The mole

One of my favorite little bits of coiled, almost crushed verse (we speak of crushed ice, why not have two options for the poetry dispenser?) from Coleridge's lesser-read later writings: "The Mole." Coleridge extracted it from his cryptic little 1811 piece, "On the First Poem in Donne's Book" (which refers to "The Flea") to use in his Friend in 1818, to describe mechanical (that is,"crass and sensual") materialists, or, as he puts it, "the advocates of the Nihil nisi ab extra":

--They shrink in, as Moles
(Nature's mute monks, live mandrakes of the ground)
Creep back from Light--then listen for its sound;--
See but to dread, and dread they know not why--
The natural alien of their negative eye.

The compactness of this little fragment and the poems immediately written before and after it are often attributed precisely to Coleridge's unfashionable fascination and admiration for Donne (this is in the age of Johnson's "Life of Cowley"): in short the seem to people like a bit of metaphysical poetry in the Romantic age (and who better to write it than the Englishman most thoroughly steeped in metaphysics?). But I don't really think this bears much relationship to Donne, actually (and for the record, Shelley is much more "metaphysical" to me than Coleridge): the sort of compactness of this verse is not like Donne's at all, really, since that comes mostly--I'll hazard--from argument. In other words, in Donne, we have intensely compressed and suprising figures like this, but their effect is secured by what they do to the (also very compressed) argumentative structure of the poem--namely, punctuate it, interrupt it, twist it. They're like time bombs for the reader in the unfolding of the case being made. Coleridge's are--almost like Dickenson's, but less opaque and disturbing in a sort of immediate sense--internally intense: they take you away from the poem completely, into the metaphor or metonymy. They are time bombs for the reader, sticking in your head, incorporated but not digested (much like Wordsworth's poetry, but more intellectual). Thus what is like Donne, is Coleridge's play with the line, and the pitting of the line--and the parts of the line--against the poem as a whole. This however is put to a different end than Donne: it gives him the space needed for a fathomless metonymy or metaphor, not an argumentative turn or suprise. It also will restore some movement or speed to the poem, as one is forced on from line to line by the pounding beats that fit the polysyllables so well (too well--that is, they do it formally, not rhythmically). While this sometimes is indeed like Donne when these rhytmic units are smaller than the line and involve more rhetorical than metric effects, or when the two sharply reinforce each other ("mute monks" sounds very Donne-like), it is overall, if anything, an amazing Miltonic sort of effect (Milton's amazing ability to fill out the line with two or three words has this effect of Coleridge's shortening), and it chiefly produces that sort of forgetting necessary for the delayed intellectual effect that is so wonderful. Now, "The Moles" is a good example of this, but the most sublime (it is one of the most amazing things Coleridge ever wrote) is the first stanza in one of those poem composed almost immediately after (in 1811, that is: besides the following, they include "Limbo," and, "A Suicide's Argument"). I'll leave you with this, which was titled by Coleridge's son (Coleridge gave it no title) "Ne Plus Ultra":

Sole Positive of Night!

Antipathist of Light!
Fate's only essence! primal scorpion rod--
The one permitted opposite of God!--
Condensed blackness and abysmal storm
Compacted to one sceptre
Arms the Grasp enorm--
The Interceptor--

The history of lyric hurts

Among the many, many gems in Stewart's book, looking at it again I'm blown away most perhaps by her initial presentation of the function/innovation of lyric, which is just overflowing with amazing formulations. Commenting on Wordsworth's famous (but still always shocking) statement about the intrinsic connection between meter and the alleviation of pain ("There can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose"), Stewart says the following:

In theories of lyric from Vico forward, the enunciation of pain at the origin of lyric must appear before the emergence of a self-conscious sense of one's own subjectivity [...]. To equate pain with subjectivity is to equate the body with subjectivity and so to confuse the most collective with the most individual. Pain has no memory; its expression depends on the intersubjective invention of association and metaphor. The situation of the person resides in the genesis of the memory of action and experience in intersubjective terms--that is, in the articulation and mastery of the originating pain. Coleridge [in Biographia Literaria] explains that in the "frequency of forms and figures of speech," we find "offsprings of passion" who are as well "adopted children of power." Yet the mastery of pain through measures and figures is not merely repressive; it is as well a matter of coming to knowledge and expression. Coleridge's explanation shows a subject coming into activity out of a passive relation to sense experience, memory, and expectation. Here the figures and forms created are those of a subjectivity enunciating itself.

Divergence in lyric is thus not between language and music but between a subject transforming him-or herself from the somatic both toward and against the social. The history of lyric is thereby the history of a relation between pronouns, the genesis of ego-tu and ego-vos in the reciprocity of an imagination posing and composing itself and its audience via the work of time. Lyric conventions of addresser and addressee are the working through on the level of literary genre of the function of linguistic shifters.


[...] First person expression in lyric is related existentially to the context of the poem as a whole; it is the poem that makes first-person expression emerge in its individuality as it engages the reader in the eidetic task of the appearance of the "you." The doubled "I" (authorial intention the expression of first person voice in the text) encounters a doubled "you" (the reader's intention towards reception, the implied addressee in the text).
-Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 46-7.

For what it's worth, I can only agree with everything here, and not just the importance of "intersubjective inventions," over the fashionably oversimple equation of pain with the body, as she nicely puts it, but the unbelievable displacement of the conflict within lyric from a tired opposition (which Wordsworth himself often uses, lacking--unlike Coleridge--a sophisticated critical language to express the deeper things his poetry is indeed up to) to one that is not only more problematic and fresh but, as you can see from where the discussion goes, much more (again, to echo my last post) intuitive. The line on the lyric genre that summarizes this is just unbelievable.

Notes on what literary theory does

Tuesday I sat down with other people to discuss literary theory (which, remember, is not critical theory) with one of our more prominent professors. I agreed a lot with what he had to say--and even more with the jovial way he said it, with genuine seriousness appended as he focused on describing how using literary theory feels. I share some of my notes here, however, because regardless of agreement they offer at least another perspective on what to do with literary theory--or rather, what it's good for--at this stage in the game.

He began by saying that the age where you had to be either for or against theory has completely passed (and this, I'll just say, is certainly true: it might be the case elsewhere that people are trying to breathe life into theory, but we're here all more focused on what you do with it now that it's over, or how you restructure things around a new and more interesting situation). Surely no one has to do it. But, then, he also stressed that in a way no one in an English department was really ever a full blown theorist to begin with--nobody ever really did it. Northrop Frye-like figures were indeed theorists, because they ultimately gave up reading to work out the system. Philosophers might be called theorists because they don't usually bring to bear what they have to say on literature. But for everyone else, in literature, it's always a matter of practical criticism, usually, or judgment and analysis--reading. Why? Because theory is not a method, he said: it gives you insight, in a way that he came back to explain, but it isn't something you can apply. So basically even in the heyday of theory people wrote practical criticism that was "in favor of having some theory" as he put it (and I'd agree, except that I'd also add the crucial missing link: when we do think we're theorists, we're really only doing methodology, and I'd try to see that perhaps as an opportunity, or as perhaps implying no only).

Literary theory usually can't be applied because it is more formative than a method: it sort of changes your whole tack towards an issue. Or allows you to grasp it at a certain angle. But the timeframe here is huge. You really get a theory over the span of a year, or something like that, he said. On that note, he said always to read the primary texts. Never read intros. And he blasted Terry Eagleton in the same way I did not so long ago: Eagleton just turns the theorist into a caricature... one after another after another. And this should not be an introduction to any of them, because it's not the primary text. Read the primary, even if you don't understand it, he said.

He used the example of Lévi-Strauss. He wrote a book on film based on Lévi-Strauss and myth. But it wasn't any sort of application. He just thought Lévi-Strauss' sense that a myth was the resolution of a social conflict was interesting. And then watching films, he started to see these sorts of figures and scenes--representations, mini-narratives--repeating themselves. Like the lone ranger riding into the sunset. Why does this occur? He took it as a myth--but by then it had already been quite a long time, and the theory was bent, as it were, so that it really didn't quite resemble where it came from. On this point, he said he didn't in fact cite Lévi-Strauss anywhere except footnotes. The best theory, he thought, was this sort of absorption of the theorist to that point... not to the point that you can rattle off his or her whole "system," and articulate how your project fits into that system, but in terms of having consumed and integrated it all and made it come out the other side, as it were, as something else, something bearing upon your object, or such that your object's fate is its fate in some mysterious way, back across the gap that the theory has since traveled. He told a story of using Marcel Mauss and then some anthropologists admiring how he did it--and he going away with some minor minor sense that he had altered a little bit of anthropology by just pulling it off. It wasn't that he used Mauss right out. It's just that he saw a problem where Mauss would be good to bring up--and the anthropologists like it, precisely because it's never something they would have done with him and probably should never have done. The disciplinary issues then were coming up: he said you shouldn't think of using a theorist as interdisciplinary work so much as the opposite, something like differentiating-disciplinary work. You show the specificity of your discipline with what you do with the others.

But back to theory, via this: he basically had the myth example and then an example with deconstruction. In the first, this was an example where he found the theory useful. In the second, he found something like a dissatisfaction with an aspect of the theory, as it was philosophically being articulated and of course picked up at Yale etc. It's "elegant pessimism"--a phrase I loved--especially at the end of whatever narrative it is reconstructing. Anyway, so he brought the theory to bear on a particular object (basically the double inscription of the mystery text in less genre-specific work), and this actually was to address a theoretical incapacity. Again, the terms in which this was done were not pure, were not theoretical--they were trying to "have some theory," or have some more coherent, interesting theory--to make an intervention through his object and its dynamics. Now, as far as technical terms go, he's for using them, but also for thinking of similar sorts of words that might cue up something like the theoretical framework, but which really bear more on your project. It's almost as if he is for writing a project where you use a vocabulary that, if you didn't really cite that theorist in footnotes, people might accuse you of ripping her or him off, or, say, thinking you were onto something original when it was exactly what Heidegger, for example, said. He wants you to toe that line, because it makes you think first and foremost about your project, not the theory, and articulate everything in a vocabulary nuanced enough to bring out your object.

Here's some quotes: when I use theory, it doesn't sound like the theory I got it from. But on the other hand, there's a certain necessity to my use of it. Also, theory is good for skepticism, in the sense that it makes you always ask--what's the upshot of this project, and never rest content with, say, history: with a description of the history or a development only. Also, find the person who is doing what you don't want to do, either as a theorist or on the project level. You'll run into them somewhere, and when you do, you will finally probably know what you want to to, because you ran into her or him when you didn't know you didn't want to do it that way so very very viscerally.

Ultimately, he concluded that theory was a good way of "seeing the consequences" of a thought. It was a little vague what this meant, though I thought it similar to the notion of the theory ceiling which I worked out a while ago, though taken in a more positive way in terms of what the ceiling or cap produces for you. I gathered what he meant in particular, though, was that you pick up a theory and follow it at a specific stage in your argument because it forces you to stop taking for granted the story you're telling and push it towards the level of upshots, payoffs--assuming, however, the theory has been sort of internalized in the way described above. The moment of theory, I took him to say, and to be theoretical, was a moment of negation, of that closure Jameson (and Greimas) talks about: you push the argument forward and then allow it to enter another series of moves, a series where perhaps another different theorist/theory might be useful. I said I was finding Jameson's eclecticism wonderful--and he said this was a sort of extreme (in that you are sort of carpetbombed with theories), but also a pretty exact, example of what he liked, where the theory is still subordinate to the matter at hand at the same time as it also is not applied, and carries argumentative force by forcing some closure, some coimplication of the object's fate and the theory's fate.

This, I'll just say in conclusion (and as a way of working a post I promised a while ago into all this) is why we don't think up the idea ourselves: literary theory is often accused of just culling together other great ideas. But, first, we transform those ideas, according to what I said above, and we show how they work, what they feel like in use. Second, we turn to these other ideas in the first place because they do argumentative work through this transformation above and beyond the analysis we're already doing, work that we don't think we should be doing alone since (like I say in the post on the theory ceiling) it is on a more general level. This means taking thinkers into a realm which used to be called aesthetic--but, since Coleridge, who first did this seriously, really can't be considered such, as this makes the issues only philosophical. I doubt many philosophers feel their work is too small in scope or in import, but this is what literary theory says is the case especially as their work bears upon art (and I tend to agree with this notion, though perhaps not for the same reasons). And it bears repeating that this doesn't mean a widening of issues into some conceptual jungle--philosophers know first and foremost how changing a framework can produce a slimmer, more focused set of problems. Perhaps this change is put best, though, if we say it's a matter of opening up the analysis of art to other areas than philosophy, seeing art as not only a philosophical problem. And we do this alongside what we also primarily do, which is refuse to see art solely as a problem of appreciation. We also perform this alongside literary history, which is another way to accomplish the dissolution of aesthetics.

I should also note this doesn't preclude some dismissal of the arguments and the texts that make up aesthetics (as I think some people sometimes believe): theorists study aesthetics very hard, but just refuse to use the texts in that limited way. One can justify this more positively with a reference to the importance of language over sense and perception, but, with my sympathies to phenomenology (including Derrida, though this might seem paradoxical unless you actually understand these people--and stop listening to the Yale school deconstructionists), I've never felt the need to do so.

Coleridge and theory

I know it is common for the literary theorist to look for precursors to literary theory. And I usually am one to hesitate before doing so: I don't like to call Plato a literary theorist, because, quite frankly, I'm still not sure whether we can even call him a philosopher of art. Nevertheless, I think it is important that we recognize how what Coleridge does--particularly in the Biographia Literaria--resembles literary theory. Not because this shows theory as such has been around for a while, but only because it shows that what Coleridge expressly does not do might have some affinity with what theory opposes.

For what Coleridge does not do is what he says Wordsworth does in the "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads and in his remarks on literature generally.

Recall that the Biographia begins with an account of Coleridge's life, and how his literary opinions are generally shaped, with a view to making some remarks about the proper place of meter in poetry and poetic diction in specific passages of poetry--remarks that indeed challenge, and attempt to correct, Wordsworth's views, through a distinction between fancy and imagination. But in order to do this, Coleridge must take a detour into the history of philosophy, looking particularly at 17th and 18th century theories of associationism, and overthrowing them using the idealism of Kant. Why? Because,

it was Mr. Wordsworth's purpose to consider the influences of fancy and imagination as they are manifested in poetry, and from the different effects to conclude their diversity in kind; while it is my object to investigate the seminal principle, and then from the kind to deduce the degree. My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift themselves above ground, and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness.
-Biographia Literaria, IV.

In other words, the general task is to come to similar conclusions to Wordsworth's about the role of art in general, conclusions which rely upon and effectively bring about a distinction between something like fancy and something like imagination. Coleridge will do this, though by searching for principles and making this distinction explicit.

For Wordsworth, it is sufficient to look at poetic effects, and "conclude their diversity in kind:" that is, it is enough to categorize poetic activity based on his immediate perception of poetic effects into two general spheres. The result of this is that he makes a distinction but does not bring it to the fore. In other words, Wordsworth can be talking about something like fancy and something like imagination, but no one would really know: the opinions are grounded in the particular standpoint he has towards the poems and poetry, which is ultimately individual, subjective. Thus the source for what he has to say about the nature of poetry in general does not come from any argument: very much like Shelley in his Defense, statements like "The end of Poetry is to produce excitement in co-existence with an overbalance of pleasure" are not based on any logic which can be reasoned out by another reader--we have to either accept them or reject them.

Coleridge, on the other hand, will talk about these poetic effects as resulting from various principles or reasons. The fancy and the imagination are these reasons, roughly put--this is why the distinction is so crucial. Like Edward Young's "originality," they are concepts that do not merely gather together poetic effects, or express a view upon poetry, but try to reveal poetry's origin in something we can all reason out. To this extent, they are not in any particular poem or prose work--this is why people (especially not schooled in the 18th century, which develops, step by step until German Romanticism, precisely this sort of critical concept) have such a tough time with them. Fancy, then, remains something more like an explanatory hypothesis than even a category of poetic effect (one can see that what Coleridge then is criticizing in Wordworth is precisely what ties him to an increasingly antiquated notion of rhetoric--that is, the notion of figural language as the production of effects).

So here is the first similarity between Coleridge and literary theorists: they both make the manifestation of some critical concept in a particular text unnecessary. Or, to put it the other way around, they do not look at poetry, say, for what is manifested in it--they don't make their points by grouping together certain aspects of the text which manifest themselves.

We just said that fancy and imagination are more explanatory hypotheses than terms used to point to what the text manifests. At the same time, they still more than merely hypotheses: they are derived from general philosophical principles--Coleridge eventually grounds it in metaphysics. Thus we can't say that the principles try to explain an aesthetic object, say. In other words, we might expect that outlining principles about an artistic object (poetry) would confine the principles themselves to the sphere delimited by the scope of their object, which here would be art--this is what it means for Coleridge's principles to be considered as explanatory hypotheses. But we must reject even this: Coleridge is not doing aesthetics, but is bringing metaphysics to bear upon texts.

This is the second similarity: theory resists confining itself to aesthetics, or a philosophical discourse upon art. It might seem like an obvious point, but it frustrates people constantly. For now the theoretical notion, like the Coleridgian notion of fancy or imagination, has no where to go: barred from resting in the realm of notions that group together textual effects or the manifestation of art, it also cannot become a general statement about the nature of art, which would account for the manifestations in another direction.

Thus Coleridge, like theorists, engages in philosophical activity but does not turn this activity into a set of statements about art. The extended passages on associationism and the grounding of the imagination and fancy in metaphysics indeed try to get at the "seminal principle," but the principle is ultimately a metaphysical notion with theological and ethical implications.

It may sound like there is also a problem emerging: by what right do philosophical (or semi-philosophical) statements come to bear directly upon poetry? It seems as if there is a shortcut here from one discourse to another, while the discourse proper to the consideration of literature (looking at what the text manifests) is done away with or at least set aside. Coleridge and theorists would reply--this is exactly the point. For what both oppose is stability we grant to the way poetry manifests itself, and on the other hand the stability we grant to the nature of art: the instability on the one side undoes the stability of the other.