Norman O. Brown

Norman Oliver Brown (September 25, 1913, El Oro, Mexico – October 2, 2002, Santa Cruz, California) was an American classicist.

Life

Brown's father was an Anglo-Irish mining engineer. His mother was a Cuban of Alsatian and Cuban origin. He was educated at Clifton College, then Balliol College, Oxford (B.A., M.A., Greats; his tutor was Isaiah Berlin) and the University of Wisconsin–Madison (Ph.D., Classics).

In 1938, Brown married Elizabeth Potter.^[1] During World War II, he worked for the Office of Strategic Services as a specialist on French culture. His supervisor was Carl Schorske, and his colleagues included Herbert Marcuse and Franz Neumann.^[2] His other friends included the historians Christopher Hill and Hayden White as well as the philosopher Stuart Hampshire. At Wesleyan University, he befriended the composer John Cage, an association that proved fruitful to both.^{[3][4][5][6][7]} Brown became a professor of classics at Wesleyan. During Brown's tenure there, Schorske became a professor of history and the two engaged in a mutually beneficial interdisciplinary discourse.^[8]

Works

Brown's commentary on Hesiod's Theogony and his first monograph, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth, showed a Marxist tendency. Brown supported Henry A. Wallace's Progressive Party candidacy for president in 1948.^[1] Following Brown's disenchantment with politics in the wake of the 1948 presidential election, he studied the works of Sigmund Freud. This culminated in his classic 1959 work, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History. The book's fame grew when Norman Podhoretz recommended it to Lionel Trilling.^[9]

Love's Body, published in 1966, examined "the role of erotic love in human history, describing a struggle between eroticism and civilization."^[1] The book was criticized by Herbert Marcuse in "Love Mystified: A Critique of Norman O. Brown", an article published in February 1967 in Commentary. Brown's "A Reply to Herbert Marcuse" was published by Commentary in March 1967.^[10]

In the late 1960s, following a stay at the University of Rochester, Brown moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz, as professor of humanities, teaching in the Boards of Studies in History of Consciousness and Literature.^[2] He was a highly popular professor, known to friends and students alike as "Nobby". The range of courses he taught, while broadly focused around the themes of poetics, mythology, and psychoanalysis, included classes on Finnegans Wake, Islam, and, with Carl Schorske, Goethe's Faust.

Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, published in 1991, was an anthology that collected many of Brown's later writings. It contained "Dionysus in 1990", an article in which Brown used the work of Georges Bataille, whom he described as a "fellow traveler on the Dionysian path", to develop a post-Marxist critique of political economy.^[11]

In The Challenge of Islam, a collection of lectures given in 1981 and published in 2009, Brown argues that Islam challenges us to make life a work of art. Drawing on Henri Corbin’s The Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, he argues that "Muhammad is the bridge between Christ and Dante and Blake.”^[12]

Personal life

In 1970, Brown was interviewed by Warren Bennis and Sam Keen for Psychology Today. Bennis asked him whether he lived out the vision of polymorphous perversity in his books. He replied, "....I perceive a necessary gap between seeing and being. I would not be able to have said certain things if I had been under the obligation to unify the word and the deed. As it is I can let my words reach out and net impossible things - things that are impossible for me to do. And this is a way of paying the price for saying or seeing things. You will remember that I discovered these things as a late learner. Polymorphous perversity in the literal, physical sense is not the real issue. I don't like the suggestion that polymorphous perversity of the imagination is somehow second-best to literal polymorphous perversity."^[13]

See also

• Ernest Becker

References

Books

• 1947. Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
• 1953. Hesiod, Theogony. Translated and with an introduction by Norman O. Brown. Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill.
• 1959. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
• 1966. Love's Body. New York: Random House.
• 1973. Closing Time. New York: Random House.
• 1991. Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Secondary literature

• In Memoriam: Norman O. Brown, ed. by Jerome Neu, New Pacific Press, 2007
• David Greenham, The Resurrection of the Body: The Work of Norman O. Brown, Lexington Books, 2006
• Dale Pendell, Walking with Nobby: Conversations with Norman O. Brown, Mercury House, 2008
• The Challenge of Islam—The Prophetic Tradition: Lectures 1981, ed. by Jerome Neu, New Pacific Press, 2009

External links

• A Brief Biography from UCSC's Special Collections
• Article on Nobby in Metroactive