A distrust of pleaure; being suspicious of suspicious reading.

I have felt that many of the articles we have have read in this course have been very demanding of us.  That every critic is chastising us for taking pleasure in reading. Or at least, that's the impression I get from browsing the bolgs.  A common response has been of relief; that uncritical reading is sometimes championed as useful, allowed and non-shameful. It is a sentiment I think is mainly a response to Michael Warner; his 'solipsistic distanciation' and 'reading through a text' which betray a fear that closeness with a text is all consuming.  However I do not think that a close alingment with the text equals uncritical reading and I disagree with it being presented as such.

Rita Felski takes up this very point in 'After Suspicion'.  She is interested in many things, aesthetics being one of them.  Conjuring up the aesthetic value of art implicates culture and ethics, both which inform the affect and interpretation of literary work.  Why should critical reading fail to take account of these elements, when, as Felski suggests, we must converse with texts across a 'chasm of historical or cultural difference'?  The 'modality of recognition' must come back to the individual.  If we do justice to the 'singularity and strangeness' of the text itself then we must also do so the reader and critic.  The idea of the 'upper case' Critic denies a nuance of understanding which otherwise might be attributed to a text.

I use the NSW high school curriculum as an example.  Though it was not the procedure when I went to school, others in my English classes tell of the way they studied King Lear in Advanced English.  They were tested on their understanding of feminist, post-colonial and Marxist readings of the play; Mark Edmundson would have a fit and presumably he writes his article in response to such learning techniques.  It is shoehorning of a most explicit kind.  Felski tells us that we need not to be suspicious of the text as it does all the work of suspicion for us, however we do need to be suspicious of the way we read it and the type of criticism we apply.  Being told how to understand a text, being subjected to an instance that there is only one way to read a text deserves a critical analysis.  Though I understand that teaching students about different types of theory is valid and useful, suggesting that models of theory are self evident in a text is not.  King Lear does not fit as neatly into critical theories as the school system would have us believe.  Last year in the Shakespeare unit at university we focused on the presence of animals in the plays; the Ovidian context, the dehumanisation, the similes and metaphors of humans into animals and the implications this had.  Or one could take Wuthering Heights another school/university novel.  Yes you could read it with the curriculum's preordained theories with mind; on the other hand our lecturer told us that she understands the work along side Freud's essays on The Uncanny and Narcissism.  She also told us that we would probably understand the text very differently, for us it would have nothing to do with Freudian thought.

In an essay on migrant and Aboriginal assimilation in Australia Anna Haebich notes that 'fundamental values' would be shaped by the nation's core Anglo-Celtic institutions and when I read it I wondered if we could expect it to be anything else.  I'm not advocating a cultural hegemony which functions to exclude certain groups, merely wondering how history could have shaped culture differently.  Imagining how to comprehend a  cultural phenomena which does not exist.  In many ways this is what Felski warns us against; judging a a text by characteristic it does not posses or produce.  Forcing meaning where the individual finds none.  And for Felski it is always about the individual.  She invites us, not to look through a text like it is a thing, but hold it at arm's length and allow it to keep us company.  
 



    

The Value of the Secret History

Nietzsche seems to be a reoccurring theme in this bolg which is quite funny, for although I own copies of his work and like to make reference to him and often think of him as I read things, I'm doing a bit of a Bayard as far as he is concerned.  This really reflects the concerns of this blog; access and right to knowledge, understanding and value, investment in what one is told one should know.  The Secret History begins with a quote from Nietzsche about the classics, their foreignness for young people and suggestion that perhaps they will always remain so.  Donna Tartt writes a novel where students strive to become familiar with ancient Greek and their failure in comprehension plays out like a Greek tragedy.  Nietzsche asserts that the origins of philology are troubled because there is no way of knowing if one should ever be suited to understanding the Greeks and Romans and it is with this sentiment that Tartt explores the issue of the canonical.
   
In their articles both Barbara Herrnstein Smith and John Guillory discuss the issue of curriculum producing the canon (which is not surprising, Guillory spends so much time quoting Herrstien Smith I felt like I had deja vu).  This brings to mind Cassonova's world of letters where every text is in competition with each other, for other mediums effect the popularity and reading of books like weekend paper book reviews and a certain talk show host's book club.  But I digress.  Tartt has an extreme version of canon formation for one teacher prescribes every text and then these books are used to teach everything from history to art and philosophy.  So limited is the range of educational resources and focus Richard notes that of his classmates only he and Bunny are aware of the moon landing.  It is ignorance of an astonishing kind.  All of the students in the Greek class principally have Julian as their only teacher.  Julian chooses not only the style and content of the classes but, because of his ability to intoxicate the students, controls how they think as well. Richard believes that Henry killed himself to prove the 'high cold principles' Julian had taught them to use, but I think Henry did it because he realised - once Julian reacted to hearing to the murders - that he had perhaps not understood Julian at all.


Knowledge is certainly power;but in The Secret History it is also the bringer of destruction.  The very thing which undoes the Greek class is the study of Greek itself.  The Greek and its literature is the only signifier of cultural values in the novel and these lead to and justify murder in a most succinct way.  How can we value their knowledge when it transforms into explicit violence, sublime or otherwise?  We could assume as Henry does that it was a misunderstanding of the classics which leads to the tragedy of the novel but I think what Tartt is suggesting that it is a lack of perspective which caused it, just as Henry and the others increasingly see murder as the only way to deal with Bunny.  


We can read this as a warning about too strict adherence of the canon which is prescribed by only a few people and almost never challenged.  Julian's canon is too tight to be allowed to breath and point by which the poison enters the air; it is a toxic mix for the class members.  In the  end Richard chooses his own literature to study.  They are still tragedies, but better reflect the humanity and error in 'sin unpunished and innocence destroyed'.  Ancient Greek taught Richard the beauty was terror, beauty was harsh.  Only when he searches a wider canon can he understand 'the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.'    






        

A Post-Authorial Landscape: A Brave New World or Horrifying Dystopia?

I have started to believe that after Nietzsche it was only a matter of time before the author got the flick.  Once you kill god there is but a small jump to the Author-god and perhaps the stipulated nihilism which is the result.  However, nihilism and all the depressing rejection of truth and by implication beauty that goes with it, is, I think, not the sum of Barthes's parts.  

Despite the uncertainty the killing of the author brings, I see it as a world of possibility.  If the author Bathes disposes of is the Author-god then it must be a white, bourgeois, Western, male one.  Because this author is a god, he creates the reader in his own image.  In this Romantic theory of authorship the ideal reader is not a woman or a worker or even perhaps from India, but a reflection of the author himself; he is like him, has the same privileges of wealth and education and can be relied on to react in a preordained fashion.  Bathes tells us that in killing off the author we give rise to the birth of the reader.  I would contend the reader who is born is not the one in the symbiotic relationship with the Author-god, but one who is sometimes female, working class and not white.  If the author is dead then the reader is free to make the text in their own image; it is agency and freedom like never before.

To give example of an author one might dispose of I shall take T. S. Eliot.  When I first studied Eliot's poem 'The Wasteland' I found it quite haunting but also exceedingly irritating.  Never had I read such a referential poem in my whole life; I felt that it was so steeped in the classics to have only been written for those who were well versed in such literary tradition.  It is a technique I now understand to go back to Shakespeare and (despite what Harold Bloom may think) especially Chaucer and is not idiosyncratic to Eliot at all.  By removing Eliot from the picture we are left only with the reader; not a reader preconceived by Eliot but forced by democracy.  Such a reader would not feel overwhelmed – as I was – by the vast number of symbols and allusions but read the poem (aghast) for the poetry. 

Eliot published his own notes at the end of the poem, listing his references and directing the reader to his meaning.  This is particularly the type of author requiring removal, for Eliot not only functions as Author-god but lords over any subsequent meaning to be extracted from his poem.  Eliot is the type of poet who makes me feel that there is but one meaning of a text, that there should be no other interpretation, that there is no place for the reader.  However, one need not be a scholar of the cannon to understand the despair and frustration because the poem conjures emotions through images:

                   You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

                   A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

                   And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

                   And the dry stone no sound of water.        (20-24)

‘The Wasteland’ creates a feeling of such sparseness and desolation through its language that no further explanation is needed.  In many ways I feel Eliot sells himself short; his fear of not being understood led to the inclusion of the notes.  What he fails to understand is that the poem does all his work for him; it does not require his omnipotent presence.                 


Obviously I am not for removing forever every author from every text (having not fully finished this blog and leaving it for a while I had a comment about the negative implications for reading the death of the author renders and I must say that I agree with it.  The death of the author does put the reader in their own wasteland of doubt - pardon the pun).  Before reading Bathes I had never thought of a text or author in this way; like a relationship you could pull apart and question why it functioned as such.  For me, Bathes has open the way to seeing reading, authorship and texts as organic things which are much more subjective than I ever thought possible.  Though it is not an absolute way to understand literature it is a great way to think newly about it.

              

How we know what Maisie knows

At the very end of Henry James's novel Maisie is very clear about what it is she knows.  Unlike the rest of the novel, where one is quite unsure as to how much she might understand, the final words of our protagonist leave us with no doubt; 'Oh I know!' (275).  In a novel about education, the fact that Maisie and the reader reach this point of undisputed knowledge is important.  Her previous state of unknowing - and the uncertainty the reader has as to what exactly the little girl comprehends - is elusive, both within the novel and stemming from it.  That is, what she knows is unclear to both the audience and when contained in the context of the narrative.


James creates this uncertainty possible at the level of language, specifically the words Maisie chooses to use herself.  As she reads the environment around her, her responses are ambiguous.  She uses language which should be foreign to a little girl as she comments on adult circumstance with disturbing loquaciousness.  Take the scene in Chapter 10 where Maisie tells Sir Claude that she might bring he and her mother together.  Maisie is merely repeating what Sir Claude and Mrs Beale said previously in her presence, but exactly what Maisie means by this repetition is disturbingly unclear.  Does she mean that she might bring Sir Claude and her mother together romantically - and also sexually - as she has he and Mrs Beale?  Is she actually aware of what it is says and what that then means?  Such a mature awareness would be perverse for a child of that age, and certainly a perversion is persistent throughout the book.  Not only is she physically over-touched, but when the adults insist in treating her like a grown up she responds with seemingly inappropriate language:


                   Well you have it too, "that sort of thing"- you've got the fatal gift:
                   you both have really!' (107)


In a similar way the audience can never clearly grasp if Maisie understands all the different men with her mother are Mrs Farange's lovers.  She makes comments about them and realises that there are a confusing number of them, but their precise role she is never clear about.  What James has done is throw her in an overtly sexual world in which she is too young to belong and then deny his audience privy to her assessment of the situation.  We wonder if Maisie knows what is going on, if she understands the things that are said because for if she does not she is threatened or worse, exploited if she does.


When Maisie defends her adulterous friends to Mrs Wix in Chapter 24 it is  with the language of economy; one cannot help but think she mimics the adults in her life.  'We're just taking it as we find it' and 'We're just seeing what we can afford' are both mature claims (198).  Such responses are so benign that they can be used in almost any situation and easily echoed by a child, yet more disturbing than her echo is the possibility that she actually understands the implication of her words.  Maisie is either a little girl using the words to falsely purchase admittance into a world where she does not yet belong or she has been irresponsibly permitted entry by the adults who serve as its gatekeepers.  We wonder at what Maisie means, at what she knows and if she plans to acts as she talks.  Maisie is threatened by language, specifically her own, and you very much want to save her though you can't find her in the plethora of meanings.


Now to look at this sense that language is the exploiter of Maisie and the way it makes you fear for her physical well being.  Pierre Bayard would have us skimming the novel, or perhaps looking it up on Wikipedia.  Indeed, you can learn the crude plot this way and perhaps locate it place along side and near other novels of similar content and impact.  In some cases this is the perfect way to 'read' a book; once a lecturer told me that Woody Allen's film Match Point was a retelling of The Golden Bowl and Crime and Punishment and indeed he was right.  Having read neither but wanting to find his assessment true I searched the internet for the information I required about the books, though I have now read the Dostoevsky.  Where Bayard's technique is rendered most inadequate is with something like What Maisie Knew which resists understanding even the reading of it.  If you don't read the book you can't understand how Maisie's knowledge, both lack and excess, threatens her.   Of course someone could explain to to you, but that would never really amount to the same affect of the reading; the uneasiness which follows you throughout the novel, a sense which you cannot quite put your finger on that makes you want to pull Maisie from the pages and give her to someone who will actually treat her like a child.  Bayard's theory has its place, but unlike the librarian from The Man Without Qualities it probably should not be the only way to 'read' a book.    


James creates wonder and fear in the novel through ambiguous language.  We wonder if the language is understood as it is spoken and when it is heard.  The title echoes through the narrative as we struggle with, grasp at, misconstrue and marvel at Maisie and her knowledge.