Filed under: Apology Song, Introspection: regrets, Lit. Rev., Observation | Tags: and how to pay attention to them anyhow, apologies, bad books, distraction, ethics of criticism, immoral reading, martha nussbaum's house of pure presence, not paying attention
… how could I hate the one and be so wholly taken by the other? Probably because the former seeks clarity, and the later rests in that greater eternal rocking-chair that is American folk music. Err. Obscurity.
Come now. I’d take White over Nussbaum anyday.
… which, I suppose, brings me to another problem. That I’ve been three years now, post-initial violation, picking battles. Cf.: I almost cited a review by Professor TK, which directly criticized old Nussbaum’s approach (while affirming her general orientation towards the public humanities–O! We adore you still, even though your face is a little cracked, The Public Humanities!), for a paper for Professor AK, even when I know that one asked the other to teach it in his class, and the other refused.
(The other is always refusing.)
How to be generous to the people one reads. As people. As… people? It’s hard enough to open an ear to the text, to pay attention for the time that is required in a way that is required. Some texts require more. From me. Less from you. Etc. Honestly, though: I feel that I was bad to Martha Nussbaum. I feel that I owe Martha Nussbaum an open apology. What am I really trying to do here? Get literature out of the law schools? Turn the whole world into Peter Stallybrass, if not kazoo-blowing members of the “Pete” Stallybrass Fan Club? No, no. There’s some good in what she’s doing. She likes books. I mean, what can be wrong with it? It can be bad–boring, unliterary, in fact (which just might be the problem–I’m much more attuned, especially this semester, to receive Heidegger in one ear and almost automatically given the critic who breathed it my other cheek; kiss it or slap it–): still, though, as Bob Dylan once said:
It’s got to be good for somebody. I know it’s good for somebody.
So what’s my business knocking her down with my small qualms? I know that I’m not on board with Nussbaum’s project. And, to confess a bit more (this is not, you may have noted by now, a literary review), I started reading less and less carefully the more it became apparent to me that disproving utilitarianism was not a particularly urgent (or interesting) question for me. I just became more and more miffed that literature was the rear-guard soldier-hero pulled out to do the trick, who triumphed by way of omniscient courage and the hand-me-down blanket of the bold knights of realism. Yes, Martha, you’ve sold me now. You’re in my metaphors. You’re all over my High Victorian: literature, dear readers, is a person.
(Or better yet, a picnic–a whole park of people for you to meet and greet! To learn moral lessons from! Make sure to try the chicken salad bake! Don’t eat that mayonnaise that’s been too long out in the sun!)
Forgive me: I am still not being generous. What I meant to say, I suppose, was that I think I pinned Nussbaum’s work as not only bad but really quite immoral–a transgression against the literariness of the literature! A violence against the irreducibility of style! You passed it by like it was a cloud of gnats, a diaphonous veil, Martha! Don’t let Charles trick you, Martha! This house of pure presence, Martha! We built it just for you!
…and I did this, largely, as a sort of messy Pollock projection of my own readerly immorality. Bad reading makes for angry criticism. (I’ll reiterate that below.)
And: // I am not even sure that I want to be forgiven.
Conclusions, moral and otherwise:
- Listening is difficult, always and anyway.
- There is an immoral sort of listening–one that fakes interest, even when one isn’t interested. I think each reader knows–and, I hope, knows how to moderate–her own closedness to the text. (I hope, too, that this is a lesson that we might work here in conjunction to non-literary life. Let’s all get open.)
- Immoral listening is slippery–like différance, it moves around. It gets in your stuff. For example, your critical reviews. It makes you angry and ungenerous. It turns your expansive scholarly motivations into: destroy.
- I’m honest, brutal and afraid of you-ou.
- There’s too much love to go around these days.
Time for a baptism and some clarificatory prose; real reviews will follow. Look for a man descending from the sky with bright red Ray-Bans.
JLR
Filed under: Lit. Rev. | Tags: allon white, ambiguity, bakhtin, coauthorship, empson, how to be a nice critic, inland oceans, obscurity, peter stallybrass, real life dialogics right here, realism's crack-up, secrets, symptomatic reading, virginity/purity/privacy/erudition
The Uses of Obscurity: The Fiction of Early Modernism (1981)
From what I’ve read, Allon White (longtime pal of Peter Stallybrass–they read Bakhtin and Rabelais together in a white house one summer, and that’s all you need to know. Well, there are other parts to the story, all wonderful and fascinating, but one must save something as remainder. The North American inland oceans didn’t do that–and now look where we’ve found ourselves!) has brilliantly arranged a variety of hermeneutic styles to address an old favorite problem of literary modernism: obscurity; ie., my new housepet–the difficulty of the text.
White’s area of focus is the early modern–in the sense of fin-de-siècle modernism. He reads, if I remember correctly, James, Conrad, and Meredith. All are, he argues, variously intractable. Here, he seems to be referring to what the critics of the time said, and reception sense: although White finds these guys difficult, it’s clearly (well–there’s another word that’s off-limits from now on) adventuresome enough for him to develop a way to hold them all in a bear-hug at arms’ length… ever respectful of difference.
Methods! White’s methods are particularly exciting–he likes folks like Husserl, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, and seems to pull his formation of the ‘problem’ and possibilities of literary obscurity directly from the debates over private language and the grounds of public meaning in continental language philosophy. Here are some things that White likes–which I find funny, or compelling (even when I haven’t tried very hard; I promise to try harder in the future to-come):
- the demise of realism
- symptomatic reading
- the “smell of treachery” (attendant to the demise of realism)
- double treachery (modification of 3; cf. 1)
- the “dark motive of a statement’s utterance”
- the “Faustian price” of a hermeneutics of suspicion
- Eagleton-bashing/ anti- ideology critique
- secrecy
- vulnerability of the author to the public gaze
- obscurity as purity; virginity; privacy
Lovely quotes, please print them onto posters:
The single most arduous task of the present work has been the attempt to preserve the insight of symptomatic reading without reducing and degrading the specific value of the literary text. It is insufficient for a critic simply to penetrate the phenomenal form of a work in order to reveal its psychological and ideological generative matrix. This is a crucial aspect of critical labor, but it is what Hegel would call ‘a one-sided abstraction.’ It falls prey to the old idealist notion that the ‘form of appearance’ (in this case, the literary work itself) is an inessential husk to be discarded once we penetrate beneath it (7).
What seems to be a part of the ‘code of the real’ in a single work may well become a ’symptom’ when seen repeated in different works… (4).
Moreover, White seems cripplingly fair–he’s quite alright with the symptomatic readers, and places symptomatic nicely in its ‘necessary’ place alongside the emergence of sneaky late realism/early modernism, without the demeaning pat and repressed anger of many cultural materialists. (I suppose, though, situating a sort of ’situational reading’ historically is among the nastier little brother tricks in a critic’s book.) But White’s okay. Really. He even starts out with a cute comment about not wanting to “succumb to a myth of origins.” And this, in the 1980s! All in all, seems like a pretty nice guy. I am excited for the rest of the book.
Filed under: Lit. Rev. | Tags: episteme, ethics and imagination, hans-georg gadamer, hermeneutics and reading, interpretation and decision, phronesis, practical wisdom, techne
- Aesthetics and ethics in Gadamer, Levinas and Coleridge: Problems of phronesis and techne http://www.jstor.org/stable/463425?seq=4&Search=yes&term=paul&term=ricoeur&term=phronesis&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dpaul%2Bricoeur%2Bphronesis%26x%3D0%26y%3D0%26wc%3Don&item=3&ttl=88&returnArticleService=showArticle&resultsServiceName=Arguments: phronesis is missing from the (pyramid) of Heidegger/Gadamer’s hermeneutics–they both problematize the relationship between episteme and techne as it relates to meaning, the construction and execution of method in the disciplines (esp. the human sciences) and something like mystical experience (Heidegger’s Concealed; technological Enframing’s “saving power,” as per “The Question Concerning Technology”); but neither considers the ethics of reading or the sorts of wisdom and judgment required in acts of interpretation–which, as Ricoeur reminds us, are already acts of decision.
