Slightly sporadic reflections on the end of a long day:
This afternoon I went to a talk and it revealed much more about myself than I'd have liked it to, and probably not at all the way the author intended.
The presentation was a meditation on memory and mourning via a phenomenon the author called "synthetic experience"--that is, the intersection between public, "historical." "ideological" phenomena and the personal, the idiosyncratic, the individual. His case study: a series of letters exchanged between a low level British diplomat and his two teenage daughters in the 18th century. The diplomat, going insane as a result of syphallis (which he had given to his wife, resulting in their legal separation, neither of which the girls knew about), is away somewhere trying to generate (badly) international relations; the girls are at home and write to him about the London scene, particularly the theater. The author's reading of their letters focused on passages describing the new stagings of Shakespeare, and he [the author] reads their descriptions and stated preferences for the plays as projections of the family drama that is actually occuring in this real life economy of domestic desire.
It was a lovely paper, compellingly presented, in a slow, almost entrancing prose. The possibilities were equally interesting--after all, if art does anything at all for real live human beings, there is a good chance that it is a way for us to hedge our own desires and pains, a way to frame our anxieties and talk about the things that are just simply too close for us to otherwise get to. And, as far as a conference presentation goes, I'm all in favor of freedom. After all, standing up in front of a crowd of people for 30 minutes to talk about art and culture shouldn't be an exam, but, instead, it should be a chance to say "here's what I'm thinking about. Here's what I'd suggest. Here's what matters to me right now."
But, at the end of the day, I didn't entirely buy it. I was highly suspicious: what right do you have to read these apparantly passing references to the staging of plays in London (one of the few public sources of entertainment available to that class) as some sort of secret performance, as a deferred and disavowed drama of its own? Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention to the passages he cited, but most of them seemed relatively minor discussions of the plays. It wasn't like one of the daughter's said "you know, Dad, Lear's dillemma really bothered me, and here's why." THAT kind of (in)direct discourse in the letters themselves I would have found far more believable. [Incidentally, one of my Shakespearen friends felt the connections were quite strong. So its possible that my knowledge of the plays was the problem.]
Essentially, I felt as if here was a very clever, and indeed impassioned, parallel being drawn between two disparate texts. It was creative. But that was about it. It didn't tell me anything really new. It didn't tell me much at all.
That is how I initially felt. And I tried to raise these points with my friends, who for the most part liked the talk. I kept saying things about method, about rigor, about the production of knowledge. I admitted there was probably a certain degree of envy coming into my complaints, as a low-level wannabe watching a Yale prof talk about what he wants, however the hell he wants, and getting paid to do it. But I tried to couch my complaints in theoretical and disciplinary problems. At the end of the day, I said, if I handed a paper like that into one of my profs, I'd have by tail handed to me. And rightly so.
But, as I kept talking, and thinking about what he'd done, I had the strange sense of alienation that we get sometimes when we find ourselves arguing vigorously for something we don't entirely believe. It was as if I was watching myself sound like a proper, theoretically justified, "disciplined" scholar, saying all the "right" things (by a certain definition, to be sure) and realizing that all of the things I was saying flew in the face of my larger commitments. Such as, the inextricable connection between emotion and thought. Such as, the impassioned commitment that needs to make one feel as if they are part of what it is they are studying. Such as, the ability (as an earlier speaker had put it) to see one's self as in history but not entirely of it.
In other words, there was so much of how this author was going about pursuing his thought that I agreed with, indeed would celebrate, even if there were certain elements of what he said that I would have done differently, or would like to have seen worked out further, or would have pushed for further definition, further "rigor," blah blah blah. Which isn't trying to drive another wedge, between, say, rhetoric and content. Its just to say that overall there was far more to that paper than my initial criteria of evaluation had taken into account.
And that was when, in my state of profound self-division, that I realized his work was far more abitious than I had initially thought. That he was, indirectly, putting forth a challenge to the way I had been thinking about the definition of literature, about how we talk and think about, about how it matters and whether we can talk about that matter at all. Maybe I've swung a little too far in the opposite direction in my response to his talk, but I'll live with that. Because, above all else, I realized that I sounded like a mealy "academic": someone with a far too narrow idea of what counts and what doesn't, who is putting up barriers to hold thought in instead of pursuing pathways by which it can be followed, and, in particular, someone whose concern with rigor was being used to tame the wildness (Andy Meyer's term) that is the literary text--and, indeed, to tame all of the tangled interactions of our desires that make those texts interesting to begin with. The whole reason I got into this business is because I believed that literature was something of an innoculation against that pedantry. But I've found out, and seen, that the scholastics are always ready to start stacking angels on pin heads.
So, my friends, this is an open invitation to you who care about any of this. Don't let the world of overpaid wordy types sap your soul. And don't let it sap mine. When I start arguing too strongly for something you know I don't believe, smack me over the head with your complete Emily Dickinson. She'd have liked it. . . and I'll be better off.
Posted by pjaussen at February 22, 2007 05:35 PM | TrackBack