Followers

23 November 2014

Thinking in Literature


What makes the question of "thinking in literature" arise? No doubt the traditional answer still carries weight: Plato gave the poet his once and future identity by making him (if "him" is the word) a philosophical outcast. Impersonators, image-makers, and storytellers are incompatible with a just and rational state over which the philosopher presides as "the guardian of rationality."[1] But it was as such a guardian that Aristotle reconceptualized poetry so as to find a place for it within his own teachings. The concepts of mimesis and plot show that poetry is a kind of knowledge and that it hangs together consecutively -- has, in some sense, a logic that makes it at least a subsidiary of the philosopher's corporation (Poetics, 1451-52).
One shortfall of this line of thinking is that it reduces literature to its narrative form and thus brackets much of what is original and compelling about literary modernism, principally its experiments with language (recall the way Aristotle brushes aside lexis as a thing of small importance). The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé's canonical argument is that a poem is made of words but not of any of the things we use words to produce -- concepts, propositions, narratives, expressions of feeling.[2] Imagine literature, not as a form of mediation on behalf of something outside itself, but as material artifact on the model of Flaubert's
book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support, a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible.[3]
Think of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a book held together by its "once current puns, quashed quotatoes, messes of mottage," and further words to that effect.[4]
For most philosophers, however, the Aristotelian reduction to narrative is a small price to pay for literature's justification (or for philosophy's jurisdiction). Thus Alasdair MacIntyre thinks the "quest narrative" provides an image of the good life that each of us, even philosophers, can internalize.[5] Meanwhile, Martha Nussbaum defends the novel as a practice and not just an analogue of moral philosophy because it shows us how moral agents act when principles and rules no longer match the complex particulars of human situations.[6] For D. Z. Phillips, taking inspiration from Wittgenstein and Peter Winch, the novel is a form of thinking with examples rather than with concepts.[7] And for Paul Ricoeur narrative is the medium of self-knowledge and even self-formation -- a philosophical project that the modernist text (James Joyce'sUlysses, for example) subverts with its turn toward formal complexity and the materiality of écriture.[8]
Anthony Uhlmann's Thinking in Literature is squarely in this Aristotelian tradition. Uhlmann wants to redeem literary modernism by showing "how the Modernist novel might be understood as a machine for thinking, and further how it might offer a means of coming to terms with what it means to think" (p. 3). This means "getting beyond words" (p. 12) and addressing the novels of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov in terms of concepts derived from Spinoza and Leibniz -- "relation," "sensation," and "composition." Not surprisingly, Uhlmann updates these concepts with the help of Gilles Deleuze's studies of Spinoza and Leibniz, such that the concept of relation, for example, becomes useful with respect to art because it involves "a kind of linking or connection that proceeds across gaps, urging flashes of insight to emerge, to speak from ourselves to the mute tableau, as a lightening flash leaps from the sky to the ground, or a signal across a synapse" (p. 12). So a Cubist collage or one of Samuel Beckett's later fictions is not simply an aleatoric assembly of random particles but an example of the disjunctive logic (parataxis) of literary modernism.[9] Here, for example, is a passage from Beckett's "Worstward Ho":
First one. First try fail better one. Something there badly not wrong. No that as it is it is not bad. The no face bad. The no hands bad. The no -- . Enough. A pox on bad. Mere bad way for worse. Pending worse still. First worse. Mere worse. Pending worse still. Add a -- . Add? Never. Bow it down. Be it bowed down. Deep down. Head in hat gone. More back gone. Greatcoat cut off higher. Nothing from pelvis down. Nothing but bowed back. Topless baseless hindtrunk. Dim black. On unseen knees. In the dim void. Better worse so. Pending worse still.[10]
Moreover, the modernist work does not simply mirror reality; it constructs a possible world, one perhaps incongruous with things as they are but one which can have "real effects" upon the way we can inhabit or even alter the world as we find it (p. 27). Thinking in literature, Uhlmann writes,
involves the creation of complicated worlds; worlds that provoke us to an interpretation [which] we are asked to bring . . . into relation with our own world view; to use it in order to produce effects within our own lives; that is, to translate the complicated worlds of others from the possible worlds of fiction into what Leibniz calls our own 'clear zone': the place in which we are able to understand, or apprehend a sense of the unity that underlies the multiple (p. 31).
As in Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics, understanding a text means appropriating a possible world projected in front of the text, not grasping a reality or intention that lies behind it.[11] Map Beckett's metaphysics onto one's own and see who laughs last.
At the same time, the modernist work thinks in sensations rather than by means of concepts. Here Uhlmann, perhaps as a way of splitting the difference between Aristotle and modernism, refers us to Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? with its conception of art as the composition of disparate materials into a self-standing unity of sensations, percepts and affects:
We paint, sculpt, compose, and write with sensations. As percepts, sensations are not perceptions referring to an object (reference); if they resemble something it is with a resemblance produced by their own methods; and the smile on the canvas is made solely with colors, lines, shadow, and light. If resemblance haunts the work of art, it is because sensation refers only to its material: it is the percept or affect of the material itself, the smile of oil, the gesture of fired clay, the thrust of metal, the crouch of Romanesque stone, and the ascent of Gothic stone. The material is so varied in each case (canvas support, paint-brush or equivalent agent, color in the tube) that it is difficult to say where in fact the material ends and sensation begins; preparation of the canvas, the track of the brush's hair, and many other things besides are obviously part of the sensation.[12]
So the work is a material construction rather than a medium of expression: "The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself" (What is Philosophy?, p. 164). Its intelligibility is compositional rather than referential; it is a formal unity -- words on a page that, like Beckett's "Worstward Ho," mirrors a distinctive idiom more than a passing show. This autotelic arrangement is what splitting the difference between Aristotle and modernism comes down to. At least, in contrast to Adorno's aesthetics, some version of the classical ideal of unity is allowed to stand.[13]
Uhlmann's critical task is to bring these concepts of relation, sensation, and composition down to earth by showing their application to Joyce's Ulysses, Woolf's Waves andTo the Lighthouse, and Nabokov's early novel, Despair. On this score most readers of these novelists will find themselves on familiar ground. Thus Joyce's Ulysses is a monumental work of literary naturalism -- a montage of persons, places, and things passing the day and a good bit of the night in Dublin on June 14, 1904 -- but its details fold into one another to form an intricate network of allusions and correspondences. Uhlmann emphasizes the complexity of relations within and among the novel's characters, whose watchwords are metempsychosis and parallax: each character is a singularity who nevertheless incarnates multiple identities in a steady state of alteration as contexts accumulate and viewpoints change. "I am another now, and yet the same," says Stephen Dedalus.[14] It all depends on who happens to be regarding him at any moment, whether he himself, another character, or the reader armed with Joyce's Homeric schema.
Uhlmann locates Virginia Woolf in the artworld of Cézanne (as seen through the eyes of the Bloomsbury art critic, Roger Fry), where sensation is not an empirical concept but something like a riveting perceptual experience that one preserves and embellishes by means of composition, whether on the canvas or the page.
The moment of being Woolf describes is a moment of pure and intense sensation. It is intense because it involves the folding within of pure potential. All life, or at least a clue to its meaning, is condensed into a moment, is held within that moment. In writing one seeks to recapture such a moment or to approximate the intense sensations it produces by other means. Such a moment, however, because it is folded in, might in turn be unfolded, teased out, either in interpretation, or in the stories which surround that moment, leading up to and away from it (p. 113).
Indeed, Deleuze's fold is one of the regulating ideas of Thinking in Literature[15]―although oddly Uhlmann seems to skirt its relevance to Nabokov's Despair, which is adoppelgänger novel that folds the history of the genre into its own details of character and event. Hermann, the narrator, tells the story of his "work of art," namely a "perfect crime" in which he fashions a double of himself out of a vagrant named Felix, whom he then kills in order to collect the insurance upon his own fabricated "death." There are folds within folds within the novel, the whole of which is further folded into the foreground of Nabokov's language, which is made of puns, anagrams, and other forms of modernist wordplay. Despair (which Nabokov originally composed in his native Russian) is, among other things, a parody of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, whose hero is here identified as Rascalnikov.
Naturally the question remains: what is it that we call thinking, whether in philosophy or literature? On this subject Uhlmann seems to me a formalist whose interests are finally in how things are made rather than in what they mean. In this respect, of course, he remains a modernist in the constructivist tradition that extends from Flaubert and Mallarmé through the Russian Futurists, much of modern European and North American poetry -- and, among other forms and movements, the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or Oulipo, a group of conceptual writers that includes the French novelist Georges Perec, who once composed a three-hundred page novel without using the letter "e."[16] Indeed, the question of thinking in literature ought properly to be pursued through a study of Conceptual Art, where the understanding of an artwork, even a piece of art trouvé like one of Marcel Duchamp's Readymades, means understanding the thinking that made it happen. In a celebrated essay, "Art after Philosophy" (1969), Joseph Kosuth explains:
Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their context -- as art -- they provide no information whatsoever about any matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist's intention, that is, he is saying that a particular work of art is art, which means, is a definition of art.[17]
A final question worth posing is what happens when composition and thinking undergo a technological transformation? At work now are writers of experimental fiction like Steve Tomasula who have crossed over into the world of digital construction in which the work is made of words and images whose forms and relations change as the reader moves through the three-dimensional space in which they are suspended.[18] Digital poetics is engaged in the production of what Deleuze and Guattari would call "multiplicities" pursuing nomadic "lines of flight."[19] To be sure, against the anarchy of "open" or "chance" forms of composition, digital philosophy "insists that 'things just don't happen.'"[20] To which a conceptual artist like Sol Lewitt would reply: Of course not. "The idea [is] the machine that makes the art," Lewitt writes. "The idea itself, even if not made visual [or verbal], is as much a work of art as any finished product." One of Lewitt's monochrome paintings, or Duchamp's urinal, "is made to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye or emotions."[21]
Certainly for most philosophers the poet will always be "a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him" (Ion, 534b). Still, it is a fact that the history of poetics is a history of writings about poetry, not by philosophers or literary critics, but by poets -- Horace, Dante, Pope, Wordsworth, Mallarmé, Paul Celan: poets possessed, not by muses, but by concepts of their own invention. In which case thinking would not be something that literature contains or performs; it would be the literary thing itself.

From:  Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov Anthony Uhlmann, Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov,  Reviewed by Gerald Bruns, University of Notre Dame 

Topics already covered and to be covered next term

1) Jane Austen 1775 – 1817

2) William Blake  1757 – 1827

3) Ralph Waldo Emerson  1803 – 1882

4) Charles  Dickens 1812 – 1870 

5) Oscar Wilde 1854 – 1900

6)  World War I 1914 -1918

7) Ernest Hemingway 1899 – 1961

8)  Robert Lee Frost 1874 – 1963

9) Carl  Sandburg 1878 – 1967

10)  Vladimir Nabokov 1899- 1977

______________________________________________________________________
* John Locke   1632 – 1704

*John Stuart Mill  1806 – 1873

*Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche  1844- 1900

* Sigmund Freud  1856 – 1939

*William James  1842 – 1910

*George Orwell  1903 –1950

*Ludwig  Wittgenstein 1889 – 1951

*Leo Strauss  1899 – 1973

* George Parkin Grant  1918 – 1988

* Francis Fukuyama  1952-

09 April 2014

Dorothy Parker 1893 - 1967

Four be the things I am wiser to know: Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
Four be the things I'd been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.
Three be the things I shall never attain: Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
Three be the things I shall have till I die: Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye


One Perfect Rose
A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.

All tenderly his messenger he chose;


Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet -

One perfect rose.
I knew the language of the floweret;
'My fragile leaves,' it said, 'his heart enclose.'
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.
Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it's always just my luck to get
One perfect rose. 

02 April 2014

Ogden Nash

To keep your marriage brimming,
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it;
Whenever you're right, shut up."

Always Marry an April Girl by Ogden Nash 1902- 1971

Praise the spells and bless the charms,
I found April in my arms. 
April golden, April cloudy, 
Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy; 
April soft in flowered languor, 
April cold with sudden anger, 
Ever changing, ever true -- 
I love April, I love you.  

That Reminds Me By Ogden Nash 1902- 1971


Just imagine yourself seated on a shadowy terrace,
And beside you is a girl who stirs you more strangely than an
      heiress,
It is a summer evening at its most superb,
And the moonlight reminds you that To Love is an active verb.
And your hand clasps hers, which rests there without shrinking,
And after a silence fraught with romance you ask her what she is
      thinking,
And she starts and returns from the moon-washed distances to the
      shadowy veranda,
And says, Oh I was wondering how many bamboo shoots a day it
      takes to feed a baby Giant Panda.
Or you stand with her on a hilltop and gaze on a winter sunset,
And everything is as starkly beautiful as a page from Sigrid Undset,
And your arm goes round her waist and you make an avowal
      which for masterfully marshaled emotional content might have
      been a page of Ouida's or Thackeray's,
And after a silence fraught with romance she says, I forgot to or-
      der the limes for the Daiquiris.
Or in a twilight drawing room you have just asked the most mo-
      mentous of questions,
And after a silence fraught with romance she says, I think this
      little table would look better where that little table is, but
      then where would that little table go, have you any sugges-
      tions?
And that's the way they go around hitting below our belts;
It isn't that nothing is sacred to them, it's just that at the Sacred
      Moment they are always thinking of something else.

I didn't go to church today by Ogden Nash 1902 - 1971

I didn't go to church today,
I trust the Lord to understand.
The surf was swirling blue and white,
The children swirling on the sand.
He knows, He knows how brief my stay,
How brief this spell of summer weather,
He knows when I am said and done
We'll have plenty of time together.


23 March 2014

On the Sale of My Farm by Robert Frost 1874 – 1963

Robert Frost by Lotte Jacobi


















Well-away and be it so,
To the stranger let them go.
Even cheerfully I yield
Pasture, orchard, mowing-field,
Yea and wish him all the gain
I required of them in vain.
Yea and I can yield him house,
Barn, and shed, with rat and mouse
To dispute possession of.
These I can unlearn to love.
Since I cannot help it? Good!
Only be it understood,
It shall be no trespassing
If I come again some spring
In the grey disguise of years,
Seeking ache of memory here.

Paul Theroux 1941


Novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts (1941). He went to the University of Massachusetts, which he said looked like it was made out of poison ivy and Tupperware, and dropped his pre-med plans to become an English major. After college, he went into the Peace Corps in Malawi, but he was thrown out for helping a poet who was a political opponent of the government and had escaped to Uganda. So Theroux went to Uganda himself, and the poet got him a job at Makerere University in Kampala, the capital city. And it was there that he met the novelist V.S. Naipaul, who was a visiting professor at the university, and became Theroux's mentor and friend for the next 30 years. Theroux started publishing novels, the first few set in Africa, including Waldo (1967) and Jungle Lovers (1971), and then Saint Jack (1973), about Singapore, where he taught for a few years. He went back to England, wrote a novel, dropped the manuscript off with his publisher, and that same day, he left for an epic journey from London to Tokyo and back again, all by train. He wrote about his experience in The Great Railway Bazaar (1975),his first travel book, which was also his first best-seller.