I found Henry James' novel What Maisie Knew to be an unusual work. It was characterised by a sense of impregnability. One had a sense of glorious architecure obscuring some treasure behind stone walls. This, I know, is very James, but it is particularly pointed in What Maisie Knew because the protagonist herself is in the same condition. That is she similarly is surrounded by events and relations which she doesn't understand although is affected by a sense of their propriety and importance. The difference is she is inside looking out and we are inside looking in.
This unusual set up seems to me a perfect example of the emergence of the hermenutics of suspicion and reader anxiety. At first one worries the whole time that one has not satisfactorily understood, that one is missing something. In particular the title is infuriating, because we spend the whole time wondering what it is the Maisie knows, and it is often mentioned by the narrative voice or the other characters, but it is never told in full. As a reader ones affected intellectual relations to the work become exposed and challening. We wonder, 'oh dear, am I not as smart as I think?' or 'I should know what Maisie knows by now, shouldn't I? What if I've missed it? What if I don't understand this cannonical author! ... How am I going to lie about this in class?...'. The obsurity of James' writing brings to the fore this bundle of anxieties and self expectation associated with the act of reading, and the role of reading in our lives, which is normally masked by the accessibilty of other works.
The hermenutics of suspicion are raised with even greater force then reader anxiety in this work. One sees the self proclaimed motives of the women using Maisie to gain ascendency over Sir Claude, and those of Maisie herself, grate against an almost palpable hypocrisy of sexual tension. The increasing sordidness of the whole affair, masked vainly by Mrs Wix' tempest of morality, screams for some authorial comment. The fact that this is refrained from by James, at least in my case, resulted in the most enourmous suspiscious of not only what he was doing, but who he was such that either a) he was blind to the terrible animal tensions that underlay his text, or b) a unbelivably dark thinker who saw the sexual termoil and cruelty hidden beneath skin deep English propriety, maintained in a type of self-deluding mantra of politeness and reasonableness. While increasing my engagement with the work I still wonder when I look at and of James' book, 'what on earth were you thinking?'.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
Casanova
Casanova
What is this person talking about?
Let us just take a look at a few points.
So she just changes the metaphor. That’s all. And it doesn’t even work that well. It really should not have blown anyone’s mind to see a new metaphor employed to describe this world.
And OMG- this petting process of past authors! She writes about them seeing this amazing hidden reality that no one else gets and they don’t even get fully. Well done canonical author. Maybe though, it’s actually them who get it all and not her. Maybe that’s because they use economic metaphors, but don’t think that they are talking in anything but metaphor.
The Euro-centrism of her work is nauseating. “International literary space began in the 16th Century” and it’s not just about the printing press. In fact it is not at all about the printing press as she doesn’t mention it once. She concludes that historical sweep by saying that Asia, India and Africa started demanding acceptance in the international literary space after de-colonisation. Sure, she might be talking about a French centred literary space, with Paris as its capital, but she isn’t. She says Paris is the world capital of literature. This is of all literature, all literature being a participant in the international literary space. So, no. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.
Why are we reading crazy and wrong French authors who think that all roads lead to Paris… Like I don’t even speak French, I don’t care about French literature, not many people in the English speaking world do. At least, I don’t care about the French opinion about French literature, I like translated French literature which remains mute on the issue. It’s almost like America, the cultural hub of the modern world, suddenly didn’t exist. Like NYC wasn’t a melting pot of literary establishments which has become so bloody familiar to English speakers that I feel if I just squinted a little on my way out of my house I’d be cruising down 42nd to the subway, past the MET, maybe about to get a bagel and coffee, roast chestnuts, gangsters, corrupt lawyers, old money, new money, drug money, money madness, high life, low life, homeless people, Wall street, Cooney Island, Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Factory, Velvet Underground, Lou Reed. You know, the list goes on. My point isn’t that New York is the literary capital, but that Casanova’s negligible evidence of Paris’ presence in the literary world through a few excerpts of descriptive passages is hilariously irrelevant and biased. You have to be trying really really hard to not notice that it is apocryphal.
Finally, let me say it once and for all. We do not need a new language to describe the circulation of texts, values and literary talent. We need a new language to describe quantum physics. Not books. There are plenty of words for book and Casanova is just living out French philosophies delusions of grandeur.
What is this person talking about?
Let us just take a look at a few points.
So she just changes the metaphor. That’s all. And it doesn’t even work that well. It really should not have blown anyone’s mind to see a new metaphor employed to describe this world.
And OMG- this petting process of past authors! She writes about them seeing this amazing hidden reality that no one else gets and they don’t even get fully. Well done canonical author. Maybe though, it’s actually them who get it all and not her. Maybe that’s because they use economic metaphors, but don’t think that they are talking in anything but metaphor.
The Euro-centrism of her work is nauseating. “International literary space began in the 16th Century” and it’s not just about the printing press. In fact it is not at all about the printing press as she doesn’t mention it once. She concludes that historical sweep by saying that Asia, India and Africa started demanding acceptance in the international literary space after de-colonisation. Sure, she might be talking about a French centred literary space, with Paris as its capital, but she isn’t. She says Paris is the world capital of literature. This is of all literature, all literature being a participant in the international literary space. So, no. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.
Why are we reading crazy and wrong French authors who think that all roads lead to Paris… Like I don’t even speak French, I don’t care about French literature, not many people in the English speaking world do. At least, I don’t care about the French opinion about French literature, I like translated French literature which remains mute on the issue. It’s almost like America, the cultural hub of the modern world, suddenly didn’t exist. Like NYC wasn’t a melting pot of literary establishments which has become so bloody familiar to English speakers that I feel if I just squinted a little on my way out of my house I’d be cruising down 42nd to the subway, past the MET, maybe about to get a bagel and coffee, roast chestnuts, gangsters, corrupt lawyers, old money, new money, drug money, money madness, high life, low life, homeless people, Wall street, Cooney Island, Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Factory, Velvet Underground, Lou Reed. You know, the list goes on. My point isn’t that New York is the literary capital, but that Casanova’s negligible evidence of Paris’ presence in the literary world through a few excerpts of descriptive passages is hilariously irrelevant and biased. You have to be trying really really hard to not notice that it is apocryphal.
Finally, let me say it once and for all. We do not need a new language to describe the circulation of texts, values and literary talent. We need a new language to describe quantum physics. Not books. There are plenty of words for book and Casanova is just living out French philosophies delusions of grandeur.
Faulkner
Screenplay
Faulkner’s screen play sparked lively debate today and I think deserves some further investigation. The issue which interests me in that debate is the notion of value which we ascribe to the screenplay as an art form. We discussed the fact that we do not consider it an art form of real value, but why not?
Something having value is the product of a widely held and systematic attraction to roughly similar objects with relatively similar means of production. It is tricky because our way of speaking is conditioned into the mode of the university endorsed aesthetic institution. This involves an attempt to ascribe a certain value, rank it in terms of importance within the chain of developments in its historical context and in the development of the form. But, really, what the hell does that have to do with me reading a book? Watching a movie? Or listening to music? The connotations of all the endorsed words lock me out of actually enjoying it. ‘Beauty’, ‘Greatness’, ‘Aesthetics’ all leave me with a bitter taste in my mouth and a sense of distance between me and the work I’m engaging with. Why? The same reason it is almost impossible to enjoy Shakespeare, years of criticism have calcified around it into a hard shell of brittle and repugnant opinions.
What’s the flip side? Not only do we have to get round the debris, but it obscures our own decisions to ascribe value. Why not find anything beautiful? Anything at all that you can find the beauty in. It isn’t like it’s actually there anyway, its something we read into a bunch of other things. I find my cat outrageously mysterious, evil and wise, switching around in a type of chaotic haze of semi-divine incarnations of either benevolent or malicious spirits. That is a type of appreciation that art tries to express and has nothing to do with reality in the normal sense of the word. Art forms are no different, they try to capture these kinds of appreciations, but enjoying them is enjoying a form of representation which involves a skill and rapport in itself.
So, why shouldn’t screenplays be a perfectly adequate art form? I don’t get it and I’m not interested, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t perfectly legitimate. The thing which is not legitimate is letting the flotsam of critic’s opinions restrain us from prescribing value where ever the hell we feel like it.
Ra.
Faulkner’s screen play sparked lively debate today and I think deserves some further investigation. The issue which interests me in that debate is the notion of value which we ascribe to the screenplay as an art form. We discussed the fact that we do not consider it an art form of real value, but why not?
Something having value is the product of a widely held and systematic attraction to roughly similar objects with relatively similar means of production. It is tricky because our way of speaking is conditioned into the mode of the university endorsed aesthetic institution. This involves an attempt to ascribe a certain value, rank it in terms of importance within the chain of developments in its historical context and in the development of the form. But, really, what the hell does that have to do with me reading a book? Watching a movie? Or listening to music? The connotations of all the endorsed words lock me out of actually enjoying it. ‘Beauty’, ‘Greatness’, ‘Aesthetics’ all leave me with a bitter taste in my mouth and a sense of distance between me and the work I’m engaging with. Why? The same reason it is almost impossible to enjoy Shakespeare, years of criticism have calcified around it into a hard shell of brittle and repugnant opinions.
What’s the flip side? Not only do we have to get round the debris, but it obscures our own decisions to ascribe value. Why not find anything beautiful? Anything at all that you can find the beauty in. It isn’t like it’s actually there anyway, its something we read into a bunch of other things. I find my cat outrageously mysterious, evil and wise, switching around in a type of chaotic haze of semi-divine incarnations of either benevolent or malicious spirits. That is a type of appreciation that art tries to express and has nothing to do with reality in the normal sense of the word. Art forms are no different, they try to capture these kinds of appreciations, but enjoying them is enjoying a form of representation which involves a skill and rapport in itself.
So, why shouldn’t screenplays be a perfectly adequate art form? I don’t get it and I’m not interested, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t perfectly legitimate. The thing which is not legitimate is letting the flotsam of critic’s opinions restrain us from prescribing value where ever the hell we feel like it.
Ra.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Barthes is dead.
So, the question I found myself struggling to answer after reading Barthes was- “is it me who doesn’t get it, or is he producing pure, unadulterated, argument salad?” This question of course comes with a bias against me. He is a published theorist/critic/polemicist (it might be well, I feel, to coin the world ‘thocremicist’ to describe his particular approach. It might help to inhibit anyone having a clue what we are talking about- I feel that would be appropriate) and I am an undergraduate student. This bias is finite though, and my rule of thumb is that if a major writer still appears violently incomprehensible after a fourth reading then, as far as I’m concerned, he is. That is how I feel about the issue, but let me try and instantiate my state of phenomenological being into you through the hermeneutics of doubt and put forward in a plane defined by the cross section of five tangential lines of analytic critique that reveals his polemic as the construct of misconceived conflations in his theory of writing- a view electric, dark and oblique.
Not.
Instead let me raise four points about his argument that left me less then convinced (ah…. English).
1.
“Writing is the neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of a body of writing.’
Umm, ‘neutral, composite, oblique’, that’s three adjectives. Who does this guy think he is, Lowell? No, this is not poetry my friend. Whenever I read that line it leaves my mind’s eye peering at a sort of gray space with weird lights coming in from different directions, and if I’m not looking closely will forget that it masks a complete vacuum in his argument. It means nothing. And that is not the only example of poetic bursts.
And as a defence of my acerbic criticism, let me point out that I am not convinced by the argument raised earlier that because it is a polemic he can do what he wants. Well, he can, of course, but that does not mean I have to read it if it does not conform to the basic, and very essential purpose, of argument (argument = polemic, same thing, there are no special rules when using a higher register synonym) which is of course to be correct. It must claim to be correct and coherent and, of course, better then what it is arguing against in terms of its rational content. He can just write what he wants, but if it is not sensible, he can’t claim both poetic license and respect for his argument. It makes me feel sympathy for all the poor teachers who have had to mark the sections of my essays which are super high register and erudite but completely opaque (which, btw is intentional, it covers the fact that I don’t know what I’m talking about), always leaving comments like, ‘he seems to have great ideas, just can’t get them across’. Barthes seems to be electrically charged by great ideas he can’t quite get round to saying strait. That might just be the style of his milieu though, I have the same reaction to Derrida.
2.
He claims that the author dies, but is actually just dramatising his challenge to an antecedent concept of Author by the literary establishment. It is a revision of ideas, and it is not the same idea when he says the Author as this older concept, and the author who dies every time writing begins. His dead Author is an opposite but equal reaction that is patently false. And again it is not a defence that he didn’t REALLY meant the author is dead. It happens to be what he said.
3.
His justification from literature are not convincing. Particularly Proust. I mean you have to be in a real intellectual tangle to find an author writing about his own life as an aspiring author to be revolutionary. And that notion that Proust ‘made his very life a work for which the book was a model’, is apparently achieved by my favourite phrase in the whole shambles, an ‘extreme subtlization’. That’s right, subtle-i-zation. I need say no more.
4.
He justifies himself on unverified sources that smack of the cloistered dogma’s of post-war French philosophy. He claims that ‘linguistics’ has shown that ‘the whole of enunciation is an empty process’. I don’t know if ‘linguistics’ would agree. Also, referencing what may be Derrida, or one any other of those theorists, that ‘we know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’. Well, fine, except it is not like Progress, the advance of the sciences. It is a new formulation of ideas about literature which makes itself seems brilliant mainly by defacing the idea which preceded it. It asserts that until I read this genius theorist I did in fact look at writing this way… which neither I, nor anyone else, ever did. It is called the Straw-man fallacy in logic (although I will admit that is all I can recall from logic.
In conclusion, then, let me just ask, ‘How can you kill the author?’. Barthes sources, read like gospel in no way convince me, and, as far as I am concerned the author isn’t dead. And as a polemic, well done. Its like imgaining cities without people, in which case sure, a question to ask would be ‘how on earth does that work, I can’t imagine?’. But that is not the case, its properly impossible. It may be, of course, that he is trying to assassinate what is already an academic kadaver, entombed deep within the catacombes of theory, already dead in its usage by theorists to the people who actually read books. In that case though, who cares anyway? This assault belongs in those catacombes fighting the dead.
The author is a real part of a work. Unquestionably so. A voice has a speaker, it is the window of the soul. So prose has an author. Its not like having a weird author is any different. Elliot’s attempts to mask and deface his own involvement is an enourmous part of the appeal of his works. Who else but an enigma could be entitled to speak in the voice of god (‘Son of man’). Still more so, if the author was a machine, and we felt the passion of the intellect, then it would be amazing. I said a few classes ago that the historical personality does not inform the ideal author that we construct in our minds. And yes, that is true. But I realise that that is not because the author is not important in their real sense. Our words, the way each of us talk and write is imbued with a special manner. It is a manner which we cannot hide. You come to know the mind, perhaps the soul rather, of a great author from his works. It is a connection of intimacy that is fundamental to the pleasure of reading...
And you can’t just kill it. It doesn’t make sense.
Not.
Instead let me raise four points about his argument that left me less then convinced (ah…. English).
1.
“Writing is the neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of a body of writing.’
Umm, ‘neutral, composite, oblique’, that’s three adjectives. Who does this guy think he is, Lowell? No, this is not poetry my friend. Whenever I read that line it leaves my mind’s eye peering at a sort of gray space with weird lights coming in from different directions, and if I’m not looking closely will forget that it masks a complete vacuum in his argument. It means nothing. And that is not the only example of poetic bursts.
And as a defence of my acerbic criticism, let me point out that I am not convinced by the argument raised earlier that because it is a polemic he can do what he wants. Well, he can, of course, but that does not mean I have to read it if it does not conform to the basic, and very essential purpose, of argument (argument = polemic, same thing, there are no special rules when using a higher register synonym) which is of course to be correct. It must claim to be correct and coherent and, of course, better then what it is arguing against in terms of its rational content. He can just write what he wants, but if it is not sensible, he can’t claim both poetic license and respect for his argument. It makes me feel sympathy for all the poor teachers who have had to mark the sections of my essays which are super high register and erudite but completely opaque (which, btw is intentional, it covers the fact that I don’t know what I’m talking about), always leaving comments like, ‘he seems to have great ideas, just can’t get them across’. Barthes seems to be electrically charged by great ideas he can’t quite get round to saying strait. That might just be the style of his milieu though, I have the same reaction to Derrida.
2.
He claims that the author dies, but is actually just dramatising his challenge to an antecedent concept of Author by the literary establishment. It is a revision of ideas, and it is not the same idea when he says the Author as this older concept, and the author who dies every time writing begins. His dead Author is an opposite but equal reaction that is patently false. And again it is not a defence that he didn’t REALLY meant the author is dead. It happens to be what he said.
3.
His justification from literature are not convincing. Particularly Proust. I mean you have to be in a real intellectual tangle to find an author writing about his own life as an aspiring author to be revolutionary. And that notion that Proust ‘made his very life a work for which the book was a model’, is apparently achieved by my favourite phrase in the whole shambles, an ‘extreme subtlization’. That’s right, subtle-i-zation. I need say no more.
4.
He justifies himself on unverified sources that smack of the cloistered dogma’s of post-war French philosophy. He claims that ‘linguistics’ has shown that ‘the whole of enunciation is an empty process’. I don’t know if ‘linguistics’ would agree. Also, referencing what may be Derrida, or one any other of those theorists, that ‘we know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’. Well, fine, except it is not like Progress, the advance of the sciences. It is a new formulation of ideas about literature which makes itself seems brilliant mainly by defacing the idea which preceded it. It asserts that until I read this genius theorist I did in fact look at writing this way… which neither I, nor anyone else, ever did. It is called the Straw-man fallacy in logic (although I will admit that is all I can recall from logic.
In conclusion, then, let me just ask, ‘How can you kill the author?’. Barthes sources, read like gospel in no way convince me, and, as far as I am concerned the author isn’t dead. And as a polemic, well done. Its like imgaining cities without people, in which case sure, a question to ask would be ‘how on earth does that work, I can’t imagine?’. But that is not the case, its properly impossible. It may be, of course, that he is trying to assassinate what is already an academic kadaver, entombed deep within the catacombes of theory, already dead in its usage by theorists to the people who actually read books. In that case though, who cares anyway? This assault belongs in those catacombes fighting the dead.
The author is a real part of a work. Unquestionably so. A voice has a speaker, it is the window of the soul. So prose has an author. Its not like having a weird author is any different. Elliot’s attempts to mask and deface his own involvement is an enourmous part of the appeal of his works. Who else but an enigma could be entitled to speak in the voice of god (‘Son of man’). Still more so, if the author was a machine, and we felt the passion of the intellect, then it would be amazing. I said a few classes ago that the historical personality does not inform the ideal author that we construct in our minds. And yes, that is true. But I realise that that is not because the author is not important in their real sense. Our words, the way each of us talk and write is imbued with a special manner. It is a manner which we cannot hide. You come to know the mind, perhaps the soul rather, of a great author from his works. It is a connection of intimacy that is fundamental to the pleasure of reading...
And you can’t just kill it. It doesn’t make sense.
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