The Wednesday Society
A podcast that takes a philosophical deep dive into forgotten or intentionally neglected texts.
The Wednesday Society
03 | On Beauty | Beautiful forms
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What might it mean to speak not of a beautiful body, but of the beauty of bodily form? This is the question that Diotima’s second step asks us to answer. And to do so, Dalia and Simon discuss a novel that - as Simon puts it - is one of the best novels he’s read. But he’d never heard of it until this episode
Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy, published in 1807, was a best-seller in its time. It takes on big philosophical questions concerning love, truth, and goodness - but also beauty and its many forms. Corinne takes Oswald (her love interest) on a tour of Italy - and it is a tour of beauty. A gifted improvisational poet, Corinne also challenges the stifling forms that her life and art are forced into, while also finding new ways to express and live in beauty.
The Wednesday Society is hosted by Dalia Nassar, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. In this first season, Dalia discusses beauty in its many forms with concert pianist and writer, Simon Tedeschi.
- Producer: Sarah Allely
- Composer: Russell Stapleton
- Sound engineer: Bethany Stewart
Email us: wednesdaysocietypodcast@gmail.com
This podcast was made possible through the support of the Australian Research Council, recorded at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Media Room at the University of Sydney, and supported by the School of Humanities at the University of Sydney. The Wednesday Society was created on Gadigal, Kuringai, and Dharug country.
Hello, and welcome to the Wednesday Society, a podcast that invites you to slow down, reflect, and discover. And we do this by discussing texts. Texts that aren't all that well known. Maybe they've been forgotten or even intentionally neglected. I'm Dalia Nassar, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. This first season of the Wednesday Society takes you on a journey through experiences of beauty. And we ask the question that so many philosophers, poets, and artists have asked can beauty change our lives? To think through this question with me is a practitioner of beauty. Pianist and writer Simon Tedesky. Hello, Simon.
SPEAKER_00Hi Dahlia. As usual, I'm very flattered by your description of me, but I'm not so sure that you would agree with me if you could hear some of the music that I've been practicing this week. Sergei Prokoviev, 1917.
SPEAKER_01That's I look forward to listening to it. But in this episode, we're gonna discuss something that can sound a bit abstract. The idea of form. Now, in our first episode, we outlined Daitima's ladder from Plato's dialogue, the symposium. In this episode, we're gonna focus on her second step. After the student has experienced the beauty of one body, she says, they're ready to see the beauty of all bodies. They're no longer captivated by just one person and start to recognize something beautiful about the human body itself. And what makes the human body beautiful is its shape or form. But form doesn't only apply to bodies. A tree has form too. Think about the form of the eucalypt and how that differs from the form of an oak. To see form, we have to see how the different parts fit together: roots, trunk, branches, leaves, and so on. And so in Diatima's second step, we're moving from immediate sensation into something more thoughtful. She asks us not only to sense beauty with our eyes or with touch, but to recognize how beauty is shaped. And to help us think about the relationship between form and beauty, we're reading a novel by Swiss French writer and philosopher Germain de Stahl. Her novel is called Coroner Italy. It was a bestseller. But nowadays, most people haven't even heard of it. Stahl was born in 1766 and she died in 1817. She grew up at the center of Enlightenment Paris. Her father was the finance minister of King Louis XVI. Just think about that. But he was dismissed because he was too sympathetic to reforms. Stahl's mother ran one of the biggest salons in Europe at the time, and as a child, Stahl got to hang out with people like Voltaire, Didier, and D'Alembert. Stahl was married off at the age of 19 to a Swedish diplomat. Now listen to this. The marriage arrangements were negotiated at the highest levels of international politics. Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France, brokered the terms of the marriage. And as part of the deal, France gave its colony of Saint-Bart to Sweden. Sweden kept the colony for about a century, but eventually sold it back to France. Now, Stahl published her first book when she was only 21, and she published it under her own name, which I take as a very significant act for a woman writing philosophy at the time. She had a lot of verve, and this continued. After the revolution, she became one of Napoleon's most formidable enemies. She had her own salon by that point, and people gathered around her salon to discuss politics. She was courageous and called Napoleon a tyrant.
SPEAKER_00That's pretty incredible when you consider who Napoleon was, and reminds me immediately of a pianist, just to nerd out for a second, Maria Udiner, who was uh a great pianist during Soviet Russian times, and I think she played Mozart's piano concerto number 23 in A major, and Stalin was very impressed by her performance, and so he uh sent her a uh quantity of ruples, and in response, rather than thank him, Judina wrote a letter saying, I will pray day and night that the Lord forgives your great sins against the people and the country. I mean, you can't make this stop.
SPEAKER_01That's just incredible. A courageous woman, somewhat somewhat like Stal, maybe even more courageous than Stahl, because Stalin is very scary, right? I wonder if Stalin banished her, because Napoleon banished Stahl from Paris for 10 years after she started criticizing him. Now, this very tense relationship between the two of them, between Napoleon and Germans de Stahl, continued. In 1810, she was about to publish her book on German culture and philosophy called On Germany. Now, at that time, France was occupying Germany, and so Napoleon saw Stahl's sympathetic book on German culture and philosophy as an act of treason. His troops pulled in and destroyed all 10,000 copies just as the books were about to leave the printers in Paris.
SPEAKER_00That also really tells you something. I mean, for a book that is relatively neglected today, think about it. If Napoleon is sending in soldiers to destroy your book on German literature and philosophy, you're not a marginal figure, are you?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely not. If you want to learn a little bit more about the sources, influence of 19th-century novelists like George Eliot, George Sand, Emily Bronte, all of those writers were actually reading this novel that we're looking at today and were deeply influenced by it. One author in particular, Elizabeth Browning, said that Corinne is a novel that we need to read every year. So Stahl wrote this novel, Corinne or Italy, some six years into her exile from Paris. And I guess exile is a bit part of the story here. But before we get into that, it might be good to just talk about the overall structure of the novel. What is it about? Who are the main characters?
SPEAKER_00Well, uh first of all, before I answer that, I'd like to thank you, Dahlia, for introducing me to this novel. I've heard of most novels, but this I actually hadn't really heard of. A lot of the time, my experience of novels that are neglected is that there's, you know, often a reason for that. But in this case, it's an a it's absolute uh um robbery of culture that this is not uh that this is not recognized.
SPEAKER_01Um Simon, would you say that everybody should go out and buy a copy of Corinne today?
SPEAKER_00In my opinion, it's a great romantic novel, but even that is imposing a, and yes I'm saying it, form on something that really uh uh is beyond that. It's uh it's a philosophical novel because it deals with big ideas, it's an essay novel, it's form within form, but it's also a much, much more than that and and speaks to many of our present concerns. But uh briefly, uh it is about a very mysterious, brilliant, incandescent and complex woman called Corinne with a mysterious past. A an aristocrat from Scotland called Oswald. Um Oswald is engaged to be married to a British woman. Um and there is uh a French count who is uh I suppose a kind of foil for many uh ideas. And uh then there is uh uh Corinne's Italian admirer. These are the main characters. It's a it's a novel driven more by ideas than by conventional plot. Um but she weaves together so many of the ideas with such uh a tapestry, almost like a fugue, that the ideas themselves take on the qualities of characters. And that brings us to the issue of form.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Well, I just want to say add one more character to this list, which I find really interesting because it comes up in the title. So the title is Corinne or Italy, and there's it's either it's like we have two centers here: there's a woman and there's a country. And they're almost seen as interchangeable. And the setting of most of the novel is Italy. It's mostly in Rome, but they also travel throughout Italy. They go to no Naples, they visit Vesuvius, and they so they see lots of parts of Italy as they go, the countryside of Italy. And just as a footnote, um this book, because it covers so much of the Italian countryside, and it also tells readers so much about Rome and the architecture in Rome, the paintings and so on, the sculpture, the history of Rome, it used to be used as a guidebook before guidebooks actually existed. So if you are a German or a French person and you've never been to Italy, you buy Corinne, you read it in advance as a preparation for going to Italy, and then you use it while you're in Italy. So, okay, we've got this title, Corinne or Italy, we've got a woman and a country, and I just want to add that Italy is itself a kind of character in this book.
SPEAKER_00Look, around this time in history, the idea of lecture novels or philosophical novels or educative novels is not unusual. But uh there's often um uh in my experience a bit of a turgid, uh preachy quality. I mean I'm thinking of s you know, the long philosophical, some people would say diatribes in war and peace. But here, for me, it is done with uh such uh humility, um it's done with a beautiful discursiveness. It's uh and it's uh often the the lectures or I suppose the educative element itself, um the quotation marks are removed completely so that there's almost a proto postmodern uh you know, who is speaking here, who is the eye behind what is being addressed? Is it the the omnipresent uh narrator speaking to the reader, or is this actually still Corinne speaking to Oswald? I find that amazing. And in this sense, it echoes um people I did or who are already playing with things that were trying to uh um to transcend reason and enlightenment reason. So it's not surprising that she was hanging out with all these really clever people, but she was at least as clever as any of these people.
SPEAKER_01That's for sure. So let me just um give uh context for all of this for you were for for what you were saying, Simon, because a big part of the novel is, well, a love story between Corinne and Oswald, who is the Scottish aristocrat. That's a part of the story. It's the main plot, it's the driving kind of force in the novel. But a lot of the other parts of the novel are, like Simon, you were just saying, uh discussions about art, discussions about beauty, discussions about the differences between Italian and English culture and norms, also between Italian and French, and French and English. And so it's about how a big part of the novel, as I see, is about how to have good discussions, discuss things without getting angry or upset with each other, to be able to disagree about whether a work of art is great or not, and still be friendly to one another. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00But intriguingly for me, Oswald does get upset a number of times. And Corinne is, as well as being, I suppose you could say, conventionally smarter than Oswald, Corinne is uh speaking in this uh in this way that allows her to tap into other forms of intelligence, the intelligence of the body, the intelligence of the erotic body, uh, the intelligence of history not simply seen from above, but history from below, but history as in. I find that incredible.
SPEAKER_01Can I just interject there? Because I think that helps us to understand the title a little bit. So Corinne or Italy, you could read it as a novel about a woman named Corinne or a novel about Italy, but you could read it as that Corinne is herself a manifestation of all things Italian. And so she's sort of uh an embodiment, as you would say, of Italian culture, of Italian history in this kind of almost unconscious way. She's so Italian, she just everything Italian just comes out of her without much thought.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. But I would go even further than that and say that Style is such a master that she's also a satirist. Now you'll notice throughout um this novel, if you read it, that there's a lot of things that are very typical of the time. For instance, Corinne will say something like, We Italians do blah blah blah blah blah. Oswald will say, Oh no, no, no, but we English do blah blah blah blah. And they're so desperate to have uh these sort of immutable traits of nationalities, and let's face it, um thanks to the Germanic tribes, it's a lot of a lot of them are really the same people who have scattered throughout Europe. And this is itself the greatest example of nationalism as form imposed on chaos. You know, we we we still do it to a degree, but back then you had this confederation of people who were, you know, Italians, we you know, we like to think in this way and we like to we um we like to write essays in this way, but we don't like to turn it into literary form. And I and this happens so often in this novel that I can't help but feel that Madame de Stael is saying something very integral about uh about language. I mean, how far do you want to take it? It's incredible, about language as um a way of expressing truth, but also a way of diluting truth.
SPEAKER_01So, so many thoughts there. I want to come back to this language thing, but I think you're right that she's satirizing a certain form of nationalism because the French Count, who is kind of like the foil, right, he always uh Count Derfut is his name. He always has to uh say that France is the best, French culture is always the best, the top is like this whole uh sense of French superiority has been around for a long time. And and she's French, and she's mocking that sense of French superiority. And he is like, oh, these Italians, they don't know how to write plays, they don't know how to do painting, we've achieved all of that, and we have society, which is something they don't have, and so on. But he's just so ridiculous, you can't take him seriously. And so there is definitely, as part of this novel, on the one hand, a sense of Corinne being really Italian and struggling with following with the fact that she fell in love with a guy who is Scottish and prizes above all English life and English norms, and that's the struggle, that's the main thing that is driving the love story is how is an Italian woman going to marry an English guy who's gonna make her into a housewife? I'll come back to that in a minute. But then there is this, so there's this Italian versus English thing, but then there's also a a bit of a kind of a a satirical twist to it, like should we take all of this that seriously given how it can be so, so ridiculous?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell So true. And what I think is style is a prophetess in the sense that I mean, a lot of the things that they're saying that the Germans do, or the Italians, whatever that means, because it's so many groups of people, or the French. And it just made me laugh because we say the complete opposite about them now. You know, at one point Oswald is talking about, you know, we English are so melancholy, which is why we have the poetic inspiration and we are the true great poets. But then you could easily turn around and say, okay, but like the Yorkshireman is like cold, choleric. Um you could then say, you know, the London the Londoner is not a passionate poet. You could say anything that you say about the Italian in this case, and I say that in in inverted commas, you could say about any other group of people, and you would be both right and you would be both wrong. And I find it extraordinary, and I'm I'm thinking that um DeStyle is already expressing some kind of fundamental ambivalence she has about uh the nation-state, which at the time was sort of, you know, a quote-unquote progressive idea, which of course turned into something else. But it's so unstable.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's really interesting because she's usually taken as someone who was a big proponent of the nation-state. But in this novel, I think that I think there is ambivalence about the nation-state. Here is something, though, that I find really interesting in the novel. It's when you talked about language, you say um the question then it becomes uh a question of language. And I want to say, so Corinne is an expression of someone who is Italian, very Italian, but we learn later on. We're not gonna give too much away of the novel. So it's a love story, we've said that. It's a love story between Corinne and Oswald. Uh let me just retrace it because I think the first opening meeting between Oswald and Corinne is so important that we just have to put the rest of the book in light of that. So Oswald leaves Scotland. He's a peer of Scotland, we are told. He leaves Scotland and goes to Italy. Upon arriving in Rome, there's this massive procession, and he asks people what's going on, and they say, Oh, the great poetess, Corinne, is going to be crowned today for her poetry in recognition of her genius. And he is standing among the crowd and he sees her walking past in the chariot, and he is just completely taken by her. It's love at first sight. And all of these wonderful attributes, characteristics are described by him. Her uh looks, her eyes, the way she walks, the way she speaks. He just sees her like no other. She is above all human beings. And um she is described by uh him and by the community around her as an improvisateur. So she's a poet who speaks on the fly, so to speak. And people tell her, hey, Corinne, um, can you tell us something about the Roman countryside? Or can you describe Naples for us? And she just sits there and she takes it all in and then she starts to speak. So for her, as a poet and an improvisational poet, uh, language is extremely important. But she's also bilingual because, as we learn later in the book, she is uh able to speak English so well with Oswald because she spent a good chunk of her teenage years in England and she has an English father. So again, this whole thing about uh nations, identity, cultural identity, it's being taken very seriously, interrogated, analyzed. What happens to someone who actually in some ways belongs to two cultures? And Corrain is perhaps an expression of that as well.
SPEAKER_00What I also find incredibly exciting, and perhaps I'm projecting my own feelings onto the novel, but how what else can I do? You know, we talk about beauty throughout history, I think in two very broad ways. We talk about it in Dio Tima's way, and then we talk about it as sort of the autotelic way, beauty that exists for itself, beauty that exists as something that doesn't need any external justification. So there's virtue on one side, and then there's the other on the other side, art for art's sake, for want of a better term. For me, this character, Corinne, encapsulates both. She brings them together. Beauty for her is both constrained and uh magnified by form. She is both uh somebody like Diotima who wants to raise beauty to higher aims, but she's also a prophetess of prehistory. And she's also somebody who I suppose Freud would call a quote unquote elemental woman. Someone who, I mean, what he said was a woman resistant to treatment. But I think we, in our perhaps hopefully more modern interpretation, would say a woman who dispenses with uh all pathologisms and psychologisms and who is more than a woman has been expected to be. And ultimately, this is Oswald's failure. Um, he meets the real woman and he can't handle it. He wants a genius, he wants a model, he wants all of these box-ticking things. You know, we we're still going through this in Tinder age, but when you meet the real person with all their complexities, and when the person loves you back and it's messy, um, she's no longer a performer, she's a human being with all of her fragilities. It's so incredibly touching. We haven't really changed that much.
SPEAKER_01You know, I gotta tell you, Simon, um, this novel is so relevant even today, 200 plus years uh old, and it still speaks. So basically, I want to say anybody who has ever had a bad love affair or a love affair go go wrong should read this novel because it also exposes the dynamics of love affairs when when one of the characters, and here we're gonna say Oswald is the problematic character, can't deal with another person being really an individual. Because he wants her to fit into his fantasies, and he wants her to fit into this English housewife kind of picture he has, and she doesn't. And I just want to um give a quote here because I think it helps us to understand why this is even more relevant. Today than it was then. So one of the big parts, most important, I think, kind of the cornerstones of the novel is a letter that Corinne writes to Oswald to explain who she is, where she comes from. Now, Simon, you just said she's kind of like a prophetess. So she identifies herself with ancient Greek and Roman culture. She takes on the name Corinna Corinne, named after Corinna, the Roman poet who Pindar called his teacher. So there's this teacher-student relationship going on between Corinna and Pindar. Corinne herself teaches a lot to Oswald by showing him around, talking to him about Italian art and culture, and trying to convince him that there is more to it than he might with his English prejudices see. And there's, of course, Diatima in the background. So all of these women are teaching men something about beauty, which I find interesting. So Cor Corinne is her name that she takes up. It's not her original name. And then she writes this letter to Oswald to explain to him who she is. And this is part of the letter. She talks about how she was living in England for a long time. A big chunk of her teenage years is spent in England. And she describes how she felt when she was sitting around an English sitting room or a drawing room or a dining room. Here's Corinne speaking. It seems to me that I could have sent a delicately improved mechanical doll in my place. It would have fulfilled my function in society very well. This is what she takes as be what this is what the English wanted of a young woman. Just to sit there and look and smile and not say a word. And you m I might as well just have sent a mechanical doll in my place. So to add to the relevance of this novel, I'm just thinking about AI-generated companions.
SPEAKER_00What an extraordinary quote. I'm thinking when I read this novel, this is a personal thing, I'll be probably flayed alive for saying this, but I thought of a novel that I didn't enjoy as much as this, and um that's uh a middle march. And I thought of Casabon. And I thought of a man who is, like Oswald, very intelligent, very educated, moreover, in the sort of, you know, the classical Enlightenment tradition, but who is divorced in an erotic and in a tactile sense from the art and from the literature and from the learning that he champions. And it's I mean, we use the word perhaps too much, patriarchy, patriarchal, but I think that there's I wish I had a better word for it, but you know, that uh that learning, but in a very uh cerebral way, but not learning with the body. And uh Corin mind and body are one. And I find that very exciting, but I just couldn't help but think of the social novel as uh exemplified by George Elliott. But this for me is more than a social novel because it's not kind of like um you know making quotation marks with its hands all the time and it's not sort of nodding and it doesn't feel overtly didactic. It feels like you're learning um in the most unintrusive way. Now many would disagree with me, and in fact I have read people who have said that Corinne is too didactic and too preachy. For me, it didn't have that. Whereas I I I find the social novels of this period, especially from England, to be, you know, a little and also Russia a little bit too sermonizing. So I mean that's just an individual thing. But I I find uh the um image of the somewhat, I suppose, uh disembodied uh English stereotypical gentleman of the time to be very, very haunting indeed, um, because it's a recognizable type. Yeah, it's a for instance, even the way Oswald is obsessed with his father's death. His father was his best friend, he cannot get over it. He can't he literally cannot get over it to the point where he cannot allow himself to get to know Corinne because of what his dead father might possibly think about it. He is constrained by form to a pathological degree.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell So this brings us to form. Um I just want to say that that parallel between Kosubon and Oswald, super interesting. So I hadn't thought that um Oswald was as terrible a character as Cosabon, but now that you mention it, I'm like, yeah, Oswald's pretty pretty problematic as a character. He has so much melancholy, he has so many, like he's just you know, one of the the the defining things for him is uh uh country and religion and obedience. It's all about obedience, social norms, fitting into these categories and so on, and that's what he loves about being um a peer of Scotland and being, you know. So so I see all of that. There's something really deadening in him.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Deadening and insipid. And it's not so much like we can morally prognosticate about him, but it's he was also a person of his time, and he's a type of his time.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell So why would you fall in love with this guy?
SPEAKER_00I think also in the same way that uh he he represents a little bit, just a little bit, of the Mr. Darcy type, because she at least thinks of him as strong, silent, noble, um, a little bit of the uh of the soldier variety, but but at the same so she is also a victim very much of the cultural symbols that she lives in. That's it. Um but you know there's a letter he writes to her quite early on, and he is really angry. It's a passive-aggressive uh letter written by, I mean, you could say quite angrily, a bit of a man-child. And he's basically um putting her down and putting all of Italy down. Um and Italy is not just bad, but is basically the site of all of cultural corruption. He can't handle it. And England is this, and you know, and Scotland and these amazing places. And the response Corinne gives him is not one of defensive neurotic fury, but actually of real uh you know, there's actually some truth in what you say, but it's a little bit more nuanced than that. Um So I think she represents both not just an ancient um Grecian uh sort of prophetess figure, but an archaic one, but also a woman of the future. Um she's sort of quite cosmic.
SPEAKER_01I think we should say the future is corin.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the future is corin. Everyone should read this.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So so let's talk about the form, because we've kind of been alluding to this um form in various ways. And so the question is why do we think this is a fitting novel to read when we're talking about second the dietema's second step on the ladder? What do you think, Simon?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Well, in music, which is you know my field obviously, people often talk about form and they often talk about content, you know, in writing as well, and then they talk about technique and they talk about interpretation. These are very difficult because ultimately they're just different expressions of the same thing. You know, technique is a physical manifestation of interpretation. And when you get right, especially to the very highest levels, you can't separate them. In this case, I'm reminded of a term in music called strophic form, which is a form essentially not, you know, sonata form, which is, you know, uh ABA or rondo form, which is A B A C A, but strophic form, which is a repetition of certain ideas almost in a um in an obsessive sense. And so what looks quite rambling and shapeless is actually not. It's extremely deliberate. It is discursive, it is uh it's sinuous, it's circuitous, and yet her control is so extraordinary to the point where the reason it works, where it wouldn't work with another less talented writer, is because of her control of language. And so that's why we can't talk, in my view, about form without talking about what the form is trying to convey. It's it's a Kafka trap. Um no matter you talk about one and the other just immediately pops up.
SPEAKER_01Interesting. So I was thinking about form also in terms of the novel form. This is a novel, but as a novel, and I think the strophic form helps to I I'd have to ask you a little bit more about that. But as a novel, it's also kind of includes all other forms. It's got letters in it, it's got these long monologues, it's got Corinne's poetry, her improvised poetry in it, it's got descriptions of the Italian countryside, and it's got dialogue, right? So it's a novel with the novelistic form, but it's also a novel that includes so many different forms. So I thought that's interesting. We can think about what the relationship between beauty and form from that perspective. Then there's another layer, at least two more layers, I would say. There is the fact of Corinne being a poet and her poetic form is improvisation. And the improvised poem is sort of like an interesting non-form form, or, you know, it's it's it's coming out very spontaneously, and at the same time, it's still has to have some kind of form, otherwise, you can't distinguish it as an improvised poem. It's just going to be plain speech. So it has to have beauty, it has to include certain kinds of ways of speaking, certain mannerisms. This is what Corinne herself says about her subject, her art. One might say that improvisation is like an animated conversation for me. Rather than limit myself to a particular subject, I abandon myself to the impression produced upon me by the mood of my audience. So improvisation or improvised poetry is more of a back and forth. So she has to have to be present, to listen to what her audience are thinking about, to get a sense of their mood before she can begin improvising. And then the improvisation is always going to be receptive. She's speaking, but she's also taking in. Are they getting it or are they not getting it? So that's why she says it's more like an animated conversation. So that's a really interesting form to think about. It just reminds me of the way in which the dialogues about art and poetry, about all these different art forms, about plays, the difference between Italian, French, and English plays, are themselves an interesting form to look at. The form of the conversations that these people have. They are responding and not reacting.
SPEAKER_00I'd like to throw another one in the mix. We think of what a poet is today, and a a poet is somebody who writes in private m very often, someone who is regarded as almost, you know, an intellectual. We think of the T. S. Eliot figure, we think of, you know, Yates. But imagine walking in ancient Greece and saying, you know, I'm a poet. It's completely different. It's like it's like walking up to a to a Sybil and saying, What's your religion? Religion is life. Poetry is life back then. Corinne is poeticizing in a way that the ancient Greeks did it, because poetry is life. She is improvising it. It is not something, you know, she's not working out pentamic form and she's not, you know, working out elix Alexandrian meters like like Pope. But she is poeticizing um in the most intelligent way, which is uh like a Sybil would, which is uh like an an ar an archaic Greek would. And I think that this is also a play on form. What is a poet? What is an Italian poet? What is an English poet? Because I mean Oswald talks about the great English poets. You know, only a country with such and such figures can really produce metaphysical poets. And Corinna's like, yo, yes, but you know, we Italians, we we enjoy life. Um and we may produce a dagger occasionally in a fit of jealousy, but we we enjoy life and otherwise we we don't gossip. You know, I I just all of these categorical statements and it's like uh they're they're trying desperately at this period in history to create categories of emotion to make sense of this burgeoning individualism. And yet somehow she stands above all of this and she uh yeah, she's she's goddess like. Um she she exists in multiplicities. She is uh prefiguring the way we understand identity now, um in our better moments, which is not simply as I am a man walking into a studio and doing a podcast, but I am, you know, I am a man, I am a pianist, I am a Jewish male, I am uh I am a uh man who has a sort of a writer. Yeah. But all of these things um that uh complicate identity. And in this sense, it's extraordinary and just as radical as anything that Diderot was writing.
SPEAKER_01So identity is also a form. Absolutely. And so we have to add that to and and a big part of this novel is about national identity, cultural identity, how you identify and how you're seen by others, because a lot of it is about how uh Oswald sees uh Corinne. It's not it becomes later more about Corinne telling us about herself, but the very first few scenes are about his perceptions of her, and he's sort of like having a hard time making sense of the fact that there's this genius of a woman who is being crowned as the poet of Rome and is like, what? This doesn't make sense. And he's he's having to uh reshape or mangle the categories, the forms that he usually applies. And he can't handle it.
SPEAKER_00And in that sense, I mean these are all just words, but it's an anthropological novel like Herodotus. Um Herodotus's great histories has been regarded too as a novel, but also a large poem. Um and he is the first anthropologist, and here is Corinne um or here is Madame de Stael writing anthropologically about what the Italians do and what the Germans do. I mean, it's it goes to that extraordinary level. Um yeah, I mean it just really defies belief.
SPEAKER_01So I think that ultimately what we could say about the novel in relationship to form is that it is exposing form, it is using form, it is taking form apart, and trying to really think through these various ways in which form plays a part in our lives. And one of the ways you just mentioned, Simon, besides Herodotus, before you talked about uh the anthropology stuff, is the way in which Corinne is like an ancient Greek poetess or an archaic poetess, right? And and her art is just so natural to her that it's almost like asking her, why are you an artist? It's impossible, right, for her to answer. It's like, why are you, if you asked an ancient pagan or a Greek, why are you religious, uh obviously you have that's who you are. And I think that that is really gets to something, and it reminds me um of the play. So at one point in the novel, they put on uh Romeo and Juliet, and she acts as Juliet. And she is so realistic in being Juliet that Oswald stops to be stops being able to r distinguish between reality and fiction, and he starts to think that she's actually suffering. And right? Okay, you can't. Extraordinary.
SPEAKER_00This reminds me of of Harold Bloom, who said that Shakespeare was the invention of the human. And now, of course, everyone rolls their eyes and says that's hyperbole. But uh when I read this novel, I get a similar feeling because as well as uh identifying uh different forms and working with different forms, she is also creating forms as she's going. Only the works at the very pinnacle of greatness do this. They create their own form. And it's almost beyond the capacity of the writer to understand what they're doing. She's she's just uh it's when you see like Miles Davis improvise a trumpet solo. He's not think he's thinking in some c he's not thinking at all. That's why I think this is such a great novel. And she is inventing or perhaps reinventing after Shakespeare and very few others, Dante Shakespeare She's inventing the human, the modern human consciousness of multiplicity and the fact that form is both something we talk about, but we ultimately can't define because where does it end? Form itself is formed.
SPEAKER_01I think that's a really uh great point, Simon. And I think if we want to just put it all together and say, well, how does this novel help us to understand the second step on Diatima's letter about beauty and form? Well, if we think about Corinne and the kinds of things you were just saying about her, she is living form. She is constantly creating this form as an improvising poet. She is fully in her art. She is inseparable from her art, but she is more than anything that we could impose upon her. And the problems that emerge between her and Oswald is as soon as he starts to impose categories on her. She's no longer a genuine individual. She becomes this mechanical doll that he wants her to be, just a foist for his fantasies. And so we could say that what's really interesting about this novel and the kinds of things that it opens up for us thinking about the relationship between beauty and form is that it's in becoming a living form ourselves in the way that Corinne is, in constantly creating form, we start to enact and realize beauty in our lives.
SPEAKER_00Couldn't say it better than that.
SPEAKER_01And it reminds me of something that Didierho had himself said, so you've been talking a lot about Didierho when he talked about great art. It's art that is no longer there because it has become so much part of life.
SPEAKER_00And that's Mozart. Somebody said his technique was so good that it could no longer be seen.
SPEAKER_01That's a perfect place to end. So you've been listening to the Wednesday Society, where we take some time out of our lives to read and think together. I'm Dalia Nassaar, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, and I'm very interested in the question: can beauty change our lives?
SPEAKER_00And I'm Simon Tedeski, pianist and writer.
SPEAKER_01Our producer and editor is Sarah Alley. Russell Stapleton composed our music, and Bethany Stewart is our sound engineer. We would love to hear your thoughts on this discussion and any suggestions for neglected texts. Email us at Wednesdaysocietypodcast at gmail.com. This podcast was made possible through the generous support of the Australian Research Council. We're grateful to record at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Media Room at the University of Sydney and recognize the support of the School of Humanities, also at the University of Sydney. The Wences Society was created on Gadigal, Kuringai, and Darog Country.