A few non-original thoughts:
Proust's masterwork, utterly remarkable, requires a certain amount of looking, wading through that which cannot be directly apprehended or remembered. Indeed, the title itself points to this; Searching for Lost Time is the book's task, not only that of Marcel the narrator. The challenge and tension of the novel, however, is that one looks but one does not, indeed, one should not, entirely find. As if it were a counter-proposition to Pound's famous "go in fear of abstraction," the philosophical given for Proust is to "go in fear of totalization." As his narrator delves deeper and deeper into his own mysterious interiority ("Why did that make me feel the way it did? What was I remembering just there that made me so melancholic?"), he realizes, as do the readers, that the interiority of other people is equally complicated and even more inacessible. Thus, totalizing others, as does the character Mme. Verdurin, is inevitably an act of violence. Proust is a good Hegelian: above anything else, the subject desires the other's desire. All of the dialectics of mastery and slavery are just beneath the surface of Parisian hierarchies. If there is any escape, it must come from not finding what one is looking for, not possessing what gives one pleasure.
The aesthetic is caught up in this potential violence, and in similar terms. Mme. Verdurin, a fan of Wagner, claims that hearing certain pieces produces in her physical pain, to the point that she claims that she will have "to stay in bed for a week": "I don't want to be made to cry until I get a cold in the head, and neuralgia all down my face" (157). In a perfect dialectical moment, her followers interpret this as a sign of her musical taste, the depth of her emotional response, in other words, her aesthetic "mastery" comes about from being made a "slave" of the work of art, an emotional reversal which is itself embedded in a social economy of imitative exchange (anyone who wants to be Mme. Verdurin's friend must admit that a young pianist she knows is the best performer of Wagner). Art is conceived of in total, and totalizing, effects. In cotnrast to this, Swann is enamoured with a single phrase, a tiny undertone that occurs in a larger piece. For a long time he doesn't even know what the piece is called, and, trying to describe it to Verdurin, she replies "I'm not in the habit" of "peering at things through a microscope, and pricking myself on pin-points of difference" (163). She is only interested in the orchestra, while Swann is looking for the phrase, to which he attaches a memory, which then evokes a subtle, and individual, pleasure. There is no mastery here, by either the work of art or the listener, simply a glancing, passing, free exchange.
Of course, the trap of mere interiority is a major problem here, if there is any effort to cross the boundary between persons. The most surefire way to escape the dialectics of violence is to remain utterly and completely alone. Which we simply cannot do, and which is why so much of Proust's narrative, slowly and gradually accumulating over 2000 pages, is dedicated to the matter of love. If we cannot directly access the other, then we fall back on the resource of language, which mediates our desire, at times as fantasy, at other times as a site of mutual communication. Language becomes a shared space, a third, which enables the other two elements to come together. For this reason, language does not merely "refer" or "perform"--instead, it becomes an object of exchange, which, in that move to objectivity, strikes me as remarkably "modernist." One example of this: after a long series of winding and charged exchanges between Swann and Odette, who has become, gradually, the object of his affection, he finally makes the move using possibly one of the oldest seduction lines in the book: "Excuse me, but the flowers on your bosom are misaligned. If I may, allow me to fix them for you." You know what happens next. What's even more interesting than schmaltzy pick-up lines, however, is the fact that the name of the flower she was wearing becomes the third in the structure of their relationship, the linguistic mediation upon which their desires meet and what, therefore, allows them to communicate it. After that evening "'Do a cattleya,' transmuted into a simple verb which they would employ without a thought of its original meaning when they wished to refer to the act of physical possession (in which, paradoxically, the possessor possesses nothing)" (179). More than simply a lover's code, "Cattleya" becomes itself an "objectless object"--precisely because, in Proustian non-totalizing love, the lover posesses nothing, words can become a substitute possession, something both can hold and exchange which keeps them from slipping into the dialectics of violence. Language is an exterior object that opens up mutual interiority, on the sly, as if by accident, an "objective subjectivity."
So next fall I get my first, full-blown, literature course. Called "Reading Literature," it's a course that is pitched largely to non-majors, tho majors take it as well. Any rate, I have to submit a course description before students register, and would like to hear what those of you reading this blog think of it. The question I have is quite basic: would you want to take a course like this? That is, just because these matters are interesting to me, and, I believe, important, does that mean that they are interesting to others? Any comments would be deeply appreciated.
Here 'tis:
The simple, two-word title of this course has embedded within it a few implications. Among them, that there is a category of texts which one could qualify as “literature”; secondly, that such texts require a particular kind of reading, different from the reading demanded by other linguistic structures (such as, for example, course descriptions); and, finally, that “reading literature” is sufficiently strange that it warrants its own university course. Instead of taking these implications for granted, the ten or so weeks of English 200F will be dedicated to experimentally, critically, and rigorously testing their verity. Is there something peculiar to the way “literary” texts are made? Do those constructions both demand and produce reader participation in ways other texts do not? What might be the value of reading these texts? Such basic yet complicated questions will occupy our thinking, reading, and writing.
To conduct this experiment, we will examine a transhistorical and heterogeneous sample pool of texts that have been called “literary,” looking for constants and variables. We will begin with readings in one of the oldest textual traditions, namely the lyric poem, considering works by Sappho, William Shakespeare, John Donne, Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Charles Baudelaire, e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, Charles Olson, and Bernadette Mayer. As we read, we’ll examine poetic devices such as metaphor, voice, rhyme, and meter, as well as poetic tropes and genres, for their conceptual, aesthetic, and affective consequences. For the second half of the quarter, the attention will shift to prose, as well as to the last 200 years (for reasons we’ll discuss), beginning with short fiction by Edgar Allan Poe ("The Purloined Letter") and Herman Melville ("Bartleby the Scriviner"), moving to Nathaniel West’s novella Miss Lonelyhearts, and ending with an extended examination of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. We will pay close attention to the strategies of narration, the function of character, and the role of plot, as well as the social, ethical, and philosophical implications of fiction. To aid our inquiry, throughout the quarter we will also examine some key theoretical literature (!) on these topics, testing the claims others have made against our own discoveries.
Students will be asked to participate actively in each class discussion, prepare an annotated bibliography of secondary material, and give a brief presentation on their final paper. The writing will be divided up into three 2-page critical response essays; students will chose one of these essays to expand into a final 6-8 page paper.
The definition of "modernism" is a troubling one, although perhaps a useless one as well. Indeed, most attempts at defining an historical period, a cultural situation, end up sounding reductive, inaccurate, or not very helpful. For instance, "loss of values" is often presented as a particularly modern problem. But it isn't peculiar to, say, the last 150 years. "Values" have been dropping like flies ever since the late mideval period, and artists have been confronting that for just as long (Read Chaucer. Read Shakespeare. Read Donne. Read Pope). "Anxieties over mass culture" is another one. But that isn't unique, either. Sir Robert Burton's 17th century Anatomy of Melancholy spends a tremendous amount of time bemoaning the fact that there are "too many books to read," and that one's eyes get wearied from running over endless pages.
Clearly, such generalizations aren't going to get you very far.
But they can point to the fact that while the problems are the same, how a particular time responds to the problems differ. And here is a generalization about modernism, particularly modernist narrative, that I've been mulling over and think may have some use. Namely, modernist authors are faced with the problem of not being able to assent to culture/society as such; for them, culture isn't just a generally good or inescapable thing with some problems that need to be fixed. It is, instead, something that simply cannot be affirmed. And, as a writer, this is a major crisis, for writing is always a collective activity.
Of course, there have always been cultural critics, satirists, etc. But the critic's position towards the culture being satirized breaks down into roughly two ways: 1) The satire is proving that the culture isn't living up to its values, to which the satirist himself assents. My impression of Pope and Swift, tho vague, would put them into this camp. They have no problem with their class position, the overall hierarchies, the large structures. But they also see vices and follies that can be playfully pointed out.
2) The criticism is offering an alternative. Rousseau is a great example of this. While he would reject civilization in part, he has no qualms about affirming the value of honest living/happy savage and/or practical compromise. See, for example, his Letter on the Theater.
In either case, the writer is offering something. Modernists, however, felt as if these grounds had been denied them. Flaubert was clearly bourgeoisie, but he could not assent to bourgeois values, culture, society. Nor could he turn to any viable alternative from which to speak. The dominant culture as such was percieved to be bankrupt. Such bankruptcy has major consequences for narrative form. What values are "heroic," if a story is supposed to have a hero? What are villanous? On what grounds can one establish narrative authority? What constitutes a narrative "situation"? These are aesthetic questions which come out of a larger position toward culture. Consequently, what makes modernist literature unique is the artistic tactics it uses to negotiate this problem.
Flaubert, cited as one of the major figures of early modernism, relies on irony in Madame Bovary. Clearly, irony is not unique to modernism. However, it was employed in particular ways by modernist writers. For one thing, it allows one to speak without really meaning it. If there are no grounds upon which to stand, perhaps the best one can do is leave one's statements in a constant abeyance. Thus, the narrator, who is a fleeting, disappearing figure (in the first chapter, he is a schoolmate of Chas. Bovary, but by the third chapter he has disappeared completely, sucked up by an impersonal narrative voice), passes judgment by making us aware that characters do not say what they mean, and, in fact, neither does the narrator. Emma's romantic fantasies, conveyed in effluvient, sentimentalized language by the narrative voice, are mocked precisely because the rest of the story does not allow us to take them seriously. The narrator cannot come out and say "Emma is delusional" (what would be the grounds?)--instead, he allows the story to make Emma look delusional. This is not realism--it is carefully crafted narrative intervention which mocks without laughing, which makes fun without cracking a joke.
One example: The famous "agricultural show" scene, in which Rudolphe, who we have been told has decided to "have" Emma, although he worries about getting "rid of her later" (137), is attempting to seduce her while they are listening to a local politician praise the new agricultural technologies. Flaubert places Rudolphe's words and the politicians right next to each other, revealing the vapidity of both. As the politician praises the farmers' "respect for law and the fulfillment of duty," Rudolphe replies to Emma,
"Always duty. I'm fed up with those words. They're a bunch of old fogies in flannel waistcoats, bigoted old ladies with foot warmers and beads, who keep singing into our ears, 'Duty! Duty' Our duty is to discern the great and cherish the beautiful and not to accept all those conventions of society with the ignominies it imposes on us." (148)
Since we already know that Rudolphe's speeches are simply a ruse to try to get Emma in bed, as the politician's are an attempt to attract support, the cultural narrative of "Duty" looks to be as much empty rhetoric as Rudolphe's "counter-cultural" libertinism. The narrator dissolves both rhetorical stances, indeed, all rhetorical stances as the novel unfolds, leaving nothing behind.
Such rhetorical dissolution of all ethical, ideological, and philosophical positions through irony tends toward another clearly modernist aesthetic goal, namely the "pure" art. Perhaps best articulated in a later essay by Clement Greenberg, the idea is that the "avant-garde" (read modern art in this context) takes as its content the medium itself--all other art, art with a separated "content," is kitsch. The desire to find and practice "pure" art, "pure" poetry, and to write the "pure" novel is characteristically modern. The thesis I am offering is that the move to the "pure" aesthetic process is also an effort to ground a type of knowledge. When culture fails, when science seems incomplete, when you can't even trust yourself (more on this below), then perhaps the discipline and practice of art will offer you some knowledge about the world. Eliot called this continual sacrifice of the self.
But there are other tactics as well. Conrad, an early modernist, wrote in a mode known as literary impressionism: the world painted through the phenomenological experience of the self. One tactic of this writing is called delayed recognition: the character relates an experience he cannot understand, only to identify it later. Two famous examples from Heart of Darkness : Marlow, who is narrating to his companions after the fact, says that he found a book in an abandoned hut with notes written in "cipher," which amazes him. Later, he finds out that the "cipher" is actually Russian. Further down the river, he is puzzled by "little sticks flying through the air," only to realize that they are "Arrows!" In both instances, Marlow the narrator (not your everyday sailor, the framing narrator tells us) adopts an impressionists style: he knows at the telling of the tale that he is dealing with Russian and arrows, but he chooses to relate the immediate sensation as directly as possible.
On its surface, impressionism seems to stem out of a certain trust in personal experience as a way of encountering reality. If we can't trust culture, perhaps all we have is ourselves. But, if that is true, Heart of Darkness systematically undermines that trust, even as it uses impressionist techniques to narrate it. Throughout the novella, Marlow constantly reminds us that the world is a mysterious place, that even when one is there things feel "unreal." Moreover, the theme of madness runs throughout the text, an internal change that dramatically effects one's ability to interpret and see what is going on around one. And, of course, the famous Mr. Kurtz is the absolute "impressionist," one who has "kicked the earth from his feet" in a completely self-enclosed interpretive framework. Like Flaubert, Marlow ruthlessly criticizes colonial ideology (those who are claiming to be "emmisaries of light") as well as the one who positions himself against the colonialists, Mr. Kurtz. [The final claim may seem strange, as most readings would say that Kurtz is the uber-colonialist. However, it is clear that Kurtz is outside the umbrella of the culture, which is why Marlow is fascinated by him. Kurtz's methods are "unsound," and all of his fellow agents hate him. Marlow says that while he was lumped with Kurtz by these unsavories, at least he was able to "choose" his nightmare.]
It is no surprise that, in the world where he cannot trust neither ideology nor himself, the most assuring thing Marlow finds is work. Throughout the novel, he praises good work being done, and he values the conceptual clarity he finds when engaged in a task. The modernist artist, seeking after the "pure" art, adopts a similar position. Only in the task of poetry can clarity be found, after all other things have failed. But more on work in my paper on Moby-Dick, which, along with Heart of Darkness and Madame Bovary, is the third crucial early modernist text.
Surrealism is possibly the most "passive" of the avant-garde aesthetics. Its characteristic practice being "automatic writing," wherein the writer attempts as much as possible to set aside her self-conscious mind and simply allow the unconscious "murmur" to come out onto the page. Creation is not a matter of active production, of the adherence to certain principles, or of imaginative "vision," but the copying down of images that emerge from the unconscious, the marvellous which, according to Breton, is the only thing that is beautiful. Breton explicitly refers to Freud as justification for all of this: surrealism as a term was used to describe an "absolute" reality in which the two states of human mental life, "dream and [conscious] reality" are resolved. In this sense, Breton is explicitly modern, not mystical. Even tho he attacks positivism as dull and destructive, the "discovery" of new, powerful mental territory provided the opportunity for the liberation of the imagination.
What is interesting here is that there is an explicit turning inward in Breton's theory. While the artist is not an active producer of texts, the images spring forth from within the unconscious. There is nothing about the "vivid imagination" in Breton, simply the ability to listen to what is going on inside the mind, a mind shaped by language, culture, desire, etc. In the truest automatic writing, the surrealist doesn't know what she's writing. She is simply an amanuensis of sorts, what Breton calls a "tracer."
The emphasis on interiority, the force within, is a strange descendent of Romanticism, and, indeed, the many theories of aesthetic creation which refer to inspiration or "trance states." Indeed, Breton explicitly claoms that "judging superficially by their results," "a good number of poets could pass for Surrealists": "In the course of the various attempts I have made to reduce what is, by breach of trust, called genius, I have found nothing which in the final analysis can be attributed to any other method than that" (26, emphasis in the orginal). While there is an obvious rhetorical move being made ("see, even Shakespeare practiced automatic writing"), it makes theoretical sense to link Surrealism and a Romantic theory like that of genius. Both are indebted to the force within the self, from which new things emerge.
A crucial difference, however, between genius and surrealism (and where surrealism is more like "inspiration") is that in the latter the force exists prior to the subject, even tho it is a force that produces language. In other words, automatic writing is language before the subject. This makes it very philosophically interesting, since 20th century thought has tended toward arguing that the subject is the product of language. Breton seems to be arguing that before the subject, there is language, and in an act of anti-subjectivity, one can bring that subconscious language forth. Surrealism is thus anti-genius even as it relies on similar categories.
It is no surprise that Lacan was affiliated with surrealism. Breton's interest in the linguistic images that come from these unconscious realms smacks of structuralism and the symbolic order.
Listen to Hart Crane:
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty--
The opening stanza from the opening poem of The Bridge, this one called "To Brooklyn Bridge." The sound is extremely precise, compacted, and simultaneously musical. Assonance in "many dawns," echoes of "chill" in "rippling," which is also alliteratively connected with rest. Order is disordered here, and the meanings of words are multiple, if even fully understandable. What are "white rings of tumult"? White rings, of course, are the bird's turnings, but why tumultous? And is the bird the one "building" Liberty, some sort of cumulative collection of the rings as they are shed, or is he as high as the buildings? Or have we switched registers and perspectives completely, so that "the chained bay waters" describes the bridge and the bay, and Liberty is the famous statue visible from the bridge? The capitalization suggests the latter, but it could just as easily be the former.
Now listen to Wallace Stevens, in another poem about a different kind of water and a different kind of maker:
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The singer is "beyond" the reality of the sea, which is called "genius," a word denoting mind or spirit, even though in the very next sentence it is connected by a simile to "a body wholly body," that is, pure material presence void of mind . The sea may be genius, but the singer is more so--she does not sing the sea, we are told later, but is "the maker of the song she sang. / The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea / was merely a place by which she walked to sing." And yet, it is more than this location for aesthetic creativity, since "its mimic motion / Made constant cry." "Mimic" is precisely chosen here, since it carries something of a literal meaning, namely that the seas motion is "reproductive," wave following wave, as if it were imitating itself. But "mimic" also carries with it the sense of "mimetic," perhaps the oldest theory of art, wherein the poet "imitates" the world around her. Stronger connection between the sea and the poetess is the fact that the ocean's mimic motion is making "constant cry," sounds "inhuman" yet "understandable." The veritable ocean seems to have a mind, a genius, even tho we know that it has never been "formed to mind or voice." I don't think it is pushing to hard on the poem to say that Stevens is reversing and doubling the theory of mimesis: it is as if the ocean wants to accompany the singer; it is as if nature is seeking to communicate with the mind that is beyond it. The gesture is not in vain, for somehow it is as if we understand this strange unspoken. This is not "Nature speaking thru the poet" (Romanticism), not "the imitation of nature" (mimesis), not even "the loss of personality to tradition" (Eliot). It is, instead, what others have called the celebration of "artifice"--art does not sing nature, but it makes something other than nature which, in turn, is read back onto it.
Such an artifice/nature relation is at play in "To Brooklyn Bridge." Indeed, Crane could be Stevens's singer. It is easy to misread Stevens's "Oh! Blessed rage for order," "The maker's rage to order words of the sea" in something of a neo-classical/theological mode: the mind arranges an order that already existed in nature but had to be discovered, or it existed in the mind of God and humanity brings that order on to the earth, or that nature is orderly, and man is the pinnicle of natural rage for order by improving upon nature herself. But Stevens is far more slippery than that; these are "ghostly demarcations" we are talking about here, fragile shapings of the oceans words that, as we have seen, are not words. Crane, similarly, doesn't provide a true "order" onto the Bridge itself--instead, the poem becomes an effluvent, artificial, antimimetic creation of language in which the mind takes pleasure. The Bridge becomes an opportunity to semantically dance an order, just as the harbor becomes an opportunity to sing one. Another stanza from Crane, one of my favorites in the poem:
And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,--
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!
"[Across] the harbor" can both refer to the location of the bridge from the perspective of a speaker, but also refer to the fact that the bridge crosses the harbor. "Silver-paced," again on a literal level, I take to refer to the metal "pacings" or divisions of the bridge, both in its macro structure of beams and supports and in the micro structure of its guidewires. But "paced" gives Crane the place to imaginatively leap to a logical disconnect: "As though the sun took step of thee." "Pacing" is like walking as well as "division," thus one description of the bridge semantically twists into another one. I can't say for certain what "took step of thee" means (ie, it may be a colloquism I'm not familiar with), but we are warrented to take the obvious meaning of the sun stepped upon the bridge, leaving a brightness which warrented the first description of "silver-paced" but also "left / Some motion ever unspent in thy stride." The movement of the mind is creating a movement in the bridge, which brings us back to "across the harbor," now to be read as "crossing the harbor" and yet "unspent in thy stride." The bridge is moving and not moving--the bridge is "charged" with both light and motion. "Unspent": the buildup of energy, movement without motion, physiological and almost erotic. And the bridge chooses this: "Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!", ie, you can choose to spend that last energy and, because it is unspent, you must be choosing to remain as you are, across the harbor, in this motionless motion. The stanza has moved from the mere brute physicality of the bridge "across the harbor," via light and movement, to the bridge's "freedom" as an agent with, presumably, an aesthetic eye.
A realm of fantastic order, blessed rage.
I'm by no means a baseball expert, even tho baseball is rapidly becoming one of my major amateur interests. But by any statistics I know, Felix Hernandez's 12 strikeout, 8 inning shut-out yesterday was something to get excited about. And a Seattle columnist agrees. To be sure, it's one game, and the Ms have a lot going against them, particularly coming off of last season. But a big chunk of that uphill battle is due, I would say, to a general lack of enthusiasm within the club. FH is something to be enthusiastic about.
Of course, knowing Seattle fans, it won't be a week before we have something to gripe about. But I'm going to enjoy it while it lasts.
There was an apparent murder-suicide at UW this morning. I was on the other side of campus.