[Paul Lake]

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

[Richard Wakefield]

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

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

<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>

1. Some people seem to think that "highest simplicity" is achieved "by a few elements;"
   
2. others, that a vast presentation of multifarious elements shows an authentic complexity;
   
3. and yet others, that authentic representation is impossible, due to the number of complex variables which would comprise such representation; these last either a) do not bother representing, or b) go for a "near approximation" which they recognize to be utterly false but in some respects right-on.
   
4. Meanwhile, some don't know the difference between #'s 1 & 2.

(And I suppose the above, taken generally, will apply to both, creator and critic.)

[I reserve the right to revise these notes.]

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

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.

[Tim Love]

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

• 's page is useful - e.g - "Disruption Theory: Mental susceptibility to disrupted text" (don't be distracted by the terminology).
• "As a form of human behaviour, experimental writing clearly belongs with play: immature members of the group dress up in eccentric clothing, walk in eccentric ways (on one foot, for example), paint their faces, make non-linguistic noises, refuse to speak in words, make up imaginary languages. In developmental psychological terms, games serve to rehearse people (or monkeys or cats) in complex behaviour patterns, needing practice; ... Young animals play the games most suited to their inner state and developmental needs at any time; games are not arbitrary but pre-selected by innate self-organizing learning programs. ... What the avantgarde seem to be playing at is practice making up rules and telling other people what to do and disapproving of them if they don't comply. " - Andrew Duncan, Angel Exhaust 9
• <A HREF=http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/texts/order.html>Literary Order and Chaos has refs and quotes (but not much else) which might be of use.
• has stuff about layers, tangled hierarchies, etc.
• <A HREF=http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/texts/obscurity.html> Obscurity has bits about layer-collapsing.
• "The human brain is an amazing organ, one that's developed through evolution from being able to clobber mammoths to knocking off sonnets. However, evolution never does any more than necessary. As sight evolved, there was no survival advantage in being able to deal with situations that didn't happen in real life - our eyes might be able to help us distinguish friend from foe at a hundred yards, but they're easily tricked by optical illusions. Thought and language processing is even more complex than visual processing, so perhaps it's not surprising that poetry can create an illusion of depth and meaning by short-circuiting the normal routes (much as stereograms give the effect of depth though they have none), exploiting a loop-hole that evolution has left open. As with stereograms, surface obscurity may be necessary to produce the effect, and there's a lot of skill involved in producing an effective illusion. Indeed, I'd say that not merely skill is involved; it's an art." - Tim Love

[Paul Lake]

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."

[Julie Steiner]

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!

Julie Stoner

[This message has been edited by Julie Stoner (edited September 17, 2003).]

[Paul Lake]

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.

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

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!

[epigone]

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