persiflage

Throughout the twentieth century, very many books and films have looked to Existentialism for inspiration and for a guiding philosophy. From Camus to the Coen brothers, story-tellers have exploited such Existentialist ideas as the freedom of the individual in an Godless, amoral universe, and the essential meaninglessness of the world. Existentialism lends itself very well to gangster films and crime novels, to satires and black comedies. The irony is that, while Existentialism proclaims itself a metaphysical theory, it exists more in fiction than in real life. Existentialism only applies to fictional people, not to real ones. This is what makes it so interesting.

It would be easy to create a theory of Existentialist literature; it has already been done. Existentialist literature has its dogma, which is well understood. What is more complicated is to create an Existentialist theory of literature.

To see if this is possible, I have been reading Satre’s “What Is Literature?”. Jean-Paul Sartre was, more than anyone else, the inventor of Existentialism and so can be considered a good guide in this area. Let me say straight off, that I read this book so that you don’t have to. Its last chapter, in particular, maunders terribly. Moreover, the book commits the cardinal sin of confusing the descriptive with the normative – that is, it confuses the question “What Is Literature?” with the question “What Should Literature Be?” This is hardly surprising: Satre was a Marxist who believed that writers should be politically engaged, committed to the cause of attacking oppression and furthering human freedom. For Satre, to write is to act and the aim of this act is to change the world.

(In fact, a confusion between the descriptive and the normative can be found in much literary theory, and the reason for this is deeper than first appears. Literature produces aesthetic pleasure. Therefore, shouldn’t the best literature be the sort that produces the most pleasure? And if we enjoy literature more if it presents a political viewpoint with which we agree, shouldn’t the politics of a work be one of its aesthetic qualities? These questions must be answered in the affirmative. But we need to ensure that the literary theory we create on these grounds is not simply an iteration of the author’s own particular prejudices. The way to resolve this dilemma is to consider not only what the author enjoys but what other readers enjoy,)

The part of “What is Literature?” that is most relevant to this blog is the second chapter, “Why Write?” I shall try to summarise the argument.

The author of a literary work encounters, in his own work, only his own subjectivity- that is, he finds only what he has himself put in there. This means, oddly enough, that he cannot take aesthetic pleasure in it. The work exists as an object only for the reader, and only when it is read:

“Reading seems, in fact, to be the synthesis of perception and creation….In short reading is directed creation.”

Because the work is created by the reader in the process of reading, the writer must make “an appeal” to the reader. He must implicity ask of the reader to “lead into objective existence the revelation which I have undertaken by means of language”. The reader cannot be forced; he must be free, free to make “a perpetually renewed choice to believe”. Reading “is a free dream.”

The freedom of the reader to ‘reveal’ the literary work differs from his freedom to observe and thus ‘reveal’ the objective, natural world. The world throws things together randomly; the author does not. When reading, “a gentle force accompanies us and supports us from the first page to the last… Thus, reading is a pact of generosity between author and reader”. This leads to the heart of Satre’s literary theory: aesthetic delight. Aesthetic delight has its origin in the reader’s recognition of his own freedom, “not as pure autonomy but as creative activity… a creation wherein the created object is given as object to its creator”. This recognition is accompanied by the knowledge that he is essential to the object, in that he has created it. The world is given to the reader as a “task” to accomplish, in a contract between two freedoms.

So far, I like Sartre’s analysis. It is the last part of Satre’s argument with which I disagree. In this final step, Satre associates the freedom of reader and writer with responsibility:

“As for me who read, if I create and keep alive an unjust world, I cannot help making myself responsible for it.”

Sartre argues that a literary work “can be defined as an imaginary presentation of the world insofar as it demands human freedom”. These quotes show that, in the final analysis, literature concerns itself with the world. Readers of my previous instalment will be aware that I have an issue with the term ‘world’ as used in this way: alert readers will also have spotted that Satre himself is ambiguous. How can a literary presentation be at once of the (social, political) world and also be “imaginary”?

What I would like to do now is to creatively misread Satre. For Satre, freedom entails responsibility: we are free to act however we can but must then bear responsibility for our actions. In opposition to this, I would argue that reading is precisely a freedom FROM responsibility. To read is to vicariously effect actions that we would not and, in fact, could not carry out in reality. Reading is a form of make-believe. In this perspective, the freedom of the reader is most fully realized when reading fantastical fiction, such as science fiction and comic books, even though these works have only a tenuous connection with the reader’s material situation. By ‘creating’ Worlds that are quite distinct from the reader’s real World, the reader is able to exercise total freedom.

I shall discuss make-believe more fully later in the next instalment.

I have to clear up a technical issue. In future postings, I shall be using the term World, with a capital W; I think I have used this term already. When I use this term, I mean it in a slightly unusual way. The World and the world are two different things. The world is the totality of existing things and their relationships with each other. The World, by contrast, is the totality of that that is revealed to a particular consciousness. Although there is one world, there are as many Worlds as there are conscious subjects and these Worlds may vary from person to person.

An example might illustrate this point. I live and spend most of time at home. I have a part-time job. Occasionally I see friends and family. These experiences constitute my immediate World. In addition, I try to read the newspaper every day. Consequently, John Key and Barack Obama are a part of my World, even though I have no direct acquaintance with them. Similarly, Argentina and Somalia are a part of my World: I know they exist and know a little about these countries despite the fact that I have never visited them. Also, Doctor Temperance Brennan from the TV show “Bones” features in my World, even though she is a fictional character.

Two important points should be made. The first is that most of the knowledge one has of one’s World is second-hand. A lot of philosophy, science and ‘common sense’ privileges direct acquaintance and, in particular sight, as the proper means of acquiring knowledge. Seeing is believing, as they say. This idea is found particularly in the philosophy of science, which stresses the importance of experimentation. However, this fails to recognise that most of the knowledge actual individuals, including scientists, posses is conveyed to them by other people, by books, newspapers, television, teachers or simply through conversation. If we only could know that of which we have first-hand acquaintance, the World we live in would be seriously impoverished.

The second point is that I have deliberate smudged the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. In reality, of course, people discriminate between fiction and non-fiction very effectively, at least under ordinary conditions (presuming, for instance, that they are not schizophrenic): although we are not given the truth-value of a particular story, we deduce its veracity of falsity from the context of its delivery. The reason I have fudged the distinction is to draw attention to the large number of ‘facts’ that people know, that feature in their World, that can not be easily categorised as either true of false propositions. Consider, for example, the Law against breaking and entering. Although this Law is written down in statutes and law-journals, the law itself is not identical with its verbal expression. In fact, the Law can not be said to exist ANYWHERE, in that there is no referent to which the expression applies. The law is not a part of the world. It is, however, certainly a part of the World, my World at least, and that of law-abiding citizens, in that it stops us from breaking down people’s doors and stealing their stuff.

Likewise, the themes of a piece of literature are ‘facts’ without referents. How much easier would it be do literary criticism, if one could simply point at something and say, “This is what this book is about!”

These ‘facts’ – necessary fictions, call them what you will- form the bulk of what we know. We ‘know’ that the killer feels remorse; we have Macbeth to remind us of this. We ‘know’ that no murder goes unpunished; we have “Bones” to reminds ourelves of this. The world, with a lower case w, is, if not meaningless, at least inhuman. The Existentialists describe it as Absurd, and say that when an individual realises that the world is Absurd, he feels Angst. The World, by contrast however, is saturated with meaning.

The idea that I am presenting is commonplace in modern philosophy, that reality is a social construction. I have tweaked the idea, however, by pitching it in terms of a distinction between a phenomenological World and a scientific world. In doing so, I have also fulfilled a promise I made some weeks ago – to describe the conscious subject in its phenomenological setting.

To conclude, I would like to relate this back to literature. Most literature deals thematically with ‘facts’- it asserts, defends and criticises the assumptions and ideologies that underpins the Worlds of various readers. However, on the surface, literature is fiction and readers know that it is fiction. In the next instalment I shall consider some reason why people might want to read stories that are completely outside their potential experience.

In this posting, I am going to write a book report. Its topic is the novel “Blood and Guts in High School” by Kathy Acker and its method will be vertical, in the sense that I am going to try to clarify some of the novel’s deeper concerns. Vertical criticism is the sort I am most comfortable with because it was the sort I wrote as a student.

The protagonist of “Blood and Guts in High School”, first published in 1978, is a girl named Janey who we find at the beginning of the story (age 10) involved in a seriously claustrophobic relationship with her father, who is also her lover, and who wants to leave Janey for another woman. ‘To find herself’ Janey flees the Mexican village of Merida for the East Village of New York City where she falls in with a bunch of delinquents called the Mosquitos, works at a delicatessan, and fucks around a lot, requiring her to have a number of abortions. Part way through the book, Janey is abducted by a couple “of teenage hoods” who sell her to a Persian slave trader, one Mr Linker, who locks Janey in a room and comes in twice a day to teach her how to be a whore. In her spare time, Janey amuses herself by writing a book report on Nathaniel Hawthorrn’s The Scarlet Letter and by translating poetry by Sextus Propertius. Succumbing perhaps to Stockholm Syndrome, Janey falls in love with the slave-trader.

Graduated at last from her locked room, Janey hits the streets, only to discover that she has developed cancer. Rather than kill herself, she buys a one-way ticket to Tangiers where she falls in with (famous French writer) Jean Genet, describing to him the times she fucked around with (former US president) Gerald Carter. She and Genet hang out, visit brothels, get arrested and then, when a revolution occurs, escape from gaol. Janey parts company from Genet and quite suddenly dies.

If this were a high-school book report, I would now say “Something I find interesting about this novel is…”

Something I find interesting about this novel are the relationships between Janey and the other characters. The sequence of men that begins with her father is comprised entirely of substitute father figures, authority figures whom Janey loves or at least needs, but who fail to love her back – Genet, the most admirable of them, being homosexual. Because these father-figures are generally unsympathetic, Janey’s love for them must be seen as pathological. To be sure, Janey has Daddy Issues: Freud would observe Janey’s low self-esteem and diagnose her with an unresolved Electra Complex. In Janey’s World, men are all-powerful and construct the reality in which she lives. To pick a quote more at least at random from the book:

“Genet doesn’t know how to be a woman. He thinks all he has to do to be a woman is slobber. He has to do more… Women aren’t just slaves. They are whatever their men want them to be. They are made, created by men. They are nothing without men.”

Male domination, in Acker’s novel, is a priori fact. Not social conditions, nor some kind of historical situation, engender this domination. It is woven right into the fabric of the reality– insofar at least as this reality is revealed through Janey’s consciousness. There is no way for Janey to oppose this power structure and so it does not surprise that at the end of the novel she simply slips quietly out death’s door.

It is instructive to compare Acker’s pessimistic diagnosis with other feminist writings. The simplest solution to the problem of male-domination is to reject men entirely –thus, perhaps, the purest form of feminist writing is lesbian. Alternatively, the feminist writer can choose to disempower the male love-interest so that there is parity between him and the protagonist. This is the strategy adopted by Helen Garner in “Monkey Grip”, a novel that describes the relationship between Nora and Javo, an unemployed drug addict some years younger than her. Similarly, in “Jane Eyre”, Jane and Mr Rochester are only able to achieve their happy ending after Rochester is blinded in a fire. “Blood and Guts in High School” can adopt neither tactic. The intensity of Janey’s self-loathing precludes such a resolution. Janey defines herself as a victim and any to ameliorate this status would undermine her sense of self.

Another thing I found interesting about the novel is its treatment of love and sex. Janey’s need for love stems from a feeling of Lack; in the symbolic economy of the book, her deficiency is symbolised by her vagina. Janey uses sex in order to compensate for the lack of love in her life. Sex, however, is a poor substitute for ‘true love’ and so, although the book contains many sex scenes, its dominant mood is one of sexual frustration. Perhaps the world in which Janey lives is too thoroughly permeated by gender inequality to allow her to enjoy the recognition and affirmation of ‘true love’. Or perhaps her self-image is so poor that she cannot even conceptualise such a love.

“Blood and Guts in High School” is a confronting book. It contains a number of sketches of cocks and cunts. These are not included to titillate but to shock. Its representation of female sexual desire is also ‘shocking’: Acker’s intends to attack a male ideology that marginalizes female sexual desire so as to treat women as objects. Her project is political:

“EVERY POSITION OF DESIRE, NO MATTER HOW SMALL, IS CAPABLE OF PUTTING TO QUESTION THE ESTABLISHED ORDER OF A SOCIETY

However, at its heart, the book is ambiguous. Acker ascribes emancipatory power to female sexual desire but the objects of this desire –men- are the agents of oppression. Sex is simultaneously an expression of freedom and a placebo that diverts attention from the real ills of society. Desire contradicts itself at its origin. Acker does not show how to escape from this dilemma.

By way of conclusion, I would like to say a few words about this book-report. Its method is mainly vertical in that it presumes to clarify the underlying thematics of the novel. However , it contains a number of observations that do not strictly bear on the novel, such as the observation that ‘true love’ involves ‘recognition and affirmation’, ideas that do not I think feature in the Acker’s text. These ideas were stimulated in my mind by my reading, and constitute a horizontal movement. This is the difference between vertical and horizontal criticism. The former is captive to the originating text; the latter uses the originating text as a springboard to talk about other subjects. I shall say more about this in later postings.

It is a privilege enjoyed by bloggers that they can wander from the point. In previous instalments, I have been discussing ‘the interesting’; I am postponing further discussion of this topic for the moment. I am also postponing any discussion of Existentialist literary theory, at least until I have finished reading Satre’s “What is Literature?”

The topic of this posting is literary criticism itself. What is literary criticism? When I studied literature at school and university, I believed that serious literary criticism was necessarily interpretive. That is to say, I believed that serious literature ‘communicated’ particular ideas, themes and statements, and that the purpose of literary criticism was to elucidate these ideas, to disrobe the originating text and reveal nakedly its core message. The tenets of my faith were as follows. A text consists of two layers, ‘form’ and ‘content’. The form of the test is the material work itself, the words; the content, mysteriously contained inside, within, the text, is the author’s intentions, he meaning that he or she means to convey. Although I never seriously identified content as being identical to intention, I was committed enough as a student to this depth-model of literature that I founded my earliest aesthetic theories on it.

Does the merit of a piece of literature derive from its form or from its content? It could not, I reasoned, be that the aesthetic value of a piece of literature resides in its form. This would render interpretation redundant. Nor could it be that readers value literature for its content, because the content of a literary work can just as easily be found in a good interpretation as in the original, and in a more easily digestable form. If the aesthetic value of a work resides neither in its form nor in its content, it follows, I reasoned, that its value lies in the RELATIONSHIP between the form and the content. It does not matter what in particular the author wants to say, it is how he says it that counts.

The theory sketched out above has a certain architectonic grandeur, and has a number of things going for it. For one thing, it puts interpreting right at the centre of the aesthetic experience (a reassuring idea for an English student whose main occupation is interpretation). The pleasure readers derive from reading, it suggests, originates from the active uncovering of a substructure of meaning, in the discovery of a thematic endoskeleton that the author has skilfully concealed. It explains why one might write interpretive criticism: such writing can be considered a form of reading, a part of the same process of mastering the text. It also explains why we might want to read interpretive criticism. The secondary literature that surrounds an originating work functions effectively as an extension of that originating work; when we read criticism of a literary work, we are engaging with the same sematic-complex found in the original. Interpretive criticism is effectively a supplement to the interpreted work.

The theory, as I have said, is attractive, and I shall develop some of these ideas in more detail later. However the theory as it stands suffers from at least three serious problems. The first is that it assumes that the content of a work is coherent and univocal. In reality, critics can disagree about the meaning of novel or poem; if we assume that the essays they write are an extension of the original work (as I argued above), we must assume that the composite-text has not only more than one author but more than one ‘message’. Exegetical essays and books, furthermore, do more than simply reformulate the central concerns of novel or poem; they present arguments, arguments in favour of particular readings. This implies, of course, that meaning is contestable and other readings are possible.

The theory says that the pleasure we have from reading is based on the uncovery of a hidden structure of meaning. If we abandon the notion of a coherent content however, we have to assume that this structure will differ from reader to reader. What then is the raison d’etre of interpretive criticism? This leads directly to the second objection: the theory focuses solely on one type of criticism. Book reviews, for example, are evaluative rather than interpretive. The theory as it stands marginalizes this form of criticism. What status does this form of criticism possess? The third, and most serious objection, privileges obscure, difficult literature and does not explain why we can enjoy literature that is ‘transparent’.

I am going to go out on a limb here and assert a positive thesis. The problem with the form/content argument is the metaphor that is used to present it. This metaphor is the idea that form/content corresponds to surface/depth, outside/inside. In opposition to this metaphor I would present the following alternative: the form is the inside of a work, the content is on the outside. Rather than containing a message, a novel points to something in the World of the reader

This way of looking at the form/content dichotomy leads us to another idea, that we should abandon the vertical metaphor of interpretation, where a critique is digging into, excavating, a buried meaning, in favour of a horizontal metaphor. Criticism exists alongside the original work, has the same status and should be subject to the same critical. Every text is interconnected to every other text and is connected to a World which is itself a kind of text. Everything has the same existential value.

These thoughts are for the moment necessarily vague but I hope to make this clearer in the future.

To recap. In the first instalment, we discussed the idea that literature is a mirror to life and rejected this idea, arguing that literature is concerned with ‘the interesting’. Rather than representing the life of its reader, the novel takes as its subject matter situations outside the reader’s experience (or perhaps only found on its periphery). In the second instalment we considered and rejected the idea that this interest could be rational self-interest. In fact, this step in the argument follows from the first. For, if people were indeed motivated solely by rational self-interest, wouldn’t they want to read books that simply reproduce their own lives? With advice?

Also in the second instalment, I lamented my lack of scholarship. I was unable to attribute the theory of rational self-interest to any particular critic. Fortuitously today I found one who comes close: Chernysaka who, in his novel ‘What is to be Done’, wrote

“…A man does evil only because he does not know his real interests; and if he is enlightened and his eyes are opened to his own best… interests, man will at once become noble, because when he… understands what will really benefit him he will see his own best interest in virtue, and… it is well known that no man can knowingly act against his best interests.

I found this quote, quite by chance, in the introduction to the 1972 Penguin edition of Notes from the Underground. Chernysaka’s statement may seem less anthropological (which tem I use to denote the study of human nature) than ethical. The last sentence, however, reveals its anthropological leanings: it is in the nature of man, Chernysaka argues, to act according to his self-interest; the only thing that prevents him being virtuous is that he is ignorant these interests. Cherynysaka’s novel, published in 1863, goaded Dostoyevsky into producing Notes from the Underground which is partly a rebuttal. In it, Dostoyevsky writes:

“One’s own free and unfettered volition, one’s own caprice, however wild, one’s own fancy, inflamed to the point of madness – †hat is the one best and greatest good, which is never taken into consideration because it will not fit into any classification, and the omission of which always sends all systems and theories to the devil. Where did all the sages get the idea that a man’s desires must be normal and virtuous? Why do they imagine that he must inevitably will what is reasonable and profitable? What a man needs is simply and solely independent volition, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.”

This quote, which I admit is quite lengthy, is valuable because it suggests, in other words, that a man’s interests may run directly counter to his self-interest. This is rather stronger than what I have been arguing, which is simply that interest is directed away from the self.

Dostoyevsky’s novel is important not only as a great work of literature, but as a precursor to existentialism. In place of rational (enlightened) self-interest, which we defined in the previous instalment as a concern to survive and thrive in the world, he makes independence, or as Satre would say ‘freedom’, the ultimate interest. This raises the question: can we build a literary theory on Existentialist foundations? I have an answer prepared but am mindful that this posting may be too long already. The question deserves an instalment (at least one) to itself.

I shall post it tomorrow.

In my previous posting, I promised to comment on “the human-subject in its phenomenological setting”. On consideration, I believe that such a treatment would be premature at this stage. Instead I would like to make some observations on the interesting, a concept which I broached in the previous instalment and which will be of continuing importance to future discussion.
As I said, the topic of this posting is ‘the interesting’. The way I wish to approach this idea is to consider it in light of a particular anthropological model, which we can set out in the following way. A human being is assumed to have particular needs, the satisfaction of which is the aim of all its activity. Need encompasses not only such things as the need for food and shelter, but more ephemeral needs such as the need for friendship and respect. We need, in other words, those things that enable us to survive and prosper in the world. We are interested in those things that enable us to satisfy out needs.
This theory of human behaviour is fairly attractive and I believe widely held. I am (alas!) too poor a scholar to know to whom I should attribute it, but certainly it underpins both evolutionary psychology and psychoanalysis. However the theory has a certain practical drawback: it doesn’t apply to real people. In the real world, people are interested in many things that aren’t in any way conducive to survival and prosperity. Why, for instance, listen to music? (I assume here that this is an interest of yours.) Why visit art galleries? Why read books? Why, to scrape the bottom of the barrel, collect stamps? Philately is surely only of reproductive advantage if the stamps one owns appreciate in value. Suppose you meet a raconteur at the pub and become interested in the stories he tells- is it reasonable to assume that this interest stems solely from a desire for phatic communion?
The problem with the model as presented is that, in treating interest as a stage in the process of need satisfaction, it makes interest into something insular, inward looking. In reality interest is outward-looking; it aims itself at what is Other to the self. Consider for example the news. Very many people make a habit of reading the news every-day: I myself have an interest in the civil war currently being fought in Libya. This interest of mine is, from the perspective outlined above, quite irrational. The only way the war in Libya directly affects me is when it causes a rise in oil prices, and this alone is not enough to justify the curiosity I feel.
So why then does the war in Libya interest me? Originally the story was one of a popular uprising against an evil tyrant, and so fitted a particular narrative (the democratisation of autocracies/ the little guy standing up to the school bully).As the story developed, new details emerged. It turns out that the rebel fighters are not particular competent. Oddly enough, this fact made the story more interesting, in that it made it easier for a lazy civilian to identify with them. The detail that Al Qaeda might have a presence among the fighters adds suspense, in that the audience is uncertain of the motivation of the protagonists.
In other words, I see the situation in Libya as if it is a story. It is a story, moreover, in which I have an emotional investment. What is the nature of my investment? The narrative of popular movements in support of democracy reinforces the belief of Westeners that we possess the best possible form of government. This is the real reason why we enjoy such narratives.
I should pause here, and take stock. Earlier I suggested that the nature of interest is that it is outward-looking, but in my analysis of my own interest in the war in Libya, I was led to the conclusion that my interest was founded on a desire to see my own society as meritorious. This suggests that interest does in fact ultimately related to the self . Do I contradict myself? The need to believe that we live in the best possible society is not a rational need. I argue that we cannot explain all interest as being ultimately founded on rational self-interest: it is either not self-interest or not rational At some level, for some reason, we project ourselves into situations outside ourselves. Of course, this is fundamental to literary appreciation and is something I shall try to explore further in the next instalment.

After a long hiatus I have decided to resume writing this blog. I wish to announce, however, a slight change in direction. For some time I have wanted to develop a theory of aesthetics, principally related to literature but, if possible, extending to all kinds of arts. What I intend to do now is use this blog to explore some ideas related to literary theory.
Let’s make a start shall we?
What (to begin with) is the subject matter of literature? It is tempting to say that this subject matter is life, in all its complexity. Stendhal, in the novel Crimson and Black offers this comment as an aside:

“…. A novel is a mirror journeying down the high road. Sometimes it reflects to your view the azure blue of heaven, sometimes the mire in the puddles on the road below. And the man who carries the mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror reflects the mire, and you blame the mirror! Blame rather the high road on which the puddle lies and still more the inspector of roads and highways who lets the water stand there and the puddle form.”

The notion of a novel as a mirror of life, with all the moral ambiguity and complexity found in life, while useful as a programmatic statement, is on analysis quite inadequate. We must reject it as being trite to the point of meaninglessness. Why? Because it fails to answer the important question: whose life? I myself have no personal experience of the nineteenth century French social milieu; it does not reflect my life; I have no basis of comparison to determine its truth-value. And yet I can enjoy the novel, despite, or perhaps even because of, the fact that it is bears so little relation to my own situation. Probably, if I were to read a book documenting an existence that really resembled the existence I myself own, I would become bored. This is because the life I lead is boring. I read\ because I am bored.
The claim that art is a mirror to life suggests that its value lies in its correspondence to reality, in its truth-value. It is this claim that we must reject.
Am I arguing that literature is necessarily escapist? Not necessarily (I don’t want to get ahead of myself). I will however make the following statement: the subject matter of literature, of enjoyable literature, is the interesting. Whaling is interesting; hence, the subject matter of Moby Dick is interesting. Police procedurals are interesting; consequently the Rebus novels by Ian Rankin are interesting, as is the TV series Bones. Aliens and spaceships are interesting, so science fiction is interesting. Even paedophilia can be interesting, so Nabakov’s Lolita is interesting. So we shall take as axiomatic that a requirement of literature is that it be interesting.
This observation, while not being trite, may seem trivial. It also might seem that I am replacing one imponderable -the subject matter proper to literature- with another- the odd category of the interesting. It is however a beginning, and will be used as a jumping off point for further discussion. In the next instalment I shall consider truth and falsity in more detail, with regard to the human-subject in its phenomenological setting.
Here’s to a new beginning!

 

Some people think that deconstruction is just a fad, a fashion popular in the eighties that has fallen out of favour in recent years. Not so! Deconstruction is a philosophical methodology that will never die. Like an octopus, it has infiltrated its tentacles into every field, to the point that the term has lost its original meaning. ‘Deconstruction’ is not what the mechanic is doing when he takes your Nissan Primera apart looking for the source of that mysterious rattle; it is, rather, a proper, technical term employed by philosophers, literature scholars and other gurus to astonish and impress their devotees. So, for all those who missed this particular post-modern bus when it drove through town, I shall briefly elucidate what the term ‘deconstruction’ really stands for. (A post-modern bus, by the way, is just a regular bus that has been preserved in formaldehyde and exhibited in the Tate).

To begin, we must ask: what is language? ‘Language’, to paraphrase Derrida, is a collection of heterogenous, imbricated elements and practices completely lacking in interiority or, for that matter, any connection with ‘the real world’. I believe it was Dorothy Parker who said that language is “a virus from outer space”. A ‘text’, by contrast, is a space in which ‘language’ vies with itself, exhibiting to the world the tensions and internal contradictions that, on the one hand, inhibit it and, on the other, provide grounds for its existence, much like a reluctant cross-dresser. Texts are always saying the opposite of what they really want to say. (This is, incidentally, part of the reason why train timetables are so unreliable.)

Language is organised principally through binary oppositions. The opposed members form a hegemonic hierarchy. The text in making an assertion, excludes all the other contradictory assertions that -ironically- form the substratum on which the primary assertion is built. Deconstruction consists in demonstrating that the text is necessarily ‘impure’ and in tracking down all the other, subaltern meanings.

An example will help clarify things. The polar opposite of the term ‘plutonium’ is ‘mashed potatoes’. Mashed potatoes are ‘Present’- you eat them every Sunday when you visit you grandmother. However, ‘plutonium’ is a subject never touched upon in conversation around the dining room table. This is ironic because plutonium is the life-blood of the Military Industrial Complex, which gauruntees the security of this gathering. We all live in the shadow of the Atomic Age.

An author Derrida himself cites is Rousseau, who, in his Confessions, admitted an unhealthy obsession with mashed potatoes:

“by adroit usage of a knife and fork, I can shape the potatoes into a semblance of the Alps, or else the Pyrenees, or else, by dribbling gravy into a hollow, of the placid Mediterranean, or anywhere. With only a plate of mashed potatoes, I have the entire world spread before me!”

Rousseau’s obsession with mashed potato dominated his life to such an extent that he began neglecting the meat and vegetables that had been formerly a central theme in his meals. This Derrida terms the Logic of the Dietary Supplement: the foodstuff that comes to supplant the meal of which it was originally only a part.

For the sake of the completeness, I should remark that according to the paradigmatic episteme in which Rousseau operated, the polar opposite of ‘mashed potato’ was not ‘plutonium’ but ‘dissipation’.

I hope this has left you a little wiser.

****

In a previous posting, I described David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest as ‘self-indulgent’. I have since been suffering the agonies of the damned, not so much because I criticised a book listed as one of Time’s 100 Great Novels of the Century, but because I wrote it offwith a single word. At the time of the posting, I could not quite remember what my problem was with it.

I’ve since remembered. At the beginning of any novel, or film for that matter, there is a certain amount of business that sets up the characters and the setting. At some point however the story starts. The problem with Infinite Jest however is the reader keeps waiting and waiting for the narrative proper to begin, but it never does. The whole thing is introductory business. Infinite Jest is really a shaggy dog story, and this is probably the key to its title.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes you need to listen to an album several times to realize how good it is? The same is true of poetry. I’ve been reading John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, and although my first reaction was “What the heck…” I’ve found his poems curiously more-ish, like popcorn. 

Taken together, The Dream Songs is a sequence of numbered cantos, each comprising three six line stanzas, sometimes rhymed, sometimes not. The poems read a little like a diary, each riffing on a particular emotion or situation from the poet’s life. The narrator, however, is not Berryman but ‘Henry’, a character that stands as a kind of alter ego for the poet, providing a little ironic distance between the poet and his work. Often, the cantos remind one of free-form jazz. A representative canto (no 141) runs as follows,

            One was down on the Mass. One on the masses.

            Both grew Henry. What cause shall he cry

            Down the dead of Minnesota winter

            Without a singular follower nearby

            Among who seem to live entirely on passes

            Espouse for him or his printer?

 

            Who gains his housing, heat, food, alcohol

            Himself & for his spouse & brood, barely.

            Nude he danced in his snow

            Waking perspiring. He’d’ve run off to sea

            (but for his studies careful of the Fall)

            twenty-odd years ago.

 

            Duly he does his needful little then

            With a chest of ice, a head tipping with pain.

            That perhaps is his programme,

            Cause: Henry for Henry in his main:

            He’ll push it: down with anything Bostonian:

            Even god howled ‘I am’.

 

Berryman, an American, published The Dream Songs in two books, in 1964 and 1968. In 1972 he committed suicide, by jumping off a bridge. A number of his contemporaries also killed themselves. This raises a serious question: can poetry kill?

In The Information, Martin Amis depicts a novelist who writes pseudo-Joycean novels so incomprehensibly complicated, prospective publishers suffer nose-bleeds trying to read them. There’s an idea, here. Perhaps the American military could read Pound’s The Cantos to detainees s as an alternative to waterboarding. My advice, to return to the point, is that if you suffered any form of haemorrhage reading the poem by Berryman above, you’re trying too hard to understand it. Basically, you should just go for the gist of the thing, Berryman’s attitude to writing (at once hard labour, and a compulsion), and permit all details to sail over your head. Presumably a scholar of Berryman would know why he is down on Boston, but I don’t.

I remember, by the way, when I found out that David Foster Wallace had offed himself. I sat in a café, with the article in Time open in front of me, and thought “Now he’s never going to produce his masterpiece.” Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest was supposed to be just that, but I’ve often thought the title of the novel was a jab at its reviewers, few of whom would have had time to read the whole thing before getting their reviews to print. I have read the whole thing, and found it (dare I use this word?) self-indulgent. The short stories in Oblivion, however, are true works of genius. Perhaps one day I’ll re-read Infinite Jest and change my appraisal, but life is probably too short for that.

When you’re writing a blog – and this is something I hadn’t anticipated- it is good to have some kind of running thread. It lets the readers know (I say ‘readers’ hopefully) that they are engaged with a genuine person with some kind of cohesive personality and ‘back-story’. It is for this reason that I chose not to do a posting on climate change, my original idea of the day, because I thought a dry as dust exposition on the science behind global warming might be a little out of keeping with my previous postings.

Obviously the most interesting thing in this blog so far is the admission that I am ‘mentally ill’. Mentally ill! I hate the expression; it licenses a world-view that treats unusual belief systems as somatic disorders that can only be controlled by indefinite treatment with heavy-duty pharmaceuticals. Of course, one can understand that the point of the term is that it brings madness into the doctors’ domain. If I could choose my label however, I would prefer the term ‘touched’ as in ‘touched by God’. The term even for an atheist suggests something of the spookiness of the experience.

On the other hand, at least the term ‘mentally ill’ suggests that it is something from which one can recover. Does anyone really recover from schizophrenia? I remember when I first became ‘ill’. I was twenty-seven; my family plucked me from the flat in which I was living and took me into the local Mental Health . It was quite traumatic. In that first week, I had a dream in which I was put on a stretcher, taken on board a helicopter and flown away. It was probably one of the few true dreams I had at the time. I was in denial, and the dream was informing me that my life had completely switched tracks.

It seems sometimes that everyone I know has been ‘mentally ill’ at least once in their life. Recently I spent time with a cousin of mine who I’d always found confident and charming – the word ‘vivacious’ I believe was coined to describe her. She confided to me that she’d been suffering from post-natal depression. She’d been prescribed Pristique and had once week visits from what she called ‘her crazy lady’. Unsurprisingly she found it easy to talk to me about it. “I’m only half-bonkers,” she’d tell me, “You’re full bonkers.” This was first hand evidence of the stigma attached to mental health issues. She did reassure me though that “It wasn’t true what they say about you.”

I wish I knew what They are saying about me or who They in fact are.

For a run-down on the history of the climate change research by the way, I recommend the site www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm.