List of Corrections for Anonymous Writing Project
Page Paragraph Original Correction
1 1 vision: we vision. We
2 Yet she She
books” books,”
5 2 with on with
8 top page antimonies antinomies
11 n4 Insituto Instituto
14 1 long fulfilled long, fulfilled
2 analyses analyzes (press requires American spelling . . . )
as an moral as a moral
15 top thought, were thought were
“our, Hitler and after “our Hitler and after
2 lives, that lives that
was adult, both was an adult, both
18 1 themselves “Falling themselves: “Falling
19 3 not what they do”; not what they do;”
20 1 malgre malgré
2 identity, not suffered identity, nor suffered
25 2 categories categorize
in quote no mean no means
3 Hitler, can Hitler can
to think, and to think and
29 n8 Heidegger”; Heidegger;”
30 n10 top her death the her death, the
n27 female pupil female pupils
31 n61 analyses analyzes
34 2 practice is due practice are due
49 2 practice I practice, I
but impossible) but impossible,
50 2 bottom form and specifically myth in form, and specifically myth, in
51 Chapter 2 Notes Notes
53 1 which came about which come about
55 top Hannah’s Hannah
2 in quote fear . . . A fear. . . . A
59 1 chivalric Chivalric
61 2 change of roles seems changes of role seem
63 top the Castle the castle
mid page knight asks knight, asks
undisclosed hidden hidden
66 3 Ate Até
70 n4 events is events and
71 n26 a corn on a horn on
n27 the first meaning the first public meaning
72 n29 top centre center
73 n64 top centred centered
n71 period placed at end
78 1 centre center
79 2 La Gioconda39; La Gioconda;39
80 end of para Head. Rosa Head, Rosa
1 commentates comments
82 2 around Dr Tulp around Dr. Tulp
85 2 (1658) (1659)
92 1 Since most of Though most of
94 1 next-to-the-last penultimate
95 1 realligns realigns
100 1 Rapunzel inability Rapunzel-like inability
102 top and a Briar hedge and a briar hedge
106 n66 Motif K521.1 (Motif K521.1).
108 top to see, squarely to see squarely
2 long hot talk long talk
109 top Once could One could
113 3 that involves that involve
genders to can genders to
117 1 to an transcendent to a transcendent
2 can related can relate
118 4 We inassimilable We are inassimilable
120 2 in quote there is not there is no
just after quote us, as us us, as us
121 top that others that of others
124 n6 handshake rapprochement
125 n28 impossible difference Impossible Difference
n37 These passages -delete passages-
n50 quotation to be quotation would be
126 n55 in note 27 in note 29
n58 is topic is a topic
n63 Harper’s Magazine Harper’s Magazine
129 1 industrial revolution Industrial Revolution
applies to in an applies in an
130 1 in quote . . . we cannot . . . [W]e cannot
132 top the latter’s desire his desire (the pronoun reference is clear enough)
1 virginity sexuality (Marina, at least, is not a virgin)
135 1 in Hegelian dialectic dialectically
136 1 request of her mother’s request of his mother’s
2 when Marina agrees once Marina offers
137 1 by sharing the same mistress by being mistress to both
138 1 last line nearly need need
139 1 man-made such cultural
140 1 colonizer-- colonizer,
underclass-- underclass,
serve as that serve as
141 1 use to so used to be so
142 1 man-made social
2 in quote friends of tyrants friend of tyrants
last line on page may have engages engages
143 top the existence of God the absence of God
1 ambivalence, close., close.
2 although which Murdoch although Murdoch
144 top being critical of deleted that phrase
n2 In an 1978 In a 1978 (US usage)
n7 theatre theater (yeh, I know, sorry for all the cultural
imperialism there, press’s orders)
145 n17 (1952) and (1952), and
146 n63 she did have she did not have
147 1 ‘Sartre “Sartre
also become also becomes
148 1 will write about will discuss
149 3 Murdoch properly Murdoch properly,
153 top pour-soi: and pour-soi and --deleted the :
1 Sartre was, that Sartre was that
156 bottom evocative visualization style to evocative style of imagery to
157 1 Yet for Murdoch Sartre Yet for Murdoch, Sartre
158 1 person male voice narrator person male narrator
162 2 that humans” moral problems that moral problems
in their relationship in a relationship
165 n1 I will refer to --deleted repetition—
(1903-1976) they (1903-1976); they
n16 hermeneutics of suspicion Hermeneutics of Suspicion
n21 negation of happiness Negation of Happiness
166 n41 rather then rather than
178 2 helps to makes helps to make
186 2 , i.e., death. , i.e. death.
188 n42 sado-masochism sadomasochism
220 n5 she is some she is in some
n10 that there some that there is some
n23 one”s one’s
222 1 Fisher Fischer
“goo’” “good”
223 1 Fisher Fischer
Patti Pattie
224 top with which I agree with with which I agree
works, i. e., that she works, i. e. that she
3 Patti Pattie
225 1 Testament, connect Testament and connect
centre center
226 mid page argument against argument for
bot page Murdoch here? Murdoch here.
227 mid page ‘tranquility” “tranquility”
he inspires, is whether he inspires, whether
228 1 Fisher Fischer
229 1 of the inner of the interior
2 The encounters others Encounters with others
an “other” which forces an “other” forces
231 mid page Patti’s Pattie’s
near bot text can we text, can we
232 mid page to continental writing to Continental writing
human condition” human condition,”
235 n13 statement disagree statement I disagree
n16 2001. ‘I have 2001. “I have
assessment.’ assessment.”
n19 Mille Miller
n24 Gerde Gerede 2x
236 n45 ideas and ideas in
239 2 an symmetry a symmetry
240 top room to reader room to the reader
1 mid page towards to
241 1 The Idea of Perfection, “The Idea of Perfection,”
platonic Platonic
2 The argument of her Her argument for her
allows this; the task allows this: the task
243 1 philosophy for the and philosophy and
by a reference by reference
take possession of. possess.
thought, between demonstrating thought, demonstrating
244 2 a love of good a love of the good
245 1 correspondences that can be perceived, although
correspondences, although
247 1 whom her family approves of of whom her family approves
248 top ethics of virtue virtue ethics
that is to say “women that is “women
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
On Graham's "Eve" because it has nothing to do with the essay in which I wrote it
Not becoming the garden, but thrown out of it, Eve presents Graham with an opportunity to meditate on the dangers and virtues of change/life/transgression and inevitability. In “Eve,” the poet works through the expansion of moments as a symbol of being captured. The view of Eden is that it was a place of innocence, but also of a radical servitude and limitation manifest as dollorous boredom: “Still noon: it is not clear how much / this green, looked-out upon, / tumbling towards the eye to land is dressed,” and “All day the green, / a sound like silk unspooling from the bolt.” In this unchanging green noon, Eve toys with the idea of change before the apple, the “Just now: like a feeling / behind one’s back.” She’s heard the “small, hissing if, oh if…” and responds almost unconsciously by playing with the gate to the garden, “I step through. I step back.” A shift in perspective leaps away from Eve’s subjectivity to some abstracted summary of the story of the fall: “Bless, blame, transvaluate— / Change context— / Unexpect context.” Through that transvaluation abstracting the fall into a coined paradox, “unexpect,” condensing Eve’s wish for a break in monotony, the real disruptive gesture of the the poem emerges in that it uses the inevitability of the story—the choice, the explusion—as forgiveness. Rendering calamity on a personal scale, Adam is reported to say yes to her offer because “he knew / the deliberate anti-climax/ by heart” and almost gently commands her, “disorder my clothing, / count my ribs, / hide your face.” ---- PMRSC
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Ripped from A Poetics of Being Two
Ok, you lot are not sending submissions, so I'll just post some odd bits of my poetics book as I cut and reject them. They will be out of context, naturally. The Irigaray I refer to here is I Love to You: A Sketch for a Possible Felicity in History. The Hegel should be obvious.
The For-Later, Review and Extension
The human being appears at his most worthy when… he appears to be at once spirit and a particular individual.
Building worlds is not enough for the mind that reaches more deeply, yet a loving heart is ample for the spirit that constantly strives.
Novalis, Philosophical Writings
The mode of living, of becoming that Irigaray seeks to inaugurate is not encouraged now. In spite of the work done by various kinds of progressive and humanitarian movements, I don’t think that the culture of the West, and definitely not the U. S., has not moved into a new mode of being. Sexual and civil rights revolutions have had a tremendous impact in U.S. culture, but there is still tremendous pressure to limit the potential of the human being, both man and woman and of all races and creeds, for the sake of a smoothly running and familiar state-economy. The “utilitarian” state of affairs, Irigaray argues, should not continue, though it may. If the family is the basis of the state, the site of its possibility and continuity, as Hegel and many other philosophers have noted, then changes in the relations between men and women, the couple, and therefore between each of them and their child will imply and require changes in the shape, content, and function of the state. Hence, when one goes to the mountain to talk to Hegel, one does not go alone. Even Zarathustra had an eagle, a serpent and a lion with him on his mountain (with Hegel). Irigaray brought a host of divinities with her. In I love to You, she begins by summarizing Hegel’s description of love, or our culture’s failing as she interprets it:
The horrible paradox of a goal and a torment, of a trick set up long ago as this annihilating reciprocity. We are out here, we humans, in historically lucky countries, making up the world for the first time, confused, timid, unsupported, or relatively undominated by church, state, codified spiritual tradition, and still there are many who would quash such cultural and social change: out of fear, out of resentment, out of tradition. I’m thinking of the religious right specifically, and people who assume that their lifestyle is applicable to everyone, or who remain within traditional roles out of simple comfort. At least the religious right practices some kind of critical engagement with their lives and the culture around them, even if the results of that critical activity are anathema to my sensibilities or desires for people. We have a serious conversation to have about what makes for human flourishing, once we get over the culture wars. There is nothing at all secure that precludes a return to the family Hegel was describing, nothing at all that stops the pendulum except our will and creativity and vigilance.
In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the family expresses the ethical sphere in natural immediacy, that is unconsciously, but is “an ethical entity,” that is consciously ethical, “only so far as it is not the natural relationship of its members” (268). The family’s relationships cannot simply be given by the accidents of blood or affection, for there is no consciousness there:
The purpose of the family is the child, the other of the man who is the family. The wife, the woman, and love have no valuable role to play in Hegel’s family or Hegel’s ethics. A woman’s only valued ethical (conscious) role is her reverent duty toward her brother—a relationship in which her (sexual) desire can play no role. So that’s very tidy. In the relationships of the ethical family:
Against Hegel’s description of our culture’s paralyzed, impoverished, and monstrous ideology of love, Irigaray brings the other language of Tantra; wherein, love is exchange in a “non-oppositional dialectic” which precludes the assimilation of woman by man, “[He] recognizes the other as what he or she already is and gives him or her the right or chance to exist” (IL 3, 9). Love that is ethical is conscious, purposeful, attentive—a project, not an accident. In it the lovers have a relationship outside their relationship to the child, and each a relationship to the universal (or divine) outside their relationship to each other. If that the child, boy or girl, owes the parents nothing, neither accomplishment nor dutiful marriage in the name of family, she and he can live to be just himself or herself having “stolen” nothing from the parents’ love for each other as lovers. The other (woman-sister) is not the for-me of the self-subject (husband-brother). Everyone has the right or chance to exist.
The For-Later, Review and Extension
The human being appears at his most worthy when… he appears to be at once spirit and a particular individual.
Building worlds is not enough for the mind that reaches more deeply, yet a loving heart is ample for the spirit that constantly strives.
Novalis, Philosophical Writings
The mode of living, of becoming that Irigaray seeks to inaugurate is not encouraged now. In spite of the work done by various kinds of progressive and humanitarian movements, I don’t think that the culture of the West, and definitely not the U. S., has not moved into a new mode of being. Sexual and civil rights revolutions have had a tremendous impact in U.S. culture, but there is still tremendous pressure to limit the potential of the human being, both man and woman and of all races and creeds, for the sake of a smoothly running and familiar state-economy. The “utilitarian” state of affairs, Irigaray argues, should not continue, though it may. If the family is the basis of the state, the site of its possibility and continuity, as Hegel and many other philosophers have noted, then changes in the relations between men and women, the couple, and therefore between each of them and their child will imply and require changes in the shape, content, and function of the state. Hence, when one goes to the mountain to talk to Hegel, one does not go alone. Even Zarathustra had an eagle, a serpent and a lion with him on his mountain (with Hegel). Irigaray brought a host of divinities with her. In I love to You, she begins by summarizing Hegel’s description of love, or our culture’s failing as she interprets it:
How does Hegel define love between men and women? He defines it as it is still often practiced in our time, but also as it is defined by monotheistic, patriarchal religion, or ostensibly at the other extreme, by theories of sexuality, like the Freudian one. He defines it, on the whole, as we still experience it, in private and in public ... without managing to resolve the problem of the lack of spirit and ethics he observes. He also defines it in terms of his method. Which means that in order to overcome what he terms natural immediacy within the family Hegel turns to pairs of opposites. Hence he is forced to define man and woman as opposites and not as different.
This is still the case for us. There are still no civil rights proper to women and men ... ; there is still no civil law in our era that makes human persons of men and women ... . For want of such laws, our sexuality lapses into barbarity worse at times than that of animal society ... .
The woman is wife and mother. But, for her, this role is a function of abstract duty. So she is not this woman, irreducible in her singularity, wife of this man, who is himself irreducible, any more than she is mother of this child or these children. She is only attributed that singularity from the perspective of the man, for whom she remains bound to natural immediacy. As far as she is concerned, she is a wife and mother in as much as these roles represent a task vis-à-vis the universal which she discharges by renouncing her singular desires.This is Paz’s vitiation, Lacan’s formulation of feminine lack, Freud’s conundrum, dearth out of which the Romantics wished to love their way to plenitude. Reason left to its own devices, leaves us in this morass that turns love and desire against us. Irigaray asks, tantrically, in her ethics that we risk our way out.We must interpret and go beyond this order in that it represents alienation from the human for both sexes and for humanity as a whole, alienation leading the human species to its loss. For love seems to remain a natural affliction, its only possible redemption being the spiritual authoritarianism of a community dominated by a patriarchal father. Of love, we know only the singularity of sensible desire bereft of a for-itself, the torments of attraction for the other, the weight of sinfulness and the price we pay for our redemption. We know about the loneliness of desire, the desperation of rejection or of wanting the impossible, the pathological derangements of the drives, the destitution of parting. We know, too, the passionate resurgence of desire for someone, a singular desire for the one feeling it but an inexpressible, ultimately irrational desire, with no language for the one who inspires it and thus an aspiration devoid of any possible reciprocity except for the annihilating reciprocity this kind of mentality produces. We also know the shame of desire, its engulfment in the loss of identity, its chaos, its drug of disillusioned tomorrows. We still know nothing of the salvation love brings, individual and collective salvation. (IL 29, emphasis mine)
Love, as Hegel writes of it, is therefore not possible on the part of the woman... . She has no right to singular love nor to love for herself. She is thus unable to love but is to be subjugated to love and reproduction ... . Love, for her, amounts to a duty—not a right—establishing her role within humankind where she appears as man’s servant. (20-22)
The horrible paradox of a goal and a torment, of a trick set up long ago as this annihilating reciprocity. We are out here, we humans, in historically lucky countries, making up the world for the first time, confused, timid, unsupported, or relatively undominated by church, state, codified spiritual tradition, and still there are many who would quash such cultural and social change: out of fear, out of resentment, out of tradition. I’m thinking of the religious right specifically, and people who assume that their lifestyle is applicable to everyone, or who remain within traditional roles out of simple comfort. At least the religious right practices some kind of critical engagement with their lives and the culture around them, even if the results of that critical activity are anathema to my sensibilities or desires for people. We have a serious conversation to have about what makes for human flourishing, once we get over the culture wars. There is nothing at all secure that precludes a return to the family Hegel was describing, nothing at all that stops the pendulum except our will and creativity and vigilance.
In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the family expresses the ethical sphere in natural immediacy, that is unconsciously, but is “an ethical entity,” that is consciously ethical, “only so far as it is not the natural relationship of its members” (268). The family’s relationships cannot simply be given by the accidents of blood or affection, for there is no consciousness there:
the ethical connection between the members of the Family is not that of feeling, or the relationship of love. It seems, then, that the ethical principle must be placed in the relation of the individual member of the Family to the whole Family as the Substance, so that the End and content of what he does and actually is, is solely the Family. (269)Irigaray’s shift is precisely that it is in the relationship of love that the ethical relationship takes place. Love is, for her, as much or more a choice than an accident of mood or proximity. Love is both an accident of fate, and a fate that one must choose, as Paz puts it. The relations of the family members differ greatly from a system in which the family member (he) is both the whole of the family and sacrifices himself completely to it without maintaining his envelope, his separateness. Inside the family, he is not substantial, not real, for “it is only as a citizen that he is actual and substantial, the individual, so far as he is not a citizen but belongs to the Family, is only an unreal impotent shadow,” just a father, not even a lover, and not a man (270). Man’s being does not take place in the Family in Hegel’s ethics. He does not exist there, and he may still in our culture not find of his being or sense of self there. The activity of the family does not center on man’s activity as a citizen or an employee, and Hegel sees no reason therefore for man to integrate himself into the family as much other than a sacrifice that is the whole of the family. The family is far too much a feminine cultural space for that. This love is so far from ethics that:
the relationship of husband to wife is in the first the one in which one consciousness immediately recognizes itself in another, and in which there is knowledge of this mutual recognition. Because this self-recognition is a natural and not an ethical one, it is only a representation, an image of Spirit, not actually Spirit itself... . This relationship therefore has its actual existence not in itself but in the child—an “other”, whose coming into existence is the relationship, and is also that in which the relationship itself gradually passes away. (Hegel 273)If this is the case, what blindness is it that convinces the husband and wife in love to have children? Is the child the only real embodied instance of their love, and the death of it? When people live unconsciously, automatically and passively, allowing the work and the child and the demands of the state to railroad them along, I can see how this would happen. Since for Hegel the basis of this thrust is the nation, I can see why the state would want it this way (273). Love, especially a love that is conscious and ethical, that determines its own course, makes the state nervous because it does not always play by the state’s rules or into its hands.
The purpose of the family is the child, the other of the man who is the family. The wife, the woman, and love have no valuable role to play in Hegel’s family or Hegel’s ethics. A woman’s only valued ethical (conscious) role is her reverent duty toward her brother—a relationship in which her (sexual) desire can play no role. So that’s very tidy. In the relationships of the ethical family:
It is not a question of this particular husband, this particular child, [note the mom-wife and sister are missing], but simply of husband and children generally; the relationships of the woman are based not on feeling [the only basis left if she attains to only natural immediacy] but on the universal... . [In] her vocation as an individual and in her pleasure, her interest is centered on the universal and remains alien to the particularity of desire; whereas the husband ... , since he possesses as a citizen the self-conscious power of universality, he thereby acquires the right of desire and, at the same time preserves his freedom in regard to it. (Hegel 274-5)That is, love for one’s husband or child as specific people is not the operant here, but service and reverence on the principle of the specific [or not] woman’s duty to Husband and Child as universals—as ideas. The flights of what would soon be the Romantic experience of love run against the ethical for Hegel, as rash, unconscious flights of all kinds do. The Romantics would go searching for earthly relations, horizontal ones that were not prejudged battles. The co-existence of the body and the soul, of the carnal and the spiritual, a sensible transcendental was part of their project. Hegel, on the other hand, prefers that vertical axis of his universal. The particular, embodied lover is so confounding to that universal that she and he are simply ruled out. The tension between them, between love and ethics (duty), is one that still tears at the bonds humans try to form as husband and wife and as fathers and mothers and children. There seems to be no resolution, except in the neutered relationship between brother and sister where “her duty to him is the highest,” and “the brother is the member of the Family in whom its [the family’s] Spirit becomes an individuality” (Hegel 275). The son/brother, after all, carries the family name while the daughter/sister is to be absorbed into another family, to become a wife, not a lover, and to foster the individuality of some other family. Do we not, still, everyday thanks to the daytime talk shows, hear stories of husbands who cannot see their wives as appropriate sexual partners after the birth of children, or of wives who cannot picture themselves as lovers once they have children? Or, stories of women who put off their weddings once they discover that conversations with family and friends shift entirely from her interests, career, talents, dreams to talk of the wedding plans and how many children she will have and china patterns—she disappears as an individual, becomes a wife-function. Should she resist that disappearance into the service of the universal, she is labeled or often labels herself as selfish, as unwomanly. How many parents are lost from their connection to each other by the all consuming focus on the child as substitute for their love between each other? How many episodes of Oprah have aired these dilemmas, or of The Jerry Springer Show have exploited this story and its pain for the edification of the viewing public? The flush, burn, rumble and rush of love-lust, the hunger, by definition realization of need, of emptiness, of the desire that springs from lack (and what do you or I have to offer from that condition?) comes smack against the ethical, the duty, of family, the lover, the obligation to give of oneself. The love of Romantic poems and romantic movies seems to get stuck on the side of life before marriage, as if the lack of boundary or envelope that form of love embodies is somehow dangerous. It is. It is as out of balance as the family of duty-only in Hegel. It is out of balance when compared to ethical love as Irigaray defines it. My, or your, purpose in love is not to lose myself in or to complete myself at the expense of the other, borrowing their identity or life. My, or your, purpose in love is to continue becoming on my own path and to encourage your becoming on your path, and to find a way that those two paths travel together. In the current therapist’s lingo: co-dependency is to be replaced with interdependency. Trouble is that one must first be independent in order to be interdependent.
Against Hegel’s description of our culture’s paralyzed, impoverished, and monstrous ideology of love, Irigaray brings the other language of Tantra; wherein, love is exchange in a “non-oppositional dialectic” which precludes the assimilation of woman by man, “[He] recognizes the other as what he or she already is and gives him or her the right or chance to exist” (IL 3, 9). Love that is ethical is conscious, purposeful, attentive—a project, not an accident. In it the lovers have a relationship outside their relationship to the child, and each a relationship to the universal (or divine) outside their relationship to each other. If that the child, boy or girl, owes the parents nothing, neither accomplishment nor dutiful marriage in the name of family, she and he can live to be just himself or herself having “stolen” nothing from the parents’ love for each other as lovers. The other (woman-sister) is not the for-me of the self-subject (husband-brother). Everyone has the right or chance to exist.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Noted in ":RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM:"
The essay appears in Joan Retallack's The Poethical Wager, possibly my favorite book of the last several years. On page 128 at bottom begins a paragraph, "Beyond the vanishing point lie shocking scenes: exposed negatives reveal a domimatrix with polymorphous perverse appetites and ambitions wreaking havoc in the popular maxiseries, "Civlization and Miss Content." It ends on 129, "To what extent have women been complicit in the substitution of the image of the female for the transgressive experimental feminine?" The whole paragraph is heavily boxed in with ink and marked with three ***, my symbol for "OH THIS IS GOOD."
The marginalia says, "archery, extreme freeze tag, dresses, roses, poking slugs with sticks // that vitality and curiosity in love, sex, work, sleep // enthusiastically living in the world lets us find out // --> 132."
Down the page a bit is this passage: " But the symbolic is not the only logical or associative order of meaning. There is metonymy, as well as metaphor; there are complex dynamic systems and fluidly interactive models, as well as equivalences. The phallus, like the romantic genius and strong poet and symbolic logic it props up, has got to go; the penis may get on quite well without it."
Amusing to me is this: my marginalia here makes a romantic/Romantic appeal to the polymorphous pleasures of my own childhood, and while that vitality is part of Retallack's project, the implied innocence is most certainly not.
See 132: "Perhaps we can canel our ad nauseam encores as ambiguously smiling, subtextual female repressed. Perhaps we can assume the active textual project of entertaining multiple, complex possibilities/improbabilities/unintelligabilities in our languages and lives."
This crossroads of the postmodern and the romantic/utopian never ceases to fascinate.
The marginalia says, "archery, extreme freeze tag, dresses, roses, poking slugs with sticks // that vitality and curiosity in love, sex, work, sleep // enthusiastically living in the world lets us find out // --> 132."
Down the page a bit is this passage: " But the symbolic is not the only logical or associative order of meaning. There is metonymy, as well as metaphor; there are complex dynamic systems and fluidly interactive models, as well as equivalences. The phallus, like the romantic genius and strong poet and symbolic logic it props up, has got to go; the penis may get on quite well without it."
Amusing to me is this: my marginalia here makes a romantic/Romantic appeal to the polymorphous pleasures of my own childhood, and while that vitality is part of Retallack's project, the implied innocence is most certainly not.
See 132: "Perhaps we can canel our ad nauseam encores as ambiguously smiling, subtextual female repressed. Perhaps we can assume the active textual project of entertaining multiple, complex possibilities/improbabilities/unintelligabilities in our languages and lives."
This crossroads of the postmodern and the romantic/utopian never ceases to fascinate.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Exam Question: History of Aesthetics III -- by PMRSC
All Exam Questions have a closed audience (a prof, a class) and a closed system of reference (the content of the course). In this exam, the students were instructed to spend no more than 30 minutes on a response, and to think of responses as little position papers. I offer it as the first post in this project because it's the kind of partial and possibly wrong-headed thing you are encouraged to post here. Since, after all, had the class been discussing Pound's shorter poems, or Stein's "Lifting Belly" or her book How to Write and Pounds ABC's of Reading, this might have been a very different response.
3. “Pound and Stein are phases of the same thing.”
Thesis: Um, respectfully, no.
If you are William Carlos Williams, and you are right next to Stein-Pound, the two poets could seem to be doing the same thing, on some levels. Ideologically, Stein and Pound both reject WCW’s preference for the regional and the American. Stylistically, Stein and Pound both violate English syntax. Historically, Stein and Pound are both related in their experiments to Mallarmé and the Symbolists, who had the unfortunate habit of writing ideas but not things. Both Stein and Pound demonstrated in their poetry a preoccupation with language qua language. WCW wanted (1) lines that made sense (whether or not the poem ‘coheres’ is another question), (2) images that put one in mind of contemporary objects and situations, and (3)an absence of any sort of comparison (similes, metaphors, etc.) Stein and Pound might deliver 2 and 3, but 1 they took for an option.
But this similarity doesn’t seem to go as far as WCW claims it does. Their aesthetic commitments differ in both method and ideology. Stein, methodologically, strips the world away from language as completely as she can in poems like "Tender Buttons." There are nouns and verbs and some adjectives, and the syntax will not get you to sense, and the images will not get you to a recognizable world. These poems are a world, a very sensual one, unto themselves. Further, the poems refuse to invent a world for the reader. In her prose, Stein works with a method of repetition and a slow accretion or revelation of ‘meaning’ that seems to wobble long like time and evolution itself. Pound, on the other hand, used refrains, not repetition, to punctuate poems which violated syntax mostly by mixing languages and historical moments of languages. As much of a collage as Pounds poems are, they are not Stein’s confetti. The language still gestures to the world, but to so much of it that finding one’s place in it is difficult. And, most different of all, Pound is trying to create a world. Stein avoids tropes, Pound feeds on them. Pound, ideologically, is committed to remaking the world in his image, an image of ‘total’ learning and totally coherent order which must be wrested both from history and from the current seats of power. He’s a classicist, mannerist, militarist, fascist. The Cantos is the instruction book for leading this new world order. Stein, on the other hand, sees the militarist fascist tendencies in classicism and other vagaries of the tradition and wants all that to melt away.
"Tender Buttons" is the disordered juxtaposition of objects (read: persons, contexts, aesthetics) which might coexist joyfully once Pound’s axiologies are surrendered (which is an axiological move on her part, yes, yes.) They do similar things in dissimilar ways for opposite reasons.
3. “Pound and Stein are phases of the same thing.”
Thesis: Um, respectfully, no.
If you are William Carlos Williams, and you are right next to Stein-Pound, the two poets could seem to be doing the same thing, on some levels. Ideologically, Stein and Pound both reject WCW’s preference for the regional and the American. Stylistically, Stein and Pound both violate English syntax. Historically, Stein and Pound are both related in their experiments to Mallarmé and the Symbolists, who had the unfortunate habit of writing ideas but not things. Both Stein and Pound demonstrated in their poetry a preoccupation with language qua language. WCW wanted (1) lines that made sense (whether or not the poem ‘coheres’ is another question), (2) images that put one in mind of contemporary objects and situations, and (3)an absence of any sort of comparison (similes, metaphors, etc.) Stein and Pound might deliver 2 and 3, but 1 they took for an option.
But this similarity doesn’t seem to go as far as WCW claims it does. Their aesthetic commitments differ in both method and ideology. Stein, methodologically, strips the world away from language as completely as she can in poems like "Tender Buttons." There are nouns and verbs and some adjectives, and the syntax will not get you to sense, and the images will not get you to a recognizable world. These poems are a world, a very sensual one, unto themselves. Further, the poems refuse to invent a world for the reader. In her prose, Stein works with a method of repetition and a slow accretion or revelation of ‘meaning’ that seems to wobble long like time and evolution itself. Pound, on the other hand, used refrains, not repetition, to punctuate poems which violated syntax mostly by mixing languages and historical moments of languages. As much of a collage as Pounds poems are, they are not Stein’s confetti. The language still gestures to the world, but to so much of it that finding one’s place in it is difficult. And, most different of all, Pound is trying to create a world. Stein avoids tropes, Pound feeds on them. Pound, ideologically, is committed to remaking the world in his image, an image of ‘total’ learning and totally coherent order which must be wrested both from history and from the current seats of power. He’s a classicist, mannerist, militarist, fascist. The Cantos is the instruction book for leading this new world order. Stein, on the other hand, sees the militarist fascist tendencies in classicism and other vagaries of the tradition and wants all that to melt away.
"Tender Buttons" is the disordered juxtaposition of objects (read: persons, contexts, aesthetics) which might coexist joyfully once Pound’s axiologies are surrendered (which is an axiological move on her part, yes, yes.) They do similar things in dissimilar ways for opposite reasons.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)