House with Shingles - Egon Schiele (1915)
Waggish
David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.
Page 43 of 148
Under the headings pun, rhyme, metaphor, and meter I have in fact already been discussing an aspect of poetic language which, since Empson, no treatment of poetics can afford to ignore: ambiguity. For Empson, ambiguity became all but synonymous with the essential quality of poetry; it meant complexity, associative and connotative richness, texture, and the possibility of irony. The ambiguous word proliferated like a vine, wove or revealed hidden strands between the most various and distinct spheres of our prosaically ordered world. By exploiting the ambiguity of words the poet could ironically undercut the surface meanings of his statements, could avail himself fully of the entire field of meanings which a word has and is. I want to shift the stress of Empson’s analysis a little. He made us aware that one word can–and in great poetry commonly does–have many meanings; I would rather insist on the converse, that many meanings can have one word. For the poet, the ambiguous word is the crux of the problem of creating a medium for him to work in. If meanings are primary and words only their signs, then ambiguous words are false; each meaning should have its word, as each sound should have its letter. But if the reverse is true and words are primary–if, that is, they are the corporeal entities the poet requires–then ambiguity is something quite different: it is the fracturing of a pristine unity by the analytic conceptualizations of prose. The poet must assume that where there is one word there must, in some sense, be unity of meaning, no matter what prose usage may have done to break it. The pun is the extreme form of this assumption, positing unity of meaning even for purely accidental homophones, such as the sound shifts of a language will happen to produce.
Ambiguity, then, becomes a test case for the poet; insofar as he can vanquish it–not by splitting the word, but by fusing its meanings–he has succeeded in making language into a true medium; insofar as it vanquishes him, he must abdicate his position as a “maker.” I would say, therefore, that he does not primarily exploit the plurisignations of words, as though they were a fortunate accident; rather he accepts, even seeks out, their challenge, because he knows that in his encounter with them the issue of his claim is finally joined and decided. A pun may be a mere play, a rhyme a mere jingle, even a metaphor only an invitation to conceptual comparisons; true ambiguities are another matter. With them it is not a question of taking two words or meanings and showing how, in some sense, they are one, but rather of taking one word and showing that it is more than a potpourri of the meanings we have a mind to attach to it. Since the poet’s credo must be the opening of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word,” he meets the temptation of meaning ultimately in ambiguity.
Sigurd Burckhardt, “The Poet as Fool and Priest” (1956)
Some of this, in its talk about meaning and intention, may read as a bit naive, but I think that’s mistaken. Rather than positing some Platonic meaning that a work aims at, one locked inside the poet’s head, I think Burckhardt means to talk about how there is inescapably the notion of some intent on the creator’s part that a reader has to deal with. There is some particular instantiation of meaning that a poet was working with. The “pristine unity” is private, maybe even an illusion. Meanings may be primary, but they are still private in their particular essence, even if it is by them that we are able to live and function. The writer’s intent is not decipherable or recoverable, but at the same time we do have the fact that such an intent existed at the time of creation. If “intent” and “meaning” are too specific, just take it that there was some unified surplus in the poet’s mind at the time. Some critics try to externalize that surplus onto historical surroundings, about which we know far more; other critics try to minimize the role of that surplus by exploding the amount of sheer ambiguity in the words themselves. Yet the collateral effect is also to dampen a sense of unity. Despite the clear attempts made by critics to reconstruct a more complex unity from the proliferations of meaning, there is a point where such unities are no longer comprehensible or plausible to a lay reader, and so multiplicity rules over unity.
Another irony is how some of those obsessive close reader critics complained about the advent of theory and other cultural readings, as though there were limits to what ambiguity could suggest, when in fact the Ambiguists had opened the door to such diversity in the first place. By positing that any “pristine unity” lay precisely in the multiplicity of meaning, they abdicated their hegemonic throne, a la Richard II. Theorists then made a rear-guard action by reclassifying where the “pristine unity” could be, outside the realm of the text-in-isolation. I love much of the work of the Ambiguists, but they should have seen it coming. They were climbing Jacob’s ladder.
Growing up in the ARPAnet days, I only had access to the books in the local library and small B. Dalton’s. I believe I found Merrill’s economics tutorial The Toothpaste Millionaire at a book fair and liked it enough to track down her magnum opus The Pushcart War in the library. The book has more or less stayed in print, though, and it certainly sells better than most of the books I talk about here.
The majority of the books I read in primary school haven’t stayed with me except for a detail or two, but three authors stand out as having imprinted themselves far more deeply on my young brain: Daniel Pinkwater, Ellen Raskin, and Jean Merrill. (I’m leaving aside obvious classics like The Phantom Tollbooth.) They are all fundamentally urban authors, though beyond that they don’t have a lot in common beyond being very strange. (Raskin’s profound Figgs and Phantoms was simply incomprehensible to me at the time, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have known what to make of Pinkwater’s brilliant Young Adult Novel had I stumbled on it.)
Merrill’s work is not as crafted or sheerly inspired as that of the other two, but The Pushcart War stood out for its epic scope and comparatively large cast, as well as its political intrigue, which was beyond anything else I’d read. Looking back at it now, though, the book is far more bizarre, because the allegorical content is so strong, certainly as great as in C.S. Lewis or Philip Pullman. Except that this is a secular book and it’s allegorizing political and social struggles, and doing saw awfully specifically. Some appropriate subtitles would be:
- Saul Alinsky for Beginners
- A Young Person’s Guide to the Battle of Algiers
- Ho Chi Minh Jr.
The subject of the book is, for the most part, guerilla warfare and insurgency. Three big trucking firms seek to have pushcarts banned from New York to clear the streets for more trucks, making way for (it is later revealed) banning cars and even small trucks as well. They work with the corrupt mayor, but the pushcart owners wage war by shooting tacks into tires, causing the trucks to break down and annoy the public/civilians, turning them against the trucks.
This seems like a pretty blatant allegory for Vietnam in particular, since the failure of the US’s huge forces against asymmetrical guerrilla warfare resulted from absurd civilian deaths causing the Vietnamese to increasingly side with the Vietcong. But the book was published in 1964. Vietnam did not have the overwhelming presence in American life then that it would have a few years later, but I get the sense Merrill was pretty well-informed and politically interested. Still, the book could also be drawing from French experiences in Algeria, or perhaps France’s own futile war in Vietnam against the Viet Minh.
There are also echoes of the civil rights movement in the nonviolent protests that occur toward the end of the book, but honestly, they are much weaker, as there is no analogue for segregation or discrimination. And the nonviolent protest is less entertaining than the tales of taking out trucks with pea-shooters. I remember being disappointed as a kid that the guerrilla war ended (though it is picked up briefly by kids imitating the cool guerrillas) in favor of more abstract dealings.
Those more abstract dealings are also allegorical. “The Three,” the leaders of the trucking firms, are two big thuggish guys named Moe Mammoth and Walter Tiger, as well as the slick mastermind Louie Livergreen. (Livergreen, like a majority of the characters, is clearly of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, though unlike Pushcart King Maxie Hammerman and elderly but stubborn pushcart owner Mr. Jerusalem, he does not speak in a Yiddish-derived idiolect. There is no mention of religion in the whole book, though.) When they are first shown riling up their truckers to cause more trouble for the pushcarts, there is this bizarre footnote (the whole book is fashioned as an academic documentary account):
“The Three” were originally known as “The Big Three,” but this caused some confusion as the leaders of three important nations of the time were also called The Big Three, and after a city newspaper ran a headline announcing BIG THREE CARVE UP CHINA (over a story about Mammoth, LEMA, and Tiger Trucking buying out the China Carting & Storage Co.), there was some international trouble in the course of which Moscow was bombed by an Indo-Chinese pilot. After that the city papers referred to the three big trucking firms simply as The Three.
Capitalists/imperialists that they are, “The Three” pretty much own New York Mayor Emmett Cudd, at least until public opinion turns so decisively against the trucks that the mayor drops them without a second thought. Cudd’s schemes are somewhat limited by the unnamed Police Commissioner (all police officials go unnamed, in fact), who enforces law and order but does refuse to go on witch hunts. He comes off more affably than the others despite going unnamed, and I have to wonder why Merrill chose to leave him anonymous. It almost seems to enforce a conservative dictum that entrenched civil servants will remain less corrupt than elected officials.
Still, the message is pretty clearly “hearts and minds.” Ultimately, popular opinion rules, and there’s no way to get traction if the public hates you. Ah, if only life were so simple. Still, this is one of the best social realist kid books ever written, and far more fun than Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done?
One loose end. While Moe and Tiger give up and Louie Livergreen goes into hiding and (it is hinted) is killed, Cudd gets reelected mayor without suffering any ill consequences. This bugged me as a kid. It still bugs me now.
Erica Weitzman’s article “Necessary Interruption: Traces of the Political in Levinas” draws a convincing comparison between Levinas’s ontological alterity ethics and the political theory of Carl Schmitt:
In the well-known interview with Schlomo Malka and Alain Finkielkraut on Radio Communauté given in response to the Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982, Levinas is asked about the possibility of the Palestinian as the political “other” in relation to the Israeli, and the ethical and political consequences this might entail. Levinas’s altogether surprising and by now infamous response seems to dismiss entirely his own notion of infinite responsibility, and, instead, delivers an analysis that startlingly recalls the friend/enemy distinction of Carl Schmitt:
My definition of the other is completely different. The other is the neighbour, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you’re for the other, you’re for the neighbour. But if your neighbour attacks another neighbour or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least then we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong.
How is one to reconcile this — if reconciliation is possible — with the infinite demand of the other, with Levinas’s idea of the self only brought to consciousness in the first place through its utter submission to and absolute responsibility for the other? For Levinas, evidently, some others are more due responsibility than other others. Levinas is not wrong in stating that Malka has fundamentally misinterpreted his philosophical writings. Indeed, his response makes clear that the other with whom the ethical relation is possible is subject to certain criteria. Or at least, these criteria come to emerge in the interruption of the ethical by the political.
Weitzman concludes that Levinas’s seeming contradiction here is not really a contradiction at all, but something that falls out of his ethics, which do not produce tolerance or pluralism, but in fact something much closer to Carl Schmitt’s polarized friend/enemy politics:
In this way, Levinas’s ethics of radical alterity in fact circle right back to the very sameness, totality, and totalitarianism which he himself finds so pernicious. The problem with Levinas’s ethics is not that it results in a passively suffering, masochistic, incapable subject, constantly at the mercy of the command of the other. The problem is that his ethics, in conceiving of alterity as something wholly beyond the borders of being and phenomenality, in fact cannibalizes alterity within the same. In this cannibalization of the other, the self takes on a psychotic hyperresponsibility that — in its transcendence and lack of necessity to correspond to any concrete situation or make any factical decision — becomes absolute irresponsibility, a sovereign will no longer even human but actually divine. “Justice,” according to this model, is a logical absurdity. For either the consensus Levinas’s thought seems to assume holds true — in which case there are no decisions or judgments to be made — or else the intrusion of the enemy puts all notions of justice and responsibility in suspension. Either there is no politics, the end of politics, utopia — or there is total war. The entrance of the third, which for Levinas is at once the necessary condition for the beginning of the political and the political a priori of the ethical relation itself, in fact only transforms the dyadic solipsism of the ethical relation into the plural solipsism of nationalism and fraternity.
Political theory is not my forte, so I will only comment on the philosophical side of things. When you have the sort of radical alterity that you find in Levinas, it really does become empty of content. Since the other is defined only in the sense of being wholly other, “alterity takes on another character” in wholly arbitrary ways. No criteria is possible besides that of total Otherness. It can be filled with the enemy just as easily as it can be filled with infinite ethical demand. Everything true becomes false. Black is white, friend is enemy, good is evil.
I think this is one of the points Hegel is making in the infamously obscure Inverted World section of the Phenomenology, which also seems to end in some kind of recognition of solipsism. If so, it’s a good point!
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Note: for an indisputably indefensible Levinas passage, consider his comment on the Soviet-Chinese conflict in 1960, during which he adopted a pro-Soviet position:
The yellow peril! It is not racial, it is spiritual. It does not involve inferior values; it involves a radical strangeness, a stranger to the weight of its past, from where there does not filter any familiar voice or inflection, a lunar or Martian past.
Emmanuel Levinas, “The Russo-Chinese Debate and the Dialectic” (1960)
Zizek ties Levinas’s attitude here back to Heidegger.
Aesthetics as self-defeating enterprise: how theories of aesthetics make it their goal to exclude the aesthetic from consideration.
7. A characteristic thing about our language is that a large number of words used under these circumstances are adjectives -‘fine’, ‘lovely’, etc. But you see that this is by no means necessary. You saw that they were first used as interjections. Would it matter if instead of saying “This is lovely”, I just said “Ah!” and smiled, or just rubbed my stomach? As far as these primitive languages go, problems about what these words are about, what their real subject is, [which is called ‘beautiful’ or ‘good’.-R.] don’t come up at all.
8. It is remarkable that in real life, when aesthetic judgements are made, aesthetic adjectives such as ‘beautiful’, ‘fine’, etc., play hardly any role at all. Are aesthetic adjectives used in a musical criticism? You say: “Look at this transition”,Z or [Rhees] “The passage here is incoherent”. Or you say, in a poetical criticism, [Taylor]: “His use of images is precise”. The words you use are more akin to ‘right’ and ‘correct’ (as these words are used in ordinary speech) than to ‘beautiful’ and’lovely’.
23. We talked of correctness. A good cutter won’t use any words except words like ‘Too long’, ‘All right’. When we talk of a Symphony of Beethoven we don’t talk of correctness. Entirely different things enter. One wouldn’t talk of appreciating the tremendous things in Art. In certain styles in Architecture a door is correct, and the thing is you appreciate it. But in the case of a Gothic Cathedral what we do is not at all to find it correct-it plays an entirely diferent role with us. The entire game is different. It is as different as to judge a human being and on the one hand to say ‘He behaves well’ and on the other hand ‘He made a great impression on me’.
24. ‘Correctly’, ‘charmingly’, ‘finely’ , etc. play an entirely diferent role. Cf. the famous address of Buffon-a terrific man -on style in writing; making ever so many distinctions which I only understand vaguely but which he didn’t mean vaguely-all kinds of nuances like ‘grand’, ‘charming’, ‘nice’.
25. The words we call expressions of aesthetic judgement play a very complicated role, but a very definite role, in what we call a culture of a period. To describe their use or to describe what you mean by a cultured taste, you have to describe a culture. What we now call a cultured taste perhaps didn’t exist in the Middle Ages. An entirely different game is played in different ages.
26. What belongs to a language game is a whole culture. In describing musical taste you have to describe whether children give concerts, whether women do or whether men only give them, etc., etc.’ In aristocratic circles in Vienna people had [such and such] a taste, then it came into bourgeois circles and women joined choirs, etc. This is an example of tradition in music.
35. In order to get clear about aesthetic words you have to describe ways of living. We think we have to talk about aesthetic judgements like ‘This is beautiful’, but we find that if we have to talk about aesthetic judgements we don’t find these words at all, but a word used something like a gesture, accompanying a complicated activity.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on Aesthetics (1938)
What Wittgenstein seems to elide, mostly, is the modern emphasis on deviancy, aka creativity. Application of positive aesthetic terms today requires a certain sense of originality or integrity in the work, some way in which a new work is not a recapitulation of extant instantiations of the positive aesthetic terms, but an elaboration on them or new development of them. This is not to say that these terms are qualitatively any different from “correct” and “nice” and “lovely,” or that there actually is a sense in which these “original” works are original in any substantive way, just that these terms make the sort of game that Wittgenstein is talking about considerably more neurotic.
[See also F.R. Leavis Remembers Wittgenstein for Wittgenstein interpreting William Empson’s poetry.]
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