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David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Category: Quotations (page 3 of 17)

The Profoundest Profundities Ever Propounded

Just to contrast with Christine Brooke-Rose’s criticism.

Language can only begin with the void; no fullness, no certainty can ever speak; something essential is lacking in anyone who expresses himself. Negation is tied to language. When I first begin, I do not speak in order to say something, rather a nothing demands to speak, nothing speaks, nothing finds its being in speech and the being of speech is nothing. This formulation explains why literature’s ideal has been the following: to say nothing, to speak in order to say nothing. If one is not to talk about things except to say what makes them nothing, well then, to say nothing is really the only hope of saying everything about them.

Death ends in being: this is man’s hope and his task, because nothingness itself helps to make the world, nothingness is the creator of the world in man as he works and understands. Death ends in being: this is man’s laceration, the source of his unhappy fate, since by man death comes to being and by man meaning rests on nothingness; the only way we can comprehend is by denying ourselves existence, by making death possible, by contaminating what we comprehend with the nothingness of death, so that if we emerge from being, we fall outside the possibility of death, and the way out becomes the disappearance of every way out.

Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death”

It sounds a little better in French, but this hyper-Romanticism is closer to Emerson than to Hegel.

The phrase “so that if we emerge from being ,we fall outside the possibility of death” is repeated twice in the English translation, a typo which has not been corrected in the Station Hill Blanchot Reader. The duplication does not hurt the text.

The Criticism of Christine Brooke-Rose

Novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose passed away recently. Chicago Blog has a good round-up of the many tributes to her. I had earlier reviewed Xorandor critically, but with great respect for what she had tried to achieve and her voracious, rigorous intellect.

I highly recommend, in particular, her essays in Stories, Theories, and Things, some of the sharpest post-structuralist criticism I have read. I quote some strikingly acute and wry passages from it which easily transcend their particular theoretical orientation. (Though some of the best essays, such as the one on Hardy, are too dense and integral to excerpt.)

“Whatever Happened to Narratology?”

Narratology was thus immensely useful. But in the end, it couldn’t cope with narrative and its complexities, except at the price of either trivialization or of becoming a separate theoretical discourse, rarely relevant to the narrative discussed, when discussed. In other words, it became itself a story, or set of stories, of narratives not only extradiegetic, metalinguistic, transtextual, paratextual, hypotextual, extratextual, intertextual, but also, yes, sometimes, textual, all at the same time. And so, yes, a ‘good’ story. Nevertheless, the study of narratological phenomena, as happens so often, turned into an endless discussion about how to speak of them. The story of narratology became as self-reflexive as a ‘postmodern’ novel. But after all, every age has the rhetoric it deserves.

“Palimpsest History”

Now knowledge has long been unfashionable in fiction. If I may make a personal digression here, this is particularly true of women writers, who are assumed to write only of their personal situations and problems, and I have often been blamed for parading my knowledge, although I have never seen this being regarded as a flaw in male writers; on the contrary. Nevertheless (end of personal digression), even as praise, a show of knowledge is usually regarded as irrelevant: Mr X shows an immense amount of knowledge of a, b, c, and the critic passes to theme, plot, characters and sometimes style, often in that order. What has been valued in this sociological and psychoanalytical century is personal experience and the successful expression of it. In the last resort a novel can be limited to this, can come straight out of heart and head, with at best a craftsmanly ability to organize it well, and write well.

George Eliot – another knowledgeable novelist, though a woman — said it was not necessary for a writer to experience life in a workshop, the open door was enough. This is obviously true: the writer cannot do without imagination. Dostoevsky understood this. And mere homework is not enough either. But a great deal of this homework done by the classical realist was sociological, and eventually led, in the modern neorealist novel we are all familiar with, to slice-of-life novels about miners, doctors, football-players, admen and all the rest. Back to the personal experience of the writer in fact. Now personal experience is sadly limited. And the American postmodern attempt to break out of it rarely succeeds beyond fun-games with narrative conventions – a very restricted type of knowledge.

The novel took its roots in historical documents and has always had an intimate link with history. But the novel’s task, unlike that of history, is to stretch our intellectual, spiritual and imaginative horizons to breaking point. Because palimpsest histories do precisely that, mingling realism with the supernatural and history with spiritual and philosophical reinterpretation, they could be said to float half-way between the sacred books of our various heritages, which survive on the strength of the faiths they have created (and here I include Homer, who also survived on the absolute faith of the Renaissance in the validity of classical culture), and the endless exegesis and commentaries these sacred books create, which do not usually survive one another, each supplanting its predecessor according to the Zeitgeist, in much the same way as do the translations of Homer or the Russian classics.

“Illiterations”

In the Symposium it is Diotima, the only woman allowed into the dialogues but in absentia, who has given Socrates the apparently extraordinary revelation that the purpose of love is procreation in beauty. For what purpose? For immortality (206e, 207a). And she rapidly moves on (in the account of Socrates) to those who have fecundity of soul (men, 209a), who will look for the beautiful object (a boy) and educate him, and at whose contact they will give birth to that with which they have long been pregnant (209c).

Why does Plato put this nonsense into a woman’s mouth, via Socrates? Precisely because she is a woman and knows about ‘real’ childbirth, the literal half of the metaphor, which gives such a solid, physical basis to her figurative sliding, that is, to the meaning Plato wants. The fecund male, though procreating through ‘contact’ with Beauty (boy or Muse) is already long pregnant, quite independently of this contact. He has been touched with divine madness, with genius. The Muse (or boy), contrary to some feminist analysis, is never a mother in this, but a memory-jogger or an ‘ideal’. In practice she is merely a titillating hand-maiden, a stage on the Platonic ladder, at most a gorgeous midwife.

Thus in the earliest texts that echo down and influence the European literary tradition, even to modern times (e.g. Pound), men have simply appropriated childbirth as a painless metaphor, a bearing over, a mater phor artistic creation. A Muse may or may not preside, but genius begets and travails. The woman in this does neither. Indeed when women did start writing, the ancient metaphor was all too easily reversed: her books were produced instead of children, as surrogates, in the absence of the all-essential male.

For men have always had it both ways: the begetting and the travail (the travail which, as ‘work’ belongs to culture, but which as bearing and ‘labour’ belongs to nature); the genius and the work (the genius which is itself both passive possession and authoritative production), the penis and the womb. Man has in fact appropriated, to represent his relation to truth or God, both aspects of woman’s role in relation to man: the being made fecund and the travail. This in addition to begetting. It is his supplement: he, as God, begets a work upon himself; he, as poet, is made fecund and labours. But on a safe, metaphoric level: he would never actually die in childbirth.

It would seem, then, that the androgyny that some men have claimed for all good writers at the creative end has willy nilly been acquired by women at the receiving end, but not by men, who rarely identify with women characters as women do with male ones. Whatever the case, it would surely be a good thing if more men learnt to read as women (even the wild zone [cf. Elaine Showalter]), so that the bisexual effort, which they have metaphorically appropriated at the creative end, should not remain so wholly on the women’s side at the receiver’s end. Both should read as both, just as both should write as both. And one of the ways in which this delightful bisexualism should occur is in a more open and intelligent attitude to experiment of all kinds by women.

“A Womb of One’s Own”

Clearly the silencing of women critics and writers, and especially of women experimental writers, is true, is constant, and is done by ignoring them or, more often than might be supposed, by stealing from them without acknowledgement. I have experienced both myself and simply put up with it. Nevertheless I have always been deeply suspicious of all movements and labels which create blind obsessions. A writer, man or woman, is essentially alone, and will be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ independently of sex or origin. This view is condemned by some feminists as the ‘androgynous-great-mind stance’, but it is fundamentally a sound one, however ill used.

But things are changing, however slowly, and only indirectly through feminism, much more directly through specific women writers.

The twentieth century in general, from the Surrealists and much misunderstanding of Freud onwards, has tended to enthrone the Unconscious as the latest substitute for dogmatic truth, rather than as a language to understand, a language to come to terms with and to explore, exploit, imaginatively. The Unconscious (or the pre-Symbolic) by definition is inaccessible, like the ontic, except through conscious effort and analysis, which automatically means structuring and schematizing and rehandling, to which all perception is subservient: we already rehandle a dream the moment we try to capture it and write it down. The Unconscious as Truth, the ‘music of the womb’ as ‘more real’. Feminism is belatedly repeating the same gesture, and I am not at all sure how ‘subversive’ it really is, on its wombish own.

Flux and chaos and primitive perceptions, for all their undoubted vitality and necessity as a means of achieving tolerance, integration, wholeness, are nevertheless at the moment more in danger of threatening all that we hold dear in civilization today. Moreover, control and logic (etc.), as well as ‘symbolic’ rather than purely ‘semiotic’ expression can hardly be said to be absent from the best and most incisive feminist criticism – it couldn’t make its points without them. Cixous and Kristeva, who seem to be the highest feminist reference, are the two most highly qualified, intellectual, and intelligent literary women in France. Feminist critics usually hold jobs in academia, with all its internecine power-struggles, and presumably they partake in those, using ‘male’ structures. Naturally there is still unfairness and difficulty, but to compete they presumably do not turn to the music of the womb, but to tough preparation for tough examinations, dissertations, conference papers, publications. It seems to me unacceptable to live in these relative sinecures and continue to talk about the desirability of flux, chaos and pre-Oedipal sensibility.

“Hawthorne’s ‘The Customs-House'”

F. O. Matthiessen, writing on Symbolism and Allegory in Hawthorne, tells us that Hawthorne ‘seems sometimes to have started from a physical object – the minister’s black veil, the Faun of Praxiteles’, but that he could also start with noting an idea, ‘and then working up an embodiment to fit it’ (1941, 244). The idea, he says later, ‘might itself be hardly more than a nervous tic, some freakish notion that possessed him in his solitude’. And he quotes an example of this from the Notebooks: ‘To personify If— But — And — Though etc’ Matthiessen adds: ‘To be sure, this proved too insubstantial even for Hawthorne, and got no further than his notebook’ (242).

I submit that in The Scarlet Letter it got a good deal further, and is far more than a freakish notion or a nervous tic, but the very stuff of poetry. I submit that as an idea it in fact rejoined the physical object, the piece of cloth, to form the antithetical style to ‘personify If- But – And – Though’, a style itself representing the signifier A and all its protean forms along the signifying chain, the human shape, openings both physiological and abstract, the threshold of the narrative, the prison-door, the alpha and omega of the human soul, the house of custom.

“Ill Locutions”

What is sadder has been the misunderstanding of Represented Speech and Thought by writers. Invented spontaneously, almost unconsciously, unreflectively, then developed very reflectively indeed, Represented Speech and Thought, like most artistic devices, eventually became unconscious again, that is, it was not only used as a cliche (already parodied by Joyce), its subtlety wasted on trivia, but it was also misused because misunderstood.

Formally, as we have seen, the sentence of Represented Speech and Thought can be similar to the Narrative Sentence, indeed identical with it when deictics and other signs of E are not linguistically present, but only the perceiving character. This formal similarity led, inevitably, to these two distinct poles being fused, and the sentence of Represented Speech and Thought being used as narration, to tell, to give narrative information – whole summaries of a situation, for instance, or analepses (flashbacks) of a whole past, which are clearly there to inform the reader and not to represent a character’s perceptions, save at the cost of making them rather gross, or at best wholly artificial. This can go on for pages. Such misuse is extremely frequent in the average modern neo-realist novel, including most classical Science Fiction that imitated the worn-out techniques of the realist novel in an attempt to be respectable. This misuse is a direct result, not only of the post-Jamesian (and Aristotelian) condemnation of’telling’ in favour of’showing’, but also of the concomitant attempt to eliminate the author: and since narrative information must be given, the easy solution was to ‘filter’ it all through a character’s mind, however implausibly, thus thoroughly weakening the device into its opposite.

In particular, the passages from “Palimpsest History” articulate something I have felt nascently but had not been able to crystallize fully before reading Brooke-Rose. That ability to give voice to our inchoate ideas is rare and invaluable.

Gilbert Ryle on Heidegger’s Being and Time

Arch-analytic Gilbert “Category Mistake” Ryle reviewed Heidegger’s Being and Time sympathetically on its publication in 1928. It is a beautifully clear statement of the methodological parting of the ways that was then taking place. The philosophical concerns, however, are similar, as are their attempts to get away from subjective psychology.

I’ve excerpted the best bits as well as his punchy conclusion.

This is a very difficult and important work, which marks a big advance in the application of the ‘Phenomenological Method’—though I may say at once that I suspect that this advance is an advance towards disaster.

[Heidegger contends that traditional ontological categories] cannot supply the terms in which we are to unpack the Meanings for which we are looking, for they are at least under suspicion of being metaphorical. Phenomenology is Hermeneutic and the categories which are the untested framework of our everyday world are among its primary interpretanda.

As a practical consequence of this view Heidegger imposes on himself the hard task of coining, and on us the alarming task of understanding, a complete new vocabulary of terms—mostly many-barrelled compounds of everyday ‘nursery’ words and phrases—made to denote roots and stems of Meaning more primitive than those in which Plato, Aristotle and subsequent scientists and philosophers have so taught us to talk and think, that we, by the strong force of habit, have come to regard as ultimate and pivotal ideas which are in fact composite and derivative. Heidegger’s ontological Phenomenology is to turn our eyes back again to contemplate with a new method and a new clarity the springs of Meaning from which flow our most familiar and most ‘homely’ conceptions and classifications. The principle on which he seems to be designing his new terminology is, I should judge, the hypothesis that certain ‘nursery’ words and phrases have a primitiveness and freedom from sophistication which makes them more nearly adequate expressions of really primitive Meanings than the technical terms which science and philosophy in the course of a long development have established.

The hypothesis seems to me a perilous one, for it is at least arguable that it is here, and not in the language of the village and the nursery, that mankind has made a partial escape from metaphor.

(I must leave till later my further and fundamental objection that all these so-called ‘primitive’ attitudes or ways of ‘being-an-I’ really involve knowledge, which knowledge necessitates universals and categories upon which the Analysis of Dasein throws—and can throw—no light at all.)

And this leads to dangerous results in the practice of the phenomenological method; it leads to them here in Sein und Zeit. For the presence of knowledge of some reality (which is surely present in any and every conscious experience) though it is not explicitly recognised is surreptitiously imported as well into such terms as ‘understanding’ and ‘illumination’ as into the countless nursery-terms which Heidegger is trying to build up into a new philosophical vocabulary.

I think, too, that it can be shown that the only reason why Heidegger’s Hermeneutic of ‘Dasein’ takes or promises to take the form of a sort of anthropologistic Metaphysic (smelling a little oddly both of James and of St Augustine) is because Heidegger presupposes that the Meanings which his Hermeneutic is to unravel and illuminate must be in some way man-constituted.

But though I deplore the damage wrought upon his Metaphysics by the presuppositions which Heidegger has unconsciously inherited, I have nothing but admiration for his special undertaking and for such of his achievements in it as I can follow, namely the phenomenological analysis of the root workings of the human soul.

He shows himself to be a thinker of real importance by the immense subtlety and searchingness of his examination of consciousness, by the boldness and originality of his methods and conclusions, and by the unflagging energy with which he tries to think behind the stock categories of orthodox philosophy and psychology.

And I must also say, in his behalf, that while it is my personal opinion that qua First Philosophy Phenomenology is at present heading for bankruptcy and disaster and will end either in self-ruinous Subjectivism or in a windy mysticism, I hazard this opinion with humility and with reservations since I am well aware how far I have fallen short of understanding this difficult work.

Sein und Zeit, it is worth mentioning, is most beautifully printed and the pages have generous margins.

Gilbert Ryle, “Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit” (1928)

In his essay, “Analyzing Heidegger: a history of analytic reactions to Heidegger,” Lee Braver has also remarked on the value of this review, complimenting Ryle’s sympathy toward Heidegger and pointing out their shared concerns. I think Braver makes too much out of some lingering Kantianism in Ryle’s terminology with which he tries to show that Ryle later embraced a position he’d criticized Heidegger for; but from a Heideggerian standpoint I can see why Braver says this.

For my part, I might like Ryle’s Heidegger more than most other versions I’ve encountered (Dreyfus’s, say).

Lucan’s Civil War: Lucan’s Latin

J.C. Bramble has a 30-page section on Lucan in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature (edited by E.J. Kenney). Bramble makes some great remarks on Lucan’s Latin, and since I haven’t been able to comment on that topic, here are some of his comments, most of which emphasize Lucan’s perversity, bizarreness, grittiness, and willful subversion of poetic ideals.

In the sphere of diction and metre Lucan avoids the precedent of mainstream epic. He abandons the versatility of the Virgilian hexameter, opting for a rhythm which is unmusical and prosaic. Logopoeia — ‘ poetry that is akin to nothing but language, which is a dance of intelligence among words and ideas, and modifications of ideas and words’ (Ezra Pound)—is his chosen mode, a more suitable vehicle for the abstractions and difficulties of his theme than the musicality of Virgil.

In diction he is less concerned to embellish his material than present it in a dry sardonic light. For instance, cadauer, a real and uncompromising word used only twice in the Aeneid and once in the Metamorphoses, occurs thirty-six times in the Bellum Civile, while mors, the everyday term, is preferred to the poetic letum—for in civil war, death is not romantic. By the same token he prefers the realistic pilum to iaculum, the heroic word.

His prosaic tendency is seen again in the precedence of terra over tellus, caelum over polus, uentus over aura, aqua over lympha or latex; and, once more, the modernity and realism of his subject matter dictate a predilection for gladius, with its forty incidences, against five in Virgil, two in Valerius, and one in Statius. Unpoetic verbs are rife, many of them compounds.

Constantly at odds with conventional epic, Lucan is not averse to coinages, or taking words from other areas of Latin literature: but most of the innovations have a cold, metallic ring. There is nothing especially ornamental about his coinage quassabilis or his four otherwise unattested verbs, circumlabi, dimadescere, intermanere, supereuolare, or again, his cumbersome three new compounds, illatrare, iniectare, superenatare; peritus, formonsus, and deliciae have no place in the higher genres; nor should lassus have been so frequent, when fessus was available.

Nouns like auctus, ductus and mixtura are more reminiscent of Lucretius and Manilius than the vocabulary of epic, and uxor, like alloquium, area, armamentum, bucetum, columen, constantia, excrementum, opera and sexus would not have pleased the critics. Of his verbal nouns in –tor, which are many, seven of them new, several are unnecessarily prosaic, or even bizarre.

Technical terms are frequent, for instance bardus, biblus, bracae, cataracta, coccus and couinnus: sparingly used by most poets, Lucan likes them for their scientific edge, which is especially apt for digressions.

He has also read his Virgil with an eye for such terms: from the Georgics he takes ardea, defectus, dilectus, donarium and monstrator; from the Aeneid, asylum and caetra. Virgil’s ‘poetic’ vocabulary, on the other hand, is consistently avoided.

Similarly, his colour vocabulary is less rich than that of mainstream epic; roughly half as many terms, used rather less then half as frequently. From a total of 34 terms, white, grey and black are the dominant tones, accounting for 15 terms with 64 occurrences. Black is preferred to white, but Lucan draws no distinction between the epic ater, Virgil’s option, and the more ordinary niger: likewise, he rejects the Virgilian albus and the evocative niueus, in favour of the neutral pallidus and palleo.

Red is Lucan’s next favourite colour — we remember the frequency of deaths in his epic — but the conventional purpureus which accounts for 15 of Virgil’s 38 reds, and the decorative roseus are entirely absent, replaced by rubere and cognates, which claim 14 out of the 25 incidences in the Bellum Civile. Blues, yellows, and greens are sparse: caeruleus and caerulus only appear once each, ousted by the duller liuens and liuor; the epic fuluus has only three incidences, flauus five, and croceus one; while uirens, at 9.523, is the only green in this predominantly monochrome epic.

J.C. Bramble

David Quint on Structuralism and New Historicism and Theory in General

David Quint, in his estimable book Epic and Empire, argues against the totalizing tendency of much literary theory and criticism of the 20th century. He speaks of poststructuralism and New Historicism but the general argument could apply to any number of other theories as well. (This is, essentially, what I criticized Derrida for doing in his attack on Husserl.)

I register here my methodological distance from, while acknowledging my indebtedness to, a poststructuralist critical practice that, in turning literary studies back toward history, has incorporated the models of structuralist anthropology. In this line of work, which is sometimes broadly called New Historicism, the literary text is one of an array of cultural products that share a single deep structure or mentality.

My reservations about this practice are partly conditioned by the more local explanations I have arrived at concerning epic and its relationship to the political order. In the widely conceived web of intertextual relationships that constitute the structuralist-historicist slice of history—in which all components of the culture are presupposed to develop at more or less the same rate at any historical moment—the literary text seems capable of being linked with almost any other text of the culture, and there appears to be no control to determine the juxtaposition. The text’s own explicit allusive network becomes only one element of this intertextuality, and certainly not a privileged one. Politics, too, the social disposition of coercive power, becomes one more product of this patterned mentality or “poetics.” That is, politics is necessarily aestheticized by the interpreter. It is one thing to acknowledge that power to some degree depends on the manipulation of semiotic and symbolic order—I do, in fact, argue this—but quite another to conflate the two.

Furthermore, attention to synchronous historical relationships can cause the text’s participation in a diachronic literary history to be overlooked.

David Quint, Epic and Empire (14)

Similar points have been made by many critics of such overarching theories, but this is the most compact statement of the critique that I’ve seen, so I thought it deserved quoting. The underlying irony Quint seems to emphasize is that the conflation of power and semiotics is, in fact, a semiotic power grab.

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