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Below is a link to my recent essay "The Enchanted Loom" in the online journal *Contemporary Poetry Review*. Last year the essay appeared in print in *The Southwest Review*. In it, I discuss poetry, postmodern critical theory, avant-garde poetry, narrative, and poetic meter and form, among other things. Hope some of you find it of interest.
http://www.cprw.com/Lake/loom.htm |
Paul:
I found myself caught up in your essay and agreeing nearly every step of the way, even while I kept thinking of related themes. It seems to me that the ideas of deconstruction are usually so foreign to anyone's actual experience of reading that they hardly need any detailed refutation -- or rather, it seems as if they shouldn't need it. In graduate school the avid deconstructionists often reminded me of the kid in the second grade who had heard the bad news about Santa Claus and simply had to tell all the other kids, thus (he hoped) wrecking their fun and at the same time establishing his own greater sophistication. But of course all the kids kept believing and, in a sense, making Santa real -- and so did he. That, as you say, is "the power of literary representation to illuminate and transform human life." We don't so much believe it because it's true as we make it true by believing it. That brings me to two writers who fit right into your argument: William James and a poet on whom he had great influence, Robert Frost. The "fuzzy logicians" you talk about can almost certainly trace many of their ideas back to William James, who described the (healthy) brain as a kind of democracy made up of competing impulses that nevertheless arrives at consensus, albeit often temporarily. There's always a residuum of uncertainty or doubt or (to use a big time critical term) ambiguity that, ideally, keeps the story open. In Frost's best poems, it seems to me, we can almost obeserve ourselves vicariously having such an experience. "The Road Not Taken" is the classic example, a poem that seems so certain of itself but that is almost impossible to reduce to a simple formula and see whole at the same time. As Frost put it, "I want to say things that almost but don't quite formulate." Thanks for a stimulating read, Paul. RPW |
<u>Incidental Notes</u>
which might be irrelevant, but what the hell... Emerson said in his essay on Goethe: <dir>"It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by a few elements, but by the highest complexity."</dir>
(And I suppose the above, taken generally, will apply to both, creator and critic.) [I reserve the right to revise these notes.] |
Paul,
Interesting essay, but there's some trouble in citing Gardner without questioning his points. For example, the business with Shakespeare having language be subordinate to character is not so much of a fact of Shakespeare not being of the same school as the other authors listed, but the fact that Shakespeare was writing plays while the other were writing novels, and in a play you don't have the voice of the narrator, let alone viewpoint, which is the loom upon which all those marvelous language games get played. Unless your play's a dramatic monologue from a particularly high-fallutin' character. As for randomly strung words producing meaning, I had that happen today. Spammers are now employing the infinite number of monkeys to assemble random message headers so at to get through anti-spam filters, such that a penis enlargement ad was titled "Unexpected Vatican Benefit." But overall, an excellent essay with many good points. |
I like it too. I too think that experimental philosopy, psychology, AI, etc are becoming increasingly useful to literature. Here are some more Incidental Notes
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Richard, Curtis, Kevin, and Tim, thanks for the kind words, careful reading, and thoughtful comments. I enjoyed the quotes, the parallel examples, and web site suggestions. I wasn't sure anybody would even make it through such a long and demanding essay, so it's doubly pleasing to share thoughts with fellow chaos wonks. So far it seems to be an all-male crew who have responded. May you all achieve many "Unexpected Vatican Benefits."
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Don't despair of us females, Paul. I've been busy dealing with actual chaos--e.g., untangling a Slinky toy from my daughter's hair, trying to remove blue crayon marks from our white (what were we thinking?) carpet, rounding up escapees from the unauthorized pillbug farm my kid started in her sock drawer the other day, etc. I'll try to take a closer look at your essay soon.
Tim, I must confess that an awful lot of my sonnets resemble clobbered mammoths. Tim's Andrew Duncan quotation about experimental writing and play reminded me of this: "Galumphing is the immaculately rambunctious and seemingly inexhaustible play-energy apparent in baby baboons, chimps, gorillas, dolphins, children--and also in young communities and civilizations. Galpumphing is the seemingly useless elaboration and ornamentation of activity...We galumph when we hop instead of walk, when we take the scenic route instead of the efficient one, when we play a game whose rules demand that we handicap our powers, when we are interested in means rather than ends...Galumphing is when we voluntarily create obstacles in our path and then enjoy overcoming them. In the higher animals and in humans, it is of supreme evolutionary value."--Stephen Nachmanovitch, author of Free Play A few more quotations on play from Gary Krane's Simple Fun for Busy People: <bl>[*]"We are most human when we are at play." --Frederich Schiller[*]"Genius is childhood recaptured."--Charles Baudelaire[*]"In our play we reveal what kind of people we are."--Ovid[*]"Play is the fount of creativity."--Stephen Nachmanovitch (see above)[*]"Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood."--Fred Rogers[*]"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."--T.S. Eliot[*]"The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes, but in having new eyes."--Marcel Proust[*]"We do not stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."--Anonymous[*]"God is the poetic genius in each of us."--William Blake </bl> I tried to teach my child with books: He gave me only puzzled looks. I tried to teach my child with words: They passed above his head, unheard. Despairingly, I turned aside. "How shall I teach this child?" I cried. Into my hand he put the key. "Come," he said, "and play with me." --Anonymous Okay, now I'm really off topic, but what the hey? These were fun, weren't they? Let's all lighten up a little! http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif Julie Stoner [This message has been edited by Julie Stoner (edited September 17, 2003).] |
Julia, Somhow my post to you earlier today didn't show up on this board. So I'll repeat: I, too, am all in favor of gallumphing. W. H. Auden says something similar to one of the quotes you posted:
"Galumphing is when we voluntarily create obstacles in our path and then enjoy overcoming them." Auden: "When have we not preferred some going round / To going straight to where we are. . . " I'm quoting from memory, so it might not be perfect. I've got an essay under consideration at The New England Review called "Poetry and the Mother Tongue" that deals with women and language and poetic form. |
What a stupendous essay this is! Thank you for posting it, Paul: you've done me a great favor--and I suspect I'm not the only one who needed this. It's the first time I've felt that I begin to understand what "Deconstruction" really means, despite the efforts of learned friends to explain it.
I've printed it, so as to be able to reread it and share it with friends. What you say about the mind's desire for order, the way it moves toward the creation of order and meaning, is exactly right. Sometimes the mind rushes to a meaning that isn't correct and then has to readjust its interpretations of what it thought it perceived, afterward, but it doesn't ever seem satisfied with no meaning, no order at all. Julie's mention of "play," and of the experimental as a kind of play, fits in with experience, and especially with the experience of teaching. I've given workshop students separate words to use in the composition of a poem--not seriously, but as an exercise--within a very short time, and what happens is revealing. Almost universally what happens is that each student comes up with something that is his own, that was somehow "there" and ready on some level, and the arbitrary words, even words tossed before them at random, were subjected to the same desire for order that you mention in the essay, and ended by forming some kind of sensible utterance. We've all had the experience of being moved in a whole new and fruitful direction in a poem by the unexpected rhyme that arrives like a pull on the sleeve! Clearly that's what we do with language, so that the poem is a coming together of language and thought, feeling, memory, associations of all kinds--not "phonemes" or any other atomic particles of speech. Why would anybody think--or want to think--that poetry--or any writing--could be produced in the absence of all evidence of humanity? Anyway, thanks for this wonderul thing to mull over and learn from! |
Paul,
Thank you for posting the link to this lucid and entertaining piece. My take on it is rather different from those above. I write as a recovering post-structuralist. I found myself disagreeing with many of your individual formulations, although I do not necessarily disagree with the general thrust of your piece. On the whole, my impression is that you have written a scholarly essay that lacks a scholarly apparatus, and as a result the essay does not present the evidence to support your strongly stated views. At times, I wonder if the evidence exists. I provide below just a few examples of local disagreement (and I may be back to add more, if I can find the time): In your opening paragraph, you claim that "the prestige of literature has declined as postmodern critical theories have percolated from the academy down to the general culture." Just as an aside, this formulation is interesting in that it relies on precisely the sort of binary opposition between the culture of the academy and “general culture” that deconstruction – and post-structuralism generally – treats with suspicion. But I think I disagree with the claim as stated. I do not believe that the prestige of literature has been affected one way or another by what has happened in the academy. I think there has been a decline in the prestige of literary criticism, but that decline was preceded by an extraordinary rise in the academic prestige – and power – of literary critics, as criticism came in the 1970s and 80s to displace philosophy at the heart of humanities. In any case, I think it is very hard to gauge how things like “postmodern critical theories” are received in “general culture.” At the end of your first paragraph you describe the disdain with which “postmodern critics” treat “traditional poets and storytellers.” This is plainly untrue of many of the leading practitioners of deconstruction, including Derrida and Paul de Man, both of whom (last I checked) write almost exclusively about canonical writers, and Romantic poetry was one of the first academic territories to be staked out and dominated by deconstructionist criticism. I have heard Derrida proclaim that the reason he comments on the works he comments on (in this case it was texts by Aquinas) is because he loves these works and considers them the most interesting, intelligent and sophisticated texts he knows. That does not mean that the texts (or their authors) are not subjected to withering critique, but the point is that the texts are worthy of critique – unlike most of the crap that gets written. There are certainly people in English departments who proclaim that the unknown diaries of peasant women are just as worthy of study and critique as the “masterworks” of Kant or Spinoza (or Emerson or Hawthorne, for that matter). But those people are not necessarily deconstructionists or post-modern critics. It seems to me that the movement towards “popular culture” studies in the humanities derives largely from huge successes in the fields of sociology and social history (especially the extraordinary influence of the French Annales school on the American academy), which predate post-structuralism and are hostile to it. Swift’s Lagodan scheme seems to me to have nothing to do with deconstruction, which denies any necessary connection between words and things. Rather, Swift seems to me to be playing on the logician’s enterprise, and there I have to say, for all his cleverness, Swift’s position is rather anti-intellectual. I do not and cannot do it myself, but there are people who can and do map out language in terms of logical symbols. They are not post-modern thinkers. Quite the reverse. They believe that meaning can be fixed. Finally (for now, at least), I think you fundamentally misunderstand Derrida’s famous dictum, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” You translate the phrase (on page 4 of my printout) as meaning that there is “nothing outside the text,” but I think a better translation is that there is no outside-the-text. In other words, I take Derrida to mean (and I take this to be a fundamental principle of deconstruction) that our world must be conceived of as a text and that we must be cognizant of the fact that our giving names to things (through a system of recognized distinctions – binary oppositions) inevitably shapes that world or, what for Derrida is the same thing, our understanding of that world. The point is not that texts exist and things do not. Rather, the point is that things cannot be divorced from the way we speak and think of them. Logocentrism is a problem for deconstruction, but it is not a problem easily avoided. Oh, and one more point. You imply that structuralists agree with Derrida that “differance” forever frustrates communication. That seems wrong to me. Structuralism is a theory of how communication is effectuated through a system of recognized differences. The differences are arbitrary and have no connection to their referents, but communication is possible based on the differences within the system. Derrida broke with the structuralists by stressing the “play” in the relationship between the binary opposites and, more politically, by contending that binary oppositions are always hierarchical in nature. Sorry for being so long-winded (and I only got up to page 5!), and thanks for the stimulating read!! epigone |
Thanks, Rhina, for your encouraging words and for confirming my sense of things with your own experience as a writer.
Thanks, too, Epigone, for your close reading and thoughtful response. I admit that to get as much in the essay as I attempted to I had to write at a high level of abstraction. I make no pretense of being an expert on Post-Structuralist criticism. There's no doubt some justice in a few of your criticisms, but I don't think we disagree as much as you suggest. For instance, you write, "Swift’s Lagodan scheme seems to me to have nothing to do with deconstruction, which denies any necessary connection between words and things." Though the analogy is far from precise, that's just what I was suggesting about Swift's Lagoadoan professors: that like deconstructionists, they have completely severed the troublesome connection between words and things--in their case, by abolishing words altogether and using things instead.That's all I meant by the comparison. As to the prestige of literature, I think there was a very palpable decline in its prestige in the academy as the importance and power of critics correspondingly increased. I think this also affected the college- educated readers, reviewers, agents, publishers, editors, and journalists who were trained in or influenced by the new criticisms. That the ideas percolated down to the general culture seems to me indisputable since I now see sports writers using terms like "deconstruct" and "marginalize" and other once strictly academic words. I think the general notion was--and probably remains--abroad among educated readers that words didn't really mean what they purport to mean. They're "under suspicion," to use a common phrase. And as to the decline of the reputation of great writers, you yourself say that they were subjected to "withering critiques" by postmodern critics. A steady diet of such critiques wears away on readers' minds. One college instructor of literature, for instance, was said to begin every discussion of literature in his class by saying, "What's wrong with this book?", meaning let's take it apart and reveal its internal contradictions, racism, sexism, classism, imperialism, etc. It may in fact be true that in my amateur way I have misconceived some of the finer points of modern criticism, but on the whole, I think my essay stays pretty much in the ball park on the larger issues. |
Yes, Paul, but then you have the problem that a number of "great books" (a term I use for convenience--I distrust it mightily) DO exhibit classism, sexism, racism, heterocentrism, and the like. Of course that may be due to anachronism: we are emeshed in a social system and we do apply our current standards to previous works. By our contemporary standards, Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Richard Wright's Native Son DO, for example, exhibit levels of misoygyny that contemporary readers may find conflict with their own standards. And I don't see a problem with pointing this out: it gives us a means of exploring both our own notions of social relationships as well as how those relations have (or have not) evolved since the work was first published.
It's a very interesting essay. Like epi, I have a number of problems with your assertions. Your opening statement alone rang warning bells for me as a reader: Increasingly over the past few decades, as postmodern critical theories have percolated from the academy down to the general culture, the prestige of literature has declined. Well,how are you defining "prestige"? By what (and whose) standards? I also was put on guard by this direct cause and effect relationship postulated between literary "prestige" and postmodern critical theories. I found it overly reductive (of course, since I can't tell from the paragraph how you are defining "prestige," I have a hard time seeing how postmodern critical theory is undermining it, let alone what it is undermining). Similarly, you later assert that Dada was a reaction to Einstein's relativity theory. Ok. Partly. But such a statement ignores the larger picture: the influence of the First World War, the invention of photography and its impact on traditional means of representation, the evolution of philosophical thought. There is also a Euro-North American bias to the argument that is arguable. These ideas of modernism are revolutionary when seen within the context of Euro-North American history of the arts. But take a walk through a gallery of African and Pan-Pacific art. Then walk through a gallery of "modern" art featuring the well-known names of European/North American art. What you may find is simply a matter of appropriation: Picasso, for example, appropriated ideas from African sculpture when painting his portrait of Gertrude Stein, acknowledged by art critics as one of the first "modern" works of European painting. "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," the first radical break with traditions of European ideas about figuration and the use of perspective and planes, incorporates what appears to be an African mask on one of its figures. Cage was influenced by concepts of Zen Buddhism as well as the latest developments in musical avant-garde circles. Such ideas of chance may be "revolutionary" to a western point of view, but they have a history behind them. I think we need to make a distinction between the art and the criticism. Any kind of critical model will have its strengths and weaknesses--and those weaknesses can be easy to exploit, either by satire or absurd reductionism. Certainly there are absurdities in postmodern critical thought--it would be helpful, for instance, if it weren't so abstract--but it can provide a useful tool for critical thought. I know a theorist like Althusser has been pretty much discredited, but reading his theories helped me "see" how a movie like "Stand by Me," (I think that's the title--though it has been quite a few years since I have seen it) with its 'rousing' story of inner-city high school students triumphing against the odds to learn enough calculus to pass the AP exam, is not quite as innocent as it seems. It inculcates a particular ideology--and that ideology permeates the structure, characterizations, plot, and dialogue. I may or may not agree with that ideology, but I think it is useful to know that even a work that appears to be no more than a light piece of entertainment--a "Rocky" for the academic set if you will--has implications far beyond mere "entertainment." Interesting stuff. One for the files. Best to ye-- Tom |
Tom, I agree that we need to look at past literature with a critical eye and examine its social presumptions, but surely "What's wrong with this books" is a limited way to approach literature.
There are a lot of historical causes for Dada, which you name. It was one of several movements that incorporated chance, all one way or another influenced by the modern scientific view. By the way, I talk more about Dada and feminism, among other things, in my more recent essay "Poetry in the Mother Tongue." |
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I would add that pointing out, for example, the racism expressed in 19th-century works of literature, is not necessarily an indictment of the work of literature or its author (assuming one believes in authors). Rather, critics often point out such things in order to show the ways in which it is not possible for writers, even great writers, to escape from the narrow prejudices of their times. epigone |
But my point Paul is that things like Dada are not ONLY influenced by a single factor--in this case scientfic theories of chance. Cause and effect relationships almost never are linear (and isn't it lucky for Ph.D candidates that they are so often ambiguous and arguable!). There are also human emotions and foibles to contend with as well.
For instance, Picasso and Braque painted dozens and dozens of cubist still lifes. Yes, they were exploring an aethethic theory--in this case, the first radical break with European ideas of perspective and vanishing points and pictoral planes--but a friend of mine who is a painter dropped this little tidbit on me when we were last in the Met looking at some: Picasso and Braque found collectors who would buy these works. When they were short on funds, they would simply paint yet another cubist still life--thus ensuring money for such little things as rent and food and booze. Would this little fact find its way into the latest monograph on cubism? Probably not. Is it important? I think so. I'm sure just as important to Dadaists as scientific theories of chance was the simple human notion that it can be fun to stir up a bit of trouble. One of the most important aspects of art is PLAY. There's a great mischieviousness to Dada and its works that I am sure is not accidental. Will that ever make it into the latest academic paper? I doubt it. Theories tend to have their own narrow focus. "History" as a social science ignored so much for so long. It is all well and good to know the Deeds Of Great White Men, but that reduces "history" to a timeline with a very narrow focus. And that focus is, as epi points out, an ideological one. The powers that be--and I use that term deliberately--decided that focus and, just as importantly, what was ignored as too "trivial" for academic research. One great thing about postmodern literary criticism is that it is unearthing a number of works that did not fit a particular ideological paradigm of a "great work." But that is its own ideological stance, isn't it? And so it goes... Tom |
<dir>
Outsider Art Most of it's too dreary or too cherry red. If it's a chair, it's covered with things the savior said or should have said— dense admonishments in nail polish too small to be read. If it's a picture, the frame is either burnt matches glued together or a regular frame painted over to extend the picture. There never seems to be a surface equal to the needs of these people. Their purpose wraps around the backs of things and under arms; they gouge and hatch and glue on charms till likable materials— apple crates and canning funnels— lose their rural ease. We are not pleased the way we thought we would be pleased. ——Kay Ryan</dir> [LOL: just "look" at those sounds!] <u>Another Incidental Note</u> I have a long-standing, even obsessive, interest in etymology. Although I haven't formulated a, er, System, I think it's interesting to notice how our words are connected by, our meanings are connected with, and we are often oblivious to the roots/histories of those words. Emerson called language a "fossil poetry," and I tend to agree. I.e., as our current language developed, from earliest times onward, changes occurred because, at the time, the people changing the language recognized connections between things and ideas. Sometimes these connections were quite temporal (from a fashionable or political/social awareness rooted in a set time frame) , sometimes these connections were quite logical (grammatical derivations, semantic correlations), and sometimes these connections were quite aesthetic (as in the case of onomatopoeia, some hapax legomena although not all, and in many neologisms such as "Jabberwocky.") Although many word choices might be aesthetic in nature, most are quite indebted to our culture and history, to the point that I often wonder how "new" our new writings can ever be: it is as if we are putting our meanings in a bag of language, giving the bag a shake, and then spilling the contents onto a piece of paper. (Or, hurling the contents at a computer screen.) Even most reasoned writing, or intent-driven writing, derives from what has gone before; so while a bit of writing might seem "new" to the writer and to the reader, in the grander scheme of things (history), it's very old in most respects. The originality is in the larger patterns/collection of the language—we might say that the root meanings/words of a piece of writing, the trees, are quite familiar whereas the forest has a shape we've not seen before/elsewhere. I happen to think that our fountain of knowledge—although it has a source so large as to be infinite for all practical purposes—has a limited flow. We are confined by our own limited awareness of language, our limited interactions with our environments, and, indeed, by the limited awarenesses/environments of all who have gone before. (The last I include in homage to literature, which shapes our awareness by adding to it or confining it—either way. But also in homage of our forebears, who have passed it on from elder to youngsters, from elder to elders, from youngster to youngsters.) So our channels are limited. Our readers' channels are limited. The beauty of the linguistic arts, the power I say, is in the way a piece of art might make us more fully aware that our own channels are not quite as limited as we thought. Although I haven't studied Derrida, I can't help believing that the man was aware of these factors. I have caught a bit of innuendo, from time to time, that I've taken deconstructionist routes in critiquing (or even writing) poetry. Whatever the exact representation of that theory, Deconstruction, I have no doubt that our written texts can be more fully enjoyed with a fuller understanding of these sub-strata of linguistic development, etymology and, actually, grammar, since both operate and have operated to give our language meaning. I don't see the forest being possible without the trees. However, I often see a predisposition for trees of a certain genus or certain genera—We can't always know what we know, what others know, and whether a limited scope is due to provinciality or to an irrational fondness for leaping the bounds of the world, or if, indeed, a particular kind of forest does not have certain trees and the limitation is apt. If we consider every poem through one partial lens, most will seem deformed. In rooting around these ideas, I would locate the relevance of linguistic sub-strata in the way it does come about from our culture and the cultures of the world, from our history (-ies), even if language is ultimately founded upon, as we are, "the Earth." [This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited September 18, 2003).] |
You know Curtis, I usually like Kay Ryan, but what a pompous ass poem that is. It never seems to occur to her that the problem may not lie with the art but with her own condescending attitude toward it.
For Ms Ryan's edification, a small list of artists who were considered outsiders when they first started: Pablo Picasso Henri Matisse (whose first painting in the official Parisian salon caused an uproar) Vincent Van Gogh (so outside the pale he never sold a single painting during his lifetime) James McNeill Whistler (whom Ruskin, the leading art critic of his day and the ultimate Victorian insider in the world of art, accused of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face") Gertrude Stein (who had to write to Harper's Bazaar after they printed a parody of her work, asking them to publish the source: "It's much funnier," she asserted) James Joyce Elvis Presley The Beatles Walt Whitman Emily Dickinson (yes, she of the "spasmodic" line) How long do you want me to go on? I've got plenty more. |
LOL, y'know Tom, perhaps it's your pompous ass. http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif Or partial lens.
I read the ending differently: <dir>lose their rural ease. We are not pleased the way we thought we would be pleased.</dir> This is not saying that we are not pleased, but only not [in] the way we thought we would be pleased. The poem is ironic, an argument against always looking for the familiar for pleasure. I think that spending an entire poem to describe, in some detail, the "outsider art," shows how pleased this speaker was, actually. The art has obviously inspired the poem. C. |
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For example, I think your claim that Derrida insists that words have "an immutable self-identity" is what a deconstructions would call an "overdetermined, strong misreading." In short, I think you just get Derrida wrong. Derrida does not say "immutable"; he says "roughly speaking." And, since his entire theory takes as its starting point structuralist linguistic theory which postulates that meaning is generated relationally, his position is not inconsistent with Hofstadter's. On another point, people use the word "deconstruct," but they almost never link it to the critique of binary oppositions. They usually use it to mean "take apart," that is analyze, criticize. Doesn't seem significant to me. "Marginal" is a different matter, but I have no problems with the fact that people now use that term to describe subtle forms of discrimination. If deconstruction has shed light on such practices, bully for it! |
Nah Curtis, I don't buy that. There's too much else in the poem that is critical to read the ending as "ironic." It sets up an "us" against "them" comparison--with "those" outsider artists removing the "natural charm" from their material with "dreary" gouging. I know it is supposed to be wry, but it sounds like typical whinging to me. At least she didn't say, "Any three year old could paint better than that."
And yes, epi, postmodern criticism does not begin and end with Derrida. I am a big fan of Foucault, particularly the early work on power, the way he repositions it to show how power creates, as you might say, marginalized categories. Or how power is embedded in our language. I studied Japanese for a very brief period, and the thing that struck me the most was that verb tenses are organized according to your social status relative to the person you are speaking with. So yes, if our language is less "elegant" (as I have heard on this site before, in reference to those who use "he and she," rather than "he") and if political correctness can tip over into the absurd, I too applaud the spirit behind it. Lord knows there's plenty that needs correcting! |
The Kay Ryan poem sounds tongue-in-cheek to me. It's the kind of thing that means what it's saying, but also simultaneously laughing at itself for meaning it.
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Curtis, your discussion of the "fossil poetry" aspect of language is right on the money.
Epigone, you write, For example, I think your claim that Derrida insists that words have "an immutable self-identity" is what a deconstructions would call an "overdetermined, strong misreading." But I quoted Derrida to back up this point. His own words indicated that he thought words had a recognizable self-identity. You're right, though, about how he and Hofstadter agree in a sense on the relationality of words. Tom, I agree with Rhina on the Ryan poem. I think she's talking about folk art, art that is REALLY outside the mainstream and will unlikely ever be part of it. Your list of outsider artists almost all experienced great success in their lifetime. But some roadside rural arts and craft shop full of matchstick scupture and nail polish paintings might indeed please us in ways we didn't think we'd be pleased in. |
Dear Paul,
Are you the smartest guy around, or what? A deeply impressive essay. And yet--oh, Paul, I don't know. I feel something wrong in someone of your intelligence bothering with a lot of this stuff. You've drawn your sword against a painted corpse and triumphed over a whited sepulcher. The Good Lord knows I'm in no position to complain. Even while I was taking courses from Gadamer, I spent my graduate-school years reading Foucault and Derrida as though there were an answer there. But a lot of time has passed since then. (Remember that the old Sartre dismissed the postmodernists as "young conservatives" for their failure to see, as he declared in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, that it all boils down to socialist economics.) But now it's been--what, thirty years?--since "Of Grammatology" appeared on the bookshelves of Paris, and most of this stuff has the smell of death about it. Once upon a time, I even tried to imagine that postmodernism offered serious possibilities for escaping from the iron logic of modernity's iron age. Read this essay, if you want a true blast of datedness and wishful thinking: http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9402/bottum.html (the first thing I ever published, and remember your own first publications, Paul, before you put me too sharply to mockery). But postmodernism has swallowed itself, and who now of any moral or intellectual seriousness actually believes this stuff? Let the dead bury the dead. You shouldn't bother while you have so much to say about what comes next. Jody |
Well Paul, it may be that you are reading text and I am reading the subtext--whether tongue-in-cheek or not, I still find her attitude condescending. So don't include me in her "We." And I basically like Kay Ryan's work (I have two books: Elephant Rocks and Say Uncle).
And yes, Mr. Bottum, there are people who find things of use in some postmodern literary criticism. Like any body of critical thought, it has its absurdities, but to dismiss it wholesale? Well so be it. I do hope you will cut some slack to people who think metrical poetry is, without exception, worthless boring shit. The impulse behind both actions seems, to me, to be far more alike than not. |
Jody, you're right about the smell of death clinging to postmodernism. At the end of an as yet unpublished essay I make a bad play on words with post modern and post mortem. The essay was finished three or four years ago when I still cared about such stuff. No more. I can't even bring myself to complete the last of the set of essays I had in mind, though given a large swatch of time, I may yet get around to it.
Soon as I get a minute, I'll link to and read your essay. As to my own early efforts, I can't even THINK of them, much less read them without cringing. |
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