stefan collini

Universities feel themselves to be on the defensive all over the world. Where so much discussion of their role turns on questions of funding, it is almost inevitable that the only criterion for the expenditure of ‘public money’ that seems likely to command widespread acceptance is the consumerist one of increased prosperity. This all too easily translates into the philistinism of insisting that the activities carried on in universities need to be justified, perhaps can only be justified, by demonstrating their contribution to the economy. Ultimately, many of the difficulties encountered in making the case for universities derive from a wider climate of unanalysed relativism—I say ‘unanalysed’ because such a position, when made explicit, invariably turns out to be internally inconsistent as well as unliveable. An egalitarian ethos, which is wholly laudable in itself, can generate that kind of ‘who’s to say?’ or ‘that’s just your opinion’ posture which implicitly denies the possibility of reasoned arguments for some things being more worthwhile than others.

This makes it all the more important to emphasize that discussion of what is of interest and importance about universities should not be confined to the topical question of how they are to be funded. This question practically monopolizes public discussion at present, and there is a danger, first, of sliding almost unconsciously into the habit of re-describing intellectual activity entirely in terms of what might be thought to ‘justify public funding’, and second, of becoming unable to throw off a defensive posture, an air of expecting a hostile or unsympathetic reaction to this case. One of the most dispiriting features of the current climate of discussion is the background implication, discernible in the comments of some journalists and politicians, that universities are something of a luxury whose rationale is not likely to survive properly searching scrutiny and that many academics are little better than middle-class welfare-scroungers, indulging their hobbies at public expense. This has been evident in, to take just one example, some of the commentary on the debate over the proposals (in Britain and elsewhere) to assess the quality of research in terms of its economic and social ‘impact’, where it seems simply taken for granted that anyone objecting to these (badly formulated and ill thought-out) proposals must be expressing a complacent sense of entitlement to public funding of their activities whether or not they are of any value. Engagement on these terms is almost bound to be fruitless and is a waste of spirit. We need to start from somewhere else.

One helpful starting point may be to consider what it is that we value and admire about good work in scholarship and science, and then to reflect on the conditions which seem conducive to its achievement. Universities are not, quite, the only places where such work is done, even now, but they unquestionably represent the biggest concentration of such enquiry. It may be that the public perception of universities focuses exclusively on their teaching role, undergraduate teaching above all, seeing them perhaps as bigger and more sophisticated high schools. This role is certainly central, but it is far from being the whole story. Major universities are complex organisms, fostering an extraordinary variety of intellectual, scientific and cultural activity, and the significance and value of much that goes on within them cannot be restricted to a single national framework or to the present generation. They do, of course, have something in common with schools, just as they have something in common with institutes for scientific or medical research, but it is worth remembering that they also have something in common with museums, and galleries and libraries and similar cultural institutions. They have become an important medium—for conserving, understanding, extending and handing on to subsequent generations the intellectual, scientific and artistic heritage of mankind. In thinking about the conditions necessary for their flourishing, we should not, therefore, take too short-term or too purely local a view.

Adopting this wider perspective may also help us become more aware of the limitations of treating economic growth as the overriding test of value. Taking a longer-term view of the history, and indeed the future, of universities encourages us to ask fundamental questions of the goal of ‘contributing to national economic prosperity’. For example, how much prosperity do we need (and who counts as ‘we’)? Is it desirable at any cost?  What is it, in its turn, good for? And so on. Any serious attempt to address these questions will inevitably involve appealing to non-economic values. Most people recognize the standing of such values in their own lives—they do not love their pictures or their children in order to generate a profit any more than they admire a beautiful view or a normal wonder because it increases employment—but, as I have suggested, it has become difficult to appeal to such values in a public sphere whose discourse is chiefly framed by the combination of individualism and relativism. Universities are not just good places in which to undertake such fundamental questioning; they also embody an alternative set of values in their very rationale. Attending to these values may help us remember, amid difficult and distracting circumstances, that we are merely custodians for the present generation of a complex intellectual inheritance which we did not create and which is not ours to destroy.

Stefan Collini is author of That’s Offensive! Criticism, Identity, Respect.

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Books can dull our understanding. But they can also be rays of hope in the gloom—even something as gloomy as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not only are events on the ground grim and depressing, but there is also the dimming of the light brought about by the war of words between the two sides. It is hard to imagine anything more miserable than the desperate, relentless contest of catastrophes: the Shoah suffered by the Jews versus the Palestinian Nakba. But, in the space of two weeks in June this year, two new books, along with the London literary events in which they were featured, rose above the fray.

At the first event, a prestigious annual literary prize was awarded to the author of My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness, the biography of the contemporary Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali. I was present when the chair of the judging panel announced the prize. Saying that all four judges ‘fell in love’ with the book, she explained that the author ‘painfully excavates the truth about how all traces of the Palestinian village of Saffuriyya were erased and replaced by the Israeli village of ‘Tzippori’. In her book, the author introduces her subject thus: ‘Taha was born and grew up in Saffuriyya, a Galilee village that Israel destroyed in the wake of the 1948 war, and most of his poems well up from the hard ground of that setting.’ Citing All That Remains, the reference work in which Wahid Khalidi and a team of researchers set out ‘to chronicle the 418 Palestinian villages that Israel effectively erased in 1948′, she describes her own ‘task’ as ‘similar’. In short, Taha Muhammad Ali, who fled with his family in 1948 and returned to live in Nazareth as one of Israel’s ‘internal refugees’, is a poet of the Nakba, and the book about him a kind of exposé of the Palestinian catastrophe.

Why do I regard this prize-giving event as a ray of hope? Because it broke all the rules about allegiances. The author of the book is Adina Hoffman, an American Jew living in Jerusalem. All the members of the judging panel were Jewish; one of them, the filmmaker Naomi Gryn, is the daughter of Rabbi Hugo Gryn, who survived Auschwitz. The chair of the panel, Anne Karpf, whose Polish-born parents also came through the Nazi Holocaust, wrote the family memoir The War After. Living with the Holocaust. And to cap it all, the prestigious award, the centrepiece of the evening, was the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize 2010.

For similar reasons, the second event, a launch for The Arabs and the Holocaust by Gilbert Achcar, shone in the dark. Achar’s book, subtitled The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, is a study of attitudes within the Arab world towards the other—the Jewish—catastrophe. Writing about this subject is about as safe as walking across a minefield, especially if you yourself come from the Arab world, as Achcar does. But this does not inhibit him in the least. He regards the Holocaust as—literally—an unspeakable crime. ‘What name,’ he asks, ‘should be given a calamity that, from the standpoint of a humanist ethics, will remain forever “unnameable”?’ His ethnic identity does not obscure his judgement that ‘the Jewish genocide surpasses all other twentieth-century genocides in scope.’ Holocaust denial he denounces as ‘the anti-Zionism of fools’, exposing it wherever he finds it in the Arab world.

At the same time, he excoriates the propagandists on the other side who try to tar all Arabs with the same vile brush, implying that deep down they are Nazis. And he seeks to overcome the contest of catastrophes by asserting the link between them: quoting Edward Said, he makes the point that the Jewish tragedy led directly to the Palestinian. This link was symbolised by the launch itself, which was co-sponsored by Arab Media Watch, the Council for Arab-British Understanding and Independent Jewish Voices (IJV).

I spoke for my IJV colleagues from the platform that evening. ‘It is impossible to talk peace’, I said, when the ‘war of narratives’ is raging. Both books—Achcar’s and Hoffman’s—transcend this war. Books can dull our understanding. But these two books are rays of hope in the gloom.

Brian Klug is the author of Offence: The Jewish Case (seagull books 2009)

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author of a book of liszts

12.3.04
Smoking my pipe, I listen to Liszt. He too smoked a pipe.

28.4.04
‘Music is a series of tones that long for and embrace each other, and they must not be fettered through the action of brutally beating time!’
Liszt—marginal note on the full score of St Elizabeth. Walker’s note, Liszt III,153

19.5.04
Wagner and Liszt are two great protaganists here—one such a shit and having to be treated, in spite of that, as a genius—e.g. Bulow’s view of him—the other believing that Génie oblige and that to be an artist is to be, essentially, a priest.
But, of course, they are really two different facets of egotism—the one unaware of other people’s feelings in his obsession with himself and his work; the other all too aware and constantly anxious that people should like and admire him and his work—the rough and the smooth.

19.12.04
My ideas about Liszt still very inchoate. The spokes of a wheel? Short stories based on those connected with him? The humble abbé in the train—traveling 2nd class, with his servant in the 1st class—from Weimar to Munich, from Munich to Vienna, from Vienna to Budapest, from Budapest to Rome and back to Weimar, with excursions all over Germany for music festivals? The lives of his endlessly fertile but unsuccessful grandfather Georg and his talented but frustrated father Adam in the clutches of the Estherházys? The career of a major celebrity, born under a star and wanting, some of the time, to be a saint or even a Christ? Or to transpose the whole thing into our time with imaginary characters partly based on these?

21.12.04
To what end? Surely not just to chronicle Liszt’s life? Or won’t I know why until I have written the book or am writing it? The purpose must lie in the music—which need not be described, cannot be properly described by me—but whose meaning, for Liszt, must be intrinsic to the whole story. When he plays the music of others, with such virtuosity, he is acting as the servant or priest of its meaning, but when he composes his own, which he does from a very early age, he is plucking emotions, he is transporting his listeners into a world of his own creation. Tenderness, nostalgia, love, the transcendental, the heroic, the funeral.
Hungary and nationalism, Rome and religion. Vienna/Paris and concert success. Weimar and administrative power (of a sort) as well as the power of influencing the young. The various festivals and the power of influencing the course of musical history. Leipzig/Dresden and his enemies. His women are supports, mothers or pupils, his children responsibilities and loveable adjuncts, but neither women nor children central to his sense of his destiny. He is insecure, not well rooted, needing constant attention and to some extent flattery, and he never gets what he really wants, which is to be another Beethoven. Why not? Because God has given him incomparable talent as a performer, but not as a composer. His compositions lack depth and absolute originality, both of which he can see in Beethoven and Wagner but cannot find in himself. He can probably see it in Berlioz and Chopin too—in their specific ways—but his is a lighter talent compared to theirs. It touches and leads the feelings but does not transform them. And this he knows very well, because he is not a self-deceiver. Hence the increasing melancholy of his old age. For all his great worldly success and international fame and the adoration of his pupils, he knows he has not succeeded. He has not been as great a man as the star at his birth seemed to foretell. But is this something God-given or God-taken away? Could he have been what he wanted to be?
What if the God-like, Stendhal-like narrator were Liszt himself? Never acknowledging it until his end—looking through the eyes of others, ironic, comedic. Not in the form of some long-lost diary or memoir, but long afterwards, now, through the mind of an ignorant admirer, with only a superficial knowledge of music. And that, I think, answers all the questions. The form and the purpose. Liszt wants the meaning of his life and of all lives, and sets me to reveal it—not the actions and reactions, which he already knows—or most of them—but the meaning, the purpose if there was one, which might be more visible from a century and a half later. I must listen more carefully to his work, because that’s where his heart lies still—the rest is intriguing, fascinating, but incidental. The biography is the outer shell, the clothes, the skin, the appearance, the sound, but what is inside is inside—the music itself, the living organism? Title? The Celebrity or just Celebrity?

25.7.06
Why this addiction to Liszt? The mystery of his music, unfamiliar but powerful, virtuoso but spiritual, largely left out of account, at any rate in Britain, by performers of nineteenth-century music. Why Schumann and Chopin but not Liszt?
Then there is the man himself, so brilliant, so successful, so famous, so handsome, yet somehow now seen only as the old, rather ridiculous Abbé Liszt instead of the young prodigy. And so generous to others, to the victims of floods and famine, but also to individuals, his pupils, his fellow-musicians, especially Wagner and Berlioz.
The there is the way he seems to be at the centre of music-making in the middle of the great period of Romanticism, acquaintance of friend of everybody from Napoleon III to George Eliot and Hans Christian Anderson, from Baudelaire to the Pope. Then there are his women—Caroline de Saint-Cricq, Marie d’Agoult, Princess Carolyn, Agnes Street-Klindworth, La Traviata, Lola Montez, the mad girl who tried to stab him. The there is his relationship, to Wagner, whose father-in-law he became unwillingly. The there is his Hungarian nationalism. Then there is his consistent Catholicism and half-attempt to become a priest. The there is his influence on the music of the future—the Russians as well as Strauss, Busoni, Schönberg. Then there is his contribution to making the artist a noble figure, not just a tradesman, and altering the nature of performances in a more serious direction.
Enough to be going on with?

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english translation forthcoming from seagull books.

The books are quietly standing in tall bookcases. The books are old. Full of words and full of their own importance, they put on a serious air, but ultimately they have nothing to say about most things, these little coffins of bliss, not even between the lines. The dust on the gilt edging says more.

Your first crown on a visible tooth, painful wear on the lumbar vertebra, a sudden hearing loss, without tinnitus yet, and suddenly you’re buying shoes at eight hundred euros and starting to acquire complete editions…At that age other men are dreaming of a Porsche or a Swiss tourbillon watch. And already you’re hearing of the first acquaintances who, either ill or tired of life, are disposing of libraries they’ve spent decades putting together and which are valuable in more than a purely monetary sense—their heirs don’t read, anyway. And you succumb, succumb to the desire for completeness or even status which the magnificient shelves express. You wall yourself in with all the paper bricks and leaf through catalogues while all around the storm-winds are tearing the trees apart. That transience is an essential part of blossoming is a nice phrase but you’d really like to have it bound in leather.

Novalis is all right, but twenty fat volumes of Hermann Hesse—when are you going to read the ten you don’t know yet? Jean-Paul in buckram, a long row and you’re already weary by the time you reach Siebenkäs. A good metre of Wieland, and Heinrich Böll safely gathered in too, a compact reminder to go into him again. But what exactly? And when? Proust in lilac, gold embossed, Proust in a slipcase, and the India paper, as you leaf throug the pages, whispering its tender ‘Too late…’

Still you keep on buying, and the workman who’s fitting an extractor hood over the stove points with his hammer drill at the shelves and spines in the living-room and asks: ‘Are they all genuine?’ — No, not really. Basically they’re the same as the fakes he’s seen in the furniture warehouse, for decoration only, since whenever you want to look something up, you reach for the tattered and torn paperbacks in the second row. In those you can find any paragraph you want almost with your eyes shut, and all the bus tickets, cigarette papers or sweet wrappers between the pages, the dog years, the passages marked with your thumbnail or a pencil twenty or thirty years ago, an autumn leaf with only the delicate veins left, the smell of nicotine, or of the heating or mould—in which flat? at the back of which tenement?—make each one of these books more valuable than the new Complete Works, standing neatly next to each other like rows of up-market townhouses, can ever be.

This or that passage has helped you to live; what’s more, it’s taught you to be aware of living, thus making it richer and you freer. The best demonstration of the truth of the hoary adage that ‘a man who reads twice as much out of life’ is when you come across one of those marked passages again. The widening of eyes, the sharp intake of breath down to the most sensitive fibres of your being seems to repeat itself, even when you changed your mind ages ago or think what is said is banal and you’re touched by your own naivety. They are phrases around which a shimmer of the astonishment or delight still remains, a reflection of your own former purity or youthful ideals, and the way they re-echo within makes you realise how far you have gone and how long it has taken to come to the plain and simple insight that only what is transient can blossom.

Ralf Rothmann. Author of Young Light (Seagull Books 2010) Available here >>>>

Collage by Sunandini Banerjee. More here >>>

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