Tweets
- Lana del Ray Weekend Update sketch = a courageous defense of mediocrity.
- Which would basically render snl obsolete.
- For all the bullshit Kickstarter projects out there, you would think we could get bill hader and Kristin wiig their own thing.
- My thoughts on I Just Want My Pants Back for @capitalnewyork
http://t.co/BZBgrelY - Prison Studies would make an okay band name. They could tour with Panopticon.
Hennesy Youngman on Post-Structuralism
No idea who this guy is but he’s clearly a badass. I wish I could send this to my lit theory students, but I think the profanity and the spoiler from The Crying Game probably violates some kind of school policy.
via HTMLGiant
Eugene Marten
For some reason I saw myself writing a long piece about Eugene Marten’s novels. But after reading two of them (Waste and Firework), I’ve kind of abandoned the prospect. Why, I’m not exactly sure. There’s something I find resistant to paraphrase, or to description of any kind in his work. Marten’s prose is often described as “brutal,” “terrifying,” and so on, which makes a kind of sense. Here, for instance, is a passage from Firework, which I happen to have at hand right now: “The janitor came in the morning. The stench filled the cell but Jelonnek was glad; it might disguise the one he hoped no one would notice. He tied his shirt around his waist and was glad he wore dark pants. The kid with the ponytail was gone.” Here Jelonnek, what I guess we would call the “protagonist” of the novel, has pissed his pants in his jail cell after being picked up for solicitation. The minimal, threatening “Lishiness” of these sentences is representative: whether Jelonnek is sitting in a jail cell drenched in his own filth or being dragged along on a psychotic joyride through L.A. or buying hot dogs for a picnic, violence seems to simmer below the very shape of Marten’s sentences.
Not quite “restrained,” his sentences concentrate, as though the effort required to restrain the rage beneath them is almost too much. Uneducated, drifting, both Jelonnek and Sloper [1] (the janitor/ necrophile of Waste) are too stymied by forms of life and experience outside of their own to ever become curious about the world. Both characters perform acts that are, to say the least, morally questionable, but Marten is able to convey enough misplaced, perverted tenderness in each of them to render them sympathetic. The woman in Sloper’s refrigerator, who is the object of one of the most (I think?) realistically-rendered necrophilic love affairs in literature, becomes the center of Sloper’s world, whereas Jelonnek idolizes and idealizes a football player, “Number Nineteen” [2].
Marten manages to suggest a wealth of unprocessed trauma at the heart of his characters’ obesessions while keep us far enough from them to disable our ability to analyze them. We are placed in regard to them as they are to the world, experiencing something just shy of curiosity, without the language to express what it is we wish to know about them.
And that’s thing, the way these novels take a central inarticulateness as a kind of style sheet, that makes them difficult to talk about. Words like “terrifying” or “brutal” express something about the tone of these books, but thinking about what makes a tightly-written sentence into a little showpiece of horror requires a statement about some deeper source of violence the writing also denies us.
[1] I couldn’t help but think back to Henry James’s Dr. Sloper from Washington Square, my least favorite James novella. It could be an allusion: Dr. Sloper is a stern patriarch who prevents his daughter Catherine from marrying Morris Townsend, who he fears is after his money. Even in death, Dr. Sloper wards off Townsend by leaving Catherine with far less money than she thought she would receive. Sloper is a janitor who, with a kind of scrupulous politeness and the meticulous cleanliness of a true professional, masturbates all over the belongings of people in the office building where he works, and eventually finds the murdered body of the only woman there who is kind to him. He brings her home and keeps her in a refrigerator, taking her out at night to romance her. So pretty obvious connection if you ask me.
[2] Who appears to be a sort-of-disguised Steve Beuerlein. I wouldn’t know that but for some quick Wikipediaing, and also I’m reminded that the Super Bowl described in the novel, Super Bowl XXVII, was supposed to take place in Phoenix, but was moved because of Arizona’s refusal to officially observe Martin Luther King Day. And even after the legislature finally folded and accepted the holiday, it’s still embarrassing to say, as I must, that I’m from Arizona.
Excerpt from a Work in Progress
It is one of the pervasive ironies of James’ work that a style so devoted to the endless articulation and registration of phenomena, to the bringing-to-consciousness of the most subtle feelings and sensations should also prove to contain within itself an inexhaustible reservoir of meaning, as though the attempt to make explicit the most private and unspoken human experiences resulted in the transplantation of those enigmas from the realm of the soul to that of the sentence.
Naivette and English
I’m not quite sure what to think of today’s entry in the New York Times philosophy blog The Stone. Titled “In Defense of Naive Reading,” the column by University of Chicago prof Robert Pippin offers a kind of retrospective glance at the whole “theory wars” thing. Though Pippin is about a thousand times more thoughtful in his (admittedly gentle) criticisms than your average conservative anti-theorist, the central rhetorical move that keeps the whole column running is a straw man, and a familiar one.
So Pippen wants, first, to gain some perspective on the phenomenon of theory. He ties “theory” back to the introduction of the study of vernacular languages into research universities. Academics studying works of vernacular literature needed a research program in order to justify his department’s inclusion in the university:
The main aim was research: the creating and accumulation and transmission of knowledge. And the main model was the natural science model of collaborative research: define problems, break them down into manageable parts, create sub-disciplines and sub-sub-disciplines for the study of these, train students for such research specialties and share everything. With that model, what literature and all the arts needed was something like a general “science of meaning” that could eventually fit that sort of aspiration. Texts or art works could be analyzed as exemplifying and so helping establish such a science. Results could be published in scholarly journals, disputed by others, consensus would eventually emerge and so on. And if it proved impossible to establish anything like a pure science of exclusively literary or artistic or musical meaning, then collaboration with psychoanalysis or anthropology or linguistics would be welcomed.
So far so good. I seem to remember Gerald Graff giving a similar account in Professing Literature, but it’s been a while. Just before that, Pippin makes the point that “poems and novels and paintings were not produced as objects for future academic study,” and so academic study of works of art needed “justification” within the university setting. On one hand, it’s clear that Pippin is right to point this out, and one can see that, when the university model takes the sciences as its core, a research program for literature settles in uneasily. But on the other – and maybe my beef here isn’t with Pippin but with history – atoms weren’t produced as objects for academic study either. Neither were marine mammals, geological formations, stars, gravity, or human cultures. Yet each of those things have their own particular discipline associated with them, their own sub-fields, and even narrower specializations within those sub-fields.
I’m only being half serious here; it’s clear that literature and art are distinct from those things in that one can’t apply the same methods to studying them as one can a star, a rock, or gravity. That’s because nobody really agrees on what it is we’re studying when we’re studying literature. Pippen sees theory as a development that stabilizes the object of study by positing a common element within the literary object that defines it as a literary object. From there you can formulate a research program.
But here’s where things get slightly weird. Because Pippen, like so many, seems to believe that when teachers teach literature “theoretically,” they run every poem and novel through the same theoretical (but all too real) meat grinder:
While it is important and quite natural for literary specialists to try to arrive at a theory of what they do (something that conservatives in the culture wars often refused to concede), there is no particular reason to think that every aspect of the teaching of literature or film or art or all significant writing about the subject should be either an exemplification of how such a theory works or an introduction to what needs to be known in order to become a professor of such an enterprise.
Does anybody actually teach literature this way? Can anybody teach literature this way? In the next paragraph Pippen writes that the meat grinder approach is untenable because works of literature “invite or invoke, at a kind of ‘first level,’ an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language.” I would wager that the literature class that bypasses this “first level,” the level of the text itself and the experience of the text, does not exist. Nobody could teach “theoretical” readings of literature without engagement in this first level – Pippen seems to imagine a literature class in which texts literally aren’t read. In this way, teachers of literature get the rhetorical shaft, because in critique of the place of theory in the classroom, the teaching of “literature” and the teaching of “theory” are figured as mutually exclusive, or at least naturally antipathetic, rather than as aspects of each other. The teaching of theory always comes on the heels of literature. Even if theory precedes literature chronologically, there is always an interpretation of a text. This can be done well or poorly but, at the conceptual level at least, that’s what happens.
This is the straw man, then. Show me a class in which a “purely” theoretical kind of reading is taught, and I’ll buy a hat and eat it. What leads to this mistake in Pippen’s case is, I think, a confusion between the “research programs” that give the academic study of literature a place in universities and what happens in English classrooms. I think you’ll find that, with the exception of things like honors seminars and independent studies, literature is by and large taught “naively,” in Pippen’s phrase. That is, with an eye to understanding the text in a fashion “unmediated” by theory, to simply learning how to think and talk about literature with the kind of heightened attention that its professional academic study will eventually require.
Of course all of that stuff about “unmediated” reading is bullshit. There’s no such thing. We all kind of know that – we all have theories about the way the world works, theories about what we’re doing when we read literature, ideas about what constitutes literature, and so on, even if we’re not aware we have them. And we bring these ideas to bear on the texts we read. But, to bring back the rest of the university, one doesn’t go learning Einstein before Newton, even if Einstein’s model of the universe displaced his. There’s a sense that a certain set of concrete skills have to be imparted, a certain provisional notion of objective truth instilled, to get a student to the point where they can eventually use those skills to disassemble that notion of truth. That’s something like what happens in a good literature classroom, even one with theory on the syllabus.
Two Points About Inception
Now that everyone has pretty much stopped talking about Inception, I have something to say. I actually saw it on opening day in IMAX, so I’ve been simmering on this for a while. Anybody who knows me will probably be able to guess that I like it, but, for what it’s worth at this late date, here it is.
1) Inception, as a film, seems to not care at all about human emotions. Notice the mechanical acting (even from actors who in other films are decidedly less rigid), the barely-sketched relationship between Cobb and Mal, etc. As a consumer of media in the early 21st century, the last thing I need is more fake, sentimental emotion. Rather, the film makes a statement about the nature of human experience, creativity, etc. structurally. The epistemological dilemma at its core is not there simply to ask us in that bullshit Matrixy way, “What is REAL?” but to divorce us from the necessity of treating its characters as “people.” When each character is viewed not as a stand-in for a human with a mind and a heart, but a structural element in the description of an utterly fictional world, things get clearer.
1.1) This gesture makes sense if you think about Inception as a work of T.S. Eliot-style modernism. Not the T.S. Eliot of Four Quartets and “Ash Wednesday,” but the T.S. Eliot of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and the objective correlative and “impersonality” and all of that.
1.1.1) So the critique that the film is “mechanical” or that it reduces psychology is, I think, misguided. The individual psychologies of the characters in the film are not psychologies, they symbolize the structure of the film itself. Ultimately I would say that what Nolan is doing is inverting how we normally think about the relationship between formally innovative films and the things they purport to represent, or question the representation of. That is, the film’s “psychology” is rigid because it’s not psychology, but a representation of the way the film is structured.
1.2) Yes, it’s true, the film is ostensibly about Cobb’s search for emotional fulfillment, but that is clearly the weakest, most tenuous, and ultimately irrelevant aspect of the film. It’s a necessary narrative element that sets the structure in motion and ultimately a MacGuffin.
2) Inception looks great. Rarely do we get a film that rejects Hollywood-style conventions of character and form while blowing things up with impunity. As a person conditioned to enjoy that kind of thing, I enjoy that kind of thing.
2.1) Thinking about Inception also entails thinking about its development and economics. Did Nolan conceive of this as a huge action movie draped over an ingenious structural model, or were the absurdly expensive and elaborate action sequences added later when his career blew up and it suddenly became possible? In the ten years it took him to write the film, he went from zero-budget indie filmmaker to the man in charge of one of the most famous franchises in the world – I assume the scale of one’s ambitions changes.
More to say, but that’ll do.