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.
Friday, April 20, 2007
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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