Point Zero

There is an essay by Blanchot – 'Man at Point Zero' - where he speaks of the desire to return to the origin: the point where art first emerges from non-art, where society emerges from nature, and so on. And he suggests that these attempts are not so much misguided desires for an impossible purity or immaculate conception, but a kind of thought experiment, a strategic hypothesis allowing the thinker or artist to round on and displace the self-evidence of the present. Not then an illusory construct but an imaginary one, Blanchot suggests, but he goes on ‘imaginary, almost according to the meaning given this word by mathematics’. I’m curious to know what this ‘mathematical’ sense of imaginary is.

Index Card 5: Body and Writing.

Walter Benjamin on Proust:

"The doctors were powerless in the face of his malady; not so the writer, who very systematically placed it in his service. To begin with the most external aspect, he was a perfect stage director of his sickness.. Even as a writer of letters he extracted the most singular effects from his malady. 'The wheezing of my breath is drowning out the sorrow of my pen..' But that is not all, nor is it the fact that his sickness removed him from fashionable living. This asthma became part of his art - if indeed his art did not create it. Proust's syntax rhythmically and step by step reproduces the fear of suffocating. And his ironic, philosophical, didactic reflections invariably are the deep breath with which he shakes off the weight of memories. On a larger scale, however, the threatening suffocating crisis was death, which he was constantly aware of, even when writing. A physiology of style would take us into the innermost core of his creativeness."

Barthes on Michelet:

'Michelet's disease is the migraine, that mixture of vertigo and nausea.. Michelet organises his physical weakness as a parasite would do, i.e., he burrows into the heart of historical substance, feeds on it, grows in it, and existing only by its means triumphantly invades it. Work, in other words being a nutritive habit in which every weakness is certain of being a value, migraines are here transferred, i.e., rescued, endowed with signification.."

Re Proust, then: it is not as a disguised referent that asthma enters his work ('ha, here we see a veiled mention of his illness'), but something like the very rhythm of asthma, which underwrites his sentences and gives to them a singularity of cadence. Asthma is carried over into the prose 'metaphorically': just as metaphor refunctions the familiar within the unfamiliar (or vice versa), so the rhythm of asthma is transmuted within the unfamiliar terrain of writing. The work does not refer to asthma but incorporates it, uses and tranforms it. Compare this with WB's own heart condition, the periodic palpitations, which he 'reintroduced' into his writing. Just as his body had periodically to pause, so it is with his prose. Benjamin's insight into Proust is thus simultaneously a mirror held up to his self.

This is what Barthes will name 'style', the revelation and resurrection within the work of the writer's body -

'Whatever is distinctive in a text is bodily, it is where the writer's desire shows through: whatever is styleless is so because it is disembodied."

les mots et les choses 1

Signs of madness

In the following quote from Foucault's madness book, we glimpse something of Walter Benajmin's world of allegory -

The dawn of madness on the horizon of the Renaissance is first perceptible in the decay of Gothic symbolism; as if the world, whose network of spiritual meanings was so close knit, had begun to unravel, showing faces whose meaning was no longer clear.. Freed from wisdom and from the teaching that organised it, the image begins to gravitate about its own madness.

Paradoxically, this liberation derives from a proliferation of meaning, from a self-multiplication of significance weaving relationships so numerous, so intertwined, so rich, that they can no longer be deiphered except in the esotericism of knowledge

.

Thinking through thinking

I remember (can’t recall who or where) someone smiling at a ‘Deleuzian’ who nonetheless prepared a genealogical tree of Deleuze’s thought. One thinks, similarly, of the Derridean who, when the logic of his rhetoric is revealed to him, appeals instead to the integrity of his intentions. Or people who are happy to talk about ‘positions of enunciation’, ‘discursive context’, ‘phatic functions’ and so on, while displaying wanton disregard for these in their actual human interactions.

Time and again, thinking operates only within the penumbra of the desk lamp, wilfully blind to its own implications, unable to translate itself into practice or to move from one domain into another - esp. into the domain of the everyday. ‘Deleuze’, or whoever, becomes one more Playstation of the intellect into which a pale narcissus plugs before returning to a life unruffled and intact. (And some of the best writing, some of the best blogs are those in which the author's theoretical or philosophical thought is fully immanent in their everyday observations).

But the point here is not simply to underline the too-familiar contrast between thinking and practice, to repeat the adage that thinking is one thing but life quite another. Firstly, because there is already a thinking embodied in those everyday actions and relations, so that it’s not look, you think this but do that; its look, effectively you think this. Secondly, though, and perhaps obviously, there is a point at which the idea, to think itself further, must pass beyond itself into life; but this passing through itself is also a coming into itself, a completion. The idea which is blind to its implications (and to its implication in the world) is stunted, partial. The actualisation of the idea (in the everyday and in the concrete) is in fact its continuation.

Citability

Am doing some work on ‘transmissibility’ vs. ‘citation’ in Walter Benjamin, as in:

“Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority”

“The transmissibility of the past had been replaced by its citability”

I’m interested in any thoughts (or citations) on this citability.
For WB, Citation breaks up the integrity of tradition and makes it say new things, meanwhile using the vestigial authority that clings to the cited fragments.

To cite involves the paradox of choosing the very authority on which you rely. The conjuring trick of modernism. (postmodern citation, by contrast, is blank - the vestige of authority now wiped.)

That which is transmitted, by contrast, is merely received, taken over – you must accommodate to it, rather than vice versa.

The intuition, too, that something precious in tradition could only be released posthumously and with the impact of a new and foreign context.

Index Card 4: Adjacentism

WB:

In the performance of the clown, there is an obvious reference to the economy. In his abrupt movements he imitates both the machines which push the material and the economic boom which pushes the merchandise..

Adorno to WB:

Throughout your texts there is a tendency to relate the pragmatic contents of Baudelaire's work directly to adjacent features in the social history of the time, preferably economic features. I have in mind the passage about the duty on wine, certain statements about the barricades, or the above mentioned passage about the arcades. I feel this artificiality wherever you put things in metaphorical rather than categorical terms.

This tendency is named 'adjacentism'. But it is a tendency which needs to be understood not as faulty conceptual thought (eg insufficient mediation etc), but as something like a surrealist technique, a way of administering to thought a sudden jolt through the abrupt 'montage' of superstructural and infrastructural levels. Benjamin does not posit a causal link between these two levels. He leaves the connection open. The hinge joining the two phenomenon together is the silence of a connection as yet unnameable by theory.

Index card 3: Adorno/ Benjamin

Adorno:

Thinkers of major significance and power will often produce insights which
address their objects with the utmost fidelity and yet at the same time are
insights into the thinkers themselves. This was the case with Benjamin.

'Benjamin and his object of study were, so to speak, twin sides of a metaphor, or two bodies which at a certain instant and angle reflect oneanother. Benjamin's skill is to capture this moment of interface, of mutual illumination. This moment is what he called a monad.'

Index Card 2: 'The shelter of your Illness'

Proust:

"One day, noticing a swelling inhis stomach, he felt genuinely happy at the thought that he had, perhaps, a tumour that would prove fatal, that he need no longer concern himself with anything, that illness was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him."

Kafka:

"From my tubercolosis this one now derives the kind of immense support a child gets from clinging to its mother's skirts. What more can one hope for? Has not the war been splendidly concluded? It is tubercolosis, and that is the end."

Illness is the exemption certificate the writer craves in order to abjure the world without guilt. There is this secret pact between the writer (of a certain sort) and death, or more precisely Fate. Fate confiscates your life, freeing up the capacity for creative work. Fate gives you your freedom.

The wild Irish; or, a note on stereotypes

Eagleton’s recent discussion of stereotyping is criticised here. I haven’t read the TE article, but the summary mentions a familiar defence of stereotypes – i.e. that they are often true, or at least broadly accurate. This overlooks a couple of rather obvious points. Every stereotype-net will of course catch something. Hence, the predictable faux-naïve defence ‘but I’ve met people like this’, the ‘I’m just saying, a lot of Irish actually are…’. But even where the net apparently catches its ‘examples’ or can be deemed to have some sort of accuracy, what makes it a stereotype is (as I pointed out in the comments) that it essentialises what are historically contingent features. The English stereotype of the lawless Irish (under colonial rule) overlooked that it was this foreign and imposed law that was being resisted or disavowed, not ‘Law itself’. (Indeed, ‘Irish’ itself might be seen as proto-stereotypical, since a diverse population, having in common the fact being of under colonial rule, is then turned into a positive entity, ‘The Irish’.) Likewise, with stereotypes of ‘lazy’ colonised peoples etc - they don’t want to work for you etc. Stereotyping is de-historicising, edits out context/ relations of power and so on. The other (I think obvious) point about the faux naïve ‘empiricist’ defence is that the particular trait chosen for the stereotype is always eloquent over and above its ‘accuracy’. The point concerns the choice of this particular trait. The trait chosen, far from being some neutral observation, is made to serve as a figure for the whole class of people concerned. Or, it is such a figure in the false guise of an observation.

Index card 1: Benjamin

.. the unity of a word which is not itself present but instead represents, as it were, the configuration of its various nuances and possibilities of meaning: an Idea in Benjamin's sense of the word.

The 'meaning' of the word is not directly present before us, nor held in the Dictionary's safe deposit box; we do not scratch the surface of the word to glimpse the meaning within, for its meaning lies 'outside' it in its potential couplings and usages and relations.

... similarly, a person is defined by his or her relations, which always await definition; no amount of intent introspection will allow us to see what is only visible in our commerce with the world.

Posts marked 'index card' are literally notes found on some index cards I was sorting through last night. Often it is unclear what is being quoted and from where - the cards are perhaps 10 yrs old.

In response to earlier posts on literature and 'subtraction,' a reader sends me the following passage from Umberto Eco's Open Work:

Any work of art can be viewed as a message to be decoded by an addressee. But unlike most messages, instead of aiming at transmitting a univocal meaning, the work of art succeeds precisely insofar as it appears ambiguous and open-ended. The notion of the open work can be satisfactorily reformulated according to Jakobson's definition of the "poetic" function of language." Poetic language deliberately uses terms in a way that will radically alter their referential function (by establishing, among them, syntactic relationships that violate the usual laws of the code). It eliminates the possibility for a univocal decoding; it gives the addressee the feeling that the current code has been violated to such an extent that it can no longer help. The addressee thus finds himself in the situation of a cryptographer forced to decode a message whose code is unknown, and who therefore has to learn the code of the message from the message itself." At this point, the addressee will find himself so personally involved with the message that his attention will gradually move from the signifieds, to which the message was supposed to refer, to the structure itself of the signifiers, and by so doing will comply with the demands of the poetic message, whose very ambiguity rests on the fact that it proposes itself as the main object of attention: "This emphasis of the message on its own self is called the poetic function..." When we speak of art as an autonomous process, as form for form's sake, we are stressing a particular aspect of the artistic message which communication theory and structural linguistics would define as follows: "The set (Einstellung) toward the MESSAGE as such, focus on the message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language."* To this extent, ambiguity is not an accessory to the message: it is its fundamental feature. This is what forces the addressee to approach the message in a different fashion, not to use it as a mere vehicle (totally irrelevant once he has grasped the content it is carrying) but rather to see it as a constant source of continually shifting meanings—a source whose typical structure, begging relentlessly to be decoded, is organized so as to coordinate all the addressee's possible decodings and force him to repeatedly question the validity of their interpretations by referring them back to the structure of the message."

*In an endnote Eco adds: This does not mean that the signifieds (when they are there) do not count. On the contrary, the poetic message so effectively forces us to question the signifieds to which it refers that we often have to return to the message in order to find, in its patterns of signification, the roots of their problematic nature. Even in the case of preexisting signifieds (say, the Trojan War in the Iliad), the poetic message casts a new, richer light on them, thereby becoming a means to further knowledge.

In his “Ulysses Gramophone: Here Say Yes In Joyce” Jacques Derrida speaks of Ulysses as an “overpotentialized text,” as a text which has “already [. . .] anticipated [. . .] the scene about academic competence and the ingenuity of metadiscourse” (281). Ulysses anticipates its own exegeses, anticipates whatever hermeneutics are developed to systematize and contain its meaning productions, and, because of this anticipation, Ulysses evades comprehensive understanding. Finnegans Wake shows the same behavior. In both these works there are multiple textual maneuvers which lead to overpotentialization: portmanteau words, structural and semantic intratextual references, metatextual words and passages, language games which subvert their own rules, and dialectics which produce confusion and multiple meanings instead of clarity. Collectively these maneuvers create a kind of metatextual atmosphere wherein the text seems to be not only talking about itself, to be showing a textual self-awareness, but seems to be reading its reader and addressing its reader. For every move the reader makes to pigeonhole the text, there is the countermove, by the text, which signifies “Yes. I’ve thought of that already. Guess again.”

So out of reach of common hearts

Discussion here about chess. It is difficult (not everywhere and always, sure) to play chess without also reflexively signalling that one is ‘the sort of person who plays chess’. Not that that’s a ‘bad thing’. G. began playing chess at Café Amato in Soho. It wasn’t just about signalling that he was the ‘sort of person who plays chess’; it was about signalling that ‘this is the sort of café in which people play chess’ – which, thereafter, it indeed became. He thus half-succeeded in recreating, in a little corner of London, some wish-image of European café society. C. got me playing chess about 3 years ago. For him it is doubtless a signifier of the cerebral but also of a certain partly imaginary era populated by Beckett and Duchamp and Debord. I agree with IT that chess is an important reference point for a certain modernism. Pared down, pure form, hermetic, with a hint of aristocratic apartness. The suggestion that this cerebral hermetic game is played in the shadow of immanent catastrophe, so that chess is both a defiant turning away from this and its own appropriate metaphor (endgame)

What do they say?
That Lugaidh Redstripe and that wife of his
Sat at this chess board, waiting for their end.
They knew that there was nothing that could save them,
And so played chess as they had any night
For years, and waited for the stroke of sword.
I never heard a death so out of reach
Of common hearts, a high and comely end. (Yeats)

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Something also about the fusing of ‘aesthetics’ and pure aggression. Fischer I think said that he wanted to crush his opponent’s ego. The opponent is encircled and defeated, his moves only serve a larger attacking orchestration of which he/she is utterly unaware and of which he is now the hapless and crestfallen victim. the fact that this ‘crushing of the ego’ has been accomplished by a poker-faced neutrality, a cold violence of intelligence, only adds to the enjoyment. Thus, the satisfaction of the checkmate is both a ‘detached’ aesthetic satisfaction, that something complex has been conceived and executed with such aplomb and the satisfaction of a knockout punch. Not that I’d know, mind.

Conversation on a Country Path (Well, somwhere near St. Pancras)

The Bergson woman was busy laughing at a stranger’s head. When she saw me, however, she continued our previous conversation at exactly the point we’d left it. Uncanny.

‘Is it not language which allows us to call forth particular things from the uninterrupted continuum of the visible?’

‘How so?’ I asked.

‘The word mountain allows us to separate the mountain itself from undifferentiated background - you know the argument in any case. The template of language divides the mundane continuum into the shapes of reality. When we see these shapes we forget that, in some sense, we are also seeing the template.

‘Animals, I said, who do not have language, are nonetheless able to pick out categories of object from the seamless visible. When you throw your dog a ball it does not matter that it is not the same ball as yesterday. The dog does not see the particular ball, only the basic repeatable pattern. There is a sense in which the dog intuitively grasps the concept ‘ball’.

It was as if a gnat had landed on her shoulder. She continued -

‘There is, to be sure, an implicit language of things, and human language is the most perfect expression and realisation of this. The world is ‘poor in language’ and awaits human nomination. The dog, lacking the word ‘ball’ does not fully know the ball, anymore than, not having the words ‘week’ ‘hour’ ‘day’, he fully knows time’

I was taken aback. ‘I’ve been calling you ‘the Bergson woman’ – are you in fact the Heidegger woman??’

‘For the time being.’

random nuts and blots

via here, this quote from Foucault:

All my books, be it Madness and Society or this one here [Discipline and Punish], are—if you like—little toolboxes. If people want to open them, and use this or that sentence, this or that idea or analysis as a screwdriver or wrench to short-circuit, dismantle, or explode the systems of power, including perhaps those systems from which these books of mine have emerged—all right, all the better. (16)

.. the temptation to hear ‘Theory’ here.

The ‘toolbox’ metaphor implies of course a pragmatic imperative: use what works – in shedding light on its object, opening up new lines of thought, producing new readings etc. The point is whether the tools are useful rather than true. If the ‘effects’ are interesting, stimulating, etc, then fine. If this does describe much of what is called ‘Theory’, then the argument that Theory draws on epistemologically or logically inconsistent concepts would be wide of the mark; or rather, the argument would have to be that this bracketing off or postponement of the question of truth, its subordination to the criterion of use or effect, was finally not feasible or defensible.

If it is difficult not to think of ‘Theory’ here, it’s also to be reminded (As SEK does) that literary analysis has long since been characterised, and at its very best, by such a ‘toolbox’ approach. And rather than being some defect or quirk, the question is what about the literary object asks for this kind of thinking. This is hardly an original thought, to be sure, but ‘literature’ has been the place where a certain non-systematic, partly mimetic thinking, a thinking which tinkers, invents and steals, has found expression. Or, ‘literature’ is the concession to which such thinking has been confined. (The tool must 'fit' (and know) its object before dismantling it, but does not thereby have to resemble it).

The more recent trend of proper-name tagging perhaps obscures this continuity, and in any case needs to be seen in relation to the institutional conditions of academic production rather than (only) in relation to ‘intellectual history’.

_____

The ‘toolbox’ metaphor reminded me also of the notion of literary criticism machines – the Iser machine, the DeMan etc,

Sometimes the machine can only be used by its inventor (and this is of interest in itself), sometimes not - we might still encounter someone using a 1982 DeMan, having long-ago ensured his tenure and perhaps drawing new crowds because of the élan with which he handles his now rather antique apparatus. One argument would be that the ‘toolbox’ model has to some extent replaced the machine model. This conveniently recalls the modernism/ postmodernism distinction. However, it doesn’t quite fit the facts.

I think also that the machines themselves were valued for similarly ‘pragmatic’ reasons – for their ability to re-awaken perception, suddenly reconfigure the available literary ‘facts’, produce an ‘intellectual high’, effectively re-invent the text.

Perhaps one could also look at it the other way round, and see the texts themselves as machines – The Hamlet machine has been particularly effective in generating readings, certain strategic or stubborn silences in its design ensure endless copy. Ulysses, of course, and by its own admission, is an apparatus geared to prolonging its own interpretive life.

To my mind the best machines are the ones that give the impression of being bastards – of being generated by the text they interpret, and yet rendering the text new and unfamiliar. (Deleuze and Guattari on Kafka, to some extent). Or rather, it is able to use the text not simply to ilustrate pre-exisitng concepts but to produce new ones.

Danger in the Voice

'Danger in the voice. Sometimes in conversation the sound of our own voice confuses us and misleads us to assertions that do not at all reflect our opinion', Nietzsche writes in Human, All Too Human (aphorism 333).

'The flute produces (mimics) a human voice without logos, and the moment a human voice is without logos it becomes demonic and abysmal'. (ere)

via here (this seems to be missing, for one), via here:

Entr'acte (Entreato)

speaking in your place

A thought in relation to the three quotes below: The subject is not first of all a free subject but one shackled by the Symbolic – by language and by convention. Already franked propositions and pre-set grammars of response are clamped into the soul. But freedom happens when this subject, first of all entrapped and tangled in the Symbolic, is forced to make space outside these received significances - or forced to recognise and name the specificity of his/her singular relation to these pre-given significances. And without the ‘concentration’ (under pressure of an arbitrary decree or law) that Proust speaks of you’ll find these pre-given grammars and utterances speaking in your place. Another thought would be that much of Beckett’s prose is about the simultaneous impossibility and necessity of this ‘freedom’.

But my train of thought led me yet further. If reality were indeed a sort of waste product of experience, more or less the same for each of us, since when we speak of bad weather, a war, a taxi rank, a brightly lit restaurant, a garden full of flowers, everybody knows what we mean, if reality were no more than this, no doubt a sort of cinematograph film of these things would be sufficient and the ‘style’, the ‘literature’ that departed from the simple date that they provide would be superfluous and artificial. But was it true that reality was no more than this? If I tried to understand what actually happens at the moment when a thing makes some particular impression upon one – on the day, for instance, when as I crossed the bridge over the Vivonne the shadow of a cloud upon the water made me cry: “Gosh!” and jump for joy; or the occasion when, hearing a phrase of Bergotte’s, all that I had disengaged from my impression was the not especially relevant remark: “How splendid!”; or the words I had once heard Bloch use in exasperation at some piece of bad behaviour, words quite inappropriate to a very commonplace incident: “I must say that that sort of conduct seems to me absolutely fantastic!”; or that evening when, flattered at the politeness which the Guarmantes had shown to me as their guest and also a little intoxicated by the wines which I had drunk in their house, I could not help saying to myself half aloud as I came away alone: “They really are delightful people and I should be happy to see them everyday of my life” – I realised that the words in each case were a long way removed from the impressions that I or Bloch had in fact received. So that the essential, the only true book, though in the ordinary sense of the word does not have to be “invented” by a great writer – for it exists already in each one of us – has to be translated by him. The function and the task of the writer are those of a translator.

constraint is the nurse of invention

"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit... the arbitrariness of the constraint only serves to obtain precision of execution."

Igor Stravinsky

"Writers, when they are bound hand and foot by the tyranny of a monarch or of a school of poetry, by the constraints of prosodic laws or of a state religion, often attain a power of concentration from which they would have been dispensed under a system of political liberty or literary anarchy."

Proust

Elias Canetti on Kafka's Letters To Felice

"To call these letters a document would be saying too little, unless one were to apply the same title to the life-testimonies of Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Dostoyevsky. For my part, I can only say that these letters have penetrated me like an actual life, and that they are now so enigmatic and familiar to me that it seems they have been mental possessions of mine from the moment when I first began to accomodate human beings entirely in my mind, in order to arrive, time and again, at a fresh understanding of them."

Academic Tagging ii

In a previous post on the practice of academic tagging, I asked someone (rhetorically): 'does Gramsci say ‘I will use Marx’s concept of class to explore how..’, no, he just uses it.’ The reason that Gramsci (for example) doesn’t say something like this isn’t just that such locutions weren’t in vogue at the time. It’s something more basic and philosophically significant – For Gramsci et al Marx had not simply coined a new concept; he had revealed the existence of class.

The current tagging practice, then, contains its own implicit epistemology. It seems to bracket off the question of whether some aspect of the world has been revealed. What we have, rather, are a stockpile of optional tools, which can be ‘used’ to produce ‘interesting’ and ‘new’ readings. These machine parts can be discarded when they cease to produce such readings.

Now, I admit that my attitude here is ambivalent. On the one hand, I of course share this practice of using whatever tools seem to yield results; moreover, I think it is important to keep visible the gap between concept and object, the maintain the provisional, hesitant relation between Idea and Thing. But this procedural hesitancy should surely be in deference to the Object itself, a reminder that the world revealed by these concepts is never exhausted by them.

My impression is that the current practice is not about such hesitancy, exactly. It is about reaffirming the vitality and preserving the glamour of the new machine parts. The Lacanian reading of Wordsworth renews Lacan more than it illuminates the poet, who is returned to Lethe when the reading is complete.

Form without content can be useful if it shows that the form has a content of its own.

More obtuse and obvious stuff.

In another post I remarked on the curious self-satisfied smile often seen on the face of bourgeois Shakespeare spectators, most notably at the ‘New Globe’. ‘Benign reassurance’ I called it.

Whether it’s Hamlet saying it will cost Ophelia a groaning to take off his edge or Timon’s despair, suicide, sexual disgust, extreme violence - all are robbed of their appropriate affect and replaced by this smile of cultural self-satisfaction and self-congratulation. This, needless to say, has nothing to do with responding to a ‘literary effect’. It is as though the plays endlessly emit ‘Shakespeare’s Genius’, to which these spectators are peculiarly attuned. This ‘attunement’ is one insignia of the taste-culture to which they belong.
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B_ has no interest in literature or philosophy at all. She’s happy watching the soaps and reading various magazines. But occasionally, as a gesture, she suggests I read her something. So I once read her Hamlet’s famous mortal coil soliloquy. When I got to the bit about “in that sleep of death what dreams may come” she’d had enough. It wasn’t that she thought it boring and unintelligible. She was disturbed by the idea of death as an endless dream-troubled sleep. It activated a memory from when she was much younger. This, then, was not one of the recognised modes of ‘literary response’. It was not ‘appreciation’ (that distanced and slightly playful relation to things which is the mark of legitimate culture). Instead, what happens in such cases is that some content cuts directly into one’s flesh and into one’s experience, short-circuiting the ‘literary effect’. From a certain point of view, it was a kind of category error. And yet..
_______________

'The influence exerted on the Irish people by Parnell defies critical analysis. He had a speech defect and a delicate physique; he was ignorant of the history of his native land; his short and fragmentary speeches lacked eloquence, poetry and humour; his cold and formal bearing separated him from his own colleagues; he was a Protestant, a descendant of an aristocratic family, and, as a crowning disgrace, he spoke with a distinct English accent.'

This is from 'The Shade of Parnell' by James Joyce. What difference would it make, in terms of our reading, in terms of the kind of things we get from the text, if there was no Parnell, if this text lacked a historical referent, if this was not an essay but part of a fiction? In some ways, perhaps not a great deal (Joyce shows how identification works not inspite of a leader's 'defects' but precisely because of them..). In other ways, the subtraction of the 'shem' of truth would automatically re-orientate our reading. Try it, try it with other texts - remove the shem from its mouth and enjoy the fiction of reading it as fiction.

An obtuse and obvious post on 'literary effect'

In response to this post on ‘literature as literature’, a question was posed as to what we respond to when we respond to a literary text, and how we respond. What is the 'literary effect' (Deleuze speaks of 'a literary effect, as we speak of an electromagnetic effect') and is there some definable phenomenology of literary response? [I don't think these questions are the right ones, but that's for another post].

One very rudimentary response to this question, but one you get even from many literary critics, is that we are responding to some fictional representation of x just as we would respond to the actual situation. Of course we are moved by Hamlet because the situation of a young man grieving for his father is moving; we would be moved by this in 'real life' so of course we are moved by its adequate representation.

In this explanation there is no reference to anything specifically literary. The 'literary' disappears into the 'situation' represented. Of course, the argument goes, there is immense literary skill, but this lies in its self-erasure. We respond to the situation, and the success of the literary devices is precisely in being able to draw us into this situation without drawing attention on themselves.

This answer obviously falls short, first of all, in only applying to a fairly restricted kind of literary object – you can see how it works in relation to Hamlet, but not How it is. But even in the former case, there is an obvious sense in which we don't respond to a literary situation as we would respond to the analogous real situation. This may seem both obvious and obtuse, but here goes. If we met, in real life, someone grieving over the death of their father, simply sat in a corner weeping inconsolably, saying nothing, for hours and days, we would certainly be moved, upset, concerned etc. If we went to see a play entirely taken up with someone sat in a corner weeping inconsolably, we'd probably walk out. If, mentally, you transpose the real griever onto the stage, and subtract only the reality if his grief, so that there is no difference at the immediate perceptual level, the response is nonetheless utterly different. For what has been subtracted is only the knowledge that it is grief. Our aesthetic/ literary response is surely predicated on this 'subtraction'. Is not the literary effect precisely something freed up and enabled by the bracketing off, the cancellation of the ‘real’ response?

7/2 cf here.

FASHION. Madame Death!
DEATH. Go to the devil. I'll come when you don't want me.
FASHION. As if I weren't immortal!
DEATH. Immortal? Already now the thousandth year hath passed since the times of the immortals.
FASHION. So even Madame can quote Petrarch like an Italian poet of the sixteenth or the nineteenth century.
DEATH. I like Petrarch's poems, because among them I find my Triumph, and because nearly all of them talk about me. But anyway, be off with you.
FASHION. Come on, by the love you bear the Seven Deadly Sins, stand still for once and look at me.
DEATH. Well? I'm looking.
FASHION. Don't you recognize me?
DEATH. You must know I'm short-sighted, and that I can't use spectacles because the English don't make any that suit me, and even if they did, I haven't got a nose to stick them on.
FASHION. I am Fashion, your sister.
DEATH. My sister?
FASHION. Yes, don't you remember that both of us are daughters of Decay?
DEATH. What do you expect me to remember, I who am the mortal foe of memory?
FASHION. But I remember it well; and I know that both of us equally aim continually to destroy and change all things here below, although you achieve this by one road and I by another.

Leopardi, Moral Tales

Un Coeur en Hiver

Plug

A colleague of mine is presenting and discussing some of her films at the NFT next Tuesday . Some of you may know Carol's The Alcohol Years.