The perfectly made-up thing

 It is possible, of course, to enjoy the literary-historical hall of mirrors in which traditional motif and classical allusion repeat and reflect one another for their own sweet sake, but sooner or later we will come up against the Johnsonian objection referred to earlier ["Where there is leisure for fiction, there is little grief," the famous remark of Johnson on Lycidas]. Essentially, this boils down to asking what after all, is the human value of the perfectly made-up thing? And the answer must be that it depends on the seriousness of what is at stake beyond the attainment of artistic finish, and on the depth of the poet's engagement with considerations other than the technical and the aesthetic. In Virgil's ninth eclogue, for example, you can sense that there is much at stake for Virgil. Again, the setting involves the kind of land grabbing that is father had suffered [which we see depicted in the first eclogue], and the deeper theme is essentially asking the question "How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?" This is the question that Shakespeare would ask fifteen hundred years later (in Sonnet 65), and it's the one which always presents itself when art feels called upon to stay power.
-Seamus Heaney, "Eclogues 'In Extremis': On the Staying Power of Pastoral"

Close reading and formalism, knowledge and sense

The new formalism, as it has been called, has gotten much less flack than the old one (Michael Wood writes of this in his new book). Perhaps because there is a realization going around that, well, we're smarter now, we've done the theory, now we can look at all those small formal things in the text with less rigidity (or however you want to characterize the crimes of the formalists). In particular our attention can wander to historical issues, political issues, but we'll always have the right object in view: form.

Maybe. What I find odd, however, is not so much the people who would identify with the new formalism (they're often trying to work out just what this might mean), as those who take comfort in it, and assume something else: that it was not formalism which lent a problematic basis for literary studies, but close reading. Saying we're new formalists, for these people, just means we can look at form and close read only really when we need to, when it is advantageous and sensible--not all the time.

This tendency here--and I don't mean to describe anything as clear cut as a position, and I'll probably be much too hard-and-fast as it is in trying to just to give some accentuating weight to a pull we might find in contemporary criticism--the tendency, I think, is more than reasonable. What's particularly good is its utter rejection of facile claims made in the 80's and 90's about "the ethics of reading," which assumed that close reading is something we do everywhere (just as the world can be understood as a text), and that to distantly read something amounted to being unethical (by which they really meant, immoral). In another context, Peter Brooks has said it was clear this position was bankrupt when it came time to explain how people like John Yoo could willfully misread statutes in the law to justify torture with something that looked a lot like what these ethical readers did constantly: it was clear just from the abandonment of poetics in anything like this form of ethics that reading and ethics had to be brought together in a less mashed-up, less defensive (in that this "ethics" was essentially something only the humanities could give you, since it couldn't really give you knowledge, like the sciences), less immediately politicized way (which is just to say that it actually had to be thought through).

The inclination I'm describing involves thinking something similar, but also involves a willingness to go, sometimes, much further in the formalist direction than the new formalists themselves. Indeed, it reworks the basic components that constitute form, rethinks the matter of form and what the literary object can be made up of. Instead of the poetics of Brooks (which I might recommend to a , it claims the territory of aesthetics, and there is something exciting about that. At the same time, I'm not sure it brings us any further towards answering questions about the knowledge the literary object can contain, and in fact may block certain ways into asking questions in this area. For it is knowledge which is ultimately the reason for close reading--why it was invented, and why we do it--and to celebrate the death of the close reader at the same time as you find comfort in form is to assume that there is no urgency to the question of whether the literary object can know something, and that we can better address our reading problems by attending instead to the nature of its sensuousness.

For close reading is much more about construing messages in the act of communication than about paying attention to form. It is about meaning, ambiguity, parables, plots: rhythms, to encapsulate things, and use a more small-scale example, more than meters (or, maybe, meters more as beats, since I don't mean to say at all that prosody only goes in the formalist direction--indeed, it becomes a tool in going the opposite way). So to align it with formalism in order to bash it, which is what has been going on at least since the 60's in the US (and actually earlier), is actually a strange move. Form was the first thing I.A. Richards actually attacked in his litany of aesthetic bogeys (Angela Leighton is the only person who I've seen actually figure this out, in a recent book On Form--perhaps because she actually went back to read Richards). It was because of the prominence of formal (if not exactly formalist) approaches that he thought we needed close reading in order to to eradicate. It only really became a formalist practice in the way we know it now after people like Wimsatt, Brooks, and the Yale people turned it into explication (or "explicitation," as Wimsatt nicely put it), and Modernists like Allen Tate and Yvor Winters gave the object itself that hard minimalist, sculptural edge to it. To accelerate the narrative, we might just say that PoMo poetry people, for all their bashing of formalism, actually only got more excited about that minimalism (the people into novels tended to do much better, as they recognized getting rid of form opened up logics of desire which really had a different texture than what verse form broke down into). We've been stuck in the formalist jam ever since, really, so to blame close reading makes little sense, since it never was close reading's fault. The English I think have a richer sense of why close reading can't go away, I think, because they never had such a stringent formalism there (though not having one leaves them with fewer moves to make ultimately with readings--it's pretty much always towards history).

In short, not unlike the hyper-political-theory people this position wants to move away from, it is an approach that seems to suppose we can always make sense of what poetry is about if we want to, if we look hard enough. Close reading is precisely asking whether we can make such a supposition, or at least in its real practice--which I think people do less often than we think--complicates such an assumption. Which is why we keep reading Christopher Ricks and Helen Vendler (not that there's no other reason to read them, of course).

I don't mean to be dualistic about knowledge and sense. I mean only to note that there is another aspect to poesis besides or rather beside making, which this tendency I'm describing occasionally recognizes often only to forget it: namely, the the vatic, possessed, oracular, inspirational aspect. And that close reading attends to this.

I'm less sure whether I don't mean to (that's certainly a phrase that hedges your bets) champion close reading over formalism. It remains a more open question to me whether the part formalism should play involves breaking down whatever dualism there is between knowledge and sense, and pushing sense (via their fates, as Susan Stewart might say, their own kind of knowing) towards questions of knowledge. Even if the tendency I'm describing often forgets knowledge it can occasionally break things down precisely by its focus on the sensuous side of things--maybe sometimes better than a smartly directed new formalism could. I think when it gets polemical, though, the dualism can't help but be deepened, and most of the time anyway such a mode sinks knowledge too far in sense to allow any jumping of the gap. In this case, it might be smart to see more of what we can accomplish by close reading without the formalist crutch.

Public good

After the unaccountable treatment the noble plan of Sir Christopher Wren met from the interested views of ignorant, obstinate, designing men, (notwithstanding it had the sanction of the King and Parliament) who by rejecting it did an irreparable injury to the city of London, the author cannot hope to see a scheme so much inferior to that, adopted in the manner he could wish; he doubts not but it will by many be treated as Utopian, a work of supererogation, and that the old cry of private property and the infringement on liberty will be objected and urged with the greatest vehemence, in opposition to the good effects he proposes…

It is very certain that no public good ever was proposed to which interested individuals have not objected, but it certainly does not follow, that for this reason public good is not to be attended at all.
-John Gwynn, London and Westminster Improved (1766), vi-vii

The images are symbolical

I was much struck recently by a young lady I was tutoring who gave the right answer when confronted with a question from an old "Practical Criticism" paper; that is, a verse was quoted, and she was to spot the date of it, giving her reasons. Sure enough, she found the images showed that this bit was late eighteenth-century; but what the examiners would not have found out was that she had no idea what the verse was saying. It urged you to carry out one of those terrific pieces of landscape gardening, cutting away the side of a hill, digging a lake, planting a forest, to improve the prospect from your country house. She thought the verse was only pictures of scenery, because she never bothered with verbs; to answer questions in the examination you only needed the images. I do not think you could really get through on this plan, but some people think you can. When the examination question says "Evaluate the following poem," the student will happily write down, "Significantly, the images are symbolical." What they signify, or what they symbolize, he does not say; he considers that if he did he would look low-class and philistine.
-William Empson, Argufying, 167

So...

...let's just get this straight: we're in the middle of an "economic downturn" (i.e. a depression) caused by unregulated Wall Street speculation, and are seriously talking about extending tax cuts to the wealthiest 1% of people in the nation, placing a freeze on pay increases for government employees, reducing the deficit overall, and (in local politics) cutting back on major infrastructural improvements that would employ new workers (the ARC tunnel) as well as help the poor schmoes who each have 2 hour commute into the city.

This is symbolic...

A golden MST3K moment I'm always going to remember whenever I get the temptation to interpret something as a symbol:

In The Castle of Fu-Manchu, three characters get a notice they have to return to London. Cut to: the train scene above. Crow (on the right, if you're not familiar with the best show ever) says: "This is symbolic of their return to London."

(Another gem from the always way-too-smart MST3K fans, that I stumbled upon recently: summarizing the plot of the horrible Time of the Apes, one writes, "a plot device transports a woman and two kids to a time when apes rule.")

Wimsatt's Law

I've been thinking a lot about the intentional fallacy, especially after trying to explain it to my students under the assumption it would get them to write more about the narrative and less about the author's design--and finding it not really helpful.

This, by the way, is now how I do literary theory: if something breaks down in the process of teaching, there's probably something wrong with it. Of course before questioning it you first question your methods and how you explained it etc., but the teachability of the thing is still a real good indicator about what needs to be adjusted in a theory. The function of pedagogy here (to pick up on my last post) is not entirely critical, in the sense of performing a critique of the theory in question: the proof works both ways, and often you know how right a theory is because it feels right when you teach it, makes intuitive sense to people. This is why, even if we refuse to be formalists, we are always in a sense practical critics when we teach: we're not out to split hairs about things, ultimately, even if we're out to multiply meaning; we're not out for what might seem wrong but beneath the surface of things is right--like a philosopher. This is why the high theory of the 80's, it seems, sometimes hits brick walls in the classroom: it's often trying too hard to be impractical, to make the stakes all-or-nothing, as they indeed are in philosophy (except there, this also makes for good classes).

Indeed, it's the practical context itself that is oddly missing from the theory of the intentional fallacy. It makes no sense to say that an author's intention is not "available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art" as Wimsatt and Beardsley put it (in The Verbal Icon, 3), except as a sort of thought experiment that opens up some space for discussion. And that's, of course, what the statement did: as a sort of postulate, it further solidified the nature of the classroom space in which one finally could encounter a work, something that outlives the intentions of its author. That is, it encouraged a type of discussion that was truer to the way a genuine encounter with a literary text works: one that doesn't try to search back to the origin of the work in the author's head in order to make sense of what is said or meant or indeed even intended, but instead just construes the meaning then and there. So it works as an axiom, you could say.

Except it isn't stated like an axiom. Empson mockingly called it "Wimsatt's Law," most hilariously in his later book on Using Biography (a very significant title in this context) to make this clear--and he's right:

Any such work [like what I'm doing in this book] is excluded by the Wimsatt Law [...] which says that no reader can ever grasp the intention of an author. This paradox results from a great failure to grasp the whole situation. Any speaker, when a baby, wanted to understand what people meant, why mum was cross for example, and had enough partial success to go on trying; the effort is usually carried on into adult life, though not always into old age.
-Using Biography, vii.

Indeed, he's right about more than one thing in this wonderfully deadpan statement, as I'll try and say later sometime. But the point is that once you start treating it as an axiom, you are actually altering the theory, and you can't really pretend otherwise.

Because, as Empson makes clear, the theory doesn't ultimately say that an author's intentions should not determine the course of your reading and discussion of the thing. It says, "no reader can ever grasp the intention of an author." It doesn't exactly say this, of course, as we already saw, but Empson's paraphrase is, I think, pretty right. It certainly makes clear--as paraphrases should do, but often precisely avoid--the implications of the argument, how it is skewed.

There's an indecision, first of all, between what's "available" and what's "desired," and it's clear that the emphasis falls, despite appearances, on the second word: the first is there to cover their bases so they can get to the real point. You see what happens when the theory is softened: the stress falls back upon "available." And perhaps if they would have said just "available," that would have been fine. This is truer to the literary encounter, and actually opens up neat questions about how far our "reach" is while reading, if we fail to reach back to the author: it's not just that we can't find some statement about the intention of the author, or that the author isn't there with us in the classroom (though Wimsatt and Beardsley probably actually only mean "available" in the first, very literal sense, if I can speculate upon their intention for a second), but that when we read we can't really find a plausible, author-like intention there--the words come in sentences, flow forth from that, and don't come shooting one by one from the mind of someone to you like invisible bullets (to move from Greenblatt to Derrida, there's a nice description of this telepathic fantasy, more often engaged in discussions of communication than you'd think, in Of Grammatology).

But if in practice you warn people about the unavailability of intention--which is what I'm suggesting most people do anyway in warning about the intentional fallacy--you still go wrong, because it's not just the stress on that authoritative, tensed "desired" (barely qualified, in truth strengthened by the "even") that is the problem with the theory: it's the way both words, and the indecision between them, are required. In other words, what's wrong with the theory is that it makes the indecision in this phrase work in its favor: it's the gap between what is available and what is desired in an interpretation that is always negotiated in the act of reading, and Wimsatt and Beardsley conveniently let the connection between the two remain blank, acting as if what is available is only what's most immediately around you, and what's desirable is just a preference, something not taken seriously. How, in other words, does the unavailability of the author's intention actually get us to the conclusion that consulting that intention, seeking it out sometimes, or even speculating upon it, actually is undesirable in interpretation?

It doesn't, is the answer. I just stumbled upon a nice discussion on the intentional fallacy right after my class, where things are put straight:

Wimsatt and Beardsley were no doubt too extreme in their suggestion that knowledge of an author's intention is "neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art." Often unavailable, often interesting, quite often misleading, and always insufficient as a critical measure, would be closer.
-Michael Wood, Yeats and Violence, 96.

That is indeed closer. And it's important to say why we have to rethink this:

[T]here is something wasteful and disagreeable about not wanting to know what writers thinking they are doing, and about the accompanying assumption that critics know better. It doesn't seem implausible that writers often achieve what they intend and that their intention has something to do with their achievement. If I find enormous subtleties in a literary work, chances are the writer put them there. The subtle mind at play is the writer's rather than mine. I'm doing what I'm can but I'm just following clues, not placing them.
-Yeats and Violence, 97.

I think its that "accompanying assumption" that is most dangerous about Wimsatt's Law, and, also, most useful. It is important in the history of literary criticism that this theory was put in way it was put, I think, since critics do have important things to say and authors indeed never say anything really sufficient for critical purposes about the work they are doing. But the kids in my class cringed at something when I explained the thing to them (even in the chaster version I sort of outlined above), and I could see in their faces not only their lament of the wastefulness of it all but something really skeptical of this self-serving aspect. We aren't at cross purposes, authors and critics, and some of the serious marginalization of literature might be attributed to the critical assumption that we are. The case for our role in the work is put better just after the last remark above: "We don't have to suspect them of lying," Wood says, "but neither can we assume they are immune to the ordinary frailties of human self-knowledge" (97). And the purposes of criticism aren't predatory upon this, so much as in the same boat with those of the author, at least insofar as both are trying to articulate something sufficient about what happens when that author is read.

But if Wood has a sounder theory of intentionality and its role in criticism, what can we now say about Wimsatt and Beardsley's theory? A theory that, ultimately, would make the court of appeal the cogency of the explication of the critic (see Wimsatt's wonderful later essays on what he calls "explicitation" for a concise summary of this), rather than, as Wood rightly goes on to put it, language--or, even better, the words themselves?

I think that in the end what the theory of the fallacy is trying to do is make possible what it presupposes, the strange afterlife of words when read and discussed. And what's crucial to remember (and Wood reminds us of this, since he is really out to get at this afterlife) is that this is actually a very different task than deciding upon the role of intention--though intention is obviously a way into the question. In other words, Wimsatt and Beardsley are trying to explain something like that "perpetual present" of a preserved verbal utterance, which allows us, when we come to a work, to actually pick apart its meanings as if we were construing the sense of the thing right there before us. Indeed, we are doing this, and we are able to do it more easily if we disregard authorial intention, since it makes us cease to think of the words as faded historical entities, exhausted in their meaning as soon or right after they are written down. For words aren't historical like this: they slip through history strangely, as if on a different sort of time-scale, and so are able to confront us in an act of reading with startling immediacy, at the same time as others are able to carry a fog about them, a distance of sorts. Wimsatt and Beardsley seem to have this particularly in their sights as they discuss the fallacy, no doubt because they are waging a war against philology (and, of course, we're all on their side except Paul de Man here, who would rather return to it), and seem to want to make this encounter more recognizable, and thus more likely to happen.

Criticism and critique

You might have caught me defending critique against the anti-critical trend of certain work in the humanities, but I think I've figured out why I've been doing it, and why it has never quite felt genuine on my part: I've been defending critique because it's often tied up with criticism, as if it implied the latter. I was worried, in other words, by a sort of guilt-by-association sort of thing, which could be used to accuse literature departments especially of screwing up the humanities in over the last few decades. And I've seen it happen, so it's not a baseless fear.

And critique certainly still is an important thing to engage in, just as critical theory (with which I should have more closely identified it) is, in the sort of watered down form that I have been comfortable defending: as, essentially, politicization.

But even so watered down what's important to note is that critique isn't the only form of politicization: critical theory is so annoying, and so doomed, precisely because it acts as if this is the case (much, much more than the Marxism whose place it usurped), and thus even reduces politics itself to a form of critique. And once you note this, you begin to recognize that if that's true of politicizing things, it's certainly true of criticism: critique, in other words, has really quite little to do with criticism, and we've been tricked somehow into thinking that the two are really more related than they are.

It's the calculated vagueness of the "critical" in the appellation "critical theory" that did this: this, in other words, is the source of the association that somehow entailed the guilt. But once you see that at the very best the vagueness only works one way (criticism might build up into something that implies a definite critique, but a critique can never really work itself out through criticism of the literary type), you don't have to defend anything about critique if you don't want to--as a literary critic. This is really only what's implied, I realized, by my splitting off literary theory from critical theory--something I've engaged in quite happily.

So I think I'm going to be less hedgy about bashing critique in the future: certainly the critical stance is the source of a whole host of problems described very clearly by Latour, not the least of which is the very sad separation of literary criticism from criticism of something having to do with the real world, the world science also describes. That is, the idea that criticism is critique or vice versa actually reinforces the separation of reality from the literature we deal with, so that we ourselves actually start to marginalize literature by saying we are dealing with lies about the world, things that can only, with a little help from us, critique the hard reality that only science can give us (John Guillory has described how this works quite well). But fictions are not lies; they don't lie about reality.

The thing to be asserted, though, if the guilt-by-association ever pops up, is the following:

Literature departments were really, really interested in moving beyond interpretation after the 60's, because they were really, really interested in moving beyond formalism (literary formalism, that is, or the sort of view of the artwork as a self-enclosed form, with clean divisions between it and the reader, and society, and history, and implies that all you can do with a work of literature is just fix the meanings of its words). This, initially, is why they turned to the people in France and Germany with the weird philosophies. What they both had in common was this anti-interpretive move.

If anything, it implied an anti-critical (in the sense of critique) gesture on the part of the literary critics, since formalism had gotten so rigid (that is, had gotten so much justification) because of Kant's third critique (the big deal literary critics made about the sublime, in the 70s and 80s, was precisely because it was the moment when Kant seemed to open up to work against his own intense formalism). And indeed it met up with an anti-critical (in the sense of critique) impulse going on especially in France then. This is just what allowed literary critics eventually to jump the gap and claim that they were also doing critique (that, and of course the huge interest in allowing criticism to address pressing social issues--issues, which, however, and as feminism in particular showed, you didn't absolutely need critique to address through criticism).

You'd think, of course, that two anti-critical stances meeting up would indeed make literary critics claim they were precisely not engaged in critique. But the problem was that the philosophers who they read (Derrida and Foucault especially) were coming at the anti-critical stance precisely from a philosophical point of view, and derived their anti-interpretive perspective from that. The problem was that the stress began to fall on resisting critique by resisting interpretation, and as more interesting things (things now that don't really look very different from interpretation) could be done instead of interpretation in both philosophy and in literature, we forgot that it was critique that also needed to be resisted.

Still, people think that our insistence upon "the world is a text" or theses like that mean that literary critics wanted to make everything into interpretation, but we were better (and worse) readers of philosophy than that. We were arguing against interpretation, alongside the philosophers, with the aim of opposing critique: the whole notion of textuality is what we might call a interpretation-resistant, and supposedly critique-resistant ontology.

On the face of it that sounds bizarre and backwards, but it's because interpretation for philosophers meant something that was an offshoot of phenomenology: hermeneutics in a Heideggerian and Gadamer-like sense. Paul de Man got this exactly, if he also in the process made it all too simple and thus, ultimately, extremely confusing: he called what you interpreted precisely what was phenomenal, and the goal always when doing literary criticism was to avoid that like hell, and to get to the non-phenomenal, what you couldn't see at first glance as it were (this is why irony and allegory were so important for him). This was the text, or the writing, or, in a different sort of framework, the discourse, and what you did when you did criticism was no longer interpretation but reading (the text didn't have to be non- but only anti-phenomenal, and there were squabbles, rightly, over this, which were much more illuminating philosophically than the philosophy that was done with these figures, and still was until just recently (after a flock of students of comparative literature actually moved over to philosophy)).

But you see what's involved even in "getting" this: the philosophers have a context in which interpretation is a genuine phenomenological issue in a truly phenomenological sense, and so are able to directly (or at least more directly) relate that to the issue of critique. For us, the phenomenon is precisely a matter of practical criticism. Interpretation, in other words, even when understood as a phenomenological issue is going to be a matter of dealing with words rather than the world (by this I don't mean to suggest that words don't deal with reality any less than what philosophers deal with), and so can't be related philosophically to opposing critique except by a sort of very indirect route, which can't be made into a direct one except by evading all sorts of issues and just acting like it is. Some of the structuralists in France and Paul Ricoeur were able to travel it, though they even didn't really do it because they relied on Saussure's theory of the sign to pull it off (there's a big difference, from literary critical perspective, between signs and words).

But that's what people did. And because they did that, they could strangely circle round and engage in what was essentially critique. The issue here then becomes one of the influence of cultural critique on literary studies, which had already somewhat related critique with interpretation. Drop the interpretive element, and you can have few scruples about what you're doing.

You see that from a philosophical perspective especially you have two sorts of frameworks in play in literary studies, one critical and the other anti-critical. What's particularly fascinating for the literary critic, for whom the issue of avoiding interpretation will always be more important (and so justified their simultaneous use), is that the stress on cultural critique actually made us forget that we wanted to avoid interpretation as well! Suddenly all our "symptomatic" criticism looks eerily like the thing that we wanted to avoid in the first place, and caused all this mess to begin with.

That narrative should make things clearer: what it shows most concretely, though, is that criticism and critique are two different things, and it's wrong to blame us as if we all thought they were. What it really teaches you too is the getting beyond critique, actually doing it, doesn't necessarily mean getting beyond criticism or even getting beyond interpretation: you have to develop alternatives to interpretation, which is what we've been doing in our criticism. That is, you can't act as if criticism is the thing that's been holding you back from reality, unless you're going to equate cultural critique and the backsliding into interpretation which I just described that seems to come with it (which is a pretty detailed process I need to much time to outline right now), with all literary criticism.

If you're set on making the equation, you're much better off equating what you're calling criticism with critical theory, which has little to do with criticism and everything to do with critique. But even then you should also remember (I hope this isn't too confusing, I've tried to be as straightforward as I can) that philosophers and indeed people all sorts of other disciplines do a lot more interpretation in general than people who write literary criticism right now, even if they don't do critique, because while they've been bringing us past critique's great divide, we've been busy developing a criticism full of alternatives to interpretation.

Understanding one's friends

Irony in this subdued sense, as a generous scepticism which can believe at once that people are and are not guilty, is a very normal and essential method; Portia's song is not more inconsistent than the sorrow of Helen that she has brought death to so many brave men, and the pride with which she is first found making tapestries of them; than the courage of Achilles, which none will question, 'in his impregnable armour with his invulnerable skin underneath it'; than the sleepers in Gethsemane, who, St. Luke says, were sleeping for sorrow; than the way Thesée (in Racine), by the use of a deity, at once kills and does not kill Hippolyte. This sort of contradiction is at once understood in literature, because the process of understanding one's friends must always be riddled with such indecisions and the machinery of such hypocrisy; people, often, cannot have done both of two things, but they must have been in some way prepared to have done either; whichever they did, they will have still lingering in their minds the way they would have preserved their self-respect if they had acted differently; they are only to be understood by bearing both possibilities in mind.
-Seven Types of Ambiguity, 44

Empson

I've grown much more comfortable with Empson. I've always been amazed at his work (and his poetry, for that matter, of which I always want to read more), and liked it a lot, but have also been a little hedgy about his larger views of things mostly because I see him so pigeonholed in theoretical circles, and these views so distorted in relation to Richards especially:

[For Richards,] poetic language is purely affective and, therefore, can never lead to cognition, since it has no verifiable referential value in reference to an external object. [... (Nothing in this last statement is true, by the way--MJ) ...] The route may be different, but the starting point is the same as Roland Barthes. [...] By bringing down poetic language to the level of the language of communication, and in its steadfast refusal to grant aesthetic experience any difference from other human experiences, [Richards' view] is opposed to any attempt to confer upon poetry an excessively exalted function, while still preserving for it the freshness and originality of invention.

But what happens when one studies poetry a little closer following these instructions? A surprising answer is to be found in the work of William Empson, a brilliant student of Richards. [Empson says what] metaphor does is [...] instead of setting up an adequation between two experiences and thereby fixing the mind on the repose of an established equation, it deploys the initial experience into an infinity of associated experiences that spring from it. In the manner of a vibration spreading in infinitude from its center, metaphor is endowed with the capacity to situate the experience at the heart of a universe that it generates. [...] Far from referring to an object that would be its cause, the poetic sign sets in motion an imaging activity that refers to no object in particular. The "meaning" of the metaphor is that it does not "mean" in any definite manner.

[It is an "ambiguity," of course...]

In the seventh and last type of ambiguity [that Empson classifies in Seven Types], the form blows up under our very eyes. This occurs when the text implies not merely distinct significations but significations that, against the will of their author, are mutually exclusive. And here Empson's advance beyond the teachings of his master becomes apparent. For under the outward appearance of a simple list classifying randome examples, chapter seven develops a thought Richards never wanted to consider: true poetic ambiguity proceeds from the deep division of Being itself, and poetry does no more than state and repeat this division. Richards did recognize the existence of conflicts, but he invoked Coleridge, not without some simplification, to the appeal to the reassuring notion of art as the reconciliation of opposites. Empson's less serene mind is not content with this formula.
-Paul de Man, "The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism," 233-237 in Blindness and Insight.

I quote so much from de Man's bizarrely skewed introduction to the American formalist tradition for people on the Continent, not at all in order to imply that everyone (or even anyone) thinks about Empson along these lines. In fact, most people who appreciate him (like those who appreciate Barthes) really don't distort him at all, because Empson works so intuitively. But when it comes time to express themselves more abstractly about this appreciation, it usually is with some hesitation or at the expense of Richards that they do so. This is fine, actually, because they also understand Richards practically, and have a sense of the unwieldiness of his system (along with a sense that it's benefits are not chiefly in removing reference--which it does not do in Richards--or dethroning poetry, which could only really be the concerns of a de Man). And most of the time, this ends up only in a comment about the brilliance and general rightness of his larger views on his subject matter: Elizabethan drama, or Milton--or Pastoral, which de Man notably has to completely dismiss as unimportant or inessential, even "deceitful":

What is the pastoral convention, then, if not the eternal separation between the mind that distinguishes, negates, legislates, and the originary simplicity of the natural? [...]There is no doubt that the pastoral theme is, in fact, the only poetic theme, that it is poetry itself. Under the deceitful title of a genre study, Empson has actually written an ontology of the poetic, but wrapped it, as is his wont, in some extraneous matter that may well conceal the essential.
-"The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism," 239.

Someone, somewhere, is still thinking that this is a brilliant "reading" of Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral, precisely because it has such astounding antipathy towards what is actually meaningful for a real literary critic: if you can regard what Empson says about pastoral as a genre as "extraneous matter," you really have to have given up on "the poetic" (and poetry) a long time ago. Empson in that book actually articulates what his "versions" (something already more subtle than the caricature of "genre" into which de Man collapses them, the better to make his misreading convincing--it's the same move he makes everywhere) have to do with the possibility and future of poetry.

This is only to say that while the practical users of Empson know what he is up to, there is a theoretical context that takes advantage of this. So the (correct) championing of Empson gets slightly twisted into a ineffective attack of the formalist tradition (when Empson is actually a much more effective attacker than this), usually via a theoretical overemphasis on his types of "ambiguity." Empson is aligned with the close-readers, and then falls in slowly with the textualists, and then with the underminers of meaning. De Man here, as he always does, motivates all these unfortunate misapprehensions into a full-blown lie, and so I present it as a caricature, really, more than anything actually believed by anyone with any shred of practical knowledge about literary criticism and figures involved who is also interested in theory (no one except de Man really thinks Empson is a deconstructionist).

I also quote it because you can see some of the feelings that get used in this process: de Man (as John Guillory points out) was adept at collecting them and using them to cultivate resentment, so it's no surprise we find this work here. "Here Empson's advance beyond the teachings of his master becomes apparent," and Richard's apparent "appeal to the reassuring notion" are caricatures still, but unlike the actual theory they are a little closer to how we feel (they have to be, in order for them to shore up such a joke of a narrative), and are a little closer to what allows a theoretical pigeonholing of Empson and Richards to take place. The whole thing is not unlike Dryden and Pope, which is a notoriously one-sided comparison to begin with: the invocation of the master-student relationship ("master"! how overblown!) is serves this purpose most of the time.

But to the point: the key is "ambiguity," misunderstood by de Man as a non-referential play of language, stemming from a (de Man would put a "no doubt," or "necessarily" here) metonymic relationship between tenor and vehicle at the heart of metaphor. This is so off-the-wall that we just have to dismiss it to get anywhere: it patently ignores anything in the later work, and especially the doctrine of Mutual Metaphor, outlined in The Structure of Complex Words (a doctrine which actually makes allegory a species of metaphor, completely at cross-purposes with the anti-mimetic doctrine de Man is trying to push it towards). It also ignores anything hinting towards this doctrine in Seven Types itself (de Man calls everything but the seventh type of ambiguity "pseudo-types" of ambiguity, which should alert us that this claim itself is just an outright falsehood). But my point is that de Man is operating at the same sites that the theorizers of Empson's undermining of language do: the emphasis on ambiguity takes away from the bounds set to the ambiguity--not by the types themselves, but by the work of words, of language. This does not proceed in a Richards-like way, but--and here's my point--with an eye to what we do when we use language and begin to analyze it:

Much of our thinking has to be done in a summary practical way, trusting to a general sense of the whole situation in the background; we get a feeling that the rest of the situation is within call, so that we can concentrate our attention on one aspect, and this feeling is often trustworthy.
-The Structure of Complex Words, 1

This is an argument for the deeper consideration of the feelings themselves Complex Words will accomplish, and so the "often" is not meant to qualify the trustworthiness of the whole practical procedure. It is meant to stake out an area where we need closer attention to what we're doing beyond the practical, with a knowledge that "much of our thinking has to be done in a summary practical way." This general opinion of Empson is what the practical people appreciate in him, but which is hard itself to understand theoretically in an environment that likes to think generalization is impossible (and that also is willing to let such generalizations pass as "[for Richards] poetic language is purely affective," which is again a gross simplification and distortion of everything interesting and, wrong, yes, but also complex in Richards' understanding of poetry as "pseudo-statement"--I'll speak more of this next time, but now the name with its emphasis on "statement" should be enough to show you how stupid it is to equate Richards remarks with the "purely affective": indeed Empson in Complex Words shows how stupid it is himself, and how it ignores the real problems!). In the absence of this, we say the level at which Empson outlines the workings of language has to be undermining any generalization it could possibly make, and here we go wrong. I'll comment more on exactly what Empson is doing in another post. For now, I'll just leave this as an outline of where the problems in understanding him and his relation to Richards actually are.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Fagles

...It teaches well. 'Nuff said. I still prefer the Fitzgerald Aeneid (for its brilliant and beautiful attempts to define a high style in American English, which I think is more like what Virgil was doing), but the more and more I work with it, I get over the shock of the rawness of Fagles' Homer and appreciate the poetry in that very quality: brutal, quick (if you read it aloud, not silently), yet capacious, it seems to really connect with the students. One still can't get over how frightening this is sometimes: you start to see that the Greek world of the poem might feel a little too close to how things are now, with intense, almost savage forms of honorific struggle among so many uncertainties, which seem to swoop down like so many gods from above... But there's something disturbing--and something that should be disturbing--in all such identifications. I can't recommend it enough.

This is scary

The comments of the CEO of a company taking over public libraries on the West Coast are genuinely scary:

“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”

[...]

“Pensions crushed General Motors, and it is crushing the governments in California,” he said. While the company says it rehires many of the municipal librarians, they must be content with a 401(k) retirement fund and no pension.

These are arguments that haven't changed since the days of union busting--though people still seem to fall for them!--but their application to the running of libraries, as if they were anything like GM, really does just sound ridiculous. The CEO even has something to say about that though:

“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization."

Nothing sacred. It sounds like the politicians in charge of the local government have decided against providing public services in general for their community, no doubt because they probably had similar things to say: the government wastes money, it's ineffective compared to the private sector (which I, the candidate, have worked in), and the first thing that has to go is government workers and their unions, who are the laziest of all the lazy American employees (for a good rejoinder to this attitude, look at Paul Krugman's excellent recent bashing of the idea of structural unemployment). We can't have the government run by the government.

But the real perversity is just simply that it is an argument for job cuts, masked as an argument for efficiency and fiscal responsibility, when it is precisely the function of the government to provide and stimulate job growth by itself offering jobs like this--especially right now. That's what's weird: they're after the heart of things, attacking the idea that government has nothing to do with anything business-related, eliminating the idea of partnerships and going all-out for privatizing the whole damn thing, as if that really would be more efficient. If they're going to compare the library to GM, why not compare this company to Goldman Sachs?

Rallying its qualities

Should I keep a journal with a view to publication? Can I make the journal into a "work"? [...]  No, the journal's justification (as a work) can only be literary in the absolute, even if nostalgic, sense of the word. I discern here four motives.

The first is to present a text tinged with an individuality of writing, with a "style" (as we used to say), with an ideolect proper to the author (as we said more recently); let us call this motive: poetic. The second is to scatter like dust, from day to day, the traces of a period, mixing all dimensions and proportions, from important information to details of behavior [...]. Let us call this motive: historical. The third is to constitute the author as an object of desire: if an author interests me, I may want to know the intimacy, the small change of his times, his tastes, his moods, his scruples; I may even go so far as to prefer his person to his work [...] I can attempt to prove that "I am worth more than what I write" (in my books): the writing in my journal then appears as a plus-power (Nietzsche: Plus von Macht), which it is supposed will compensate for the inadequacies of public writing; let us call this motive: utopian, since it is true that we are never done with the image-repetoire. The fourth motive is to constitute the Journal as a workshop of sentences: not of "fine phrases," but of correct ones, exact language: constantly to refine the exactitude of the speech-act (and not of speech), according to an enthusiasm and an application, a fidelity of intention which greatly resembles passion: "yea, my reins shall rejoice, when thy lips speak right things" (Proverbs 23:16). Let us call this motive: amorous (perhaps even idolatrous--I idolize the Sentence).

For all my sorry impressions, then, the desire to keep a journal is conceivable. I can admit that it is possible, in the actual context of the Journal, to shift from what at first seemed to me improper in literature to a form which in fact rallies its qualities: individuation, spoor, seduction, fetishism of language.
-Roland Barthes, "Deliberation," Tel Quel, 1979

Sweetening

I tended to conceive of English and Irish as adversarial tongues, as either/or conditions rather than both/ands, and this was an attitude which for a long time hampered the development of a more confident and creative way of dealing with the whole vexed question--the question, that is, of the relationship between nationality, language, history, and literary tradition in Ireland.


Luckily, I glimpsed the possibility of release from this kind of cultural determinism early on, in my first arts year at Queen's University, Belfast, when we were lectured on the history of the English language by Professor John Braidwood. Braidwood could not help informing us, for example, that the word "whiskey" is the same word as the Irish and Scots Gaelic word uisce, meaning water, and that the River Usk in Britain is therefore to some extent the River Uisce (or Whiskey); and so in my mind the stream was suddenly turned into a kind of linguist river of rivers issuing from a pristine Celto-British Land of Cockaigne, a riverrun of Finnegans Wakespeak pouring out of the cleft rock of some pre-political, prelapsarian, ur-philological Big Rock Candy Mountain--and all of this had a wonderfully sweetening effect upon me.
-Seamus Heaney (in the introduction to his Beowulf)

Fiscal responsibility

Every time you hear the phrase "fiscal responsibility," think "job cuts," and "no services," because that's what it means, and what it has meant for 30 years now. "We have to be fiscally responsible," in the mouth of some conservative or libretarian or pro-business leftist blowhard, however "multicultural" or "green" or "patriotic" or whatever they are, means "I think we have to cut jobs and refuse to provide services to the public; I think we have to take away the few stable jobs that there are right now--government jobs, at the federal and local level--which provide vital public services and a national infrastructure; I think we need to 'privatize' it all, make the narrowest of private interests dictate what's in the public's interest--and in fact, wholly dictate whether ten percent (or more) of all of them can be employed or not, can make a living or not."

Object-oriented Wordsworth

(Many apologies for the sloppiness of everything below, and all the fulminations on the place of literary criticism etc.: I wrote it all way too fast, and with the intention of showing how what we've been up to in the last 10 years especially has really been more philosophy-friendly than in past decades, and especially friendly to the realist sort of view.)

Paul Fry's new book Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (Yale, 2008) is something that the object-oriented ontologists/realists should probably take a gander at: Fry has been defending what can be called a realist, objecty sort of aesthetics since the mid-80's, against both Derridianism and historicism, and this book pushes that argument even further. Tim Morton has gained a lot of attention in OOP circles because he understands the metaphysics of the realism better than Fry, and is just more interested in it, for good ecological as well as literary-critical reasons. And thing-theory has become a branch of critical theory, though I don't really think it is object-oriented at the moment (preferring to deal with discourses, representations, etc.). But we should look at Fry for a very fully developed account of what an object-oriented literary theory looks like (and I use the words "literary theory" precisely: that is, meaning basically a methodology for literary criticism that opposes itself to a wide-ranging, PoMo, pseudo-philosophical critical theory which most philosophers are encouraged to think is literary theory as well--mostly by critical theorists themselves).

Graham Harman has done an amazing job of working out what an object-oriented aesthetics would be, or rather teaches us what the role of aesthetics is in a object-oriented philosophy. He has also married philosophy and the use of literature quite well, much better than most philosophers (and critical theorists) who use it as a sort of mix between an illustration and a case-study and then switch back into an aesthetic concern about what art is (this goes all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, though the relation between literature and philosopy before Aristotle especially was very different). Even Stanley Cavell, who uses literature more than most, does this a bit, though his work on the marriage-plot is great (Cavell sticks with film more, though, because I think it's a more friendly medium for his reflections). This sort of attitude is not a fault, by the way (as some critical theorists would contend): I don't want philosophers doing something like literary criticism/theory, because it'd keep them away from doing good philosophy.

What I like about Harman is that he doesn't really stick with the "illustrative" end of things and moves the philosophizing back to the more aesthetic area: it's here that philosophy actually works best with literary theory, actually, because what literary theory does is to work out aspects of aesthetics by testing them against methodological consequences for literary criticism, and work out methodology by testing it against aesthetics (the purest example I can think of is William Wimsatt, though Northrop Frye comes to mind). Nothing more, nothing less, really: you either descend into literary criticism proper when you do too much of the latter, or become an apolitical criticial theorist when you do too much of the former (more on the proper, productive role of critical theory in a moment--for now I want to focus on how it screws up both literary theory and philosophy). The illustrative/case-study sort of philosophizing (though using case-studies is better than illustration, in philosophy all things on this end of the scale tend towards the latter, unless you really resist the tendency like Cavell), is good for ethics if you have the patience for that sort of stuff (Nussbaum), and for outlining more clearly what you are already saying on the aesthetic level (think Aristotle on plot). But the literature here is like flat soda, warm soda (Harman had a great post on warm soda a while back), warm beer: it has to be treated as a sort of empty vessel in order for the job to get done. You read it like a parable, and indeed I think philosophy in these moments is closer to religious interpretation than literary studies gets, for all the talk about the origin of the latter (not exactly historically accurate, more a convenient fiction) in scriptural exegesis (Ricoeur I think would support this argument: Gadamer isn't exactly the one to go to here since for him interpretation is--rightly for his argument--too vague and huge a thing). That's not entirely bad, but it often passes itself off as interpretation in a literary critical sense, either by critical theorists or literary critics looking for a sort of cheap alliance between philosophy and literary studies--one that can be and should be based on something that we have more in common than this vague thing (the goddamned badass mission of the humanities, and particularly our less-historically-minded end of the humanities). And in the end it makes us (lit. crits.) look bad, since philosophy at least has big questions to answer through this method (and is much more precise about what exactly interpretation is, while we feel what it may be more keenly because we practice it), while we seem like we're using it to do what we're always accused of doing: nothing substantial except reading or at most teaching literacy (though I know philosophers will come back with the litany of things they are accused of not doing, which is substantial--what we should take away from this is that perhaps no two disciplines are as actively marginalized as us both together since we don't do history as much, which is something we should both, together, fight against). But enough of the big talk, which I use just to sort of work out how, from a lit. crit. perspective, literary criticism can work with OOP--and why lit. crit. could actually add to the OOP enterprise.

The more immediate point is the following: this is why addressing things in a more aesthetics-minded way, like Harman, is going to be better for literary criticism. Where the literary object is brought up as an object, which is what aesthetics does, you don't do this sort of illustration. But Harman doesn't exactly confine himself to this: his definition of aesthetics is, generally, something that happens in reality amongst objects that adds to them (it is something like the touch of objects on objects, their feelings in the more literal sense of this word and of the word aesthetics), and as such can veer away from the literary object to what we might say (if we weren't Fry or a realist) are "representations" that are in the world (the ugly words "discourse" or "textuality" might be invoked here, and the former surely would be extremely inappropriate--the latter might be more friendly to the object-oriented if it was tweaked [you all know I think Derrida is ultimtely reconcilable with an OOP perspective]).

I'll say why this use of "representations" is wrong in a moment, but let me just say that this is where phenomenology comes in: because Harman lets phenomenology do the work of taking us towards what is "represented" in the literary object, as well as what is added to reality amongst objects and their sensitivity to other objects ("representations"), Harman does a much better--because phenomenology-friendly--job than Latour's realist "scientifiction." The latter outlines a neat sense of what the literary object does, or what it is (no representation layered upon the real, no dualism [no dualism at least that could be opposed to monism], no folding of reality as Latour says in Irreductions somewhere, which I would agree is a sort of folding-over, a concession to history's view of reality that I'll get to in a minute I promise), but Latour can only really use literature as a case-study to get at what he means. At his best, he does that shifting between trying to use Rick Powers as a case study and using Powers' works as an object (as I've said on the Latour blog), but most of the time he tries to sink that shifting into the former sort of interpretive use of the work. So Powers can be considered right beside the amazing Turing, and we don't have any sense where fiction begins or ends: it's all mush, when what literary criticism wants is a precise sense of where the fiction is. We don't want to know that hypotheticals or thought-experiments in philosophy or science are basically fictions, and that fictions do something a lot like thought-experiments. Granted, Latour is working in weird territory, and that what Turing does is surely more like fiction than even the richest thought-experiment (he presupposes so much more than any "experiment," and--Latour is magisterial in bringing this out--even more than this the swiftness with which he slides into these sorts of fictions is the thing that really makes them extraordinary, or more fiction-like [only Latour could make us feel the urgency of the fiction-like, by the way--even if this is a central subject of literary theory which we know a lot about and we do think is crucial] than the thought-experiment in general). But we feel there is something different between Powers and Turing, even if we refuse to say that there is less of a distinction between the science each does. There is something different, in other words, between them, even if we try and curb our desire to say that the one is an artist and the other's work traditionally is seen as computer science or engineering or whatever thing you want to characterize it as which belongs on the other side of campus (Turing just is that hard to pin down). And we want to know what that is, or rather where that is. In the grand scheme of things, in short, there might be little difference between them, but we feel something is different. And the job of the literary critic/theorist is to find out what that is, in a real practical sense. The philosopher can find out what it is too, but he's probably--and rightly--going to be more willing to keep looking at the big picture or argue against the feeling in favor of the big picture.

This is why I'm always sort of confused when I see Lovecraft as the darling of the object-oriented philosophers (not just Harman), when Wordsworth, the poet who wanted to treat words themselves as objects (see the "Essay upon Epitaphs"--written itself "upon" the epitaphic, in an object-like, "physical" sense rather than the "representative" sense), is right there. I know it's important to get at what's weird, and stick with the weirdness of reality, and even that the object-oriented view of things actually probably maps onto the amazing Lovecraftian sort of weirdness better than with what we normally associate with Wordsworth (Lovecraft may better outline the differences between a general new sort of realism and an object-oriented sort of realism, maybe). I also know that frankly Lovecraft isn't paid enough attention in literary studies, though you'd actually be surprised if you looked at just how much is actually written on him. I also know he's a figure is more popular than "high" literature.

But Wordsworth is weird. He's really, really bizarre. Trust me, and trust everyone who studies Romantic poetry now or has studied it in the last 50 years or so, who, like Fry, have actually done a lot to make literary studies the place where an object-oriented view of things can really be accepted, as we sort of get frustrated with all those into representations/discourse and textuality who wanted to steer us more towards pure critical theory (the classic study of all this, its chapters published right in the thick of it all, was Frances Ferguson's amazing Solitude and the Sublime, which is extremely realist and even object-oriented--it is another bit of required reading alongside Fry for the philosopher who has the time for all this--though it wants to then ask, rightly I think, what happens precisely to what we once called representations [see Ferguson's more recent Pornography: The Theory for a more worked-out picture of the result, which recuperates much in classical Utilitarianism]). The Victorian view of Wordsworth, as well as the Modernist view of Wordsworth (and there's a lot the two eras share with each other), was just a guy who likes nature in a sort of pantheist way. But he's nowhere near that: if you read the writings with that in mind, they just don't make sense (okay, maybe the daffodil poem, but that's about it). The rest of it, the stuff that really matters, is way like Lovecraft. Morton can attest to that (listen to his course on Romanticism, and his great classes on Wordsworth, which are spot on--note: opens iTunes link to all Morton's courses), but so can Fry, whose reflections on Wordsworth lead him to a Harman-like thought in his book A Defense of Poetry:

The thinking that is accomplished by matter, to turn then to the hard-to-grasp notion of what I want to call the "embodied," appears on the face of it to be a strange transumption of the nature of matter that may or may not some day reveal its neurophysiological secret in terms that make sense within the Cartesian tradition; but in the meantime its nonuman task is to think itself as matter and not prefigured as res cogitans. Perhaps the way to do this [...] is not to think mind as matter but to think matter as mind, which, when it fails to think, can then stand revealed for what it is, like Heidegger's hammer.
-A Defense of Poetry (1995, collecting essays from the 80s), 206.

You see Fry struggling to articulate what he means, and he has lots of recourse to PoMo, textualist sorts of rhetoric in order to do so throughout his writings--which might have the stink of language-centered philosophy that the object-oriented people rightly don't like (though it's really not that bad, is it?)--but the impulse towards the object-oriented is there. It is also, yes, an impulse that very wrongly gestures towards what Harman continually tries to fend off, which is panpsychism. This too is what seems to be lurking behind Wordsworth for people, and is really what we mean when we fling the old accusation of "pantheism" at him. But precisely following Wordsworth, being led there by him, Fry stresses the "failing to think" of matter, and does so through precisely the hammer of Heidegger, through tool-being--and this, however inaptly put, is just one indication of an underlying tendency in Fry that is deeply, I think, object-oriented (or at least realist with an object-oriented sort of drive). It is obviously going to be less clear about the metaphysics, but this is because Fry isn't a metaphysician, nor does he want to be. He is outlining the consequences of a view of literature that sees its purpose as providing that sort of suspension of--he calls it "knowledge," but that's again too postmodern sounding (remember Fry is a huge critic of PoMo, but that literary theory is now dominated by a French-centered vocabulary which makes it sound critical-theoryish all the time, when it isn't). What is suspended is, as he says elsewhere in the book and all throughout the new one on Wordsworth, intention as human-centered. He also calls this knowledge or meaning, because that is what we are concerned with in intention in literary studies (as opposed to say, haptic, double-touches, lost limbs, all the great stuff of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty), and so we talk about intention in that vague way (believe me who once entertained the philosophy path for a while, that yes I know this is very frustrating for philosophers who spend so much time trying to be precise about this stuff!). But Fry means the non-human, and precisely the non-linguistic-centered (less fashionable to think around 1995, certainly):

To think the nonhuman. To stand back from the anthropocentrisim and pathetic fallacy that is built into our very language, here begins necessarily, the release from signification, not just as the already shopworn gesture of decentering the mental subject but also as the less fashionable through or around the determinate linguisticity that so quickly and suspiciously acquires human attributes in post-structuralist thought. It is only by thinking human being in its objecthood, in its continuity with being in general, that we can suspend the dialectics of reflection...
-A Defense of Poetry, 205.

He's talking about Lyotard in this moment, thus the vagueness of the last phrase: what he means is the sort of drive to interpret that we get when we literary critics pick up a poem, which is actually so different than the drive to actually write literary criticism on the thing--that is, what we normally do and do well. The first tendency is the one we share with the parable-reading people (philosophers, exegetes, everyday readers), who see meaning multiply as reality gets folded over more and more. The literary critic, whether she thinks this or not (we do a lot by intuition) brings the work closer to reality though, back away from this meaning-making, which treats the literary object precisely as a sort of extension of a man-made-intention, or essentially crystallization of it, a representation that folds it over, however much we try to water-down this New Critical, formalist, Aristotelian (that is, Aristotle of the Poetics and Rhetoric) attitude towards the work by seeing it as a chunk of language, discourse, whatever. We bring it back as an object working against and with other objects, all of which are nonhuman or just thought in their objecthood, like the hammer which discloses more, more and more, but not more human-centered meaning, when it breaks down (Harman and Fry might differ as to how this moment is interpreted, but I think Fry might like Harman's reading of it better than his own, which is vague but pretty good for a literary critic).

All this is Fry, and all of it comes from a Wordsworthian sort of view of things:

An Epitaph is not a proud Writing shut up for the studious: it is exposed to all, to the wise and most ignorant; it is condescending, perspicuous, and lovingly solicits regard; its story and admonitions are brief, that the thoughtless, the busy, and indolent may not be deterred, nor the impatient tired: the stooping Old Man cons [knows, understands] the engraven record like a second horn-book;--the Child is proud that he can read it;--and the Stranger is introduced by its mediation to the company of a Friend: it is concerning all, and for all:--in the Church-yard it is open to the day; the sun looks down upon the stone, and the rains of Heaven beat against it.
-Wordsworth, "Essay upon Epitaphs"

That's just a bit of the amazing essay: notice that it admits of a pantheism, but what matters actually are the things and their precise, definite, hard and soft interactions--you have to read the list as a list of individual things, and not just a rattling on. Because it's clear Wordsworth thought all his writings were something approximating this writing on tombstones: Geoffrey Hartman was the first to point this out in the 60's in his Wordsworth's Poetry, which first enlightened us as to just how un-Victorian, how weird he was. This was the real motivation behind his resistance to "poetic diction," which everyone knows about. That's not about encrusted phrases versus a lower, more homely language that everyone can understand. When Wordsworth says the poet should be a man talking to men, he means it quite in the sense that the person speaking is just a man and he has a just a man as his immediate audience: the humans are there in their objecthood, their hardness, in this sort of way. If this sounds too human-centered, also reflect that this isn't a sort of "let's get together in language" sort of thing: that's what 18th century poetry is like; that's why you use stock phrases like "finny coursers" (as a metonymy for fish) or invoke muses. The community he seeks is very much like the society of objects that Latour often describes (politically too, much like Wordsworth) and that Harman describes more clearly: this is why the poetic object doesn't even have men as its "audience," but just as men who are witness to it, to the talking. The phrase, essentially is a tautology--something Wordsworth defended vigorously (see his long note on his poem "The Thorn") as not a fault of language but perhaps its chief beauty. The reason is that the tautology (and he means it not logically but rhetorically, so it's not the tautology you hear rightly condemned in philosophy departments but the sort of repetitious saying of the same thing that you hear in speeches) just says what there. It gets rid of reference as representation and opens up a saying of what, well, is just said. The man talking to men is like a brute description of what poetry is; it's not what it should be like if you understand this to mean the poet should "represent himself as a particular type of speaker." Read all of Wordsworth's poems with this sort of distinction in mind, and you'll see that he's right up your object-oriented alley:

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

I think I better stop there: what's important though is not that there are objects "represented" in the poem (this is what thing theory sadly looks at most of the time, though Latour plays a big part there, and why most of the time it isn't object-oriented; but that's also why it is a critical theory more than a literary one), but how the poem works and how it is in touch with the real and with these objects. For instance, pay attention to what the word "seemed" is doing: the only representation-producing word here, is actually working to undermine the human-centeredness of feeling and touch, bring them closer to the earth, by setting them up precisely as what death--or is it death as is usually assumed (because of the sequence of poems it is in)? has anyone really died here? or is it just a sort of change of viewpoint that is being registered? you don't need to die to roll around like this--undercuts, or as what is in contrast to what the speaker "now" finds.

The other main things I wanted to note are that 1) the most explicit example of what type of fiction this realism-fiction is (it's not exactly object-oriented, but it has something like OOP's realism), then, can be seen It's Garry Shandling's Show as I said a while back; 2) that history (or a certain view of it) is the thing that prevents a lot of this realism from catching on (history opposes fiction and reality, whereas fiction considered alone just has no opposition to reality at all but adds to it: see Michael Wood's Literature and the Taste of Knowledge on this, and in a more exploratory way Fry), and that literary history is a huge part of literary studies--whereas history is never at all really an issue in philosophy departments except when it is made a philosophical issue--which is why we are more likely to view literature in terms of the representational even if we don't really criticize it that way; and 3) what critical theory does well is combine various idioms across departments, and direct them towards neglected areas, thereby politicizing the fields they join (it can easily be a reactive stance, though it seems progressive, which is why feminism and labor don't really need it, nor various groups when they get some real power behind them), and is very important if what you are theorizing is neglected. All these things can be got into more: the best thing to read on 2) is Fry and also Michael Wood (as I mentioned above). On 2) I'll also say I think philosophy does what it needs to do without much history, though history can be a great resource for it philosophically (you can dig up neglected philosophies if you look for them); and I really mean history in the history-department sense of it, which I think once it hits philosophy gets turned into what they call politics or political metaphysics (look at the work of history of philosophy people to see what happens there: it is a lot more like the bad sociology of science that Latour hates), whereas in English we marry the two a lot (no Milton without the Civil War). And I'll add that it is the historicists who really battled alongside the deconstructionists in promoting a view of fiction that was opposed to reality, that subtracted from it or undermined it, and promoted a representational sort of view of it all (Foucault, who should be the enemy of OOP, was the foundation of New Historicism, and the impact of the latter was massive; and though Derrida I think is just philosophically less of a problem for OOP, as I said above, Paul de Man's Derrida, which was hugely influential, basically turns him into a thinker of language qua representation/underminer of reality).

And I should add one more thing to this history angle, which is that I know the status of history is changing in philosophy through OOP and OOP like projects, because Latour is the one person who can write histories of objects, ideas, everything: there has been a focus on Braudel by Levi Bryant and Harman is actually making his way through Gibbon (though I know less about what he's going to do with it once he's done: it's awesome though, because Gibbon is amazing and changes the 18th century view of history radically, and well it's just an amazing read). I'd add that the reason this is able to happen is because Latour writes narratives, understands objects compose narratives or that reality is a composition of narratives, and that despite the fact that this sounds like something linguistic which the perverse PoMo critical theorist would love, it means nothing of the sort. In fact, it actually means we as literary critics are in a good position to understand what Latour means in a different way, in a more substantial way than the hard line PoMo linguistic angle, if only because that's just critical theory and doesn't really reflect what we do with narratives or even how we think of them in literary theory. To be blunt: there is a moment in the LSE event, when Harman and Latour are talking to the audience (I think it's the LSE event since it had to be, but my memory is shoddy of this), and someone brings up some possible objection to what he says about, well, reality. The objection is, well how do you know where these narratives begin or end? How are you able to tell where the narrative you are composing, the account you are giving of the way objects work and public transit systems are developed and decomposed etc., begins or ends? In short, it's a legitimate question, but it has a sort of false epistemological sort of dualism about it which Latour must destroy: he says rightly that this is a question that scientists don't ask when they try to account for their work, and so it brings you away from the reality and towards the critical sorts of histories of science that he always wants to avoid. The position is right: the narrative is just the narrative, and it's over when it's over, when you've accounted for the events. But there's a practical angle to this, which is on the level of narrative and how you compose it: when do you begin and end your narrative? It is literary criticism and literary theory that can come in and answer this question, because it is a question about the limits of fiction and how narratives work, which we can answer. This is the area that was exploited by people allied with literary studies in the 80's to undermine science for the humanities: but in practice, we deal a lot with these questions and less with the undermining, and can help with the narrative issues (see Wood again for this).

And one last note: criticism and critical are two words that get thrown around a lot in OOP circles because of Latour and it is important to note that when I talk of literary criticism I mean nothing like the sort of Kantian critical attitude. The "critical" of critical theory, or its sort of criticism, definitely are of this Kantian sort, and it is in critical theory's interest to equate literary criticism with something critical. (I've heard that what the "critical" means in "critical theory" is the "close reading" of theoretical texts: perhaps, yes, this technique is used there--though it really isn't the same thing even then, since the close reading in theory is just so much more flighty--but still we then have to say that there is a huge difference between the theoretical text and the literary one, and that this leaves "theory" undefined. Essentially we have to enforce the gap between the two senses of the term, the one implying a whole Kantian task and the other--the literary critical, literary studies sense--is actually only adopted because in literary studies we need a word for what we do when we don't do literary history, or the historiographical sort of work we also pursue, and it looks a lot like the stuff they called criticism--i.e. judgment and analysis--they did way before Kant in the 17th and 18th century). So I don't really see anything wrong with combining the words "object-oriented" and "criticism," or maybe even speaking of "object-oriented criticism," when I mean objected-oriented literary criticism--though I think it's probably good to avoid that phrase in general ("literary critical realism" might be more accurate, since we rarely hold to any precise sort of philosophical distinctions when we criticize, and only use them for practical purposes when we theorize).

Liking Homer straight

I reflected a little while ago on the English of Robert Fagles' translations, not to criticize the translation, but to criticize us who use it--so accurately does Fagles capture contemporary English in all its range. What I mainly wanted to document was basically that English in America lacks the registers that it had in the past, or that if it has registers (low, middle, and high styles), it never subordinates itself to decorum. Now, I'm not saying that this is really a bad thing. Decorum is one of those concepts that looks more internal to the language than it is, when it is really something that comes from a whole cultural agenda: you have to want culture to function a certain way (and have to just expect it to work a certain way, grow up learning that it works that way) in order to appeal to it. "Impact" or "catchiness" might be a more contemporary version of something similar: but you see the sort of assumptions the use of the term makes about how culture should function. And these assumptions don't invalidate the thing either, by the way: they just inform the use of the term and certain appeals to it.

The only thing is that decorum is one of those more fundamental sorts of concepts, which actually contain the idea of a sort of functioning culture within them: it sets the bar really low, in the sense that all it really expects culture should be is something that has a function. Even then, though, decorum projects a certain type of culture that is more functional than... not functioning. I'd say that Britain still has a sense of decorum in speech, if only because they seem to have a sense that the threat of the fragmentation of a functional culture (a culture with a social purpose) is what we get when we lose it (which may or may not be the case). Of course, they also have a longer history of invoking the term and know what happens when it is invoked (particularly throughout the 18th century). All this tends to color certain battles over the use of dialects there: we have something like that, of course, but it seems less, well, important here. Nothing much is at stake culturally in the use of a particular dialect, though it seems to say something about the language user, and vaguely bring up some stupid worry about culture's "decline" (think of the "debates" over rap lyrics, etc.). They are colored as dialects before any sort of rich concept of their cultural function can be developed, and so decorum is never really invoked: only "broadcasting standards," "free speech," etc.

To come to my point: American English mixes what we might have thought was the low and the high. And what is sort of wonderful about this is that it allows us to get some sense of Homer's Greek. This is what I think Fagles is really getting at when he says in an interview that "the English tend to like their Homer, as they take it, 'straight,' meaning in prose. We tend to like our Homer in verse, and I think that may tend to explain why American Homer—American translations, in fact—are with us." He's also referencing his belief that Homer should be less "literary" in the stuffy sense and rather something that should be picked up often, thumbed through, dogeared (though this seems like that make the thing pretty "literary" to me). We like our literature to be a performance, or, in other words, an event. Seems pretty accurate, but concedes too much to an idea of "the media."  But the main point is, I think, that rather than something without decorum, England would have nothing. That's a bit of an England-hating statement, but it's important to be biased in these matters: not because of any sort of nationalism, but because that's how you argue about literature an international level (which we should distinguish from a "comparative" sort of point of view). But again it seems right: we don't care about decorum, and so we can actually give you something approximating a real visceral sort of language--and this seems to be very much like what Homer himself (that is, the collective subject we refer to as "Homer") is trying to do.

I applauded Fagles' Odyssey more than the Iliad, because Homer does this more successfully in that poem, blending the mythic and the everyday in a way that Longinus once smartly pointed out (even though he also hated it: it's not that one should decide between the two, but that  mix should to be a sort of strong combination, rather than a dissolution of the two terms). But, that said, both really do give something like an idea of Greekishness (I hesitate to say Greek), or rather bring it to life in a sort of new way: we're not dealing with the old stereotypes of Homer that, for so many in England over the years, have kept him and his language in place, somewhere with respect to decorum. I'm warming to these translations, in other words, as poetry. Where I think you see the failure of this sort of approach is in something requiring decorum: the Aeneid. We just don't have what it takes to do this right, on some level, and though Fagles tries, there's just no high style in English that he really can inhabit that will do the job. Robert Fitzgerald, on the other hand, does, but by working with the meter Fagles here doesn't really elect to use--probably because its Miltonic background is just too imposing. But working against the lack of decorum on the one hand and the foreign rhythms creeping into American English on the other, Fitzgerald gives us a nice approximation, building decorum from the ground up, relying on its American sounds rather than its sense (Fagles does the latter marvellously, but neglects the former I think--something again that works better for the Greek than the Latin).

All this reveals that the directness of the American English may be a sort of simulacrum of the Homer, rather than an approximation of it, if we just sit back and don't really feel the English as English, or just expect that what we're getting is Homer in English. We should try and hear an Americanized Homer, as Fagles says, rather than just Homer and American English. Translation is just not about transparency in this sort of simplistic sense: it is about a transparency that is really a sort of combination, addition, which you have to look twice as hard at--and often can enjoy twice as much. But this really means thinking about what then in the Fagles is poetic: we have to sort of invent this much like Fitzgerald does with the Latin. That's a task that is wonderfully left open by Fagles, I think, and gets me exited that the translation is so popular. It's not only great that that so many people are really reading verse: Fagles also really encourages us to look at all the savagery of the Iliad, and treat it less like a "movie" (the parody of a real movie, full of "scenes," to which we now reduce our coneption of novels), than, well, verse poetry in some really undefined, new, American sense.

This was what was important in Fagles' work, I think, for Bernard Knox, though he might not have put it in these terms: their openness, combined with their immediateness, visceral directness (which is not of a cinematic or mediactic type) opens up the possibility that the classics can become relevant in a way that they never really seemed to be in the 20th century. At the same time, his recent death I think marks the end of an era where this sort of openness could be entertained as a possibility of renewal, at the same time as it was used conceptually to undermine the classics Knox defended: now, I think, we actually have to pursue the renewal or the destruction. This means in a sense that the arguments Knox often made are now a bit irrelevant, either because we've benefitted from his efforts or because what he opposed has changed. Arguments about "radical feminists," which really meant classical scholar Eva Keuls, undermining the bases of Western culture are now quite absurd to entertain, because they have exhausted their local purpose just as much as the tactics Knox opposed--and often played more into the hands of those who wanted to get rid of the humanities altogether than those like Keuls who wanted to change it. The game has changed (we now can see that "multiculturalism," the other term he opposed, might have been something much better to focus on, rather than the people who were stupidly killing the Women's Movement that by making sex into violence and victimization--though this did have measurable benefits in making rape and domestic violence much more visible [and prosecutable]) and as we reread these texts we should keep this in mind, I think, especially when the people truly undermining Western culture of whatever sort are those who would focus on this old sort of debate as Knox's only achievement: his NY Times obituary gives him tribute by leaving us with one of his more bitter quotes that is almost twenty (that's 20!!) years old, apparently because replaying early 90's battles in the humanities apparently works better with audiences (and keeps America polarized).

Dryden's translation of Horace's Second Epode

I was having the darndest time trying to find Dryden's translation of Horace's famous second epode in a form that was able to be copied and pasted. This happens to be the case with much of Dryden's work in general, and especially his translations (there isn't even a full version of the Fables that is easy to use anywhere). But the unavailability isn't due to indifference so much as the lack of resources to cope with Dryden's massive output: efforts to tackle it (rightly) get concentrated on getting the dramas and the Virgil up first, and then seem to flag.

But his earlier translations (that is, relative to the massive output after he lost the Laureateship), especially those collected in the second volume of the famous miscellanies published with Tonson (1685), are wonderful, and deserve a bit more attention just in general (they include a lot of pastoral and a lot of Lucretius--a really readable version all you philosophers should check out). This translation is one of my favorites: we see Dryden at a marshaling all his skill in heroic versification in a shorter four-beat line, wonderfully varying the rhyme with all the talent involved in deploying his famous triplets (if you're interested in the latter, Christopher Ricks--with his usual brilliance--has addressed this neglected aspect of Dryden's versification in a wonderful piece in Cambridge Companion to Dryden).

It is also just one of Horace's best poems, which I have fond memories of trying my hand at in Latin class: the famous "Beatus ille" epode (you can find the original and a literal translation here), loaded with the counter-pastoral skepticism or rather (because skepticism is too critical and neutral a term) doubled-perspective that can only come from a working-man like Horace, it has a wonderful dignity that is constantly poised upon devolving into something simpler--either through too rich a portrait of the simple life, or through resentment that comes through such doubling, its sardonic sort of turn that would explode the vision--but never does. The achievement of Horace is not tone so much as a sort of pointedness of ridicule: the mockery is not of the simple life so much as of the rich Alfius' impulse to desire it materially--this is what turns the vision into a cartoon. And Dryden captures this perfectly, I think (I should mention that Dryden changes Alfius to Morecraft, a famous contemporary usurer--see also his "Essay of Dramatic Poesie"--a traditional practice in translations of satiric material). But enough prefacing:

The Second Epode of Horace
‘How happy in his low degree,
How rich in humble poverty, is he,
Who leads a quiet country life;
Discharg'd of business, void of strife,
And from the griping scrivener free.
(Thus, ere the seeds of vice were sown,
Liv'd men in better ages born
Who plow'd with oxen of their own
Their small paternal field of corn.)
Nor trumpets summon him to war,  [10]
  Nor drums disturb his morning sleep,
Nor knows he merchants gainful care,
  Nor fears the dangers of the deep.
The clamours of contentious law,
  And court and state, he wisely shuns,
Nor brib'd with hopes, nor dar'd with with awe
  To servile salutations runs;
But either to the clasping vine
  Does the supporting poplar wed,
Or with his pruning-hook disjoin   [20]
  Unbearing branches from their head,
  And grafts more happy in their stead:
Or, climbing to a hilly steep,
  He views his herds in vales afar,
Or sheers his overburden'd sheep,
  Or mead for cooling drink prepares,
  Of virgin honey in the jars.
Or in the now declining year,
  When bounteous Autumn rears his head,
He joys to pull the ripened pear,   [30]
  And clustering grapes with purple spread.
The fairest of his fruit he serves,
  Priapus, thy rewards:
Sylvanus too his part deserves,
  Whose care the fences guards.
Sometimes beneath an ancient oak
  Or on the matted grass he lies:
No god of sleep he need invoke;
  The stream that o’er the pebbles flies,
  With gentle slumber crowns his eyes.   [40]
The wind that whistles through the sprays
  Maintains the consord of the song;
And hidden birds, with native lays
  The golden sleep prolong.
But when the blast of winter blows,
  And hoary frost inverts the year,
Into the naked woods he goes
  And seeks the tusky boar to rear,
  With well-mouthed hounds and pointed spear;
Or spreads his subtle nets from sight  [50]
  With twinkling glasses to betray
The larks that in the meshes light,
  Or makes the fearful hare his prey.
Amidst his harmless easy joys
  No anxious care invades his health,
Nor love his peace of mind destroys,
  Nor wicked avarice of wealth.
But if a chaste and pleasing wife,
To ease the business of his life,
Divides with him his household care,  [60]
Such as the Sabine Matrons were,
Such as the swift Apulian’s bride,
  Sunburnt and swarthy though she be,
Will fire for winter nights provide,
  And without noise will oversee
  His children and his family,
And order all things till he come
Sweaty and overlabored home;
If she in pens his flocks will fold,
  And then produce her dairy store,   [70]
With wine to drive away the cold
  And unbought dainties of the poor;
Not oysters of the Lucrine lake
  My sober appetite would wish,
  Nor turbot, or the foreign fish
That rolling tempests overtake,
  And hither waft the costly dish.
Not heath-poult, or the rarer bird
  Which Phasis or Ionia yields,
More pleasing morsels would afford   [80]
  Than the fat olives of my fields;
Than chards or mallows for the pot,
  That keep the loosened body sound,
Or than the lamb, that falls by lot
  To the just guardian of my ground.
Amidst these feasts of happy swains,
  The jolly shepherd smiles to see
His flock returning from the plains;
  The farmer is as pleased as he
To view his oxen, sweating smoke,   [90]
Bear on their necks the loosened yoke:
To look upon his menial crew
  That sit around his cheerful hearth,
And bodies spent in toil renew
  With wholesome food and country mirth.’
This Morecraft said within himself,
  Resolved to leave the wicked town,
  And live retired upon his own.
He called his money in;
  But the prevailing love of pelf   [100]
  Soon split him on the former shelf,
And put it out again.