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Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Fictional Characters 5: Shakespeare
While thinking this stuff through I remembered there was an article in PsyArts about literary characters in Shakespeare:
Shakespeare and the Problem of Literary Character
by W. L. GodshalkShakespeare’s characters, as well as literary characters in general, are merely words on a page, and yet we talk about them as if they were living creatures with volition, agency, and a full complement of human attributes. How do we account for this apparent double-think? A survey of comments about Shakespeare’s characters made by Bertram Russell, L. C. Knights, Harry Berger, Maurice Morgann, A. D. Nuttall, Alan Sinfield, Gerald Graff, and James Phelan indicate a range of possible answers to this question. Kendall Walton’s theory that interpreting literary characters is a game of make-believe and pretense is both economical and satisfying.
It presents a nice survey of how diverse thinkers have approached the problem of fictional characters in Shakespeare. Note, in particular, good old Bertrand Russell, logician, postivist, and proto-analytic (John: yes? no?). There’s not much to Russell’s 1919 remark, which is only incidentally about Shakespeare and literature, but it’s nice to know he made the remark, and when he made it. The discussion really gets under way with a discussion of L. C. Knights’ famous essay, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” (which I’ve never read). And so on.
This article is one of several in an online festival of articles on Shakespeare and Psychoanalysis.
Comments
Yes, Russell, when young , viewed Shakespeare and literature in toto as a type of massive deception (however eloquent or apparently profound) which prevented people from perceiving political, scientific and metaphysical problems and issues. His views softened a bit but he was quite consistenly contra-aesthetics, as were, really, many “fabian” socialists and a few rational types of marxists: and isn’t there some anti-literary feeling even among some postmods? But the belle-lettrist business, Shakespeare, Inc. is hardly willing to acknowledge this: how could anyone deny the greatness of the Bard! mere rustics and churls. (now, cue the Hog! (er, Hogblo)
I held off in hopes that someone might have something to say more central to your point. But no.
As readers, especially as naive readers, one of the things we hope for in a fictional character is that their actions might be such that we can plausibly figure out their motivations in terms of what we know about their past. On top of that, we give extra credit to an author who produces a character whose actions first prove puzzling, but later turn out to be understandible. In this case, we give extra extra credit if the revelation of character is one which we feel is realistic or illuminating, in the sense that once we’ve understood Julien Sorel, we’re better equipped to understand ambitious young guys we meet in real life.
No one feels too bad either about an unmotivated character if his character is consistent throughout—Iago was just evil.
Right now I’m working on Musorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina. (M. wrote the libretto himself). Of the six main characters, five are men whose characters are very well drawn and plausible, but not very surprising. They’re more or less types: The arrogant usurping traditional aristocrat, the arrogant reformist aristocrat (possibly a usurper), the conspiring aristocrat (in Peter the Great’s service), the fanatical, otherworldly reformer, and the powerless scribe who sees but cannot act.
The sixth character is a woman (Marfa) who is a.) the rejected lover of the traditionalist aristocrat’s son, b.) a fortune-teller hired by the reformist aristocrat, and c.) a follower of the religious reformer.
To me she has too many functions which are too loosely stitched together. (In particular, b. doesn’t seem to fit the other two.) On the other hand, each individual part of her role is powerfully written. On the third hand, quite a bit of the action in the opera (which otherwise tends toward set pieces revealing character and situation) comes from her, and some of the connection between the various scenes comes from her presence in both, and chopping her up into three different women would make the opera too episodic.
My appreciation of this opera would be increased if I were able to feel better about this character’s plausibility. (Each of the parts of her role is powerfully written, and M. himself was happy with his work. At the same time, the opera is not quite finished, and there may be planned but unwritten scenes which would have helped.)
Iago was just evil
This is quite inadequate, as most of your attempts at literary or philosophical analysis are. Iago, however melodramatic, also is clever, witty, deceitful, as evidenced in many lines (such as “your daughter is making the beast with two backs, etc.") He’s a Hannibal Lector type: and it’s not hard to perceive parallels between this sort of eloquent monster and say psychopaths, ancient or modern (JW Gacy or Wuornos perhaps, to some extent, tho Aileen would have problems with the Bard’s polysyllabic language). Many humans in the audience might see themselves mirrored in Iago. Indeed, the melodramatic villain could be read in facile Freudian terms as a sort of repressed image of the id, or at least secretly admired; or, perhaps Iago functions as a sort of machiavellian icon for, shall we say the bourgeousie. (Or prototype of Uebermench?) Thus the constructed character more or less affirms a type of aristocratic, nihilist ideology: “there is nothing evil but thinking makes it so” etc. Iago or Edmund or Antonio or James I or Henry VIII, variations on a theme.
nd sort of E and . somcoul be probably not string together cirmnal . Indeed the hero of tje play in some sense could be said to be IagoBut the Shakespearean sort of villain
Thank you for frankly expressing your view. I guess my chuckleheaded nature makes it harder for me to empathize with Iago than it is for normal people. I shall certainly resign from the Shakespeare crit biz forthwith.
I don’t entirely understand your concluding statement, which perhaps is postmodernist:
nd sort of E and . somcoul be probably not string together cirmnal . Indeed the hero of tje play in some sense could be said to be IagoBut the Shakespearean sort of villain
as they say that be errata . Low See-ento. Popov hangover. Really man, were an Iago type to manifest himself on the Sopranos, chicks would want to bear his children, were he like suave enough. Anthony Hopkins has been taking the more British sort of Iago to the bank for decades.
Popov hangover.
“Popov”—is that what they’re calling crystal meth these days? Oh, those crazy kids and their lingo!
Obligatory ToS-mockery aside, though, I do think it’s correct to point out that Iago is emphatically not an example of unmotivated evil. Indeed, Shakespeare gave him one of the most canonical and easy-to-grasp of villains’ motivations: envy. (A modern audience watching Othello could easily add prejudice to the mix if they were so inclined, though Elizabethan audiences undoubtedly wouldn’t have cared much.) His consuming envy of Othello doesn’t strike me as being that hard to appreciate from a readers’/viewers’ standpoint, particularly a naive one.
There are Shakespearean villains that represent unmotivated evil of the Hannibal Lecter-ish type (Aaron in Titus Andronicus comes to mind), and they illustrate a different appeal that characters can have to audiences naive or otherwise: that of personifying some force or aspect of the “order of things.” In a lot of cases villains reflect common phobias—with varying degrees of effectiveness—rather than their own personal motivations. There also seems to be a certain comfort associated with villains whose actions, though undeniably evil, seem to fulfil some purpose (or divine order, perhaps) other than their own. Hannibal Lecter, for instance, plays charismatically to the anti-intellectual subcurrent in the American psyche—yet despite his all-consuming monstrosity, his actions also often “punish” the petty, the stupid and the venal. He’s such a popular villain precisely because his actions stand outside motivation.
John,
As readers, especially as naive readers, one of the things we hope for in a fictional character is that their actions might be such that we can plausibly figure out their motivations in terms of what we know about their past.
Just when are we doing this? While reading the novel, or listening to the opera? Or afterward, perhaps in conversation with friends, or simply private thought? Or both? When we’re in mid-stream we generally don’t take time—or even have time in the case of opera, when our pace of apprehension is dictated to us—to think things though. They either make intuitive sense, or they don’t. If they don’t, well, they don’t. We still have to plunge ahead. Maybe we feel satisfied at the end, maybe not.
Concerning Marfa, is her implausibility something you sensed from the very beginning, or is it something that you decided upon only in retrospective reflection?
...quite a bit of the action in the opera (which otherwise tends toward set pieces revealing character and situation) comes from her, and some of the connection between the various scenes comes from her presence in both, and chopping her up into three different women would make the opera too episodic.
I’m not at all familiar with the opera, so . . . I sometimes feel that aesthetic lapses like this—assuming your judgment to be correct—are, in effect, cues telling us to really pay attention, that it’s the implausible elements that hold the whole thing together.
My appreciation of this opera would be increased if I were able to feel better about this character’s plausibility.
By appreciation do you mean your experience of listening to the opera, your rationalized understanding of it, or both?
As for Iago and his relationship with Othello, Thomas McFarland has said that “G. Wilson Knight, indeed, has elucidated the relationship as one of almost a single split personality” (Tragic Meanings in Shakespeare, Random House 1966, p. 72). He seems to be referring to Knight’s essay, “The Otello Music,” which is listed as a “suggested reading” but not specificially cited.
To the extent that Iago’s “descended” from the Medieval Vice character he’s evil because, well, as you say John, that’s just what he is. Don John in Much Ado About Nothing is a milder example of the type. He’s got a dirty job to do, he does it, and he’s all but forgetten at the end of the play:
Benedick: Think not on him till tommorrow; I’ll devise thee brave punishments for him. Strike up, pipers!
So much for that. Can’t let the demands of justice get in the way of party-time.
If Iago is evil the obvious question then is what that “evil” consists of, from a materialist or secularist perspective---evil being the name for what? “out of step with society’s mores”? Poor toilet training? Pain-inflicter, Etc. It’s the reliance on the old theological categories which should irritate (if Iago is supernaturally “Evil"--or even satanic to some degree (which is hinted at in some S-speare plays perhaps, Macbeth as well), then that evil and demonic power is ultimately stems from any supposed Deity, obviously).
Iago’s sense of irony and rhetorical skills compound or increase the sinisterness to some degree; like Hannibal Lector, his wit and cleverness make him both more entertaining and sinister than a mere thug or ghoul such as Caliban, and redeem him and make him likeable in some sense. (Alex in Clockwork Orange another related Iago meme--). Brits obviously are often cast in Ho-wood films precisely for this effect: however horrible a robot or “Terminator” is, the -bot’s machine-like slaughter pales next to the wicked, eloquent depravity of a Lector, an Iago, an Alex. As far as Iago’s motivations go, I disagree with Doktor Quack: it’s not mere envy or resentment, but a nihilistic glee, a de-sadean or at least aesthetic pleasure derived from Operation Phuck-up: Kix, in a sense, even if rather kix of a sanguine sort: and the kix a type of appeal in a sense. The audience--especially aristo and theatrical audiences of Shakespeare’s time--itself participates in the kix vicariously: theatre as blood sport-lite.
OK, seriously, I was not trying to make a contribution to Iago criticism. It was a throwaway line off the top of my head. I read the play decades ago.
My concessive point was that sometimes we don’t actually think too much about one of the characters in the sense of trying to get inside their heads, but just take them as given.
But my main point that the other business (of trying to “understand” a character) can make us appreciate a work less (if we can’t make sense of the character) or more (if we have an “aha” experience, and we feel that in figuring out how the character works, we have learned something about how real people work).
I have a great admiration for Khovanshchina, but the first time I went all the way through the opera he role bothered me for the reasons I said. It was retrospective because in the middle I was hoping for illumination, but didn’t get it at the end. And I did feel that somehow Mussorgsky was trying to kill three birds with one stone and just bundled them into Marfa.
A complicating factor—Musorgsky was required to find a female lead in his operas, even though his political-conspiracy succession-struggle stories weren’t romantically motivated at all and didn’t require a love-interest. Anothe rpoint against Marfa.
My opinion is not the consensus—Marfa is gernallt thought of as a powerfully-written role. However, most opera criticism is musical whereas I think that Musorgsky’s drama is good enough to require attention.
However appealing or suggestive or seemingly profound the grand characters of Literature appear to be, perhaps the character obsession of literary studies could be read as itself a type of aristocratic indulgence. And if I recall any of the cliffnotes to Aristotle’s Poetics correctly, A., early determinist, did rank plot as the central and most important element of literature, with character second. Hollywood of course depends on consumers’ character obsessions as well: and I would agree with Russell, as far as I understand him, that literary constructs--a few words, really--are sort of assembled into acutal persons: Hamlet coexists with Napoleon in most persons’ literary ontology, and this is a great mistake, if not fallacy. Yet it’s not merely a mistake: but more akin to the nobleman’s taste for collecting paintings of various imagined or romantic tableaus; Hamlet (and the big Family Shakespeare, and the library of baggy Classic novels, next to the Good Book) sort of reinforces an aristocratic and mostly catholic Weltanschauung.
Perhaps BF Skinner was not entirely mistaken in his criticisms of literature (such as critique of Rousseau) and the humanities as promoting and upholding archaic, immaterial and/or theological views of freedom, of volition, of agency. The naive philistine should he shouted down; the more emprically adept philistine (i.e. Russell or Skinner) on the other hand rightfully points out that literature--whether novels, drama, poetry, opera, etc.-- generally functions as a type of sophisticated idolatry, if not intoxicant.
[A little long—ok. But I’ve time on my hands. And, like Bill, I’m working something out. Though, it’s as much working out how to write as it is what I’m writing. But—and here I get to my discussion!—is there a difference?!]
In my post to Fictional Characters 4 there was a confusion as to whether I was arguing against or, by accident, with Bill. The confusion lies, I believe, in that the language being used in his discussion, irrespective of point of position, is all of the same general character: that of the hermeneutic, of directly referential language. I am saying that to understand ‘character’ in fiction, that position must be recognized as limited in scope: it is describing only one way of reading (what Kermode calls the naïve, what Derrida calls the logocentric, what Barthes call consumption of a Work). There is a second modality, however (the clerkly, free play, pleasure of the Text, respectively), that does not exclude the hermeneutic, but recognizes it as a self-limiting construct within the greater cosmos of language/being.
Part of my confusion over Bill’s ‘FC’ posts is I’m not sure why, if he is arguing against cognitive science’s concepts of character, he continually brings them up as though an answer can yet be found. The suggestion I am getting from the language in your posts, Bill, is that you are defeating various c.s. approaches to the issue, but are still accepting the possibly validity of c.s.’s underlying assumptions: in essence, thought as rational, material, referential hermeneutic.
I want to use a couple posts in this thread to show how I see these assumptions at work, and how literature itself immediately calls the language being used to speak about character into question. I am going to shift away from Shakespeare, though, because I want to avoid having to make digressions to explain the complication made by the fact that Othello et al are plays, and as such are visually performed – and as such (1) the text of the performed play is already interpreted by the director and the actors (and more) before the viewer get’s their chance to interpret a text which is no longer the words on the page; and (2) any reading of the text is going to be influenced by any viewing, not only in the normal sense of a reading tapping into one’s bank of knowledge and experience, but in that the the visual cues may be being fed into the text, in which case the director’s, and actors’, etc., interpretations may be dictating the reading of the words on the page.
Bill: Just when are we doing this? While reading the novel, or listening to the opera? Or afterward, perhaps in conversation with friends, or simply private thought? Or both? When we’re in mid-stream we generally don’t take time—or even have time in the case of opera, when our pace of apprehension is dictated to us—to think things though. They either make intuitive sense, or they don’t. If they don’t, well, they don’t. We still have to plunge ahead. Maybe we feel satisfied at the end, maybe not.
My first instinct is to defend the viewer here: I believe Bill’s words overly simplistic (and probably intentionally so). If a viewer were not capable of thinking on the fly, narratives would not work. There would only be confusion on the stage.
This is not to say confusion doesn’t happen. (And let me use film here as a time-sensitive artform. I’m a little more familiar with it than with drama.) Take Lynch’s Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway. Most people come out of those films after the first watching quite confused. They could not keep up with the ideational field being created. Those movies take figuring out (and not in a rational way). Another example: Malick’s The Thin Red Line. A beautiful and amazing film. I saw it in the theater that had maybe 10 other people (almost all businessmen) in it. The majority of them were bored silly. They did not understand what was happenning (in sense of the film as Text, not in the sense of the story-line), and were not able to engage the film.
Then take Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. This is an astoundingly complex film. Yet, people can come out of it making sense of the images they saw: though that sense (after the first viewing), is incomplete when thought out against the film. It is very worth noting that while Eyes was panned in the first go around, many critics, a year later, admitted that having seen the movie again, and again, that they got it wrong in their earlier panning, and recognized it as a masterpeice. The point here: Eyes, and movies like it, cannot be viewed successfully the first time they are seen.
Barthes again, if you haven’t already jumped there ahead of me: One of the differences between Work and Text: the work is consumed; read it once and you got all there is. The Text cannot be read a first time. It can only be read in re-reading. Why? Because the text is not reportage (as in the nature of a Work). It is not simple, surface narration of events. It is a complex field of meaning. To succcessfully engage the first sentence, the last sentence must already be known: every word influences the reading of every other word. Not in the sense of linearity, as in every word is influenced by all the words previously read. But in the sense of a crafted field: no word is supposed to be understood outside of the field generated by a full reading (viewing) of the text. When you read Much Ado, you aren’t supposed to be able to fully engage the wedding scene without also engaging all that came before and after. You can if you so read it (part of the brilliance of Shakespeare is that it can be engaged pleasurably both by the naïve the and clerkly), but you are missing out on the aesthetic beauty of the text if you do so. That is, you are no longer reading the text as Text, as capital-L Literature. You are reading it as, in essence, pulp.
(This idea is very useful in learning to engage the non-linearity of Lynch’s films.)
(Also, I recognize my use of “aesthetic” is undefined – consider it example to the point. Define it through the argument as a whole.)
So my response to the bit excerpted from Bill’s words is agree/disagree. I agree with the idea that a text may not be understandable a first time. But I disagree with the meanings imputted into “when do we do this” by the overall context. The phrase seems to carry in it that linear, code-like, referentially-based interpretation that I’m trying to show as inadequate and contaminatory. The answer to “When do we do this?” is “Always.”: the minute we start to engage the text we are – and the circularity is to the point – engaging the text. That engagement does not end simply because the curtains drop or the book closes. It continues on: and, importantly, we need not have to have the visual, referential prompt of the play or words in front of us for engagement to continue. I see Othello. The next night I’m watching Seven Samurai on the TV. The next night I read some of Alice in Wonderland. There is no reason not to say that on the fourth night, while I am working a crossword puzzle, drinking internation foods coffees, that I am not also still engaging all three texts.
How, without there being direct stimulation? The modality of the unconscious. What is the (recognizably quickly arrived at) corrollary to this question/answer? The question of direct stimulation is not sine qua non to the question of engagement.
Let me reel back:
John: one of the things we hope for in a fictional character is that their actions might be such that we can plausibly figure out their motivations in terms of what we know about their past.
Take the phrasing here. ‘Motivation in terms of their past.’ This language implies that a character’s past – and (not “or”) knowledge there of – precedes development of motivation. Why must it be so? It need be so only in a linear, codelike understanding of thought. My more immediate question, though, approaching the issue in awareness of the fallacy of which I spoke in my FC4 response, is, does literature itself even permit thinking of characters in this manner? Keep in mind as I progress two things:
(1) there are two kinds of reading, and two kinds of texts. The language John is using applies – to a degree – to Work (continuing with Barthes’s terms). But I am arguing it does not apply to Texts. Why is this important to me? Because the aesthetic is the realm of Texts, not of Works. So, my argument is not one of “You are wrong, I am right,” but, “I believe in speaking of texts that are literary in nature, the language you are using does not apply. And to speak of those Texts, in the way you are speaking of them – or in the way cognitive science is speaking of them, or in the way I see Bill’s posts speaking of them because of the language of his discussion – diminishes them and relegates them from the realm of the aesthetic to the realm of the consumable.
(2) Literary Texts must be reread. There is no complete first reading: to engage the beginning one must also engage the ending.
So, a couple examples to back me up, and permit exploration of the idea.
De Sade, Justine: “What do you expect to find here? Mercy? we know it not; humaneness? to us, our contempt for it grows the better acquainted with it we become; [. . .] you will discover nothing but cruelty, egoism, and the sustained debauchery and impiety. The completest submissiveness is your lot [. . .].” (Pg 567 in the Grove edition.)
These are words spoken by Dom Severino in the Benedictine Monastery. They are describing the events in the monestary, and the characters of the four monks there. Yet, they are also informing the reader of Justine. If our understanding of a character is to be limited to the characters themselves, how can this relation between Dom Severino’s words and the character of Justine exist?
Reversing the approach: words that are not about Justine are nonetheless about Justine. Why? Because the entire book is an argument that uses Justine as a lynchpin. To understand the idea Justine as the Text Justine offers the idea of Justine to us, you cannot divorce character from book as a whole. The two are inseparable: the former is a complex of ideas within a greater cosmos of ideas: a complex which is informed by every other idea created in the engagement with the text. This is especially prominent in Justine, where the ideas are utterly ironized: the heroine is not the heroine, the villains are not villains per se. (Though, they do have varying degrees of ‘natural nobility,’ to coin a phrase.)
(Of course, Justine is mostly narrated by Justine: a complication I set aside.)
Stoker, Dracula: one of the keys of opening up the book to engagement is to recognize that the collection of texts you are reading have been transcribed, ordered, and edited by Mina Murray. As such, to understand the key events of the text, you must also understand that the ideational field of the book is one fully tinctured by the idea of Mina. Mina’s character, then, is created out of every word of the book: not merely those that directly address or describe her. Recognizing this ironizes Mina’s character. She wishes to portray herself – and the other characters, to the degree she believes them to merit it—as virtuous and proper. But we must question: is this presentation really Mina’s character – are the other characters really so?—or is this how Mina-as-editor wishes it in her redaction of the documents?
(One of the things I love of Coppola’s version is how Lucy is so very much a animalistic, sexual creature, and yet Mina so continually intends and desires to regard her as a ‘proper’ lady.)
The point: can Mina’s character at all be said to be learned—‘cognized’—through the observance of recorded events and the discernment of the motivations that underly them? The recorded events taken as materially referential make it clear that Mina is a virtuous little soul who would (like Janet in Rocky Horror) never . . . never ever. But those recorded events are called into question by the ideational field created by the Text as a whole.
One more, by the writer in imitation of which innumerable crimes have been committed against literature-as-aesthetic-object in the 20th century: Hemingway. Hemingway is the great example because is writing style is like that of Works, but his works are very much aesthetic Texts. (Unfortunately, creative writing programs and workshops across the U.S. have failed to pick up on this.) His stories are perfect here because they are a kind of inverted test case: they are stories wholly ‘about’ characters. Yet, when you read the two parts of “Big Two-Hearted River”, if you content yourself with understanding Nick as a character, and exploring his motivations, you are completely missing the Text. Hemingway’s stories are like paintings: no word can be considered without including in the engagement every other word. To collapse “Big Two-Hearted River” to linear reportage about the events of a character, to speak about characters as material, or cognitively ‘real’—collapses the cosmos of the story—itself a micro-cosmos of the collection In Our Time—into Work, into consumable, linear, codes. To read the stories as they ask to be read, however, is to generate a greater field of meaning, one that simultaneously is created out of and informs the ideas of the characters and events. Nick cannot be separated from the field of the book as a whole: in fact, Nick is a function of the field of the book as a whole. To speak of the book in terms such as cognitive scientists, nor writers/readers of Works, is, blunty, to not engage the book or the stories therein.
That’s a overly brief presentation of a broad idea – but it will do for now.
One more thrown in, just because: can the ideational field of Hamlet be divorced from Polonius’s lessons to Laertes? Likewise, can the ideational field of Polonius’s speech be divorced from the field of Hamlet?
More simply, and returning to the fore, a Text is a non-referential field. It is nonsense to speak of a character’s motivation as divorced from the character: we create both ideas ‘simultaneously’ (use that word loosely) in our head. Neither is divorced from the other. Again, and pedanticly: There are no facts. There is no reality. There are ‘only’ words and ideas. Characters are not real people, and can not be analyzed in the way ‘real people’ can be analyzed.
In fact, this reveals, obtusely, what is the fundamental fallacy of referentiality and ‘cognitive science’ such as we have been discussing here. The analysis should not be “Do we think characters in the way we think real people?” but should be “Do we think real people in the way we think characters?” But then, as said elsewhere, the opposition between those two sides has been going on since the formation of the rational conscious, and underlies the history of Western thought. (I’d prompt “Why?” but I’d only end up referring to Kermode again, whose book is a great intro to the answer.)
In summary: my engagement with these threads is centered on one idea: that the question of character in (as) literature cannot be answered or explored in a discourse that considers characters as people, as referential events (that is, the words in the book reference non-existence persons that in the mind are treated as material, referential events). To explore character in a Text, one must think in terms of a Text: that is, ideational fields. The aesthetic, not the hermeneutic. Free play, not logocentric discourse. Jouissance, not consumption. Or else, as I put forth, however frailly, in the response to FC4, the language used will contaminates – and quickly cripple – the exploration.
The question then, and it’s the same as Bill’s in word – though I’m not sure if in context --, is, “How do we do this?”
A most stimulating post, Andrew. Don’t agree, not at all. But, quickly now, as other matters are pressing:
“Do we think real people in the way we think characters?”
I think that’s the argument to make about, for example, literature’s adaptive value. Characters in our fictions, whether the culture hero tales of the Bororo, or highly refined impersonations in a Kubrick film, suggest the terms through which we engage one another.
To explore character in a Text, one must think in terms of a Text: that is, ideational fields. The aesthetic, not the hermeneutic. Free play, not logocentric discourse. Jouissance, not consumption.
There was a time when I thought I understood such language. But I decided that I’d rather not write it. And with that decision, the illusion of understanding dissipated.
At the turn of the year I flailed away on this business of reading, here, here, and here, but also here. I’m not sure there’s much point in rehashing those formulations once again.
So let me say something rather different, rather extreme. The words in literary texts are dumb as rocks, deliberately so. Trying to tease out their meaning is pointless; they have none. Hence all interpretive and clerkly projects are pointless, and attempting to build such knowledge into your method changes nothing. Rather than using Wordsworth on the beach as a means to plumb the nuances of intentionality we should attempt to understand how it is that the dumb forces of wind and water can act on the scattered density of sand so as to inscribe Wordsorthian intricacy on the sands. Time after time. Precisely. If we could understand that, then we’d know something.
Upon reflection, Andrew, it seems to me that our major difference is over how one should think and write about literature. Anything else of importance pretty much follows from that. On this issue, I don’t see us reaching agreement soon, or easily.
Godshalk:
“I would like to retain Walton’s basic idea, that interpreting literary character is a game of make-believe and pretense. In this game, we pretend that literary characters—words on a page, or actors on a stage—are real people.”
Thus the Lit. game may be read as not merely trifling amusement more or less designed for the bored nobles, but a type of deception: instead of attempting to establish whatever facts are known about historical or economic processes, say, the literatteur in effect invents somes convenient or amusing myths, though one would grant, on occasion following some template (Miles Gloriosus, etc.): Godshalk then appears to be another neo-platonist, at least in echoing the prohibition of lyric poetry (if not aesthetics as a whole) outlined in Book X of the Republic (P-to did make exceptions for the JP Sousa’s of the time). And Russell himself, however anti-classicist he may have been, was probably not unaquainted with that Republic bon mot.