For some reason I've been absolutely addicted to audiobooks lately. It started with Tristram Shandy, which I was rereading but realized I didn't quite have the time to go all the way through again. Then I stumbled upon Peter Barker's unbeleviably excellent recording. It is ridiculously inexpensive ($7!!!), since it is in the (still excellent) "Great Literary Classics" series made by the Royal National Institute for the Blind, but that's not only why you should check it out. I generally am suspicious of the full-on dramatization in the reading of literary texts, or the playing up of characters at the expense of something like a narrative voice (I don't speak here of actual dramatizations, which are quite amazing alternatives to TV or Film adaptations--I'll recommend a couple below). Except in some very special cases--namely, the indescribably wonderful readings of Harry Potter by the inimitable Stephen Fry, and what is (to me) simply the most hilariously absurd satire ever written, Wigfield, by Stephen Colbert, Amy Sedaris, and Paul Dinello--because I am a literary critic, I want the tonelessness of the page (or, rather, its multiple tonalities) somewhat available to me at all times, and that is the first thing to go when this sort of thing happens. But if there is any one text that repays this sort of work, it is Tristram, since the text itself is already cut up so much into so many voices that it becomes almost impossible to read silently straight through. In short, much is actually lost in the silence, and Barker brings it all (and more) back. It feels like a different book, in all the best ways--and is all the more hilarious. All the other recordings of Shandy, as well, don't even compare with this one (though looking at them all, you can see Sterne has had a better audio fate than other authors).
I have been looking for the best Austen recording lately, but I'm still not satisfied with what is out there. I will venture to say the "Great Literary Classics" Emma by Richard Baker isn't bad, Anne Flosnik's is somewhat better, while the Juliet Stevenson's Emma is the best. Fascinatingly, Jeremy Northam who played Knightly in the popular Paltrow movie adaptation, reads a version which is actually really, really good--though abridged (blech!). I will say Flo Gibson's Pride and Prejudice is a little too quick for me--you don't get the unbelievable balance (or telling imbalance) of Austen's prose when you go that quick.
But all that is prose. It's quite a different thing to listen to poetry--and not just in a live reading, but in a recorded version. For, strangely, the temptation is even greater here to work up these wonderful lines into something like drama, which makes them fall so very flat for me: take, for example, Ian McKellen's Ancient Mariner, which--sad to say, since he has of course one of the most amazing voices around--is so overdone (unlike, however, McKellen's wonderfully quick, sprightly rendition of Robert Fagle's quirky Odyssey). The BBC's recent adaptation of Wordsworth's "Two-Part" Prelude which--with its interesting sound effects and music--is a bit more effective, but again dulls the poetry. Anton Lesser's Milton (the most recent BBC recording of Paradise Lost, as well as Regained and many of the other poems for Naxos) so ov-er-em-pha-sizes-every syl-able that all rhythm is murdered--though he occasionally produces some unbelievably sublime moments. But, just to be clear, it isn't dramatization as such that is really the problem: the dramatizations of Austen by the BBC are really wonderful, and so is the recent Maltese Falcon with Tom Wilkinson--which is really, really, really good. And of course Shakespeare is meant to be heard on a stage--not on the page. But with certain bits of poetry, or perhaps certain forms of poetry, a certain space opens up in between drama and silent reading which is problematic--and in which, at least for me, it is better to err by moving away from drama.
This all said, it will be no suprise that I was again suprised to find myself getting quite addicted to Ralph Cosham's absolutely excellent recording of Paradise Lost. It is of course just another aspect of my Milton-mania over the last few weeks (not just because of--again I'll mention them, they are that good--John Rogers' lectures which I have been enjoying, but also because some bits in my research have taken me back to Milton [Paradise Regained might have some part in my diss], whom I haven't read in a few years). But the recordings are so good because they hit exactly the sort of open tone or antitone I think is excellent. His reserved, controlled approach--perhaps too reserved for prose--is actually extremely well suited to capturing Milton's prosodic pyrotechnics, and I really recommend this version over every other one: what's so essential--though there is a lot of literature on this (Robert Pinsky, to take the most recognized example, writes well on the demands of reading aloud and promotes it tirelessly)--is that the rhythms of verse produce the drama first and foremost, and Cosham nails this. Also exellent are any of Derek Jacobi's recordings.
I should add as a footnote to all this that it is an extremely tough thing to read any book aloud with any amount of talent--as anyone who has been in a literature class, and listened to our plain, shy, amateur attempts to just sound out the thing to get a grip on it knows. This is especially the case with poetry, which sounds so flat so easily... Nearly every reading from the Naxos Great Poets series is excellent.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Language
I am rereading Frances Ferguson's excellent early work, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (1977). I remember the following statement well, though, not only because it is the first, most concise articulation of a position that will run through the rest of Ferguson's work, but also because I have always thought it the most sensible and most demanding of any possible position. In other words, I have--when push comes to shove--always come back and stuck to the approach it outlines:
The recent re-examination of literary language which has flourished increasingly in criticism is an attempt to articulate the implication of the statement that all literature is necessary linguistic. Yet this very preoccupation with language, which heuristically substitutes an interest in linguistic process for an interest in literary content (mythic, thematic, psychological), can itself become a rehearsal of pat answers and artificially persistent mysteries when "language" is taken as an absolute. The paradox that language is both the most familiar and the ultimately unknown element in any individual's experience seems overwhelming until we recognize once again that literary texts not only postpone but also mock whatever éblouissement the paradox inspires. Thus, this study anchors itself in texts--not because the text has iconic absoluteness but because the text is there to be read, and the reading itself can alone demonstrate the legitimacy of speaking as though any literary work reveals a consciousness of language and a simultaneous consciousness of its erosion of a mythically exalted status for language.
-Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit, 2-3.
Remember this was said in 1977, at the height of what would be called, outside literature departments, "the linguistic turn." In other words it underscores what some people outside the discipline--as Tim Morton nicely puts it in a nice recent interview (and indeed Ferguson is talking about structuralism)--don't seem to understand in their (justified) backlash against postmodern excess (which it is misleading to heap on literature departments): language in some absolute sense was and is never, seriously, that big of a deal for most literary critics. Dealing mostly with words, sentences, meters, styles, plots, forms, genres, and other concrete things (over which we have an unparalleled, yet teachable mastery), what we know of languge is something abstract--not absolute. Absolutized, literary critics would never know what to do with it! How could we? The only people who did do this--those around de Man and some of the other star figures of yesteryear--were and are (and they merit this, though the suspicion is not always for the right reason) suspect throughout the discipline precisely for being so vague, and often treating the texts we read as props for something larger--and, let's just be frank, much less interesting. But Ferguson's suspicion towards the exaltation or absolutization of "language" is not the only thing or the main thing that I have found so useful here: the last sentence is in fact perhaps the most important, and is what makes the position both more positive and indeed most demanding, as I said above. What characterizes reading critically is this speaking "as though," which requires engagement with or a test of the text to be read--and not in any way that would (Wimsatt-like) absolutize this latter beyond the bounds of the test. What's more, to think of reading in this way is actually (like Ferguson does: the author of Solitude and the Sublime and Pornography, the Theory is certainly not anti-theory at all) to believe in and promote theorizing--not to reject it--for this is one way the "as though" can be refined (the "something larger" can be helpful and, depending on how it is developed, further concretize the often ambiguous operations involved in reading, though it is not really related to reading in the sense developed here--and indeed de Man can be extremely helpful). I might recall also a comment of one of my professors with which Ferguson's seems to resonate (and which I more and more agree with), even though he is looking backward at precisely the time she is writing this: as readers of literature, we never really were theorists but readers who hoped, who believed in, the possibility of theory--who were (and still are) in favor of having some theory.
The recent re-examination of literary language which has flourished increasingly in criticism is an attempt to articulate the implication of the statement that all literature is necessary linguistic. Yet this very preoccupation with language, which heuristically substitutes an interest in linguistic process for an interest in literary content (mythic, thematic, psychological), can itself become a rehearsal of pat answers and artificially persistent mysteries when "language" is taken as an absolute. The paradox that language is both the most familiar and the ultimately unknown element in any individual's experience seems overwhelming until we recognize once again that literary texts not only postpone but also mock whatever éblouissement the paradox inspires. Thus, this study anchors itself in texts--not because the text has iconic absoluteness but because the text is there to be read, and the reading itself can alone demonstrate the legitimacy of speaking as though any literary work reveals a consciousness of language and a simultaneous consciousness of its erosion of a mythically exalted status for language.
-Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit, 2-3.
Remember this was said in 1977, at the height of what would be called, outside literature departments, "the linguistic turn." In other words it underscores what some people outside the discipline--as Tim Morton nicely puts it in a nice recent interview (and indeed Ferguson is talking about structuralism)--don't seem to understand in their (justified) backlash against postmodern excess (which it is misleading to heap on literature departments): language in some absolute sense was and is never, seriously, that big of a deal for most literary critics. Dealing mostly with words, sentences, meters, styles, plots, forms, genres, and other concrete things (over which we have an unparalleled, yet teachable mastery), what we know of languge is something abstract--not absolute. Absolutized, literary critics would never know what to do with it! How could we? The only people who did do this--those around de Man and some of the other star figures of yesteryear--were and are (and they merit this, though the suspicion is not always for the right reason) suspect throughout the discipline precisely for being so vague, and often treating the texts we read as props for something larger--and, let's just be frank, much less interesting. But Ferguson's suspicion towards the exaltation or absolutization of "language" is not the only thing or the main thing that I have found so useful here: the last sentence is in fact perhaps the most important, and is what makes the position both more positive and indeed most demanding, as I said above. What characterizes reading critically is this speaking "as though," which requires engagement with or a test of the text to be read--and not in any way that would (Wimsatt-like) absolutize this latter beyond the bounds of the test. What's more, to think of reading in this way is actually (like Ferguson does: the author of Solitude and the Sublime and Pornography, the Theory is certainly not anti-theory at all) to believe in and promote theorizing--not to reject it--for this is one way the "as though" can be refined (the "something larger" can be helpful and, depending on how it is developed, further concretize the often ambiguous operations involved in reading, though it is not really related to reading in the sense developed here--and indeed de Man can be extremely helpful). I might recall also a comment of one of my professors with which Ferguson's seems to resonate (and which I more and more agree with), even though he is looking backward at precisely the time she is writing this: as readers of literature, we never really were theorists but readers who hoped, who believed in, the possibility of theory--who were (and still are) in favor of having some theory.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Empson on Smart
I'm not particularly fond of William Empson--especially the early work, which many people not overfond of him (fewer than you might think) are willing to admit isn't as good as the looser, wilder, later stuff--but at certain times his eye, his ear, his strident way of characterizing what is going on in a poem is indispensable, even if misguided. He produces "strong readings" of the minutest details--if I can say that, the oxymoron not shading too much into paradox. Take Empson too seriously--as seriously as he takes himself (he is, after all, patron saint of ambiguity, never irony--and there's something useful and refreshing about that too)--and you won't be able to get his particular emphasis on a word out of your head for years: people are still unable to escape Empson's influence in their approach to Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, even if they dismiss his tenuous jab at history via the "bare ruin'd choirs" in Seven Types of Ambiguity--it's his immense control of the mind-blowingly complex intersection between phrasing (even just the grammar), metaphor (not the leaves, but the time is the vehicle to be extended!), and form (not to mention the famous, sublime numerical puzzle of the sequence some, none, few) in the three lines prior ("That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold") that makes Empson's sort of daring on the following line possible and probable. But then, if you take him skeptically, realize that specific phrasings are elements over which we interpreters indeed have the most control, and place him beside other readings, knowing that his chief skill is in grasping the many possible active alternatives that a poet could have taken but didn't--if you realize all this, he becomes extremely enlightening, thus reduced in scope and definitiveness, though not in wit, insight, and concision (see the absolutely unbelievable "like dancing in heavy skirts," below). The problem is only that Empson in particular--but the poet more generally as he or she confronts a critic--has a way of bullying you into thinking that you never really have known much about the small-scale inner workings of language, but have only moved at some higher, less concrete level in your deepest scrutiny and exactest attention. Thus, we get statements like this one:
The mode of action of a double plot is the sort of thing critics are liable to neglect; it does not depend on being noticed for its operation, so is neither an easy nor an obviously useful thing to notice. [...] It is an easy-going device, often used simply to fill out a play, and has an obvious effect in the Elizabethans of making you feel the play deals with life as a whole, with any one who comes into the street the scene so often represents; this may be why criticism has not taken it seriously when it deserved to be.
-Some Versions of Pastoral, 27
The claim, really, is that there are two types of notice--and perhaps more essentially, two types of neglect. But even the most formalist sort of critic--the one who looks so often for the functional upshot of this sort of thing, how it adds to the whole--doesn't employ any different sort of gaze than the uncritical (in the descriptive sense) gaze, and doesn't have any sort of neglect that is qualitatively different than the uncritical neglect. We just look at things or don't look at things for different reasons. This doesn't mean we notice or fail to notice different things. To say otherwise is not only to commit a logical injustice, but also to be more like Richards--always supposed to be so much less sophisticated than Empson--than Richards himself: he, at least had the good sense to confer upon such perspectivized poems an objective psychological existence. And many who uncritcally (here in the perjorative sense, the sense in which it means something descriptively different) love these strong-minute readings of Empson, these "quaint opinions wide," indeed are willing to say otherwise with their hero. In short, most good statements about literature in general precisely involve the sort of neglect or semi-notice that Empson says the critic always misses, too busy murdering to dissect (here in more way than one: what's faulted is--just to be clear--a lack of attention that does not, Empson assumes, allow any subsequent notice, when his gaze will, when not noticing, at least admit the feature in question). What's not noticed here, indeed, is that criticism precisely tries to talk about this "dim and undetermined sense," and moves from it--and much more often than the non-critical, I'll add--to its statements. In short, as usual, it's a straw man here: the non-critic or the uncritic or even the poet simply is using the same gaze, and has the same dim appreciation--which is no less able to be worked up into notice--of the double plot. But why this is particularly offensive--why it would just have to be otherwise, with a difference in kind--I'll never quite understand: indeed, there are different kinds of experience involved in creation or enjoyment as opposed to analysis, but experience is something different than attention, and it is criticism that allows us to actually reinforce the connection between the two, rather than crudely assert and reassert their identity.
Nevertheless, you want Empson to say these sorts of things, as they foster his deep sense of the internal workings of the poem, and spur him on to stronger and stronger readings. It's just that you have to brush these "bland words" away--along with the tired general sentiment to which it gives voice.
So with that said, I have no qualms of just quoting another--this time brilliant--bit from Some Versions of Pastoral, where Empson is, if not right, then attuned to something really excellent about Christopher Smart's (amazing, as with all of Smart's works) Song to David in his chapter on (or about, or around) Marvell and what he calls "the Orpheus idea, that by delight in Nature when terrible man gains strength to control it":
This grand theme too has a root in magic; it is an important version of the idea of the man powerful because he has included everything in himself, is still strong, one would think, among the mountain climbers and often the scientists, and deserves a few examples here. I call it the idea of the Hymn to David though being hidden behind the religious one it is nowhere overtly stated, except perhaps in the line
Praise above all, for praise prevails.
David is a case of Orpheus-like behavior because his music restrained the madness of Saul.
His furious foes no more maligned
When he such melody divined,
And sense and soul detained;
By divining--intuiting--the harmony behind the universe he "makes it divine," rather as to discover a law of nature is to "give nature laws," and this restrains the madman who embodies the unruled forces o nature from killing him. The main argument of the verses describing nature (or nature as described by David) is that the violence of Nature is an expression of her adoration of God, and therefore that the man of prayer who also adores God delights in it and can control it.
Strong the gier eagle on his sail
Strong against tide, th' enormous whale
Emerges, as he goes.
But stronger still, in earth or air
Or in the sea, the man of prayer
And far beneath the tide.
The feeling is chiefly carried by the sound; long Latin words are packed into the short lines against a short one-syllable rhyming word full of consonants; it is like dancing in heavy skirts; he juggles with the whole cumbrous complexity of the world.
-Some Versions of Pastoral, 120-1.
The mode of action of a double plot is the sort of thing critics are liable to neglect; it does not depend on being noticed for its operation, so is neither an easy nor an obviously useful thing to notice. [...] It is an easy-going device, often used simply to fill out a play, and has an obvious effect in the Elizabethans of making you feel the play deals with life as a whole, with any one who comes into the street the scene so often represents; this may be why criticism has not taken it seriously when it deserved to be.
-Some Versions of Pastoral, 27
The claim, really, is that there are two types of notice--and perhaps more essentially, two types of neglect. But even the most formalist sort of critic--the one who looks so often for the functional upshot of this sort of thing, how it adds to the whole--doesn't employ any different sort of gaze than the uncritical (in the descriptive sense) gaze, and doesn't have any sort of neglect that is qualitatively different than the uncritical neglect. We just look at things or don't look at things for different reasons. This doesn't mean we notice or fail to notice different things. To say otherwise is not only to commit a logical injustice, but also to be more like Richards--always supposed to be so much less sophisticated than Empson--than Richards himself: he, at least had the good sense to confer upon such perspectivized poems an objective psychological existence. And many who uncritcally (here in the perjorative sense, the sense in which it means something descriptively different) love these strong-minute readings of Empson, these "quaint opinions wide," indeed are willing to say otherwise with their hero. In short, most good statements about literature in general precisely involve the sort of neglect or semi-notice that Empson says the critic always misses, too busy murdering to dissect (here in more way than one: what's faulted is--just to be clear--a lack of attention that does not, Empson assumes, allow any subsequent notice, when his gaze will, when not noticing, at least admit the feature in question). What's not noticed here, indeed, is that criticism precisely tries to talk about this "dim and undetermined sense," and moves from it--and much more often than the non-critical, I'll add--to its statements. In short, as usual, it's a straw man here: the non-critic or the uncritic or even the poet simply is using the same gaze, and has the same dim appreciation--which is no less able to be worked up into notice--of the double plot. But why this is particularly offensive--why it would just have to be otherwise, with a difference in kind--I'll never quite understand: indeed, there are different kinds of experience involved in creation or enjoyment as opposed to analysis, but experience is something different than attention, and it is criticism that allows us to actually reinforce the connection between the two, rather than crudely assert and reassert their identity.
Nevertheless, you want Empson to say these sorts of things, as they foster his deep sense of the internal workings of the poem, and spur him on to stronger and stronger readings. It's just that you have to brush these "bland words" away--along with the tired general sentiment to which it gives voice.
So with that said, I have no qualms of just quoting another--this time brilliant--bit from Some Versions of Pastoral, where Empson is, if not right, then attuned to something really excellent about Christopher Smart's (amazing, as with all of Smart's works) Song to David in his chapter on (or about, or around) Marvell and what he calls "the Orpheus idea, that by delight in Nature when terrible man gains strength to control it":
This grand theme too has a root in magic; it is an important version of the idea of the man powerful because he has included everything in himself, is still strong, one would think, among the mountain climbers and often the scientists, and deserves a few examples here. I call it the idea of the Hymn to David though being hidden behind the religious one it is nowhere overtly stated, except perhaps in the line
Praise above all, for praise prevails.
David is a case of Orpheus-like behavior because his music restrained the madness of Saul.
His furious foes no more maligned
When he such melody divined,
And sense and soul detained;
By divining--intuiting--the harmony behind the universe he "makes it divine," rather as to discover a law of nature is to "give nature laws," and this restrains the madman who embodies the unruled forces o nature from killing him. The main argument of the verses describing nature (or nature as described by David) is that the violence of Nature is an expression of her adoration of God, and therefore that the man of prayer who also adores God delights in it and can control it.
Strong the gier eagle on his sail
Strong against tide, th' enormous whale
Emerges, as he goes.
But stronger still, in earth or air
Or in the sea, the man of prayer
And far beneath the tide.
The feeling is chiefly carried by the sound; long Latin words are packed into the short lines against a short one-syllable rhyming word full of consonants; it is like dancing in heavy skirts; he juggles with the whole cumbrous complexity of the world.
-Some Versions of Pastoral, 120-1.
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