-
About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. On the spirit of poetry in a time of plague by Richard Berengarten
2. More trouble with genre. Markku Nivalainen in conversation with Simon Collings
3. Plum Pudding books: Anthony Howell reviews Michael Hampton and Marius Kociejowski
4. Why I am not a philosopher, or The Annoyances of Philosophy, by Alan Wall.
5. ‘oracle’ and ‘Mary Does Laugh’. By Kate Ashton
6. Of Peace and Strife by W.D. Jackson, illustrated by Alan Dixon. A verse-column
7. J’accuse…injustement, Anthony Howell considers Stephen Glascoe’s account of being falsely accused
8. Passion, framed by silence. Michelene Wandor reviews James Runcie.
9. The Hills and the Desert: Claude Vigée and Edmond Jabès, by Anthony Rudolf.
10. ‘A Way to Dismantle’ and four more poems by Ion Corcos.
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections and Blind Summits
Previously: More below. Scroll down.
New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series, with more than 2,000 items in its archive, is more than ten years old! So, unless you’re reading this in the state pen, you may never catch up, but YOU CAN START HERE: Four short texts by Jeff Friedman | Hacheston Halt by John Matthias | Disinterest and Aesthetics Pt 1/Pt 2 by Tronn Overend | Out of the house and into the business district by Martin Stannard | We need to talk about Vladimir, by Jonathan Gorvett | Two new poems by Fred Johnston | Several dwarves and one pet by Meg Pokrass The wheel in the tree: An appreciation of Penguin Modern Poets 12. By Ian Seed | Wonder Travels: a memoir by Josh Barkan | Five poems from Fire by Jaime Robles | Three instructive texts by Rupert M Loydell | On John Wilkinson’s ‘Wood Circle’, by Rupsa Banerjee | The Ringstead Poems by Peter Robinson. With an afterword by Tom Phillips | From Dialyzing: poetry by Charline Lambert. Translated by John Taylor | The O.E.D Odes by Lea Graham | Demarcation and three more poems, by Pui Ying Wong | What are poets for? Alan Wall on Nathaniel Tarn’s Autoanthropology | Martyrdom. Anthony Howell on the Russian invasion of Ukraine | Bard-think: Anthony O’Hear on teaching with Shakespeare | The Pleasure of Ferocity: A review of Malika Moustadraf’s short stories. By Michelene Wandor | Pastmodern Art. By David Rosenberg | Central Park and three more new poems. By Tim Suermondt | What Is Truth? By Alan Macfarlane | The Beatles: Yeah x 3. Fab books and films reviewed by Alan Wall | The Marriage by Hart’s Crane of Faustus and Helen by John Matthias | Young Wystan by Alan Morrison | Nothing Romantic Here. Desmond Egan reviews Donald Gardner | Parisian Poems, by César Vallejo, translated by César Eduardo Jumpa Sánchez | Two sequences of poems by David Plante, introduced by Anthony Howell | Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Big Noise in the Night: Film commentary by Simon Collings | Gli Ucelli and two more poems by Michael Anania | Interior and three more prose poems by Linda Black | For Britney (or whoever) by Fran Lock | The wages for reading is rage: Reflections on the Book Revolution in Texas. By Christopher Landrum | Selfies by Rupert M Loydell | The Loves of Marina Tsvetaeva by C.D.C. Reeve | My Mother’s Dress Shop by Jeff Friedman | The Bride’s Story. Grimms’ No. 40. An elaboration by W. D. Jackson | Poetry Notes: Early titles for 2022, by Peter Riley | Short Icelandic Fiction: Fresh Perspective (Nýtt sjónarhorn) by Aðalsteinn Emil Aðalsteinsson and The Face and Kaleidoscope by Gyrðir Elíasson | Exercises of memory: Prose poetry by Adam Kosan | Species of light and seven more poems by Mark Vincenz | Two Micro-fictions by Avital Gad-Cykman | Pictures, with Poems: A two-generation collaboration. Photographs by Laura Matthias Bendoly, with poems by John Matthias | In Famagusta, a revisit by Jonathan Gorvett | Shakespeare’s Merchant by Oscar Mandel | Toughs by Anthony Howell | Holding the desert, a sequence of poems by Richard Berengarten | Two pages by Michael Haslam | Contusion not Rind by Peter Larkin | Four poems by Katie Lehman | Blind summits, a sequence of poems with an audio track, by Peter Robinson | The Censor of Art by Samuel Barlow | Small Magazines, and their discontents (as of 1930) by Ezra Pound | Modern Artiques by Robert McAlmon | Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Blavatsky in violet: poetry by Alan Morrison | Everything that is the case: A review of John Matthias’s Some of Her Things by Peter Robinson | Khlystovki by Marina Tsvetaeva, newly translated by Inessa B. Fishbeyn and C. D. C. Reeve | A king and not a king, a poem by W. D. Jackson | Violet, an essay by John Wilkinson :: For much more, please consult our partial archive, below on this page.
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
-
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
Time Out’s New York listings here.
In the New Series
- The Current Principal Articles.
- A note on the Fortnightly’s ‘periodicity’.
- Cookie Policy
- Copyright, print archive & contact information.
- Editorial statement.
- For subscribers: Odd Volumes from The Fortnightly Review.
- Mrs Courtney’s history of The Fortnightly Review.
- Newsletter
- Submission guidelines.
- Support for the World Oral Literature Project.
- The Fortnightly Review’s email list.
- The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.
- The Initial Prospectus of The Fortnightly Review.
- The Trollope Prize.
- The Editors and Contributors.
- An Explanation of the New Series.
- Subscriptions & Commerce.
-
By Roger Berkowitz, Juliet du Boulay, Denis Boyles, Stan Carey, H.R. Haxton, Allen M. Hornblum, Alan Macfarlane, Anthony O’Hear, Andrew Sinclair, Harry Stein, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, and many others. Free access.
· James Thomson [B.V.]
Occ. Notes…
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
.
Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
-
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
.
Prohibition’s ‘original Progressives’.
.
European populism? Departments
Subscribe
0 Comments
Popping the larger question.
A Fortnightly Review of
What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: a Defense
Sherif Girgis, Robert P.George and Ryan Anderson,
Encounter Books, 2012 | pp x + 126 | $15.99 £10.99
By Anthony O’Hear.
It is a human institution – at least, disavowing religious underpinning in their argument, that is the starting point of Girgis, George and Anderson. Of course human institutions and words referring to them cannot be changed at will. But they can be changed, and they do evolve, as the understanding of marriage surely has over cultures and centuries. Moreover how we understand them can be ‘essentially contested’, to use the useful phrase of the philosopher W.B.Gallie. Consider ‘education’, ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, ‘the civil law’, and now, of course, ‘marriage’. And it is no use complaining that with marriage, this wasn’t the case 20 years ago (or whenever). It is now, and with a vengeance, and I doubt that anyone is going to be headed off with a pre-emptive definition, or anything that seems to be relying on a definition.
Actually, once they get down to it, our authors do something quite useful. They outline and analyse two contrasting conceptions of marriage, inviting us to choose between them. One is what they call ‘conjugal marriage’ – roughly the traditional conception, ‘a comprehensive union of purposes’, lifelong, exclusive, involving heterosexual sexual congress, as well as domesticity and union of mind, and in a broad sense directed to procreation. On the other hand there is what Girgis, George and Anderson term (slightly pejoratively perhaps) the revisionist view, where marriage is seen as focusing on and fostering what they call ‘emotional union’. They do not deny that emotional union is or should be part of conjugal marriage, but the difference is that on the revisionist view emotional union is taken to be the essence of the relationship, and as such is far more likely to be seen as defeasible, shifting and temporary.
THE ARGUMENT OF the book is really about the role of the state in all this. In a sense anyone could set up a relationship with a suitable partner in which there was permanent, heterosexual, procreative bonding, or one in which the partners saw what they were doing in terms of close and strong emotional union, encompassing the possibility of homosexual or even a-sexual bonding. Should the state give legal backing to either or both or neither type of relationship under laws relating to what it would term ‘marriage’?
According to Girgis et al., the state should protect conjugal marriage and only conjugal marriage. This is largely because of its role in the production and nurturing of children, conferring on them the benefits of a stable upbringing, a two-parent household with each parent contributing a distinctive role, and protecting the rights of the child. Not only do the children do better in traditional marriages, as is shown by a large number of measures (which are referred to in the book and which of course underline the more general social benefits of marriage), but marriage benefits the parents too: ‘permanently committed to a relationship whose norms are shaped by its aptness for family life, husbands and wives gain insurance against life’s temporary setbacks… Dedicated to their children and to each other, they enjoy the benefits of a sharpened sense of purpose. More vigorously sowing in work, they reap more abundantly its fruits. So the state’s interest in productivity and social order creates an interest in marriage. ‘ And while much of this is conventional, traditional marriage is firmly rooted in the biology (and psychology) of sex, of procreation and of natural sexual complementarity.
By contrast purely emotional unions, as envisaged by civil partnerships and the like, are not rooted in biology, nor are they anchored in the procreation and upbringing of children, or in the social structures which support children. Because of their lack of biological and social underpinning they are in effect protean in nature, sustained only by the emotional bonds between, so to speak, consenting adults, bonds which may just as easily dissolve. Moreover, once marriage is seen primarily in terms of emotional union, it is very hard to put limits on the type of relationship it could encompass. Homosexual pairs, now, as well as heterosexual couples, but why not polyamorous groups of several loving co-habitees, a-sexual partnerships, pairs of widowed sisters or groups of co-habiting celibate monks? And if civil marriages were taken to encompass emotional unions, what interest would the state have in giving them special legal standing (when practically all the relevant benefits apart from state recognition could be secured by private agreements)?
But what if people in the revisionist camp want to have children? More difficult for the conjugal marriage view than deliberately infertile heterosexual marriages is the fact that increasing numbers of homosexual couples are now taking steps to produce children, so quite a lot of the argument about the stability and strength provided by the joint upbringing of children would apply to them too. Is it enough? Is the evasion of the biological involved in such stratagems sufficiently ‘unnatural’ to prevent these arrangements being seen as types of conjugal marriage? As far as I can see, our authors touch on this question only in a footnote late in the book (on page 102), in which they appear to inveigh against any form of artificial reproduction, including presumably IVF for a traditionally married couple. I say appear to, because the discussion is too short to be clear here. At all events this is a serious gap in what is clearly intended to be a comprehensive review of all the arguments pro and con traditional marriage.
What Is Marriage? is indeed useful as a survey of the merits of conjugal marriage, and it certainly shows that the revisionist view can hardly stop at licensing homosexual couples. But there is a sense that at this stage it is all slightly beside the point. In Britain at least revisionism is currently going through on the nod, with barely any of the sort of discussion which has been happening in the USA, and I’m not clear how long resistance can be effective there either in the current political climate. In Britain anyway the homosexual lobby is so powerful in the worlds of politics and entertainment that the campaign is won almost without any effort on the part of that lobby, and they know it. Woe betide anyone who works in the media or local government and dares to appear as ‘homophobic’ (i.e. supporting a privileged position for conjugal marriage).
We can step back and lament (or applaud) the extraordinary transformation in law and opinion over the past two decades, but it has happened, and is happening. What those who value conjugal marriage need to do is not to attempt fruitlessly to turn back this tide; rational argument on their part, when it is even acknowledged, will tend to provoke little more than shrill abuse. What they need to do is to think carefully not just about the merits of conjugal marriage, but about how in their own communities and groups it can be fostered without state support or backing.
♦
Anthony O’Hear is director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, professor of philosophy at the University of Buckingham, a co-editor of The Fortnightly Review, and the editor of Philosophy: The journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. He is the author of The Great Books: A Journey Through 2,500 Years of the West’s Classic Literature among many other books.
More: Mona Caird’s The Morality of Marriage, portions of which first appeared in the Fortnightly Review.
Related
Publication: Saturday, 9 February 2013, at 00:40.
Options: Archive for Anthony O'Hear. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.