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.

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

Saturday, February 04, 2006

 
Somewhat belatedly, I wanted to write about the recent Valve seminar on Graphs Maps and Trees, which has been described as offering a qunatitative approach to literary history, based on documenting the history of differing genres (analysing all tests from a given period rather than solely the canonical ones) through 'distance reading' rather than close reading. This piece seemed particularly striking to me:

"In this piece, Moretti addresses the problem that the clues in the Sherlock Holmes stories are not decodable by the reader—whereas today the decodability of clues is “the First Commandment of detective fiction.” “Conan Doyle gets so many things right,” writes Moretti, so how is it that he can “lose his touch” at the last minute? Moretti eventually concludes that the unintelligibility of the clues is a deliberate means of emphasizing Holmes’s omniscience: if the reader could decode the clues, Holmes would no longer be a superman. Conan Doyle, in short, misuses clues “because part of him wants to.”

In “Trees,” Moretti passes over the “wants to” element—presumably to underscore the element of randomness. But I think he had it right the first time. Science is necessary but not sufficient for Holmes’s genius. After all, Dr. Watson is a good scientist, and conscientiously uses the “deductive method,” only to arrive, time and again, at the wrong conclusion—as the reader is guaranteed to do. Holmes’s use of clues strikes an incredibly delicate balance: the mystery is always solved using rational rules, but this doesn’t mean the solution is available to just anyone. Holmes is essentially aristocratic: things come to him effortlessly that never come to others at all.

Perhaps the Holmes stories are not half-baked versions of the “correct” mystery story, but a different kind of mystery story, wherein the nondecodability of clues is not a bug, but a feature. Conan Doyle was writing during the conquest of England by industry and rationalism; perhaps his readers wanted stories about the kinds of magic that are possible within the constraints of science. Holmes categorically rejects the supernatural, not in order to show that the new, rational rules preclude magic, but in order to show that you can still have magic even if you play by the rules. Decodable clues came a “generation” later, with Agatha Christie and the first World War, and became more rigorous after the second—by which time readers wanted to be reminded that the world was still rational."


This isn't really especially radical and is indeed particularly reminiscent of Mikhail Bakhtin's account of heteroglossia and its consequences in the polyphonic aspects of the novel. If criticism and comparison are two tools that can be used to interpret the text, then surely the above comparisons throw light into questions like Christie's social conservatism or the role of the gothic and supernatural in Doyle. Such examples of how genres are interpreted and redefined are surely not all that unusual; the case of how Langland rewrote sections of Piers Plowman in response to radical authors appropriating elements of the text seems to offer a particular concrete example.

With all that said, what does tend to concern me about Graphs, Maps and Trees somewhat is the attempt to quantify elements of literary history across large periods of time and distance; firstly because genres are rarely especially stable (and individual texts are rarely confined to single examples of any genre) and their classification somewhat arbitrary. Even with a defined morphology, it seems difficult to define why certain genres succeed and other do not. After all, literary history is riddled with examples of authors that failed to catch the popular imagination and were only to be acclaimed later; such models might work well with Doyle and Christie but what about authors like Bernhard, Pessoa and Kafka who remain even now largely acclaimed through critical endorsement than popular success (and who were very far from being even remotely representative of the bulk of work published in their lifetime)? Moretti's model seems to work well for popular genres but I'm not quite so sure it works so well otherwise.

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posted by Richard 6:28 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

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

 
One of the themes I seem to keep on tripping across these days is the division between historical literary criticism, literary writing intended for the mythical common reader, and academic criticism, such as post-structuralism and deconstruction. The latest example of this comes from this review of The Oxford English Literary History:

"Writers are intensely interested in what might be called aesthetic success: they have to be, because in order to create something successful one must learn about other people's successful creations... But conventional, non-theoretical criticism often acts as if questions of value are irrelevant, or canonically settled... In his new book, After Theory, Terry Eagleton describes two camps, the belletristic and the theoretical. Why is it, he asks, that the former is credited with seeing what is 'really in the text'? 'To see The Waste Land as brooding upon the spiritual vacancy of Man without God is to read what is there on the page, whereas to view it as a symptom of an exhausted bourgeois civilisation in an era of imperialist warfare is to impose your own crankish theory on the poem."


On the whole I have always been sceptical of claims regarding aesthetic judgement, where, it seems to me, the difference between opinion and prejudice is merely a recognition than man is as much a rationalising animal as a rational one. This seems particularly so in this case, where the problem is not that the Oxford Review lacks aesthetic discrimination, but that it does indeed discriminate between works according to an aesthetic the reviewer is not in sympathy with (i.e. one that prefers postmodern and politically committed aesthetics).

In fact, this review raises several questions that are poorly answered; for example, surely there is a great deal that is arbitrary about the formation of the canon (after all, the Victorians read Scott and Rossetti rather than Austen and Hopkins; a prejudice always rather more congenial to me than that of modern times). Equally, if one should be wary of reasing texts symptomatically, one feels tempted to ask what is the value of literature if it cannot be regarded as being symptomatic? But rather than doing nothing more than writing a rebuttal, it might be better to recall what a criticism of aesthetic merit resembled. Though he disliked the term 'aesthetic' FR Leavis would nonetheless seem to the very acme of the type of criticism being exalted. His criticism sought to weigh the merits of differing authors. Those admitted into the great tradition included George Eliot, James, Conrad and Lawrence; those excluded had Milton, Woolf, Tennyson and Hardy amongst their number. Dickens and Charlotte Bronte flitted between the two camps. While contemporary criticism might be guilty of neither selecting nor rejecting, aesthetic criticism promptly went to the other extreme.

There's a good argument to be made that some notion of 'literatity' is important, even an arbitrary one. But such arbitrary notions cannot be founded on anything other than prejudice masked as judgement. It seems to me that a division between criticism and theory is something to welcome. Let the former return to being the preserve of writers like James, where there is little pretence that one is seeing anything other than a mirror of the writer themself (as with Rushdie and Franzen, both cited by the reviewer) while the role of the critic as self-appointed arbiter of taste can comfortably be left to wither on the vine. While I have a great many reservations about contemporary theory (its selective appropriation of philosophy and linguistics, its ignorance of historical conditions in favour of what remains a vulgar Marxism, to cite the two most obvious complaints in what would otherwise be a rather long list) I'd still prefer the likes of Bakhtin and Lukacs to Trilling and Richards any day of the week.

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posted by Richard 6:41 pm