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Thursday, July 28, 2011
Close Reading is Toast
Two days ago, or was it three? Andrew Goldstone made a somewhat bemused post about close reading at Arcade. Others made comments, myself included, and at some point I said to myself: close reading is toast. No one said as much in the discussion, nor did I, but the fact of that discussion, at that place, at this time, that taken together with my sense of the ‘vibe’ in literary studies tells me that close reading is toast. It has lost its mythos.
Goldstone’s post is entitled Close Reading as Genre. That says it right there; it’s a genre, a form. It’s not an induction into the mysteries. He opens:
Just what is that infamous thing, a close reading?
I have recently been seething with irritation at a certain scholarly book. Tempting as it would be to use the internet for its natural purpose and gripe about that book in detail, I am instead going to channel my energies into something with a little more intellectual value. The source of my irritation, you see, is that this book exaggerates to a fault—an incredibly irritating fault—all the virtues of “good” close reading. But what do I mean by that, my rational self asks my (normally dominant) griping self? Hmm. Fair question, rational self.
What follows is not a denunciation of close reading. It’s an attempt to make sense of what it is, with a list of some 19 features ending with an invitation for more.
The mystery is no longer the text, that thing that will unfold before close reading. The mystery is close reading itself. And that mystery has become a mere puzzle: What? Why?
To my mind it is Lee Konstantinou who delivers the coup de grâce: “What has characterized close reading — as opposed to what we might call careful or attentive reading — is the endless production or proliferation of readings.” The endless production, everyone gets one. And this is opposed to mere ‘careful’ or ‘attentive’ reading. That’s it, right there. For close reading had claimed for itself closeness: there is no closeness but that of the close reader. That it could be put in opposition to mere attentiveness to the text betokens its doom.
Much more was said, about evaluation, about ways of reading close, and everyone expressed proper appreciation for “good close readings.” But it’s clear that that appreciation is directed toward the past. These young critics are on the hunt for something new, ways of looking carefully at texts, but that do not invite the indulgence of endless production. Whatever the object of close reading is, that object is no longer compelling, alluring, or even credible.
That’s the key, the object is gone. And so the practice that sustained it must go as well.
Toast.
I hope.
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Tuesday, July 26, 2011
HD10: Empiricism, Psychohistory, Narratology: The horror! The horror!
Once Marlow reached the Inner Station, he found Kurtz, of course. Kurtz was weakened and gravely ill. He died on the trip back:
“One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, ‘I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.’ The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, ‘Oh, nonsense!’ and stood over him as if transfixed.
“Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision,—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—
“‘The horror! The horror!’
At the very end of the story, when Marlow is talking with Kurtz’s fiancée, known only as “the Intended,” she insists on knowing the last thing he said. He tells her that it was her name, which is, of course, a lie. But as Johanna M. Smith* points out in a feminist reading of the text, things are not so simple:
And surely the particular lie Marlow chooses is meant to satisfy his “dull anger” with the Intended’s naïveté and her insistence that he give her something “to live with.” He and his audience—and the reader—know that by substituting the Intended’s name for “the horror! the horror” he equates the two; her ignorance of this equation becomes a punishing humiliation.
I believe that she is correct in this matter. And that opens up three lines of inquiry which I’d like to sketch out: 1) empirical, 2) psychohistory, and 3) narratology.
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Thursday, July 21, 2011
Distribution of Paragraph Lengths, What’s Up?
A couple of days ago I put up a post about the lengths of paragraphs in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I sent notice of the post to a number of people, including Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Liberman. Mark then put up a post at Language Log where he: 1) reported work of his own on HoD, 2) reported work that Shalizi had done, and 3) reported work he did on Nostromo and The Golden Bowl. There was some discussion at Language Log as well.
I don’t know quite what I think of this. It’s been interesting, but . . .
So, in this post I will: 1) restate my original observation, without the rhetorical frills of my original post, and 2) append two longish comments I made at Language Log. In the first comment I suggest that patterns of paragraphing are to prose (fiction) as, say, verse forms are to poetry. The second comment outlines a pilot study, one that alas, I do not quite have the resources to carry out myself – though, if I can learn a bit of Python, who knows? I finish with a note on a parallel matter.
Paragraphing in Heart of Darkness
The central matter involves four observations about Heart of Darkness, two quantitative and two qualitative. This post is almost entirely about the quantitative observations, but the qualitative observations provide useful context. A long-term research objective would to, of course, to somehow ‘bridge the gap’ between those two sets of observations.
I’ve been working with a text that I downloaded from Project Gutenberg. In that text Heart of Darkness consists of 198 paragraphs. I counted the number of words in each paragraph using the word-count function in Microsoft Word, loaded the results into a spreadsheet, and made two charts. Think of these charts as being an abstract kind of X-ray image of “the text.” We’re now looking at “internal organs” not otherwise visible.
In this chart the paragraphs are ordered as they occur in the text, the first paragraph at the left and the last at the right:
It’s rather spiky, as you would expect. There are a few long paragraphs, there are many short paragraphs, and there are paragraphs in-between. But those different length paragraphs are all mixed together in the text. The result is long paragraphs sticking up out of plains and rolling hills of short and mid-size paragraphs.
Notice that the longest paragraph is a bit to the right of center, and that it is flanked by two slightly shorter paragraphs (with valleys in-between). That gives the distribution the overall shape of a pyramid. One would like to know whether that pyramid shape is important or not. If those three paragraphs were, say, only 800 or so words long, you’d still have a spiky shape, but the pyramid would be gone.
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Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Is Chinua Achebe to Joseph Conrad as Ike Turner is to Sam Phillips?
The idea that Joseph Conrad, one of the canonical writers of Western literature, and properly so, is / might be a racist is not so shocking now in 2011 as it was back in 1975, when Chinua Achebe delivered a lecture entitled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Many were shocked that Achebe would make such an argument, and about a narrative that was so obviously an indictment of European imperialism in the Congo. Many critics responded with vigorous and sophisticated defenses of Conrad and of Heart of Darkness. In consequence Achebe’s essay and the response to it are now central to the scholarly literature about this text and this author.
Then and Now
At that time I was a graduate student in the English Department at SUNY at Buffalo though, I’m slightly embarrassed to say, I have no recollection of the firestorm. If I’d had a specific interest in late 19th century British fiction I would, no doubt, have been aware of Achebe’s address and its repercussions. But that wasn’t where my interest lay, so I wasn’t attending to those currents. Had I been doing so I might well have taken offense at Achebe’s essay. As it is, I’ve only read the essay in the last week and I cannot find anything shocking about it.
What made Achebe’s argument so shocking (in 1975) is simply that we — what we? — want our culture heroes to be flawless. As a canonical literary figure Joseph Conrad is a culture hero, at least to the public that pays attention to literary culture. Racism is bad. It therefore follows that Joseph Conrad cannot be racist.
I would like to think that we, at least some WE, have become more sophisticated in such matters and are prepared to recognize that artistic greatness sometimes comes with unpleasant traits, such as racism or sexism. The question of Conrad’s racism, or of racism in Heart of Darkness, which is not the same question, is complicated, and Achebe has picked his textual evidence carefully, as all critics do. One can certainly argue against him, as many critics have done.
But I do not, in this post, want to enter directly into those discussions. I’m not going to argue about racism in Conrad’s text. I’m doing something different.
Beyond Language
I’m presenting a fairly recent conversation between a black man and a white man on a topic that involves relations between blacks and whites and in which racism is a central issue. I’m offering this conversation as, shall we say, a parallel to the conversation between Achebe and Joseph Conrad or, since Conrad is long dead, his defenders against Achebe.
My question is a simple one: Can we get along with Achebe, and those who agree with him, as this white man and black man get along with one another?
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Monday, July 18, 2011
HD7: Digital Humanities Sandbox Goes to the Congo
Or, Speculations in Computational Evolutionary Psychology
Note: This version of the post has been revised from an earlier version in which I suggested that the distribution in the first chart followed a power law. Cosma Shalizi checked it for me and it’s not a power law distribution. It’s an exponential distribution.
So, I’ve been exploring Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In the last two posts I’ve examined one paragraph in the text, the so-called nexus. It’s the longest paragraph in the text, it’s structurally central, and it covers a lot of semantic territory.
OK, but what about the other paragraphs.
What about them?
Aren’t you going to look at them?
Well, yeah, but I sure don’t have time to troll through them like I did the nexus. I mean, that post stretched from here to Sunday.
I get your point. Why don’t you do the Moretti thing?
Moretti thing?
You know, distant reading.
Distant reading? You mean count something? Count what?
How about paragraph length?
What’ll that get me?
I don’t know. Just do it. I mean, you already know that the nexus is the longest paragraph in the text. There must be something going on with that. Mess around and see if something turns up.
* * * * *
I did and it did.
I used the MSWord word-count tool to count the words in every paragraph in the text. All 198 of them. One at a time. Real tedious stuff. Then I loaded the results into a spreadsheet and created a bar chart showing paragraph length from longest to shortest:
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Sunday, July 17, 2011
Heart of Darkness 6: Some Informal Notes about the Nexus
My previous post in this series (see links at the end of this post) was about the longest paragraph in Heart of Darkness, one that is structurally central to the text. For that reason I’ve called it the nexus.
In this post I offer comments on the entire paragraph, along with comments on several preceding paragraphs and one following paragraph. My object is to demonstrate, in some detail, the range of material Conrad covers in this structurally central paragraph. What’s lacking in these comments is an overview. To invoke an old metaphor, I’m commenting on trees by ones, twos, threes and stands, but the shape of the overall forest is obscure.
Perhaps there’s no overview to be had. But I doubt that. I just don’t know the terms in which an overview can be constructed. I’d appreciate suggestions.
* * * * *
At this point in the story Marlow and the others are close to the Inner Station, where they expect to find Kurtz and, of course, his ivory. The boat is attacked from the shore. The helmsman is transfixed with a spear and dies, bleeding all over the floor. Marlow notices that his shoes are drenched in blood. He transfers the wheel to one of the pilgrims who’d been sent by the manager, and tosses one shoe overboard, thinking about how Kurtz must be dead and how he’d lost the opportunity to talk to him.
I have interpolated comments in italics, thus. The comments do not strive for depth. They note or ask about the obvious. Where I break a paragraph into segments to comment on the segments individually, I number the segments A, B, C, etc. I also give the total word count for the entire paragraph, but only list that total in the first segment of a multi-segment paragraph.
Before the Nexus
[99. 117 words]"The other shoe went flying unto the devil-god of that river. I thought, ‘By Jove! it’s all over. We are too late; he has vanished—the gift has vanished, by means of some spear, arrow, or club. I will never hear that chap speak after all,’—and my sorrow had a startling extravagance of emotion, even such as I had noticed in the howling sorrow of these savages in the bush. I couldn’t have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life. . . . Why do you sigh in this beastly way, somebody? Absurd? Well, absurd. Good Lord! mustn’t a man ever—Here, give me some tobacco.” . . .
(1) Notice the sorrow and desolation he experiences while thinking of the meeting he’ll never have. (2) And then he turns his attention to his present listeners, one of whom apparently has sighed. Where does the “absurd?” come from? What’s Marlow thinking the other has judged to be absurd? (3) And then the concrete need of tobacco for his pipe, which gets lit in the next paragraph, which focuses our attention on the here and present of the frame tale.
[100. 61 words] There was a pause of profound stillness, then a match flared, and Marlow’s lean face appeared, worn, hollow, with downward folds and dropped eyelids, with an aspect of concentrated attention; and as he took vigorous draws at his pipe, it seemed to retreat and advance out of the night in the regular flicker of the tiny flame. The match went out.
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Saturday, July 16, 2011
The Heart of Heart of Darkness
Or, Center Point construction in a tale within a tale within a tale
For Mary Douglas
It’s a long way through this post. First, I look at the structural center of Heart of Darkness, which is that long paragraph I’ve called the nexus. I then argue that Heart and Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis deploy different techniques for achieving what I’m calling center point construction, which is close kin to the ring forms that held Mary Douglas’s attention at the end of her career. Finally, I attach an appendix that contains the complete text of the nexus.
Consider the following diagram. It represents, albeit crudely, the narrative structure of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:
While the tale is told mostly by Marlow, Marlow does not speak directly to us, the readers. Rather, his tale is told to a group of four men aboard a boat in the Thames. One of those tells it to us. That tale is the frame tale. It begins Conrad’s novella, running for roughly 1300 words before giving way to Marlow, and it concludes the novella, with the last 70 words or so. It also shows up here and there during Marlow’s tale, though never for long. The diagram doesn’t show those . . . what shall we call them, intrusions, reminders, touchstones relief points?
This much is well-recognized in the literature on the book, which I’ve been examining in the two case books I’ve just acquired, the Norton Critical Edition (2006) edited by Paul Armstrong, and Ross C. Murfin’s Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011). But there’s a third ‘level’, which I’m calling the nexus. It is not, in what I’ve read so far, singled out as a tale within the tale within the tale, as my diagram has it.
But it is certainly mentioned. For example, in Albert Guerard’s, “The Journey Within” (from his 1958 book, Conrad the Novelist), which is reprinted in the Norton, pp. 326-336. He says, “We think we are about to meet Kurtz at last,” referring to a passage in paragraph 101 (see endnote on paragraph numbering) where Marlow tells us that he did get to meet Kurtz. And then Guerard observes: “But instead Marlow leaps ahead to his meeting with the “Intended”; comments on Kurtz’s megalomania and assumption of his place among the devils of the land; reports on his seventeen-page pamphlet ...” In those three clauses Guerard has characterized the paragraph that I’m calling the nexus.
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Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Ontology at the Heart of Darkness
Let’s recap. At the thematic center of Conrad’s novella we have a litany. It first appears in the long paragraph I’ve called The Nexus (paragraph 103), 1503 words long: “’My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—‘ everything belonged to him.” It is repeated later on in paragraph 148, while the steamer is on its return trip with Kurtz on board: “My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas--these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments.” Notice, FWIW, that while it is Kurtz who produces the phrase the first time it appears in the text – I assume that’s what Conrad meant by the single quotes – it is Marlow himself who produces it the second time.
If we take the two statements together, we have this list: (1) Intended, (2) ivory, (3) station, (4) river, (5) career, and (6) ideas, all prefaced, of course, with “my”. Ivory and river are physical things. But ivory is, in this usage, a formless substance, though any piece of ivory, such as a tusk, must necessarily have particular form. So is station in its use to designate Kurtz’s compound beside the river. But station could conceivably be abstract as well, where it could mean his position within the company, which is a matter of some discussion here and there in the story, or his station in life more generally. Those things are positions in a network of social relationships and, as such, are rather more abstract. Career and ideas are both abstract, with ideas being possibly more abstract than career.
As for the Intended, that is a person. People are physical things, of course, like ivory tusks, or rivers. But they are living things and so they have . . . what? Classically they have souls, with plants having vegetative souls, animals having (additionally) sensitive souls, and humans having (additionally) rational souls – think of Aristotle, De Anima, and of the Great Chain of Being. Within that list the Intended is the “link” between ivory and ideas, as it were. She is a physical thing, like ivory, and, as the possessor of a rational soul, is capable of having ideas.
That’s a list then, that implies a whole world in a more differentiated way than the “everything” that appears in the first telling of the list. That list is an ontology or at least implies one by virtue of the fact that its members span various ontological categories. It’s what the object-oriented ontologists call a Latour Litany. Rhetorically, it’s a gesture that implies the world.
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Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Closure, Attachment, and Abstract Objects in Heart of Darkness
Or, Did Conrad’s Kurtz pioneer the Latour Litany?
I continue to think about the ending of Heart of Darkness, a conversation between the teller of the tale, Charlie Marlow, and Kurtz’s bereaved fiancée, known only as the Intended – a significant, depersonalizing, practice (one thinks of those characters in Dickens novels carousing about like self-contained armored vehicles). She wants assurances of his goodness and nobleness of spirit, which Marlow provides, despite the fact that, however remarkable he may have felt Kurtz to be, he also thought he was crazy at the end. She wants to know his Kurtz’s words and takes comfort when Marlow tells her that her name was the last thing that left his lips. But that is not so, at least not unless her name was Horror. And, in fact, I have no trouble imagining a bit of British sketch comedy in which The Husband refers to The Wife simply as The Horror.
But Heart of Darkness is not a comedy sketch. It is . . . well, what IS it?
The story’s ending reads like a grim parody of all those 19th Century British novels that happily end with He and She destined for wedded bliss. In Heart of Darkness He and She are like two continents, call ‘em East and West, and never the twain shall meet.
So that’s one thing. Here’s another. There’s that long paragraph in the second installment – it was originally published in three installments in Blackwood’s Magazine – in which Marlow, among other things, leaps ahead of his story and tells us about all the ivory they found at Kurtz’s station and piled onto the steamer. Let’s call that paragraph the nexus, for it seems to gather all the strands of the story into itself — I’ll say more about it in a later post. At 1503 words it’s the longest paragraph in the text, with 2nd, 3rd, and 4th longest being 1129, 1103, and 865 words respectively.
Anyhow, once the nexus gets good and rolling along, we have this: “You should have heard him say, ‘My ivory.’ Oh yes, I heard him. ‘My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my--’ everything belonged to him.” Somewhat later in the story, in the third installment, we have:
Continue reading "Closure, Attachment, and Abstract Objects in Heart of Darkness"Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now--images of wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas--these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments.
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Sunday, July 10, 2011
Heart of Darkness: Narration and Temporal Displacement
Well, I’ve read Heart of Darkness. And, yes, Apocalypse Now is quite different. But, no, I’m not going to subtract any points from Coppola for not being faithful to the text. Why? Because, even if he did carry around a copy of Conrad’s story and marked it up six ways from Sunday and copped the general river voyage situation and some lines from it, even then it wasn’t his text and fidelity isn’t relevant.
I suppose, as a stunt, I could subtract points from Heart of Darkness for not being faithful to AN, but what would that get me? Not even another day older and deeper in debt. That happens, but it’s automatic and has nothing to do with this. So I won’t attempt that.
Herewith some notes.
Closure
At first blush the most interesting comparison between the two is in closure. AN closes upon the double sacrifice, one aspect of which has Willard, the Marlow character, killing Kurtz. That doesn’t happen in HD, where Marlow wasn’t sent to kill Kurtz, but simply to get to his station so Management could recover the ivory he’d gathered for the Company. There IS a moment where Marlow considers that he might have to kill Kurtz, but Kurtz backs off.
Instead, as Management has taken Kurtz’s ivory on board, so Kurtz brings the man himself, very ill, on board. He dies in transit: “Mistah Kurtz – he dead.”
Kurtz entrusted Marlow with his papers, as Kurtz had asked Willard to convey the truth to his son. He gives the last packet of papers to Kurtz’s Intended. Note that difference: Coppola’s Kurtz is married with children; Conrad’s Kurtz is only betrothed. Here’s the conclusion of Marlow’s conversation with the Intended:
“‘Forgive me. I—I—have mourned so long in silence—in silence. ... You were with him-—to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody near to understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to hear. ...’
“‘To the very end,’ I said, shakily. ‘I heard his very last words. ...’ I stopped in a fright.
“‘Repeat them,’ she said in a heart-broken tone. ‘I want—I want—something—something—to—to live with.’
“I was on the point of crying at her, ‘Don’t you hear them?’ The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. ‘The horror! The horror!’
“‘His last word—to live with,’ she murmured. ‘Don’t you understand I loved him—I loved him—I loved him!’
“I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.
“‘The last word he pronounced was-—your name.’
Whatever comfort that lie may have given the Intended – didja notice, BTW, that this creature has no proper name, just a functional specification; I don’t know Conrad’s work at all – through I read The Secret Agent in college – so I don’t know whether this is a feature of his style or merely a feature of this text – it bothered Marlow enough for him to wonder whether it caused a disturbance in the cosmos:
It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn’t he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn’t. I could not tell her.
So, Conrad’s tale achieves its closure with a lie told to a woman about the man she loved, no, it would seem, worshipped. Coppola’s tale achieves its closure with the completion of a military mission, albeit one that was off the books.
I’m not quite sure what to make of that difference. Not sure at all. It seems to me that The State is very much in play in AN, but not HD. European civilization, yes, The State, no. To be sure, The State is not front and center in AN, but it’s the matrix in which the whole tale is set. Is love between a man and a woman the matrix in which HD is set?
An interesting puzzle.
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Wednesday, July 06, 2011
That Shakespeare Thing
It is a truth fervently believed, at least among those who have beliefs about such things, that Shakespeare is the greatest writer the world has ever seen. Without question. Period. End of story. So help me god. Cross my heart and hope to die.
Bollocks!
It’s not that I doubt Shakespeare’s excellence. Of course he’s good. But not that good. For THAT good is not about history, it’s about mythology.
And that mythology has got to stop. We can’t treat our literary culture as though it were but an appendage to Shakespeare’s large, various, and excellent output. Debts are owed, certainly. But appendages to, certainly not.
It’s simple: We can’t enter into the 21st century as long as we keep swearing fealty to The Bard, even if we cross our fingers behind our backs while so swearing. The world’s changing, it’s been changing since Shakespeare’s time. The old guy can no longer keep up. It’s time to put him on a raft, and cut the raft free. Let him float out to sea.
Who’s this WE you’re talking about?
Good question. Tricky question. I suppose I could say Harold Bloom and the Bloomistas and be done with it. In fact, that’s what I will say: Bloom and the Bloomistas!
Call it a figure.
Though Harold Bloom is real enough. His admiration for Shakespeare is well known – didn’t he write a fat book explaining how we’re all Shakespeare’s children? And he’s set himself up as the Defender of the Western Literary Canon, the Finger in the Dike that Protects Western Civ from the Sea.
Give the finger a rest. Let the water flow. Life goes on.
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Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Neurochemistry and Autobiography: On the Benefits of Narrative for a Coherent View of the World
The evolutionary critics have wondered whether or not the arts, including literature, have adaptive value as evolutionary biologists conceive it. I’ve found those discussions to be rather flat-footed. Here’s an essay from New Savanna in which I present some speculations of my own.
This is, I suppose, the last in my series of posts about behavioral mode (I’ve listed the others at the end of this post). In this post I take up the problem of autobiographical continuity: if our memories are neurochemically ‘keyed’ to emotions, desires, and moods, then how can we possibly construct a coherent account of our lives? Won’t any attempt to remember, to reconstruct, the past be biased by our current mood?
I argue that play-acting and story-telling are the keys to this problem. Through those imaginative activities we create a psycho-cultural space in which it is possible to assemble a coherent autobiography. I am thus arguing the art provides the prototypes through which we recollect our lives.
Note: This post is based on two earlier pieces, post at The Valve, Emotion Recollected in Tranquility, and a long article originally published in PsyArt, First Person: Neuro-Cognitive Notes on the Self in Life and in Fiction (abstract and link to PDF). The PsyArt article contains documentation that I’ve omitted from this post.
Autobiography and Dissociated Identity Disorder
In two recent books Antonio Damasio (Descartes’ Error, The Feeling of What Happens) has articulated a theory of the neural self. Damasio distinguishes between a core facet that is an integrated representation of one’s body states and an autobiographical facet. These selves—Damasio does refer to these systems as selves even as he refers to the neural self to mean both of these systems—are best conceived as processes, not things, and are subserved by extensive networks. Neither of these processes is the master process that runs the whole show—Damasio rejects the notion of such a process. As its name suggests, the autobiographical self organizes the historical events of one’s life and imagines future events. The core self organizes sensations from the body’s interior milieu and somesthetic and kinesthetic senses into an on-going evaluation of one’s current body state.
But I’m not interested in the core self. I’m interested in the autobiographical self. In particular, in the problem of establishing a continuous and routinely accessible representation of the events of one’s life.
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Monday, May 30, 2011
Implicit Analysis in Two Texts, a Cartoon and a Romance
It’s been a commonplace for two or three decades that narrative is a mode of thought. It is my impression — though I could be wrong — that this literature takes narrative at face value. Narrative situates things and events in relation to one another in time and space and that’s what narrative thinking is about.
I think narrative is used in a more subtle way. That more subtle mode of thought is the object of this post. Just how this more subtle thinking works, the fundamental mechanisms, that is not at all obvious. That something interesting is going on, though, that is relatively easy to spot.
I want to begin by presenting a more or less contemporary example, the Walter Lantz cartoon The Greatest Man in Siam. After that I’ll offer a suggestion or two about what might be going on. Then it’s on to a second example, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I conclude by suggesting that we’re dealing with a computational form that realizes the poetic function as defined by Roman Jakobson.
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Monday, May 16, 2011
Ritual in Sita Sings the Blues, Part 3 – Shakespearean Resonance
Despite it’s numbering, this is the fourth in a series of posts about ritual structure in Sita Sings the Blues (there’s a 2a and 2b). But it follows naturally from my examination of the Agni Pariksha as it discusses the stylistic patterning I examined in that post. And it compares that stylstic patterning with Shakespeare’s stylistic patterning in Much Ado About Nothing.
It is high time I concluded my investigation into ritual patterning in Sita Sings the Blues.* But alas, that is not to be. Once I plunged into it, the Shakespeare connection has proven to be too rich to be given only the first half of a post, where the other half was to be a return to cosmology and such. So, that’s what we’ve got here, just Shakespeare and Paley. Cosmology will have to wait.
Multiple Plots
Much Ado About Nothing, like all of Shakespeare’s comedies, and Elizabethan comedy in general, is multiply plotted. We have two couples, Claudio and Hero, Beatrice and Benedick, who become engaged, though it takes a bit of work to pull it off. The play gets its dramatic shape from the Claudio-Hero plot, so let’s start there.
Claudio has returned from war (along with his friend, Benedick); he sees Hero and decides that she’s the woman he wants to marry. He asks his company commander, Don Pedro, to speak with Hero’s father, Leonato, to arrange a marriage. And so it is done, though not without a hitch or two.
Meanwhile, Don Pedro’s misanthropic and bastard brother, Don John, does not at all like the outbreak of happiness that is likely to follow upon this wedding. So he schemes to stop it. He arranges for Claudio to witness a tableau in which he thinks that Hero is having an assignation with another man. Thus it comes about that, when all are gathered in the chapel for the big wedding, Claudio himself has different ideas. When he arrives he denounces her as a whore.
The frame grab is from Sita, but the issue, woman’s purity, is as old as the hills.
Not only is the wedding called off, but in the ensuing anger and confusion, Hero faints. She is presumed dead by most of those present, who leave the scene before she revives. Those who remain determine to preserve the appearance of her death so as to watch and see what happens. Perhaps things aren’t as they seem – are they ever? What happens, of course, is that everything gets worked out and we have a happy ending; Claudio and Hero become engaged once again, and so do Beatrice and Benedick.
The first thing to note is that this botched wedding has become, in effect, a rite of separation (as I explained in the first post in this series [1]). Hero is socially dead – and presumed physically dead as well. This event takes place at the opening of Act Four (of five). That is to say, it happens a bit after the mid-point of the play. Thus it takes place at the same relative point in the play’s action as the point where Dave dumps Nina, 51 minutes into a 78 minute film (not counting the end credits).
In both cases we, the audience, saw the break coming. In Much Ado we saw Don John’s plot; in Sita we could see that Dave had lost interest in Nina – she saw it too, but didn’t want to draw the logical conclusion, not until the fateful email hit her over the head with it. The endings, of course, are different. Hero becomes reconciled to her man and so will re-enter society as his wife. Nina does not become reconciled to Dave, nor does she find another man. She finds the Ramayana and makes a film. That’s a very different kind of ending for a romantic comedy and reflects, among other things, 400 years of history between Shakespeare’s play and Paley’s movie.
My first point, then, is simply about relative timing. In both cases the woman goes into social exile at roughly the same time in the action – presumably this reflects some aspect of how the nervous system works, we need so much time for the build-up and then, Wham! break things wide open. My second point is, again, a simple one: it is the woman who goes into social exile, not the man. Yes, it is 400 years in the past, but we in the West are still in touch with Shakespeare’s world. On this point, his world is not so different from Valmiki’s rather older world half-way around the globe.
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Friday, May 13, 2011
Mailer Coulda’ been a Rabbi
Norman Mailer’s writing in The Faith of Graffiti is quite remarkable. He could have tossed it off as a pot-boiler. But, no, he took it on as real work, as I indicated in my 13 September 2010 review of the book’s reissue. Here’s a follow up that I posted at New Savanna where I dicuss one of his conceits.
I continue to think about the new edition of The Faith of Graffiti. FOG2 really is quite a remarkable book. One could even make a case that it has changed the world in a way that’s difficult to describe.
I’d known about the book for awhile, but had never seen the original edition. It’s out of print, not in my local library, and I didn’t want to pay a collector’s price just to see the photos and read the essay. Besides, the photos have been newly avaible since 2007, when Naar reissued them in a collection, The Birth of Graffiti (Naar talks about the book), which also contained 100 photos from that shoot that hadn’t made it into FOG1. Thus, the photos in FOG2 didn’t surprise me, though I was glad to look at them in a larger format.
But Mailer’s essay WAS a surprise. I’ve read a bit of Mailer, some of it very fine indeed, but I feared he might have coasted through this one. Nothing I’d read about it suggested otherwise. But he didn’t coast. Not a bit.
His essay is cultural criticism at its BEST. While the range of reference is not astonishing in itself, not from a man of Mailer’s intelligence and curiosity, the way he deployed it in this essay IS astonishing. Here’s his third paragraph:
The first is a Jewish joke. Perhaps it is the Jewish joke. Two grandmothers meet. One is pushing a baby carriage. “Oh,” says the other, “what a beautiful grandchild you have.” “That’s nothing,” says the first, reaching for her pocketbook. “Wait’ll I show you her picture.”
What has Mailer done here? In the first paragraph he introduces himself as A-I, Aesthetic Investigator. In the second paragraph he gives us CAY 161, TAKI 183, Junior 161, half the Italian Renaissance (will, not half, but you get the idea), tosses in Rothko and Ellsworth Kelley, and ends with the Church and God. And now a Jewish joke. A Jewish joke.
So he’s told us he’s Jewish, sorta. And he’s moved from the sublime – though the reader may well have been wondering whether or not these photos of vandalism merit such rhetoric – to the quotidian. And what’s that joke about? It’s about pictures, in a picture book no less. And what’s the joke about pictures do? It asks us to compare the picture to the original, that’s what. How very old, how very Platonic. Also, remember that this book came out in the Spring of ’74, only four and a half years after those pesky deconstructive postmodernist French landed in Baltimore. In THAT climate, Mailer, who’s gonna write about pictures in a picture book, tells us a joke in which a Jewish grandma elevates the picture over the original.
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