Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Reading this selection from Fish's "Interpreting the Variorum," several problems appear.
Fish holds that the practices of "interpretive communities" predetermine readings.
For Fish, this is particularly powerful thing, because he considers the text to be what is read, not its object. Discussing a set of hypothetical readers with varying reactions to Lycidas, he comments, "A reader other than myself who, when presented with Lycidas (please keep in mind that the status of Lycidas is at issue), puts into execution a different set of interpretive strategies will perform a different succession of interpretive acts.) One of us might then be tempted to complain ot the other that we could not possibly be reading the same poem . . . and he would be right; for each of us would be reading the poem he made" (218).
Fish's wording rejects any difference made by the poem itself. Surely he would not deny that one reader using one consistent reading strategy will find Lycidas and Ashbery's "Skaters" different. But even this simple admission means that one cannot reasonably favor text or interpretation in an analysis, and that Fish misrepresents the activity he describes in claiming that "each of us would be reading the poem he made": the poem is as least as validly represented as an articulated entity that includes its readers and readings.
One might dismiss such distinctions as semantic equivocation, but Fish demonstrates the potential for error within a few pages as he good-naturedly noodges his reader towards his conclusion: "knowing full well that you will agree with me (that is, understand) only if you already agree with me" (221).
Here Fish baits his hook: as I start to disagree, I appear to demonstrate his point. But note here a couple assumptions in his particular writing strategy. He gives agree with me as equivalent to understand. He doesn't mean anything so unsubtle as that understanding consists in alliance with one Stanley Fish, but that understanding consists in sharing common assumptions. This statement differs sharply from asserting only that the judgment of understanding conferred by one interpretive community will depend on a convergence of reading strategies. Fish states that understanding itself amounts to this social relationship as opposed to, say, some correspondence to a physical text in a given set of contexts.
If one follows Fish's statements syllogistically, the text effectively disappears -- something Fish clearly does not intend, since he actually grants qualities to texts and distinguishes extensively between texts himself.
Another factor that gets lost is the effect of the text itself on interpretative strategy. Does one not form an interpretive strategy primarily by reading and interpreting texts? If this is so, it stands to reason that readers' interpretative strategies tend to be different at the end of a book than at the beginning. How often does Fish himself note that Milton plays against one's interpretive strategy? Does Fish suppose that Milton will frustrate my strategies every few lines, but that I won't wake up to that by Book X?
Thursday, May 3, 2007
DeFreuded
Freud, Sigmund. "The Dream of the Botanical Monograph." The Interpretation of Dreams. In Rivkin & Ryan's Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd Edition.
Freud gives us a useful view of psychoanalytic methodology, giving first what one might call the fabula of the dream, then coursing through his associations with various aspects thereof. He describes his insight as follows:
As we follow Freud following the trace of association, his path feels as arcane as his resourcefulness seems admirable. We move along the peripheries, the side-roads, of a highway of thought. The royal road here is Freud's feeling, and for all the brilliance of his observation, he never manages to state (and likely never finds) how he feels. The analysis thereby must proceed in the dark because Freud remains stranger to himself.
We have been left two hints. "I then suddenly perceived" shows that the preceding recall and analysis, the scraping-through of details, has been done in partial blindness. The insight that occurs, then, requires all or at least multiple preceding details considered jointly, globally. Next, the matter that sparks his sudden insight is the detail that "never fails to excite" feelings.
What Freud must scrape for is what he does not feel. What he does not feel is his unconscious, we may be told; just this is Freud's great discovery or invention. He does not feel that because it is his unconscious; it's his unconscious because he does not feel it.
We're apparently not conscious of what-all lies or sits in the unconscious. Perhaps we can undestand that several things therein seem to get conflated. To handle the most mundane matters first, one seldom traces the course of somatic functions: one doesn't focus on one's beating heart, breathing lungs, or delicately weeping pancreas. Then, clearly, a certain, possibly variable threshold of neural firing in distal sensory nerves appears necessary to stimulate response in more central neural processing. The itch must gather intensity to excite our attention. Waving a hand before one's face, one habitually ignores the quite clear trail of visually apparent hands that follow it. Looking across a room, one recognizes a single 3-dimensional visual panorama although one knows full well that this is a composite fiction generated from the input of two practically 2-dimensional sets of receptors at the back of one's eyes.
All of this is unconscious, and in whatever sense that a the unconscious exists, these are components thereof. Yet this is not in any way the target, or at least the proper target, of psychoanalysis. It's not the target because it's not pathological. Were anyone fixedly attentive to his or her kidneys or pancreas, that would be pathological. Were cardiac activity to require waking attention, the condition would quickly become fatal.
Since we have no reason to believe such neural impulse attempts to become evident to waking consciousness, we have no reason to believe that such information gets repressed. Freud talks about "unconscious" and "instinctive" drives, but were such drives or desires simply and naturally unconscious, like kidney function, we would simply and naturally remain unaware of them in the same way.
The single class of event that quite clearly gets pared away from consciousness is trauma. We can verify this abundantly. The victims of social violence -- soldiers and their victims, slaves, unwanted children, the very poor, the victims of traffic accidents -- frequently suffer symptoms that suggest repression of information.
Freud would have better stayed with his early, trauma-related theory, rather than move to appraisals of repression of vague matters like "instinct" or "unconscious drive." Granted the two might be similar. One might call the species-wide desire that infants have for their mothers an "instinct." One might wish to so distinguish that from a "need," because babies do survive without their mothers, granted surrogate care and suffering. But whether we call the removal of the mother "nonfulfillment of instinctive drives" or unfulfillment of needs, the result pains and damages the infant, and what one represses is not simply an instinct -- a traumatized infant may be convinced to suck; a neurotic adult may love, if often poorly -- but the pain of the specific memory of wound or denial.
One thing this means for psychoanalytic terms is that only Sophocles had an Oedipus complex -- assuming that indeed he did. Shakespeare may have had a similar Hamlet Complex and T.S. Eliot might be accused of a suspiciously familar J. Alfred Prufrock Complex. On the one hand, the insight of dynamic psychology have much to tell us about literature. On the other, the glib way critics throw around abstract and derivative terms like "castration" is ridiculous. What gets repressed is not some inherited fear of loss of one's testicles, some abstracted and theoretical entity derived from genital sensation in one's sense of self, or even exactly a way to please one's mother or father. What gets repressed is traumatic experience and its associated agony.
Since trauma involves event, each neurotic must invent his or her neurosis in response to trauma, as a means of survival. We in the 21st century are indeed impacted by the Oedipus complex, but because we have read it as a literary reference.
Thus Freud jumps to conclude about his dream, he does indeed choose a feeling, a thing he wants to say, but he neglects the past component of what "always raises his emotion." With the emotion comes the insight.
Why not start with the feeling?
Freud gives us a useful view of psychoanalytic methodology, giving first what one might call the fabula of the dream, then coursing through his associations with various aspects thereof. He describes his insight as follows:
"I then suddenly perceived that my dream was connected with the events of the previous evening. I had walked hom precisely with Dr. Konigstein and had got into conversation with him about a matter which never fails to excite my feeling whenever it is raised. WHile I was talking to him in the entrance-hall, Professor Gartner [Gardener] and his wife had joined us; and I could not help congratulating them both on their blooming looks. But Professor Gartner was one of the authors of the Festschrift I have just mentioned, and may well have reminded me of it. MOreover, th Frau L., whose disppointment on her birthday I described earlier, was mentioned -- though only, it is true, in another connection -- in my conversation with Dr. KOnigstein" (398).
As we follow Freud following the trace of association, his path feels as arcane as his resourcefulness seems admirable. We move along the peripheries, the side-roads, of a highway of thought. The royal road here is Freud's feeling, and for all the brilliance of his observation, he never manages to state (and likely never finds) how he feels. The analysis thereby must proceed in the dark because Freud remains stranger to himself.
We have been left two hints. "I then suddenly perceived" shows that the preceding recall and analysis, the scraping-through of details, has been done in partial blindness. The insight that occurs, then, requires all or at least multiple preceding details considered jointly, globally. Next, the matter that sparks his sudden insight is the detail that "never fails to excite" feelings.
What Freud must scrape for is what he does not feel. What he does not feel is his unconscious, we may be told; just this is Freud's great discovery or invention. He does not feel that because it is his unconscious; it's his unconscious because he does not feel it.
We're apparently not conscious of what-all lies or sits in the unconscious. Perhaps we can undestand that several things therein seem to get conflated. To handle the most mundane matters first, one seldom traces the course of somatic functions: one doesn't focus on one's beating heart, breathing lungs, or delicately weeping pancreas. Then, clearly, a certain, possibly variable threshold of neural firing in distal sensory nerves appears necessary to stimulate response in more central neural processing. The itch must gather intensity to excite our attention. Waving a hand before one's face, one habitually ignores the quite clear trail of visually apparent hands that follow it. Looking across a room, one recognizes a single 3-dimensional visual panorama although one knows full well that this is a composite fiction generated from the input of two practically 2-dimensional sets of receptors at the back of one's eyes.
All of this is unconscious, and in whatever sense that a the unconscious exists, these are components thereof. Yet this is not in any way the target, or at least the proper target, of psychoanalysis. It's not the target because it's not pathological. Were anyone fixedly attentive to his or her kidneys or pancreas, that would be pathological. Were cardiac activity to require waking attention, the condition would quickly become fatal.
Since we have no reason to believe such neural impulse attempts to become evident to waking consciousness, we have no reason to believe that such information gets repressed. Freud talks about "unconscious" and "instinctive" drives, but were such drives or desires simply and naturally unconscious, like kidney function, we would simply and naturally remain unaware of them in the same way.
The single class of event that quite clearly gets pared away from consciousness is trauma. We can verify this abundantly. The victims of social violence -- soldiers and their victims, slaves, unwanted children, the very poor, the victims of traffic accidents -- frequently suffer symptoms that suggest repression of information.
Freud would have better stayed with his early, trauma-related theory, rather than move to appraisals of repression of vague matters like "instinct" or "unconscious drive." Granted the two might be similar. One might call the species-wide desire that infants have for their mothers an "instinct." One might wish to so distinguish that from a "need," because babies do survive without their mothers, granted surrogate care and suffering. But whether we call the removal of the mother "nonfulfillment of instinctive drives" or unfulfillment of needs, the result pains and damages the infant, and what one represses is not simply an instinct -- a traumatized infant may be convinced to suck; a neurotic adult may love, if often poorly -- but the pain of the specific memory of wound or denial.
One thing this means for psychoanalytic terms is that only Sophocles had an Oedipus complex -- assuming that indeed he did. Shakespeare may have had a similar Hamlet Complex and T.S. Eliot might be accused of a suspiciously familar J. Alfred Prufrock Complex. On the one hand, the insight of dynamic psychology have much to tell us about literature. On the other, the glib way critics throw around abstract and derivative terms like "castration" is ridiculous. What gets repressed is not some inherited fear of loss of one's testicles, some abstracted and theoretical entity derived from genital sensation in one's sense of self, or even exactly a way to please one's mother or father. What gets repressed is traumatic experience and its associated agony.
Since trauma involves event, each neurotic must invent his or her neurosis in response to trauma, as a means of survival. We in the 21st century are indeed impacted by the Oedipus complex, but because we have read it as a literary reference.
Thus Freud jumps to conclude about his dream, he does indeed choose a feeling, a thing he wants to say, but he neglects the past component of what "always raises his emotion." With the emotion comes the insight.
Why not start with the feeling?
Hawthorne's Solid Time
As I read through Hawthorne's Marble Faun, I find myself humming that old Jim Croce song, "If I Could Have Time in a Bottle." NH's obsession with the past bothers me. I find him hard to place precisely on an ideological landscape. He conflates various things -- guilt and trauma; absolution and catharsis; time or Time and a kind of puritan eidos and memory -- yet he does so advisedly, and seems at best partially convinced of the veracity of his operations.
Let's take a moment in The Marble Faun. Here when Hilda breaks down and confesses to the priest (795 Notes and Tales NY: Modern Library 1937), we get a revealing passage:
This bears odd reflections. Hawthorne's describing what Freud might call an abreaction, catharsis, or (in a translation that I am told is unfortunate) hypercathexis. The incident bears examination in terms of symbol in the sense that the psychiatric profession uses that term; that is, the suggestion that she might confess Pro Anglica Lingua has released Hilda's defensiveness and allowed her to feel herself at home. That at home Hawthorne describes as "If she heard her mother's voice," so the image of parental support could hardly get more immediate. The priest, likewise, appears as transparently paternal: not only is he kindly and understanding; he's also quite conveniently from New England.
Perhaps notably, Hawthorne describes Hilda as pouring out "the dark story," which suggests that she may have narrated it. If so, this would not constitute a complete reliving of the event, since a narrator separates him or her self from the action, recounting what has happened instead of speaking, thinking, and feeling as though one were directly within the incident.
As another factor that must be active in this moment, Hawthorne has for the duration of the novel spent considerable time describing how each of his characters do or do not resemble one or another work of art. Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon all produce objets d'art; Donatello is allied with the production of a wine called sunshine which has something approaching magical properties.
Let's take a moment in The Marble Faun. Here when Hilda breaks down and confesses to the priest (795 Notes and Tales NY: Modern Library 1937), we get a revealing passage:
"If she had heard her mother's voice from within the tabernacle, calling her, in her own mother-tongue, to come and lay her poor head in her lap, and sob out all her troubles, Helda could not have responded with a more inevitable obedience. She did nothting; she only felt. Within her heart was a great need. Close at hand, within the veil of the confessional, was the relief. She flung herself down in the penitent's place, and tremulouslyu, passionaltely, with sobs, tears, and the turbulent overflow of emotion too long represed, she poured out the dark story which had infused its poison in her innocent life.
Hilda had not seen, nor could she now see the visage of the priest. But, at intervals, in the pauses of that strange confession, half choked by the struggle of her feelings toward an otlet, she heard a mild, calm voice, somewhat mellowed by age. It sppoke soothingly; it encouraged her; it led her on by apposite questions that seemed to be suggested by a great and tender interest, and acted like magnetism in attracting the girl's confidence to this unseen freind. The priest's share in the interview, indeed, resembled that of one who removes the stones, clustered branches, or whatever entanglements impede the current of a swollen stream. Hilda could ahve imagined -- so much to the purpose hwere his inquiries -- that he was already acquanted iwth some outline of what hse strove to tell him.
Thus assisted, she revealed the whole of her terrible secret! The whole, except that no name escaped her lips.
This bears odd reflections. Hawthorne's describing what Freud might call an abreaction, catharsis, or (in a translation that I am told is unfortunate) hypercathexis. The incident bears examination in terms of symbol in the sense that the psychiatric profession uses that term; that is, the suggestion that she might confess Pro Anglica Lingua has released Hilda's defensiveness and allowed her to feel herself at home. That at home Hawthorne describes as "If she heard her mother's voice," so the image of parental support could hardly get more immediate. The priest, likewise, appears as transparently paternal: not only is he kindly and understanding; he's also quite conveniently from New England.
Perhaps notably, Hawthorne describes Hilda as pouring out "the dark story," which suggests that she may have narrated it. If so, this would not constitute a complete reliving of the event, since a narrator separates him or her self from the action, recounting what has happened instead of speaking, thinking, and feeling as though one were directly within the incident.
As another factor that must be active in this moment, Hawthorne has for the duration of the novel spent considerable time describing how each of his characters do or do not resemble one or another work of art. Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon all produce objets d'art; Donatello is allied with the production of a wine called sunshine which has something approaching magical properties.
Roland Barthes' Mythologies
Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Barthes gives a diagram that joins signfier and signfied as the sign, then joins that composite sign with MYTH as SIGN, to form a simplest instance of a hierarchy of nested signification.
Barthes describes with fair success the general weave of symbolic reasoning. For instance, if we substitute the signs of formal logic for the saussurian labels above, the overall shape of the argument becomes a + b --> c; c + d ---> e. If we think about this in terms of someone reading a paragraph in well-wrought freshman essay, the procedure follows our reading through Barthes' chart as easily:
One might assume that corresponding actions of recombination happen between various subdivisions of the assembled synthesis one calls "a thought," however variously a thought might be described. In this, I would cross-reference Barthes with Jacques Lacan in "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious," in which he goes through a long discussion of parallelism not only of linguistic units but of images, not only of images but of non-imagined ideas. I'm reminded of the concept of "subject-rhyme" that I came across somewhere in relation to Pound's Cantos.
Meanwhile, in Barthes' discussion, he limits language to sentence-level interchange, and reserves a neologism metalanguage for the larger interactions which presumably include syntagmatic actions. One suspects that he wrote Mythologies before being influenced by Derrida's explosion in 1967. He rests quite content on the discrete nature of ante and post-defined objects within linguistic operations. He dismisses the kind of recursive interactions fundamental to Derridean analysis from "Structure, Sign, and Play" in a way that he will not do by the time he writes S/Z:
Here he's precisely wrong and precisely along the lines that Derrida pointed out in "Structure, Sign, and Play." The action of literature precisely uses what he's calling metalanguage to revise elements of what he's calling language-objects. Most particularly, what people like Pound called "new" and Bernstein calls "open" or "active" language revises elements of the formal relationships of semantic and category. We've had, by this point, various descriptions of this -- Kristeva's is notable, though I'm not sure at the moment in which work I noted it.
Yet there's something that remains to describe. For one may take it as clear that humans repeatedly reform semantic meaning by context throughout daily use without usually experiencing the unsettling that we associate with literature. For instance, I can easily suspend judgment about whether the sounds "greenhouse" in a friend's sentence refer to Missus Greene's residence, that building on the edge of the nursery, or a dangerous accumulation of gases, and do so without substantially re-arranging my ideas of any of the above. The fact that I may do so implies that I retain some conceptual categorization that is not identical to or coterminous with linguistic functions. The fact that language creates may at times create the havoc it does with such ideas suggests strongly that whatever these conceptual operations are, they are not discrete from language. but that the operations are somehow articulated in the greater conceptual-perceptive-neural process.
While neurological investigations have just begun to reflect on the nature of such things, their beginnings are already suggestive. Apparently, nervecell firing triggers nervecell firing as creatures associate. A certain mean concentration of neural firing is requisite to pass the impulse from so-called "lower," or more sensory consciousness or distal neural activity, to the so-called "higher," or more abstract, synthesized, cerebral processing. While much of cognitive neuroscience remais unexplored, researchers state quite clearly that what a literary critic might take as "directly sensed," or what Williams or even Robert Lowell might take as "things" are neurally synthized and composite structures even when they're sensory and not specifically linguistic. Adamic naming and Platonic or Aristotelian archetypes
One might confirm that this nears very closely to Barthes' concept of myth by his application of the idea to maps of The Blue Guide. Here he most specifically discusses the reduction of the complex and nuanced interlaced sets of visual constructs that constitute one's recall of a landscape to the glyphic marks of a map.
It would appear, then, that the actions of literature rake across this preverbal, averbal, or quasiverbal semantics, necessitating a reassemblage, restructuring, renegotiation of the relationships. When one takes this to create a more harmonious structure, "everything seems to just fall into place," so that one has "a sense of the sublime."
. . . myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semeological system. That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concep and an image) in the fidrst system, becomes a mere signifier in the second. We must here recall that the materials of mythical speech (the language itself, photography, painting, posters, rituals, objects, etc.), however different at the start, are reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth . . . . Whether it deals with alphabetical or pictorial writing, myth wants to see in the only a sum of signs, a global sign, the final term of a first semiological chain. And it is precisely this final term which will become the first term of the greater system which it builds and of which it is only a part" (81).
Barthes gives a diagram that joins signfier and signfied as the sign, then joins that composite sign with MYTH as SIGN, to form a simplest instance of a hierarchy of nested signification.
Barthes describes with fair success the general weave of symbolic reasoning. For instance, if we substitute the signs of formal logic for the saussurian labels above, the overall shape of the argument becomes a + b --> c; c + d ---> e. If we think about this in terms of someone reading a paragraph in well-wrought freshman essay, the procedure follows our reading through Barthes' chart as easily:
Reader courses through the signs suspending judgment; comes to a period; "stops;" combines the predicative unit "sentence," "making sense;" largely jettisons the short-term memory of sentence elements for the assembled meaning.- Reader continues to the next sentence.
- Of course, the reader retains in memory some elements of the now-read sentence. (The identity of subject and sometimes object nouns is retained, for instance, so that an author designates a previously named subject with a simple pronoun: in the sentences, "Jim awoke. He went to the beach," no one would ask to whom the pronoun He refers. There is some tendency that nouns, or "thingy" entities, remain more durably whereas verbs or actions pass. We retain this distinction profoundly in human thought even though no such noun|verb or thing|event distinction works rigorously in physics. To follow Yeats, one separates the dancer from the dance only as a convenience -- or inconvenience -- of predication.)
- However, whereas the reader suspended the meanings of these in judgment in reading the first sentence, the meanings are fixed in the second sentence by the necessity to maintain consistency.
One might assume that corresponding actions of recombination happen between various subdivisions of the assembled synthesis one calls "a thought," however variously a thought might be described. In this, I would cross-reference Barthes with Jacques Lacan in "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious," in which he goes through a long discussion of parallelism not only of linguistic units but of images, not only of images but of non-imagined ideas. I'm reminded of the concept of "subject-rhyme" that I came across somewhere in relation to Pound's Cantos.
Meanwhile, in Barthes' discussion, he limits language to sentence-level interchange, and reserves a neologism metalanguage for the larger interactions which presumably include syntagmatic actions. One suspects that he wrote Mythologies before being influenced by Derrida's explosion in 1967. He rests quite content on the discrete nature of ante and post-defined objects within linguistic operations. He dismisses the kind of recursive interactions fundamental to Derridean analysis from "Structure, Sign, and Play" in a way that he will not do by the time he writes S/Z:
"When he [sic] reflects on a metalanguage, the semiologist no longer needs to ask himself questions about the composition of the language-object, he no longer has to take into account the details of the linguistic schema; he will only need to know its total term, or global sign, and only inasmuch as this term lends itself to myth" 82).
Here he's precisely wrong and precisely along the lines that Derrida pointed out in "Structure, Sign, and Play." The action of literature precisely uses what he's calling metalanguage to revise elements of what he's calling language-objects. Most particularly, what people like Pound called "new" and Bernstein calls "open" or "active" language revises elements of the formal relationships of semantic and category. We've had, by this point, various descriptions of this -- Kristeva's is notable, though I'm not sure at the moment in which work I noted it.
Yet there's something that remains to describe. For one may take it as clear that humans repeatedly reform semantic meaning by context throughout daily use without usually experiencing the unsettling that we associate with literature. For instance, I can easily suspend judgment about whether the sounds "greenhouse" in a friend's sentence refer to Missus Greene's residence, that building on the edge of the nursery, or a dangerous accumulation of gases, and do so without substantially re-arranging my ideas of any of the above. The fact that I may do so implies that I retain some conceptual categorization that is not identical to or coterminous with linguistic functions. The fact that language creates may at times create the havoc it does with such ideas suggests strongly that whatever these conceptual operations are, they are not discrete from language. but that the operations are somehow articulated in the greater conceptual-perceptive-neural process.
While neurological investigations have just begun to reflect on the nature of such things, their beginnings are already suggestive. Apparently, nervecell firing triggers nervecell firing as creatures associate. A certain mean concentration of neural firing is requisite to pass the impulse from so-called "lower," or more sensory consciousness or distal neural activity, to the so-called "higher," or more abstract, synthesized, cerebral processing. While much of cognitive neuroscience remais unexplored, researchers state quite clearly that what a literary critic might take as "directly sensed," or what Williams or even Robert Lowell might take as "things" are neurally synthized and composite structures even when they're sensory and not specifically linguistic. Adamic naming and Platonic or Aristotelian archetypes
One might confirm that this nears very closely to Barthes' concept of myth by his application of the idea to maps of The Blue Guide. Here he most specifically discusses the reduction of the complex and nuanced interlaced sets of visual constructs that constitute one's recall of a landscape to the glyphic marks of a map.
It would appear, then, that the actions of literature rake across this preverbal, averbal, or quasiverbal semantics, necessitating a reassemblage, restructuring, renegotiation of the relationships. When one takes this to create a more harmonious structure, "everything seems to just fall into place," so that one has "a sense of the sublime."
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
I found Gilman a mixed bag. Her story "The Yellow Wallpaper" is admirably trim. She uses the unreliable narrator to full effect, and the tracing of progressive insanity through the descriptions of the wallpaper pattern works wonderfully. Moreover, the so-called cure that the narrator's subjected to -- the so-called rest cure, what a horror! -- stands marvelously as metonym for the mistreatment and misappraisal of women in western society in general, and in the bourgeois classes from the victorian eras into the 1970's in particular. And also, actually, much of the mistreatment of other outwardly pampered and domesticated groups of society -- all the recipients of the mushroom treatment. In this story, Gilman leads the reader through the ideas non-didactically, one at a time, almost one clipped paragraph per idea. It's a masterwork.
Herland, sadly, does not approach the same level. The plot feels like a cross between kinky femdom and The Planet of the Apes. But to discuss Herland on its own terms is to ignore its flaws as fiction and discuss Gilman's ideas of women and men in society. This can better done in conjunction with her Women and Economics.
Gilman, like many reformers inflamed by new problems and opportunities afforded by industry, wanted to socialize the family unit. She confused the effects of democracy witht hose of industry and abjured any idea that women should naturally raise their own children. (The idea that men should raise their own children doesn't come up, but this is not likely Gilman's fault.) Her explanations are very broadly based on a Darwinist positivistic determinism that plays fast and loose with distinctions between "instinct" and "desire" and socially influenced traits.
She finds thus:
Women are dependent on men whereas men are not dependent on women. In this she confines herself to economic dependency, but traces its many effects, mostly the loss to society of healthy, hardy and productive women. Her analysis also deals primarily with proletarian and bourgeois gender economy, leaving other possibilities to analogy.
Women have no particular ability to raise their own children. She regards formal education as key, individual love as unreliable and inadequate. Sex is something that males are over-occupied with, to the detriment of all concerned. Women waste considerable time and suffering in seduction and barter that would be better avoided were they economically equipped to just ignore male desire. Proper understanding of the love of society or mankind or something like that is or will be better. Accordingly, childcare should be hired out to a few pros.
Her suicide note may be as personally revealing as anything she wrote. Obviously retaining her intellectual capacities and her faith in science and objectivity as a basis.
Herland, sadly, does not approach the same level. The plot feels like a cross between kinky femdom and The Planet of the Apes. But to discuss Herland on its own terms is to ignore its flaws as fiction and discuss Gilman's ideas of women and men in society. This can better done in conjunction with her Women and Economics.
Gilman, like many reformers inflamed by new problems and opportunities afforded by industry, wanted to socialize the family unit. She confused the effects of democracy witht hose of industry and abjured any idea that women should naturally raise their own children. (The idea that men should raise their own children doesn't come up, but this is not likely Gilman's fault.) Her explanations are very broadly based on a Darwinist positivistic determinism that plays fast and loose with distinctions between "instinct" and "desire" and socially influenced traits.
She finds thus:
Women are dependent on men whereas men are not dependent on women. In this she confines herself to economic dependency, but traces its many effects, mostly the loss to society of healthy, hardy and productive women. Her analysis also deals primarily with proletarian and bourgeois gender economy, leaving other possibilities to analogy.
Women have no particular ability to raise their own children. She regards formal education as key, individual love as unreliable and inadequate. Sex is something that males are over-occupied with, to the detriment of all concerned. Women waste considerable time and suffering in seduction and barter that would be better avoided were they economically equipped to just ignore male desire. Proper understanding of the love of society or mankind or something like that is or will be better. Accordingly, childcare should be hired out to a few pros.
Her suicide note may be as personally revealing as anything she wrote. Obviously retaining her intellectual capacities and her faith in science and objectivity as a basis.
"when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one."
Cleanth Brooks, New Critics
"The Formalist Critics." Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Cleanth Brooks was one of the "New Critics" that followed T.S. Eliot in ushering the wild WWI and '20's poetry back into political and aesthetic conservatism. He gives about as good a summation of New Critical dogma as one could ask:
I find the explanation that follows the list bland, sadly, so I'd rather send people to T.S. Eliot, whose objective correlative more or less underlies all of the above.
It's interesting to compare these men with Russian formalism. Brooks' insistence on "symbolism" seems to favor Jakobson's "metaphoric" as opposed to "metonymic" operation of language. Mind you, Jakobson uses "metonymic" oddly enough that I wonder about translation issues. He seems to mean something like semantic for metaphoric and syntactic for metonymic.
This seems part of the sharp division between Eliot and William Carlos Williams, the more progressive wing of the imagist cum vorticist cum objectivist camp. In "The Language of Paradox," originally in A Well-Wrought Urn (1947), Brooks misses completely the idea behind Williams' "things," and lapses back into what amounts to a rehash of Hulme.
Williams' red wheelbarrow passage from Spring and All, to take a familiar example, touches the sublime because the verb depends throws the objects under description (the nouns) into sudden arrangement so that the issue of arrangement itself becomes highlighted, in part by the very lack of direct description of Williams' beloved things, and we catch the undescribed human in the act of arrangement that constitutes human perception. To see how ideal Williams' things are, crack a volume of Robert Lowell open to any page, and compare.
The Russian formalists, for whatever reason, had no such problems. Jakobson and Schklovsky and Eisenberg's theories included and accounted reasonably well for the most radical work of Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, and for Mandelshtam thereafter.
Would that Trotsky and Stalin have been so comprehensive!
One can watch an odd interaction of Eliot's late symbolism crossed with Pound's truly modernist work in The Wasteland, particularly if one examines the facsimile edition. It's Eliot, T.S. The Wasteland: A facsimile and transcript of the original drafts including the annotations of Ezra Pound. Valerie Eliot. Ed. London: Harvest, 1971, though Amazon has no listing. One can observe at length the extensive distinctions between mellifluous early work like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and quieter later work like The Quartets. The Wasteland, of course, was hewn and scraped by Pound, a very different compositor than Eliot, and one who extensively suits Jakobson's metonymic in ways that Eliot would not care to. Pound makes the elements tense against each other through juxtaposition of startling contrasts. Eliot, in all cases, retains a more transparently unified approach, laden with transitions and fundamentally predicative.
But the fact that I find myself talking about Williams, Pound, and Eliot in this entry says most of what I personally have to say about Cleanth Brooks.
Cleanth Brooks was one of the "New Critics" that followed T.S. Eliot in ushering the wild WWI and '20's poetry back into political and aesthetic conservatism. He gives about as good a summation of New Critical dogma as one could ask:
That literary criticism is a description and an evaluation of its object.
That the primary concern of criticism is with the problem of unity -- the kind of whole in which the literary work forms or fails to form, and the relation of the various parts to each other in building up this whole.
That the formal relations in a work of literature may include, but certainly exceed, those of logic.
That in a successful work, form and content cannot be separated.
That form is meaning.
That literature is ultimately metaphorical and symbolic.
That the general and the universal are not seized upon by abstraction, but got at through the concrete and the particular.
That literature is not a surrogate for religion.
That, as Allen Tate says, "Specific moral problems" are the subject matter of literature; but that the purpose of literature is not to point a moral.
That the principles of criticism define the area relevant to literary criticism; they do not constitute a method for carrying out th e criticism" (22).
I find the explanation that follows the list bland, sadly, so I'd rather send people to T.S. Eliot, whose objective correlative more or less underlies all of the above.
It's interesting to compare these men with Russian formalism. Brooks' insistence on "symbolism" seems to favor Jakobson's "metaphoric" as opposed to "metonymic" operation of language. Mind you, Jakobson uses "metonymic" oddly enough that I wonder about translation issues. He seems to mean something like semantic for metaphoric and syntactic for metonymic.
This seems part of the sharp division between Eliot and William Carlos Williams, the more progressive wing of the imagist cum vorticist cum objectivist camp. In "The Language of Paradox," originally in A Well-Wrought Urn (1947), Brooks misses completely the idea behind Williams' "things," and lapses back into what amounts to a rehash of Hulme.
Williams' red wheelbarrow passage from Spring and All, to take a familiar example, touches the sublime because the verb depends throws the objects under description (the nouns) into sudden arrangement so that the issue of arrangement itself becomes highlighted, in part by the very lack of direct description of Williams' beloved things, and we catch the undescribed human in the act of arrangement that constitutes human perception. To see how ideal Williams' things are, crack a volume of Robert Lowell open to any page, and compare.
The Russian formalists, for whatever reason, had no such problems. Jakobson and Schklovsky and Eisenberg's theories included and accounted reasonably well for the most radical work of Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, and for Mandelshtam thereafter.
Would that Trotsky and Stalin have been so comprehensive!
One can watch an odd interaction of Eliot's late symbolism crossed with Pound's truly modernist work in The Wasteland, particularly if one examines the facsimile edition. It's Eliot, T.S. The Wasteland: A facsimile and transcript of the original drafts including the annotations of Ezra Pound. Valerie Eliot. Ed. London: Harvest, 1971, though Amazon has no listing. One can observe at length the extensive distinctions between mellifluous early work like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and quieter later work like The Quartets. The Wasteland, of course, was hewn and scraped by Pound, a very different compositor than Eliot, and one who extensively suits Jakobson's metonymic in ways that Eliot would not care to. Pound makes the elements tense against each other through juxtaposition of startling contrasts. Eliot, in all cases, retains a more transparently unified approach, laden with transitions and fundamentally predicative.
But the fact that I find myself talking about Williams, Pound, and Eliot in this entry says most of what I personally have to say about Cleanth Brooks.
Walter Benjamin
Benjamin the effect on art of the advent of photography:
Benjamin makes an interesting judgment in calling photos the first "means of reproduction" although printing had reproduced words and their written arrangement for centuries prior. Although he doesn't say so, surely the automation of print in the 1800's and even increased transport and distribution would have contributed to these same effects for similar reasons. Just as painting no longer had to photograph, the novel had less to do with journalism.
Here he begs some questions, but the idea is interesting. Just how does reproduction release art from ritual? Does it remove the necessity of a priesthood to interpret or perform it? Would the term ritual be as meaningful if the statue of divinity were in a secular museum instead of a temple? I wonder whether Benjamin might not mean in part that art can be freed of certain socioeconomic trappings, that reproduction removes the objet d'art from social contextualization or from a contextualization.
If so, this seems opposed to the findings of Horkheimer and Adorno, who insist not many years later (Benjamin 1935, Horkheimer & Adorno, 1947) that capitalism and broadcast technology have rendered artistic production uniform.
Either way, publication in 1935 was rigidly linked to patterns of profit and distribution, broadcast even more so, at least in the US, where public airwaves had been given away to now-familiar broadcast corporations.
Perhaps more important to ritual than the physical mobility of the objet d'art is its social mobility, its usability by different classes. In that event, use must refer to consumption, production, and determining decisions over production and distribution.
There may be a general principle here. Contemporary readers may refer to current debates over intellectual property, .torrent files and filesharing networks. Some will remember how similar the dialog was in the early 1980's when the music industry momentarily crashed or played possum in response to the arrival of recordable cassette tapes. But I suspect that technology has impacted power over information for a long time. Papyrus would have also made writing easier to hide as well as transport. It would have made it possible to view writing without the authority of a temple. The early development of Western monotheism has survived more extensively and securely in the Hebrew texts than in the Egyptian record, not because the Egyptians had no paper or less paper, of course, but because the Hebrews may have known early on that their records had to be moved and stored. The religious texts include documents that are in some ways revolutionary; that may in part be because of the draw of the form.
Well, enough speculation in that quarter. Walter Ong has some interesting things to day on the subject, though, if anyone's interested. Benjamin, meanwhile, goes on with some appreciation of film:
I find the tone here interesting because Benjamin himself has clearly lived through the change. There's something in it that reminds me of trying to convey to students what it felt like typing papers on an old underwood typwriter and swearing and running to the store for white-out. Awareness of the distinction is lost to the population very quickly.
Ten years ago I read in books that The Book was to come to and end. Now I read in blogs that the book will survive. We ain't in Kansas anymore -- though, for all I know, you might be.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." in Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
" With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, the right reacted with the doctrine of l'art pourl'art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of 'pure' art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter. (In poetry, Mallarme was the first to take this position)" (1237).
Benjamin makes an interesting judgment in calling photos the first "means of reproduction" although printing had reproduced words and their written arrangement for centuries prior. Although he doesn't say so, surely the automation of print in the 1800's and even increased transport and distribution would have contributed to these same effects for similar reasons. Just as painting no longer had to photograph, the novel had less to do with journalism.
". . . for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the wo of art reproduced becomes example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the 'authentic' print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to ritual, it begins to be based on another practice -- politics . . . .
With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunites for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statute of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple. (1237).
Here he begs some questions, but the idea is interesting. Just how does reproduction release art from ritual? Does it remove the necessity of a priesthood to interpret or perform it? Would the term ritual be as meaningful if the statue of divinity were in a secular museum instead of a temple? I wonder whether Benjamin might not mean in part that art can be freed of certain socioeconomic trappings, that reproduction removes the objet d'art from social contextualization or from a contextualization.
If so, this seems opposed to the findings of Horkheimer and Adorno, who insist not many years later (Benjamin 1935, Horkheimer & Adorno, 1947) that capitalism and broadcast technology have rendered artistic production uniform.
Either way, publication in 1935 was rigidly linked to patterns of profit and distribution, broadcast even more so, at least in the US, where public airwaves had been given away to now-familiar broadcast corporations.
Perhaps more important to ritual than the physical mobility of the objet d'art is its social mobility, its usability by different classes. In that event, use must refer to consumption, production, and determining decisions over production and distribution.
There may be a general principle here. Contemporary readers may refer to current debates over intellectual property, .torrent files and filesharing networks. Some will remember how similar the dialog was in the early 1980's when the music industry momentarily crashed or played possum in response to the arrival of recordable cassette tapes. But I suspect that technology has impacted power over information for a long time. Papyrus would have also made writing easier to hide as well as transport. It would have made it possible to view writing without the authority of a temple. The early development of Western monotheism has survived more extensively and securely in the Hebrew texts than in the Egyptian record, not because the Egyptians had no paper or less paper, of course, but because the Hebrews may have known early on that their records had to be moved and stored. The religious texts include documents that are in some ways revolutionary; that may in part be because of the draw of the form.
Well, enough speculation in that quarter. Walter Ong has some interesting things to day on the subject, though, if anyone's interested. Benjamin, meanwhile, goes on with some appreciation of film:
"For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. It is only an obverse of this fact hat behavior items shown in a movie can be analyzed with much more precisely and from more points of view than those presented on paintings or on the stage. As compared with painting, filmed behavior lends itself more readily to analysis because of its incompareably more precise statements of the situation. In comparison with the stage scene, the filmed behavior item lends itself more readily to analysis because it can be isolated more easily. This circumstance derives its chief importance from its tendency to promote the mutual penetration of art and science" (1238).
I find the tone here interesting because Benjamin himself has clearly lived through the change. There's something in it that reminds me of trying to convey to students what it felt like typing papers on an old underwood typwriter and swearing and running to the store for white-out. Awareness of the distinction is lost to the population very quickly.
Ten years ago I read in books that The Book was to come to and end. Now I read in blogs that the book will survive. We ain't in Kansas anymore -- though, for all I know, you might be.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." in Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
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