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Thursday, May 05, 2005
Hasty notes on Hartman’s Scars of the Spirit
I'm reading Geoffrey Hartman's Scars of the Spirit (Palgrave, 2002) for what are proving to be insufficient reasons. There is something odd. I'm not sure whether it means anything, but it seems related to this and this.
It starts innocuously: "From the film Blade Runner, inspired by Philip Dick ..." (p. viii). Well, yes, it was. Then: "Don DeLillo, the novelist, captures this perfectly in a scene ..." (p. ix).Then:
Let me mention, finally, Jean Beaudrillard's view that differentiates simulacrum and simulation [awkward sentence, no?]. The simulacrurm is said to be an indistinguishably true simulation, a "hyperreal" model that is its own reality referent. Baudrillard, a French culture critic, suggests what may always have prompted not only the concept of absolute immanence but also that of absolute transcendence: of the One who exists beyond imitation, and so both inspires and defeats all copies.
Could anyone who had never heard of Baudrillard before that third sentence possibly understand the rest?
"We have confused documentation with the Book, Emmanuel Levinas, the French philosopher, writes."
"The Dutch historian John Huizinga was motivated to write ..."
"Thomas Mann's brother, Heinrich, writes in 1934 ..."
I could give those last two a pass. But:
Jane Tompkins, whose memoir I comment on in chapter 4, goes wrong in one respect. Her attack on the New Criticism (an influential mode of literary study from the 1930s into the 1960s) is simplistic. (p. 9)
What Michel, Leiris, an important French writer, calls introducing the "shadow of a bull's horn" ... (p. 9)
As Paul Celan (perhaps the greatest post-Holocaust poet writing in German) reminds us: "Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen." (p. 18)
But the next two just kill me:
... or playing like Nabokov, the modern novelist, with "pale fire" ... (p. 22)
The sympathetic imagination, as Adam Smith, the eighteenth century economist and man of letters pointed out ... (p. 27)
The book is chock full of unexplicated references to lots of relatively obscure folks but the famous ones tend to get these little informational tags.
I'm not sure whether to email E.D. Hirsch and tell him the world needs an authoritative Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, to sort out who we can be expected to have heard about; or reach for some boy's adventure books. You see I've been reading the stuff. "Little Julius Weiss, the mathematics genius of the Spindrift group, leaned forward." There ought to be a word for this stylistic tic. Not infodump, but infosquirt - a puff of probably unnecessary biographical data in the middle of a sentence.
I have no opinion about why Hartman is writing this way. Do you?
I've read the beginning and the end, and it seems to me eclectic and distracted to no good purpose. Trivialities tricked out manneristically; faux conceptual precision:
The relation between play and reality affects all of life. It is not just a temporary factor in growing up. As D.W. Winnicott [no biographical data?] has shown, it shapes mature decision making and the well being of individuals and polities. "If the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton," the reason must have been an ability to fight and to play, to flexibly leave and reenter a safe transitional space that allows for growth, speculation, imaginative options. (p. 6)
A lot like that. Please feel free to diagnose exactly what is wrong with writing this way.
I'll just quote a few more bits that may speak to issues of contemporary literary studies culture raised around here recently. Hartman - who must be granted a certain insider status in literary studies - says many of the things that some folks - gzombie, for example - have impatiently dismissing as symptoms of ignorance. Hermeneutics of suspicion dominates; literature is appreciated only as a political tool; methodological eclecticism - a sort of hyper-amateurism - is the pseudo-disciplinary norm.
I do not intend to offer a systematic defense of art. In fact, I sometimes wonder what claim can still be made for its contribution to authentic existence. For the complicity of art in the realities of its time, a complicity that has become the dominatn theme of contemporary criticism, makes it harder to look beyond a demystification that justifies it only as an instrument involved in the social or political struggle. (p. 7)
Valued only as exemplary fodder for the politically savvy mind, many works would have to be dismissed as morally inauthentic, a self-deluding species of consciousness or a counterfeit promesse de bonheur. (p. 7)
Literary theory, despite recent trends, need not accept a reductive view of the relation between art and politics. It should keep the use and abuse of speech, the justness and scrutinizing power of words as well as their deceitful or deceptive character, constantly in mind. It can recall how thought is deeply, and not always consciously, verbal, how the common tender of words enters every aspect of culture. (p. 8)
That last bit seems to me almost a parody of an attempt to rise above the 'reductive view'. It is patently too bland to serve. (Maybe it can go in the department handbook.) And then, skipping a few lines:
Most of the time, unfortunately, we remain unaware of the lava of petrified metaphors that constitutes so much of daily language. Perhaps because words on the page, although meant for thoughtful absorption and reconsideration, must always reenter the pressured marketplace of ideas: chaotic debates where force of personality is often decisive. (p. 8)
This is an unhappy combination of excessive weakness and excessive strength. 'Most of the time', 'so much', 'perhaps', 'often'. There is no danger of Hartman getting refuted when he has all these qualifications to hide behind. On the other hand, is the reader supposed to accept (as a premise?) that the marketplace of ideas is bad for language, or bad in itself? That there are no orderly debates? No, it is just a bold gesture; made and dropped in the next paragraph. A sort of rhetorical ADD, even as we are being lectured about the importance of linguistic attentiveness.
Before I quote a passage from the final chapter, "Aestheticide", let me quote a comment from that monster CT comment thread. You know the one. blah writes:
As far as I can tell, contemporary literary study in the U.S. has essentially become amateur sociology, amateur political science, amateur history in the service of rooting out race, class, gender, and sexual identity bias – too often done with insufferable arrogance and condescension. It’s pretty much a dead end. If you ask other English grad exiles, they’ll know exactly what I am talking about.
But it doesn’t surprise me that the defenders of the institution, the true believers, have reacted with such ferocity. They really believe they are serving some noble purpose, serving the cause of justice. It’s that self-delusion that gives too many of them such arrogance.
This provoked a rebuttal from gzombie:
Farther up, blah writes, “contemporary literary study in the U.S. has essentially become amateur sociology, amateur political science, amateur history in the service of rooting out race, class, gender, and sexual identity bias” Nope, not at all, although this is a common stereotype.
Hartman is more of blah's mind, and Sean McCann's; and mine; and Henry Farrell's. (Although I think blah could have toned it down about the self-delusion and arrogance. I would have, anyway.)
Today the scientific model, while still contributing to centralized systems of education in Europe, is not taken all that seriously - except when grants are applied for. At the same time, literature is becoming less the object of literary study than of an informal sociology or politology: I say "informal" because so few who approach literature this way have actually worked in sociology or political science. They use socioeconomic categories, particularly class, gender, race, and property relations, to inspect works of art as "products" of a certain form of social life, which Marx - who is being read - considered temporary or transitional. The motivation for most of these analyses is social justice, and the field established by them is what we call cultural studies. But where do we find, together with that social awareness, the inventiveness, playfulness, and art-centeredness of a Kenneth Burke? (p. 223-4)
The first line of the next paragraph seems telling as well: "We all share the aim of social justice; the quarrel is about the means to that end." Not about what the proper conception of justice might be, mind you. Honesty compels me to admit this is a softball lobbed to conservatives. 'You see, they aren't willing to consider different political points of view. For them it's only a question of how to enforce their point of view.' This does, indeed, seem to be Hartman's position. Take it or leave it.
So what do folks think of Hartman? Is he a grumpy old man out of touch with all the vibrant, new work being doing in literary studies? Horribly unrepresentative? I've really never read any Hartman before. What's with telling us Nabokov is a novelist and Adam Smith an economist?
Well, those are my notes for the night.
Comments
There ought to be a word for this stylistic tic. Not infodump, but infosquirt - a puff of probably unnecessary biographical data in the middle of a sentence. ... Please feel free to diagnose exactly what is wrong with writing this way.
Because it sounds like Dan Brown. See the analysis here:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001628.html
Perhaps it was an editing requirement?
If I had read those examples blind and had to speculate as to who had written them, Geoffrey Hartman never would’ve cropped up. The Hartman I’ve read (most of which predates or is roughly contemporaneous to the Gang of Four’s divorce) is someone whose points I often can’t stomach but whose prose has always been sharp. To wit (on both accounts):
“How curious that teachers who permit into the curriculum the most experimental fiction are aggressively defensive when it comes to literature which demands as much or more: the writings, namely, of great speculative thinkers like Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, Freud...I call it ‘literature’ not only to make a polemical point but from the conviction that each thinker draws on and in turn generates a text milieu of his own, so that it is not a matter of ‘knowing’ Derrida or Heidegger but of reading and steeping oneself in a corpus of critical, philosophical and literary texts which they incorporate and revise. Coleridge can be our example in this as well. If he failed, then we too should have his courage to fail.”
The fuzziness, esp. around the that first mention of “literature,” is deliberate. He sets up the distinction between experimental fiction and the literature of speculative thinkers. If granted that, those who would concede the claims of T.S. Eliot, a minor American poet of the first half of the twentieth-century, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” must perforce accept that it’s as acceptable to teach Derrida as Eliot, Pound and other “difficult” writers. (Or deny the validity of Hartman’s distinction, but for some reason, very few did.) In the ‘70s and ‘80s, Hartman could corner and finish. I wonder if the difference between the article I’ve quoted from, published in 1977, and the book you’ve quoted from, published in 2002, might not be the obvious one.
Talk about Nabokov! He sounds like Charlotte Haze. I especially liked “politology.”
I think Cephalous has it right, though that stuff also sounds like it might be the byproduct of overwriting for a public readership. You can imagine him imagining that the unwashed need to be told who Smith and Nabokov are.
Hm. Taking one of the Hartman quotes:
Literary theory, despite recent trends, need not accept a reductive view of the relation between art and politics. It should keep the use and abuse of speech, the justness and scrutinizing power of words as well as their deceitful or deceptive character, constantly in mind. It can recall how thought is deeply, and not always consciously, verbal, how the common tender of words enters every aspect of culture.
and whittling away a little gives me this:
Literary theory need not accept a reductive view of the relation between art and politics. It should keep the use and abuse of speech constantly in mind. It can recall how thought is deeply verbal, how the common tender of words enters every aspect of culture.
It’s still loose. The parallelism doesn’t work. Maybe a little more?
Literary theory need not accept a reductive view of the relation between art and politics. It should keep the use and abuse of speech constantly in mind. It can recall how the common tender of thought, the word, enters every aspect of culture.
Better. Not great, but not bad.
I blame the word processor.
Ever play the telephone game?
I think Cephalous has it right, though that stuff also sounds like it might be the byproduct of overwriting for a public readership.
Somebody was obviously very confused about the readership for this book. What kind of reader would bother working through this book who did not know who Nabokov or Dellilo were?
Here’s my edit:
We need not accept a reductive view of the relationship between literature and politics. Instead, we should keep in mind both the use and abuse of speech: the scrutinizing power of words, as well as their deceptive character. We should remember that thought is irreducibly verbal and that language permeates every aspect of culture.
Possibly it’s aimed at culturally illiterate object-relations psychoanalysts working in paediatrics
Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens agrees.