Active vs. Contemplative

Before J.K. Rowling penned the epilogue to the final Harry Potter book, my mom, sister, and I used to hypothesize as to the future careers of the three main characters. Or, rather, of one of the three main characters, since there could be only one with whom we all identified. And the consensus among us for years was that Hermione Granger was surely going to become a professor at Hogwarts.

Of course she would, right? Was she not that instantly recognizable type -- the "smart one" -- to whom each member of my family silently competes to have the best claim as a fictional analogue? And what did the smart ones do, other than become scholars and teachers?

Then book seven came out, and the verdict was in. Hermione did not become a professor at Hogwarts. She was, of all things, a lawyer.

I think we all felt deflated. What a depressing concession to the reality of the academic job market. "I guess everyone's choosing law school over academia these days," I said to my college friends with sadness.

It was a choice so many of us were facing. And at a stage of life in which every possible choice and outcome seems somehow equally terrifying and absurd, judging from the precedent of a fictional character was as good a method as any for determining one's own next steps. (Ultimately, I decided to do neither. I reasoned from the example of Jedis rather than Hogwarts students, and went to divinity school.)

Of course, I don't know why I should have felt so stung by Hermione's rejection of the groves of academe. My fantasy for my own life had never—or at least not for very long— involved becoming a professor.

To be sure, my plan in high school involved me becoming an "intellectual." While I certainly regarded this as a vocation, maybe even as a career, however, I never saw it as one that revolved around me having a "job" per se.

Modeling myself loosely on George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and the like, I assumed that I would drift for a while between various short-term professional commitments on the outskirts of the intelligentsia - bookstore clerk, assistant librarian, freelance journalist, substitute teacher - until the novels that I would eventually start writing became popular enough to put food on the table.

In-between jobs, I would presumably be active in socialist politics and participate in the defining left-wing political events of my era. I'd fight in the Spanish civil war, for instance.

I perhaps hardly need to add that I had a very faulty understanding of just how well my novels would have to sell in order to eventually feed me - especially since I assumed the novels in question would be unreadably dense metafictional tomes accessible only to the elect. But if these books didn't sell —and I sort of hoped they wouldn't, since worldly failure was part of the fantasy—then I could always support myself with "hack work" that I would find spiritually demeaning and an insult to my artistic nature.

It was only in my first year of college, at a school where a future career in the academy would club one over the head if you didn't first bother to contemplate it, that I started to think maybe I ought to get a PhD.

As I began to dimly perceive that it was in fact desirable to have a salary and health insurance, etc. in our society, I decided that working as a tenured faculty member might not be too much of a betrayal of my ideals to stomach. Plus I could be airily contemptuous of it the whole time I was doing it. I assumed it was roughly as easy a career path—and one as amenable to being mocked and treating with scorn and irony in the process—as it appears to be in Lucky Jim.

To discover—further on in college—that getting a tenure-track job in the academic humanities was in  fact difficult as well, and not obviously the more practical choice than earning a living as a bookstore clerk-cum-novelist, was a whole extra dose of reality I was not prepared for.

Then yet another problem began to emerge. In the closing years of college, and then in divinity school, everyone I knew began to tell me that despite the dreadful prospects, I ought to get a PhD in history and go into academia anyway. Given my personality and interests, it was concluded, this was simply the best thing for me.

This, if anything, annoyed me far more than when I had been told to regard the academic career path as foreclosed to me. It was such a betrayal of the Orwell/Koestler program for my life!

The people who urged academia upon me, after all, frequently argued from the observable fact that I was interested in books, literature, and history. And what did people who cared about those things go on to do? Surely, they became scholars and teachers.

This seemed to me to be obviously neglecting or rendering invisible the category of "intellectual" to which Orwell and Koestler belonged, and which I assumed we all—since I did—had available in our minds as one of the possible career paths. Neither of them worked in the academy.

Plus, it seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that if the humanities are to have any value, it has to be because they can play a significant role in informing lives outside the academy. It is true that I care about literature and history. The reason these fields are interesting, however, is not solely—or even primarily—because of the way that ideas within these fields relate to one another; but also because they have something to say about human experience. They must be useful in some way to the active life as well as the contemplative one.

They need to be about something, that is to say—otherwise, what are they, apart from a circular and self-referential game—and why should we study or teach them in the first place?

There is a scene in Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety in which the lackadaisical would-be poet Sid is arguing with his future wife Charity as to whether he ought to get a job (Sid is in the enviably well-heeled position in which this decision comes down to a matter of personal preference).

Sid quotes from one of Yeats' more insufferably twee compositions, the celebrated "Lake Isle of Innisfree," to the effect that he ought to wander off into the wilderness and do more or less nothing, apart from growing bean plants, while he occasionally writes poems.

Charity's response to this is one I can get behind. She asks what materials exactly he would have for his poetry, if he were to shut himself off from human beings and human experience. "You wouldn't have anything to write poems about but beans," she says.

Unhappily for the case I am making in this post, the career path Charity is urging him to take up is one in academia. I suppose everything is relative. And by the standards of quasi-aristocratic New England Brahmins in the first half of the twentieth century, a career on the humanities faculty is one of the more pragmatic, rote, and bureaucratic of the available life options—at least as compared to being a poet-cum-bean grower.

I for one feel that Charity's argument applies just as well to her favored career option of becoming a student and teacher of literature as to becoming a creator of it, however. At some point, must not literature have reference to something other than its own creation, if it is to avoid an infinite regress? Must it not reflect back to us in some way those lives and careers—or those elements of our own lives and careers—that are spent in the "active" realm?

Interestingly, we learn from Ellmann's study of the poet, that Yeats—for all his bean- and bee-keeping fantasies— could just as well have been invoked on the Charity as on the Sid side of the debate describe above. The mature Yeats, after all, once he had finally and unexpectedly had a late marriage and started a family, decided just as suddenly that this was the only proper way for a poet to live. Rather than being a hindrance to creative expression, he decided, forming affective ties in the active sphere of life provides the life experience from which alone poetry and art can be wrung.

Ellmann cites one of Yeats's letters to this effect—written at an early stage of his own career, but resonating preternaturally with the insights of his later years. In it, he argues: "a poet, or even a mystic, becomes a greater power from understanding all the great primary emotions & these one only gets out of going through the common experiences & duties of life."

Of course, in response to this quotation, Sid would be wholly justified in firing back with some Flaubert. As the French master is quoted in Julian Barnes' great quasi-novel Flaubert's Parrot: "You can depict wine, love, women and glory on the condition that you're not a drunkard, a lover, a husband or a private in the ranks. If you participate in life, you don't see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much."

This would be the argument in favor of not experiencing life, in order to better create art.

You will notice that Flaubert favored the side of the question that more readily justified his own approach to life and art. Yeats flip-flopped on the issue, once he suddenly found himself with a wife and kids. Following their lead, I prefer to take the Flaubertian view when it comes to marriage and children (since I have not so far decided to take that path) and the Yeatsian one when it comes to having a job (which I did decide to do that).

Here, then, is my justification for taking Charity's and the mature Yeats' advice on the career front.

It seems to me that the primary interest of literature and history stems from the way in which they reflect back to us the decisions we face in practical moral life. These fields of human cultural production, to remain interesting, must illumine not just themselves, but the domains of politics, ethics, and the quest for a just society.

Over time, I have gradually realized that this is what I had in mind all along, in an inarticulate way, when I modeled my future plans as a teenager on the example of George Orwell. Reading Orwell's essays, one finds that he refers incessantly to books. He does so, however, not in order to make sense of other books. But in order to say something about the times in which he lived.

This is why, by the end of divinity school, Hermione's ultimate choice of career path ceased to be a source of disappointment to me. Rather, it became positively liberating. Wait a minute, a person doesn't have to choose academia after all! One can participate actively in the lifeblood of one's time and place—and all without forfeiting one's claim to be "the smart one"!

Hermione, let us recall, does not become just any lawyer. She becomes a crusading civil rights attorney for the cause of house-elf equality.

In one go, this solves the old riddle so many of us pondered as to why she was in Gryffindor, rather than Ravenclaw— the latter being generally regarded as the house for intellectuals. It was because—intelligent and learned though she was—her calling was not truly in the ivory tower. It was to try to reshape society in the direction of greater justice. And such is surely the most Gryffindorian of vocations!

I am told, to my dismay, that Rowling has in later years said that she herself would be a Ravenclaw, and therefore that Hermione—who is largely a self-projection of the author—probably ought to have been placed in that house as well.

If true, this seems to me one of those plentiful cases in which a creator's subconscious artistic conscience was more on-target than their latest reflective pronouncements. Hermione is obviously a Gryffindor, I believe, as is the author herself.

Rowling, after all, did not become a professor of anything. She worked for a time as a researcher with Amnesty International, before drifting through odd-jobs in an Orwellian fashion. Her childhood hero was Jessica Mitford, meanwhile—a perfectly Orwell-esque choice of role model, since Mitford too was a wandering left-wing journalist and muckraker with a bit part in the Spanish civil war.

Now, plainly as someone who also works for a human rights organization and whose childhood hero was Orwell, I too am a Gryffindor. I find very little support for this case amongst my friends, however. One, who thinks I ought to be in academia, insists I am a Ravenclaw. Another, who just likes to insult me, says I would be in Hufflepuff.

Plainly, though, I am in the same position as Hermione. I am unjustly consigned to other houses than Gryffindor, just because I like to read. Allow me to explain.

If we accept the theory, as I increasingly do, that the Hogwarts houses reflect the division between the four "humours" of medieval Galenic psychology, then I find even more support for my Hermione-(and-therefore-me)-being-in-Gryffindor theory.

According to this theory, Ravenclaw corresponds to the melancholic humour and Gryffindor to the sanguinary. And it is true, in Frances Yates's telling, that there was some support among Renaissance theorists for the notion that melancholia too could lead to a life devoted to social change. While in the middle ages, melancholics —those born under the sign of Saturn—were considered the lowest of the low, Yates tells us that their status was revalued at the hands of the Renaissance thinkers and artists, creating the first traces of the romantic myth of the brooding, saturnine "genius."

While melancholics were often inspired to take up artistic and intellectual pursuits, there was a third kind of inspired melancholia that could yield a career as a prophetic social activist. While all melancholics (read: Ravenclaws) partake primarily of the life of the mind, therefore, some apply their mental gifts to matters of practical justice-making.

Yates quotes the Renaissance magus Cornelius Agrippa to this effect, describing one of the three varieties of inspired melancholia: "thus we see a man suddenly become a philosopher, a physician, or an orator; and of future events they show us what concerns the overthrow of kingdoms and the return of epochs, prophesying the way that the Sybil prophesied to the Romans."

Okay, so if we have to accept that Hermione, by which I mean me, is a Ravenclaw, then it is plainly as this prophetic variety of melancholic in which she can be said to play that role.

Reading Erwin Panofsky's Studies in Iconology, however, I am inclined to return to the more straightforward theory that she is in fact sanguinary and drawn to the active life, albeit in a highly intellectual capacity.

The great art-historian tells us that, according to another scheme of the Renaissance theorists, there were two ways to attain beatitude in earthly life. One, saturnine and melancholic, was to turn oneself toward the contemplation of divine and eternal things. The other, Jovian and sanguinary, was to commit oneself to securing the reign of justice and right relations among one's fellow beings.

In this case, writes Panofsky, "man's Reason, illuminated by his Mind, can be applied to the task of perfecting human life and destiny on earth [...] he practices the moral virtues comprised under the heading of iusticia, and distinguishes himself in the active life; in doing this he emulates the Biblical characters of Leah and Martha and cosmologically attaches himself to Jupiter."

Hermione, you will note, did not choose the life of scholastic contemplation, among these two options. She chose to take an active part in reshaping the world and the social order around her. Can there be any doubt as to which side of the great Sid-and-Charity, Yeats-and-Flaubert, saturnine-and-jovian, melancholic-and-sanguinary debate she has landed? Has she not opted for the active over the contemplative life? Is she not with Yeats and Charity on the side of experience, and with Jupiter on the side of pursuing iusticia in this world -- both for wizards and house-elves alike?

Is she - by which I mean I - not, in fact, and without hesitation, a Gryffindor through and through?