Dick Minim

I reread today Johnson's amazing satire of critics, the hilarious narrative of Dick Minim in Idler 60. I forgot that Johnson ridicules what I think we all hate (or should hate) about reading poetry but still succumb to even today: the tendency to not only find the sound echoing the sense, but also the deeper tendency to see the lines as celebrating (as it were) the fact of their own composition--which makes them precisely about what the critic with his "skill" can make evident for you. In other words, Johnson shows us the way critics can read for their own self-aggrandizement by passing this off as precisely the "meaning" of the lines:

...He [Minim] is the great investigator of hidden beauties, and is particularly delighted when he finds "the sound an echo to the sense." He has read all our poets with particular attention to this delicacy of versification, and wonders at the supineness with which their works have been hitherto perused, so that no man has found the sound of a drum in this distich,

When pulpit, drum ecclesiastic,
Was beat with fist instead of a stick;

and that the wonderful lines upon honour and a bubble have hitherto passed without notice,

Honour is like the glassy bubble,
Which costs philosophers such trouble,
Where one part crack'd, the whole does fly,
And wits are crack'd to find out why.

In these verses, says Minim, we have two striking accommodations of the sound to the sense. It is impossible to utter the two lines emphatically without an act like that which they describe; bubble and trouble causing a momentary inflation of the cheeks by the retention of the breath, which is afterwards forcibly emitted, as in the practice of blowing bubbles. But the greatest excellence is in the third line, which is crack'd in the middle to express a crack, and then shivers into monosyllables. Yet has this diamond lain neglected with common stones, and among the innumerable admirers of Hudibras the observation of this superlative passage has been reserved for the sagacity of Minim.

Raymond Williams on "Sesame Street"

Certain forms have evolved within the conventions of current television programming. In American television, with its extraordinarily short units and as it were involuntary sequences, mainly determined by commercials, there have been such interesting innovations as Laugh In, Sesame Street and The Electric Company. The comic effects of fast-moving disconnection, using many of the local techniques of commercials and trailers, made Laugh In in its early years a fascinating example of an effective form created out of a deformation. In Britain, in a different way, Monty Python's Flying Circus developed new kinds of visual joke out of standard television conventions, by simply altering the tone and perspective. Sesame Street is perhaps a different case. It has been said that it uses the techniques of commercials for education. Yet this is a doubtful description. Many of the technical possibilities for mobility of every kind were were first exploited, at a popular level, for commercials, and have no necessary connection with that kind of simplified selling. Some of the best mobility of Sesame Street and The Electric Company is a way not only of responding to a highly mobile society but of responding in some depth, since the central continuities, within the fast-moving sequences, relate not only to planned teaching but to a kind of eager openness, a sympathetic curiosity, which is perhaps a truer social use of some of the intrinsic properties of television than any of the more fixed and confirming social forms.
-Television, 74-5.

All I can say is that this is the most proper viewpoint from which to analyze this show. Despite its age (1974) the analysis still seems more relevant now than the recent discussions we have seen in the news of the show (since its first couple of years recently got released on DVD)... and I am generally one to think that more familiarity with a medium or emerging form produces better consciousness of it...

Impossible words

I am finding it almost impossible to use the following words, which get bandied about in discussions of literature continually, with any control--that is, with any sense of what they mean as opposed to what they don't mean:

theory
methodology
critical
reading
form
figure
trope
practice
discourse
narrative
irony
rhetoric
metaphor
feeling
style

I could go on, but these are the big ones. "Theory" has to be the worst by far. Every sentence I write about "theory" I immediately regret, because I know the term can mean basically anything. Everyone will not only hear it differently, but also be equally in the dark as to what it means: the word survives by not being questioned. How we can talk at all with all these placeholders seems to me amazing. No wonder people like to talk about meter and octets and sestets on the one hand, or political tracts and historical documents on the other: these things are definite, and actually refer to something.

My feeling is that de Man had a lot to do with the expansion of these terms in recent decades into things that practically don't signify at all. If you look at his use of irony, you are led to ask, how can the term exclude anything? "The Return to Philology" is perhaps the most equivocal use of "philology," and with that, "reading," that I can think of. But the New Critics also introduced these things: "irony" there also can signify "tension" of any kind. "Metaphor" is also particularly bad (when Richards used this term, on the other hand, he meant something extremely precise about it: whenever it was used on a larger level than that of a particular syntactic operation in a sentence--I am avoiding the words "rhetorical" and "figure" here--it referred to a particular linguistic structure of cognition).

A willingness to use terminology: is that too much to ask for? Maybe it is all those hours spent in philosophy classrooms coming back, but why this reluctance to have a somewhat standardized vocabulary? Narratology had one and the results are amazing, given the immense complexity of the object. Actual standardization is probably not possible--and actually it is, I think, a merit specific to the literature department that it is able to get by and resist this standardization: it is amazing (as I said above) in this sense as well, because it reveals a will to talk that is powerful and productive. But some willingness to stop and consider the vagueness involved might be handy--that's all I'm saying. In other words, after a sentence is uttered involving the word "theory," it would be nice to hear more often the question: "Wait. What do you mean exactly by 'theory?'" This is of course something people say a lot, but writing some papers lately brought it home to me.