Agnes Callard: belief

Transcript context

…He says. Yeah, he says. But it’s part of my view that people can’t aspire to something without knowing that they aspire to it. Aspiration has to be as transparent as it can be, given that you only have a partial grasp, right? So he couldn’t be aspiring to something else that he is unaware of. Stephen — from the very beginning of the novel, he hears the sounds of words, and he’s interested in their sounds and in the way that they connect up to one another, and he’s asking himself questions about his place in the universe. What we see over the course of that is him working towards a kind of self-understanding as an artist, and I think he makes genuine progress there. But you’re right. He doesn’t make a lot of progress with respect to how he treats other people, and that seems to be something that he doesn’t care about that much. And that’s consistent with my view. My view is only that when you aspire to something, that thing has to actually be good. You don’t have to be good in other respects. How much is aspiration the result of a kind of crude mimetic desire as evidenced, say, by Elena and Lila in Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend? It seems to me, for instance, Lila marries Stefano as part of a somewhat misguided aspiration to be successful and accepted in mainstream. Pretty early on in the marriage, he’s basically beating her and raping her. Isn’t this something unhealthy about aspiration? It doesn’t seem there she had ambition. It seems it was aspiration, and she went down this unknown path and did something actually quite desperate.…

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