, which will change your viewpoints gradually.

Jacquie, an American university teacher, opened with approving comments on the essay's "very nice flow" and its "cohesive and seriously considered" argument, and noted that many literary academics had made similar objections to "LitCrit." She also acknowledged:

As you know, I find that some of the plenary lectures have "moved me not" (especially with regard to the reliance on handouts at the expense of more engaging audio-visual tools). I see your point.

Then, however, remarking that "the various approaches to literary critical theory can be productive lenses through which to view a text," she took the curious turn of referring me to works I might consult to learn more about literary criticism.

Jacquie's comment did offer one quibble, questioning whether I was using the term "LitCrit" correctly: "Downside" characterized LitCrit as "jargonism, contrived complexity, pointless uglification," whereas in her view, though LitCrit used jargon, it was not itself jargon.

We subsequently met for lunch, and I was prepared to take this up. But, as she professed, it was a quirk of hers to be highly averse to argumentation of any kind. So I resigned myself, and we talked of other things. Once again, I'd failed to find debate.

What after all is argument? This was elucidated long ago in Monty Python's Argument Clinic: It is "a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition." It was also something that was extremely difficult to find. I don't believe Cambridge even offered a clinic where I could buy one.

Was my memory playing tricks on me, or had I not experienced argument ... sometime, somewhen, in the mists of my past? A connected series of statements ... something surpassing Bianka Reinhardt's Fuck off! ... something refined, stimulating, enlightening, uplifting....

Or was I remembering Emma?

At the core of the novel is the sort of thing I'd thought it not impossible to experience at Cambridge. Have such conversations disappeared from the face of the earth?

Emma (the heroine) has become absorbed in the deliciously exciting project of arranging a good match for the young protégé she has adopted -- pretty, 17-year-old Harriet Smith. One day Emma discloses a little secret to her old friend Knightley: Harriet has just declined a marriage proposition made by Robert Martin, a gentleman-farmer.

Knightley is not pleased. Emma's news "was obliged to be repeated before it could be believed; and Mr. Knightley actually looked red with surprise and displeasure." Knightley stands up "in tall indignation" to say:

Then she is a greater simpleton than I ever believed her. What is the foolish girl about?

Emma impetuously counters with a wild distortion of her reasonable friend's position:

Oh! to be sure, it is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage. A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her.

Knightley duly protests; then expresses the hope that Emma is mistaken about Robert's proposal being declined. Emma assures him there is no mistake:

I saw her answer, nothing could be clearer.

Now Knightley understands what happened:

You saw her answer! you wrote her answer too. Emma, this is your doing. You persuaded her to refuse him.

Emma declines to confirm or deny, instead going on the offensive, suggesting that Knightley is the source of the difficulty because he has encouraged an inappropriate proposal:

If I did (which, however, I am far from allowing), I should not feel that I had done wrong. Mr. Martin is a very respectable young man, but I cannot admit him to be Harriet's equal; and am rather surprised indeed that he should have ventured to address her. By your account, he does seem to have had some scruples. It is a pity that they were ever got over.

Knightley exclaims "loudly and warmly":

Not Harriet's equal!

Then "with calmer asperity," he continues:

No, he is not her equal indeed, for he is as much her superior in sense as in situation. Emma, your infatuation about that girl blinds you. What are Harriet Smith's claims, either of birth, nature or education, to any connection higher than Robert Martin? She is the natural daughter of nobody knows whom, with probably no settled provision at all, and certainly no respectable relations. She is known only as parlour-boarder at a common school. She is not a sensible girl, nor a girl of any information. She has been taught nothing useful, and is too young and too simple to have acquired anything herself. At her age she can have no experience, and with her little wit, is not very likely ever to have any that can avail her. She is pretty, and she is good tempered, and that is all.

Emma protests:

What! think a farmer a good match for my intimate friend! I must think your statement by no means fair. You are not just to Harriet's claims. They would be estimated very differently by others as well as myself; Mr. Martin may be the richest of the two, but he is undoubtedly her inferior as to rank in society. The sphere in which she moves is much above his. It would be a degradation.

Knightley reiterates: The girl is illegitimate and ignorant:

A degradation to illegitimacy and ignorance, to be married to a respectable, intelligent gentleman-farmer!

Emma confronts the illegitimacy point:

As to the circumstances of her birth, though in a legal sense she may be called Nobody, it will not hold in common sense. She is not to pay for the offence of others, by being held below the level of those with whom she is brought up. -- There can scarcely be a doubt that her father is a gentleman -- and a gentleman of fortune. Her allowance is very liberal; nothing has ever been grudged for her improvement or comfort. That she is a gentleman's daughter is indubitable to me; that she associates with gentlemen's daughters, no one, I apprehend, will deny. She is superior to Mr. Robert Martin.

Knightley points out that Harriet's parents seem content to do no more for her than leave her in the hands of Mrs. Goddard the schoolmistress (whose school the narrator has previously described as "a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school where girls might be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into a little education without any danger of coming back prodigies"):

Whoever might be her parents, whoever may have had the charge of her, it does not appear to have been any part of their plan to introduce her into what you would call good society. After receiving a very indifferent education she is left in Mrs. Goddard's hands to shift as she can; -- to move, in short, in Mrs. Goddard's line, to have Mrs. Goddard's acquaintance. Her friends evidently thought this good enough for her; and it was good enough.

Knightley then charges that Emma's interference has harmed her friend:

She desired nothing better herself. Till you chose to turn her into a friend, her mind had no distaste for her own set, nor any ambition beyond it. She was as happy as possible with the Martins in the summer. She had no sense of superiority then. If she has it now, you have given it. You have been no friend to Harriet Smith, Emma.

Knightley adds a supplementary point, countering Emma's earlier implication that he himself is guilty of interference by virtue of having persuaded Robert to "get over his scruples" and propose to the socially superior Harriet. Robert's attentions must in fact have been encouraged by Harriet herself:

Robert Martin would never have proceeded so far if he had not felt persuaded of her not being disinclined to him. I know him well. He has too much real feeling to address any woman on the haphazard of selfish passion. And as to conceit, he is the farthest from it of any man I know. Depend upon it he had encouragement.

Emma knows her friend Harriet too well, and is herself too honest, to oppose this claim. "It was most convenient to Emma not to make a direct reply to this assertion," the narrator reports. Instead she takes a different line:

You are a very warm friend to Mr. Martin; but, as I said before, are unjust to Harriet. She is not a clever girl, but she has better sense than you are aware of, and does not deserve to have her understanding spoken of so slightingly. Waiving that point, however, and supposing her to be, as you describe her, only pretty and good-natured, let me tell you that in the degree she possesses them, they are not trivial recommendations to the world in general, for she is in fact a beautiful girl, and must be thought so by ninety-nine people out of a hundred.

Emma knows she has reached firm ground. Laughingly dismissing her male mentor's idealistic notions of what men want, she goes on to pronounce the timeless verities that revolve about girls like Harriet:

Till it appears that men are much more philosophic on the subject of beauty than they are generally supposed, till they do fall in love with well-informed minds instead of handsome faces, a girl with such loveliness as Harriet has a certainty of being admired and sought after, of having the power of choosing from among many, and consequently a claim to be discriminating.

Emma is not yet finished. It is folly to underrate the appeal to men of a girl like Harriet. Noting that her friend possesses not only "loveliness" but also "sweetness of temper and manner," Emma delivers this final blow:

I am very much mistaken if your sex in general would not think such beauty, and such temper, the highest claims a woman could possess.

Knightley is appalled. He believes that the mind, the intellect, are all-important qualities -- in men and women. Yet Emma, who personifies female intelligence, abuses that intelligence to construct terrible, perverse arguments impugning the value of intellect in women. It's almost enough to make him agree that it's best for women to be brainless:

Upon my word, Emma, to hear you abusing the reason you have is almost enough to make me think so too. Better be without sense, than misapply it as you do.

(Above excerpts slightly edited for brevity and modernized usages.)

Now that's an argument!

(Continued....)

[1]     reproduced in my letter #3, Polls versus Thought

[2]     reproduced in my letter #2, The Downside