Into the Open: Reflections on Genius and Modernity by Benjamin Taylor

by Benjamin Taylor

Benjamin Taylor's Into the Open is an inquiry into the deeper meanings of an indispensable modern "genius." What legacy do we invoke when we use it? Taylor answers in an original way, exploring the role of Leonardo da Vinci in the works of Walter Pater, Paul Valery, and Sigmund Freud. Da Vinci becomes an issue for each, Taylor argues, because for each the received idea of genius has ceased to be a romantic certitude or sacred truth and has become a problem. Taking Nietzsche's drastic critique of genius as his control, Taylor assesses the far less programmatic, far more anxious cases of Pater, Valery, and Freud. Whereas Nietzsche sought for and found a way out of romantic humanism, Pater, Valery, and Freud remain troubled, equivocal witnesses to the modern plight. They do not share in Nietzsche's jubilant transvaluating nihilism. They cannot relinquish the idea of genius, hedged about though it is in their works by skepticism. "A myth of genius has been our way of making good the losses our romantic modernity entails," Taylor writes. "A myth of genius has existed to affirm that, among human lives, some have sacramental shape; that, among human lives, some put into abeyance the equation between life and loss....Such is the post-theological, post-metaphysical role we have compelled our geniuses into. They make for us one last claim on the sublime."

Hardcover

First published May 1, 1995

About the author

Benjamin Taylor is the author of a book of essays, Into the Open, and two novels, Tales Out of School, winner of the Harold Ribalow Prize, and The Book of Getting Even, a 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Award Finalist, a 2008 Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year, and a Ferro-Grumley Prize Finalist. In October 2009, The Book of Getting Even appeared as El Libro de la Venganza in Spain, where it was named a best book of the year by El Pais. In November 2010, Viking Press released Saul Bellow: Letters, edited by Taylor. Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, a travel memoir from Marian Wood Books, is scheduled for 2012. Taylor is a graduate of Haverford College and Columbia University where he earned the doctorate in English and comparative literature. He has contributed to magazines including Bookforum, BOMB, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New Leader, The Georgia Review, Raritan, and others. A longtime member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty at The New School, he has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, Bennington College and the Graduate Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia.