Toni Cade Bambara 1939-1995
African-American, Harlem-raised, engaged leftist, Bambara sets her stories in leftist organizing communities, the communities they support, or with people otherwise involved in left issues. She maintains strict focalization in her stories; that is, nothing enters narrative that does not corespond strictly with what the focal character might see, feel, think. The prose is active, rhythmic, impassioned, and strong throughout, although certain details of perspective seem lacking at times in the impressionistic flow.
From The Sea Birds Are Alive. NY: Random House, 1977
"The Organizer's Wife" is set in what appears to be rural black community, perhaps Southern, 20th Century. Bambara handles the dialect like Twain, with steady misspellings, rather than like Toni Morrison, with the dialect rendered clearly by syntax alone. The focalizer falls in love with a guy, but Revun Michaels' church sells the place out from under her. She beats him with a yardstick and kicks him in the head when he tries to get up. He's "small and balding" or the "short, fat, balding preacher" and appears unable to defend himself against the young woman, who is apparently rather large. The narrative makes out that the preacher's height and weight are linked somehow with craven hypocrisy and moral weakness. One feels the contempt often felt by people engaged in manual labor for those who make a living without lifting; it's unclear how much distance Bambara herself has from this opinion.
The woman sort of mysteriously begins holding an infant - she's gotten pregnant somewhere along the way - and her husband is apparently the organizer. Someone has probably bought out the church so that they can't organize and work with the community on it, and probably particularly so they can shut the school down. I was left feeling that more details about the preacher's position would help define the difference or correlation between the focal character's rage and her situation. an injustice, but one wonders the extent to which the focalizer's criticism of and violence against the preacher is justified. Does she assume that he could avoid the sale, and is this justified? One needs the details of the business transaction to decide. While these details are clearly no yardstick of justice, they would give us an idea what the preacher might or might not accomplish practically.
The difficulty seems to be that Bambara herself considers these things as morally or practically straightforward. Perhaps they are in some sense. Clearly, racist cops should be curbed. Clearly, a church that serves as the center for an entire community should not be sold out from under that community, however its continuance might be arranged. But even assuming Ultimate Justice for such assessments, left groups constantly fragment over ideological and practical differences over just how to repair such problems. Taken very broadly, such distinctions account for the entire spectrum of social opinion on these issues.
This seems to me just the weakness of ideological or politically involved literature in general. The difference with Bambara, really, is that she's so engaging and so loving with emotional detail that she manages to reduce the issue greatly. But she doesn't resolve it here.
"The Apprentice"
Narrator's with a friend, Naomi, who stops to interrupt a bust in which a cop's roughly frisking a black man; the cop stops and lets the man go, perhaps since he sees witnesses. Naomi seems pretty professional about it, insists on getting details of the man who's been pulled over, the cop and the badge and so forth.
Naomi's got some grey hair. She appears to be an organizer of some stripe.
They wind up at a church, talking with an older woman. An old man brags obtrusively. The story wanders. She's doing a character sketch of her energetic organizer buddy Naomi, that's all. In this we find the strength and weakness of Bambara's writing. She catches moments of consciousness authentically and intensely. But strangely, the episodes do not reveal their ideological inspiration as they might. That is, one empathizes with the narrator's clear feeling that Naomi is wise and courageous. We see in a general way that Naomi works against Injustice: the police treatment of the African-American driver smacks of racism and might have done so more clearly. Bambara's issue might have to do with the level of engagement, and she may be signalling readers that one who becomes engaged winds up doing so 24/7, simply out of the constant need.
All this is valuable, but one wants something more out of such a sharp observer. What is the political nature of Naomi's involvement? How does the psychological dynamic relate to the business of involvement? What internal conflicts does Naomi face?
This issue, of course, breaks down differently here than in "The Organizer's Wife," which seems more complete emotionally, but in which the exact nature of the sale of the church seems missing. Clearly the sale of the church constitutes a loss for the community andlated errand in the snow and cold, running through the ghetto with a bunch of kids.
"The Long Night" is a thrilling description of living through a police raid, worth reading just for the emotional roller coaster, but also nice to visualize life as a target of CIA involvement in Latin America or in the gunsights of COINTELPRO in the US. Little media attention has been given to back the realism of this kind of description, but this is just plain harrowing, very intense stuff, and feels totally authentic and particularly relevant in this day and age, given the demise of habeas corpus and our onetime 4'th and 6th Amendment protections.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman
In Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, the narrator relates a sequence of tales about his African-American servants in the South after the Civil War. The stories share a single dynamic: the African-Americans tell extraordinarily tall tales and insist on their veracity to such an extent that the narrator, out of indulgence for his wife, whom he presents as terribly indulgent to the African-Americans, must repeatedly change his behavior out of respect for their apparent superstitions.
As the tales continue, Chesnutt's point comes clear by stages. The ex-slaves have a different approach to truth and falsehood, at least when they have to deal with white people. They assume they following:
1) A African-American cannot tell a white anything and be believed.
2) A African-American cannot help a white person beyond following instructions without causing problems.
Therefore, the African-Americans make up stories to draw the whites in to behave as the African-Americans would wish. Most of these events involve garnering some small advantage for the African-American, his friends or family. But on some occasions it clearly involves quite a bit of work and imagination just to save white people from their own folly as well. This comes out most clearly in an involved plot involving prolonged insistance that a certain road is haunted, just to bring together two lovers who have been fighting.
For the Northern narrator, the entire manner of speech is at first unfamiliar; in fact, he never presents himself as mastering it. He patronizes the African-Americans obtusely and presents himself as over-generous in doing so. The plot undercuts his attitude quite clearly, presenting the African-Americans as wise beyond their education and position. However, the whole effect seems to imply that they're charmingly ignorant and folksy-charming in a very Aunt Jemima Stephen Fetchit kind of way.
As the tales continue, Chesnutt's point comes clear by stages. The ex-slaves have a different approach to truth and falsehood, at least when they have to deal with white people. They assume they following:
1) A African-American cannot tell a white anything and be believed.
2) A African-American cannot help a white person beyond following instructions without causing problems.
Therefore, the African-Americans make up stories to draw the whites in to behave as the African-Americans would wish. Most of these events involve garnering some small advantage for the African-American, his friends or family. But on some occasions it clearly involves quite a bit of work and imagination just to save white people from their own folly as well. This comes out most clearly in an involved plot involving prolonged insistance that a certain road is haunted, just to bring together two lovers who have been fighting.
For the Northern narrator, the entire manner of speech is at first unfamiliar; in fact, he never presents himself as mastering it. He patronizes the African-Americans obtusely and presents himself as over-generous in doing so. The plot undercuts his attitude quite clearly, presenting the African-Americans as wise beyond their education and position. However, the whole effect seems to imply that they're charmingly ignorant and folksy-charming in a very Aunt Jemima Stephen Fetchit kind of way.
Lydia Marie Child
Bio: http://www.bookrags.com/biography/lydia-maria-child-dlb/ 2/10/07.
Hobomok
I find Child interesting primarily through her political affiliations, which were abolitionist and feminist. She wrote effectively for her causes although her elequence did not always advance her literary career.
Hobomok is the name of a male Indian, but the novel has to do with the amours and marriagiability of a young lady in the early MA, 200-odd years prior to Child herself. The narrator is a young man, who arranges a frame story about how a friend of his has written a manuscript. The male friend's manuscript has a female focalizer, and this unmistakable female focus constitutes the rest of the novel.
The primary focalizer is female. The male characters seem uniformly wooden, dogmatic, and clueless, including those whom Child seems to consider appealing. The young women are adventurous, resourceful, though naive in ways that must have been charming. Their repeated anger seems more than merited by the foolish males, who drone on about church attitudes towards romance in the face of an apparently causeless looming war with some local Indian tribes, with no obvious reference to politics or economics, aspects of life with which Child herself must have understood but considered as outside the scope of interest.
Synopsis.
1. Mary Conant, resists her crusty father to love young Charles Brown, albeit chastely, per the customs.
2. Charles Brown has to leave, hopes to come back and marry her.
3. News arrives that Charley Brown has died.
4. When Mary's caring mother dies, Mary despairs.
5. Mary marries Hobomok because he's a nice guy who'll help her escape her father. Hobomok seems completely conscious of this circumstance, but marries her anyway.
6. Charles Brown turns out to have jumped ship and hung out in the colonies for several years; he returns to claim Mary as his bride, and asks poor Hobomok where to find her.
7. Hobomok leaves, abandoning his son because his wife loves Brown. Child carefully describes this event to exonerate Mary and Hobomok of the obvious criticisms, with little success.
8. Child asserts blandly that the son's well raised. It's unclear whether the "great tree" that Hobomok has produced is the child or the American nation built on his grave.
For Child this in part is a tale of the noble Indian -- without a twig of judgment. She patronizes, interrupts narrative to comment on the state of his judgment, make explanations and excuses for his lack of literacy and Christian education and so forth. To some extent she may be looking out of the eyes of focalizer Mary Conant, but such irony is weak and inconsistent at best. Given that she did make real sacrifices for minority causes, this is an interesting gauge of how far American society was from egalitarian ideals.
Hobomok
I find Child interesting primarily through her political affiliations, which were abolitionist and feminist. She wrote effectively for her causes although her elequence did not always advance her literary career.
Hobomok is the name of a male Indian, but the novel has to do with the amours and marriagiability of a young lady in the early MA, 200-odd years prior to Child herself. The narrator is a young man, who arranges a frame story about how a friend of his has written a manuscript. The male friend's manuscript has a female focalizer, and this unmistakable female focus constitutes the rest of the novel.
The primary focalizer is female. The male characters seem uniformly wooden, dogmatic, and clueless, including those whom Child seems to consider appealing. The young women are adventurous, resourceful, though naive in ways that must have been charming. Their repeated anger seems more than merited by the foolish males, who drone on about church attitudes towards romance in the face of an apparently causeless looming war with some local Indian tribes, with no obvious reference to politics or economics, aspects of life with which Child herself must have understood but considered as outside the scope of interest.
Synopsis.
1. Mary Conant, resists her crusty father to love young Charles Brown, albeit chastely, per the customs.
2. Charles Brown has to leave, hopes to come back and marry her.
3. News arrives that Charley Brown has died.
4. When Mary's caring mother dies, Mary despairs.
5. Mary marries Hobomok because he's a nice guy who'll help her escape her father. Hobomok seems completely conscious of this circumstance, but marries her anyway.
6. Charles Brown turns out to have jumped ship and hung out in the colonies for several years; he returns to claim Mary as his bride, and asks poor Hobomok where to find her.
7. Hobomok leaves, abandoning his son because his wife loves Brown. Child carefully describes this event to exonerate Mary and Hobomok of the obvious criticisms, with little success.
8. Child asserts blandly that the son's well raised. It's unclear whether the "great tree" that Hobomok has produced is the child or the American nation built on his grave.
For Child this in part is a tale of the noble Indian -- without a twig of judgment. She patronizes, interrupts narrative to comment on the state of his judgment, make explanations and excuses for his lack of literacy and Christian education and so forth. To some extent she may be looking out of the eyes of focalizer Mary Conant, but such irony is weak and inconsistent at best. Given that she did make real sacrifices for minority causes, this is an interesting gauge of how far American society was from egalitarian ideals.
Kate Chopin
Chopin apparently wrote on a lapboard between kids' interruptions. She claimed to be an intuitive artist not given to revision, which must have helped under the circumstances. She wrote lots quickly, partly with an aim to support herself, most likely.
The Awakening
Chopin wrote in somewhat the manner of french realists and naturalists like Zola, de Maupassant, Flaubert or Balzac. She caused some scandal by writing about adultery and infidelity without condemning them, but fell into relative obscurity, perhaps as report of such things became more commonplace. Interest in her work resumed as options of ignoring childrearing to pursue status and money became more acceptable, and as feminist critics looked for women's works ignored by male academics.
In The Awakening, Chopin sketches a woman's failed attempt at liberation. She leaves her husband and children with no introspection besides a couple abstract comments by Chopin's narrator, then drowns herself when she finds she cannot have her favorite of several suitors.
Along the way, Chopin sketches us some fairly rich surfaces of family life among in and around upperclass fin de siecle New Orleans. She draws male characters quickly but deftly. Mr. Pontellier is an unsympathetic cuckold though Edna doesn't actually cuckold him. He's more concerned with what he may consider propriety. He returns from gambling to inform his wife that their child Raoul, soundly sleeping, has consumption. Then he sits and smokes, pouting. Likewise, Robert and Viktor LeBrun appear as variant pretty young men, shy and bold respectively; Alcee appears as an attractive rake. We read nothing to suggest that her children are other than chirpy or bothered by their mother and father's inattention and their mother's eventual suicide.
Chopin's narrator obtrudes at various points to philosophize or moralize, probably in favor of some vision of liberation. Thus on 492-3 we find explanation of Edna Pontellier's immediate actions in her recognition of her "position in the universe," whatever that is. On 524, Edna has comments to make about identity. On 547 we are informed, quite explicitly, that a relative is not aware that he has coerced his wife to an early grave, although no supporting detail or further explanation appears.
Teaching
This text has been popular with undergraduates. It's brief and clear, as far as it goes. I'd prefer taking apart the formal problems of realism and naturalism with Flaubert, Zola, or Henry James, all formally more proficient works, apart from their maleness -- and it seems unfair to trouble James even with that. It does seem a fine basis for debate over relative gender roles. Unfortunately, I suspect it's becoming dated for many young women, some of whom find Ms. P's separation from her husband prosaically obvious and her troubles over it rather inexplicable.
I'd should think that something in a similar vein dealing with the circumstances of women raised in a post-1970's milieu would be most useful, but I can't say I know of a title.
"Desiree's Baby"
A short story, kind of fun, straight out of de Maupassant but set in the American South around N'awlins. A local haciendado falls in love with a pretty orphan and impulsively, apparently open-mindedly, marries her over his father's objections. She bears him a child, who becomes with time obviously African. He rejects his wife as black and sends her and the child away. As he burns her remaining effects, he also burns a letter from his own mother, who admits that she is black.
Sadly, Chopin does not describe precisely whether he has known this and is sending her away to protect himself, or whether he has not known and cannot face it, or even whether he finds out or whether someone else burns it.
Despite the improbable coincidences left as possible by this unclarity, it's a nice little twist-ending short that nicely shows up inconsistencies in racial and gender standards. I haven't used this in a class, but I should think it would be a popular piece.
"The Storm"
A storm throws two ex-fiances together for a couple of hours. Although they have each married other people, they have sex, certain that the woman's husband will not venture to travel with his child until the storm has passed.
The woman welcomes her family with no obvious discomfort. Chopin lets moral judgment remain conspicuous by its absence.
When I've used this in class, Chopin's amorality still provoked nifty quarrels.
Kate Chopin, nee Katherine O'Flaherty (1851-1904)
The Awakening
"Desiree's Baby"
"The Storm"
The Awakening
Chopin wrote in somewhat the manner of french realists and naturalists like Zola, de Maupassant, Flaubert or Balzac. She caused some scandal by writing about adultery and infidelity without condemning them, but fell into relative obscurity, perhaps as report of such things became more commonplace. Interest in her work resumed as options of ignoring childrearing to pursue status and money became more acceptable, and as feminist critics looked for women's works ignored by male academics.
In The Awakening, Chopin sketches a woman's failed attempt at liberation. She leaves her husband and children with no introspection besides a couple abstract comments by Chopin's narrator, then drowns herself when she finds she cannot have her favorite of several suitors.
Along the way, Chopin sketches us some fairly rich surfaces of family life among in and around upperclass fin de siecle New Orleans. She draws male characters quickly but deftly. Mr. Pontellier is an unsympathetic cuckold though Edna doesn't actually cuckold him. He's more concerned with what he may consider propriety. He returns from gambling to inform his wife that their child Raoul, soundly sleeping, has consumption. Then he sits and smokes, pouting. Likewise, Robert and Viktor LeBrun appear as variant pretty young men, shy and bold respectively; Alcee appears as an attractive rake. We read nothing to suggest that her children are other than chirpy or bothered by their mother and father's inattention and their mother's eventual suicide.
Chopin's narrator obtrudes at various points to philosophize or moralize, probably in favor of some vision of liberation. Thus on 492-3 we find explanation of Edna Pontellier's immediate actions in her recognition of her "position in the universe," whatever that is. On 524, Edna has comments to make about identity. On 547 we are informed, quite explicitly, that a relative is not aware that he has coerced his wife to an early grave, although no supporting detail or further explanation appears.
Teaching
This text has been popular with undergraduates. It's brief and clear, as far as it goes. I'd prefer taking apart the formal problems of realism and naturalism with Flaubert, Zola, or Henry James, all formally more proficient works, apart from their maleness -- and it seems unfair to trouble James even with that. It does seem a fine basis for debate over relative gender roles. Unfortunately, I suspect it's becoming dated for many young women, some of whom find Ms. P's separation from her husband prosaically obvious and her troubles over it rather inexplicable.
I'd should think that something in a similar vein dealing with the circumstances of women raised in a post-1970's milieu would be most useful, but I can't say I know of a title.
"Desiree's Baby"
A short story, kind of fun, straight out of de Maupassant but set in the American South around N'awlins. A local haciendado falls in love with a pretty orphan and impulsively, apparently open-mindedly, marries her over his father's objections. She bears him a child, who becomes with time obviously African. He rejects his wife as black and sends her and the child away. As he burns her remaining effects, he also burns a letter from his own mother, who admits that she is black.
Sadly, Chopin does not describe precisely whether he has known this and is sending her away to protect himself, or whether he has not known and cannot face it, or even whether he finds out or whether someone else burns it.
Despite the improbable coincidences left as possible by this unclarity, it's a nice little twist-ending short that nicely shows up inconsistencies in racial and gender standards. I haven't used this in a class, but I should think it would be a popular piece.
"The Storm"
A storm throws two ex-fiances together for a couple of hours. Although they have each married other people, they have sex, certain that the woman's husband will not venture to travel with his child until the storm has passed.
The woman welcomes her family with no obvious discomfort. Chopin lets moral judgment remain conspicuous by its absence.
When I've used this in class, Chopin's amorality still provoked nifty quarrels.
Kate Chopin, nee Katherine O'Flaherty (1851-1904)
The Awakening
"Desiree's Baby"
"The Storm"
Cathy Davidson
Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. Oxford: Oxford, 1986.
Davidson documents the rise of the novel in the US; its relation to women's writing and reading; and to some degree its relation to the history of publishing and distribution technology and economics. She's thorough and perceptive, and provides quite a useful background. The overall picture seems to be that of simultaneous and related rises in secular fiction, women's expression and reading, sequential reading, ease and speed of production and distribution.
I cherry-picked the following quotes from many I might have chosen:
On the beginnings of large-scale popularity for novels:
"Although Susanna Rowson's Charlotte: A Tale of Truth (1791) -- later known as Charlotte Temple -- had sold nearly forty thousand copies by the first decade of the nineteenth century, many of the copies were from pirated editions that brought no recompense to either the author or her American publisher. That publisher's first edition, it might also be noted, ran to only one thousand copies. One of the countries morst prosperous and sagacious early printers, Mathew Carey simply had no basis for predicting the popularity of Rowson's book. In fact, a first printing of a late eithteenth-century AMerican novel typically ran somewhere between three hundred and fifteen hundred copies, so Carey's edition of Charlotte was relatively large by the standards of the itme. In contrast, by 1825 a press run of ten thousand copies for an American novel was not unheard of ; by 1830 the paperback novels or 'story papers' that were distributed as newspapers through the U.S. postal system were retularly run in edition sof thirty thosuand copies" (17).
Davidson gives this account of how to get published in the 1800's:
"An author was required to contact a printer and contract with him (rarely, her) to have a new book brought before the American public. The a\uthor's offical recompense would be whatever the printer agreed to pay for the rights to an edition of a certain number. Often the actual recompense was whatever the printer was finally able or willing to pay. The printer's recompense would come from the sale of those same volumes, so the printing shopo that was also a publishing establishment was usually a bookstore, too. . . . Since publishers were often small local businesses in a large land with a sparse and scattered population, it was difficult to gain a large audience for most books." (18).
She notes also the publishers' and printers' problems.
"How could a publisher gauge the demand (or lack of one) for a specific title? Would a book (especially a novel) offend censorious critics? Would it be lively enough for an increasingly secularized public? Those decisions were all the more crucial in that for most printers there was little margin for error" (19).
"It should come as no surprise that most early printers, like most authors, brought forth only one American novel during the course of a whole career" (19).
This suggests, among other things, that a publisher or printer generally had to make money in some other way, and that the odds were that printing or publishing happened at a net loss or with too little remuneration to be with the labor involved. One might infer that this is a major reason that we find few early minority or underclass authors (white women, as usual, forming a subclass that tries these definitions).
English curriculae generally ignore the economic basis of production and distribution of literature itself, yet Davidson palpably shows distinct correlations between form and circumstance.
A description of Printing methods:
"The early publishers who decided to print a particular volume generally did so in a cottage-industry fashion. His shop might have one or two indentured apprentices, often as young as six or seven years of age. The apprentices took care of such unpleasant chores as 'treading out the pelts,' literally stomping on sheep pelts that had soaked for several days in the slop pail, a first step in making the ink balls necessary to ink the type. Apprentices and the printer's children would help with the cleaning, would sort type, and when strong enough would actually operate the heavy presses. The work was hard. Several eighteenth-century accounts describe the usual build and gait of one who had long served at the press -- an enormously develped right arm, a limp from having used the right foot on the 'step' in order to make the 'pull,' and sometimes even distended or permanently dislocated shoulders. The work was also general. To supplement the income from the press the printer's wife might run the town post office out of the print shop; often she sold books (imported or exchanged from different booksellers as well as thoseprinted in th shop) and other goods -- everything form household items and her own handicrafts o theater or lotter tickets, stateionery, pens, ink , and fancy imported products" (19-20).
My first publisher, William Van Doren, worked for a time in the 1980's by silkscreening a poster-style broadside he called The Wallpaper. He developed the unusual production method himself as a pre-digital way to support extensive experimentation with graphical presentation of text, and did some remarkable things with it. He personally described to me changes in his back and arms that came from the repetitive movements of silkscreening.
Transportation and shipping troubles:
"Joseph Dennie, in a letter to Royall Tyler regarding the Walpole, New Hampshire publication of Tyler's The Algerine Captive, aptly summarizes the too-common consequence of the combined problems of local printing and precarious distriubtjion: 'Your novel has been examined by the few and paproved. It is however extremely difficult fo r the Bostonians t supply themselves with abook that slumbers in a stall at Walpole, supposed, by the latest and most accurate advertisements, to be situated 400 miles north of their meridian.
"Four hundred miles was as formidable distance. To travel by stagecoach from Boston to Walpole might take two weeks or longer. Nor was it an inexpensive trip. In 1800, a stagecoachjourney could cost as much as $1 for ten miles" (21).
Relations with booksellers -
"The imprint on the title page of the first edition of Charles Brockdon Bron's Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800) indicates the sway in which one Philadelphia printer sought to carry his books to the larlger market: ' Printed and published by H. Maxwsell and sold by Messr's. T. TDobson, R. Campbell, H. and P. Rice.
"What effect did the improved transportation systems and the expanding publisher's networks have on the shape of American fiction? Obviously, that is a difficult question to answer. But it is worth noting that nearly all of America's novels published prior to 1820 were first published in the North. There were exceptions, such as George Fowler's A flight to the moon: or the Vision of Randalthus (1813) and John Neal's Keep Cool (1817) both published in Baltmore; . . . . but these volumes were all issued after 1809, with only marginal success, and none enjoyed a second edition. To put he matter in its most general terms, the new American novels tended to do best where they could best be distributed" (22-23).
If the sales item under discussion were gym socks, I doubt anyone would imagine that something so elemental as distribution were not involved in their dissemination.
On Copyright:
"Until the passage of federal copyright laws, there could be no real profession of authorship. Publishing, too, requried some protection. If a printer needed, say, to sell half fo a first edition of a novel simply to recoup his costs, he could not afford to have another printer, impressed by the novel's sales, come forward with a competing -- and perhaps cheaper -- edition. Such a pirated edition deprived both the author and the publisher of the profits they would otherwise have received."
One wonders how this relates to Net-era publication. It certainly has not applied in the straightforward manner described here to music sales. They bombed briefly in the mid-1980's, in response to cassettes, but picked up within a very short period of time, the pause being apparently an industry-wide panic of professionals rather than anything else. Moreover, while one may feel some empathy for authors and first publishers being robbed of their profits, a pirated edition was at least distributed, and perhaps distributed more than it might have been otherwise. So the relation to dissemination of literature in general might not be quite as described here.
Looking altogether at Chapter 2, one must note that
1. The economic difficulties of authorship and booksales prohibited reading and sales
2. The lending libraries were a great boon not only to reading and literacy but to publishing as well,
3. The physical object of the book was a great amount of its value and a great part of the trouble in its production.
4. The value difference between a particularly dense book like Paradise Lost and a new novel would have been immense, and a worthy consideration in terms of purchase. One can read Milton over and over without exhausting its ideas -- something that would be hard to say for Harriet Beecher Stowe. This may be a major factor in the shift from long poems to novels in general. Novels make more sense if one's going to read the work once, consider that one has put enough work into the thing, and set it aside.
5. Economies of scale impeded American publishing because English and european markets were larger, and booksellers could profit more by jobbing britlit than US lit. This would have made the results of any other economic and logistical difficulties more critical.
6. these substantial limits must remain in place to varying extents in third world countries and among minority communities.
Economics and Censorship
A quote for George Bush I, after his recent comments about blogs:
"I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing [in Virginia], and I hope we shall not have these [for a] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!
William Berkeley, Gov.
Virginia 1619
Cited p 38
Fiction and Morality
"The opinion of the world in regard to works of fancy has of late years undergone a wonderful change. It is no longer considered an offense against either religion, morality, or prudence to peruse a book bearing the name of a novel. . . . To us it appears as if it were but yesterday, that the grave, the serious, the religious, and the prudent, considered novel reading as an employment utterly beneath th dignity of the human mind . . . . In those days, it was almost as disreputable to be detected reading anovel, as to be found betting at a cock-fight, or a gaming table. Those who had sons would have supposed them forever incapacitated for any useful pursuit in life, if they exhibited an inclination for novel reading; and those who had daughters who exhibited such an inclination, would have considred them as totally unfitted for ever becoming good wives or mothers." (James Mchanry, 1824, cited page 38).
Production and Reading Styles
"Rolf Engelsing, one of the important practictioners of histoire du livre, has argued persuasively that by the end of hte eighteenth century in Germany (and, by extension, throughout the Western world), reading was no longer largely limited to the Bible and other basic religious books for most people. Not only was the number of books increasing apace with the increasing number of readers but, in addition, more readers read more books in the course of a lifetime. Engselsing also argues that this change in quantity also effected a change in the quality and nature of reading. Instead of reading the book 'intensively' (reading the Bible over and over again), books were read 'extensively.' one book regularly replacing another, to result in a proto-mass consumption of print. Engelsing sees the novel as both a primary contributing factor to this change and its chief benefact or. Engelsing's insight is crucial. The whole mentality of reading was changing by the end of the eighteenth century, at least in America, and, clearly, the Bible and Psalter no longer occupied the singular place they once had in the life fo the community of of the individual leader. This is not to say that religion had lost its importance. Rather, other books rivaled the Bible for reading time in early America. Just as clearly, and increased demand for different kinds of books called the novel into being" (72).
I should point out that traditional plotted novels work far better for this kind of reading. One reads through For Whom the Bell Tolls one time in comfort, whereas earlier narrative forms, say Paradise Lost, suggest re-reading. Important exceptions exist, but they're treated different socially. For instance, how many readers of the Ulysses or Finnegans Wake read it straight through and do not discuss it, say in a class? The academic community provides something rather like the old priesthood for these works.
NOTE: On page 95, Davidson has a picture of the title page of The Power of Sympathy, given as the first American novel. It's interesting that the font is obviously old-fashioned in the variation of the typeface, which 20th Century and even late 19th Century readers would find distracting. This suggests that simplified, regular typefaces evolved in part with the need to streamline the reading process for sequential reads, as in novels.
NOTE: It's interesting that the early novels should focus on matters "of seduction," as Davidson describes extensively. This would seem to fit the sequential structure of novels on several counts. What this amounts to in a more contemporary description would be gender roles -- an aspect of human society in which one makes little headway without undersanding of global contexts. How people romance has to do with how they will raise children; how they raise children depends on how economy shapes their lives and how they were raised, and so forth.
And Reproductive Politics
"The high fertility rate of the postrevolutionary period is striking, but what is even more striking is the precipitous fall in the rate during the next century. The fertility rate dclined by 23 percent before 1850, by 50 percent before 1900. Since no new technologies for preventing births (such as the recent [Davidson writes in 1986] birth control pill) were developed during those years and since prophylactics were certainly known in late eighteenth-century American (and used widely in other countries, notably France), this striking decline in birthrate reveals a massive change in American social attitudes even within a generation or two" (117).
For a history of prophylactics, see Sex and Destiny, by Germaine Greer.
Probably true even though CD seems to discount the issues of distribution and marketing of the devices; distribution could only have been impeded by the the social disruption attendent on revolution, particularly given the unsympathetic nature of the Christian institutions that were often the first to re-establish order in outlying areas.
This doesn't mean there was no change in attitude, however; I just wonder in what ways attitude interplayed with distribution.
"Amorphous psychosociological shifts such as an emerging ideal of affectional marriage (rather than patriarchal authority and wifely subordination), a relaxing of parental control over one's offspring (especially in the matter of choosing marriage partners), an increased substitution of affection or authority in the dealings between parents and children, and a new emphasis on the mother's responsibility for imparting to her children both knowledge and principles of virtue have all been traced to the last part of the eighteenth century. All such changes, it has been further argued, became still more institutitonalilzed in the next century through industrialization and the increasing gender specialization within the family. With the father cast as the primary wage earner and more and more employed away from the home, the mother, even if she also worked for wages, was deemed responsibile for childrearing and household management" (125).
The note to this, .on page 293, continues, "The historiographty of changing family patterns is controversial and the picture tends to look different depending on what factors one includes. Class, regional, and racial factors all influence the interpretation in different ways. Degler, Kerber, and Norton, for example, all tend to see a changing family pattern with more options for women by the end of the eighteenth century, although Kerber, perhaps, views the situation less optimiistically than the other historians. Lawrence Stone has charted a change in family structure in England during the eighteenth-century, especially an increase in affectional marriages and affectional modes of child-rearing. See his The family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800. (NYC: Harper & Row, 1977). A similar pattern is described in the US by Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Polgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1982.) Daniel B. Smith, Inside the Great House: PLanter Family Life in EIghteenth-Century Chesapeake SOciety (Ithaca: Cornell, 1980); . . . . For a brief overview of the different arguments, see Thomas Pl Slaughter, "Family Politics in Revolutionary America, American Quarterly, 36 (Fall 1984), 598-606.
Davidson documents the rise of the novel in the US; its relation to women's writing and reading; and to some degree its relation to the history of publishing and distribution technology and economics. She's thorough and perceptive, and provides quite a useful background. The overall picture seems to be that of simultaneous and related rises in secular fiction, women's expression and reading, sequential reading, ease and speed of production and distribution.
I cherry-picked the following quotes from many I might have chosen:
On the beginnings of large-scale popularity for novels:
"Although Susanna Rowson's Charlotte: A Tale of Truth (1791) -- later known as Charlotte Temple -- had sold nearly forty thousand copies by the first decade of the nineteenth century, many of the copies were from pirated editions that brought no recompense to either the author or her American publisher. That publisher's first edition, it might also be noted, ran to only one thousand copies. One of the countries morst prosperous and sagacious early printers, Mathew Carey simply had no basis for predicting the popularity of Rowson's book. In fact, a first printing of a late eithteenth-century AMerican novel typically ran somewhere between three hundred and fifteen hundred copies, so Carey's edition of Charlotte was relatively large by the standards of the itme. In contrast, by 1825 a press run of ten thousand copies for an American novel was not unheard of ; by 1830 the paperback novels or 'story papers' that were distributed as newspapers through the U.S. postal system were retularly run in edition sof thirty thosuand copies" (17).
Davidson gives this account of how to get published in the 1800's:
"An author was required to contact a printer and contract with him (rarely, her) to have a new book brought before the American public. The a\uthor's offical recompense would be whatever the printer agreed to pay for the rights to an edition of a certain number. Often the actual recompense was whatever the printer was finally able or willing to pay. The printer's recompense would come from the sale of those same volumes, so the printing shopo that was also a publishing establishment was usually a bookstore, too. . . . Since publishers were often small local businesses in a large land with a sparse and scattered population, it was difficult to gain a large audience for most books." (18).
She notes also the publishers' and printers' problems.
"How could a publisher gauge the demand (or lack of one) for a specific title? Would a book (especially a novel) offend censorious critics? Would it be lively enough for an increasingly secularized public? Those decisions were all the more crucial in that for most printers there was little margin for error" (19).
"It should come as no surprise that most early printers, like most authors, brought forth only one American novel during the course of a whole career" (19).
This suggests, among other things, that a publisher or printer generally had to make money in some other way, and that the odds were that printing or publishing happened at a net loss or with too little remuneration to be with the labor involved. One might infer that this is a major reason that we find few early minority or underclass authors (white women, as usual, forming a subclass that tries these definitions).
English curriculae generally ignore the economic basis of production and distribution of literature itself, yet Davidson palpably shows distinct correlations between form and circumstance.
A description of Printing methods:
"The early publishers who decided to print a particular volume generally did so in a cottage-industry fashion. His shop might have one or two indentured apprentices, often as young as six or seven years of age. The apprentices took care of such unpleasant chores as 'treading out the pelts,' literally stomping on sheep pelts that had soaked for several days in the slop pail, a first step in making the ink balls necessary to ink the type. Apprentices and the printer's children would help with the cleaning, would sort type, and when strong enough would actually operate the heavy presses. The work was hard. Several eighteenth-century accounts describe the usual build and gait of one who had long served at the press -- an enormously develped right arm, a limp from having used the right foot on the 'step' in order to make the 'pull,' and sometimes even distended or permanently dislocated shoulders. The work was also general. To supplement the income from the press the printer's wife might run the town post office out of the print shop; often she sold books (imported or exchanged from different booksellers as well as thoseprinted in th shop) and other goods -- everything form household items and her own handicrafts o theater or lotter tickets, stateionery, pens, ink , and fancy imported products" (19-20).
My first publisher, William Van Doren, worked for a time in the 1980's by silkscreening a poster-style broadside he called The Wallpaper. He developed the unusual production method himself as a pre-digital way to support extensive experimentation with graphical presentation of text, and did some remarkable things with it. He personally described to me changes in his back and arms that came from the repetitive movements of silkscreening.
Transportation and shipping troubles:
"Joseph Dennie, in a letter to Royall Tyler regarding the Walpole, New Hampshire publication of Tyler's The Algerine Captive, aptly summarizes the too-common consequence of the combined problems of local printing and precarious distriubtjion: 'Your novel has been examined by the few and paproved. It is however extremely difficult fo r the Bostonians t supply themselves with abook that slumbers in a stall at Walpole, supposed, by the latest and most accurate advertisements, to be situated 400 miles north of their meridian.
"Four hundred miles was as formidable distance. To travel by stagecoach from Boston to Walpole might take two weeks or longer. Nor was it an inexpensive trip. In 1800, a stagecoachjourney could cost as much as $1 for ten miles" (21).
Relations with booksellers -
"The imprint on the title page of the first edition of Charles Brockdon Bron's Arthur Mervyn (1799-1800) indicates the sway in which one Philadelphia printer sought to carry his books to the larlger market: ' Printed and published by H. Maxwsell and sold by Messr's. T. TDobson, R. Campbell, H. and P. Rice.
"What effect did the improved transportation systems and the expanding publisher's networks have on the shape of American fiction? Obviously, that is a difficult question to answer. But it is worth noting that nearly all of America's novels published prior to 1820 were first published in the North. There were exceptions, such as George Fowler's A flight to the moon: or the Vision of Randalthus (1813) and John Neal's Keep Cool (1817) both published in Baltmore; . . . . but these volumes were all issued after 1809, with only marginal success, and none enjoyed a second edition. To put he matter in its most general terms, the new American novels tended to do best where they could best be distributed" (22-23).
If the sales item under discussion were gym socks, I doubt anyone would imagine that something so elemental as distribution were not involved in their dissemination.
On Copyright:
"Until the passage of federal copyright laws, there could be no real profession of authorship. Publishing, too, requried some protection. If a printer needed, say, to sell half fo a first edition of a novel simply to recoup his costs, he could not afford to have another printer, impressed by the novel's sales, come forward with a competing -- and perhaps cheaper -- edition. Such a pirated edition deprived both the author and the publisher of the profits they would otherwise have received."
One wonders how this relates to Net-era publication. It certainly has not applied in the straightforward manner described here to music sales. They bombed briefly in the mid-1980's, in response to cassettes, but picked up within a very short period of time, the pause being apparently an industry-wide panic of professionals rather than anything else. Moreover, while one may feel some empathy for authors and first publishers being robbed of their profits, a pirated edition was at least distributed, and perhaps distributed more than it might have been otherwise. So the relation to dissemination of literature in general might not be quite as described here.
Looking altogether at Chapter 2, one must note that
1. The economic difficulties of authorship and booksales prohibited reading and sales
2. The lending libraries were a great boon not only to reading and literacy but to publishing as well,
3. The physical object of the book was a great amount of its value and a great part of the trouble in its production.
4. The value difference between a particularly dense book like Paradise Lost and a new novel would have been immense, and a worthy consideration in terms of purchase. One can read Milton over and over without exhausting its ideas -- something that would be hard to say for Harriet Beecher Stowe. This may be a major factor in the shift from long poems to novels in general. Novels make more sense if one's going to read the work once, consider that one has put enough work into the thing, and set it aside.
5. Economies of scale impeded American publishing because English and european markets were larger, and booksellers could profit more by jobbing britlit than US lit. This would have made the results of any other economic and logistical difficulties more critical.
6. these substantial limits must remain in place to varying extents in third world countries and among minority communities.
Economics and Censorship
A quote for George Bush I, after his recent comments about blogs:
"I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing [in Virginia], and I hope we shall not have these [for a] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!
William Berkeley, Gov.
Virginia 1619
Cited p 38
Fiction and Morality
"The opinion of the world in regard to works of fancy has of late years undergone a wonderful change. It is no longer considered an offense against either religion, morality, or prudence to peruse a book bearing the name of a novel. . . . To us it appears as if it were but yesterday, that the grave, the serious, the religious, and the prudent, considered novel reading as an employment utterly beneath th dignity of the human mind . . . . In those days, it was almost as disreputable to be detected reading anovel, as to be found betting at a cock-fight, or a gaming table. Those who had sons would have supposed them forever incapacitated for any useful pursuit in life, if they exhibited an inclination for novel reading; and those who had daughters who exhibited such an inclination, would have considred them as totally unfitted for ever becoming good wives or mothers." (James Mchanry, 1824, cited page 38).
Production and Reading Styles
"Rolf Engelsing, one of the important practictioners of histoire du livre, has argued persuasively that by the end of hte eighteenth century in Germany (and, by extension, throughout the Western world), reading was no longer largely limited to the Bible and other basic religious books for most people. Not only was the number of books increasing apace with the increasing number of readers but, in addition, more readers read more books in the course of a lifetime. Engselsing also argues that this change in quantity also effected a change in the quality and nature of reading. Instead of reading the book 'intensively' (reading the Bible over and over again), books were read 'extensively.' one book regularly replacing another, to result in a proto-mass consumption of print. Engelsing sees the novel as both a primary contributing factor to this change and its chief benefact or. Engelsing's insight is crucial. The whole mentality of reading was changing by the end of the eighteenth century, at least in America, and, clearly, the Bible and Psalter no longer occupied the singular place they once had in the life fo the community of of the individual leader. This is not to say that religion had lost its importance. Rather, other books rivaled the Bible for reading time in early America. Just as clearly, and increased demand for different kinds of books called the novel into being" (72).
I should point out that traditional plotted novels work far better for this kind of reading. One reads through For Whom the Bell Tolls one time in comfort, whereas earlier narrative forms, say Paradise Lost, suggest re-reading. Important exceptions exist, but they're treated different socially. For instance, how many readers of the Ulysses or Finnegans Wake read it straight through and do not discuss it, say in a class? The academic community provides something rather like the old priesthood for these works.
NOTE: On page 95, Davidson has a picture of the title page of The Power of Sympathy, given as the first American novel. It's interesting that the font is obviously old-fashioned in the variation of the typeface, which 20th Century and even late 19th Century readers would find distracting. This suggests that simplified, regular typefaces evolved in part with the need to streamline the reading process for sequential reads, as in novels.
NOTE: It's interesting that the early novels should focus on matters "of seduction," as Davidson describes extensively. This would seem to fit the sequential structure of novels on several counts. What this amounts to in a more contemporary description would be gender roles -- an aspect of human society in which one makes little headway without undersanding of global contexts. How people romance has to do with how they will raise children; how they raise children depends on how economy shapes their lives and how they were raised, and so forth.
And Reproductive Politics
"The high fertility rate of the postrevolutionary period is striking, but what is even more striking is the precipitous fall in the rate during the next century. The fertility rate dclined by 23 percent before 1850, by 50 percent before 1900. Since no new technologies for preventing births (such as the recent [Davidson writes in 1986] birth control pill) were developed during those years and since prophylactics were certainly known in late eighteenth-century American (and used widely in other countries, notably France), this striking decline in birthrate reveals a massive change in American social attitudes even within a generation or two" (117).
For a history of prophylactics, see Sex and Destiny, by Germaine Greer.
Probably true even though CD seems to discount the issues of distribution and marketing of the devices; distribution could only have been impeded by the the social disruption attendent on revolution, particularly given the unsympathetic nature of the Christian institutions that were often the first to re-establish order in outlying areas.
This doesn't mean there was no change in attitude, however; I just wonder in what ways attitude interplayed with distribution.
"Amorphous psychosociological shifts such as an emerging ideal of affectional marriage (rather than patriarchal authority and wifely subordination), a relaxing of parental control over one's offspring (especially in the matter of choosing marriage partners), an increased substitution of affection or authority in the dealings between parents and children, and a new emphasis on the mother's responsibility for imparting to her children both knowledge and principles of virtue have all been traced to the last part of the eighteenth century. All such changes, it has been further argued, became still more institutitonalilzed in the next century through industrialization and the increasing gender specialization within the family. With the father cast as the primary wage earner and more and more employed away from the home, the mother, even if she also worked for wages, was deemed responsibile for childrearing and household management" (125).
The note to this, .on page 293, continues, "The historiographty of changing family patterns is controversial and the picture tends to look different depending on what factors one includes. Class, regional, and racial factors all influence the interpretation in different ways. Degler, Kerber, and Norton, for example, all tend to see a changing family pattern with more options for women by the end of the eighteenth century, although Kerber, perhaps, views the situation less optimiistically than the other historians. Lawrence Stone has charted a change in family structure in England during the eighteenth-century, especially an increase in affectional marriages and affectional modes of child-rearing. See his The family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800. (NYC: Harper & Row, 1977). A similar pattern is described in the US by Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Polgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1982.) Daniel B. Smith, Inside the Great House: PLanter Family Life in EIghteenth-Century Chesapeake SOciety (Ithaca: Cornell, 1980); . . . . For a brief overview of the different arguments, see Thomas Pl Slaughter, "Family Politics in Revolutionary America, American Quarterly, 36 (Fall 1984), 598-606.
Twain
Were you to set up the reading list, which Twain would you choose? I suppose Huck Finn's de rigeur, given its place in the history of narrative voice, its social contexts, its history of being banned here and there. None of the other novels seem necessary in the same way, and I'd be tempted to go to short stories and essays.
In his forward to Pudd'nhead Wilson, he describes his creative process in a way that reminds me of Frank O'Hara's poem about his painter friend and the oranges, or Henry Miller's "The Angel is my Watermark;" that is, he describes a process in which the finished work springs dynamically from the author's experience of his materials, and the results little resemble the initial conception. This is a valuable statement in itself. Twain presented it as though it were a weakness of process, but in a way such that one expects that he knew full well it was not.
He had intended Wilson as a short story, and it's interesting to imagine how it must have expanded. The key theme, of course, is another of Twain's little identity reversals, launched once again to level another pretentious class division. It's not surprising that Twain should have originally conceived this piece as a short story. One can imagine the idea expressed -- and for a 21st century American, probably adequately expressed -- in a line or two. It's a snapshot, if a revealing one and relevant to its day; all the author had to do was set the snapshot up to show us what we were looking at.
But that setting-up took some work.
Wilson himself must have been necessary at first simply to provide some excuse for having fingerprinted a little African-American child in the antebellum South. The embellishments of his personality and the cartoon-hick dismissal of his education by the townsfolk set this up. Twain's gloriously expansive trial scene, with Wilson outdoing unborn generations of TV and movie barristers, was probably motivated by his own original audience's imperfect acceptance of fingerprinting as firm evidence.
Given both of these as necessary, the text had to have body. Narrative convention needed a concatenation of scenes establishing Roxy's maternity to set up the cruelty of her son's racially based dismissal of her. As is, son seems almost from the first unnecessarily and wantonly cruel in ways that don't get explained. I thought we'd get some insight into this when so-called Tom responded to his mother's revelation of his African ancestry with an "I know." I thought we'd get an examination of some phobia of discovery or some recognition of having been given away, and an obsessive cruelty derived from that. But no, so-called Tom's cussedness goes so unexplained that at time's one's tempted to take Roxy's crude "It's the n----- in you," for Twain's own explanation, far from Twain's expressed opinions as it is. The narrative is still being used to set up the single photo-perfect scene, and does not explore as far as it might.
Twain's good for plenty of fun along the way, of course, but set beside Huck Finn, for instance, Wilson suffers badly for scale. For all Twain's ear for dialect, the characters seem cut-out because they don't violate stereotype or category. Judge Driscoll remains the pompous ass he is at the start of the story, a man too stupid to realize when a child he's charged with is switched for another, then inane enough to fight a duel with a man he barely knows because he thinks the man has kicked said charge. One needn't imagine that Twain, of all people, would ascribe to such a man any sense. Not even Roxy or so-called Tom show much more nuance. No, Twain's got what he needs for his point without that. As he shows so-called Tom beside so-called Chambers, and the manners each have because of Roxy's social improvisations, one can easily conclude that all such class distinction constitutes usurpation -- the point of each and all of Twain's switched-identity novels: Wilson, Yankee, The Prince and the Pauper.
I wonder whether the sort of picaresque form of Huck Finn wasn't ideal for Twain on this basis. It seems the picture he must have had of Huck slowly enlightened by the nature of his partner must have bore more nuance and process from the beginning, since it requires in some form the passage of time and, since his observations and not his journey are the central focus, suggests Huck as the narrator -- really, with the return to picaresco, the innovation of this text. Then the phsysical resemblance of the Missiissippi itself to the plot -- Huck floats down river into the deep South a bit like Conrad's Marlow sails up the Congo -- lends both an episodicity and a sort of odd teleology to the text. One knows that as Huck wanders from home, Jim wanders towards a deeper and deeper culture of slavery. In all, the text makes happy use of the confluence of the Mississippi.
But I think in general Twain's strongest for the pithy comment, that his poetics leans towards rhetoric and polemic when he's not in a yarn, and that I'd like to make a good list of his essays and shorts, and largely teach from the highlights.
In his forward to Pudd'nhead Wilson, he describes his creative process in a way that reminds me of Frank O'Hara's poem about his painter friend and the oranges, or Henry Miller's "The Angel is my Watermark;" that is, he describes a process in which the finished work springs dynamically from the author's experience of his materials, and the results little resemble the initial conception. This is a valuable statement in itself. Twain presented it as though it were a weakness of process, but in a way such that one expects that he knew full well it was not.
He had intended Wilson as a short story, and it's interesting to imagine how it must have expanded. The key theme, of course, is another of Twain's little identity reversals, launched once again to level another pretentious class division. It's not surprising that Twain should have originally conceived this piece as a short story. One can imagine the idea expressed -- and for a 21st century American, probably adequately expressed -- in a line or two. It's a snapshot, if a revealing one and relevant to its day; all the author had to do was set the snapshot up to show us what we were looking at.
But that setting-up took some work.
Wilson himself must have been necessary at first simply to provide some excuse for having fingerprinted a little African-American child in the antebellum South. The embellishments of his personality and the cartoon-hick dismissal of his education by the townsfolk set this up. Twain's gloriously expansive trial scene, with Wilson outdoing unborn generations of TV and movie barristers, was probably motivated by his own original audience's imperfect acceptance of fingerprinting as firm evidence.
Given both of these as necessary, the text had to have body. Narrative convention needed a concatenation of scenes establishing Roxy's maternity to set up the cruelty of her son's racially based dismissal of her. As is, son seems almost from the first unnecessarily and wantonly cruel in ways that don't get explained. I thought we'd get some insight into this when so-called Tom responded to his mother's revelation of his African ancestry with an "I know." I thought we'd get an examination of some phobia of discovery or some recognition of having been given away, and an obsessive cruelty derived from that. But no, so-called Tom's cussedness goes so unexplained that at time's one's tempted to take Roxy's crude "It's the n----- in you," for Twain's own explanation, far from Twain's expressed opinions as it is. The narrative is still being used to set up the single photo-perfect scene, and does not explore as far as it might.
Twain's good for plenty of fun along the way, of course, but set beside Huck Finn, for instance, Wilson suffers badly for scale. For all Twain's ear for dialect, the characters seem cut-out because they don't violate stereotype or category. Judge Driscoll remains the pompous ass he is at the start of the story, a man too stupid to realize when a child he's charged with is switched for another, then inane enough to fight a duel with a man he barely knows because he thinks the man has kicked said charge. One needn't imagine that Twain, of all people, would ascribe to such a man any sense. Not even Roxy or so-called Tom show much more nuance. No, Twain's got what he needs for his point without that. As he shows so-called Tom beside so-called Chambers, and the manners each have because of Roxy's social improvisations, one can easily conclude that all such class distinction constitutes usurpation -- the point of each and all of Twain's switched-identity novels: Wilson, Yankee, The Prince and the Pauper.
I wonder whether the sort of picaresque form of Huck Finn wasn't ideal for Twain on this basis. It seems the picture he must have had of Huck slowly enlightened by the nature of his partner must have bore more nuance and process from the beginning, since it requires in some form the passage of time and, since his observations and not his journey are the central focus, suggests Huck as the narrator -- really, with the return to picaresco, the innovation of this text. Then the phsysical resemblance of the Missiissippi itself to the plot -- Huck floats down river into the deep South a bit like Conrad's Marlow sails up the Congo -- lends both an episodicity and a sort of odd teleology to the text. One knows that as Huck wanders from home, Jim wanders towards a deeper and deeper culture of slavery. In all, the text makes happy use of the confluence of the Mississippi.
But I think in general Twain's strongest for the pithy comment, that his poetics leans towards rhetoric and polemic when he's not in a yarn, and that I'd like to make a good list of his essays and shorts, and largely teach from the highlights.
Wordsworth
Wordsworth applies a philosophy bearing traces of Locke and Kant to the practical problems of poets, influencing the line that runs through Emerson, Whitman, and Williams through the Objectivists and Beats. He lays the principles out concisely in his Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads,
He sees his work as "fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation" (437 Adams). Or, again, ". . . all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (438). He sees poetry not as an attempt to "explain the ways of God to men," as per Milton, but a rendering of human emotional percept. Accordingly, he holds plain-ish language essential to this task: ". . . such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical langauge than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets" (438). This particularly reflects upon deliberately and falsely decorative language:
"The reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes, and are utterly rejected, as an ordinary device to elevate the style, and raise it above prose" (439).
And, further, " --It is not . . . to be supposed that anyone who holds that sublime notion of poetry which I have attempted to convey, will break in upon th sanctity and truth of his pictures by transitory and accidental ornaments, and endeavor to exite admiration of himslef by arts the necessity of which must manifestly depend upon the assumed meanness of his subject" (443).
A key theme underlying these observations can be drawn from assumptions of commonality of perception articulated distinctly by Kant and Locke. Wordsworth's version, while less extensively articulated, reads with admirable clarity:
" . . . the poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are producedin him in that manner. But these passions and thoughts and feelings are the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men" (443).
He extends this universality to an insistence that poetry should most properly be engaged in other disciplines:
"The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or the mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed . . . " (442). His appreciation of the basis for this observation is subtle, and deserves a longer passage:
"We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure: I would not be misunderstood; but wherever we sympathize with pain, it will be found that the sympathy is produced aand carried on by subtle combination with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone. The man of science, the chemist and mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this. . . . What then does the poet? He considers man and the objects that surround him as acting and reacting upon each other, so as to produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure" (442).
So here we have a central position not only for the poet in recognizing Truth, but even a central role for the emotions in recognizing even the most technical of information. Wordsworth refuses the distinctions -- including, I must add, since I have referred the reader to Kant -- at least some of the distinction between pleasure and beauty accorded by Kant.
Pretty radical for a guy out sniffing daffodils.
Page #'s are from Hazard Adams' anthology, Critical Theory Since Plato.
He sees his work as "fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation" (437 Adams). Or, again, ". . . all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (438). He sees poetry not as an attempt to "explain the ways of God to men," as per Milton, but a rendering of human emotional percept. Accordingly, he holds plain-ish language essential to this task: ". . . such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical langauge than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets" (438). This particularly reflects upon deliberately and falsely decorative language:
"The reader will find that personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes, and are utterly rejected, as an ordinary device to elevate the style, and raise it above prose" (439).
And, further, " --It is not . . . to be supposed that anyone who holds that sublime notion of poetry which I have attempted to convey, will break in upon th sanctity and truth of his pictures by transitory and accidental ornaments, and endeavor to exite admiration of himslef by arts the necessity of which must manifestly depend upon the assumed meanness of his subject" (443).
A key theme underlying these observations can be drawn from assumptions of commonality of perception articulated distinctly by Kant and Locke. Wordsworth's version, while less extensively articulated, reads with admirable clarity:
" . . . the poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are producedin him in that manner. But these passions and thoughts and feelings are the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men" (443).
He extends this universality to an insistence that poetry should most properly be engaged in other disciplines:
"The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or the mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed . . . " (442). His appreciation of the basis for this observation is subtle, and deserves a longer passage:
"We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure: I would not be misunderstood; but wherever we sympathize with pain, it will be found that the sympathy is produced aand carried on by subtle combination with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone. The man of science, the chemist and mathematician, whatever difficulties and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this. . . . What then does the poet? He considers man and the objects that surround him as acting and reacting upon each other, so as to produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure" (442).
So here we have a central position not only for the poet in recognizing Truth, but even a central role for the emotions in recognizing even the most technical of information. Wordsworth refuses the distinctions -- including, I must add, since I have referred the reader to Kant -- at least some of the distinction between pleasure and beauty accorded by Kant.
Pretty radical for a guy out sniffing daffodils.
Page #'s are from Hazard Adams' anthology, Critical Theory Since Plato.
Longinus
Longinus shrinks and shrink-wraps Aristotle. Where Aristotle attempts to describe living literature, pressing upon it form and category and not unmindful of the violation, Longinus prescribes. Those wishing a good critical review of Aristotle's strictures (something that bears quite directly upon any practical use of Longinus' theories) might check out J. Hillis Miller's Reading Narrative, which methodically pries apart Aristotle's readings of Homer and, particularly Sophocles. Miller doesn't answer all the questions he raises, but then, doing so may take some time.
Meanwhile, what we have at least thought we were doing writing fiction and drama has as much to do with Aristotle and Longinus as just about anybody.
Longinus grants five principles of sublime art, most of which are moderately self-explanatory as far as he investigates them:
1. Conception of "high" idea. He does conflate "high" both with selfless and with social status, though he seems most concerned with the requirement to see outside of one's POV. The gesture feels like Kant's more extensively articulated descriptions in A Critique of Judgment.
2. Passion.
3. Figure -- He divides these into figures of thought and figures of expression, apparently but not explicitly regarding these as separable even while granting thought a figure.
4. Diction
5. Elevation.
* ability to perceive beyond individual perspective
* even under duress
* amplification -- by which he seems to mean something like what writing primers call parallel structure. He gives Demosthenes' reliance on parallel structure as occurring most when listeners are to be "most enthralled" (83). I suspect if one thinks of MLK, that's a good comparison. He goes on about Cicero:
"The profusion of Cicero is in place where the hearer must be flooded with words, for it is appropriate to the treatment of commonplaces, and to perorations for the most part and digressions, and to all descriptive and declamatory passages, and to writings on history and natural science, and to many oher departments of literature" (83)
As the flood of words fits the common, so the channeled words with repetition, with alignment of sensual details, fits the exalted, the noble, the sublime -- a rather nifty observation, however one may want to play with dichotomies of high and low. And I think the analysis gains from his treating fictional and nonfictional, poetic and rhetorical discourse within the same rubric.
He holds amplification attainable in part by the implementation of various techniques:
EMULATION of previous poets. Attitudes about copying have changed vastly with the refinement of systems of production and distribution of texts. For a medieval person to criticize the copying of a text would be like somone criticizing Olivier for copying Shakespeare because he played Hamlet. For more on this, Ong, Walter, especially Orality and Literacy. Jerzy Grotowsky had related observations on the differences between performers from literate and pre-literate cultures, but I'm not certain he ever got them into writing. I intend to go back through the one collection I have seen of his work:
Grotwski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. London: Methuan, -- I'm not sure what year.
IMAGES -- ". . . the design is enthrallment". He uses an example by Demosthenes to indicate that image must correspond to argument, an issue of qualifications in a sense almost like Stephen Toulmin's, although not articulated in detail.
WORDS WITHOUT CONNECTING LINKS. He gives an example from Xenophon, but misunderstands it, if I may judge by the translation: "'Locking their shields,' says Xenophon,'they thrust fought slew fell.'" He describes the urgency created by the rush of words, but neglects the logical distinction: these seem to become, in a sense, one action. They move a step closer to being hyphenate. There's a suggestion, then, not only of rush, but of a lack of intervening reflection. Altogether it's a fine observation, and deserves more attention.
For examples, see the following:
1) Nakell, Martin. Two Fields that Face and Mirror Each Other, which makes frequent successful use of the form. Nakell seems abundantly aware of both the effects on intensity and the warps of logic involved.
2) Kristeva, Julia. "From One Castle to the Other." I don't recall which collection this is in, but she considers L.F. Celine's obtrusive swearing and elipses as dissociating elements from sentence syntax, thereby, she claims, slamming them directly into the syntagma. There's a natural ground here for reflections on the shifts of syntax and signification within the sentence as controlled by factors outside the sentence itself.
3) The Objectivist poets, with their concern with the "little words." One has to dig for this, but I'd go through George Oppen and Louis Zukovsky particularly, and notice the play with (and without!) prepositions and articles.
4) Ginsberg does this and seems to do it more in his best work, although I'd argue that the effect seems different than that which Longinus describes. He seems to associate this with the "lengthening of the line in American Poetry" that he discusses frequently. In some interview, Ginsberg says he finds connection more interesting and powerful than disconnection. In his classes at Naropa (some are available on mp3, as are a lot of other wonderful things, on the Naropa Website) he seems extensively concerned with relations between this kind of diction and breath and Charles Olsen's "Projective Verse" and a relation to Buddhism.
INVERSIONS - Longinus claims that inversions make for intensity. Go figure. Perhaps Celine's interjections or Dickinson's repeated pauses might be construed as a positive example of this. But one can as easily posit the urbane inversions of John Milton or Henry James as counterexamples. On the other hand, one wonders whether Longinus is not taking a different view of intensity itself.
* REPETITIONS - He names this separately from the parallelism above, but gives little reason for the distinction
* DIALOG - cites the enhanced immediacy as opposed to narrative.
* 3RD PERSON NARRATOR ASSUMES 1ST PERSON, PAST BECOMES PRESENT.
* PERIPHRASIS = Contemporary "making strange"
* METAPHORS he treats separately from images. Says little of it, as though the question were whether to use them, not how they function or differences between them.
* HYPERBOLE - he doesn't really describe this.
ELEMENT 5 - ARRANGEMENT OF WORDS IN A CERTAIN ORDER -- In this he recognizes sublimity an effect of syntax or syntagm, of arrangement:
"So the constitutents of grandeur, when separated from one another, carry with them sublimity in distraction and when further encircled in a chain of harmony they become sonorous by their very rotundity; and in periods sublimity is, as it were, a contribution made by a multitude" (96 Hazard Adams).
Meanwhile, what we have at least thought we were doing writing fiction and drama has as much to do with Aristotle and Longinus as just about anybody.
Longinus grants five principles of sublime art, most of which are moderately self-explanatory as far as he investigates them:
1. Conception of "high" idea. He does conflate "high" both with selfless and with social status, though he seems most concerned with the requirement to see outside of one's POV. The gesture feels like Kant's more extensively articulated descriptions in A Critique of Judgment.
2. Passion.
3. Figure -- He divides these into figures of thought and figures of expression, apparently but not explicitly regarding these as separable even while granting thought a figure.
4. Diction
5. Elevation.
* ability to perceive beyond individual perspective
* even under duress
* amplification -- by which he seems to mean something like what writing primers call parallel structure. He gives Demosthenes' reliance on parallel structure as occurring most when listeners are to be "most enthralled" (83). I suspect if one thinks of MLK, that's a good comparison. He goes on about Cicero:
"The profusion of Cicero is in place where the hearer must be flooded with words, for it is appropriate to the treatment of commonplaces, and to perorations for the most part and digressions, and to all descriptive and declamatory passages, and to writings on history and natural science, and to many oher departments of literature" (83)
As the flood of words fits the common, so the channeled words with repetition, with alignment of sensual details, fits the exalted, the noble, the sublime -- a rather nifty observation, however one may want to play with dichotomies of high and low. And I think the analysis gains from his treating fictional and nonfictional, poetic and rhetorical discourse within the same rubric.
He holds amplification attainable in part by the implementation of various techniques:
EMULATION of previous poets. Attitudes about copying have changed vastly with the refinement of systems of production and distribution of texts. For a medieval person to criticize the copying of a text would be like somone criticizing Olivier for copying Shakespeare because he played Hamlet. For more on this, Ong, Walter, especially Orality and Literacy. Jerzy Grotowsky had related observations on the differences between performers from literate and pre-literate cultures, but I'm not certain he ever got them into writing. I intend to go back through the one collection I have seen of his work:
Grotwski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. London: Methuan, -- I'm not sure what year.
IMAGES -- ". . . the design is enthrallment". He uses an example by Demosthenes to indicate that image must correspond to argument, an issue of qualifications in a sense almost like Stephen Toulmin's, although not articulated in detail.
WORDS WITHOUT CONNECTING LINKS. He gives an example from Xenophon, but misunderstands it, if I may judge by the translation: "'Locking their shields,' says Xenophon,'they thrust fought slew fell.'" He describes the urgency created by the rush of words, but neglects the logical distinction: these seem to become, in a sense, one action. They move a step closer to being hyphenate. There's a suggestion, then, not only of rush, but of a lack of intervening reflection. Altogether it's a fine observation, and deserves more attention.
For examples, see the following:
1) Nakell, Martin. Two Fields that Face and Mirror Each Other, which makes frequent successful use of the form. Nakell seems abundantly aware of both the effects on intensity and the warps of logic involved.
2) Kristeva, Julia. "From One Castle to the Other." I don't recall which collection this is in, but she considers L.F. Celine's obtrusive swearing and elipses as dissociating elements from sentence syntax, thereby, she claims, slamming them directly into the syntagma. There's a natural ground here for reflections on the shifts of syntax and signification within the sentence as controlled by factors outside the sentence itself.
3) The Objectivist poets, with their concern with the "little words." One has to dig for this, but I'd go through George Oppen and Louis Zukovsky particularly, and notice the play with (and without!) prepositions and articles.
4) Ginsberg does this and seems to do it more in his best work, although I'd argue that the effect seems different than that which Longinus describes. He seems to associate this with the "lengthening of the line in American Poetry" that he discusses frequently. In some interview, Ginsberg says he finds connection more interesting and powerful than disconnection. In his classes at Naropa (some are available on mp3, as are a lot of other wonderful things, on the Naropa Website) he seems extensively concerned with relations between this kind of diction and breath and Charles Olsen's "Projective Verse" and a relation to Buddhism.
INVERSIONS - Longinus claims that inversions make for intensity. Go figure. Perhaps Celine's interjections or Dickinson's repeated pauses might be construed as a positive example of this. But one can as easily posit the urbane inversions of John Milton or Henry James as counterexamples. On the other hand, one wonders whether Longinus is not taking a different view of intensity itself.
* REPETITIONS - He names this separately from the parallelism above, but gives little reason for the distinction
* DIALOG - cites the enhanced immediacy as opposed to narrative.
* 3RD PERSON NARRATOR ASSUMES 1ST PERSON, PAST BECOMES PRESENT.
* PERIPHRASIS = Contemporary "making strange"
* METAPHORS he treats separately from images. Says little of it, as though the question were whether to use them, not how they function or differences between them.
* HYPERBOLE - he doesn't really describe this.
ELEMENT 5 - ARRANGEMENT OF WORDS IN A CERTAIN ORDER -- In this he recognizes sublimity an effect of syntax or syntagm, of arrangement:
"So the constitutents of grandeur, when separated from one another, carry with them sublimity in distraction and when further encircled in a chain of harmony they become sonorous by their very rotundity; and in periods sublimity is, as it were, a contribution made by a multitude" (96 Hazard Adams).
Chomsky
Where does a student of literature grab a handle on Noam Chomsky?
Chomsky himself denies a useful connection between his linguistic work and literature, further denies tight links between his linguistics and his political work, and makes little of any connection between his political work and literature. This in some ways seems consistent with his assumptions of species-universal, species-specific observations based on similar perceptive and cognitive equipment in humans. Yet even accepting some of these assumptions, I find myself moved to deny the divisions.
Chomsky calls the 17th Century his "favorite century," and one takes little trouble in identifying John Locke as among his favorite people in it. The ideas laid out in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding make a nice basis for Chomsky's assumption that an inherited organ produces language. Chomsky points out repeatedly and usually patiently observations that Locke made before: that human brains share similar structures and might reasonably assumed to share substantially common observations.
Chomsky further extends this to suggest that we share moral judgments in a similar way. While he consistently presents this idea of the source of moral judgment as speculative, Occam's razor suggests that something like this will turn out to be correct: the separate evolution of vastly different cognitive equipment for different cognitive problems seems so unlikely historically and so impractical from the standpoint of engineering a viable organism that one has to at least suspect that cognitive systems are mostly similar. The complication does remain that similarly designed and evolved subsystems might yield pragmatically distinct results, but the assumption of a common system, of a similar pattern, should allow for the generation of testable hypotheses much as did Chomsky's initial assumption of a universal grammar.
If that is the case, one would expect to find that moral and aesthetic judgments will form or flow similarly to language. Moral and aesthetic relationships could then be posited by correspondence with linguistic patterns, with relative hope of success and of ultimate verifiability by the standards we understand as scientific.
Of course, one might object that we know what we find moral like we speak without being linguists. But then, given the hedging, prevarication, and disagreements about such things, one might not.
Some qualifications do seem inherent in this. The good, the sublime, and the beautiful establishable in this way could not be understood as metaphysical or theological or universal as most people seem to understand these. They would be species-specific and species-universal in whatever sense the language faculty might be described as such. But establishing and describing fixable values for such attributes might make huge differences in both the appraisal and the support of human events.
I am aware of no extensive or systematic effort to correspond a "deep structure" of human literature with a deep structure of human language on the one hand or with human moral judgments on the other. But a glance suggests similarities may be more than superficial. Similar moral and aesthetic ideas prevail among extensively varied social systems in various physical circumstances across the planet. A basis for Chomsky's proposition of a universal grammar is the extensive similarities of human grammars across the same social and physical range. And moral judgments vary in the specific just as do human languages. Cultures, classes, and individuals vie in part out of varied self-interest, but also in apparent fidelity to moral schemata as distinct and similar as English and Swahili. The tendency of humans to twist or deny moral judgment to suit convenience blurs any comparison, but does not obviate the suggestion of central similarities -- such as these just observed.
Given these factors and possibilities, a science of literature or culture might describe and correspond relations between poetics and the formal requirements of physical media on the one hand, the relation between poetics and the moral-aesthetic demands of the species and social-physical situation on the other.
Granted, speculative correspondence does not equal established or absolutel correspondence. It does not equal no correspondence either.
Chomsky himself denies a useful connection between his linguistic work and literature, further denies tight links between his linguistics and his political work, and makes little of any connection between his political work and literature. This in some ways seems consistent with his assumptions of species-universal, species-specific observations based on similar perceptive and cognitive equipment in humans. Yet even accepting some of these assumptions, I find myself moved to deny the divisions.
Chomsky calls the 17th Century his "favorite century," and one takes little trouble in identifying John Locke as among his favorite people in it. The ideas laid out in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding make a nice basis for Chomsky's assumption that an inherited organ produces language. Chomsky points out repeatedly and usually patiently observations that Locke made before: that human brains share similar structures and might reasonably assumed to share substantially common observations.
Chomsky further extends this to suggest that we share moral judgments in a similar way. While he consistently presents this idea of the source of moral judgment as speculative, Occam's razor suggests that something like this will turn out to be correct: the separate evolution of vastly different cognitive equipment for different cognitive problems seems so unlikely historically and so impractical from the standpoint of engineering a viable organism that one has to at least suspect that cognitive systems are mostly similar. The complication does remain that similarly designed and evolved subsystems might yield pragmatically distinct results, but the assumption of a common system, of a similar pattern, should allow for the generation of testable hypotheses much as did Chomsky's initial assumption of a universal grammar.
If that is the case, one would expect to find that moral and aesthetic judgments will form or flow similarly to language. Moral and aesthetic relationships could then be posited by correspondence with linguistic patterns, with relative hope of success and of ultimate verifiability by the standards we understand as scientific.
Of course, one might object that we know what we find moral like we speak without being linguists. But then, given the hedging, prevarication, and disagreements about such things, one might not.
Some qualifications do seem inherent in this. The good, the sublime, and the beautiful establishable in this way could not be understood as metaphysical or theological or universal as most people seem to understand these. They would be species-specific and species-universal in whatever sense the language faculty might be described as such. But establishing and describing fixable values for such attributes might make huge differences in both the appraisal and the support of human events.
I am aware of no extensive or systematic effort to correspond a "deep structure" of human literature with a deep structure of human language on the one hand or with human moral judgments on the other. But a glance suggests similarities may be more than superficial. Similar moral and aesthetic ideas prevail among extensively varied social systems in various physical circumstances across the planet. A basis for Chomsky's proposition of a universal grammar is the extensive similarities of human grammars across the same social and physical range. And moral judgments vary in the specific just as do human languages. Cultures, classes, and individuals vie in part out of varied self-interest, but also in apparent fidelity to moral schemata as distinct and similar as English and Swahili. The tendency of humans to twist or deny moral judgment to suit convenience blurs any comparison, but does not obviate the suggestion of central similarities -- such as these just observed.
Given these factors and possibilities, a science of literature or culture might describe and correspond relations between poetics and the formal requirements of physical media on the one hand, the relation between poetics and the moral-aesthetic demands of the species and social-physical situation on the other.
Granted, speculative correspondence does not equal established or absolutel correspondence. It does not equal no correspondence either.
Percy Shelley's "Defense"
I'd love to get the author of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and "Mont Blanc" to comment at length on form, but Percy Shelley's "Defense of Poetry" primarily responds to Peacock. Shelley does refer to the composite nature of poetic information, the formal and synthetic aspects of knowledge, but he doesn't go into the specifics one senses he might.
"He starts, "Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things" (516 Adams).
His "whole" hovers smokily around the sublime as per Plotinus, Kant, and perhaps his buddy Coleridge, but he's not here to go into an epistemology.
"Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent" clearly violates Saussure's later assumption of the arbitrary signifier. But note Shelley's talking about sentences, lines, stanzas, and so forth, not isolated words.
This raises some interesting questions. Even granted, for the moment, that the relation of signified to signifier might be completely arbitrary as per Saussure, sentence, phrase, line and so forth are not related so arbitrarily to concept. To clarify, that part of the chain of meaning that one might reasonably call arbitrary might not be the relation between sentence and thought so much as between sentence-thought and referent.
So, a typical classroom argument to demonstrate Saussure's arbitrary relation might run that neither the English table nor Spanish mesa resemble furniture or the idea of furniture. Even the English "cock-a-doodle-doo" bears but little resemblance to the Spanish "Qui qui ri quí" of a rooster that speaks el castellano verdadero. But "Traígame la mesa," and "Bring me the table" actually do resemble each other in significant ways, as discussed in Noam Chomsky's linguistic work from Syntactic Structures on.
Shelley, meanwhile, oblivious to my questions, continues to answer Thomas Peacock's concerns about social good, but we cross paths again in the structure of his insistence on the moral value of poetry.
"But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought"
Note these combinations -- Shelley, whether carefully or in passing, involves compositional aspects in his defense. He joins this with an idea that sounds right out of Keats:
The Great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautifiul which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own" (519).
Again we have an insistence on something which could be described structurally. His love constitutes very pointedly a "going out of our own nature," that is, a kind of visitation with or appreciation of an other.
The hints here seem buried in the form of his sentences, but I think there's a clearer statement of his aesthetics. The title below is lifted almost exactly from Plotinus. So here's a treat, an old favorite:
HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY.
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us,--visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,--
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, _5
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,--
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,--
Like memory of music fled,-- _10
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form,--where art thou gone? _15
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, _20
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom,--why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?
No voice from some sublimer world hath ever _25
To sage or poet these responses given--
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven.
Remain the records of their vain endeavour,
Frail spells--whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see, _30
Doubt, chance, and mutability.
Thy light alone--like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream, _35
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.
Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal, and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, _40
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
Thou messenger of sympathies,
That wax and wane in lovers' eyes--
Thou--that to human thought art nourishment,
Like darkness to a dying flame! _45
Depart not as thy shadow came
Depart not--lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.
While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, _50
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
I was not heard--I saw them not--
When musing deeply on the lot _55
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming,--
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy! _60
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine--have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers _65
Of studious zeal or love's delight
Outwatched with me the envious night--
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery, _70
That thou--O awful LOVELINESS,
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.
The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past--there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, _75
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply _80
Its calm--to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.
Percy Shelley, 1816.
"He starts, "Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things" (516 Adams).
His "whole" hovers smokily around the sublime as per Plotinus, Kant, and perhaps his buddy Coleridge, but he's not here to go into an epistemology.
"Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent" clearly violates Saussure's later assumption of the arbitrary signifier. But note Shelley's talking about sentences, lines, stanzas, and so forth, not isolated words.
This raises some interesting questions. Even granted, for the moment, that the relation of signified to signifier might be completely arbitrary as per Saussure, sentence, phrase, line and so forth are not related so arbitrarily to concept. To clarify, that part of the chain of meaning that one might reasonably call arbitrary might not be the relation between sentence and thought so much as between sentence-thought and referent.
So, a typical classroom argument to demonstrate Saussure's arbitrary relation might run that neither the English table nor Spanish mesa resemble furniture or the idea of furniture. Even the English "cock-a-doodle-doo" bears but little resemblance to the Spanish "Qui qui ri quí" of a rooster that speaks el castellano verdadero. But "Traígame la mesa," and "Bring me the table" actually do resemble each other in significant ways, as discussed in Noam Chomsky's linguistic work from Syntactic Structures on.
Shelley, meanwhile, oblivious to my questions, continues to answer Thomas Peacock's concerns about social good, but we cross paths again in the structure of his insistence on the moral value of poetry.
"But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought"
Note these combinations -- Shelley, whether carefully or in passing, involves compositional aspects in his defense. He joins this with an idea that sounds right out of Keats:
The Great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautifiul which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own" (519).
Again we have an insistence on something which could be described structurally. His love constitutes very pointedly a "going out of our own nature," that is, a kind of visitation with or appreciation of an other.
The hints here seem buried in the form of his sentences, but I think there's a clearer statement of his aesthetics. The title below is lifted almost exactly from Plotinus. So here's a treat, an old favorite:
HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY.
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us,--visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,--
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, _5
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance;
Like hues and harmonies of evening,--
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,--
Like memory of music fled,-- _10
Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
Spirit of BEAUTY, that dost consecrate
With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form,--where art thou gone? _15
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever
Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain-river,
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown, _20
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth
Such gloom,--why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?
No voice from some sublimer world hath ever _25
To sage or poet these responses given--
Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven.
Remain the records of their vain endeavour,
Frail spells--whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,
From all we hear and all we see, _30
Doubt, chance, and mutability.
Thy light alone--like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream, _35
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.
Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal, and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, _40
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
Thou messenger of sympathies,
That wax and wane in lovers' eyes--
Thou--that to human thought art nourishment,
Like darkness to a dying flame! _45
Depart not as thy shadow came
Depart not--lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.
While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin, _50
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
I was not heard--I saw them not--
When musing deeply on the lot _55
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming,--
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy! _60
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine--have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave: they have in visioned bowers _65
Of studious zeal or love's delight
Outwatched with me the envious night--
They know that never joy illumed my brow
Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free
This world from its dark slavery, _70
That thou--O awful LOVELINESS,
Wouldst give whate'er these words cannot express.
The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past--there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky, _75
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply _80
Its calm--to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.
Percy Shelley, 1816.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Kant
The universe that Emerson & Co. and a lot of others seem to imagine themselves reeks of Kant, whom I haven't read in years. So I glanced at Observations on the Feeling of the Sublime and the Beautiful. But this doesn't seem to be the best sampling of Kant's work. Critique of Pure Reason does, of course, and anything that goes so far into epistemology must have ramifications for aesthetics and literature, but that's a chunk that I suspect I won't get to reread it this year. So I've started into a section of the Critique of Pure Judgment from Adams, Hazard. Ed. Critical Theory Since Plato. Revised. NYC: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. That's been just right. Here are a couple slices, with comments.
"Taste is the faculty of judging of an object or a method of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction is called beautiful" (378).
In coming to this conclusion, Kant distinguishes beauty from good by saying beauty is intuitable or sensible, whereas good is intellectual or analytical -- so here's a basis for subjective intuition as the base of aesthetic judgment. But he distinguishes that from more relativistic explanations such as have become popular later:
"That which gratifies a man is called pleasant; that which merely pleases is beautiful; that which is esteemed or approved by him, i.e. that to which he accords an objective worth, is good" Pleasantness concerns irrational animals also, but beaut only concerns men, i.e. animal, but still rational beings -- nto merely qua rational (e.g. spirits) , but qua animal also -- and the good concerns every rational being in general. This is a proposition which can only be completely established and explained in the sequel. We may say that, of all these three kinds of satisfaction, that of taste in the beautiful is alone a disniterested and free satisfaction; for no interest, either of sense or of reason here forces our assent" (377).
So pleasure must be felt directly by the subject for the subject's own sake; the subject must receive attain or confront something that's pleasant. The good may be rationally observed and enjoyed in its way without being subjectively felt at all. But Beauty must be felt and may be independent of any subjective or personal self-interest. So while the artist's judgment is subjective, it remains judgment of something universal -- again a foundation of Romanticism and Transcendentalism.
This also relates to the judgment being subjective in the sense that it is made by the perceiving subject, not the perceived object in itself. Kant allows for considerable interaction and complexity in such relationships. That is, intellect uses aesthetic judgments, and multiple aspects of judging may be used in a single judgment:
"Given representations in a judgment can be empirical (consequently, aesthetical); but the judgment which is formed by means of them is logical, provided they are referred in the judgment to the object. Conversely, if the given representations are rational, but are referred in a judgment simply to the subject (to its feeling), the judgment is so far always aesthetical" (376).
Thus, we can get Kant's conclusion, in which beauty constitutes the intuitive, aesthetic, subjective, personal judgment that an object or condition is beautiful, that is, pleasing in a universal way, not just to oneself.
He goes on to state that "The beautiful is that which pleases universally without requiring a concept" (380). Although Kant himself qualifies this quite sharply later on, one can see the relation to Rousseauvian ideas in the importance given to untrained intuition and native insight.
"To seek for a principle of taste which shall furnish, by means of definite concepts, a universal criterion of the beautiful is fruitless trouble, because what is sought is impossible and self-contradictory" (384).
That is, you can't do beauty by the numbers or by category; it has to be specifically instantiated with reference to context and surroundings. Yet on the other hand it involves universal benefit and universal purposiveness. It's worth comparing this and Kant's description of the sublime with Emerson's passage about the transparent eyeball early in Nature, and also with the nature of Whitman's 1st person narrator who is nominally "I" but palpably everyone and all the universe as well and at the same time.
To my knowledge, Kant supplies the most precise and explicit articulation of a theory of personal direct sensation of something like the infinite, the universe, or spirit. Emerson's Nature -- which requires an individual, personal relationship to the universal -- seems to conflate (rightly or wrongly) the good and the beautiful, whereas Kant distinguishes them. In many ways, though, the logical distinctions are impressively similar.
Kant's interpenitration of universal and instantiation constitutes the center of Kant's doctrines of transcendance. It was interesting to nose into A Critique of Pure Reason after so many years and shortly after reading Emerson to see the word transcendental or some form thereof wedged into nearly every chapter title. I doubt Emerson's use of the term a generation afterward could hardly be coincidental. That moment with the transparent eyeball reads like a classic moment of beauty or even of the sublime. This fractal harmonies described by these men seems to be the basis of Romantic and Transcendental aesthetics in general.
The Romantic writer typically assumes that his or her innermost feelings are those of the readers. Therefore the most universal, most sublime material comes from the expulsion of the artist's innermost angst or desire. For the Romantics, the person who so dips into his or her deepest soul, most unmediated passions is the person who most grasps the Truth, not only of his or her innermost being, but of the principle of movement of the universe.
One might go back to Whitman for the example, and not just Whitman's expansiveness, but the particular and peculiar relation of the speaking subject to the reader and to the text. Whitman most directly assumes that he may speak directly for the reader without the reader's permission and with complete assumption of confidence. We have in this way an assumption of similarity of perceptive mechanisms in all readers, similar possession of a mutual reality, subjective appreciation of the tick-tock movements of the universe. This would seem to operate Kant -> Schiller -> Coleridge and Wordsworth -> Emerson -> Whitman -- with various other branches, mostly across Europe.
Kant's sublime only reinforces this impression:
"The beautiful in nature is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having definite boundaries. The sublime, on the other hand, is to be found in a formless object, so far as it it or by occasion of it boundlessness represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought" (386).
The sublime is still something to be experienced directly, as per Emerson or theologial Karl Barth. Talking of the absolute grandeur of the sublime, Kant insists that "It is not a pure concept of understanding that is thus signified; still less is it an intuition of sense; and just as little is it a concept of reason, because it brings with it no principleof cognition. It must therefore be a concept of judgement or derived from one, and a subjective purposiveness of the representation in referene tothe judgement must lie at its basis" (387).
So it is subjectively perceived. It's not, however, sensed per se, because it has no identifiable limits, no specific extension. It's greatness, however many times he says absolute, seems to have some kind of relativism. He will eventually get to saying that it involves the relation between things. The first clue seems to be the relativism of said greatness -- it appears to be not a size (how could it be?) but a hierarchy and the characteristic of being at the perceptible outer reach of a system of hierarchies:
"In a judgment by which anything is designated simply as great, it is not merely meant that the object has a magnitude, but hat this magnitude is superior to that of many other objects of the same kind, without, owever, any exact determination of this superiority" (388).
The sublime is the greater thing which contains and subsumes the lesser -- the greater plan of God, the syntax of the sentence, the syntagma of the larger work. Kant makes an interesting further gesture towards the individual perception, concluding this section so:
" . . . the sublime is that, the mere ability to think which sews a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of sense (387).
In passing, I should note that this coincides very nearly to Jacques Derrida's conception of God as expressed in The Gift of Death (page 109, if I recall).
A couple of paragraphs of Kant seem worth typing out:
"The feeling of the sublime is therefore a feeling of pain arising from the want of accordance between the aesthetical estimation of magnitude formed by the imagination and the estimation of the same formed by reason. There is at the same time a pleasure thus excited, arising from the correspondence with rational ideas of this very judgment of the inadequacy of our greatest facultyfo sense, insofar as it is a law fo us to strive afte rthese ideas. In fact it is for us a law (of reason) and belongs to our destination to estimate as small, in comparison with ideas of reason, everthing which nature, regarded as an object of sense, contains that is great for us; and that which arouses in us the feeling of this supersensible destination agrees with that law" (389).
"Sublimity . . . does not reside in anything of nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious that we are superior to nature within, and therefore also to nature witout us (so far as it influences us). Everything that excites this feeling in us, e.g. the mightof nature which calls forth our forces, is called them (although improperly) sublime. Only by supposing this idea in ourselves and in reference to it are we capable of attaining to the idea of the sublimity of that Being which produces respect in us, not merely by the might that it displayes in nature, but rather by means of the faculty which resides in ous of judging it fearlessly and of regarding our destination as sublime in respect of it" (391).
"Spirit, in an aesthetical sense, is the name given to the animating principle of the mind' (391).
There at the end we have the pure Romanticism:
"In a word, the aesthetical idea is a representation of the imagination associated with a given concept, which is bound up with such a multiplicity of partial representaitons in its free employment that for it no expression marking a definite can be found; and such a representaiton, therefore, adds to a concept much ineffable thought, the feeling of which quickens the cognitive faculties, and with langauge, which is the mere letter, minds up spirit also" (392).
And and this point, one feels that the individual has slipped quite solidly into aesthetics and spirit, and may use his own personal judgment as an indicator without reference to prior judgment, social judgment, religion or government.
The bizarre thing is that this straightlaced man who seems to have never confronted anyone has been instrumental in the great revolutions, and perhaps more than anyone who carried a gun or sword. I don't know that I find a "pen is mightier" here, but at least a "to thine own self be true."
"Taste is the faculty of judging of an object or a method of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction is called beautiful" (378).
In coming to this conclusion, Kant distinguishes beauty from good by saying beauty is intuitable or sensible, whereas good is intellectual or analytical -- so here's a basis for subjective intuition as the base of aesthetic judgment. But he distinguishes that from more relativistic explanations such as have become popular later:
"That which gratifies a man is called pleasant; that which merely pleases is beautiful; that which is esteemed or approved by him, i.e. that to which he accords an objective worth, is good" Pleasantness concerns irrational animals also, but beaut only concerns men, i.e. animal, but still rational beings -- nto merely qua rational (e.g. spirits) , but qua animal also -- and the good concerns every rational being in general. This is a proposition which can only be completely established and explained in the sequel. We may say that, of all these three kinds of satisfaction, that of taste in the beautiful is alone a disniterested and free satisfaction; for no interest, either of sense or of reason here forces our assent" (377).
So pleasure must be felt directly by the subject for the subject's own sake; the subject must receive attain or confront something that's pleasant. The good may be rationally observed and enjoyed in its way without being subjectively felt at all. But Beauty must be felt and may be independent of any subjective or personal self-interest. So while the artist's judgment is subjective, it remains judgment of something universal -- again a foundation of Romanticism and Transcendentalism.
This also relates to the judgment being subjective in the sense that it is made by the perceiving subject, not the perceived object in itself. Kant allows for considerable interaction and complexity in such relationships. That is, intellect uses aesthetic judgments, and multiple aspects of judging may be used in a single judgment:
"Given representations in a judgment can be empirical (consequently, aesthetical); but the judgment which is formed by means of them is logical, provided they are referred in the judgment to the object. Conversely, if the given representations are rational, but are referred in a judgment simply to the subject (to its feeling), the judgment is so far always aesthetical" (376).
Thus, we can get Kant's conclusion, in which beauty constitutes the intuitive, aesthetic, subjective, personal judgment that an object or condition is beautiful, that is, pleasing in a universal way, not just to oneself.
He goes on to state that "The beautiful is that which pleases universally without requiring a concept" (380). Although Kant himself qualifies this quite sharply later on, one can see the relation to Rousseauvian ideas in the importance given to untrained intuition and native insight.
"To seek for a principle of taste which shall furnish, by means of definite concepts, a universal criterion of the beautiful is fruitless trouble, because what is sought is impossible and self-contradictory" (384).
That is, you can't do beauty by the numbers or by category; it has to be specifically instantiated with reference to context and surroundings. Yet on the other hand it involves universal benefit and universal purposiveness. It's worth comparing this and Kant's description of the sublime with Emerson's passage about the transparent eyeball early in Nature, and also with the nature of Whitman's 1st person narrator who is nominally "I" but palpably everyone and all the universe as well and at the same time.
To my knowledge, Kant supplies the most precise and explicit articulation of a theory of personal direct sensation of something like the infinite, the universe, or spirit. Emerson's Nature -- which requires an individual, personal relationship to the universal -- seems to conflate (rightly or wrongly) the good and the beautiful, whereas Kant distinguishes them. In many ways, though, the logical distinctions are impressively similar.
Kant's interpenitration of universal and instantiation constitutes the center of Kant's doctrines of transcendance. It was interesting to nose into A Critique of Pure Reason after so many years and shortly after reading Emerson to see the word transcendental or some form thereof wedged into nearly every chapter title. I doubt Emerson's use of the term a generation afterward could hardly be coincidental. That moment with the transparent eyeball reads like a classic moment of beauty or even of the sublime. This fractal harmonies described by these men seems to be the basis of Romantic and Transcendental aesthetics in general.
The Romantic writer typically assumes that his or her innermost feelings are those of the readers. Therefore the most universal, most sublime material comes from the expulsion of the artist's innermost angst or desire. For the Romantics, the person who so dips into his or her deepest soul, most unmediated passions is the person who most grasps the Truth, not only of his or her innermost being, but of the principle of movement of the universe.
One might go back to Whitman for the example, and not just Whitman's expansiveness, but the particular and peculiar relation of the speaking subject to the reader and to the text. Whitman most directly assumes that he may speak directly for the reader without the reader's permission and with complete assumption of confidence. We have in this way an assumption of similarity of perceptive mechanisms in all readers, similar possession of a mutual reality, subjective appreciation of the tick-tock movements of the universe. This would seem to operate Kant -> Schiller -> Coleridge and Wordsworth -> Emerson -> Whitman -- with various other branches, mostly across Europe.
Kant's sublime only reinforces this impression:
"The beautiful in nature is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having definite boundaries. The sublime, on the other hand, is to be found in a formless object, so far as it it or by occasion of it boundlessness represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought" (386).
The sublime is still something to be experienced directly, as per Emerson or theologial Karl Barth. Talking of the absolute grandeur of the sublime, Kant insists that "It is not a pure concept of understanding that is thus signified; still less is it an intuition of sense; and just as little is it a concept of reason, because it brings with it no principleof cognition. It must therefore be a concept of judgement or derived from one, and a subjective purposiveness of the representation in referene tothe judgement must lie at its basis" (387).
So it is subjectively perceived. It's not, however, sensed per se, because it has no identifiable limits, no specific extension. It's greatness, however many times he says absolute, seems to have some kind of relativism. He will eventually get to saying that it involves the relation between things. The first clue seems to be the relativism of said greatness -- it appears to be not a size (how could it be?) but a hierarchy and the characteristic of being at the perceptible outer reach of a system of hierarchies:
"In a judgment by which anything is designated simply as great, it is not merely meant that the object has a magnitude, but hat this magnitude is superior to that of many other objects of the same kind, without, owever, any exact determination of this superiority" (388).
The sublime is the greater thing which contains and subsumes the lesser -- the greater plan of God, the syntax of the sentence, the syntagma of the larger work. Kant makes an interesting further gesture towards the individual perception, concluding this section so:
" . . . the sublime is that, the mere ability to think which sews a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of sense (387).
In passing, I should note that this coincides very nearly to Jacques Derrida's conception of God as expressed in The Gift of Death (page 109, if I recall).
A couple of paragraphs of Kant seem worth typing out:
"The feeling of the sublime is therefore a feeling of pain arising from the want of accordance between the aesthetical estimation of magnitude formed by the imagination and the estimation of the same formed by reason. There is at the same time a pleasure thus excited, arising from the correspondence with rational ideas of this very judgment of the inadequacy of our greatest facultyfo sense, insofar as it is a law fo us to strive afte rthese ideas. In fact it is for us a law (of reason) and belongs to our destination to estimate as small, in comparison with ideas of reason, everthing which nature, regarded as an object of sense, contains that is great for us; and that which arouses in us the feeling of this supersensible destination agrees with that law" (389).
"Sublimity . . . does not reside in anything of nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious that we are superior to nature within, and therefore also to nature witout us (so far as it influences us). Everything that excites this feeling in us, e.g. the mightof nature which calls forth our forces, is called them (although improperly) sublime. Only by supposing this idea in ourselves and in reference to it are we capable of attaining to the idea of the sublimity of that Being which produces respect in us, not merely by the might that it displayes in nature, but rather by means of the faculty which resides in ous of judging it fearlessly and of regarding our destination as sublime in respect of it" (391).
"Spirit, in an aesthetical sense, is the name given to the animating principle of the mind' (391).
There at the end we have the pure Romanticism:
"In a word, the aesthetical idea is a representation of the imagination associated with a given concept, which is bound up with such a multiplicity of partial representaitons in its free employment that for it no expression marking a definite can be found; and such a representaiton, therefore, adds to a concept much ineffable thought, the feeling of which quickens the cognitive faculties, and with langauge, which is the mere letter, minds up spirit also" (392).
And and this point, one feels that the individual has slipped quite solidly into aesthetics and spirit, and may use his own personal judgment as an indicator without reference to prior judgment, social judgment, religion or government.
The bizarre thing is that this straightlaced man who seems to have never confronted anyone has been instrumental in the great revolutions, and perhaps more than anyone who carried a gun or sword. I don't know that I find a "pen is mightier" here, but at least a "to thine own self be true."
Friday, April 13, 2007
Sartre vs Faulkner
Is this complete: "On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner" : http://www.usask.ca/english/faulkner/main/criticism/sartre.html?
Thursday, April 12, 2007
The Sound And The Fury
This novel is broken into four sections. The first one is a major hurdle to get over, but if you can get past it, you'll be just fine...
Benjy's POV is a little scattered to begin with, and there are also time shifts that complicate matters. It's not apparent what Benjy is witnessing at all times...and his trauma is only directly named later on. Then, there is Quentin's section. Here, I started to make connections and I was also familiar with the character of Quentin (having read about Quentin in Absalom, Absalom! I think this second section is most representative of Faulkner's style. Quentin's POV has a grace and poetic sense about it. The third section, with Jason, was less satisfactory. I didn't care about his point of view (in fact, I didn't care for his character) and I wanted to know more about what happened to Caddy. I also wanted to know more about what happened to Jason's niece (also named Quentin...which is more than a might confusing). Although Jason's POV is probably the most straight-forward of the narratives, it is less satisfactory because he is so unsavory. Lastly, we have the fourth section which ties things neatly together and ends with a poignant sermon from an Easter Sunday Church service. This section dispenses with the first person points of view entirely.
If you have access to it, I heartily recommend reading the criticism of this novel by Jean-Paul Sartre (On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner). This really informed my reading of the novel and helps to draw attention to details like Quentin's broken watch in section two.
Just as with the old Greek legends...like the curse of the House of Atreus...the Compson family is doomed. They can never escape the chains of time. To paraphrase Faulkner, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." (Requiem for a Nun, 1951).
Benjy's POV is a little scattered to begin with, and there are also time shifts that complicate matters. It's not apparent what Benjy is witnessing at all times...and his trauma is only directly named later on. Then, there is Quentin's section. Here, I started to make connections and I was also familiar with the character of Quentin (having read about Quentin in Absalom, Absalom! I think this second section is most representative of Faulkner's style. Quentin's POV has a grace and poetic sense about it. The third section, with Jason, was less satisfactory. I didn't care about his point of view (in fact, I didn't care for his character) and I wanted to know more about what happened to Caddy. I also wanted to know more about what happened to Jason's niece (also named Quentin...which is more than a might confusing). Although Jason's POV is probably the most straight-forward of the narratives, it is less satisfactory because he is so unsavory. Lastly, we have the fourth section which ties things neatly together and ends with a poignant sermon from an Easter Sunday Church service. This section dispenses with the first person points of view entirely.
If you have access to it, I heartily recommend reading the criticism of this novel by Jean-Paul Sartre (On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner). This really informed my reading of the novel and helps to draw attention to details like Quentin's broken watch in section two.
Just as with the old Greek legends...like the curse of the House of Atreus...the Compson family is doomed. They can never escape the chains of time. To paraphrase Faulkner, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." (Requiem for a Nun, 1951).
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