Posts Tagged ‘criticism’
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world”*…
The estimable Terry Eagleton on the equally estimable Peter Brooks‘ Seduced By Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative…
Forty years ago, Peter Brooks produced a pathbreaking study, Reading for the Plot, which was part of the so-called narrative turn in literary criticism. Narratology, as it became known, spread swiftly to other disciplines: law, psychology, philosophy, religion, anthropology and so on. But a problem arose when it began to seep into the general culture – or, as Brooks puts it, into ‘the orbit of political cant and corporate branding’ [and importantly, your correspondent would observe, into journalism]. Not since the work of Freud, whose concepts of neurosis, the Oedipal and the unconscious quickly became common currency, has a piece of high theory so readily entered everyday language. The narratologists had given birth to a monster: George W. Bush announced that ‘each person has got their own story that is so unique’; ‘We are all virtuoso novelists,’ the philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote. What Brooks glumly calls ‘the narrative takeover of reality’ was complete…
Everyone these days is on a journey, which can lend some provisional shape to lives without much sense of direction. Humanity was also on a journey in medieval times, but it was a collective expedition with an origin, well signposted stages and a distinct destination. The Enlightenment notion of progress was more open-ended: to imagine an end to human self-perfecting was to deny our infinite potential. This creed was inherited by some 19th-century thinkers – ironically, since the dominant model of development at the time was evolution, which is random, littered with blind alleys and lengthy digressions and heads nowhere in particular.
If you can carve your own path to the grave these days, it is because grand narratives of this kind have crumbled and can no longer constrain you. Journeys are no longer communal but self-tailored, more like hitchhiking than a coach tour. They are no longer mass products but for the most part embarked on alone. The world has ceased to be story-shaped, which means that you can make your life up as you go along. You can own it, just as you can own a boutique. As the current cliché has it, everybody is different, a proposition which if true would spell the end of ethics, sociology, demography, medical science and a good deal besides.
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One of the great clichés of modernism is that art imposes order on an anarchic reality. In Brooks’s view, narrative invests our lives with a shapeliness they would otherwise lack. But the world comes to us not as raw material to be sculpted but as already organised, in however rough-and-ready a way. There may be no grand narrative immanent in history, but that isn’t to say situations don’t have a certain structure which is independent of the ways we articulate them. That there was once a revolution in France isn’t just a tidy way of arranging the world. One of the traditional functions of fiction was to give voice to stories that were somehow inherent in reality. This conception was thrown into crisis by modernism, rather as a faith in the inevitability of human progress was challenged around the same time by the First World War. Among other things, modernism is a crisis of narrativity. Telling a story is becoming harder and harder. But there is no point in making things even more difficult for yourself by adopting the Nietzschean position that reality lacks all form until we ourselves breathe one into it.
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For a slim volume, Seduced by Story covers an impressive array of topics: oral narrative, the function of character, the role of narration in law, storytelling’s affinity with child’s play, what narrators know and don’t know, those raconteurs who calculate the act of narrating into their stories and those who refuse to be authoritative. In the end, however, there is a touch of desperation about demanding so much of fiction and narrative while acknowledging the ease with which they are abused. It isn’t that Brooks thinks fiction can save us, as I.A. Richards believed poetry could; it’s rather that he can think of nowhere else to turn. Story and poetry are important, to be sure, but not that important. Literary types, unsurprisingly, have often overrated their power, loading them with a pressure to which they are unequal. The hope that value and insight are to be found mainly in art is a symptom of our condition, not a solution to it….
The use and abuse of narrative: “What’s Your Story?” from @EagletonTerry in @LRB. Both the book and the article are eminently worth reading in full.
And see (also from Eagleton): “Conspiracies are the price of freedom“: Conspiracy theories are the insecure person’s defense against a confusing world with too many competing narratives. Conspiracy theories allow believers to claim a position of relative strength: They alone know what is going on. This hidden truth is always sinister, not because conspiracy theorists need more to fear, but because they need an explanation for the fear in which they already live. (via @TheBrowser)
* Philip Pullman
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As we ponder plots, we might note that today is National Rationalization Day.
“There’s no accounting for taste”*…
As Matthew Baldwin demonstrates, the praise of professional critics hardly matters to the book-reviewing readers at Amazon.com…
The following are excerpts from actual one-star Amazon.com reviews of books from Time’s list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to the present. Some entries have been edited.
Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)
“Morrison’s obviously a good writer, but truly, her subject matter leaves a LOT to be desired in this book. It’s raunchy beyond belief. People do things with farm animals that they shouldn’t. I couldn’t get through the first two chapters without vomiting. Some things you just shouldn’t put in your head.”…
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
“So many other good books…don’t waste your time on this one. J.D. Salinger went into hiding because he was embarrassed.”…
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
“While the story did have a great moral to go along with it, it was about dirt! Dirt and migrating. Dirt and migrating and more dirt.”…
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)
“This book is like an ungrateful girlfriend. You do your best to understand her and get nothing back in return.”…
More at “Lone Star Statements,” a compilation of the best of the worst… about the best. From @TheMorningNews.
Apposite: “The Strangely Beautiful Experience of Google Reviews“
* An English adaptation of the medieval (Scholastic) Latin saying “De gustibus non est disputandum” (regarding taste, there is no dispute)
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As we contemplate connoisseurship, we might recall that it was on this date in 1927 that Louis B. Mayer presided over the founding of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Anxious to create to create an organization that would mediate labor disputes without unions and improve the film industry’s image, he envisaged an elite club open only to people involved in one of the five branches of the industry: actors, directors, writers, technicians, and producers. He gathered a group of thirty-six industry leaders at a formal banquet at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and presented them what he called the International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Everyone in the room that evening became a founder of the Academy. Between that evening (this date in 1927) and the filing of the official Articles of Incorporation for the organization (on May 4, 1927), the “International” was dropped from the name. Labor negotiations were also briskly dropped, leaving the organization to focus on promoting the industry.
In 1929, Academy members, in a joint venture with the University of Southern California, created America’s first film school to further the art and science of moving pictures. The school’s founding faculty included Douglas Fairbanks (President of the Academy), D. W. Griffith, William C. deMille, Ernst Lubitsch, Irving Thalberg, and Darryl F. Zanuck.
But their most recognizable venture into image enhancement was also born in 1929: the Academy held it’s first annual awards ceremony, bestowing the first “award of merit for distinctive achievement,”-what has become the Academy Awards– the Oscars.
“A picture is a poem without words”*…
A collection of pithy illustrations…
Many more artistic aphorisms at Visualize Value.
* Horace
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As we picture it, we might send aesthetic birthday greetings to Rene Ricard; he was born on this date in 1946. A painter, poet, actor, and art critic, he was a seminal figure in the New York art scene of later 20th century. After dropping out of school in Boston, he moved to New York City, where he became a protégé of Andy Warhol (and appeared in the Warhol films Kitchen, Chelsea Girls, and The Andy Warhol Story). He was a founder of Theater of the Ridiculous (with John Vaccaro and Charles Ludlam). He was a regularly-published poet. And from the early 90s, he was a widely-exhibited artist. But he was perhaps ultimately most influential in his art criticism (and his contributions to gallery and exhibition catalogues)– especially a series of essays he wrote for Artforum magazine in which (among other impacts) he launched the career of painter Julian Schnabel and helped bring Jean-Michel Basquiat to fame. Andy Warhol called Ricard “the George Sanders of the Lower East Side, the Rex Reed of the art world.”
“Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love”*…
Or is it? The web– and the world– are awash in talk of the Mimetic Theory of Desire (or Rivalry, as its creator, René Girard, would also have it). Stanford professor (and Philosophy Talk co-host) Joshua Landy weights in with a heavy word of caution…
Here are two readings of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Which do you think we should be teaching in our schools and universities?
Reading 1. Hamlet is unhappy because he, like all of us, has no desires of his own, and therefore has no being, properly speaking. The best he can do is to find another person to emulate, since that’s the only way anyone ever develops the motivation to do anything. Shakespeare’s genius is to show us this life-changing truth.
Reading 2. Hamlet is unhappy because he, like all of us, is full of body thetans, harmful residue of the aliens brought to Earth by Xenu seventy-five million years ago and disintegrated using nuclear bombs inside volcanoes. Since it is still some time until the practice of auditing comes into being, Hamlet has no chance of becoming “clear”; it is no wonder that he displays such melancholy and aimlessness. Shakespeare’s genius is to show us this life-changing truth.
Whatever you make of the first, I’m rather hoping that you feel at least a bit uncomfortable with the second. If so, I have a follow-up question for you: what exactly is wrong with it? Why not rewrite the textbooks so as to make it our standard understanding of Shakespeare’s play? Surely you can’t fault the logic behind it: if humans have indeed been full of body thetans since they came into existence, and Hamlet is a representation of a human being, Hamlet must be full of body thetans. What is more, if everyone is still full of body thetans, then Shakespeare is doing his contemporaries a huge favor by telling them, and the new textbooks will be doing us a huge favor by telling the world. Your worry, presumably, is that this whole body thetan business is just not true. It’s an outlandish hypothesis, with nothing whatsoever to support it. And since, as Carl Sagan once said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” we would do better to leave it alone.
I think you see where I’m going with this. The fact is, of course, that the first reading is just as outlandish as the second. As I’m about to show (not that it should really need showing), human beings do have desires of their own. That doesn’t mean that all our desires are genuine; it’s always possible to be suckered into buying a new pair of boots, regardless of the fact that they are uglier and shoddier than our old ones, just because they are fashionable. What it means is that some of our desires are genuine. And having some genuine desires, and being able to act on them, is sufficient for the achievement of authenticity. For all we care, Hamlet’s inky cloak could be made by Calvin Klein, his feathered hat by Diane von Furstenberg; the point is that he also has motivations (to know things, to be autonomous, to expose guilt, to have his story told accurately) that come from within, and that those are the ones that count.
To my knowledge, no one in the academy actually reads Hamlet (or anything else) the second way. But plenty read works of literature the first way. René Girard, the founder of the approach, was rewarded for doing so with membership in the Académie française, France’s elite intellectual association. People loved his system so much that they established a Colloquium on Violence and Religion, hosted by the University of Innsbruck, complete with a journal under the ironically apt name Contagion. More recently, Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, loved it so much that he sank millions of dollars into Imitatio, an institute for the dissemination of Girardian thought. And to this day, you’ll find casual references to the idea everywhere, from people who seem to think it’s a truth, one established by René Girard. (Here’s a recent instance from the New York Times opinion pages: “as we have learned from René Girard, this is precisely how desires are born: I desire something by way of imitation, because someone else already has it.”) All of which leads to an inevitable question: what’s the difference between Girardianism and Scientology? Why has the former been more successful in the academy? Why is the madness of theory so, well, contagious?…
Are we really dependent on others for our desires? Does that mechanism inevitably lead to rivalry, scapegoating, and division? @profjoshlandy suggests not: “Deceit, Desire, and the Literature Professor: Why Girardians Exist,” in @StanfordArcade. Via @UriBram in @TheBrowser. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Friedrich Nietzsche (an inspiration to Girard)
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As we tease apart theorizing, we might spare a thought for William Whewell; he died on this date in 1866. A scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science, he was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
At a time when specialization was increasing, Whewell was renown for the breadth of his work: he published the disciplines of mechanics, physics, geology, astronomy, and economics, while also finding the time to compose poetry, author a Bridgewater Treatise, translate the works of Goethe, and write sermons and theological tracts. In mathematics, Whewell introduced what is now called the Whewell equation, defining the shape of a curve without reference to an arbitrarily chosen coordinate system. He founded mathematical crystallography and developed a revision of Friedrich Mohs’s classification of minerals. And he organized thousands of volunteers internationally to study ocean tides, in what is now considered one of the first citizen science projects.
But some argue that Whewell’s greatest gift to science was his wordsmithing: He created the words scientist and physicist by analogy with the word artist; they soon replaced the older term natural philosopher. He also named linguistics, consilience, catastrophism, uniformitarianism, and astigmatism.
Other useful words were coined to help his friends: biometry for John Lubbock; Eocine, Miocene and Pliocene for Charles Lyell; and for Michael Faraday, electrode, anode, cathode, diamagnetic, paramagnetic, and ion (whence the sundry other particle names ending -ion).
“Christmas may not bring a single thing; still, it gives me a song to sing”*…
At the same time, as Mahalia Jackson said, “if you want me to sing this Christmas song with feeling and the meaning, you better see if you can locate that check.”
Novelist and publisher Tariq Goddard reviews this year’s crop of seasonal songs, for example…
Kelly Clarkson and I at least meet as equals, neither of us having heard of the other, although 25 million album sales mean more people have heard of her than they have me. Her handle on Christmas is not that much more assured than mine – she knows only what the seasonal songs that use the same formulas as hers tell her, which is of course a game of diminishing returns. There is the odd nod on When Christmas Comes Around to modernity (‘Christmas Isn’t Cancelled (Just You)’), but her trite take on tradition, if heard in a public space while experiencing another of life’s seasonal setbacks, may just bring the number of shopping trips down this Yuletide. Meghan Trainor, A Very Trainor Christmas, is more evidence that reality is multi dimensional, a Christmas euphemism for, ‘Are they all fucking mad or are we?’ Meghan is a hyperbolically successful young American whose version of ‘Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree’ makes Kim Wilde and Mel Smith’s version sound like Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis — which is unfortunate as her frightened and life-denying version of the track is also by far the best thing on the record.
Billy Idol‘s Happy Holidays was the record I was most looking forward to, and like the later odes of Holderlin, is a lot stranger than you might expect. Idol starts in the only way the voice behind ‘Rebel Yell’ would be expected to, bullishly, going for broke on ‘Frosty The Snowman’ like he wants him to cry more, more, more. Eschewing howling axes for triangles and bells, the song is a Carry On Christmas-style piss take with a wink to music hall, full of fruity nudge nudges and spoken asides, which – unlike the awkward office party singalong it could have been – works because Idol sounds like he is having fun. He is a Bill Sykes that plays to the gallery and not to his demons. Unfortunately by track two he is beginning to grow a little more jaded, as if it is slowly occurring to him that just because we all grow old and still need something to do, that something doesn’t actually need to be this. Still, the realisation that a whole album of this stuff is going to be overkill, does not stop his version of ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ from keeping Richard Harris company in the astral bar that never closes, and ‘Auld Lang Syne’, a risk if ever there was one, is genuinely spooky, more Fagin watching the gallows being built from his cell than a new beginning in January.
So much more at “Jingle Hell: Tariq Goddard Reviews Christmas Music,” from @theQuietus. Via always-illuminating The Browser.
* Charles Dickens
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As we hum along, we might on the other hand recall that it was on this date in 1955 that Carl Perkins recorded “Blue Suede Shoes,” at Memphis Recording Service (later known, for the record label with which it shared a building, as Sun Studios). Written by Perkins and produced by Sam Phillips, it combined elements of blues, country, and pop music– and is thus considered one of the first rockabilly records.
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