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Monday, August 22, 2005
Literary Interest, Part II: This Time, It May Even Be Coherent
In the earlier version of this post I impatiently criticized arguments I had yet to establish, the result being a brazenly inaccurate or deeply stupid account of the argument Knapp forwards in Literary Interest. I promise no assumptions’ll be prodded until after I proffer his argument in toto.
He articulates the short version of his argument at the end of the fourth chapter:
The object of literary interpretation is necessarily the meaning intended by some agent or collectivity of agents. But the object of literary interest is not an intended meaning; in fact, it isn’t literally a meaning at all. The object of literary interest is a special kind of representational structure, each of whose elements acquires, by virtue of its connection with other elements, a network of associations inseparable from the representation itself. (104)
Floating there alone, far from the arguments which substantiate it, that claim surely strikes readers as the conventional formalist claim for the autonomy of the literary object. Its “representational structure” closes in upon itself such that being interested in the regicide in MacBeth is “not to be interested in regicide as but in regicide as set in its “galaxy of symbols"--regicide, that is, as suggesting, and suggested by, the thoughts and emotions appropriate to daggers, and crows, and naked babes, and so on” (104). The previous version of this post jumped the tracks by overemphasizing the arguments Knapp proposes and dismisses as he updates Wimsatt’s notion of “the concrete universal.” Here they are:
The intended world of an author like Milton should allow “his reader to imagine states of affair whose interconnections would be tight enough, for example, to sustain an inference from Eve’s speaking to Eve’s having a mouth; or from Adam’s standing to Adam’s being in contact with the ground” (9). If he succeeds, his intentions can be divined. If he fails, his intentions can be probed and critics can attempt to supplement the work with whatever it needs to achieve coherence, e.g. the Romantics reenvision Milton’s intentions and in so doing create the coherent Miltonic world Milton himself could not. But Knapp insists that “one’s interest in the problem of Milton’s authorial agency can go beyond an interpretive interest in figuring out what action milton performed or failed to perform” (27). Therefore
an interest in analogies between poets and their poems, or poets and readers, or readers and poems is hard to account for in either theoretical or interpretive terms. But [his] claim is not that a non-interpretive and non-theoretical interest in analogies is for that reason anomalous or mistaken. On the contrary, it is precisely for this kind of interest that I propose to reserve the adjective “literary.” (29)
Via Keats’ Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil and Kant’s Third Critique, Knapp then discusses the possibility that aesthetical ideas, as represented in metaphor, are suggestive without being meaningful in any predetermined way. Metaphors brim with “negative capability” because they communicate only indirectly. Whatever cognitive content a metaphor possesses, it also possesses aesthetic attributes which cannot be conceptualized. The metaphor is “can never yield a definite cognition, since the content of the representation...remains an ‘illimitable field’ of associated effects, that is, ‘sensations and and secondary representations’ for which no definite verbal expression can be found’” (42). The author and reader collaborate in this speculative enterprise unlike the economic case in which the speculator gives up an immediate payoff for an immediate payoff for an anticipated but uncertain future return. “In the aesthetic case, what one gets in return for a surrender of immediate agency is not a later benefit but a certain mode of experience or consciousness” (40).
As was the case with the coherence of the intended world, here again Knapp insists that authorial intention is irrelevent to the production of literary interest. It
isn’t necessary to for a metaphor’s author to intend each assumption that belongs to the set of assumptions the metaphor is intended to commnicate. The reader is free to extrapolate on the basis of what the author has explicitly indicated. But such extrapolation...will only continue to count as interpretation as long as the interpreter has reason to think that what she arrives at continues to belong to the content intended by the author. (48)
Knapp sees “no reason why the activity triggered by a poetic metaphor--or indeed any literary representation--should take the form of an attempt to interpret the representation” (47). (I strongly disagree with the principle here but, as promised, will hush for the time being.) Still, he acknowledges that “what remains to be explained is why a speculative interest that goes beyond an interest in a representation’s meaning should nevertheless remain bound...to the representation that excites it” (48). The representation that excites, i.e. the author, remains bound because, historically, readers have folded the author back into the literary object, have shifted attention “not from the object to the representation itself but from the object to the agent of representation (from the matter of poetry to the poet)” (51). Knapp thinks this a mistake, both for the reasons I’ve already outlined, and one additional one: Socrates long-ago exploded the notion that basking in the greatness of another is a rational activity.[1] Literary interest avoids the object-of-representation/agent-of-representation circuit by recreating “the concrete universal” through an authorless and intentionless oscillation between types and universals.
These types appear in literature as signs and representations clustered around a literary object. These clusters or constellations of signs produce, to use Knapp’s example, the experience of the type or concept
Chevalier for Jean-Paul Sartre:
To decipher the signs is to produce the concept “Chevalier.” At the same time I am making the judgment: “she is imitating Chevalier.” With this judgment the structure of the consciousness is transformed. The theme, now, is Chevalier. By its central intention, the consciousness is imaginative, it is a question of realizing my knowledge in the intuitive material furnished me. (37)
With “the concept ‘Chevalier,’” Knapp contends,
we have arrived at the notion of a particular feeling experienced on a particular occasion, but a feeling that at the same time possesses the irreducible generality of a concept, since it necessarily involves a reference to other feelings on other occasions (whether those other feelings are remembered or only imagined. We have arrived, in short, at something it apparently does make sense to call a “concrete universal.” [...] Sarte’s example concerned the imagining of an absent person, but his account applies equally to the perception of persons as such. For persons, in a crucial sense, are always absent. To perceive a person is always to perceive a particular body as the present incarnation of an identity that is distributed across a range of particular occasions now absent. (77-78)
Having, he believes, answered the Platonic charge of patent irrationality, Knapp wonders whether literary interest has value for activities outside the production and consumption of literary objects. He queues the usual suspects and finds them all wanting. A discussion of Ronald de Sousa’s axiological theory--which entails the testing of scenarios, one against the other, until one “restructures one’s emotions by ‘consciousness raising’"--is followed by the de rigueur deflation of de Manian notion “the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations.” He saves his positive platform the final chapter, “Collective Memory and the Actual Past,” the subject of tomorrow’s follow-up post on Literary Interest.
I believe I’ve eradicated my inchoate criticisms from this version of the post. At the very least, I’ve bitten my tongue bloody muzzling my yap this time through, so this should represent a presentation of the strong form of his argument up to Chapter 5. Tomorrow I’ll cover and critique Chapter 5 while swinging wildly through the material I’ve presented today.
Unless, of course, I’ve flubbed it again. (Crosses fingers. Prays. Looks around, sees no one, prays harder.)
[1]In Ion he informs the eponymous rhapsode that Homer’s poetry only excites the lower faculties, the passions of his audience, and that it does so from a position of substantial intellectual vacuity, since the content of poetry is so universal as to be utterly devoid of content.)
Comments
I have to say, Scott, this is, so far, a very bad account of the book. Bad in a variety of ways, but positively false in your claims about what Knapp is _arguing_.
Throughout, Knapp is concerned to understand how certain very commmon claims about interpretation _work_. What, for example, might you have to believe to believe that a literary text is means _the opposite_ of what an author can legitimately be said to have intended (Blake’s Satanic Milton)?
Or, more broadly, why might we be interested in meanings that we _give to_ (or “find” in) a literary text as well as meanings that authors intended them to have? And how do we account for the limits past which the things that a text happens to make us think of _don’t_ count as part of the text’s meaning? Thus, the title. Knapp’s account is not of a special kind of meaning that literary texts have, but a special kind of interest we have in them-- interest in both the general fact of and in the particulars of interpretations that exceed “meaning” (for meaning, as we know for Knapp, is what the author intended) and interest in attributing those meanings to the text rather than to ourselves.
Your claim that “Knapp believes that authors attempt to create internally consistent worlds when they write” may be true or false, but it is not supported by the book, and not necessary to its argument. Knapp is at that point, explicating one account of what one _might_ believe in order to justify certain claims about interpretation. On the other hand, your assertion that Knapp “claims that readers of all critical stripes engage a work in the same way: they impute to it meaning based on assumptions foreign to it” seems to me to be just false. I’d like a cite of where Knapp says it.
I’m not trying to be harsh, but your desire to have people respond critically to what _they think_ Knapp is saying, based on your presentation of Knapp here is going to lead to conversations that have very little to do with what he is actually saying, and I’m not sure I see the point of getting people to call bullshit on a straw man.
HZ, it sounds harsh, but I’m not offended. To deal with your final question, that’s just sloppiness on my part: I omitted a “do not.” That should read Knapp “claims that readers of all critical stripes engage a work in the same way: they do not impute to it meaning based on assumptions foreign to it.” While he never directly says as much, I think it’s implicit in his claim that there’s no reason new historicists (I’d include culture studies) shouldn’t “extend the range of literary interest beyond the spehere of literary artifacts in the traditional sense” (104). That extension authorizes work on The Little Mermaid as well as Hamlet because the academic apparatus of literary scholars is one which may deny, but is still heavily invested in, literary interest. But, as always, I could be mistaken.
Now, as for your more substantial critique, I’ve deliberately pointed to his contention about the “worldliness” because I believe that’s one of the few places in the book in which there’s some strain in his argument. For example, he closes the chapter on “Negative Capability” by saying “what remains to be explained is why a speculative interest that goes beyond an interest in a representation’s meaning should nevertheless remain bound...to the representation that excites it” (48). The representation that excites it is the author, and he is there describing how interpretation works; but what I want to focus on are the potential prescriptive claims that can be taken from LI, and they often seem contrary to the descriptive claims he makes. What I mean by that is simply that his definition of what constitutes literary interest--"a special kind of representational structure, each of whose elements acquires, by virtue of its connection with other elements, a network of associations inseparable from the representation itself” (104)--buckles under the weight of his earlier arguments about the intentionality of literary language.
[Broken in two because of odd HTML issues.]
In short, I’m not convinced by the quick divorce initiated on 104:
“The object of literary interpretation is necessarily the meaning intended by some agent or collectivity of agents. But the object of literary interest is not an intended meaning; in fact, it isn’t literally a meaning at all.”
While this distinction holds logically, as he’s already demonstrated, that “representational structure” returns--but needn’t necessarily return, which is his point--to the representation from which it came, i.e. the author. There are four or five more links in that reflexive representational chain, but I don’t want to overcomplicate affairs now.
All of these qualifications aside, I think you’re right that in focusing on the hows of Knapp’s claims I may’ve obscured his argument, especially as regards his idea that it’s the tension between the reader’s belief in the coherence of an author’s created world (or in the ability of that world to cohere, vis-a-vis Blake’s Satanic Milton) that generates “literary interest” (29). I’ll rework some of the above to better indicate that...but I still have some issues to take with what I see to be the prescriptive applications of LI.
So, H.Z., is this better? (And by “better” I mean “coherent” and “not complete crap.")
<object of literary interpretation is necessarily the meaning intended by some agent or collectivity of agents.</i>
What does such a statement mean in practice?
Let me see if a understand the argument. A literary text has a (single) meaning, it means something. What does the text mean? What the author intended it to mean. What did the author intend it to mean? Look at the evidence - the text itself, the author’s other statements, reasonable inferences, etc.
But what counts as the author’s intended meaning? If I asked Henry James what he intended the novel The Ambassadors to mean, would he have understood the question? It is a meaningful question?
He might have said that he intended to tell a certain story that involved certain characters facing certain psychological dilemmas who achieve certain insights at the end of the novel. He might say that he hoped to portray the evolving consciousness of these characeters in a subtle, artistic fashion. He might say that he had certain ideas about innocence and experience that he was attempting to dramatize in his novel.
Yes, but what is the meaning? Is meaning (and thus interpretation as Knapp sees it) simply a matter of paraphrasing the work? What is so special about that?
How is literary meaning different from other forms of artistic meaning? Can we say that the meaning of a painting, sculpture, ballet, sonata, is the meaning intended by the creator of the work? Why or why not?
In short, I am having trouble understanding the meaning of meaning as applied to a literary work. Undoubtedly the creators of artistic works are engaging in intentional acts and have certain intentions, but I am puzzled at how these intentions can be shown to be the (single) meaning of the work.
It is better-- by which, of course, I mean the slightly less condescending “truer to my sense of Knapp’s argument"-- but you continue to submerge something important about the rhetoric of the book, which is, at every moment, not about offering a theory of literary reading, but an explanation of what the payoff of a set of historical accounts of reading might be. Knapp is offering arguments that make incompletely articulated arguments --Keats’s, for example-- more coherent, or that save the appearances of incoherent positions (Wimsatt’s, for example) by offering better arguments that give you altered (or as you say, “updated") versions of what was desired (the concrete universal) NOT in order to provide a program for reading, but in order to understand why the outcome was desired in the first place.
Thus, when Knapp says that “an interest in analogies between poets and their poems, or poets and readers, or readers and poems is hard to account for in either theoretical or interpretive terms,” he is precisely not offering a theoretical defense of those analogies (which he thinks is impossible-- that is, I think, what me means by “hard"); rather he is trying to give an account of what we are interested in when we are make those analogies (as we do) despite not having any (coherent) theoretical grounds on which to do it, nor any point to make that could coherently be called “interpretive.”
The sentence you so object to, in which Knapp sees “no reason why the activity triggered by a poetic metaphor--or indeed any literary representation--should take the form of an attempt to interpret the representation” (47)” is not a statement of principle; it is a) a summation of the preceeding argument coupled to b) a completely unobjectionable statement of fact: a) there is no _reason_ (no account of what a metaphor IS) that would make all responses to metaphors count as intended meanings. And in fact, b) metaphors make readers respond in all kinds of ways, not all of which can coherently be said to be interpretations of the metaphor. I might feel that the top of my head has been taken off. When Blake writes “The crow wish’d every thing was black, the owl, that every thing was white” I might find myself wishing that everying was peach. Or thinking about my laundry.
What Knapp finds himself wanting to explain though, is why so many thinkers-about-poetry who have _wanted_ to see non-interpretive responses (Keatsian “speculations") as bound to the poem even when there is no reason why we _must_ see them as part of the meaning of the poem. (My laundry obviously is obviously something that few readers would say is bound to the poem, but not NO readers. What is more common among experimental poets than the claim that my reaction to the poem is part of the poem?)
So, Knapp wants to know: What is the payoff of treating literary works _as if_ they had a a “special kind of representational structure, each of whose elements acquires, by virtue of its connection with other elements, a network of associations inseparable from the representation itself.” What are we interested in when we are interested in THAT?
Ah, so it sounds like my final guess ("what rules are being followed—what heuristics are preferred—in the contemporary critic’s game, including the collection of evidence as to the author’s possible imagined worlds. So I’d hope he’s headed in that direction.") wasn’t that far off, even if it was based on Scott’s earlier faultier account of the argument?
Thanks for showing up, HZ. You do make the book sound worth seeking out.
Yes, Ray, the Peeps are all yours. I also want to thank HZ for helping me clarify my thoughts on the matter; I’m currently working on a follow-up post that responds to the issue, so I’m loath to get into it too much now, but the crux of it is this:
If, as HZ contends, Knapp’s interested in explanation than prescription, then how does this LI relate to the decidedly prescription arguments of “Against Theory” and “Against Theory, II.” Another way to say this would be that I don’t entirely buy into the idea that Knapp’s so disinterested in his account of interest. It may take me a day or so to coordinate LI with “AT” I & II, because I also want to consider how Benn Michaels’ work fits into Knapp’s (to my mind, reductive and unsatisfactory) account of new historicism in the “Collective Memory” chapter. (If you have access to JSTOR, you can read it here.) Knapp’s criticism of the phenomenon of “collective memory” accords with Benn Michaels in some respects; in others, it’s an implicit criticism of the work Benn Michaels does from a similar set of assumptions. I may, however, merely be biting off far more than I can chew again…