Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

 
This piece from Morgan Meis in The Smart Set struck a chord with me:

"Criticism isn’t powerful anymore. It doesn’t drive anything, it doesn’t define what is good and bad in culture. Surely this has mostly to do with all the changes in the media landscape over the last few decades. Basically, culture has been democratized. It has been flattened out and multiplied. There are no longer real distinctions between high and low. There’s just more... The blogosphere and social networking sites allow anyone to communicate tastes and opinions directly to those people with whom an outlook is already shared. Criticism is essentially bottom-up now, whereas it used to be practically the definition of top-down. The audience does not look to an external authority to find out what to think — it looks to itself...

Critics have, traditionally, prided themselves in a certain amount of distance. There’s even a name for it: "critical distance." To some extent this distance was always an illusion, the byproduct of a metaphysics that saw mind and world as fully separate and staring at one another from across an epistemological abyss. But more importantly, people believed that critical distance was possible and that they were achieving it. This self-perception was enough to fuel the practice from at least the early Enlightenment until some time in the middle of the last century... Trying to maintain critical distance today is thus a practice in self-alienation. The distance might as well be infinite. The proclamations might as well be made in outer space. So we need another metaphor. If criticism isn't about distance anymore, maybe it can be about closeness....

Pleasingly, a version of this argument was made by George Nathan, the co-editor (along with H.L. Mencken) of the original version of The Smart Set back in the early 20th century. Nathan wrote a little book called The Critic and the Drama. It was, I think, ahead of its time in setting up the dilemma of criticism in an age of too much art and suggested some ways to deal with it. Here's the crucial paragraph:

If art is, in each and every case, a matter of individual expression, why should not criticism, in each and every case, be similarly and relevantly a matter of individual expression? In freeing art of definitions, has not criticism been too severely defined? I believe that it has been. I believe that there are as many kinds of criticism as there are kinds of art. I believe that there may be sound analytical, sound emotional, sound cerebral, sound impressionistic, sound destructive, sound constructive, and other sound species of criticism. If art knows no rules, criticism knows no rules — or, at least, none save those that are obvious.

That last sentence is particularly crucial. Art, Nathan is perfectly willing to accept, has no rules. Another way to say this is that each work of art generates its own set of rules. The only way to deal with any individual work, then, is to read out that set of rules, to discover something about its own internal logic. A criticism that wants to step away, to achieve distance in order to apply a set of external rules and to make judgments, ends up stepping away from the only criterion available: the criterion there within the work. Nathan doesn't use the metaphor explicitly, but he is talking about closeness versus distance. He is talking about a kind of criticism that stands there right alongside the work of art, participating in it rather than holding it at arm’s length.

Going a little further into the metaphor of distance and closeness brings us inevitably to the grand master of critical distance, Immanuel Kant. It is simply impossible to talk about the modern critical attitude without addressing the sage of Königsberg. A central component of his aesthetics is the idea of disinterest and then of universality. For Kant, when we make genuine aesthetic judgments we do so with the implication that they are not made 'for ourselves' but with the implicit idea that they stand on their own, that anyone else would make the same judgment, that the judgment ought to be universally true even if that cannot be proven. This is how Kant puts it:

For if someone likes something and is conscious that he himself does so without any interest, then he cannot help judging that it must contain a basis for being liked that holds for everyone. He must believe that he is justified in requiring a similar liking from everyone because he cannot discover, underlying his liking, any private conditions, on which only he might be dependent, so that he must regard it as based on what he can presuppose in everyone else as well.

In contrast, here's a comment by William Hazlitt, an anti-Kantian in terms of aesthetics in every bone of his body: I hate people who have no notion of any thing but generalities, and forms, and creeds, and naked propositions, even worse than I dislike those who cannot for the soul of them arrive at the comprehension of an abstract idea…They are for having maps, not pictures of the world we live in: as much as to say that a bird's eye view of things contains the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."


It's always seemed to me that the idea of universal standards of taste was an obvious absurdity; any such standard wide enough to encompass Perec, Dante, Orwell and Rabelais would be so generalised as to be meaningless. There's often something quite unpleasant about aesthetic demagoguery of critics; Ruskin's praise of gothic architecture and Pre-Raphaelite painting was predicated on a dismissal of Whistler's painting or architects like Cuthbert Broderick who disdained the gothic revival. Leavis praised Eliot, James, Lawrence and Conrad in The Great Tradition while dismissing the experimental on the one hand (Woolf, Joyce) and the gothic or sensational (Dickens, Bronte) on the other. Both essentially make the mistake of conflating their own predelictions with the universe and do so on grounds that are often moral or political. In either case, it's doubtful that many of us would agree with them now. In many respects, the idea of someone whose sole function is to tell us what to think about art or literature seems a form of impertinence.

When I was first introduced to the ideas of Barthes and Derrida, it seemed to me that much of the basis for criticism as a specialised function had been demolished. If literature was less the product of a single individual writing at a specific historical period and more the product of an endless play of differance in the mind of the reader, then meaning became a subjective affair. Sceptical even then, I'm less attached to either Barthes or Derrida now, but I do still think this view holds. Matters of interpretation or hermeneutics arose out of religious exegesis, the assumption that there were transcendent meanings encoded in texts that could be divined. I suspect I'd still agree with Derrida that such concepts have become untenable. Criticism as a professional activity might do well to be based on Moretti's sociological techniques or exploring reception theory through study groups, but the idea of interpretation as a valid function is one that probably should be discarded.

If there is a problem with the argument outlined above, it's less likely to be an aesthetic one and is rather more likely to be a political or social one. For example, Matthew Arnold's Kantian defence of criticism is partly due to his desire for a set of universal aesthetic standards to replace universal religious standards. Since criticism is derived from the study of religious texts and operates in a similar fashion, Arnold presumably saw the critic as an ideal replacement for the priest. A lot of this assumes that art is a form of individual expression and that the response to it is equally individual. Morgan's arguments are the perfect ones for an atomised, individualistic post-traditional society where consumption is as much a matter of individual preference as it is one of collective identification. But there is something rather ahistorical in this view and it does seem to me that there's a good case to be made that art if an expression of collective mores. That might be why particular genres tend to cluster in certain places at certain times. Labels like Greek tragedy, Restoration comedy or the nineteenth century novel are undoutedly generalisations but they do nonetheless exist for a reason; the works in question did not orginate in a vacuum.

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posted by Richard 2:57 pm

Monday, May 12, 2008

 
Stanley Fish reinterprets Derrida:

"What was involved was less the rejection of the rationalist tradition than an interrogation of its key components: an independent, free-standing, knowing subject, the "I" facing an independent, free-standing world. The problem was how to get the "I" and the world together, how to bridge the gap that separated them ever since the older picture of a universe everywhere filled with the meanings God originates and guarantees had ceased to be compelling to many... both the "I" or the knower, and the world that is to be known, are themselves not themselves, but the unstable products of mediation, of the very discursive, linguistic forms that in the rationalist tradition are regarded as merely secondary and instrumental. The "I" or subject, rather than being the free-standing originator and master of its own thoughts and perceptions, is a space traversed and constituted — given a transitory, ever-shifting shape — by ideas, vocabularies, schemes, models, distinctions that precede it, fill it and give it (textual) being.

The Cartesian trick of starting from the beginning and thinking things down to the ground can’t be managed because the engine of thought, consciousness itself, is inscribed (written) by discursive forms which "it" (in quotation marks because consciousness absent inscription is empty and therefore non-existent) did not originate and cannot step to the side of no matter how minimalist it goes. In short (and this is the kind of formulation that drives the enemies of French theory crazy), what we think with thinks us. It also thinks the world. This is not say that the world apart from the devices of human conception and perception doesn’t exist "out there"; just that what we know of that world follows from what we can say about it rather than from any unmediated encounter with it in and of itself. This is what Thomas Kuhn meant in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions when he said that after a paradigm shift — after one scientific vocabulary, with its attendant experimental and evidentiary apparatus, has replaced another — scientists are living in a different world; which again is not to say (what it would be silly to say) that the world has been altered by our descriptions of it; just that only through our descriptive machineries do we have access to something called the world.

This may sound impossibly counterintuitive and annoyingly new-fangled, but it is nothing more or less than what Thomas Hobbes said 300 years before deconstruction was a thought in the mind of Derrida or Heidegger: "True and false are attributes of speech, not of things." Three centuries later, Richard Rorty made exactly the same point when he declared, "where there are no sentences, there is no truth … the world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not." Descriptions of the world are made by us, and we, in turn, are made by the categories of description that are the content of our perception. These are not categories we choose — were they not already installed there would be nothing that could do the choosing; it would make more sense (but not perfect sense) to say that they have chosen or colonized us. Both the "I" and the world it would know are functions of language. Or in Derrida’s famous and often vilified words: There is nothing outside the text. (More accurately, there is no outside-the-text.)

This is not the conclusion that would be reached either by French theory's detractors or by those American academics who embraced it. For both what was important about French theory in America was its political implications, and one of Cusset's main contentions — and here I completely agree with him — is that it doesn’t have any. When a deconstructive analysis interrogates an apparent unity — a poem, a manifesto, a sermon, a procedure, an agenda — and discovers, as it always will, that its surface coherence is achieved by the suppression of questions it must not ask if it is to maintain the fiction of its self-identity, the result is not the discovery of an anomaly, of a deviance from a norm that can be banished or corrected; for no structure built by man (which means no structure) could be otherwise.

If "presences" — perspicuous and freestanding entities — are made by discursive forms that are inevitably angled and partial, the announcement that any one of them rests on exclusions it (necessarily) occludes cannot be the announcement of lack or error. No normative conclusion — this is bad, this must be overthrown — can legitimately be drawn from the fact that something is discovered to be socially constructed; for by the logic of deconstructive thought everything is; which doesn’t mean that a social construction cannot be criticized, only that it cannot be criticized for being one. Deconstruction's technique of always going deeper has no natural stopping place, leads to no truth or falsehood that could then become the basis of a program of reform. Only by arresting the questioning and freeze-framing what Derrida called the endless play of signifiers can one make deconstruction into a political engine, at which point it is no longer deconstruction, but just another position awaiting deconstruction. "Deconstruction thus contains within itself…an endless metatheoretical regression that can no longer be brought to a stop by any practical decision or effective political engagement. In order to use it as a basis for subversion…the American solution was..to divert it…to split it off from itself." American academics "forced deconstruction against itself to produce a political 'supplement' and in so doing substituted for "Derrida's patient philological deconstruction" a "bellicose drama.""


While Fish's account of Derrida's 'negative theology' is quite coherent I'm less than convinced that it's an especially accurate summary of what Derrida had intended. In some senses it would be more valid to argue that Derrida intended a revaluation of all values, overturning logocentric western hierarchies, rather than simply a pragmatist redescription of the linguistic turn (particularly since an alteration of our understanding of how the world is described does change the world perhaps rather more than Fish is suggesting - his pragmatist account of the philosophy of science being a rather telling case in point). The extension of this to the feminist concept of phallogocentrism, with its influence on Cixous, Irrigaray and, indeed, Butler, introduces an explicitly political element into his work. Derrida certainly felt deconstruction to have political implications in his later stress on a form of Kantian idealism that stated justice to be the undeconstructible condition that makes deconstruction possible. In that sense, Fish is introducing a criticism of Derrida more than his American interpreters. I seem to recall Rorty wondering why should we think that the abandonment of Platonic ideas and strivings would have important ramifications for the rest of culture and questioning why Derrida insisted that science has been constrained by 'metaphysical bonds that have borne on its definition and movement from its beginning.' Instead Rorty preferred to cite the likes of Popper and Dewey to argue that the natural sciences have done a lot to loosen those bonds, and to make possible a post-metaphysical culture.

Update: a piece arguing that Derrida's ideas of differance can be empirically tested and found wanting:

"Hijacking methods from psychology, Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, Dan Kruger, and I surveyed the emotional and analytic responses of 500 literary scholars and avid readers to characters from scores of 19th-century British novels. We wanted to determine how different their reading experiences truly were. Did reactions to characters vary profoundly from reader to reader? As we write in "Graphing Jane Austen," a book undergoing peer review, there were variations in what our readers thought and felt about literary characters, but it was expertly contained by the authors within narrow ranges. Our conclusion: rumors of the author's demise have been greatly exaggerated."


I've always regarded Derrida as a Hume in need of a Kant to refute him; while Derrida's logic is robust there remains the gnawing sense that we empirically already know that language functions in far more straightforward and unambiguous terms than he suggests (as with Tarski's meta-analyses of language and their use to map the hermeneutic possibilities of even texts like Ulysses). Nonetheless, I'm not sure that the above approach is necessarily the best way to determine the 'valency quotient' of any given text; response to characterisation is a fairly narrow aspect of the response to the text as a whole. Assuming the above study relates to Jane Austen it also seems important to note that texts like The Outsider, Querelle of Brest or Correction would prove a father more difficult proposition.

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posted by Richard 7:48 pm

Thursday, April 10, 2008

 
An interesting summary of Beckett's lectures on literature:

"Beckett first defined his literary criteria by way of the contrast he set up between the 19th-century French authors Balzac and Flaubert. Unlike his Irish contemporaries, Beckett saw Balzac as the counter-example of the modern novel, and Flaubert as the great innovator. For Beckett (as he has the protagonist of his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, put it): "To read Balzac is to receive the impression of a chloroformed world." He resented both the lack of confusion and the lack of self-criticism in Balzac. What fascinated him was the clair-obscure (the painterly distribution of light and shade) he found in the writers he admired, like Dostoevsky and Flaubert. Balzac, by contrast, only transcribed the surface, creating a fictional world that resembled a pool table on which balls are perfectly arranged and sent in one direction or another according to a very precise strategy of control. In Beckett's eyes, Balzac divested his fictional universe of the unexpected and the unknowable, properties which, for Beckett, lay at the heart of human experience and whose expression must find its way into fiction.

Art for Beckett at this period was the progressive discovery of the "real", as Burrows remembered in an interview in 1982: "The artist himself was changing all the time and his material was constantly in a state of flux, hence you had to do something to organize this mess, but not to make puppets and set them in motion." Beckett favoured the absence of a controlling authorial personality and any sense of finality in a text, and was opposed to the control, embellishment or glorification of reality. In these respects, Flaubert was an exemplary modern author for him. Citing Madame Bovary and Salammbo he explained that Flaubert was neither photographer nor image monger, but a writer who displayed an honest apprehension of reality.

Beckett denied any modernity in Balzac, whose flawed duality he denounced - on the one hand he was a realist, and on the other a romantic psychologist. But, for Beckett, these two aspects did not fit together, resulting in a profound lack of cohesion in Balzac's work. According to Beckett a modern writer must seek "homogeneity". Thus, Flaubert was at once coherent and complex, in the manner in which the extreme precision of his texts revealed the contradiction of so-called 19th-century realism: exactitude was inevitably bound to be frustrated because confusion cannot be reduced to a neat narrative à la Balzac.

Beckett also appreciated that Flaubert, rather than fabricating heroes, created circumstances that reduced his characters to their just level of banality, thus revealing their paradoxical nature and sometimes their stupidity, an approach which shocked Henry James, who said: "Why did Flaubert choose, as special conduits of the life he proposed to depict, such inferior and ... such abject human specimens?" Madame Bovary's creator had anticipated such a charge by once writing that there were neither good nor bad subjects, and that, from an artistic point of view, the subject was irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things. He refused to dissociate form and content. "Here form is content, content is form. [...] His writing is not about something; it is that something itself" was Flaubert's motto, which Beckett used to champion Joyce's Finnegans Wake. It's a formula at one with Flaubert's notion of the ideal book - that would be about nothing, one that would rely on its style alone and whose subject would be invisible."


As noted on my previous post on this subject, there's a lot about this that reminds me of the distinction Keats drew between Milton (the egotistical sublime) and Shakespeare (negative capability) or that outlined by Berlin in the case of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, with Balzac firmly characterised as a writer who celebrates diversity and the contradictory and Doestoevsky described as the type of writer who sees the world through the lens of a single lens (itself an opposed description to Bakhtin's characterisation of Dostoevksy's work as polyphonic). It's certainly true that in Flaubert, we have the sense of consciousness as something submerged and independent from the normal categories of the social novel, as with Emma Bovary's romantic longings or Frederic's admission at the end of Sentimental Education that the zenith of his life was a hitherto unmentioned visit to a brothel. It's also not difficult to see how Flaubert's stated aim to "derouter le lecteur" would appeal to Beckett. Sentimental Education in particular goes a long way to confirming Beckett's contention; in a Balzac novel the different paths taken by the characters would often lead to different moral outcomes, whereas in Flaubert all paths lead to the same destination. The usual teleological structure of the nineteenth century novel, with its remorseless progress towards tragedy or marriage, is abandoned. While the depiction of Dambreuse is not that far removed from that of Merdle or Melmotte (the poverty of Madame Arnoux and Rosanette is also not that far from Dickens), Flaubert is equally cynical as to the alternatives, as with his observation that Senecal is filled with love towards the mases in their aggregate state and is merciless towards individuals; "a sort of Athenian Sparta in which the individual would only exist to serve the state... anything which he considered hostile to it he attacked with the logic of a mathematician and the faith of an inquisitor." Frederic is at once an aristocratic snob ("he felt utterly nauseated by the vulgarity of their faces, the stupidity of their talk...the knowledge that he was worth more than these men lessened the fatigure of looking at them.") and is fired with revolutionary ideals ("I think the people are sublime"). Deslauriers similarly notes that "he had preached fraternity to the conservatives and respect for the law to the socialists." Sentimental Education is the great novel of the middle ground, with all viewpoints contested and all found wanting Frederic and not steering a straight enough course, and Desluariers being too rigid, with the same applying to the aesthetic debates of Pellerin and Senecal.

Nonetheless, I'm still not quite convinced I find Beckett's argument wholly meaningful. It's certainly true that, like Dickens, Balzac seems to see his characters as caricatures, driven by social and moral concepts rather than an idea of human consciousness (his idea of each individual having only a certain amount of life force that can be frittered away by dissolute or hubristic behaviour has a rather medieval quality to it). On the other hand, there is the difficulty that Balzac, like Thackeray is not an especially good moralist, and the moral fables that lie at the centre of his work either lack conviction or simply go awry altogether, leading to something rather more interesting. In short, I think that the disconnection of the romantic and realist in Balzac is a strength rather than a defect - not the first time, I find myself preferring the dissonant and inconsistent to the consistent and harmonious. Homogeneity is probably the very last thing the novel should aim for. To take the example of The Black Sheep, I was struck by what an anti-novel it is. The form of the novel should be similar to that of Nicholas Nickleby but instead of simply dwelling on the notion of the good and neglected Joseph eventually receiving his dues, Balzac pays as much attention to Philippe, the prodigal son, and instead of solely focussing on the dissolute aspect of his life, depicts the raw will to power as someone could have been a great general but is left out of place in the world he finds himself in. Instead of a simple moral fable, Balzac instead describes "a place where speculation and individualism are carried to the highest level, where the brutality of self interest reaches the point of cynicism." Philippe's rapacity is as vital and necessary here as Eugenie Grandet's self sacrifice or Cousin Pons's good nature is as pointless or helpless in the novels of those name. In Balzac, we always feel that we are reading a novel where the characters are evaluated primarily in moral terms, only to discover that such considerations are never of any importance.

To take another example, Lost Illusions I was struck by how it forms a mid-point between the picaresque novel (since although Balzac's narrative is highly plotted, the plot nonetheless tends to turn through unexpected events in an episodic fashion, a moral fable depicting the travels of a young man from country to city and consequently from innocence to corruption and redemption) and later social novels (where morality has a much more problematic relationship with social conditions and where the character of society is not necessarily regarded as a given, though Balzac is markedly more nonchalant on that score than Zola). For instance, Balzac writes of Lucien that "he was under the spell of luxury and the tyranny of sumptuous fare; his wayward instincts were reviving," but in practice the majority of the narrative is driven not by Lucien's fall into immoral debauchery but by the machinations of society driven by the cash-nexus; "everything is taxed, everything is sold, everything is manufactured, even success." Accordingly, Balzac links dissipation with the society that produces it; "the helotism to which the Restoration had condemned young people... having no outlet for their energy they... frittered it away in the strangest excesses." The consequence is that although 'Herrera' is clearly marked as a Faustian figure, both author and narrator are left pinioned by the novel's own logic when he declares that any morality can only come after financial security. A statement that is worthy of Brecht's What Keeps Mankind Alive?

Update: an interesting comment on the same theme from a review of a history of modernism:

"Each of Gay’s dramatis personae exhibit his two key modernist traits – that is, the desire to challenge the cultural establishment (Ezra Pound’s 'make it new') and to give expression to hitherto unencountered depths of the self, be it the 'monologue interieur' of Joyce or the near pathological self-portraiture of Max Beckmann... Modernism, for its constituents, was experienced not simply as liberation, but as crisis. It bespoke something profound: the cultural experience, indeed, the disillusionment of modernity’s promise of autonomy. The emancipation of individual subjectivity, encouraging self-scrutiny as Gay sees it, if bereft of social bonds becomes as much a prison as a promise of freedom.

This is writ large in the development of literary modernism. As Gay notes, the mimetic, realistic component typical of nineteenth-century realism was increasingly experienced as a formal inhibition. But he fails to tell us why this was the case. What had changed between the time of Balzac and that of Flaubert and Baudelaire, the two progenitors of modernism identified by Gay? As the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs explained, between these two generations of French writers 'lies the year 1848 and the bloody days of June, the first independent action of the working class, which left so indelible an impression on the ideology of the French bourgeoisie, that after it bourgeois ideology ceased to play a progressive part in France for a long time'. In other words, universal aspirations were abandoned in favour of the protection of particular interests.

This is crucial. For the realist writer, the ability to narrate, to find meaning in social praxes, rests, as Lukács argues, on the artist having a 'living relationship to the real life of the people'. Be it Balzac or Walter Scott, the vital problems of the time are experienced as their problems; the life and struggles of the community as their struggles. Modernism’s emergence depends on the dissolution of just such an involvement. As Peter Nicholls notes, it is with Baudelaire, writing during the 1850s, that 'a cleavage begins to open up between bourgeois modernity, on the one hand, and aesthetic modernity on the other'.

The sovereignty of the artist, his autonomy, is set against the political sovereignty and autonomy won in 1789. Although free to experiment, to push the boundaries of their art, the artist loses those with whom he had previously found common, if problematic cause. His professionalisation becomes a burden. Bereft of something like solidarity, he is left before his fellows – the market – as before an antagonistic mass: 'Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere!'"

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posted by Richard 8:16 pm

Sunday, April 29, 2007

 
Hermione Lee discusses various critical approaches to the novel, ranging from Kundera to Moretti:

"Hegel called the contingent, the everyday, the mutable, "the prose of the world," as opposed to "the spiritual, the transcendent, the poetic." "Prosaic" can mean plain, ordinary, commonplace, even dull. Prose fiction, historians of the novel tell us, has had to struggle against the sense of being a second-rate genre. Heidegger said that "novelists squander ignobly the reader's precious time." In late-eighteenth-century Britain, when large numbers of badly written popular novels were being published, "only when entertainment was combined with useful instruction might the novel escape charges of insignificance or depravity."

In pre-modern China, Japan, and Korea, the general word for fictional writing was xiaoshuo (in Chinese), meaning "trivial discourse." Socialist critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have accused the novel of bourgeois frivolity. By contrast, aestheticians of the novel, like Flaubert, proposed the ideal novel as "a book about nothing," or, like Joyce, as a game which would turn the everyday world into the most concentrated and highly designed prose possible. Moral writers of novels like George Eliot or D.H. Lawrence believed in the novel as the book of truth, teaching us how to live and understand our lives and those of others...

The most interesting pursuit of categories comes when they are seen crossing cultural borders, as in a rather fascinating account in Moretti (by Jongyon Hwang) of how in the early twentieth century, Korean fiction began to adopt the genre of the bildungsroman as a means of moving away from the previous generation's authoritarian culture (which collapsed under Japanese colonialism) and toward more Western desires for "self-expression and social advancement." Classification can be valuable, too, when the category is seen as a shape-shifter, as in a brilliant essay by Bruce Robbins on how the "upward mobility story" in fiction shifted from social climbing to the making of a writer...

The idea of the novel as contradictory, double-dealing, and secretive, the secret agent of literature, is matched in all these critical commentaries by an equally strong idea of the novel as multifarious, polymorphous, expansive, and superfluous, the behemoth of literature. For the prose of the world to be turned into the world of prose, superfluity, spilling-over, and generous abundance are called for. These critics show how even the most formal and aesthetically stringent of novelists also have appetites for excess. A.S. Byatt on Balzac eloquently celebrates his "manic inclusiveness." One critic of Ulysses describes it as investing in "an ideal of exhaustiveness..." Mary Shelley, in Frankenstein, "officially" endorses the theories of her time "of inherent human goodness," but at the same time, through her story, refutes them as "sentimental and false." Emily Brontë divides herself painfully between a desire for a marriage between the world of human vision and inhuman nature, and a recognition of its impossibility: "the romantic dreamer longs for a home that she is doomed never to find." For Mullan, secrets, suppressed emotions, and withheld information are some of the main engines of the novel—"moments when the surface of things suddenly changes its meaning.""


Similarly, Jonathan Ree also writes on this subject:

"The novelty of the novel is of course connected with the rise of printing, and the growth of a literate public with time and money to spare. Beyond that, the sheer scale of the form allows storylines to be extended and multiplied as never before, crossing and re-crossing each other with ample scope for coincidence, surprise and contingency, and hence for the depiction of characters with whom, as William Hazlitt put it, the reader can "identify..." The art of reading a novel involves a dash of experiment, conjecture, even risk. It requires readers to try out different narrative perspectives, styles, even personalities, and so to explore the inherent variousness of experience, and to recognise the vein of arbitrariness that runs through any possible version of events. Novels, in short, are implicitly pluralistic...

If Cervantes rent the curtain that separates us from the prose of ordinary life, Kafka tore it down completely. After Kafka, according to Kundera, the novel entered a realm where reality could never "correspond to people's idea of it"; from now on the novel would be a constant witness to the "unavoidable relativism of human truths..." And this gentle scepticism has political implications too, as Kundera notes when he recalls the "Manicheism" that deformed his native Czechoslovakia when he was a student in Prague after the second world war. Politics at that time was not a forum where perplexed citizens could engage in a collective search for freedom and happiness, or truth and reconciliation, but a battlefield where militant partisans would try to vindicate their correct views about everything and punish anyone who saw things differently...

One of the great virtues of the novel, according to Coetzee, is to teach us that there is no perfect way of carving up the world or recounting its stories. This is a lesson that bears on politics as well, counting against any political aspiration that arises from nationality, identity or tribal loyalty. But Coetzee does not confine his attention to novelists, and an outstanding essay on Walt Whitman allows him to explore a conception of democracy that he himself would evidently endorse: democratic politics, he suggests, is "not one of the superficial inventions of human reason but an aspect of the ever-developing human spirit, rooted in eros." Those who make a fetish out of politics, he implies, are in danger of foreclosing on democracy. Take Walter Benjamin, for example. Coetzee, refusing to treat him with the awed indulgence that has become customary, contends that when Benjamin decided to become a good communist, it was not through an imaginative appraisal of political options, but was simply "an act of choosing sides, morally and historically, against the bourgeoisie and his own bourgeois origins." And if there was something silly and unconvincing about Benjamin's Marxism — "something forced about it, something merely reactive" — it could perhaps be attributed to a certain literary narcissism. "As a writer, Benjamin had no gift for evoking other people," Coetzee says; he had "no talent as a storyteller," and no capacity for the kind of compassionate intelligence implicit in the art of the novel. In a perverse attempt to opt for political realism rather than literary imagination, Benjamin managed to cut himself off from both.

Susan Sontag would have agreed with Coetzee about the political significance of literature. The novel, as she remarks in her last, posthumous collection At the Same Time (Hamish Hamilton), exists to recall us to a sense of the interminable diversity that is the basis of what she calls "politics, the politics of democracy." In a substantial essay on Victor Serge, she praises him for having combined political militancy with a serious engagement with the art of writing. As a mature novelist, she says, Serge was able to deploy "several different conceptions of how to narrate," elaborating a capacious "I" as a device for "giving voice to others." It was through his narratorial doubles that he liberated himself from what he called the "former beautiful simplicity" of the fight between capitalism and socialism, so as to produce books that were "better, wiser, more important than the person who wrote them.""


Perhaps due to its relatively recent historical orgins, the novel has had far more attempts to interpret the implications of its genre in terms that are either metaphysical or political. It particularly tends to interest me how such interpretations can often be entirely opposed. From a Marxist perspective, Georg Lukacs saw the novel as the 'bourgeois epic,' the product of a disjunction between consciousness and society that is the product of the alienation produced by modern capitalism. Writers like Scott accordingly demonstrated a historical consciousness that demonstrated the contradictions of capitalism, their aristocratic sensibilities providing an ideal platform to critque bourgeoisie. Walter Benjamin went rather further, describing a distinction between the novel and story telling that he views as analogous to a distinction between the role of chronicler and historian. The former simply relates, the latter interprets and expounds. Benjamin sees the novel as a commoditised form of storytelling, burdened with information. The evolution from the story to the novel is something he sees as being akin to the evolution of crafts into industrial production; in other words, it is something he unambiguously disapproves of. Benjamin's tastes run to writers whose work resembles fairytale and form part of an oral tradition, like Kafka's Metamorphosis (by contrast, Lukacs preferred Mann to Kafka). Benjamin's admiration of Kafka is largely predicated on the opaque quality of his writing, which is all surface, lacking interest in consciousness or social relations. Symbolic imputations may be made but interpretation is withdrawn from the events being depicted. Benjamin's distinction between story and novel stems from his distinction between painting and film; the latter a form of mass reproduction and a form of art geared for modern capitalism. On the whole, I tend to agree with Coetzee; although Benjamin is the more famed writer today, Lukacs was far less doctrinaire and his notion of critical realism far more in keeping with the genius of the novel.

An alternative view of the novel is provided by Mikhail Bakhtin. Although influenced by Marxism, Bakhtin saw the novel as polyphonic, a means of representing multiple voices in a democratic manner that opposed monologic political viewpoints. Where Benjamin preferred the closed and withdrawn, Bakhtin prefers the open and untidy, the heteroglossic, dialogic and carnivalesque. I've already written elsewhere about this type of opposition between writers like Kafka and Shakespeare on the one hand and writers like Eliot and Dickens on the other. It's not an opposition that necessarily corresponds to the novel; Blake and Baudelaire are both 'open' writers while Kafka and Coetzee are 'closed.' Nontheless, the former category opposes meanings, the latter denies them. For instance, Coetzee's Slow Man places the central elements of the novel in the background, whether it is narrative (events are understated, abandoning resolution in favour of the indeterminacy of life) or consciousness (the central character being essentially hollow, experiencing a series of reactions towards Marijana, none of which can be fully characterised as emotion or feeling). As a fable, Slow Man is non-existent, its protagonist gaining no redemption, resolution or closure, simply a dying fall.

Elizabeth Costello has also led to questions as to whether it can be called a novel at all, seeming more like Murdoch's Acastos or Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Composed of a series of lectures given by the author himself, the issue of the author function is also present to an unusual extent, although this issue is further problematised by the extent to which the Costello personae's views are challenged throughout. In practice, the central issue of more one of the relation of literature of life; "the word-mirror is broken, irreparably... we are just performers speaking our parts." Similarly, the section on the novel in Africa foregrounds the solitude of reading as much of Costello's seclusion when writing, "people on trains take books out of their bags or pockets and retreat into solitary worlds" The novel and writing become a form of imperialism, a form of cancer, denying the ability to think ourselves into the mind of a bat and diminishing the ability to think oneself into the mind of an ape or cockroach; "if I do not convince you, that is because my words here lack the power to bring home to you the wholeness, the unabstracted unintellectual nature of that animal being." Where Lukacs saw the novel as typifying the disjunction of self and society, Coetzee sees solipsism.

Similarly, in In the Heart of the Country the narrator is denied awareness of the basis for her own actions, speaking of theories and fictionalised narratives of herself; "I signify something. I do not know what... is it possible that there is an explanation for all the things I do and that explanation lies inside me, like a key(?).. To die an enigma with a full soul or to die emptied of my secrets."

The Life and Times of Michael K is a novel that reprises the theme of the idiot from Dostoevsky and Cervantes. The obvious influence though, as indicated by the title, is Kafka, reminding me of some of Zadie Smith's recent comments; "His influence seems to cause a mutation in the recipient, metamorphosing the novel into something closer to a meditation, a fantastical historiography, an essay, a parable... Novelists simply do not resist life in this fashion. Life, in its shared social form, is, for lack of a less vulgar term, their material. They cannot say, as Kafka did, "Never again psychology!" Or, as Walter Benjamin put it, Kafka used the traditional forms of representation without the associated truth value. Like Kafka, Coetzee inverts the normal function of the novel, serving to obfuscate rather than elucidate social relations (hence the lack of a definite setting); "barely aware of its surroundings, enveloped in itself". The novel is therefore polyphonic, offering a narrative of resistance to social norms (even to civilisation, since Michael is described "as if he had once been an animal") or of emotional dependency to matriarchal domination. Experience cannot be reduced to the neat patterns of literary convention.

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posted by Richard 2:52 pm

Thursday, September 07, 2006

 
Since a few people have been kind enough to lament my not posting rather more, it would seem churlish not to attempt to redress this. As it happens, this piece I came across last week on Allen Ginsberg, did indeed remind me of something I wanted to write about for quite sometime now, about how the hermeneutics of meaning seem to work in very different ways for different authors.

"Ginsberg's audacity in comparing himself to Apollinaire was matched by his knack for advertising "Howl" as an all-purpose cultural barometer. When he learned in the spring of 1956 that the New York Times had assigned the poet Richard Eberhart to write an article on the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, he sent him a long letter explicating his poem: "Howl is an ‘affirmation' of individual experience of God, sex, drugs, absurdity etc." In an interview with Gay Sunshine in 1974, Ginsberg remarked that "Howl" was a "coming out of the closet." Two years later, in a volume commemorating the twentieth anniversary of "Howl," he announced that the poem "was really about my mother."


While the piece is acute in its judgement of some of the more embarrassing aspects of Ginsberg's work, it does also have to be said that Ginsberg was very much the sort of poet whose work can simply accumulate the most diverse and incompatible meanings and accommodate them alongside one another. Like his mentors Blake and Whitman, Ginsberg fitted into the class of writer that draws a vast amount of heterogenous experiences and influences into their work which them remain alongside one another even as the writer elsewhere seeks to weave all into a unitary philosophy. As Whitman put it, "I contain multitudes" It is not an uncontentious aesthetic. TS Eliot once tartly observed that Blake had concoted a personal mythology from odds and ends he had found lying about the house, while DH Lawrence waspishly complained that Whitman had contained so much that he had drowned in a sea of multitudes and lost himself. Nonetheless, to my mind it does afford a particular interest to the work of these writers where unity and disunity sit alongside one another, particularly with Blake's complex and shifting depictions of such themes as god and sexuality.

Isaiah Berlin discussed this sort of writer in The Hedgehog and the Fox where he classed Shakespeare, Balzac and Joyce as foxes (writers who celebrate diversity and the contradictory) and as Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Ibsen as hedgehogs (writers who relate everything into a single vision). Inevitably, the question of how to class each writer is a difficult one; for myself I would see both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche as foxes; for all of Nietzsche's vehement insistence of themes like the superman and the death of god, his work is nonetheless alive with so of the most fascinating contradictions (between his celebration of the will to power and his disdain for Prussian militarism and preference for French civilisation). Similarly, for all of Dostoevsky's insistence on his christian faith, his fascination with atheism and what we would now term existentialism formed the entire basis of Mikhail Bakhtin's account of how the novel typified a dialogic and polyphonic way of depicting reality that refused to relate everything into a single vision. Finally, characterisations of Shakespeare as an exemplar of negative capability (where the author is impersonal and hidden behind his characters) and Milton as an opposed exemplar of the egotistical sublime (where the writer does indeed subsume everything into his own vision) seem perhaps more acute than Berlin's descriptions.

Susan Sontag, writing in Against Interpretation addressed these questions from the point of view of how critics should attempt to discuss literature and film. Sontag detested hermeneutic criticism that sought to arrive at a single key to a meaning of a work, whether that key happened to be Marxist, Christian or Freudian. Ultimately, this is a religious approach to criticism that applies the techniques of Biblical scholarship to novels and poetry and uses them to discern divine pattern and meaning, even when the impulse to interpret is secular rather than sacred.

"The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation. All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud's phrase, as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning--the latent content--beneath... It is always the case that interpretation of this type indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something else... Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories."


Instead, criticism should consider the formal properties of works and use them to account for how meaning is structured by them. After all, the precise manipulation of meaning and ambiguity in writers like Donne, Marvell and Hopkins is very different to the more untidy and novelistic approach of writers like Blake. On the whole, I find myself in sympathy with Sontag but am still left suspecting that the question is not that simple. By their very nature, works tend to invite interpretation. Two writers in particular exemplify this difficulty; Shakespeare and Kafka. Sontag herself cites Kafka as an example:

"The work of Kafka, for example, has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory see desperate revelation of Kafka's fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thralldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafka as a religious allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Joseph K. in The Trial is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God."


The Trial always reminds me foremost of Eliot's essay Hamlet and his Problems, from The Sacred Wood, where Eliot suggests that art expresses emotion through a suitable vessel, an objective correlative. However, in the case of Hamlet "The artistic "inevitability" lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear." With Kafka, none of the events or personae exist in relation to the reality that appears to the reader (just as the text refuses to exist in relation to either allegory or realism). As Robert Calasso noted, Kafka is not an 'organiser' of human experience in the manner of Proust and Joyce. In Kafka, consciousness is never more than vestigial; 'for the last time psychology!' is his watchword, where the central characters of his novels are rarely even fully described. Instead of action and causality being the central aspect (indeed being almost peripheral; the precise narrative voice never hints at the extremity of the events that often follow and never changes register when they occur), undifferentiated bureaucratic time is the substance of his fiction; his characters simply wait. Calasso describes this as plunging the 'sharpest Ockham’s razor into the substance of the novel,' utilising the form of the novel in a manner completely opposed to its origins. Kafka does indeed generate vast numbers of interpretations and will doubtless continue to do so but his work simply does not respond to such efforts and any interpretation will run off him like water from a duck's back.

Much the same does indeed apply to Shakespeare, where I have always remembered Camille Paglia's observation that Shakespeare confronts the reader with verse that is both extraordinarily intricate and extremely hostile to the reader and to interpretation. As an author, Shakespeare is every bit as impersonal as Kafka and evry bit as absent from his own works. There is no notion of an authorial presence that provides any convenient commentary or interpretation of its own work. Shakespeare, living in an age whose metaphysical certainties had been upturned by state decree (it is not for nothing that madness and seeming figure so strongly in so many of his plays), ensures that his characters instead defy augury, dramatising their consciousness and constantly examining and shifting their own roles. Hamlet is the overreacher, the machiavel, the fool and the wronged hero, failing to become, as Eliot had it, a clear objective correlative for the events of the play. There is no more clear answer to what Hamlet calls the nature of action within the play than there is to the events of The Trial. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Shakespeare and Kafka both seem to represent an extreme in terms of their impersonality and resistance to interpretation (something similar could be said to apply to Moby Dick or A Passage to India but Melville and Forster are far from being as occluded and inaccessible). There is something glacial and remote about them that will always be occasion for new interpretation and speculation while ensuring that none of them will ever account for their work. It's difficult not to agree with John Bayley's argument in The Uses of Division that imperfect and untidy but more knowable authors like Dickens, Blake, Nietzsche, Lawrence, Ginsberg or Forster have perhaps more to commend them. Disharmony has its own value.

Update: an itnerestingly similar post from 3quarksdaily:

"As Milosz says of him, “Gombrowicz lived in an epoch which neither quantitatively nor qualitatively brings to mind any of the previous epochs and which distinguishes itself through ubiquitous cases of ‘infection’ with mass and individual madness.” Man, as Aristotle once mentioned, needs a world, a complicated arrangement of social interactions, in order actually to be man. But that same ordering of complicated social arrangements can also be the vehicle by which human beings destroy themselves and one another.

But Gombrowicz chose flight, literally and metaphorically. From his exile in Argentina he conjured up an absurd mental universe that spins out the problems of experience in countless ‘as if’ scenarios that are so powerful exactly insofar as they make sense despite their insanity. Gombrowicz took flight into the endless malleability of human experience in order to keep a step ahead of the world as it is. That is his particular freedom. It is the freedom of Socrates as Kierkegaard describes him in The Concept of Irony, the freedom that escapes from every possible determination.

Truth be told, this version of freedom annoys Milosz. Because for Milosz, the possibility of meaning in human affairs is dependent on commitment. If nothing else, it is founded on the capacity for human beings to hold experience together even as forces from within and without work to tear it apart. "

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posted by Richard 7:46 pm

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

 
Via the Valve, a critical discussion of Maurice Blanchot's views on reading:

"For Blanchot, the good reader would not be what he terms the critical reader but the literary reader. Rather than interrogating “the work in order to know how it was fashioned” (SL 203), which is to say, rather than subordinating the openness of reading to an active means of elucidating the value and meaning of the work (and, by proxy, the value of reading itself), all of which Blanchot identifies with critical reading, the literary reader or what Blanchot refers to as “the true reader” (SL 203) passively collapses before the work, giving “the work back to itself: back to its anonymous presence, to the impersonal affirmation that it is” (SL 193). The work says nothing and of the work, therefore, there is nothing to say. If the work is to remain communicable at all, this is what it is necessary to say, always again, always badly, and always for the first time. As such, the task of the good reader is not to say the work but rather to procure a space in which the work can continue not to say itself..."


I'm not convinced. I certainly feel that there is a point where thinking analytically about much literature becomes futile; for instance, what happened in the Marabar caves, the source of Hamlet's hesitations or what Josef K was charged with. The figures in these particular carpets must of necessity remain hidden and we can indeed only give such works back to themselves. On the other hand, reading seems to me intrinsically analytical; we read with a horizon of expectations which we constantly re-evaluate in the light of new information or new thoughts. This is something that one of the comments at the Valve notes, citing how Bakhtin views works as structuring themselves in anticipation of a response and requires the reader to provide it. It's this which makes reading a dialogic process of engaging with the text; something that seems an infinitely preferable idea of reading to me.

My own relationship to the school of school of language inhabited by the likes of Blanchot and Derrida is a somewhat oblique; while I agree with the criticism of the 'metaphysics of presence' the notion of there being nothing outside the text seems to confer a form of metaphysical status on the text (Blanchot's romantic idea of desoeuvrement being emblematic here). Language ceases to be social category and becomes something quasi mystical and transcendent, apparently detached from the phenomenal. Thus the waspish comment from Habermas that Derrida was a 'jewish mystic.' It's difficult not to feel sympathetic to the Searlian complaint that the idea of language as a system of differences is precisely a system of presences and absences and accordingly rather failed to live up to the claims Derrida made for it. Inevitably, I grew to prefer Mikhail Baktin's concepts of polyphony and heteroglossia, which proceed from the same criticism of metaphysics but instead relates hermeneutics to the social and political.

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posted by Richard 7:29 pm

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

 
An interesting piece on American hostility to French theoretical ideas, over at the Borderlands Journal:

"However, regardless of its trapping, French theory, has had a powerful influence on American thought for more than twenty-five years. French theory galvanized the European side of American philosophy in a way that not even the Frankfurt school had been able to accomplish after the war. Philosophers like Habermas (who was always more popular with analytic than with continental philosophers), and Marcuse, were still far too connected to traditional Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxist philosophy, to achieve the level of popularity that thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard, came to enjoy in this country—even if at times, for all the wrong reasons. Explicit in the philosophy of the Frankfurt school was a 19th century Hegelian faith in Reason. No such faith exists, or existed from the outset, in French theory. In fact, one can easily interpret French theory as a response to the despotism of Reason, and the fascistic social, economic, and psychic structures—micro and macro—to which it gave birth. Hence, the American-French series of the questioning of reason....

Claire Parnet says in Dialogues (with Deleuze) that perhaps one of the reasons why Americans never really developed a cultural institution of philosophy is because they never felt a need for it—for philosophical systems. For Americans "philosophical" thought found its way into literature instead, literature being a much more rhizomal and less arborescent form of thinking (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 30). Compare Rimbaud's "drunken" voyage to Whitman's walk through "leaves of grass", and it becomes a question of the relation between surface and depth. In the end Rimbaud had to escape to the desert, to reach an exterior that had been there for the American poet all along."


It's hardly novel to suggest that the differences between a empiricist and analytic 'Anglosphere' and a metaphysical and sceptical continent account for the controversial status of 'theory' in Britain and America. For myself, I've long suspected that Anglo-American irritation with French theory was largely attributable to the fact that culture remained a domain where France retained its position as the central player, in spite of American pre-eminence everywhere else. As Perry Anderson has argued:

"The arrival of the Fifth Republic coincided with the full flowering of the intellectual energies that set France apart for two generations after the war. Looking back, the range of works and ideas that achieved international influence is astonishing... Sartre refused a Nobel Prize in 1964, but after him no French writer ever gained the same public authority, at home or abroad. The Nouveau Roman remained a more restricted phenomenon, of limited appeal within France itself, and less overseas. Letters in the classical sense lost their commanding position within the culture at large. What took their place was an exotic marriage of social and philosophical thought, at the altar of literature. It was the products of this union that gave intellectual life in the decade of De Gaulle's reign its peculiar brilliance and intensity. It was in these years that Levi-Strauss became the world's most celebrated anthropologist; Braudel established himself as its most influential historian; Barthes became its most distinctive literary critic; Lacan started to acquire his reputation as the mage of psychoanalysis; Foucault to invent his archaeology of knowledge; Derrida to become the antinomian philosopher of the age; Bourdieu to develop the concepts that would make him its best-known sociologist."


The problem, as Anderson notes, is that such pre-eminence cannot be sustained independently of a wider status in political and economic spheres that France simply lacked. Forms of economic, social and cultural capital could not be regarded independently. In Derrida's later works he responded to Fukuyama's 'End of History' idea by suggesting that the notion of capitalism as the only possible social system represented a denial of plurality; nonetheless critiques of Western political, economic and philosophical structures often began to seem disconnected with contemporary events and to remain situated within a post-war context. To take the example of Foucault in particular, his work represents a fundamental challenge to Enlightenment assumptions but, as I wrote earlier, is deeply questionable when one considers its wider implications.

I've long pondered to what extent views of theoretical approaches to literature might be different, if the centre of such movements had been St Petersburg and not Paris. During the nineteen thirties the Soviet Union proved an extraordinarily fertile ground for what we would now term theory through writers like Bakhtin, Shklovsky and Voloshinov. A writer like Bakhtin sought to challenge assumptions about singular, unambiguous interpretations of language as much as Derrida did, but lacked any wider metaphysical critique. Originating within literary studies rather than philosophy, it seems to me that the Russian theorists remain more relevant to literary theory than their French counterparts.

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posted by Richard 7:57 pm

Saturday, August 06, 2005

 
Sometime ago, I came across an unually interesting meme. Based on an idea from the Vienna circle whereby each of the propositions in Wittgenstein's Tractatus was declared to be either true or false, it suggested doing the same to Alain Badiou's Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art. On the whole, I don't think that the idea that statements can be verified in this manner is worth spending too much time and certainly not in the case of Badiou, many of whose theses reflect a very specfic policitical worldview. However, I was struck by one of the propositions:

"Every art develops from an impure form, and the progressive purification of this impurity shapes the history both of a particular artistic truth and of its exhaustion."


It's not an obviously flawed idea, but I'd still have to answer false. Clearly, influence will inevitably work to alter and even refine what has preceded it but the thesis still asumes that purity in art is necessarily a welcome concept. The most extreme example here is Shakespeare, who seemed to me best described by Camille's Paglia's comment that she was alwasy struck by the implacable density and hostility of Shakespeare's writing, its resistance to all interpretation. While much of Shakespeare seems to be all pattern and symmetry, it is equally true to say that it is all shifting perspectives and lacunae. When Eliot bemoaned the absence of an objective correlative in Hamlet he had identified the source of its power; interpretation runs off it like water from a duck's feathers, ensuring that it can always be renewed and reinterpreted.

At the same extreme are modern writers like Kafka and Coetzee. The protagonists of The Trial and The Castle have no key to the events that unfold around them and neither does the reader, with political, relgious and even Freudian interpretations seeming equally applicable and inapplicable. Coetzee's characters are equally denied access to self-knowledge; Elizabeth Costello speaks of how her beliefs are only provisional, Michael K simply has no lexicon to explain himself. In spite of the humour in Kafka and Shakespeare there's is nonetheless something hostile about both of them a certain glacial quality that comes from never being able to get close to any of their works, to penetrate to the heart of what they are about.

By contrast, I always liked John Bayley's The Uses of Division for its argument that the imperfections in a work were what brought it to life, what made it appraochable were Shakespeare and Kafka are forbidding and impersonal. Another theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin argued that the novel in particular would always thwart aesthetic purity; its different registers and voices would always create something characterised by different perspectives, something polyphonic. Ambiguities and uncertainties remain but appear more human. I think of how DH Lawrence's anxieties over his sexuality created fractures in his visions of new modes of being, of how George Eliot's sense of empathy for the lost meant that she could never quite depict sacrificeand sympathy in the way her system demanded, of how Hardy's social convictions could never be quite brought to tally with his pessimistic Schophenhauerian worldview. There's something endlessly fascinating about these imperfections, largely because they are so immediately apparent to us.

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posted by Richard 6:12 pm