chapman e301 intro to theory spring 2009

E301 Instructor's Blog Home Page

2009-02-22T16:15:00.001-08:00

Welcome to English 301, Intro to Literary Theory and Criticism

Spring 2009 at Chapman University in Orange, California

This blog will offer posts on all of the authors on our syllabus. It contains general and page-by-page notes as appropriate. Both kinds are optional reading. While the entries are not intended as exact replicas of my lecture notes, they should prove helpful in your engagement with the authors. They may also help you arrive at paper topics and prepare for the final exam. Unless otherwise noted, the edition used for our selections is Leitch, Vincent, ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

A dedicated menu at my Wiki site contains the necessary information for students enrolled in this course; when the semester has ended, this blog will remain online, and a copy of the syllabus will remain in the Archive menu.

Week 15, Skura and Barker & Hulme

2009-02-22T15:59:00.000-08:00

I will add notes on these authors as time permits....

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

and/or

McDonald, Russ, ed. Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945-2000. Malden, MA/Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004. ISBN-13: 978-0631234883.

Week 14, Edward Said

2009-02-22T15:58:00.001-08:00

Week 13, Foucault and Dollimore

2009-02-22T15:57:00.001-08:00

Supplement on Foucault: “What is an Author?” and “Truth and Power”

Foucault's first statements in "What is an Author" are by now familiar ones since we have read Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author": the writer is said to have disappeared into the writing. And indeed, it has long been understood that we have no direct way of learning what the author's interpretation of the text might be--a phrase like "the author's intentions" implies a convenient interpretive reconstruction, not access to the biographical author's mind. But Foucault is concerned to point out that even in the structuralist period, when the author has supposedly given way to the operations of language, terms such as "work" and "writing" still are used in a way that validates the author-function. To speak of a work, for example, involves one in a process of authentication on the basis of stylistic and thematic unity--a set of concerns not much different from those of the Church Fathers who set about deciding which texts would be part of the Bible and which would be deemed apocrypha. And as for the term "writing," argues Foucault, critics still use it as a kind of negative theology--just as the medieval schoolmen try sometimes to define God by what He is not, so the term "writing" is made to refer to an absence that calls forth interpretation reconstructive of an author-function, even if not the biographical, real-life author. So it seems that Foucault sees the often-declared "death of the author" as more of an Irish wake (a celebration and a keeping watch) than a dismissal of the author-function itself in favor of textuality.

What, then, is the reason for this persistence of the author-function? Foucault writes of the various uses to which the function has been put: it serves to transform texts into appropriated objects--things that can be copyrighted, sold, owned, and so forth. The author-function also serves different cultures differently at different times, so it is a kind of useful variable in the cultural matrix. Aside from that, it is a principle of interpretive unity and the attribution of authorship, as Foucault points out, is far from simple, as readers who try to maintain distinctions between the "I" of, say, a novel and the scriptor would readily attest. There is even a special kind of author-function, one that Foucault applies to writers such as Freud and Marx, whose texts are capable of generating a great variety of heterogeneous discourses that are not reducible to and do not subsume the first discourse--i.e. Marxism or Freudian psychoanalysis. Sociology, for example, does not simply swallow Marxism into itself, though many would say that Marx is the father of sociology.

Fundamentally, Foucault's interest in "What is an Author" is not to revalidate the author-function; it is instead to study the reasons for its persistence. What he wants to do is build up a typology of discourses and determine how they operate. Further, it is not so much what we say about our use of the author-function as what we actually do with it that Foucault wants to examine. According to Foucault, while we generally say that the author-function opens up the possibility of varied interpretation, we use the author-function to limit what can be thought and said about a particular text. So the real social and critical use of the author-function is inversely related to the narrative we spin about that use. In sum, Foucault's position hardly amounts to a Barthesian celebration of pure textuality or "intertextuality" (a term implying that texts are like fabrics with their threads interwoven, so that no text is really self-contained); it has rather an Orwellian dimension in that the author-function as Foucault analyzes it turns out to be an operation of what he will soon begin calling "power"--a term that leads us to examine the next assigned essay.

In "Truth and Power," Foucault identifies the point of contention between his work and structuralism as history. Structuralists study how structures work; they are interested in synchronous operation, not in diachronic questions like "how did this structure or system develop over time? We have seen Derrida identify the same difficulty in structuralist analysis--it has great trouble doing other than dismissing concepts like "the event." Foucault shares with Derrida at least this concern for diachronicity--for Foucault, an event must be seen as occurring on multiple levels; it is to be spoken of as a network of practices, institutions, exercises of power.

Foucault's view of the event has had a great deal of influence over the writing of history--his view differs markedly from more old-fashioned models based on simple cause-and-effect or biography (i.e. the "great man" theory of history). One event doesn't simply cause another--as, for example, when we argue that World War I began due to the assassination by a Serbian nationalist of Archduke Ferdinand. Rather, we must speak of "events" in terms of complex, interinvolved networks of practices, institutions, and power-tactics. Foucault is a Nietzsche-style genealogist in that regard: one doesn't explain history by referring it to conscious, autonomous subjects (people who go around saying "I did this" or "I thought such and such"). Personal agency in this naive sense does not interest him because he simply does not belief the self is outside of or anterior to what we call historical or political events. In fact, at some point in his career Foucault refers to "man" as a fold in history, and one that is bound someday to disappear at that! Neither is it the case, Foucault argues, that his genealogical method is out to demystify some "ideology." Even the term "ideology," if used in the sense he invokes, implies unfounded faith in some external, scientific standard of reality against which me may judge things true or false, i.e. mystified or distorted.

So far I have written of Foucault after the fashion of negative theology--I have been defining his modus operandi by what it is not. Is there a way to deal with his ideas in a more positive way? That is a difficult thing to do because of the complexity associated with his term "power." Foucault is concerned to trace the distribution and exercise of power in human societies. The term is one he has borrowed in part from Nietzsche, who often wrote about "the Will to Power" as a kind of non-subjectivity-based explanation for why things happen the way they do. Power itself, Foucault explains, should not be written about as entirely negative in the exercising--the example he provides on 1139-40 has to do with childhood sexuality. Repressive operations of power turn out to reenergize the whole phenomenon of childhood sexuality, directing the behavior of parents toward emphasizing the very thing they are trying to forbid. But Foucault's broader point is that power does not only repress and deny, it opens up certain possibilities at that same that it shuts down others. In this sense, then, power's workings aren't merely negative--many people "get something" (whether in terms of social or economic rank, permission to do or say or think certain things, etc.) from the operations and distribution of power. Power, then, may at least partly accord with or work alongside of what most of us call "the pleasure principle": if we were all miserable all of the time, we would rebel against the political and social order that we believed responsible for such a state of affairs.

But again, we really cannot simply locate power itself: we cannot say, "Aha! there is power!" or "that is power!" We cannot do so for the same reason Nietzsche, as you will recall, says we can't naively repeat statements like "Lightning flashes." To do so is to fabricate a cause for an activity we don't fully understand. We cannot, similarly, say "Napoleon caused the great war that occurred after the French Revolution." The proper noun "Napoleon" here serves the same slick purpose as the common noun "Lightning" in Nietzsche's illustrative sentence. And so we cannot say "power is x" or "power is y." For Foucault, the explanatory value in the term "power" lies in just this unlocatability, this resistance to the essentialist sleight of tongue in language itself; like many recent philosophers or theorists (among them Nietzsche, de Saussure, Heidegger, de Man, and Derrida) he is fighting against the notion that words are directly or even indirectly connected with things themselves or that they are innately meaningful. Ultimately, Foucault's goal is perhaps best stated as consisting in the tracing of power's operations insofar as they can be traced in a society's beliefs, practices, and institutions. And since we may speak of "truth" as a function of power, it seems fair to say that Foucault's interest lies in a rather Nietzschean questioning of "truth"--how it is produced, appropriated, and deployed, among other things. Language is part of the network in the production of truth and the circulation of power, but it is not the whole story--thus another difference between Foucault and structuralism.

I will add notes on Dollimore if time permits....

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

and/or

McDonald, Russ, ed. Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945-2000. Malden, MA/Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004. ISBN-13: 978-0631234883.

Week 12, Cavell and Williams

2009-02-22T15:56:00.001-08:00

Week 11, Kott and Keast

2009-02-22T15:53:00.000-08:00

Week 09, De Beauvoir, Greene, etc.

2009-02-22T15:50:00.000-08:00

Notes on Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex

Along with Betty Friedan's later book The Feminine Mystique, French author Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is among the most important feminist works yet written. This supplementary essay will provide a brief analysis of our reading selections from Chapters 10-11. Beauvoir is concerned at the outset to explain how male writers have generally dealt with the female characters in their works. The striking similarity among the major authors she discusses consists in their setting up "Woman" as an absolute Other--she becomes something by which men may define themselves. The problem with that male scheme, of course, is that the woman exists only as a man's destiny--there is no room within it for female self-discovery or appropriation of her own destiny. One is reminded of Milton's phrase in Paradise Lost describing the relationship between Adam and Eve: "He for God only, she for God in him." It is the Adams of the world, according to authors like Montherlant, Claudel, and company, who relate directly to the higher things, while the Eves participate in such higher things--if they do so at all--only through interaction with men. Beauvoir sees this kind of scheme as revealing men's underlying insecurity about their place in the world; she underscores the gap between men's world view and their "egotistical dreams." She is a handmaiden to male ideology and wish-fulfillment.

Beauvoir does not make her criticism a blanket one--it is hard to miss her real admiration for the texts of Stendhal, in which women are construed as free and equal human beings capable of engaging in reciprocal relations. Stendhal's ideal mistress helps him attain a unity of destiny that he would otherwise not be fully able to reach. Nonetheless, as class members pointed out, this pleasant-sounding state of affairs is still something constructed to suit the needs of Stendhal and his male characters; ultimately, in his work, too, woman has man for her destiny; she may not be a myth, but she is man's crucible for fulfillment and change.

What, then, is the "myth of woman" that Beauvoir wants to analyze and dispel? It is the lore of the Eternal Feminine--a term that most all of us have come across at one time or another. I think we are familiar with the standard qualities of this abstraction: women are said to be irrational, sensitive, more erotically inclined than men, passive and earthy while men are all intellect and action, and so forth. At the same time, the Eternal Woman may be considered an almost angelic being, above sexuality, kind, motherly, and so on. Whether women are spoken of and treated in a degrading or exalting manner, implies Beauvoir, the operation is the same: men have generalized from concrete relations with women and set up an empty, yet controlling, myth called Woman.

Against this static benchmark men can then judge actual women living in the real world, and if the women do not conform to the set of abstractions judged proper, they are deemed wrongheaded, unwomanly, unnatural. Real relations between human beings must be reciprocal, but a relation between man and myth is vapid, with the man understanding himself as essential and active and the woman not being understood at all. She is not a creature subject to history and true intersubjectivity, but a walking Mystery. What we label a mystery, Beauvoir says, there is no need to understand or explain since it is an empty, false essence. The term "mystery," as applied to women, is a means for failing to perceive actual human beings in their everyday lived reality.

If to men this mysterious creature is so by nature, if she and her condition are thought to be purely natural, it follows that no changes ought to be made in the way actual women live. If they suffer and get the worst of every social bargain, it's only natural. Alexander Pope sums up this use of the term "Nature" in his verse, "Whatever is, is right." The point is not to change what is natural, but rather to accept it as a condition of existence. There may be some truth to the saying that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, but if that particular foxhole is occupied, "nature" makes a pretty good second choice.

Why have such relations between men and women held sway over many centuries? Because it is necessary to a male-centered social order. Beauvoir explains that once social relations "congeal" into a relatively stable hierarchy, with patrimony being distributed among the males, women must accept their passive, submissive lot--to bear the children, manage the household (the locus of a man's property) and generally serve the men. The setting up of the Myth of Woman generates ambivalence since, after all, a woman may be feared as a destroyer of patrimonial order as well as praised for her willingness to conserve that order. A woman may, for instance, be a saving "angel of the hearth" (in Coventry Patmore's Victorian poem) or the adulteress who scatters men's concentrated wealth, thereby injuring an economic order favorable to men.

To understand Beauvoir more precisely, it is necessary to see her views as flowing from Existentialist thought. For an existentialist, the most important thing is to understand that "essence does not precede existence." In sum, our actions define us, if indeed we want to use terms like "definition" with regard to human beings, as we really shouldn't. For Sartre, the concept of "choice" is fundamental--we choose what we do and thus who we are. Although that emphasis on choice invokes the subjective dimension of life, one must be careful to understand how Sartre deals with personal agency--at base, he rejects Cartesian dualism--we cannot just say that our intellect or some other "essence" is prior to and in control of our physical existence in the world, and thereby establish a false cause-effect relationship between mind and body. (Think of Nietzsche's critique of the phrase "lightning flashes"--there we see an abstraction, a noun, made to precede and cause the activity with which we associate it. The noun, in this way, is a false "essence" preceding "existence.") In Sartre's existentialism, the verb "exist" must be understood in light of its etymology: "exist" derives from the Latin prefix ex and the root sisto--to cause to stand, send, cause to appear, establish, etc. We make ourselves in the exercise of choosing, with the "us" not preceding the "making"; further, that "making" involves bodily action in the world and intersubjective contact with other human beings. When a man constrains a woman to suit his need to believe in the Eternal Woman, he sets up (or rather accepts the fiction that has already been created for him by his society) an Essence-of-Woman, an inessential Other that can then vacuously be used to judge everything she says and does.

To be solely what someone else has made you is to be nothing at all. As Beauvoir describes this state of affairs, men require that women be an absolute Other even to themselves, an empty Mystery without actuality, incapable of existing, incapable of exercising choice, in the way that men alone are permitted to do. Her example of the rich older woman and her young male "insignificant other" shows, of course, that this vapid mysteriousness is not really a function of gender; it has rather to do with inequality in social and sexual relations. What is needed, says Beauvoir on 999-1000, is an "authentic relation with an autonomous existent"--such relations would amount to true and dynamic reciprocity, with neither individual canceling or dominating the individuality of the other.

As we move towards understanding Beauvoir's hopes for future relations between men and women, perhaps some reference to Hegel's Master and Servant Dialectic would be appropriate here since feminist authors like Beauvoir and Judith Butler have found it useful for exploring inequality in gender relations. In the Phenomenology of Mind (1807), German Idealist philosopher Georg Hegel theorizes the development of consciousness from its earliest forms. (Note 1) As his history moves along, of course, Hegel must deal with the kinds of consciousness possible for the individual within the developing societal stages. One of these kinds is captured by the Master/Servant relation. The servant is constrained to labor and to produce for the master the things necessary for living. In the most obvious sense, the master has the better end of this struggle for recognition and dominance, since it is he who appropriates to himself the products of the servant's labor. What Homer calls "the good things that lie at hand" are, for the most part, lying in the master's household, waiting to be consumed for his satisfaction. But while the servant does not benefit much from the products of his labor, he develops a limited degree of independence, of self-awareness, through his relation to the objects and materials upon which he must work. That independence is something the master does not get from his relations with the servant and the worked-upon object. A translation of Hegel's language from Phenomenology of Spirit reveals the inadequacy of the master's self-consciousness:

Paragraph 191. ...[The Master or Lord] achieves his recognition through another consciousness....[The Master or Lord] is the pure, essential action in this relationship [with servant and objects], while the action of the bondsman is impure and unessential. But for recognition proper the moment is lacking, that what the lord does to the other he also does to himself, and what the bondsman does to himself he should also do to the other. The outcome is a recognition that is one-sided and unequal.

Paragraph 192. In this recognition the unessential consciousness is for the lord the object, which constitutes the truth of his certainty of himself. But it is clear that this object does not correspond to its Notion, but rather that the object in which the lord has achieved his lordship has in reality turned out to be something quite different from an independent consciousness. What now really confronts him is not an independent consciousness, but a dependent one. He is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself. On the contrary, his truth in in reality the unessential consciousness and its unessential action.

Paragraph 193. The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the servile consciousness of the bondsman. This, it is true, appears at first outside of itself and not as the truth of self-consciousness. But just as lordship showed that its essential nature is the reverse of what it wants to be, so too servitude in its consummation will really turn into the opposite of what it immediately is; as a consciousness forced back into itself, it will withdraw into itself and be transformed into a truly independent consciousness. (pages 116-17, A.V. Miller translation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.)

Hegel's point is that in the far from acceptable relationship between master and servant, the potential for change and independence belongs not to the master but instead to the servant. It turns out that the master is in truth uncomprehending about the true basis of his dominant position, that he is dependent on the servant, and that the servant has a more accurate understanding of himself and his position. One produces one's independence and self-consciousness through work upon materials and objects that are to be crafted into useful things--a point that Marx, of course, will emphasize and amplify almost half a century after Hegel's Phenomenology was written. It is not hard to see how feminist writers might extrapolate from this Hegelian scheme about the development of independent consciousness.

We need not suppose that being dominated or oppressed is a good thing to see that the kind of unequal relationship Hegel describes contains the seeds of change within itself--it is in truth unstable and unsatisfying. One might say the same thing of relations between men and women in modern times. When Beauvoir calls for an "authentic relation with an autonomous existent," her term existent, a specifically existentialist term, implies that the social, political, and economic order must change so that men and women may relate to one another on an equal, mutual basis. As Beauvoir writes in 1949, the Second World War has ended not so long ago--a war that saw a large influx of women into the work forces of Europe and America simply from military necessity. It is difficult to sustain an idealistic view of women as homemakers and "inessential others" when you need them to turn out rivets for airplanes and bullets for machine guns. But as we know, thanks to our historical perspective, 1949 is just on the cusp of "the fifties," at least in America--a time when, despite tremendous growth in the economy and in US power around the world, domestic conformity and submission were imposed (or rather reimposed) to the point of maddening inanity for women, African Americans, and other groups who had always been seen as subordinate and inessential. If women didn't all simply go home from their factory and office jobs, they were at least expected to act as if they had done so. This cyclical phenomenon is what Susan Faludi refers to in her book Backlash: the Undeclared War against American Women (1991). (Note 2) her thesis is that whenever women seem to be making good progress, male opposition to that progress kicks in and we get a social, political, and economic backlash that threatens to drive women back to their earlier status, or perhaps worse. To see how Beauvoir responds to the continuing subordination of women, you would need to refer to the works she wrote after The Second Sex.

Note 1. See Summary of Hegel's Philosophy of Mind.

Note 2. See my Comments on Susan Faludi's Backlash. and Allison Miller's Feminist History Timeline.

I will add notes on the other authors if time permits....

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

and/or

McDonald, Russ, ed. Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945-2000. Malden, MA/Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004. ISBN-13: 978-0631234883.

Week 08, Ransom, Brooks, Empson

2009-02-22T15:48:00.001-08:00

Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn (1350-65), and “The Formalist Critics” (1366-71).

General Notes on Cleanth Brooks’ “The Heresy of Paraphrase” from The Well Wrought Urn (1350-65).

The New Criticism. Our editors mention the essay collection I’ll Take My Stand (1930). John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate were sympathetic with an agrarian and anti-scientific, anti-industrial movement in the South. This kind of philosophy goes way back to the Southerners who opposed the new party of Lincoln—the railroad and banking interests, etc. So the formalism that develops may be in part a way to reassert the old values – states’ rights and artistic autonomy, to put it crudely. These authors oppose utilitarianism’s vulgar notion of language as denotative, and education as immediately useful for all the wrong reasons—making money, for the most part.

If you read through the book mentioned above, you’ll find one of the authors decrying the way Northern capitalists have turned the educational system into a means of churning out factory workers—everybody gets what passes for an education, but it’s the kind of education that only crams facts into people’s heads, and doesn’t teach them in the C18 Enlightenment or Renaissance humanist fashion to make proper use of their leisure. In fact, leisure becomes either time to fill up with competition or mere dissipation—not something productive that envelops one’s entire existence, work included. In this sense, the Brooksian way of experiencing a poem could be traced back to Kantian disinterestedness, Schiller’s play drive, and other formulations that deal with art as an experience of our mind’s freedom from being determined by nature or by our fellows. It isn’t so much that we are free to say anything we like about the poem, but rather that if we approach it with due regard for its connotative workings and formal integrity, we will be granted an authentic experience of a very different kind than we can have in the busy everyday world, where everything is done for some other purpose beyond itself. Poetry is an end in itself, and we are privileged to see that we, too, can exist in this fashion—just as that Southern planter worked only to gain leisure, not to amass a pile of wealth or show off to the neighbors.

The New Critics emphasize connotativeness and figuration. The connotative aspect of language is better suited to human nature, more likely to improve us, than any number of facts. But it is worth keeping in mind that the background of American formalism is Southern Agrarianism. Many of us have been trained to offer “close readings,” so we have been exposed to this kind of idea. Of course, the best formalists are the ones who don’t entirely follow their own prescriptions. That is, they don’t ignore history or biography. Read Abrams’ Mirror and the Lamp, for instance. No method or system humans devise is perfect, after all, so it’s best not to be rigid.

Moreover, the New Critics rebel against purely biographical and historical criticism. I recall the old anecdote about the Harvard professor who ends an analysis-free, history-biography-psychology-filled lecture with “damn fine poem, men, damn fine poem.” But there is something almost scientific about the way formalists describe the critic’s task—which is paradoxical, given their opposition to industrialism and scientism. They find it necessary to theorize in terms that the scientific or modern mind can understand.

The formalists transfer romantic claims about the genesis and value of poetry to the text itself. They want to purge the romantic metaphysics and keep the claims about art’s value to keep humanity together. So we still get a stirring defense of the poetic word, without any romantic talk about inspiration or genius. The poetic symbol is critical; poetry is a site for the recovery of common passions that link people together in a community—it is therapeutic. Brooks insists he does not see poetry as therapeutic, but his theory as a whole belies this claim. Let’s go through the Norton selection “The Heresy of Paraphrase” from The Well Wrought Urn; see my page-by-page notes below.

Summary Observations: Brooks’ main points are that a good poem’s formal structure has all the integrity of a biological organism. Poetry is autonomous or self-contained and is not therapeutic in any way that critics need concern themselves with. Poetic language thrives upon connotation, not denotation, and irony and paradox are central to poetic structure because they are the way poetry “warps” and transforms ordinary language into meanings rich and strange. Anglo-American formalism is to some extent humanistic since it transfers the romantic exaltation of poetic imagination to the language of the poem. An irony of formalist discourse is that although it generally tries to carve out a space for the study of literature in a world obsessed with the scientific paradigm, it is compelled to do so mainly in terms acceptable to science.

1355. “Unless one asserts the primacy of the pattern, a poem becomes merely a bouquet of intrinsically beautiful items.” This statement is very similar to what Matthew Arnold says in the “Preface” to his own 1853 Poems. Earlier than that, during the C18, poetry was rhetorical, a matter of formal eloquence: poetry as prescription for what we should believe or do. (Think of Pope’s finely chiseled couplets: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan / The proper study of mankind is man.”) Poetry should not be a collection of isolated, even if excellent, lines. Brooks continues that “The structure meant is certainly not ‘form’ in the conventional sense in which we think of form as a kind of envelope which ‘contains’ the ‘content’.” The term “form,” therefore, means structure. The meaning isn’t outside the poem. It is generated within the poem, which is a largely self-sufficient meaning system. As Brooks explains, “The structure meant is a structure of meanings, evaluations, and interpretations; and the principle of unity which informs it seems to be one of balancing and harmonizing connotations, attitudes, and meanings.” The poem’s structure works rather like Coleridge’s power of imagination: it “reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative,” etc. (681). A poem doesn’t cancel tensions or give us reductive propositions; it unifies and harmonizes things otherwise discordant, and preserves the richness and complexity of experience. A poem is a formal object that allows us to understand it only on its own terms, which it generates from within itself. (We may remember Coleridge’s claim that the symbol delivers “multeity in unity.”) Brooks writes, “The unity is not a unity of the sort to be achieved by the reduction and simplification appropriate to an algebraic formula. It is a positive unity, not a negative; it represents not a residue but an achieved harmony.” All of this is very similar to Coleridge.

1356-1357. Brooks does not agree that poetry makes referential statements. When this claim is set forth, “the critic is forced to judge the poem by its political or scientific or philosophical truth; or, he is forced to judge the poem by its form as conceived externally and detached from human experience.” As the romantics say, genius works according to its own laws; Coleridge declares in “Shakespeare’s Judgment Equal to His Genius,” “No work of true genius dare want its appropriate form.” Brooks gives us the same claim, the same organic metaphor, without the direct spiritual overtones since he is talking about poetic language, not the mind of the poet. Poetry’s meaning is dependent on its own contexts and connotations—it need not refer to the world of denotation. Whatever the outside context of a poem or play may be, the essentials of that outside context need to be transformed into terms intrinsic to the work itself. As Brooks puts the matter, “[W]hatever statement we may seize upon as incorporating the ‘meaning’ of the poem, immediately the imagery and the rhythm seem to set up tensions with it, warping and twisting it, qualifying and revising it.” What would have been a scientific or denotative statement must be submitted to the poetic process, which, again to borrow from Coleridge on secondary imagination, “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to re-create” (676).

At the bottom of 1356, Brooks writes, “let the reader try to formulate a proposition that will say what the poem ‘says.’ As his proposition approaches adequacy he will find, not only that it has increased greatly in length, but that it has begun to fill itself up with reservations and qualifications—and most significant of all—the formulator will find that he has himself begun to fall back upon metaphors of his own in his attempt to indicate what the poem ‘says.’ In sum, his proposition, as it approaches adequacy, ceases to be a proposition.” So if we try to paraphrase a poem, the paraphrase keeps leading us back to the original situation, to the context, to the connotative aspects of the text’s language. Poetry has to do with metaphor and figure, and it does not refer to the world in utilitarian contexts. It generates its own contexts. Towards the bottom of 1357, Brooks says that we tend “to take certain remarks which we make about the poem …for the essential core of the poem itself…. [Form] and content, or content and medium, are inseparable.” We will see how Brooks continues to make his case in the next few pages, but in general, he (like Wordsworth in his “Preface”) emphasizes how good poetry links disparate experiences vitally, and how it rejects artificial, abstraction-dependent language that doesn’t speak to common human nature. He emphasizes the autonomy and integrity of the text, even to the point where the formalist critic becomes something of a natural scientist, describing how that “acorn-poem” grows into an “oak-poem,” or observes how it holds together as an organic unity. It’s fair to ask, “But how can a poem be a hermetically sealed meaning system? How can it be an autonomous object to the extent that formalists think it can?” For heuristic ease, I suppose, most teachers treat literary works as if the formalist view were more or less correct, but when it comes to “doing theory,” why, notions of organic wholeness are “a whole ‘nother matter”: today, few critics would insist on the completeness and near self-referentiality of an invidual work of art.

1358-59. “To refer to the structure of the poem to what is finally a paraphrase of the poem is to refer it to something outside the poem.” Brooks argues at 1359 top that if we try to maintain a distinction between form and content, “we bring this statement to be conveyed into an unreal competition with science or philosophy or theology.” We cannot win at that game. Trying to make poetry yield objective knowledge will always fail. It would be best to recognize that literature connects us to another dimension of language, one perhaps most proper to us as human beings. At 1359 bottom, Brooks offers several metaphors for poetic structure: “The essential structure of a poem... resembles that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern of resolved stresses. Or, to move closer still to poetry by considering the temporal arts, the structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme.” We may see tensions in a building’s structure, but the edifice stands and it is beautiful—consider arches, flying buttresses, and so forth. Perhaps Brooks’ rhetoric here will remind us of John Ruskin’s spiritualized way of interpreting architecture in The Stones of Venice. As for Brooks’ comparison between poetry and music, we don’t take musical notes as representations of anything else; it is obvious that with music we can’t distinguish between form and content. Brooks will develop indirectly another dimension of the music metaphor later on, when he insists that although poetry certainly involves emotion, that quality is embodied in the poem and need not be traced to the author. Music, too, seems to generate its own affective or emotional weather: we all know Beethoven was “a stormy romantic genius,” that he was passionate and moody; but somehow, when we listen to his “Moonlight Sonata” or the Fifth Symphony, there’s no need to get behind the delightful notes and ask, “how do I connect Beethoven’s personal feelings with these notes?” The notes engender and embody feeling, so to speak—we don’t look outside the music for an explanation. Brooks evidently thinks language should be treated with the same respect.

1360-1361. The third metaphor Brooks offers is that of drama. Here again, we feel comfortable not referring opinions and feelings back to the artist, but even more importantly, “conflict” is built right into plays. What the characters say gets its value from how the words relate to other characters and events in the play. As Samuel Coleridge declares, “a willing suspension of disbelief” governs our response to poetry—we do not insist that it refer directly to life. We take it as a genuine experience in its own right. Brooks deals with the notion of unity in poetic composition as follows: “The characteristic unity of a poem... lies in the unification of attitudes into a hierarchy subordinated to a total and governing attitude. In the unified poem, the poet has ‘come to terms’ with his experience.... the conclusion of the poem is the working out of the various tensions—set up by whatever means—by propositions, metaphors, symbols. The unity is achieved by a dramatic process, not a logical; it represents an equilibrium of forces, not a formula” (1361). The play must resolve its own conflicts within the contexts that it has itself established. Then Brooks considers attitudes and feelings, saying that “the effective and essential structure of the poem has to do with the complex of attitudes achieved.” Again and as Coleridge would agree, a drama or poem “balances and reconciles opposite or discordant qualities.” It does not cancel out the complexity and richness of life, but preserves it in a publicly accessible manner, in the structure of a work of art. What is most worthwhile in terms of thought and feeling should not be allowed to collapse into a private world, a private sanguage (solipsism). Brooks is offering another means of salvaging humanism, one more compatible with scientific demands than were older kinds of humanism.

1362-63. Brooks does not make extravagant claims about poetic language, the power of figure and connotation. He professes, “I have in mind no special ills which poetry is to cure.” Poetry is not therapeutic. On 1363, Brooks renders somewhat more precise what he means by the sort of sea change language undergoes in literature: “[I]rony is the most general term that we have for the kind of qualification which the various elements in the context receive from the context.” He explains below that the “terms of science are abstract symbols which do not change under the pressure of the context. They are pure (or aspire to be pure) denotations; they are defined in advance” (1363). But in poetry things are different: “When we consider the statement immersed in the poem, it presents itself to us, like the stick immersed in the pool of water, warped and bent.” What would Friedrich Nietzsche say about Brooks’ acceptance of scientific terminology as pure denotation, as language that simply gets out of the way or points to absolute reality? Essentially, Brooks accepts the scientific outlook and its understanding of language. This acceptance combines with the hardening of the binary opposition between poetry and science. The formalist method objectifies emotion in order to preserve it. It flattens out what the romantic critics posited as depth of soul. Feeling is embodied in the poem; feeling does not involve reference back to the human author.

1364-65. Brooks cites John Donne’s poetry as a good example of irony and in general of the warping of language within poetic contexts. Donne employs logic, to paraphrase Brooks, “to fight the devil with fire.” That author “proves his vision by submitting it to the fires of irony—to the drama of the structure—in the hope that the fires will refine it.” In other words, “the poet wishes to indicate that his vision has been earned, that it can survive reference to the complexities and contradictions of experience.” (Brooks’ direct quotation from Robert Penn Warren.) He continues that “It is not enough for the poet to analyze his experience as the scientist does, breaking it up into parts, distinguishing part from part, classifying the various parts. His task is finally to unify experience. He must return to us the unity of the experience itself as man knows it in his own experience” (1364-65). Such claims are reminiscent of Coleridge or Wordsworth or Percy Shelley in the way that they contrast the man of science with the poet. (See, for example, Wordsworth’s remark that “The Man of Science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor” or Shelley’s statement that “We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know…we want the poetry of life” [658 and 712, respectively].)

At 1364 bottom, Brooks makes a qualified statement about the experiential status of a poem: “The poem, if it be a true poem, is a simulacrum of reality—in this sense, at least, it is an ‘imitation’—by being an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience.” Archibald Macleish had said much more directly, “A poem should not mean but be.” And on 1365, Brooks tells us that the poet is “giving us an insight which preserves the unity of experience and which, at its higher and more serious levels, triumphs over the apparently contradictory and conflicting elements of experience by unifying them into a new pattern.”

That’s an impressive claim for a critic who insists that poetry is not or should not be therapeutic. It is every bit as grand a claim—again stripped of metaphysical overtones—as the ones made by the romantic poets a century and a half before Brooks. The poet will deliver to us something science cannot give and, perhaps, something we had thought was utterly lost—a sense that all experience is unified. We derive this sense from a species of encounter with language unavailable to us when we use it in other ways. We might ask just how different any of this really is from romantic emphasis on a renewal of spirit and a revivification of language by means of poetic encounters. How much does transferring the concept of “interiority” from the poet to the poem differentiate new critical formalism from romantic expressivism? And does Brooks’ doctrine still seem compelling when it comes at the expense of separating poetic language from the world of reference? Wordsworth had argued that his poetry employed “the language really used by men,” which at least had the virtue of not separating poetic language from ordinary life. (Of course, the concept of selection was vital to Wordsworth—he was not claiming to deliver ordinary language unaltered.) Some critics of Brooks might say that you cannot leave things at this level, that you must reconnect words with the world if your theory is to be compelling. They might say you cannot just claim by means of a discussion of something so two-dimensional as “structure” that poetic language preserves human potential and interiority. Why, the skeptical reviewer wants to know, should we preserve this connotative potential of language if doing so is not somehow good for us?

Oddly enough, Brooks’ New Critic defense of poetry in the name of its formal, structural properties shares a common problem with the art for art’s sake movement of the 1890s. When it comes to authors such as Oscar Wilde, one either “gets it” or one doesn’t. If someone says, “aesthetical poses and shocking forms of art don’t do much for me,” the aesthete will just keep doing the same thing and dismiss that person as a philistine. But obviously, Brooks is writing this essay because he wants to change people’s minds and bring them over to his views about the nature and value of poetry. He is in fact defending poetry, just like a long line of critics and poets before him. That is unarguably a humanistic enterprise. He is interested in poetry as mediating between a modern, scientific way of understanding the world and another, more ancient one that seems to have much going for it. Movements based on shock and confrontation—including modernism, to be sure—share this problem. They’re trying to preserve older, metaphysical, spirit-suffused notions about humanity without really believing in the old philosophical terms that made it possible to “come right out and say it.” A metaphor for meat-lovers: are we getting turkey or tofurkey here? As I suggest in my general remarks and as I learned from Prof. Michael Clark at UC Irvine, the formalists talk about literature as its own place, an autonomous realm that critics, even though they are no scientists, can analyze with much the same precision as a scientific researcher. They find themselves defending literature as relevant in the terminology lent to them by an imperious scientific paradigm, which paradigm or course they say is opposed to or very different from that of the arts. But this maneuver may only further isolate literature as something separate from the main part of life, as something we can study with clinical precision but not really connect with any other area of our lives. So how does such a program of criticism change the way people see their world and their place in it? Of course, those who make such remarks may be expecting formalist critics to accomplish more than they themselves find possible.

Here’s a very simple formulation: “we” (critics, students of art and literature) say that literature and art are worthwhile. But in order to get our point across, we must describe this worthwhileness in terms acceptable to the scientific/academic community. Doing so only makes us look more isolated and tangential, and not relevant to the community at large. True, the public’s notions may be less “romantic” and more “scientific” and compartment-happy than I’m making them sound. But on the basis of my own experience as a teacher, I gather that most of us still go to literary works hoping to derive pleasure from them and to make connections between the fictional characters’ actions and views and our own. In differentiating ourselves from the scientific paradigm, we end up aligning ourselves with that paradigm as just another highly compartmentalized and specialized interest group against the commons.

We have our “legitimate object of analysis” and our approved methods of analysis to be used on those objects. There’s much sense in this critique, although I wouldn’t condemn a theory based on the dilemma I am describing. It’s a lot easier to describe a problem in this simple way than to figure out what to do about it. My sense is that many modern theorists still believe in the uplifting power of art, at least to some degree. And many stop listening to them when they insist otherwise and practice what they preach: “long reading” (for example, deriving general claims about the novel from interaction with a gargantuan novel-database), as opposed to close reading of individual texts has its benefits, but being really interesting to read isn’t one of them. I recall reading structuralist stuff in graduate school that more or less reduced literary texts to mathematical equations. With that sort of method, you could hand people the keys to the next universe, and they would still complain. There isn’t an easy way out of the dilemma I’m describing: most of us love “literature,” but we really don’t believe in things like “the autonomous text,” authorial presence, or anything that smacks of essentialism. But then, “literature” as a concept is essentialist and humanistic. Much criticism proceeds in the mode of denial—its latter-day methods still pursue (to an unacknowledged extent) old-fashioned humanistic goals. At what point does co-optation amount to the complete erasure of difference and alternative value? At what point does the dance of believing and not believing take on the dimensions of an Orwellian “this is and is not true” statement? Our cultural studies authors will provide some valuable observations on how to assert and maintain the “worldly” situatedness of literary texts, but they by no means do away with the problems I’ve been trying to describe here.

Page-by-Page Notes on Cleanth Brooks’ “The Formalist Critics” (1366-71).

1366-69. This piece doesn’t make a substantially different case from the earlier essay we have read, but in it Brooks refutes some of the main criticisms leveled against formalism. His list of articles of faith is interesting in that it defines the object of formalist criticism, the “successful work.” He doesn’t say all literature responds equally well to formalist analysis or that formalism is the only worthwhile kind of criticism. On 1368, Brooks rejects a couple of common criteria for judging a text’s excellence: the “author’s sincerity” criterion and the “it gave me an intense reaction” standard. Neither, Brooks insists, tells us much. As for the first one, well, Oscar Wilde said that (to paraphrase) “all bad poetry begins with sincere emotion.” Poetry isn’t simply self-expression. The second criterion is equally objectionable in that it strips poetry of any value other than the emotional wallop it packs. And surely, that’s like saying all music should take as its theme, “I’m so lonesome I could die” just because it’s common. Such notions diminish the range of humanity to what can be encapsulated in a saccharine pop song. Certainly a poem ought to spark some kind of reaction, probably both on the emotional and intellectual level—but Housman’s “bristling beard” standard doesn’t go very far towards encompassing the possible range of worthwhile responses.

1370-71. Brooks acknowledges that literary works may, indeed, have a great deal to do with life experience and with ideas. He insists, however, that whatever real-world complexity and “recalcitrancy of the material” there is must be dealt with in appropriately sophisticated contexts derivable within the text itself. Literature deals with ideas by “involv[ing] them with the ‘recalcitrant stuff of life’,” and “The literary critic’s job is to deal with that involvement” (1371). Brooks takes issue with Lionel Trilling’s suggestion that many “literary ideas” are drawn from areas of life that have nothing to do with literature proper. Authors such as Eugene O’Neill and William Faulkner, says Trilling in The Liberal Imagination, benefited greatly from the study of Freud. Brooks counters that “knowing what a given work ‘means’” is a “basic” sort of knowledge (1371); it must be derived from close study of the work itself, not from the application of methods more proper to psychoanalysis. In other words, we shouldn’t put O’Neill’s Tyrones from A Long Day’s Journey into Night on the couch and then call the results the meaning of the play. Well, that returns us to the claim that formalist analysis is foundational because it puts us most directly in touch with what is proper to the realm of literature.

We can imagine that Brooks would have quite a problem with the claims of a cultural studies author who might say, for example, that the “meaning” of Shakespeare’s The Tempest has mostly to do with how the play is scripted by and inflects a nascent western discourse of imperial definition and domination, which claim we propose to validate by referring almost continually to the historical record left us by Shakespeare’s contemporaries and to the writings of historians and critics of our own time. That is to treat a literary text, he would almost certainly say, as if it were just like any other kind of writing, any old historical document or newspaper clipping, rather than as an extraordinary performance that “deals with” this real-life issue (among others) in an embedded, dramatic manner most proper to itself.

My putting it this way doesn’t make the problem of “context” disappear, of course—I’ve read a bit too much Derrida to buy into the notion that you can just delineate a seamless literary or dramatic “object” as Brooks does, and then go to work on it with the tools of formalist analysis, confident that the reading at which you arrive amount to something foundational for any other possible kind of analysis. But at the same time, when you’ve read enough post-everything criticism that avoids close encounters with what you consider sophisticated works of art, it’s easy to see the attraction of Brooks’ formalist imperative: whatever its flaws, it at least encourages us to pay attention to the workings of language. I don’t think it’s entirely old-fashioned and pre-post-literate-age—at least I hope it isn’t, anyway—to suggest that not being able to pay such attention marks a critic as a blockhead and dupe, however sophisticated his conceptual framework may otherwise be. Any brand of criticism that says “attention must be paid” to a text’s actual words can’t be all bad, can it? At the same time, I wouldn’t care to be limited to formalist analysis—I admit that my own way of approaching texts is scandalously impressionistic, though I don’t want to be misunderstood here: a major source of my “impressions” comes from my reading in philosophy, religion, literature, and contemporary theory. It isn’t “personal” in the simplistic sense. An old friend of mine says that good criticism makes readers (whether they be general readers or sophisticated critics) want to go back and re-experience the text first-hand. That makes sense to me—whatever methodology the critic brings to the text (formalism included), it ought to have that effect, or it fails in an important respect. This isn’t in any way to condemn a critic who has determined that, say, dealing with lots of nineteenth-century pulp novels is important because it sheds light on what sorts of books got written, how they got written, and how they were received by diverse publics. It’s only to suggest that a really fine researcher will come up with interesting, enlightening things to say about such material without pretending it is intrinsically meritorious as literature (a common mistake, I think: “this book I’m writing about now has been misunderstood, etc.—or as some wiseguy said about Wagner’s music, “it’s better than it sounds”). If he or she succeeds in this regard, I’ll probably want to go back and read one of those Jane Austen novels on my shelf again thanks to what I’ve learned about and from her “lesser” sister and brother novelists.

I will add notes on Ransom and Empson if time permits....

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294. Also McDonald, Russ, ed. Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945-2000. Malden, MA/Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004. ISBN-13: 978-0631234883.

Week 07, Nietzsche and Freud

2009-02-22T15:46:00.001-08:00

Page-by Page Notes on Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (870-884).

874-75. Since so much in Nietzsche comes down to his taking up an attitude towards the uncomfortable insights that flow from his investigations—for the most part, he counsels that we should follow his lead in embracing those insights (and the consequences that impend) rather than denying them—style is uncommonly important to him. We don’t often talk about philosophers in terms of their style, but in Nietzsche’s case it’s vital. In the present essay, we should attend to his rhetorical strategy at the outset. He begins with a question: since our very survival must for a long time have depended on the deceptive use of our remarkably strong intellect as a species (after all, we don’t have sharp teeth or incredible speed like the big cats, etc.), whyever should we have come to value “pure cognition” so much? How did we develop ein Trieb zur Wahrheit (a drive towards—or an appetite for—truth)? The once-upon-a-time (es gab einmal) quality of the first paragraph helps Nietzsche capture humanity’s predicament in almost fairy-tale dimensions: what self-important, vain creatures we’ve always been, thinking ourselves and our intellect the center of the universe! This very self-importance, this inability to look critically at our own cleverness and see it for what it is, only suggests even more strongly that intellect is the gift of obliviousness to our unimportance and (on the cosmic scale, anyhow) imminent destruction. It preserves us in our weakness, and from the melancholy thought of our weakness. “What a piece of work is a man” indeed! Says Nietzsche, the “art of dissimulation reaches its peak in humankind, where deception, flattery, lying and cheating, speaking behind the backs of others, keeping up appearances, living in borrowed finery, wearing masks, the drapery of convention, play-acting for the benefit of others and oneself” are developed to an astonishing degree. Given all this foolery, what interest can we possibly have in “Truth”? At the middle of 875 we find him pose this question (in the form of a statement) for the first time, and his style in posing it is mocking but not dismissive. Somehow, we do seem to posit such a thing as truth, so this fact will be matter for investigation. Whether it’s really the main question Nietzsche means to answer in this essay—well, that’s another question altogether. I believe his goal isn’t simply to hand us “the truth about truth” so that we may dismiss such balderdash as truth altogether, leaving it behind with a Penn & Teller-style ejaculation “The Truth is Bullshit!” (They did an episode for their Showtime program Bullshit! ridiculing our consumerist drive towards “the Best,” so the Truth shouldn’t be far behind—well, except that they’re scientific rationalists who really do believe in the power of reason to arrive at truth, so far as I can tell.) As the essay proceeds, it seems that Nietzsche wants to get at something more fundamental about us than our drive towards truth: something more unsettling and yet also, perhaps, more worthwhile—something that he will explain most fully at the bottom of 881 and onwards.

875. “[D]oes nature not remain silent about almost everything, even about our bodies, banishing and enclosing us within a proud, illusory consciousness . . . ?” So “where on earth can the drive to truth possibly have come from?” We are in effect trapped in our splendidly deceptive self-awareness and cleverness, cut off from our own bodies and the physiological processes that sustain us and, indeed, account for our cognitive abilities. Again, our vanity is at the outset a survival tactic; as Wilde says, “ it is dangerous to go beneath the surface” of things. Nietzsche is at this point writing in the vein of an anthropologist and offering us fables about primitive humanity, but since modern philosophy—the grand idealism of, say, Hegel—is “thinking about thinking” that often posits the independence and integrity of human intellect and its products as opposed to positing the dependence of thinking on the body in relation to physical nature, his words are also directed at them. Thinking at all is inherently deceptive, we might say, and as such there’s something of the survival tactic in any kind of it whatsoever.

876. At the top of page 876, we are told that the process whereby the conceptual twins “truth/lie” are born begins with “the Social Contract.” As Nietzsche explains, “necessity and boredom” ( a need for peace and for community) lead to the tacit invocation and acceptance of this contract. We must do this to quell the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes. Afterwards, “that which is to count as ‘truth’ . . . becomes fixed, i.e. a way of designating things is invented which has the same validity and force everywhere, and the legislation of language also produces the first laws of truth….” This linguistic development doesn’t in itself account for the acquisition of an interior drive towards “truth,” but it’s the beginning of the process. People desire “the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth,” and whatever doesn’t produce such consequences is designated by common consent as untruth. This is not the same thing as saying (to adapt an old phrase), “let the truth be told, though the heavens fall” but is instead what we might call “utilitarian”: useful in the sense of tending to shore up our comfort and secure regular yields of pleasure.

At 876 middle, Nietzsche raises one of modern philosophy’s most basic questions: regarding linguistic conventions, “Is language the full and adequate expression of all realities” To put this question another way, are words and the material world commensurate, or are they completely different orders? In a sense, the question is unanswerable since, after all, we would have to know exactly what “the world” is in order to say whether or not language can describe it fully. Even so, Nietzsche’s analysis of the movement from sensory perception to speech is compelling and comes close to a firm “No.”

876-77. Let’s look at how this movement occurs: “What is a word? The copy of a nervous stimulation in sounds,” writes Nietzsche. As he describes this “copying” process, “The stimulation of a nerve is first translated into an image: first metaphor! The image is then imitated by a sound: second metaphor! And each time there is a complete leap from one sphere into the heart of another, new sphere….We believe that when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and flowers, we have knowledge of the things themselves, and yet we possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entities.” So whether or not language can correspond to the material realm, the empirical facts of perception show that it doesn’t. Well, we’ve all been told not to mix our metaphors – only Shakespeare was supposed get a free pass there, right? It turns out that we’re all sinners against the light in that regard: we can’t perceive and describe anything without performing what Nietzsche classifies as a fundamentally creative double-metaphorizing operation. What we call perception and experience are, to borrow a phrase, “always already” (immer wieder, toujours déjà, and all that jazz) bound to alter or distort the “objects” of perception. You cannot, so far as anyone can tell, “see the object as in itself it really is.” (Sorry, Matthew Arnold!) The point Nietzsche makes on 877 has some affinity to what romantic philosophers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge say: all perception is active, creative. The empiricists’ claim that our senses passively receive natural objects in an accurate way and that then such sensory data, when processed at higher and higher levels, become the basis of secure knowledge-systems is a pure fabrication, though really an admirable one in its way. No, the metaphoric operations Nietzsche describes are at work right at the beginning; we never simply receive proper images of things from the outside world, so we shouldn’t say that we can build up an accurate understanding of the world by means of our senses and by mechanical extensions thereof.

877-78. But of course that doesn’t stop us from trying, and here we arrive at the concept. What’s in a concept? Why, nothing. Nietzsche’s explanation here is incisive: “Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is non-equivalent. Just as it is certain that no leaf is ever exactly the same as any other leaf, it is equally certain that the concept ‘leaf’ is formed by dropping those individual differences arbitrarily, by forgetting those features which differentiate one thing from another, so that the concept then gives rise to the notion that something other than leaves exists in nature, something which would be ‘leaf,’ a primal form, say, from which all leaves were woven.” But that’s crazy Cloud-Cuckooland talk straight from the Thinkery of Aristophanes’ Plato in The Clouds: there is no LEAF-of-which-all-individual-leaves-are-copies. In nature, as Nietzsche reminds us on 878, there are no species, forms, or types—therefore, the individual entity in the usual sense arises from a distinction we cannot prove to be legitimate. And much as we love Dr. Johnson, we really can’t be with him on his character Rasselas’ demand that artists shouldn’t streak their tulips. Johnson’s neoclassical “general idea” of a tulip, which is supposed to “recall the original to every mind,” does no such thing. It is a useful abstraction, a “concept,” that makes us suppose we’ve comprehended something universal and orderly about nature when in fact we haven’t. Nietzsche’s point isn’t that our metaphoric translation of stimuli into images into sounds is unnecessary; it’s that it has nothing to do with Truth.

All sorts of fine things can be done with substantive lies (i.e. nouns)—above all, they serve as false but compelling “causes” for natural actions, as in Nietzsche’s famous deconstruction of causality in The Genealogy of Morals: I say “lightning flashes,” and think I’ve explained something about nature. But really what I’ve done is invent an abstraction, a noun (a substantive, a substance, an essential thing), to account for “flashing” or “flashes.” What I’ve done is produce, ex post facto, a tautological expression that explains precisely nothing. Language abstractions do not cause events to happen in the external world, at least not directly. The same remarkable fiction governs statements connecting “doers” as the source and cause of their “deeds.” The “I” who is said to do the deed is just as much a fiction as “leaf” or “lightning.” (All honor to Lord Krishna in The Baghavad-Gita, who says much the same thing about the illusion of selfhood. Of course, Nietzsche doesn’t believe in Krishna, who attributes all actions to himself as “Doer in Chief.”) Again, none of this has anything to do with truth. It’s much closer to everybody’s favorite right-wing parodist Steven Colbert’s notion of “truthiness.” “I,” “leaf,” the “general tulip,” and “lightning” are truthy—they’re useful and they make us feel good.

878. But if we really want to know where the drive to truth comes from, explains Nietzsche, we must bear in mind that we aren’t even aware that we perform the above-described metaphoric and creative translations to produce language and conceptual systems. Like Colbert, we love truthiness, but unlike him, we perceivers and speakers are always on the air, deadpan, completely ensconced in our rock-solid Colbert-World. If it feels right, believe it, we might say. At 878 middle we find the heart of Nietzsche’s explanation of where that mysterious “truth-drive” comes from: “[people] lie unconsciously in the way we have described, and in accordance with centuries-old habits—and precisely because of this unconsciousness, precisely because of this forgetting, they arrive at the feeling of truth. The feeling that one is obliged to describe one thing as red, another as cold, and a third as dumb, prompts a moral impulse which pertains to truth…. As creatures of reason, human beings now make their actions subject to the rule of abstractions; they no longer tolerate being swept away by sudden impressions and sensuous perceptions….” There you have it: forgetting makes important things happen—a theme Nietzsche returns to again and again in his texts: “truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions….” Underlying grand illusions like truth, good/evil, civilization, science, the autonomous individual self, event, causality, god, and so forth is this capacity to forget how such concepts were first articulated and then to become passionately attached to them for their own sake. We’re all “salespeople” for such illusions, and, as an old friend of mine likes to say, “In the end, salespeople are the biggest suckers for the sale.” Why? Because, to borrow a line from Hamlet, “they [do] make love to this employment”; they’re enamored of the idea of the sale far more than the goods to be sold. If lying centers and grounds us, how can we be expected to give up such a fruitful occupation? As Nietzsche says, “Everything which distinguishes human beings from animals depends on this ability to sublimate sensuous metaphors into a schema, in other words, to dissolve an image into a concept” (878). And what accompanies this “humanity” of ours? Why, “the construction of a pyramidal order based on castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, definitions and borders, which now confronts the other, sensuously perceived world as something firmer, more general, more familiar, more human, and hence as something regulatory and imperative” (878 bottom). In a few words, the allied principles of rank and regularity. In sum, we acquire a taste for truth, an inner need for it; an unconscious manner of “lying” leads to a “feeling for truth.” We end up with “a moral impulse which pertains to truth,” and begin to say that people are superior or inferior, good or bad, on the basis of their attachment to truth.

878. But I haven’t given Nietzsche’s devastating verdict yet: “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins.” This is situational rhetoric, to be sure—Nietzsche is summing up in this poetical, almost Paterian, set of phrases the real process whereby what we take to be truth is generated. And it makes us feel, perhaps, a bit like Menelaus trying to hold on to Proteus the shape-shifting god in The Odyssey, Book 4. The question from here on out will be, “if Nietzsche is right, what attitude should we take towards such an insight?” If we hold on tight to this Protean passage, what additional insights will we derive?

879. Paul de Man generally defines “ideology” as the confounding of words and the world. We seem to do this inevitably, and are most confounded of all when we think we are most certain of ourselves and our world. At 879 bottom, Nietzsche says much the same thing: our whole web of understanding is a product of anthropomorphization; “forgetting that the original metaphors of perception were indeed metaphors, he takes them for the things themselves.” We naturalize our radically transformative acts of perception and start thinking that our language simply describes the world itself. Notice Nietzsche’s near-simultaneous comic buildup and takedown of this process: first he says man is to be “admired” as a “mighty architectural genius who succeeds in erecting the infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on moving foundations, or even, one might say, on flowing water.” Shades of “Kubla Khan,” no? And then he says of these concepts we reasoning creatures have spun out of ourselves, “If someone hides something behind a bush, looks for it in the same place and then finds it there, his seeking and finding is nothing much to boast about….” In Civilization and Its Discontents (1939), Freud would later poke fun of scientific endeavor (as Nietzsche does in the present essay’s Section 2) in similar terms, comparing its great discoveries to a man sticking his leg out from the covers on a chilly evening so he can feel warm and comforted when he puts the leg under the covers again. Marx’s great line comes to mind in this regard, too, although the context is different: “Mankind . . . inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve” (“Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859). In essence, philosophical reason and physical science congratulate themselves for finding what—based on their methodology and assumptions—they can’t help but find. “Humanity” itself, implies Nietzsche, is the grandest of illusionary metaphors: we don’t simply propagate ideology and illusions, we are them, or are constituted by them: the humanist dictum “Man is the measure of all things” testifies to that fact.

880. “[O]nly because man forgets himself as a subject, and indeed as an artistically creative subject, does he live with some degree of peace, security, and consistency; if he could escape for just a moment from the prison walls of this faith, it would mean the end of his ‘consciousness of self’.” Un-forgetting this artistic process is clearly a risky proposition. What would happen if man, having built up an edifice of human dignity and scientific understanding, suddenly remembered the illusionism and deception that made it all possible? We would lose the firm sense of ourselves as independent consciousnesses, and we would lose as well the notion that nature follows regular laws.

881. Following upon the previous thought, I should add that this page amounts to a shot at Kantian philosophy, and specifically Kant’s assumptions about the affinity between human perceptual and cognitive apparatus and the objects of experience in the natural world. “[E]verything which is wonderful and which elicits our astonishment at precisely these laws of nature, everything which demands explanation of us and could seduce us into being suspicious of idealism, is attributable precisely and exclusively to the rigour and universal validity of the representations of time and space. But these we produce within ourselves and from ourselves with the same necessity as a spider spins . . . .” Our metaphoric “creations” apparently presuppose the “relations of time, space, and number,” so we can then claim those creations result in a stable “edifice” of conceptual knowledge. But it just isn’t so, says Nietzsche.

881-82. By now, the question about the origin of the truth-drive has come to sound a bit too truth-driven. Nietzsche is interested in leading us to consider a more fundamental drive, one which distinguishes us from other animals even more strongly than our false presuppositions about the dignity of man in his grasp of truth. At 881 bottom, Nietzsche writes, “That drive to form metaphors, that fundamental human drive which cannot be left out of consideration for even a second without also leaving out human beings themselves, is in truth not defeated, indeed hardly even tamed, by the process whereby a regular and rigid new world is built from its own sublimated products—concepts—in order to imprison it in a fortress. The drive seeks out a channel and a new area for its activity, and finds it in myth and in art generally.” In so far as we want to keep using terms like “humanity” and distinguishing ourselves from “the animals,” it is this drive—something which really does (unlike the truth-drive, which is acquired and derivative, a necessary bad habit) appear to be primordial and innate. We don’t pick up or learn how to perform the multi-step metaphoric translations previously discussed; we just do it. That other kind of dull-making creativity—the building of a stable sense of self and society—indeed builds upon this metaphoric drive as that which is to be “forgotten.” But what is forgotten, in Nietzsche’s scheme, doesn’t simply go away; the metaphoric drive is no more eradicated than Freud’s later “libidinal energy” disappears when it is repressed. In Nietzsche’s perceptual-instinctive economy and in Freud’s psychic one, what is repressed will return. And here, the return takes the form of artistic process, a process that seems to delight in making a break from the prison-house of concepts and staying close to the chaos and instability of raw perception. It isn’t that the artist returns to a time when “people saw things as they really were”: that is a ridiculous formulation because there never was such a time. No, art is a kind of “pretence” that seems most proper to “the intellect” (882 bottom paragraph) and gives the pretence-maker a sense of mastery.

883-84. With Nietzsche’s exuberant praise of the artist, the person of intuition, we return to that all-important Nietzschean issue of attitude or style. What happens when we consistently admit to what Nietzsche has confronted us with about our sense of self and our security in language and the world’s truth? What attitude shall we strike up? Do we make like the Stoic who, “If a veritable storm-cloud empties itself on his head . . . wraps himself in his cloak and slowly walks away from under it” (884)? Do we engage in what Nietzsche calls Christianity’s “denial of life,” insisting to the bitter end on moral observance, on renunciation, from each believer and yet demanding an endlessly deferred, otherworldly security and justice because none is really to be had in this “valley of the shadow of death”? (Nietzsche interprets Christ’s redemptive sacrifice as part of the denial of life since the offer of redemption makes human suffering unnecessary: there’s a clear path out of the woods, so to speak, and no inherent need to get lost in them, unless it be from willful perversity.) It seems that Nietzsche instead urges us to be more like the ancient Greeks, who (at least before that decadent character Plato got hold of them) did not believe they could demand that the cosmos or universe yield them justice, security, or peace. As in their great tragedies, suffering is shown to be necessary, and we dare not demand that the gods be just. They are what they are. At 883 first paragraph, Nietzsche describes the “liberated intellect’s” way of thinking and living: “The vast assembly of beams and boards to which needy man clings, thereby saving himself on his journey through life, is used by the liberated intellect as a mere climbing frame and plaything on which to perform its most reckless tricks; and when it smashes this framework, jumbles it up and ironically re-assembles it, pairing the most unlike things and dividing those things which are closest to one another, it reveals the fact that it does not require those makeshift aids of neediness, and that it is now guided, not by concepts but by intuitions. No regular way leads from these intuitions into the land of the ghostly schemata and abstractions.” He goes on to suggest that Greek culture established “the rule of art over life” where humanity’s “neediness” was persistently denied and where “the radiance of metaphorical visions” prevailed over reason. The Greeks had a tragic vision of life, then, and they were open to suffering, open to experience without the props of intelligibility. Consider Sappho’s fragment on love: “Eros seizes and shakes my very soul / Like the wind on the mountain / Shaking ancient oaks.” She wouldn’t be open to erotic experience if she weren’t strong enough, like the rooted oak braving the wind, to withstand the sway of her own passions (which the ancients figure as a god, an external force not unlike a great wind or storm). Ultimately, I think that’s Nietzsche’s vision of life, too: openness to experience, staying “true” not to “the Truth” but rather to the intuitive and metaphoric quality in human perception and thought. There is, again, no question of a return to truth; there is only the possibility of awakening to a sense of deception’s heady immediacy rather than moving ever farther away from it. Both the society-building “distortion” and the artist’s “pretence” and deceptiveness are, at base, creative—the first is creative in a constructive, comforting way, while the second is creative in a destructive, challenging way. Perhaps these two modes of creativity, like Nietzsche’s Apollo and Dionysus in another early text of his, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, are so intimately sourced and related that we can’t “think” them rightly in isolation from each other; perhaps they both need each other. There is really no question of dismissing the men of reason—we notice that the Stoic’s dignified conduct in the storm is given its due, and even gets the last word: the fellow has, says Nietzsche, pulled off quite a feat in the face of adversity: “a masterpiece of pretense” (italics mine).

To conclude with a thought about philosophy and “theory” after Nietzsche, that grand concept humanity itself is just the sort of conceptual sham whose deconstruction (since Nietzsche’s way of handling his subjects is fairly labeled proto-deconstructive) such an attitude or style is meant to embrace, isn’t it? It, too, is a product of the distortional truth-drive Nietzsche has been examining. We don’t simply propagate ideology in the everyday sense—we are ideological constructions. Other modern authors have taken up an attitude, so to speak, about this great deflation of human puffery and certainty. Michel Foucault writes with antihumanist brio in The Order of Things (in French, differently titled Words and Things—Les mots et les choses), “it is comforting . . . and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form” (xxiii). Martin Heidegger is also instructive regarding the gist of Nietzsche’s deconstructive and antihumanist efforts. In his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger suggests that humanists have reduced thought itself to a kind of techne or instrument, one which entails a permanent split between subject and object. Mind comes to know “world” through the instrumentality of thought, thereby shoring up its own firmness at the expense of authenticity. This kind of “thought” has surely stepped away from all that is proper and worthy of “thinking.” Much of Heidegger’s project involves the destruction of this humanistic, philosophical imposition upon thinking. De Man, while in dialogue with Heidegger’s texts, counsels something like perpetual vigilance when it comes to the question of ideology. Jacques Derrida, as a thinker and stylist, has a strong affinity with Nietzsche, insisting as he does on rigorous, yet at times exuberant, deconstruction of anything that appears likely to set itself up (and of course without acknowledging what it’s doing) as the newest latest metaphysical grounding of certainty. In Derrida’s view, structuralism—of which the notes of Ferdinand de Saussure the linguist and, later, the published work of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, serve as prime examples—is just such a back-door metaphysical center, the unquestioned principle of intelligibility of what might as well acknowledge itself as a new version of a systemic philosophy, with its drive either to dismiss the world outright (some have said de Saussure’s emphasis on the synchronic dimension of language does that because he dismisses the troubled word-world connection issue out of hand) or to account for it altogether, as, say, the sophisticated Idealism of Hegel or the thoroughgoing materialism of Marx might be said to attempt. In a strong sense, both Nietzsche and Derrida and others who think along the same lines reject the notion (so pervasive here in America, by the way, with our move-it-along-now logical positivist tradition) that we can either simply accept or simply dismiss the ontological and epistemological concerns of traditional western philosophy.

As I mentioned regarding de Man earlier, just when we have made a clean break with the past and its concerns, that’s when they have the most power to script and dominate what we do in the present. The one who thinks he or she has dismissed ideology (or Dame Philosophy) with a contemptuous wave of the hand is almost surely the biggest dupe of all. So when structuralism develops into the robust semiological adventure it becomes in the 1950’s and 1960’s (mostly in Europe; it never fully caught on here in the States), when what Derrida himself calls “the hyperinflation of the signifier” takes hold and everyone tries to explain everything after the manner of the structural linguist’s mode of analysis, it is then that the unexamined principle of “structure” should disturb us most of all. As the French saying goes about love relationships, “ni sans toi ni avec toi”: to paraphrase, “I can’t live without the other but I can’t live with the other, either.” I can’t even really decide the issue one way or the other, because if I do, it’s nearly certain that the troubles I’ve repressed will come back to haunt me when I least expect them to. Well, structuralism proper isn’t exactly in vogue nowadays, but such observations never really go out of style since they apply with equal force to anything that comes along (cultural studies, feminism, neo-formalism, whatever) and becomes the fashion in academic fields. Given that it is difficult today to distinguish between “literary theory,” philosophy, social theory, and so forth, it’s good to keep in mind this complex of concerns as you move forwards to a consideration of contemporary theory.

General Notes on Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (884-95).

Here the focus is on a genre (tragedy) from an ancient culture (the Greeks) that both produces and unsettles the Apollo/Dionysus split. Apollo is the god of light, reason, the lovely dream of order, justifying life’s tribulations in a purely aesthetic way. Dionysus is the god of wine, intoxication, and surrender of the calm, self-contained ego to forces both within and beyond that ego. But both gods are necessary to each other and cannot be kept separate. If tragedy can lead us to this insight, art is very significant, and in no way inferior to philosophy or theology.
At base, Greek tragedy offers a way to embrace one’s fate as a human being; it justifies suffering by creating beauty from it that does not simply disown the process of generation (of that beauty). End note for 894—together, Apollo and Dionysus account for the acceptance of life, amor fati, as opposed to Christianity’s supposed “denial of life.”

I will add notes on Freud as time permits....

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

Week 06, Hegel and Marx

2009-02-22T15:45:00.000-08:00

General Notes on Hegel’s “Master-Slave Dialectic” from Phenomenology of Spirit and Lectures on Fine Art

Dialectic. In Plato’s dialogues, it’s easy to see that “dialectic” (root: dialogos,dialogeo) is a linguistic process whereby two speakers reason their way to the truth of some subject—or in Plato’s case as often as not and especially in the early dialogues, they pursue the object to the point where they realize they’ve said what they can say and haven’t arrived at the truth, even if they think there is a truth to be attained. The ancient contrast is between dialectic as a truth-retrieval process and rhetoric, language employed as means of praise or of persuasion in, say, a law-court as “forensic rhetoric” or in the assembly as deliberative rhetoric—what should we do? etc.

Rhetoricians may be concerned with truth, but all those jokes about lawyers should tell us that they may not necessarily be after truth first and foremost. Hegel’s version of the dialectic can be read in different ways—anthropologically or in terms of strife within an individual’s consciousness (as in deconstructive readings that don’t accept Hegel’s belief in the processive evolution of consciousness to higher and ever higher stages). What he’s trying to do in the Phenomenology of Mind, in the standard reading that it’s best to employ here, is to explain how individuals become fully conscious of themselves as rational and spiritual beings and how they come to understand that their individuality can only be brought out within a genuinely social setting. We need an objective realization of spirit in the good society.

Dialectic’s modern form is a way of arriving at philosophical “Truth” while accounting for a complex and dynamic world and individual consciousness, and for the interdependence between one human consciousness and others. In the Master/Slave Dialectic, we read about an unsatisfactory stage in the development of consciousness. But in this discussion we can see the makings of modern concentrations on the play of power, on struggle as central to social and political development, and on the need to place the individual in a dynamic relation with the others we collectively term “society.” Hegel isn’t trying to describe a disembodied, bloodless self; he’s trying to deal with the reality of human existence as something lived, felt, and experienced in subtle and ever-changing ways. One major point is that labor turns out to be central to human life: we “produce” ourselves through labor. Marx derived his ideas about the status of work from Hegel. Because of his sophisticated dialectic and refusal to oversimplify the processes of thought, Hegel remains central to philosophy and theory—in other words, we can’t just talk about individuals and events or historical periods in total isolation from everything else, formalist style.

Ideological Critique. Hegel articulates the question of form and content, and he also relates individual consciousness to the political or ideological realm. For instance, the first kind of consciousness, historically, would have been “desiring self-consciousness”—just being aware that one has needs. All those desiring people got into many a scrape, and so we move to master/slave consciousness—which is hardly a satisfactory state of affairs societally or individually. The slave consciousness works out strategies for coping with servitude—namely stoic self-consciousness and its concern for work and virtue, which of course tend to result in punishment since, as the saying goes, “no good deed goes unpunished”; and then skeptic self-consciousness (cynical disbelief and resignation, disdain of care for others). Skepticism leads to the unhappy self-consciousness: ascetic rejection of the world, etc. But the unhappy self-consciousness at least gets some sense of the power of free will. That leads to idealist consciousness, which makes Ideas the sole reality. That notion is ultimately untenable—it excludes nature, and we must come to terms with nature. So Rational Consciousness leads to Empirical Consciousness. But then the Empirical Consciousness can’t see itself as other than animal, with reality as something outside itself.

Ideological critiques are, of course, a mainstay of modern criticism and literary/cultural theory. One might say that ideology consists in the linguistic and institutional rules that inform our actions and beliefs and make us think there is a stable world and a place for a stable “us” in it. A different definition would be that it consists in a fundamental confusion: the attempt to confound words and the world. Language, according to some modern critics, simply doesn’t work the same way physical nature does, and you can’t just “use” it to describe the world as if there were a close fit between the workings of language and the workings of natural processes. People are constantly eliding the fact that words, no matter how well you arrange them, don’t describe reality and are not “the same as” reality. To think otherwise is to be mystified and to think that words and the world correspond or even reduce to the same thing.

It’s easy enough to understand that the word “tree” isn’t the actual thing out there in the park, but at a broader level we tend to assume that our language is operating on the world in substantive ways. We naturalize our linguistic tricks to the point where the tricks seem like nature itself. So today theorists tend to focus on the constitutive and ideological role of language and not on arriving at philosophical certainty about events and things by means of it. Perpetual demystification might be a good way to describe this process, except that demystification tends to presuppose that there is an unmystified final state we can get to. Hegel thinks he can account for the world and consciousness as a dynamic totality, or at least that it would be possible to arrive at an intelligible perspective on that totality.

Page-by-Page Notes on “The Master-Slave Dialectic” from Hegel’sThe Phenomenology of Spirit

Introductory remarks. Immanuel Kant tends to assume that we are self-contained units, and he depends upon the sameness of our faculties in dealing with our activities and customs, and with aesthetic perception, ethics, and so forth. For Hegel, the self is founded upon confrontational moments—risk, contradiction, dread. The self is established by struggle for recognition and certainty, which entails withholding recognition from others. Hegel is an idealist who finds progressive states of consciousness embodied in certain historical moments. History is teleological, and labor is central to subjectivity and purpose in life, to social formations. Humanity’s relation to objects is central to life.

630-31. “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when... it so exists for another....” To attain self-consciousness, we must first set boundaries. Emerson describes this as distinguishing between “me/not me.” Exclusion and separation are necessary to the founding of the self. The earliest stage is desiring self-consciousness. But then the situation becomes confrontational: a pair of self-conscious individuals confront each other as objects. They are not yet authentic in their self-consciousness.

632-33. “The individual who has not risked his life they will be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.” Abstract self-consciousness must risk itself, must risk death to move towards genuine self-consciousness. Each side must try to annihilate the other. Something more active than exclusion is needed—recognition, a kind of incorporation/destruction of the other. But death would be negation, not a step forward. Therefore, a person needs recognition, but resents this need. Life implies limitation, negotiation, mediation. A different kind of relationship emerges from the struggle. The struggle shows a need for a mediated relationship. The Lord and bondsman both relate not directly to each other but rather to the thing.

The Lord consumes and negates objects, while the servant is forced to labor upon those objects—that is not the same thing as consuming them. But this is still unsatisfactory—the Lord only gets recognition from a non-essential and unequal other. The bondsman’s recognition cannot give the Lord a true grasp of himself or his relationship with others.

633. Paragraph 190. “The Lord relates himself mediately to the bondsman through a being [a thing] that is independent....” The thing becomes the locus of necessary mediation, part of the bargain struck to stave off death. However, as Karl Marx understood, this thing/being is also the site of great confusion in our relationship to things and, through them, to one another.

634-35. “The object in which the Lord has achieved his lordship has in reality turned out to be something quite different from an independent consciousness…. he is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself.” The Lord is in effect the slave of his slave and of the objects upon which the slave works. Moreover, the slave withdraws into himself and becomes independent. See 635 on this matter. Fear throws us back upon the body’s confines, and the servant-to-be shrinks into “absolute negativity.” Service allows him to realize that he is an individual. Work allows him to work at recovering a sense of his independent selfhood. We produce ourselves by means of work.

636. Hegel goes on to describe the movement from stoicism to skepticism to the unhappy consciousness. The point is that the movement grasps increasingly the unsatisfactory nature and contradictoriness (divided consciousness) of the servant consciousness; and therefore of the whole lord/servant relationship. The movement is supposed to be towards freedom, which will require genuine reciprocity. Marx will exploit this exposure of contradictions. The keys to this selection are 1) intersubjectivity as the foundation of the self rather than positing an autonomous ego, which is no more than an effect; 2) contradiction as teleological process; 3) the centrality of labor.

Page-by-Page Notes on Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art

639-40. “What is man’s ‘‘need’’ to produce works of art?” Why do we need art and adornment? We think ourselves, represent ourselves to ourselves. (This point will be appropriate when we come to Baudelaire as well.) Perspective and identity imply a going-out-of-self. You cannot see something or grasp it mentally unless you get far enough away from it: “the universal and absolute need from which art (on its formal side) springs has its origin in the fact that man is a ‘‘thinking’’ consciousness....”

We make the journey in two ways—theoretically, through acts of self-consciousness, and practically, through practical activity like ordinary labor and artistic creation. We set objects before us and shape them, we embody imaginative acts in sensuous form.

And in the product, we see ourselves. So labor is self-production, spiritual process. A central human need is to transcend what we are, and to ‘‘get’’ somewhere.

A similar idea occurs in the master/slave dialectic—our sense of identity is not left to solidify on its own. It is a product of social interaction, a product that involves risk and confrontation. We confront another person, see ourselves in another person, and seek to annihilate or dominate that other person. Notice that Hegel often shows contradictions emerging in systems—competing, incompatible demands generated within the same system. Marx will describe capitalist economics the same way, especially when he discusses how overproduction crises lead to cycles of boom and bust.

639 bottom. “In the second form of art....” Adornment is natural—we turn nature into a means of self-reflection. Nature is useful as a springboard for successive acts of self-consciousness. However, this process is destructive and violent—what ought to be respected is annihilated or interpreted out of existence. Compare the Westerner’s “I have conquered the mountain” to the Buddhist’s claim, “the mountain has befriended me.” Hegel’s march of the spirit could be a violent and destructive series of aggressive acts against others. Marxism tends to advocate an outright struggle between humanity and nature for supremacy. We might even connect this attitude towards nature with Baudelaire and his fellow decadent authors on the need to reject nature in the name of artifice and variety.

640-41. “The first form of art is therefore rather a mere search for portrayal than a capacity for true presentation....” Symbolic art is a search to embody a vague ideal in matter. This kind of art achieves an asymmetrical yoking together of idea and material. The two roughly correspond but do not fit together well. Symbolic art also shows the foreignness of ideas to matter. It reaffirms striving as one of the keys to humanity, and it also encourages respect for the sublime, the mysterious, fermentation, and movement. It is a necessary stage in human experience—we must be foreigners in our own territory. Symbolic art is expressive of mystery.

641 (bottom) - 642. “In the second form of art which we will call the classical, the double defect of the symbolic form is extinguished.” Classical art is the second stage. Greek statues would be the perfect example. Greek sculpture achieves an adequate embodiment of the ideal. The human form expresses spirit determined as particular and human. The problem is that to do this, the sculptor must bring spirit down to the level at which it can be adequately represented or embodied. That is unacceptable since spirit is “the infinite subjectivity of the Idea” (643).

643-44. “The romantic form of art cancels again the completed unification of the Idea and its reality....” The third stage is romantic art, the perfect form of which is music. In romantic art, striving comes to the forefront again. Music is freest of material limitations. Romantic art seeks to transcend itself through itself, and we rediscover, as in the earlier stage of symbolic art, the incommensurateness of material to spirit. The problem with romantic art is that it triumphs over matter. The idea can only achieve perfection within itself. We see that we cannot simply fix spirit in stone or on the canvas, or even in a succession of notes on a page. William Blake understood well, for instance, that media are necessary but also liable to become traps. Romantic art is by no means comforting. It does not satisfy the individual’s sense of his or her own cognitive powers, the ability to render events intelligible, as in Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic theory.

Edition. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York : Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

E491 FALL 2007 KARL MARX AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS (ADAPTED FROM FALL 2006)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (759-67); The German Ideology (767-69); from The Communist Manifesto (769-73); Grundrisse (773-74); “Preface to A Contribution...” (774-76); Capital’’, Vol. 1 Ch. 1 “Commodities” (776-83).

Page-by-Page Notes on Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (759-67).

764. “On the basis of political economy itself....” The darkened chamber metaphor is a figure for ideology—the paradox is that the worker creates an opulent society and starves in the middle of it.

764. “Political economy proceeds from the fact of private property, but it does not explain it to us.” Political economists see private property as natural, and they think value resides in things. At the bottom of this page, Marx implies that political economists cannot account for capitalism’s development, for change and historical process. We might “apply the master/slave dialectic to this page—the political economists speak for the masters and do not understand their relationship to property, or at least they have naturalized that relationship. Labor, implies Marx, must and will come to understand its relations with capital and the commodity form.

765. At the top: alienation from labor and the product of labor—labor is turned against itself as a human expressive act and a force for social cohesion; now labor produces atomistic relations amongst humans and treats things as if they alone were alive. We suffer an “attack of the killer widgets,” so to speak. Marx writes, “Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain.” Marx refers a little below to the myth of the fall, and asserts thereby the need for a dialectical view—what is the relationship between two things?

765. “With the increasing value of the world of things...” here Marx brings up an actual fact: an increase in commodity value makes labor cheaper. Then he goes on to say that under capitalism, labor is stripped of its human value, congealed in abstract form in an object, the commodity. The worker owns the minimum socially necessary command of other people’s labor to prop up the capitalist order—ever more capital is generated, but the worker does not share in that affluence. “All these consequences are contained in the definition that the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object.” Marx plays the anthropologist with capitalism, comparing the commodity form to magic and fetishism. We invest or transfer our own power to an object we have made with our hands. Nature becomes an alien, determining power over us, not something over which we have dominion. That is the paradox of the Industrial Revolution.

766. “Thus in this double respect the worker becomes a slave of his object....” Under private property, the worker’s relation to objects is one of slavery.

766. “Political economy conceals the estrangement....” political economy conceals ideology, and makes exploitation seem natural. That is the function of ideology. Below, refer to the relationship between the master and the object that he simply consumes; here this idea is applied to the accumulation of capital.

767. Page top: work as meaningless when it should render us free agents who belong together in a morally intelligible world. “What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor?” Marx’s fourfold theory of alienation: we are alienated first from our self-image as free human beings, second from the labor process, third from the product of labor, and fourth from the community. The capitalist productive process involves self-alienation; the production of commodities creates a worker who is not human. It renders labor meaningless in terms of human expression and identity—we are not “at home” in the world we are creating. He also brings up religion as mystification, and says “what is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.”

767. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic applies here to what Marx says about capitalists and workers. The revolutionary potential lies with the working class. The workers’ experience consists in fourfold alienation. They are alienated from themselves as free human beings with the power to develop; they are alienated from the activity of working; they are alienated from the products of the labor (refer to 765); and they are alienated from their fellow workers and therefore from society in general.

Workers do not benefit from the products of their labor. When the factory worker makes an item, its value is lost to him and will be sold by the boss as a commodity. The worker “produces” a world of rich capitalists and consumer goods, few of which goods he or she can afford. We find misery and despair in the midst of plenty. The worker becomes a thing, and things themselves, as commodities, come to life.

Marx’s view of human nature is that we produce ourselves through the active process of laboring. However, there is a suggestion here of a potential to be expressed and developed. We do not have a fixed, pre-existing nature but rather work, as the creative process, produces our nature. This emphasis on expression and self-development is similar to romanticism. Marx stresses a dialectical mode of expressing the self in relation to natural objects. He resembles Hegel in that regard. What would be the point of criticizing capitalism if one system or environment were not better? Scientific socialism has a humanist basis in asserting the primacy of humanity in the relationship between humanity and nature.

Page-by-Page Notes on Karl Marx’s The German Ideology (767-69).

768. Note on the camera obscura figure for ideology. Capitalism produces the ideology that perpetuates it—it not only personifies things, endowing them with fetish power and turning human beings into mere things—it produces the illusory philosophy that keeps most of us from understanding the true basis of ourselves as workers and of our society. Marx’s metaphor of the darkened chamber implies that descrambling ideology is possible. Things are upside down, but at the same time absolutely clear: we can examine the life process (economics) and strip away ideology to get to the truth. But we might also ask whether illusions must be perpetual, representation perpetual, and the production and variation of desire also perpetual—if so, that might account for the continuing existence of capitalism to this day. Marx apparently believes in a teleological conception of history, one in which the contradictions inherent in the market order and its social forms will lead to something better. (By “contradiction,” I refer to such phenomena as overproduction, the association of workers, and so forth.)

768. The superstructure, says Marx, has no history. But as he recognizes, in his brief comments on art later, the correlations between ethics, religion, art, and the economic system are not necessarily synchronous. The realm of ideas isn’t a mere reflex—it takes on a power and temporality or rhythm of its own, it becomes semi-autonomous. Artists and philosophers can resist the reigning ideas of their time, i.e. the ones that merely support private property and bourgeois individualism. We must ask, therefore, “where does such resistance come from, and how successful can it be?”

768. “The production of ideas....” Would Nietzsche accept this passage? He would take things further back to biology—what Marx refers to comes along too late in the process; refer to Nietzsche’s discussion of the way language falsifies our relationship to the world.

768. “If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.” Must we always generate an ideology? It does not seem so from this selection.

Marx and Engels’ Guide to Appearing German, Profound, and Speculative:

First of all an abstraction is made from a fact; then it is declared that the fact is based on the abstraction. That is how to proceed if you want to appear German, profound, and speculative.

For example: Fact: The cat eats the mouse.

Reflection: Cat = nature, mouse = nature, Consumption of mouse by cat = consumption of nature by nature = self-consumption of nature.

Philosophic presentation of the fact: Devouring of the mouse by the cat is based upon the self-consumption of nature.

From The German Ideology. London : International Publishers, 1965. 530.

768. “Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history....” So the superstructure is derivative, not material. Therefore, working with abstractions—even dialectically as Hegel does—only leads us further astray from material history’s processes, the very processes that give us our ideas. When Hegel talks about the march of spirit, he is tilting at windmills like Don Quixote. Kant also provides interesting examples, but his conception of the self remains abstract, and his nature is a general world—not Marx’s world of struggle, or the pain of our ancestors. For Kant, each mind functions similarly, but in isolation, and universal laws are generated from supposedly stable inner capacities.

Page-by-Page Notes on Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto of 1848 (769-73).

Capitalist philosophy assumes that our default nature is acquisitiveness. It assumes that “greed is good,” as the movie line goes. It also supposes that our basic instinct can perpetuate itself by encountering and incorporating infinitely many objects of desire—fashion is a fine example of this process. Fashion recycles objects of desire. Desire—and the desire to desire—drives the system. We might say also that excess is vital to the functioning of capitalism—”reason not the need,” as King Lear says. We are creatures of excess, and would never be satisfied with the bare minimum for life. Capitalism is like a shark that has to keep moving to stay alive. If we only purchased what we needed, the capitalist order would collapse almost instantly, and we would relapse into something like a barter economy such as existed during the Middle Ages. We might refer for example to the Great Depression and to the fascist order it led to in Europe . But does this process ever need to stop? Are the chickens coming home to roost, or are we dealing with “real chickens in an imaginary hen-house”?

One argument might be that Marx, with his contradiction-theory whereby the desire to accumulate capital results in overproduction, and the need to bring workers together in factories leads them towards revolutionary class-consciousness, covers up the possibility that the answer is no, the process need not end. Furthermore, since Marx obverts Hegel, he is quite invested in the idea that object-relations are central to the full development of humanity. He remains chained to what Jean Baudrillard calls “the mirror of production”—it’s all about us and objects, and about how we represent that relationship to ourselves and others. Perhaps that is unfair to Marx—has anyone really escaped from that trap, from the order of representation, from the need to understand that we are not simply pure spirit freed from materiality, that desire will always be partly for material things and never for purely immaterial or spiritual things?

In any case, the point is that Marx privileges “material reality” over representation, even if he admits that the relationship between them harbors some complexity. Is postmodernism complicit in perpetuating post-industrial capitalism? Postmodernism suggests that there is no viable exit strategy from the order of representation to the real. This raises the question as to whether capitalism is simply better at representation (refer to the African-American expression “representing”) than socialism or any other idealistic way of looking at the world.

769. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Class struggle is the law of history, and reality is a material process. It proceeds by strife, and the contradictions that develop can be understood through dialectical method.

770. Top: history proceeds by contradictions and conflicts, and then comes a new set of warring groups, a new form of society.

770. On this page, Marx repeats Hegel’s ideas about the march of spirit, but here the engine is class antagonism. “From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns.” Therefore, productive forces and social forms develop in accordance with their own internal laws. Development comes organically from within; Marx does not rely upon a model with external interruptions as the agent of change.

770. “The feudal system of industry... now no longer sufficed....” we go from feudal production to manufacturing, which makes better use of division of labor. But as markets increase, the big capitalists and the industrial order alone can meet the new demand. Feudal society generated its own opposition—thanks to the contradictions in the feudal order. Its productive forces outgrew the social system.

770. “We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development....” The bourgeoisie is the product of successive revolutions in the modes of production and exchange.

771. On this page, Marx points out the revolutionary quality of the bourgeoisie. “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” The state represents class interests. The representative state is built upon the bourgeois notion of the self as isolated and as pursuing pleasure through the purchase and consumption of commodities. This kind of self is intimately related to the laws of property and to the efficient accumulation and circulation of capital.

771. “The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.” This class strips away all of the old illusions in favor of direct, brutal exploitation. But in his chapter on the fetishism of the commodity, Marx hints at the kind of illusion that perpetuates capitalism. He uses an anthropological framework to describe powerful human tendencies to make people content with their lot. Moreover, among the exploited are some of the biggest producers of middle-class ideology.

771. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production....” There is a constant revolution in the relations between workers and employers, and in social institutions. When Marx says, “all that is solid melts into air,” I must ask whether this is what actually happens. Or is it rather that the upheaval comes to seem natural?

772. “In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.” This is a very important point—capitalism actually produces desire itself, and even the desire to desire things. Marx goes on to explain below that capitalism is bent upon internationalizing and globalizing the economy and social relations generally. “It creates a world after its own image,” he says. It would add that when we arrive at global capitalism, capitalism as a universal system, it comes to seem natural and we begin to lose the power to criticize it. What is universal is everywhere and nowhere at the same time—that is probably what Foucault is getting at with his term “power.” First comes nationalism, and then internationalism.

772. “The bourgeoisie... has agglomerated population....” The bourgeoisie therefore centralizes the means of production. But that is one of the contradictions in capitalism—the working class comes together and becomes conscious of itself as a class.

Page-by-Page Notes on Karl Marx’s Grundrisse (773-74).

773. Marx says that he is no Marxist, and to some extent, that flexibility shows here, when he discusses the relationship between art and the base. Mythology is possible only when people do not understand natural forces.

774. We take Greek art to be naïve and childlike—we become nostalgic for an earlier state of human development, for the good old days. Is Marx suggesting that in pre-technological Greece , myth flourished, and became sophisticated in its naivety? That is, the Greeks had better art than we would expect because art was proportionally such a large part of life in ancient times, whereas at present, science and economics dominate the scene? The second question—Marx says that from nostalgia, we set up the Greeks as an ideal. Does that imply self-deception? Is nostalgia a form of distortion?

774. “Why should not the historic childhood of humanity... exercise an eternal charm?” Marx says that the Greeks were normal children, and that we feel nostalgia for that earlier time. Does this point towards self-deception or illusion as a basic human trait? That would be suggestive with regard to the Marxist view of literary criticism as a practice that demystifies distorted representations of real material conditions.

775. The superstructure transforms rapidly, but parts of it may take longer to change, so they become ideological battlegrounds and what is said requires decoding. A novel by Dickens, for example, criticizes the excesses of capitalist bosses and those who unreflectively act within capitalist ideology; even so, Dickens can be read as a supporter of the system trying to fix it, to mend it rather than end it. The word “reform,” is similarly tricky—one person’s reform is another person’s poison. Marx says that no class or system gives way until all of its resources (of whatever kind) have been exhausted—art is one of those resources.

Page-by-Page Notes on Karl Marx’s “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (774-76).

775. “With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.” This passage is important to the understanding of art. The old order may carry out a rearguard action, maintaining a human face on its old ways. I like the suggestion that “no social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed.” I should repeat here what I said earlier—history proceeds by strife from one system to the next; each system generates its own internal contradictions. We can understand and even predict such movements scientifically if we comprehend the contradictions. History proceeds in an orderly fashion and we can understand its processes—that is a fundamental assumption behind scientific socialism.

Page-by-Page Notes on Karl Marx’s Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. 1., Section 4: “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof” (776-83).

776. Marx defines society as people producing their subsistence and the means of production. Man the toolmaker produces his society materially, and the form of production determines social relations and institutions like law and religion. So if man loses control over those relations—as happens in a capitalist commodity culture—he becomes alienated from his work and from the products of his labor, from others, and from his own potential for freedom. His consciousness becomes determined by capitalist production. That is why Marx is so determined to explain commodity production and exchange—it is the site of this displacement.

777. On this page, Marx explains what he means by fetishism. Exchange is the key to mystification.

781. “Let us now picture to ourselves....” At this point, Marx discusses the social nature of labor. Production and distribution ought to be in harmony.

783. “So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond.” Marx sarcastically brings up the way we invest value in things. Sarcasm of this sort is a major feature of his writing style.

General Notes on Karl Marx: Commodities and History (Written at UCI in the 1990’s)

It is best to begin with a statement about Marx’s conception of human society. Marx (1818-1883) largely agrees with his philosophical predecessor Georg W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) that it is essential to human beings to “objectify” themselves in an external world and then to comprehend that external world as an adequate expression of themselves. Work, for both Hegel and Marx, is the main way in which humans accomplish this self-affirming objectification. Labor, that is, brings out the latent potential in human beings and leads them toward an ever-greater realization of freedom within a community of fellow-workers. Human society, for Marx, consists in people laboring to produce what they, as members of society, need for their subsistence and happiness. At one and the same time, their labor both brings out their human capacities or potential and affirms their relationship with all their fellow workers. Work then, is for both Hegel and Marx essential to the very concept of humanity. Both thinkers are aware, of course, that this ideal society has by no means been fully established, and in their analysis of the reasons for the imperfection of human affairs, they part company.

Hegel and Marx use the term “alienation” to describe the cause of human unhappiness and failure to live in harmony. The content of this abstract term, however, shows the great differences between Hegel and Marx. While to the idealist Hegel alienation has to do primarily with the sphere of religion, Marx interprets the concept in accordance with his own materialist philosophy. Hegel, that is, argues that an alienated, “unhappy consciousness” is the result of humans’ experiencing themselves as empty and placing “worth” out of reach in a supernatural realm. Marx, by contrast, insists that such idealist formulations only obscure the true cause of human misery, injustice, and alienation. The real reason for these problems, says Marx, can be traced to the material ways in which people work and live—to their economic and social arrangements. Religion, says Marx, is nothing but a reflex of this real world; the misery humans express in religious terms is, therefore, nothing but a reflexive distortion of the misery and alienation they experience as members of an actual, material society. It will not do, then, to look to religion and the realm of the spirit for an understanding of (or a cure to) human ills. One must look to economics and to the “class struggle” that has always—right up to and most intensely in the time of industrial capitalism—characterized human history. After all, as Marx says succinctly in The German Ideology, “men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”

Since Marx argues that economics is the key to understanding how human societies function and change, his task in Das Kapital as an antagonist of nineteenth-century capitalism is to explain the nature and behavior of that system’s most important phenomenon: the commodity. Since, in turn, understanding what a commodity is and how it behaves in the marketplace involves an understanding of the term “value,” we must turn first to Marx’s analysis of this concept, and then move on to the revolutionary implications which Marx himself draws from this fine-grained economic study.

The three types of value that Marx identifies in Capital, Volume One are use-value, exchange-value, and surplus value. We should consider use-value first. An object becomes a use-value, says Marx, by virtue of its utility, its capacity to satisfy human wants. A useful object cannot become a commodity, however, until we sell it to someone, and so exchange-values come into play. Exchange-value, which we must now consider, is quite different from use-value. While an object’s use-value is dependent on its “usefulness” and the labor that went into its production need only be conceptualized as “specific and determinate,” its exchange-value must, says Marx, be determined differently.

The following example will illustrate the difference in valuation: Let’s say I have some wheat. Insofar as I simply want to grind it up and bake for myself some bread with it, I am only concerned with the “productive activity of a definite kind and exercised with a definite aim” (Capital 49) that I have put into the growing and harvesting of my wheat. There is as yet no need to determine its value in terms of anything but its usefulness to me. But what if I live in a fairly well-developed market society and so intend to sell my wheat as a commodity? What if I want not to make bread with my wheat but to exchange it for something else that I need? How do I compare its value in relation to that something else? Well, says Marx, I have to recognize that my useful object, once I take it to market, can only function during a given exchange as a manifestation of abstract labor power. I cannot compare two things without reference to a third thing that will serve as a common denominator. How, for example, could I say, “My ten pounds of wheat are equal in value to one coat”? (Use-values or useful objects can only confront each other as qualitatively different; no one would exchange a coat for a coat, but someone might exchange a coat for another useful thing. Nonetheless, such qualitative differences do not establish a common standard of value.) Abstract labor power is Marx’s answer—I can compare the two objects because into the making of both went a quantity of homogeneous, “abstract” labor. Notice here that no one cares about the specific, determinate labor that went into the making of a given item, or even about the object in all its glorious usefulness. At the market, at the point of sale, all we care about is the fact that “abstract labor,” however absurd such a concept may in fact be, can serve as a common property for both items. If we started arguing over the quality of the work involved, we would no longer be able to agree on a standard measure of value.

Since a commodity can express its value only through exchange, we must measure that value in terms of congealed, socially necessary labor—just as much quantity of time, no more, no less, as it takes efficient workers in an efficient commodity-society on the average to produce a given item. (Adam Smith had explained long ago the benefits of the division of labor, wherein each worker does only one little task with robot-like efficiency. Thanks to the division of labor, ten people making part of, say, a pin can make thousands of pins in a day while those same ten people, each trying to make an entire pin, would have very little to show for their efforts at day’s end.) So here we are, gone to market with our useful objects. In order to transform those objects into commodities, we must exchange them as pure congelations of abstract labor power. During the moment of exchange, nothing else matters except that abstract standard; all else is unavailable to us, is bracketed out.

The commodity, to repeat, is no respecter of specific, determinate labor; it requires that we should consider it merely as a portion of general labor. All commodities are equal; all work is equal, when exchanged in certain proportions. A commodity is indeed a useful thing, but that usefulness cannot be realized as value until the thing is exchanged. The commodity then, says Marx, is a peculiarly two-fold phenomenon. We can grasp its value only as an expression of abstract labor, only when it embodies this labor at the point of exchange, only in “the social relation of commodity to commodity” (54). Our own mutual relations and interdependence, our own concrete labor as producers of serviceable objects, says Marx, no longer matter; once a capitalist economy gets going, those commodities might just as well have picked themselves up and gone to the market without us. We exist to produce commodities; they do not exist to serve us, and we cannot hope to commandeer them our way just because we happen to have done some specific piece of work a few days back. In effect, the man working himself to death in a coal mine has no right to demand more from the society he keeps warm than his paltry wages allow. His money represents a given amount of abstract labor, and he may command only that much and no more. Money, of course, is the absolute, universal standard, the congelation of labor by which all other items may be measured as values, and our workman has very little of it to show for his pains, and so no right to live like the capitalist who employs him.

How, indeed, is it that the capitalist lives so well? We must now bring up the third kind of value that Marx discusses, “surplus value.” Simply put, this is the profit that the man of business turns. Whatever certain economists may say, Marx explains, profit is not generated by sharp buying and selling prices. People do, of course, sometimes buy things below their value and/or sell them to some poor devil at an exorbitant price, but we must not equate such practices with profit. No, our capitalist generates his profit not during an exchange of commodities but beforehand, right in the factory. How so? Well, consider that in a given society, the entirety of the workforce only needs to produce a certain quantity of goods to keep itself going. Society X (read “workforce plus dependents”) needs to make only quantity Y of goods, no more, no less, to provide for its own well-being. Let us say that providing this quantity of serviceable things—food, shelter, tools, and the like—takes each worker an average of, say, four hours per day. Thanks to the marvelous technology and division of labor that came into play with the Industrial Revolution, it only takes half a day’s work to satisfy all basic human needs. Nonetheless, we must forget any ideas this fact may have given us about producing our way to industrial utopia; the capitalist is intent on turning a buck, and he cannot do it so long as the workers all provide for their own welfare and then go home. He points to the terms of employment laid out in that lopsided contract between himself and his workers. He knows full well that he, the capitalist, owns the means of subsistence (money and the materials with and upon which to labor) so necessary to the worker, who has only his labor power to sell. In practice, this means the worker will have to do a little more work than he might have planned. Does ten or twelve hours sound like a nice round figure? Fine, it’s settled. Welcome aboard!

In essence, each extra hour of labor, each extra object or part thereof that the worker provides, goes right into the pocket of old moneybags the capitalist, or at least it will make that familiar jingle when all of his surplus commodities reach the market and get sold at the rate determined by competition. The point is, the worker owns only his labor and is paid in wages for the exercise of that labor; he does not own the products of his labor, and has no right to any of the money to be had from the sale of these products. What the capitalist accumulates, then, is the surplus labor provided by his workers, which surplus labor, conveniently compressed into its money form, he can then venture in exciting new ways to harvest even more surplus labor. For the moment, let us leave aside the obvious question that arises here: since the worker’s wages command only a rather small quantity of goods, who is going to buy all the extra things that the dynamic capitalist’s ambition brings to market? Some of them, says Marx, will obviously be bought by those who have accumulated a great deal of money and can afford to live well, but it is not as simple as that, so we shall have to return to the problem below.

What does Marx draw from all this economic analysis? Well, he says that the commodity, by its very conditions of existence, has by the nineteenth century transformed the relationship between human beings and the quality and products of their labor. Human relations are no longer valuable until they are expressed in the grotesque exchange of commodities; they have to be “embodied” in commodities, which then take on all the power and ferocity and determining quality of fetish objects. Instead of regulating the great productive capacity that the scientific revolution has given us, instead of making what we need to live well and distributing it on a rational, orderly, and just basis, says Marx, we live chaotically. The old, hierarchical social bonds of feudal Europe have been broken forever, replaced by the Darwinian social environment of capitalism with its two great antagonistic classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat. While the latter class has little to hope for in Marx’s day except to work and subsist on what wages it can earn, the former class has for its interest the ceaseless accumulation of wealth, a quest which leads to what Marx calls perhaps the worst “contradiction” of capitalism. Namely, since nearly round-the-clock manufacturing of goods is essential to the capitalist, overproduction, undertaken on far too grand a scale to respond to the Invisible Hand of competition in which Adam Smith put so much faith, is bound to result in periodic crises. The market, that is, will surely suffer through ever-increasing cycles of boom and bust. The owners of capital, helped along by the state they control, will try anything to keep their markets expanding—including subterfuge, colonization of pre-industrialized lands, and war against the capitalists of other nations. (Not that the word “nation” means much within such an international system as capitalism, Marx would point out.) Obviously, even the most cursory look at the first two world wars should convince one that Marx’s model, whatever its flaws, has a certain predictive value. This century’s wars in Europe surely had much to do with economic crises and empire-building. The great powers became desperate for new markets and jealous of one anther’s successes, and hell broke loose.

As for the strictly social effects of capitalism, or what Marxists call the “superstructure” when they are not on guard against being called vulgar, these follow the same fetishistic logic as capitalist economics. Marx, a good materialist who tries to begin with his observations of the world around him, declares in The German Ideology that “men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with . . . their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (47). However, under capitalism, just as in the economic sphere the mutual relations between human workers are obscured and displaced into the allegedly social exchange of things, of commodities, so in the social sphere the institutions by which humans live are taken as a priori, eternal commands from some supernatural being. The contents of religion, morality, philosophy, law both civil and criminal, politics domestic and foreign, and so on are taken as natural rather than as corollaries, however indirect, of a given economic system, or, in Marxist terminology, of a given “set of material relations between men.” If capitalism dictates that our actions are controlled by the objects we produce, says Marx, it follows that we understand everything else on the basis of our mystified relation to commodities. We become the slaves of abstractions which we ourselves have produced, whether directly in the factory and marketplace or in our minds. The tendencies of the logic described here are perhaps to be summed up best by the Romantic poet William Blake’s almost Marxian line, “Prisons are built with the stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion.” That is, we take our religious dogmas and our laws and institutions as unquestionable, eternal truths rather than as the effects of the way in which we relate to one another as human beings, as producers of our material subsistence. This reification and naturalization of certain moral values, says Marx, we then employ to condemn those who do not share in the benefits of a market-based economy. As always, ranking follows reification, and the final equation is just what we might have expected: “whatever is, is right.” The poor, the thief, the prostitute, are born losers, and they deserve whatever happens to them, while the wealthy are considered superior and deserving of all good things.

Finally, we should remember that while the foregoing description of capitalism sounds rather bleak and hopeless, Marx himself is anything but a pessimist. He is a firm believer in “progress” or “historical development.” In other words, Marx is convinced that just as certain historical factors made the development of industrial capitalism inevitable, so will its demise occur almost like clockwork. The increasingly violent economic cycles and imperialist sprees that system is bound to suffer, says Marx, will lead to that system’s overthrow. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, he says, the proletariat will realize that they have already attained the capacity to produce enough to make the world a comfortable place, and they will stop obeying the orders of capital. Then the revolution will occur on an international scale, and the path will be open to the full development of that many-sided “communist man.” Remember when you compare Marx to some of the English cultural analysts that for Marx, the proletariat is a class like no other in history. Its appearance on the world stage precludes any attempt to turn back the clock to some falsely idyllic feudal age and thereby defuse the threat that the working class presents to the new, but self-destructive, world order. We could, of course, spend a great deal more time discussing the problems with Marx’s historical vision—his ideas about women, race (he says that Asia has no history!), and the time-frame or even the inevitability of capitalism’s self-destruction, for example. One thing to keep in mind, however, as we move towards Sigmund Freud, is that Marx has no fully developed notion of the Unconscious, though his analysis of fetishism clearly bears a psychological cast. Perhaps this dark little secret about humanity, the Unconscious, plays a role in the survival of capitalism. At least, that is what Freud would say.

Page-by-Page Notes on Friedrich Engels’ “Letter from Friedrich Engels to Joseph Bloch” (783-84).

787. Here Friedrich Engels argues that while the economic system is the base, superstructure determines the form of struggle.

Edition: Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York : Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

Week 05, Immanuel Kant

2009-02-22T15:42:00.000-08:00

General Notes on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment

Kant’s significance in his own era: a “Copernican Revolution” in Philosophy.

1. Politics: Kant’s Enlightenment-based, philosophical idealist claims about the sufficiency of the mind’s moral and rational powers leads to much grander claims on the part of romantic expressivists and political revolutionaries. Kant is a bit like Banquo in Macbeth—though no political revolutionary or proponent of formalism or art-for-art’s sake, he “gets” such heirs. Kant never traveled beyond his home in Königsberg , East Prussia , but his ideas about humans’ capacity to render themselves and their surroundings intelligible spread throughout Europe and, at least indirectly, went into the making of the French Revolution. Why? Because if the mind is posited as constitutive of reality (not passively receptive of it) and if we are cast as autonomous moral agents, the political implication, at least in the most motivated and optimistic readings, would be democratic revolution against the era’s prevailing monarchism (a kind of determinism by “natural rulers” over the ruled). The French Revolution of 1789 is the dynamic embodiment of this possibility of change.

2. Art: When Kant says that we can know the “phenomenal” world (literally, “that which appears”), his emphasis is on a kind of subjectivism (in the sense that we cannot simply step outside of the perceiving self and know things directly), which nonetheless posits universal faculties or mental capacities. And art, like nature, is part of the phenomenal realm—we see a beautiful object in nature or art and make an aesthetic judgment. So by valorizing and studying it, we are engaging with a realm that has cognitive significance. Kant validates the field of aesthetics as a legitimate branch of philosophy. Further, Kant’s theory of a capacity for disinterested aesthetic judgment—one not based on logic or external moral standards or sensory/sensual gratification, but rather on a felt harmony between the form of natural objects and the mind’s powers—led near-contemporaries to treat art as an autonomous realm of experience, one that could be kept separate from the encroachment of social constraints and corruptive influences like politics and economics. To the romantics, an autonomous realm of art could serve as the basis for societal renewal, with the poets and artists, accessible priests of imagination, as the ones whose claims to speak with authority about human problems should be granted the highest level of authority.

Kant’s significance for 20th-21st century theory.

1. Politics: Kant’s claims about our freedom as rational and moral agents living in a world we ourselves largely render intelligible and livable remain, in one variation or another, central to the argument over the possibility of political consensus and progress implying such assumptions. To what extent, if at all, can humans change themselves and the social and political reality they find around them? Modern theorists can sound cynical about the universality and “freedom” of the mind’s powers, but the questions posed by Kant and other Enlightenment philosophers continue to play a role in shaping contemporary discourse about political consensus and ethics. Is there a common set of human powers and traits that give us some measure of control over our destiny, or is it rather the case that nature or environment or even ideology (our belief systems and institutions, enshrined in social practices and linguistic usage and codification) exercise a determining power over all that we do and think and say, so that moral and intellectual freedom, even political freedom, are little more than humanistic illusions and philosophical sham? Does life boil down to power and ideological determination, to the exclusion of concepts like free will and enlightened, educated humanity? Does insistence on such free agency merely serve repressive political ends, perpetuating distorted views about the way things are?

2. Art: Kant’s positing that there is such a thing as a pure, disinterested, autonomous judgment (as indicated above) implies that art is at least potentially a free and independent realm of human endeavor and experience, and even one with tremendous regenerative power for individuals and societies. Few theorists today would accept that claim directly—they would suggest that art’s production and reception are permeated by ideological imperatives and that the people who make and perceive art are not free in the sense Kant implies they are. Still, none of these criticisms do away with the key questions about art’s social, political, and cognitive value: what is art, can we even ask what art is, what is the social and political significance of such arguments about what art “is”? etc.

Aesthetics has long been a suspect branch of philosophy. The insistence upon an autonomous realm of art is often seen as a form of political escapism into a never-never land free of immediate, real-life consequences; it is seen as implying a naïve model of human subjectivity. In fact, a seemingly escapist doctrine such as “Art for Art’s Sake” owes something to Kant—as manifested in the British Decadent Movement, it shows up as a commodified notion of elitism that can be marketed to the middle class. (That’s true even if we can’t imagine old Immanuel strolling along Piccadilly with a medieval lily in his hand.) But suspicions about aesthetics and aestheticism aside, we should not dismiss all consideration of the central assumptions underlying aesthetics.

One other point of influence about Kant is that although he describes beauty as something that happens in the perceiver, not in the perceived object itself, his aesthetics lead to later formalist theories such as that of the New Critics of the 1930’s-40’s. This is because he claims that the pattern, or arrangement, or form, of a phenomenally given object is a matter of significance. We judge an object beautiful, at base, because our mental faculties feel a certain pleasurable harmony with the formal arrangement of the object, as if the natural world is giving us a sense of its “it-fits-ness” with our own mental structure. The object accords with our powers of perceiving. Kant expressly says that aesthetic judgments about beauty are not dependent on the innate properties of things. Still, aesthetic judgments are the result of the mind’s ability to construct harmony from its own formal organization of sensory data. So does the New Critics’ brand of concentration on the formal properties of a text that they consider autonomous and coherent or whole.

Elaboration:

1. Kant said that the essence of the Enlightenment could be captured in the phrase “Dare to Know.” Humans possess the power of cognition, of reason, and they are responsible for knowing the sources, operational principles, and limits of that power. That is what the three famous Critiques are for: Critique of Pure Reason (how we can perceive and know); Critique of Practical Reason (Ethics); Critique of Judgment (Aesthetics). Kant asserts that we are rational and morally free. We are not determined by our environment or nature but are instead responsible beings who largely render the world intelligible by means of our powerful mental faculties. We give laws to what we call Nature, and our standards derive not from an external source (God) but rather from our own capacity to act morally.

It is important to realize that in Kant’s day much of Europe was split philosophically: Cartesian rationalism asserting that reality is derivable through logical operations or mathematical formulae, Leibnizian claims about a perspectiveless kind of knowledge, dogmatic Idealism asserting that mind alone is real; and the British empiricism of Bacon and Locke, which insists that all knowledge is derived from sensory data acting upon a passive, initially blank mind or “blank slate” (tabula rasa). Kant wanted to find a way to show some relation between human beings and nature without the need to deny the integrity of either. He does not want us to assert blandly that nature doesn’t matter or that we are entirely in the grip of natural laws. The latter option amounts to determinism, and it denies human dignity and free will.

Kant’s solution is ingenious. He says that we cannot indeed know “things in themselves” (the noumenal world, something not accessible through the senses). Ceasing to claim either that we can know noumena or that there simply is no noumenal realm turns out for Kant to be a liberating movement. Why? Without dismissing the possibility of an ultimate reality, Kant works things out so that any alleged ultimate reality ceases to be endowed with determining force over us. Not only is that so, but we can now begin to make a reasonably scientific investigation of the realm that we can know: the phenomenal world, the world of “things as they appear to us through our acts of perception.”

So in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant locates the “reality” he wants to investigate not in things themselves, not in some external realm, but rather in the mind’s own ability to organize sensory data into something intelligible. The most basic way this happens is through the fundamental forms of intuition, space and time. To borrow an analogy from Meyer Abrams and Hazard Adams, those forms are like spectacles we can never remove; we structure the world through them. Kant is implying that at this fundamental level, the mind is constitutive and active; it structures what we call reality. Furthermore, this reality is something we can investigate and come to know; we can know how we construct what we call reality. Kant is no empirical psychologist, but he asks, “how does the mind work?” Objects seem to accord with our perceptions. In that sense, at least, there is harmony between nature and our mental faculties. We are not aliens wandering an earth that we cannot understand or be at home in.

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant is concerned to establish the grounds of our moral freedom. Our status as rational and moral beings, he says, lifts us above animal nature and even allows us to connect with Infinity, what is beyond our finite perceptions. Our minds have “legislative power” over nature, so we can adopt an at least partly independent stance towards it without dismissing our existence as beings in nature. Similarly, our morality is not an externally derived or determinant force over us; our morality comes from an innate capacity to generate moral standards that bind us as individuals and as a community. Kant’s categorical imperative says that a moral law must be binding for all: I can’t go out and borrow money not intending to pay it back because that renders the whole moral universe meaningless. Who would lend money if there were no universally recognizable expectation that it ought to be paid back? If we make exceptions for ourselves as individuals, he insists, we put the very possibility of acting morally to shame. (See Francis Bacon’s quip that revenge does violence not only to the offender but also to the law itself; revenge, writes Bacon, “puts the law out of office.”) This kind of ethical “subjective universality,” treated as objective and binding reality, means that we can make a world in which we can live according to rules whose force we all recognize. It’s in our nature to do so.

In The Critique of Judgment, Kant’s claim is that aesthetic experience gives us a palpable sense of our moral and intellectual freedom; it helps us experience the bridging of the gap between the concepts of nature and freedom. Freedom isn’t just meant to be a truth we can understand through abstract philosophical study. Imagination or sensibility, the function of which is to supply the understanding with data that must be synthesized, arrives at a relation of free play and harmony with the understanding (which usually brings data under concepts with a view to action or knowledge, but which in the case of aesthetic judgments need not refer to any determinate concept like “goodness,” “usefulness,” etc.).

This pleasurable experience of the mind’s faculties in harmony makes us aware of our freedom and convinces us that nature is compatible with the mind’s powers. We cannot be alien to a world that gives us pleasure without making any demands upon us. So Kant’s analysis of aesthetic experience helps him bring home to us the claims made in the other two Critiques about our status as free, intelligent moral beings. As for the sublime, it’s important because although our experience with vast, powerful natural phenomena exceeds the capacity of our imagination and understanding to subsume it, we do not feel threatened by the “beyondness” of the experience. On the contrary, we are reassured in a very palpable way of the power of human faculties. We may not know the infinitely large in the sense of being able to quantify it or bound it determinately, but we still can think infinity in a manner that doesn’t overwhelm us. Our whole sense of self and of stability in the world doesn’t come crashing down upon us, so the mind must be a very powerful thing indeed.

Page-by-Page Notes on Kant’s Critique of Judgment

503. Editorial introduction. Kant is not concerned with the creation of art. Art is not necessarily created to achieve beauty. It may be made for many purposes—most notably ritual or religious. Or perhaps expression might be the goal of the artist; certainly contemporary art is not about beauty. It seems more like a confrontation with unintelligibility, or with the audience’s value system. It is “disturbing and disintegrating” (Wilde’s phrase) with regard to what we have falsely determined to be serene, integrated, unassailable, and unquestionable. Of course, this gesture can be turned into a style, a commodified act of rebellion. Oscar Wilde says that beauty is just such a disturbing element, given what it opposes. The difficulty lies in opposing the world while being immersed in it, working with and against the world’s rules, forms, and prohibitions.

505. Kant defines imagination as “the power of a priori intuitions”—i.e. the power to synthesize the intuitions given by sensibility. It is the power of exhibition. He defines understanding as “the power of concepts.” The point is that the mind is structured in such a way that its faculties can receive and construe sensory data. See Kant’s summary—subjective universality does not mean “merely subjective” in the non-philosophical sense. Taste is the ability to make aesthetic judgments.

506-07. “Interest is what we call the liking we connect with the presentation of an object’s existence.” Disinterestedness implies freedom from bias; it means we must have no immediate relation to the object we are contemplating and no sense that it must have an immediate purpose. The author’s intentions, the social implications of the object, and so forth, do not matter when one speaks of aesthetic judgments.

507. “Agreeable is what the senses like in sensation.” We merely like what is agreeable. Pancakes with maple syrup are not beautiful. They simply gratify our taste buds—we like the flavor. We must abstract from such sensory pleasure when making an aesthetic judgment.
We also take an interest in the good—we desire the existence of the object for its own sake (moral goodness) or because it is useful, as a wheelbarrow is useful to someone who wants to do some gardening. We do not take any interest of that sort in a flower or in a fine design. So whether we say that something is good in itself or good for some purpose, both statements involve an interested judgment; we would have to know a definite purpose. Kant refers here as well to what he will later call “free beauties” such as flowers and arabesque designs.

508-09. “For the good is the object of the will (a power of desire that is determined by reason).” Simply put, we want a “good” object to exist. But then Kant moves towards the three sorts of liking and to what constitutes a judgment of taste proper. “A judgment of taste ... considers the character of the object only by holding it up to our feeling of pleasure and displeasure.” We do not care about the existence of such an object, and taste is the ability to judge objects by means of a liking that contains no interest. Notice that towards the bottom of the page, Kant provides a straightforward summary after all the complex analysis he has offered—”we call agreeable what gratifies us, beautiful what we just like, good what we esteem....” Agreeable / beautiful / good; gratify / like / esteem; incline / favor / respect. So a judgment of the beautiful is “disinterested and free,” as Kant says at the top of 509.

510. “A judgment of taste must involve a claim to subjective universality.” Freedom from interest makes us say that our judgment of beauty is universal and valid.

510. “If he says that canary wine is agreeable he is quite content if someone else corrects his terms and reminds him to say instead: it is agreeable to me.” My example is passionfruit fudge. It would be boorish to insist that others should like strange flavors or particular baseball teams just because we do.

510. “But if he proclaims something to be beautiful, then he requires the same liking from others.” We demand that there be a universal faculty of taste. We assume that an unbiased mind’s judgments will be the same for everyone, or that they ought to be the same for everyone. An unimpaired, free judgment would indicate that this particular painting or this particular flower is beautiful. Kant assumes a universal model of how the mind is structured and how it works, and says (see below) that failure to reach universal consensus in actual life need not destroy our faith in this assumption.

510-11. “There can be no rule by which someone could be compelled to acknowledge that something is beautiful. No one can use reasons or principles to talk us into a judgment on whether some garment, house, or flower is beautiful.” Can we prove that our judgment is correct? What if somebody contradicts us? Well, so what? We are not reasoning about the point; we are positing a universal voice, a capacity to make universally binding judgments: “nothing is postulated in a judgment of taste except such a universal voice about a liking unmediated by concepts.”

512-13. “If the pleasure in the given object came first....” Pleasure does not arise from mere sensation. What causes the pleasure is a certain set of occurrences in the mind. These result in a “universally communicable mental state” that allows us to say, for example, “this rose is beautiful for everyone.”

513. “Now this merely subjective (aesthetic) judging of the object, or of the presentation by which it is given, precedes the pleasure in the object and is the basis of this pleasure, [a pleasure] in the harmony of the cognitive powers.” So pleasure arises from the free play of the imagination and understanding working together harmoniously towards no determinate purpose. We judge an object beautiful before taking pleasure in it—the pleasure comes from harmony between the mind’s powers. The mind engages freely with objects in the phenomenal world, and we feel harmony, a correspondence between mind and nature. Aesthetic encounters offer us a pleasant and easy way to experience our potential freedom. Ethics and philosophy are more difficult, and ordinary perception does not yield us free pleasure—it is too busy, too self-interested.

In aesthetic judgment, our ordinary faculties (the ones that let us construe the world as intelligible) operate in a special way. Beautiful objects of any sort are an oasis; they provide a contemplative encounter that gives pure pleasure. That is, imagination and understanding must work for even general cognition to take place, but in aesthetic experience, they play freely, so we experience our subjective, universally communicable freedom in the presence of an object given us from nature or art. We take pleasure from experiencing our freedom. To borrow from the high-serious realm of gaming, how about a pinball image? Experiencing beauty in nature or art sends us into a recursive scoring loop, racking up pleasure-points. A terminology issue: at the bottom of 513, Kant defines presentation as “the presentation by which an object is given us.” A “presentation” is that “by which an object is given us.” (Bottom of page.)

514-15. “A pure judgment of taste is one that is not influenced by charm or emotion…and whose determining basis is therefore merely the purposiveness of the form.” Kant defines “form” as shape or play on 515 top. Form is the design or pattern of presentations (not things themselves, but phenomenal “presentations” to our senses).

“Empirical aesthetic judgments are judgments of sense (material aesthetic judgments); only pure aesthetic judgments … are properly judgments of taste.” Color, musical instrument tones, and so forth, are charms. They please our senses and are agreeable, but they aren’t beautiful. They may even get in our way if we aren’t sophisticated or measured enough in our taste. (Notice the Hellenist term “barbaric” on 515.) Sensation is only the matter or raw material, the facilitator, for pure aesthetic judgment. Form is the determining element: “Design is what is essential” (515). Formalists will later pick up on this claim.

515. “Even what we call ornaments (parerga), i.e. what does not belong to the whole presentation of the object as an intrinsic constituent….” There is ornament and there is mere finery. Kant goes on to say that emotion isn’t involved in an aesthetic judgment; neither is sensation part of an aesthetic judgment: “Hence a pure judgment of taste has as its determining basis neither charm nor emotion, in other words, no sensation, which is [merely] the matter of an aesthetic judgment.

516. On Free Beauty: flowers and designs. “Flowers are free natural beauties.” And “Thus designs à la grecque, the foliage on borders or on wallpaper, etc., mean nothing on their own….” Kant will need to deal with the issue of imitation when he discusses art as distinct from natural beauty. Below, he writes that “When we judge free beauty … we presuppose no concept of any purpose for which the manifold is to serve the given object, and hence no concept [as to] what the object is [meant] to represent….” Here is the idea of play that Schiller will recast as a fundamental drive, a Spieltreib.

517. At the end of this section, Kant defines imagination as “the power of exhibition.”

518. “We solicit everyone else’s assent because we have a basis for it that is common to all.” The common basis for judgment is the sameness of each mind’s powers, at least the potential sameness.

518. “[I]s taste an original and natural ability, or is taste only the idea of an ability yet to be acquired and [therefore] artificial….? It will be interesting to see how Kant responds to this question. It’s an important one—either taste is innate, or it depends purely on cultural acquirement, or some mixture of the two.

519. “It seems, therefore, that only a lawfulness without a law….” Kant refers here to “purposiveness without a purpose.” If your judgment were referred to a standard such as the original of a portrait, or a firm idea about the object, the judgment of taste would not be pure.

520. “But some significant differences between the beautiful and the sublime are also readily apparent.” Sublimity and its quality of “unboundedness” suggest the possible incommensurateness between mind and nature. Perhaps objects don’t pre-accord with our capacities, and perhaps, as a corollary, nature is not purposive like art, but rather mechanical or simply chaotic. The sublime is reassuring because it “indeterminately” confirms reason’s superiority over sense and imagination, the “power of exhibition” or impregnating intuitions with concepts. What was a threat becomes a hosanna to the highest—Reason. Humanity, like honor, goes before everything. Current theory exploits the same possibility with regard to language and nature, intentionality, and so forth. The sublime suggests some violence to our imagination, underscoring a seeming disjunction between mind and nature. But in the end, the sublime is very important because it leads us towards at least some sense that there's a transcendental order beyond anything to which experience can give us access. What it leads us towards, Kant implies, is faith that there is an order of this sort and a God. Those who go back to Kant from a post-modern perspective are probably more apt to emphasize the unsettling initial moment of the sublime. And those who are interested in aesthetics may be most captivated by Kant's notions about how we judge an object in nature or art beautiful.

520. “[N]atural beauty carries with it a purposiveness in its form, by which the object seems as it were predetermined for our power of judgment….” The sublime, Kant goes on to write, suggests that the object of sublimity is “contrapurposive for our power of judgment, incommensurate with our power of exhibition, and as it were violent to our imagination….” (Be sure to read this passage. Refer also to the note at bottom about reason and understanding.) When Wordsworth writes in his “Immortality Ode,” “to me the meanest flower that blows / can give thoughts that too often lie too deep for tears,” might we call that an expressive version of sublimity?

521. “For what is sublime…cannot be contained in any sensible form….” A stormy ocean, or indeed any object in itself, is not per se sublime. Rather, we would have to refer this sight to “ideas of reason, which, though they cannot be exhibited adequately, are aroused and called to mind by this very inadequacy….”

521. “Independent natural beauty reveals to us a technic of nature that allows us to present nature as a system in terms of laws whose principle we do not find anywhere in our understanding….” Aesthetic judgment leads us to analogize nature and “purposive” art.

521. “However, in what we usually call sublime in nature there is such an utter lack of anything leading to particular objective principles and to forms of nature conforming to them….” The sublime does not suggest harmony between objects of nature and our powers of perception, so it isn’t as important as the beautiful. Of course, some will later say that this threat of disjunctiveness is very important! (Tentatively, we might say that contemporary theorists interested in aporia and so forth are pursuing a variant of sublime experience, only this time it’s an experience with language.)

522. “[N]othing that can be an object of the senses is to be called sublime.” Reason demands something that imagination is not able to deal with.

523. “[I]f we are to give an example of it that is fully appropriate for the critique of aesthetic judgment, then we must point to the sublime not in products of art…but rather in crude nature….” So the sublime is a matter of raw nature, not art.

524. “If the human mind is nonetheless to be able even to think the given infinite without contradiction, it must have within itself a power that is supersensible….” We can think of the world as a totality, but imagination cannot represent it.

525. “[I]n judging a thing sublime it [the aesthetic power of judgment] refers the imagination to reason so that it will harmonize subjectively with reason’s ideas….” Kant writes that “[T]he mind feels elevated in its own judgment of itself when it contemplates these without concern for their form and abandons itself to the imagination and to a reason that has come to be connected with it….” Here on this page is the key to the reassuring quality of the sublime: reason’s ideas are greater than imagination, the power of exhibition. The sublime experience exalts our sense of reason’s power. We can think infinity even if we can’t see it or count it or bound it. That is a very special thing to be able to do!

526. “In presenting the sublime in nature the mind feels agitated….” This is the opposite of the experience of beauty, where the mind is restful.

527. “Just as we cannot pass judgment on the beautiful if we are seized by inclination and appetite, so we cannot pass judgment at all on the sublime in nature if we are afraid.” The sublime requires safety—you can’t be standing on the edge of a cliff.

527. [The sublime] reveals in us a superiority over nature that is the basis of a self-preservation quite different in kind from the one that can be assailed and endangered by nature outside us.” The sublime shows our superiority over nature. Reason is higher than sensibility in Kant’s scheme, but he seems careful in his praise at this point for the sublime because he doesn’t want us to become arrogant about our powers—self-sufficient and mature, willing to be responsible for our actions, yes, but not arrogant and withdrawn from nature. As mentioned above, though (see comment about pg. 520), this doesn't diminish the value of the sublime.

529. “[T]he fact that a judgment about the sublime in nature requires culture … still in no way implies that it was initially produced by culture….” The sublime, Kant goes on to say, has its foundation in moral feeling. Also, “taste we demand unhesitatingly from everyone, because here judgment refers the imagination merely to the understanding, our power of concepts; in the case of feeling, on the other hand, judgment refers the imagination to reason, our power of ideas….” Reason ranks higher—it is the “power of ideas.” Understanding is only the “power of concepts.” That is, understanding has to do with the ordinary capacity to perceive things.

Perhaps we can see Coleridge and Shelley here—the world of sense is chaotic, and for Shelly, imagination takes on some Kantian functions; it harmonizes sensory input. Faculty psychology seems to get sucked into “imagination” as if it were a philosophical black hole. See also Coleridge’s idea about Primary Imagination, which works like the Understanding, only tinged with the divine. Secondary Imagination is the capacity the poet employs; it is the creative power at work in the making of art.

530. “[W]e must [here] take sensus communis to mean the idea of a sense shared [by all of us], i.e., a power to judge that in reflecting takes account…of everyone else’s way of presenting….” This is a key passage on sensus communis. Read also the following: “[W]e compare our judgment not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible judgments of others….”
530. “[Let us compare with this sensus communis] the common human understanding, even though the latter is not being included here….” Then Kant makes the fundamental claims of the Enlightenment: “(1) to think for oneself; (2) to think from the standpoint of everyone else; and (3) to think always consistently.” The main thing is to be liberated from superstition. Being human, by definition, involves being able to think beyond the senses. Nietzsche says that consistency is admirable, but false. (One might profitably relate Nietzsche to Kant, Schiller, and Freud on the task of civilization.)

531. But Kant elevates the term sensus communis by saying that taste is more properly called a sensus communis than is common human understanding. He writes further that “We could even define taste as the ability to judge something that makes our feeling in a given presentation universally communicable without mediation by a concept.” The judgment of beauty doesn’t require a college degree—all it requires is that our basic capacities aren’t impaired; it demonstrates the mind’s freedom and nature’s accordance with our primary capacities: the free play of the imagination with the understanding. The sublime has more to do with reason and, to an extent, culture. Yet, the sublime tends to make us arrogant and rationalistic. It withdraws us from nature rather than making us feel at home in its proximity and harmony for us. We are not “aliens” on earth, as the medieval Church says. Yes, the romantics will like Kant—he keeps us rather close to nature.

531. “Art is distinguished from nature as doing…is from acting or operating in general….” Regarding “On Art in General,” we might refer to Coleridge’s statement that the secondary imagination “coexists with the conscious will.”

532. Art is a product of deliberation—the artist intends to make art. But that isn’t the same thing as saying precisely what the characteristics of the finished work will be. Art is a kind of play, so the viewer is able to deal with it as “beautiful” much as with a flower in nature. There is no need to refer it to a definite idea or preconceived conception. The artist needs rules to provide “body” for spirit. The material is the medium for spirit.

532. “Art is likewise distinguished from craft.” Art is not the same as labor. But Kant also says that “there is yet a need for something in the order of a constraint….” Art requires constraints, just as Wordsworth says poetry, while it mustn’t be reduced to meter, requires meter and other constraints.

533-34. “[G]enius is the exemplary originality of a subject’s natural endowment in the free use of his cognitive powers.” Genius consists in being highly endowed with the free use of mental powers—especially imagination. If I am sculpting a bird, for instance, a free imagination may play with or develop the concept, tease out its possibilities.

Moreover, spirit is transmissible; the artist can express the “mental state” involved in the creative act. That is, the artist can embody the harmony of creation or passion in an image or an idea. Kant is not interested in the claim that art is imitation. He’s close to the Coleridgean remark that genius provides its own intrinsic rules.

534. On imitation—artists shouldn’t strive to imitate genius’ example; the point is to follow genius by way of emulation. Some concluding questions about the difference between art and natural objects: the form of a painting can be beautiful, as can the form of a flower. But what if the painting is an imitation or representation of an object? What if it is a portrait of which, as Aristotle would say, we know the original? Or even if it is only claimed to be a portrait of Lady So-and-So, 1784? Wouldn’t this amount to accessory beauty—adhaerens—something that we would refer to an original? Can a portrait or an image of a flower be matter for a pure judgment of taste?

See the Werner Pluhar edition of Critique of Judgment, page 173, paragraph 45. The fine arts, as opposed to the mechanical arts, seem like nature. We do not think about the artist’s intention to copy something—a face, a rule, etc. As for genius, Kant says, it gives the rule to art. Genius is natural endowment, and it operates like nature. We suspend our consideration of the artist’s intent. Finally, Kant does not capture the entire range of possible values in an encounter with art. He emphasizes the one that allows him to demonstrate our freedom from determination by nature. Notice the contrast here with Aristotle, who pays a great deal of attention to the emotional side of our response to art.

New note for 2005 session: the first page of our selection is a summary of Kant’s aesthetics, so it’s a good passage to analyze in straightforward language. At bottom, Kant is positing an experience that is universally communicable and (at least potentially) valid for all. As individuals, we get a pleasurable, even “easy,” sense of our own mind’s power, and we also might derive from this experience at least the possibility of a universal human community rooted in pleasure—rooted, that is, not just in cold reason or logic, but in feeling. Kant’s notion of humanity is itself based on his faith in the power of enlightenment—we all have a tremendous amount of potential, so we can develop ourselves into fuller human beings and develop communities in which everyone, both together and individually, takes full responsibility for his or her actions. It is well to investigate the mind’s logical and intellectual powers (Critique of Pure Reason), and well also to investigate what is meant by duty (Critique of Practical Reason). But a vital part of Kant’s philosophy is his concern for aesthetics, for the experience of beauty. This experience is, in his view, liberating—we sense our powers in a way that doesn’t leave us enslaved to nature (the world of objects), or cast us as mere thinking machines, or as a set of imperious duties and responsibilities always to be carried out. In a way—and in spite of the difficult vocabulary in Critique of Judgment, Kant is playing Philip Sidney’s “right popular philosopher” when he writes about aesthetic judgment: he is embracing the realm of pleasure and feeling, rather than bracketing it out in favor of absolute philosophical coherence.

Edition:The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York : Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Week 04, Horace and Dr. Johnson

2009-02-11T19:00:00.000-08:00

Notes on Horace’s “Ars Poetica.”

We are used to the idea that art is oppositional, a “disturbing and disintegrating force,” as Wilde said individualism and art should be. As post-romantics, we also tend to judge art with an eye towards its originality, its source in an individual’s imagination and passions. Horace’s views may not appeal to us if we don’t historicize our sensibilities to the needs of his time and to the Romans’ attitude towards concepts like “genius” and “expression.” For Horace, art’s social function is not opposition but rather urbane adornment. A good poetic craftsman reassures the public’s sense of what is appropriate in speech and conduct, enhancing their sense that they live in a stable world. He delights and teaches them with good verses, ones that make them take pleasure in what is essentially already their own view of politics and their particular social order. Decorum—the delineation and observance of what is fitting—are central to the Horatian poet’s task.

Horace lived through tough, unsettling times (65-8 BCE). Rome had lived through decades of dictatorships and civil unrest. Horace was around twenty years of age when Julius Caesar was assassinated (44 BCE), and Octavian didn’t take over to become Augustus Caesar until 27 BCE (the reign lasted until 14 AD, when Tiberius took over). Although Horace at first opposed Octavian, he came around later to accept the Emperor’s vision of post-Republican stability, continuity, and virtue. The political forms had changed, but Augustus wasn’t interested in radically transforming Roman civilization; he seems genuinely to have admired the ancient virtues that made Rome strong, and he tried to promote them every way he could. Horace, then, allies his notions about patient craftsmanship and practical recognition with Augustan political imperatives.

125. Horace would agree with modern people that languages and societies are born, develop, and die or get transformed. He uses the organic metaphor of “leaves” to make this point. So the poet must, in the deep sense, be a follower of fashions, know how the leaves are falling: know your time’s needs, and the words most appropriate to your audience’s aesthetic and moral sensibilities. You can’t teach and delight people who lived 500 years ago, so you have to please those in the here and now.

126. Expression? Well, we need to read Horace carefully here. When he says that you must first weep if you want to make others weep, he isn’t offering a romantic expressivist theory of poetic creation. He is arguing instead that certain kinds of utterances or written sentences most closely “fit” certain character types and situations. Notice that he says nature produces expression by fashioning and shaping our emotions. In ancient times, the passions are figured as coming from without, as an external set of forces that impact us powerfully. Consider Sappho’s brief lyric poem, “Eros seizes and shakes my very soul / Like the wind on the mountain / Shaking ancient oaks.” Words are like tragic masks, validating and expressing the emotion that the poet has deemed appropriate to the character and the situation. We should not forget that masks don’t quash emotion or individuality—they both enhance and validate it, rendering it more permanent. So the fact that emotion isn’t something that comes from within and then is “expressed” shouldn’t make us interpret Horatian expression as stale conventionality. Conventionality itself, handled well, is a powerful artistic element. Wilde said, “give a man a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth.” No doubt he was thinking of Greek drama.

127. Imitation: we don’t imitate nature, but rather human nature and social conventions. The poet finds out from literary tradition and close social observation what the appropriate conduct and language are, and then makes his poetry reflect those standards. The public wants its stable world view reflected and ennobled in poetry and other art forms. That’s why decorum is important—well-crafted poetry’s harmony with received notions produces pleasure. Craft itself is important, too, because it is orderly and observant of literary rules. The poet should be a good literary citizen.

129. Horace sees some licentiousness behind tragedy. The Satyr play is a response to the audience’s less noble composition and needs. That’s how Horace deals with the Dionysian element in tragedy. But he shows some pragmatic concern about art’s relationship with an audience. He would agree that we should “preserve and ennoble” character types, not debase our art to the level of lowbrows in the peanut gallery. Art should maintain what is best in a society, and improve what is less than worthwhile.

130-31: The artist should follow Greek models. But Horace also wants to assert Roman independence from the Greeks. His classicism is of the better sort, and his advocacy of Roman literature’s development looks forward to French and Italian advocacy of a modern national literature, not just copying from the Romans. (Cf. Du Bellay and Dante, among others.) The “Children of Numa” have their own literature, and they should keep developing it. So Horace’s view of language and literature is dynamic—it must fit its public’s sensibilities and needs at any given time. Polish seems to be the Roman form of excellence—Roman artists are good craftsmen, in the way we think of the French as great chefs and winemakers.

Horace sees literature as a force for shaping culture and morals as well as for accommodating political and social needs, not a vehicle for violent change. He has come to support Augustus’ political values and his enlistment of literature in that cause. See his comments on the degeneration of Old Comedy into mere licentiousness, and the Satyr play as a great lady dancing a bit with the peasants on a feast day because everyone expects her to.

131. Poets and Critics. The critic provides advice on craft and decorum, on how to achieve formal excellence. Horace sees the person of letters as a literary stylist in a rather modern way. The artist measures his success partly by selling his work as a commodity, even if not for a living. The broader point to be drawn from Horace’s practical comments about selling books is that poets serve a specialized function in Roman society. They please and teach the public, decking out their cultural values attractively. Language clothes morality, serves as ornament. Horace keeps making fun of the “mad poet.” He would probably agree with Wilde that “the origin of all bad poetry is sincere emotion.” True craftsmen knows their duty with regard to the reading public; their “specialized” labor function (a modern version of that idea appears in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations) should not consist in a fashionable, class-driven pose of alienation, isolated genius, or divine inspiration by the Muse. Byron’s sardonic opening of Don Juan—“Hail muse! etc.”—isn’t far from Horace’s lips.

So what underlies good writing and craftsmanship? Wisdom—the wisdom that comes from long imitation of “life and manners,” not the insights or delusions flowing from observing the obscure movements of the psyche.

131: The Romans are businesslike even in art. They appreciate fine craft, orderly and well planned work. The Greeks are wonderful, says Horace, but at times a bit wild. Let them have their divine madness.

132-33. Since the poet adorns values, fitness of speech is of the essence. The buying public won’t tolerate a mediocre poet who lacks eloquence and who violates their sense of decorum, of proportion in all character types and situations. A mediocre lawyer or doctor may be useful, but a mediocre poet’s main function is to adorn our world view, so we demand excellence as integral to that function. We want to be delighted and taught—Horace might well agree with Sidney’s later formulation that the poet teaches by delighting, even though Sidney’s statement stems from the Christian notion that original sin has adversely affected the will. Moreover, Horace apparently would like to see a greater sense of professionalism amongst poets—too many equestrian-ranked amateurs are scribbling poetry. Poetasters have been around forever, it seems. Wealth does not give one the crown as poet. See Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon for a send-up of rich art patrons.

133: Art has done humanity great service, writes Horace. It has allied itself with wisdom, helping thereby to establish and maintain the golden mean. It has been vital to civilization, separating, ordering, ranking things and people in the proper way. (See Shelley’s broad definition of the poet—perhaps his argument owes something to Horace, though the sentiment is much different.)

133-34: Talent and genius are both necessary. Genius, says Horace, may be a gift of nature, but talent must help us develop our genius and our linguistic facility. Artistic labor shapes and directs the force of genius as a builder and enhancer of civilization. Originality, in the modern romantic sense, does not seem to matter to Horace. Still, for all Horace’s love of conventionality, we need not consider him stale and bloodless. An artist can work within established literary and cultural traditions and yet be innovative and fulfill deep cultural and individual needs. Again, a mask is conventional artifice or a device, but if properly deployed, it enhances expression.

134-35: The “mad poet” enframes and overflows Horace’s text on poetry, as if the text offers itself as “the safe and sane middle ground” on the issue of what poetry is and how one becomes a poet. Horace writes a decorous treatise on decorum. He doesn’t see a need to offer us either Plato’s condemnation of art or Aristotle’s confident defense of poetry. Aristotle, of course, comes late in the line of philosopher-scientists from the Pre-Socratics onward, and he vigorously opposes Plato’s view of the relationship between art and life. One might say Plato was concerned that the ancient mythology lowered over his “modern” Greece, promoting an uncomfortably close association between irrational art and everyday life. Under the rule of myth, art was an all-encompassing way of life. Aristotle has more confidence in the advent of the rational, scientific outlook, so he is able to defend art by treating it in a scientific manner. Horace’s argument is less philosophical than either Plato’s or Aristotle’s, but he is responding to the needs of a practical culture embarked upon an imperial project that would span centuries. So he promotes art as a valuable but specialized social practice; the Romans have no problem separating and distinguishing art from life’s other facets. The poet has a well-delineated, limited role with regard to the community. Perhaps this is true in all highly specialized, urban societies: consider the advent of industrial capitalism and its driving class, the bourgeoisie. With the coming of the new scientific-industrial paradigm, romantic artists responded with anxious defiance to what they felt as a radical threat of marginalization and even extinction of the human imagination and the art created from it. Horace feels no such anxiety.

Concluding thoughts on Horace: the Greeks understood the forces impinging upon the individual and the human realm as wild and incompatible, while the Augustan Romans treated external forces as more regular and predictable. These different visions of how the world beyond us shapes our identities and social forms are still with us—you can find both attitudes in modern philosophy and theory. Everyone says external forces impact us and at least partly account for who we become and what we do, but people differ concerning our chances of comprehending and controlling those forces.

Today the notion that, for better or for worse, everything is regulated by convention has come back into vogue. Not so much in an affirmative “neoclassical” or Horatian way, but rather in the sense that contemporary theorists see conventional systems regulating everything from language to power relations in the social and political sphere. There’s a great deal of distrust of any formulation telling us we can strip away conventionality and artifice and get at the essence of something like “meaning,” “language,” “spirit,” etc. The individual is construed as the effect of many forces converging and conflicting, and meaning is often described as an effect generated by the play of elements within a sign system, whether the theorist sees that system as satisfyingly closed and complete or otherwise. Structuralism certainly emphasized the notion that we understand things on the basis of structural relationships, by way of relations rather than fixed inner meanings or roles. All of this acknowledges that we are creatures of both habit and convention, and takes up an attitude towards the fundamental claim that stability of perception and thought is itself a kind of necessary wish-fulfillment on our part.

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Page-by Page Notes on Johnson’s “The Rambler, No. 4.”

Johnson remains interesting partly because he writes at the point where neoclassical precepts are about to be challenged by romantic practice and theory. One the whole, however, he is a fine example of the best sort of neoclassical “pragmatic” criticism—perceptive, flexible, and sound in his comments. His defense of Shakespeare, for instance, still rings true today.

Discussing the relatively new and popular genre, the novel, leads Johnson to lay bare his mimetic and pragmatic theories in combination. As with Aristotle and Corneille and Dryden and Pope, the poet’s task is to imitate nature. But as with the same critics, that doesn’t mean simple-minded copying of the environment, human characteristics and habits, or social conventions. It involves SELECTION and arrangement with a PURPOSE—in Johnson’s case a directly moral purpose.

463-65. Johnson was called “the last great critic who understood absolutely nothing about art” because he is straightforwardly didactic in his demands of artists. He is especially worried about the novel in this regard—it reaches a broad audience of semi-educated people. Johnson isn’t as cynical about this new kind of relationship between authors and readership as, say, the late Victorian George Gissing in New Grub Street, one of whose characters refers to the reading public as "quarter-educated," but he is determined to lay down some moral rules that the novelist ought to follow.

Novelists are usually realists—”they are engaged in portraits of which every one knows the original” (463). Novelists write for an audience that knows the world they are evoking with the stroke of a pen. So they can judge a novelist's mimetic performance, but they can also be morally corrupted by a book whose author doesn’t select carefully what ought and ought not be shown to the reading public. After all, the novel in Johnson’s day probably had about as much impact, comparatively, as film today. Today, we sometimes hear arguments about how corruptive the internet can be to people’s sense of fact, and perhaps to their sense of right and wrong. Culture critics still complain sometimes that there’s no “moderator” for internet information—that is, no authority figures step in to make appropriate selections. This argument has something of the flavor of Johnson's moral concerns about art’s power to corrupt the ignorant by appealing to their basest passions.

464. SELECTIVE IMITATION based upon sound moral principles is the key to good art. Johnson is very blunt on this point, more so than previous critics we have read.

465. Literature, says Johnson, should be uplifting. That was the idea during the Renaissance as well: as Sidney wrote, the poet should “lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of” (333). But now novelists (not the poet) is the “right popular philosopher[s],” and they reach bigger audiences than ever. There is some danger that the moral stuffing will go out of the genre and authors will simply give the public what it wants: mere titillation, entertainment without further value. Such entertainment would amount to pandering, not instruction from a position of cultural authority. We might illustrate Johnson’s concern by referring to a diagram in terms of the novel. One might draw it as follows: Work | Critic | Public—as if they’re all on the same level, rather than there being an hierarchical relationship with the work at the highest level, the public at the bottom, and the critic mediating between the two.

Page-by Page Notes on Johnson’s Rasselas

466. “It is commonly observed that the early writers are in possession of nature, and their followers of art....” Johnson makes the same point as Alexander Pope—Homer knows best. But again, that is true of Homer only because he first looked to “nature and life.” Johnson’s philosopher Imlac does the same.

466-67. “To a poet nothing can be useless. Whatever is beautiful, and whatever is dreadful, must be familiar to his imagination....” A fair amount of Johnson’s phrasing shows up in the work of subsequent authors. If we didn’t know better, we would think Johnson was Shelley with that phrase “legislator of mankind.” This is probably where Shelley got the phrase, though he added “unacknowledged” as a qualifier, thus signaling a fundamental temporal and spiritual split between poetic imaginative vision and the utilitarian, bourgeois public of early C19 Britain. Shelley says that the poet is “superior to time and place.” The romantics borrow the rhetoric of universality, but the universal passions are what they emphasize, and there is less emphasis on reason. Oscar Wilde and the modernists will also borrow the idea that nothing is useless to the artistic consciousness.

When Johnson says the poet must not streak the tulip or color his work with the “prejudices of his age or country,” he is making a broad point, not painting pictures of nightingales singing to please themselves, in total isolation from their fellows. Rather, poets themselves should skillfully select from, abstract from, their own age’s customs and manners to present an ideal moral vision that will shore up the moral consensus amongst their contemporaries. This “superiority,” therefore, has to do with the smooth transmission of cultural values based upon a sound hierarchy of education and rank—not with romantic self-isolation and exaltation.

467. “The business of a poet, said Imlac, is to examine, not the individual, but the species: to remark general properties and large appearances: he does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest. He is to exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features, as recall the original to every mind....” This passage does not mean that Johnson ignores the need for close empirical observation of manners, customs, nature, etc. In fact, close observation is required as the raw material for proper selection. Still, I wouldn’t make a romantic of Johnson—there’s a big difference between most of his statements about “just representations of general nature” and Walter Pater’s claim that “it is only the roughness of the eye that ever makes two things appear alike.” Johnson might say, “you may be right, but who cares about the streaks on the tulip? We want an idea of the tulip, an image we can all recognize—that idea is vital to the reaffirmative function of art.” I believe Johnson would be fully capable of appreciating streaked tulips in nature, but when he writes about art (i.e. representations that send us back to nature armed with an intelligible scheme for comprehending it), such inexhaustible variety isn’t to the point. The phrase “interpreters of nature” clues us in to the element of good Baconian empiricism in Johnson’s pragmatic theory of art. Johnson betrays a certain distrust of particularity at this point—like many 18th-century philosophers, he distrusts words, images, representations that might come at us as if they were the thing itself. A representation that tries so hard to rival physical nature (or human nature, for that matter) that it displaces it might succeed in averting our gaze from “things themselves.”

The poet should bring out what is universal about nature and humanity. Johnson’s poetics are deeply social and pragmatic. Selection is the lifeblood of civilized society. As Oscar Wilde says later, “it is a mark of the civilized man to be profoundly moved by statistics.” That is very different from romanticism—Blake says, “to generalize is to be an idiot.” Of course, that statement is itself a generalization.

Page-by-Page Notes on Johnson’s “Preface to Shakespeare”

468. “To works... of which the excellence is not absolute and definite... no other test can be applied than length of duration and continuance of esteem.” Johnson says only time can test poetic value. Obviously, he projects his culture’s values to an infinite point in the future and links them back to the ancients. Continuity is central to him—we might compare his ideas in this regard to T. S. Eliot’s claims in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

469. “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.” Shakespeare has stood the test of time because he offers “just representations of general nature.” He offers us common humanity, the “general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated.” We may be surprised to find Wordsworth using much the same language to describe the poet’s subject matter. He, too, believes that certain “passions” are universal to all humankind, though of course he favors the natural environment and rural speech as the best means of digging down to this bedrock of general human nature. Johnson calls Shakespeare’s characters “species,” not mere individuals. (Don’t we get the sense that Shakespeare’s characters are individuals? What would Johnson say to that? Well, probably that they seem so “lifelike” precisely because we recognize elements of our own common nature, not because Shakespeare’s characters are unique.)

470-71. “But love is only one of many passions....” Shakespeare’s universalism does not come at the price of unrealistic ideals—we see human beings on the stage, not heroes. “Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men....” No matter what the Beatles say, love is not all you need. Other strong passions may exert just as great an influence upon us. (Madame de Staël makes the same point, by the way.)

471. “Shakespeare approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful....” Shakespeare “mirrors” life—but again, Johnson’s notion of imitation isn’t narrow copying. Shakespeare’s Romans don’t look like Romans. (See Thomas Love Peacock’s hilarious send-up, “The Four Ages of Poetry,” 690 near bottom.) He draws the universal principle from close scrutiny of the accidentals and particulars. So who says he had insufficient Greek? He’s a good Aristotelian natural scientist. We might also say that Shakespeare is the master of metaphor—Johnson’s description of Shakespeare’s ability to make remote things feel close and wonderful things familiar is a pre-romantic way of saying that Shakespeare “strips away the film of familiarity” or, as Shelley writes, that art should teach us to “imagine that which we know.”

472. “All pleasure consists in variety.” Robust appreciation of Shakespeare lifts Dr. Johnson out of the run of neoclassical critics here—the bard’s drama embraces the high and the low, and Johnson, in spite of his moral quibbling, refuses to condemn its variety.

473. “Shakespeare engaged in dramatic poetry with the world open before him; the rules of the ancients were yet known to few....” Shakespeare was a genre-buster. Maybe he wasn’t a follower of strict rules formulated by critics, but he understood human nature so well that at times he is effectually a law unto himself. But he’s really just a good observer of humankind. So it’s okay to have a gravedigger scene in Hamlet: that’s the way life is, the tragic is always next to the comic and ridiculous. King Lear mustn’t be allowed to stray too far from his Fool. Coleridge and others will take this notion much farther, since of course they’re interested in Shakespeare as a sublime example of genius, a capacity that generates its own laws in the process of artistic creation.

But do you agree that Shakespeare put only his skill into tragedy, and his genius or instinct into comedy? Could that be because tragedy is Dionysian, and requires surrender of identity? Or because tragedy requires more stylistic rigor? I don’t know. At any rate, Johnson says Shakespeare is universal, a poet for all ages. Well, so far I’d have to say he’s making good on that claim. Still, forever is a long time.

474-76. Shakespeare’s faults: 1) he sacrifices virtue for the sake of convenience, and generally fails to keep good and evil apart, so sometimes we get too attractive a portrait of vice; 2) he is loose in his plots, as in King Lear’s letter-plot hatched by Edmund; 3) he does not observe the niceties of history—see Thomas Peacock’s satire in “The Four Ages of Poetry” about Elizabethan dealings with history; 4) there are too many faults in his diction—he would give up the world for a quibble, and has tried every style except simplicity (“Tis scarce two hours since the worshipped sun peered forth the golden window of the east,” etc.); 6) he does not observe the unities.

476. “I shall... adventure to try how I can defend him. His histories, being neither tragedies nor comedies are not subject to any of their laws....” Johnson’s defense of Shakespearean poetry involves him in a discussion of neoclassical verisimilitude.

477-78. “The necessity of observing the unities of time and place arises from the supposed necessity of making the drama credible.” The upshot is that we are not fooled into taking the performance on the stage for reality; rather, it calls to mind reality. As Johnson says on 478, “The reflection that strikes the heart is not, that the evils before us are real evils, but that they are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed. If there be any fallacy, it is not that we fancy the players, but that we fancy ourselves unhappy for a moment.” We know the difference between reality and representation. Imitations “bring realities to mind.” In such and such a way might we feel or act in such and such a well-played situation. The emotion that arises when a mother reflects upon the possibility that death might snatch her child away is real and true to life. We fancy ourselves happy or unhappy—but such a fancy is still an authentic feeling.

It simply isn’t the case that we get so drawn into the whole affair that we feel for the characters themselves or absolutely identify with them. There’s more critical distance here than some neoclassical theorists—especially bad ones—allow. We appreciate fiction as fiction, and we don’t mistake it for life. It is arguable whether or not this kind of claim is fully compatible with Aristotelian catharsis, which some theorists who really like the Dionysian background of tragedy find has a lot to do with genuine emotion getting stirred up in spectators for the characters. But Johnson clearly doesn’t see drama as an opportunity to stir up communal frenzy in the name of Dionysus.

And of course modern dramatic theory like that of Artaud in The Theater and Its Double wouldn’t accept the way Johnson treats engagement with a work of art as something neatly delimitable and reflective, in a kind of mirror relation with real life. For Artaud, we have lost the ability to experience anything in real life or at least to appreciate its full power; the point is to make theater a genuinely unsettling experience, to immerse us in it, stripping us of the everyday ego that helps us make the kinds of firm separations and distinctions Johnson thinks necessary. We must stage events, says Artaud, not petty men wrapped up in themselves. So Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty isn’t like life, it is life. It doesn’t abstractly instruct us about life, it is life.

Edition: Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition. New York : Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

Week 03, Aristotle

2009-02-10T20:08:00.000-08:00

Notes on Aristotle’s The Poetics

An introduction to Greek Theater can be found in the Guides section of my Wiki.

Scientific Method: Aristotle is a scientist who treats art as any other thing that can be studied. Why dismiss it? Our topic is poetry, he says, as if it were an organism that can be taken apart and studied. Plato was not interested in that kind of study, and didn’t consider the natural world fit to study; it wasn’t a valid source of knowledge. Aristotle, however, disagrees: we learn our earliest lessons by representation. It is a natural activity, not a matter of hack copying or divine inspiration. An infant mimics things, and learns from that activity. The child begins to make sense of the world, and takes pleasure in learning. We can even see painful events represented and yet take pleasure in the representation. The major difference between Aristotle and Plato is that for the former, the universe is processive, a matter of becoming; for Plato, Being is central, and it cannot be grasped through material perception. (Footnote 1)

Representation: Aristotle says that tragedy is a representation, but we should ask, “of what specifically?” Certainly not everyday affairs since the subject of tragedy is usually mythic—did Oedipus or Medea really exist? Rather, tragedy imitates an ‘‘action’’—an intelligible design or pattern that we derive from a well-constructed plot. (Footnote 2)

Plot: As for the construction of plot, Aristotle isn’t interested in what the neoclassical critics called verisimilitude: exact copying isn’t the point. See 114—even if I paint a female deer with horns, we can excuse the fault somewhat if I did it very well. And the unities of time and place are subject to artistic need; they don’t govern artistic need. Aristotle simply says that a play should be made so that we can “take it in,” maintain a proper sense of proportion with regard to characters and events. (Footnote 3)

Action: Let’s define what Aristotle means by plot a bit more precisely. What’s important isn’t just the plot incidents. See his definition of tragedy on page 95: “Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action…” Included in this definition are the key terms “pity and terror” and “catharsis.” Well, the dramatist arranges plot events in accordance with probability and necessity, so the plot events (the “arrangement of incidents,” to be precise) will be able to deliver to us an intelligible pattern—this is what we might call the ‘‘action’’—which will have universal cognitive significance. We will learn something from the play.

Consider Oedipus Rex. Surely the lesson isn’t simply that you shouldn’t sleep with your mother and kill your father. Those are primal taboos. Perhaps, then, we see the iron law of prophecy brought home to us: Oedipus had tried to flee a prophecy, but the god’s words catch up with him anyway. Even this admirably clever character cannot outwit his own fate. Or perhaps we come to understand the painful process of gaining insight into the nature of things and of ourselves. The play tells us something about the way the world works and how we fit into it. Another example would be Sophocles’ Antigone—there are competing sets of laws and right in the cosmos. Antigone asserts familial piety, while Creon asserts his prerogative to be obeyed as king. To some extent, both are right. Again, what about Dickens’ Great Expectations? Characters find out that their hopes are rooted in illusion, and they must let go of the hopes. We can discover a pattern of meaning in material phenomena and events by studying them carefully. The world is an intelligible order that we can learn from and about, so why not, Aristotle seems to be asking, employ the methods of natural science to art? He offers us a very powerful methodology that allows us to derive meaning from any object of study. (Footnote 4)

Catharsis: Why arouse strong emotions simply to purge them? As a professor of mine used to argue, “that’s like saying, ‘please beat me because it feels good when you stop.’” Perhaps Aristotle means that we learn something about an action by our emotional response to it, just as the characters in the plays constantly hash out their responses to a sparse distribution of terrible events. The idea that by “catharsis” Aristotle means “intellectual clarification” is an attractive idea, but we need not deny the sway of passion as an element in his theory. I believe there’s a way to put the “emotional” and the “intellectual” interpretations of catharsis into a meaningful relationship. I suggest that while tragedy may induce a physiological state, at the same time or as part of the same process it provides us critical distance from life, so it is also a learning experience. This critical distance occurs as a complex reaction during the emotional experience and from the fact that the theater is only partly closed off as a space. (For the Athenians, we might point out, the theater was not entirely an enclosed space as it generally is today.)

Perhaps, then, we should not be too quick to dismiss the notion that by catharsis Aristotle really means “the stimulation and purgation of powerful emotions.” Aristotle always said that arriving at the mean was the best thing to do: keep the middle way in all things. Tragedy, after all, may be viewed in broad social terms as a response to the need to contain primal violence and disturbing emotions that cannot be eradicated from human nature. If we can’t banish them outright, we have to find ways of containing them within the rituals of civic life. The drama staged at annual festivals at Athens and elsewhere developed and remained under the aegis of Dionysus, the orgiastic god of wine and dance, so it might plausibly be said to serve such a function. The cathartic effect isn’t necessarily the poet’s conscious aim. Rather, the way he puts together his play generates the effect Aristotle finds desirable. The Greeks had long seen music as a means of curing insanity, and their mystery rituals seem to have involved dancing that induced frenzy giving way to less intense emotions. (This is the distinction between pathos and ethos.) So perhaps Aristotle borrows from this “health-care” framework to a greater degree than proponents of catharsis as a means of intellectual clarification would find comfortable. It may be that the events at the City Dionysia festival were a “controlled overflow of powerful feelings,” which could be aroused and released as part of an overall learning experience. If so, we can have intellectual clarification and emotional release, too.

I’m suggesting that we might be in accord with a medical notion of catharsis, and yet draw from Aristotle the idea that art provides us with a degree of formal distance from which to reflect upon life’s events. Without this distance, there is no place for reflection, for learning. Some later critics will agree with this—see Wordsworth’s comments in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” about what meter does for poetry, though post-modern art would respond in complex ways to the demand for distance. For instance, isn’t some modern art based on the notion that we are already distant from or alienated from our own life conditions? If so, the point might well be to re-immerse us in the flow of life, to present art as more immediate than life itself, not necessarily to force reflection upon us. Maybe we have Hamlet’s disease—conscience “doth make cowards of us all.” Hamlet inhabits a world in which “enterprises of great pitch and moment / Are sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, / And lose the name of action.” But we can derive from Aristotle the fundamental notion that art requires formal distancing from everyday life, and that this distance is necessary if we are to gain perspective. If you want to play Hegel with that idea, you could mutter something profound about the need for consciousness to lose itself so that it may transcend itself. We need contradictions in order to overcome them and arrive at a higher understanding, a higher level of spirit and intellection. But that’s for later on. The basic idea is that art is a vital kind of artifice, and that artifice, if we listen to Aristotle (and Oscar Wilde, and Schiller, and the Symbolists, etc.) is simply part of what it means to be human. Good lord! Stop me before I sound even more like a school catalog description of “humanistic inquiry.” So let me put things in a more Wildean way—it is unnatural for humans to be caught au naturel, unnatural for them not to adorn their sense of reality the better to reflect upon it and gain insight.

It makes sense to register the effects of strong tragedy in your own consciousness. I do not pity King Lear or feel afraid at the spectacle of his downfall. His behavior and his situation move me, but the “feeling” is strangely intellectual and somehow different than a merely physiological response to real events. From such real-life events, one feels something more like shock and numbness. However, when I watch a tragedy, it seems that my intellect is constantly acting upon or reacting to feelings generated by the play. The term “critical distance” is plausible here. Could it be that feeling and intellect are in such a close relationship that we cannot separate them into stable opposites? For the sake of clarity, we need to separate feeling and intellect in a manner that Aristotle himself does, but as usual, the imperative of clarity, as Nietzsche would point out, involves terminological sleight of hand, and the drive to obtain clarity muddies the waters. We can certainly value some of Aristotle’s own ideas about imitation because they force us to consider the complexity of the relationship between the intellect and emotion.

Some Final Thoughts: One way of interpreting The Poetics is that in them Aristotle attempts to make tragedy safe for rational philosophy. After all, his work is a culmination of the philosophy-science movement from Anaximander onwards; for its practitioners, the point was to explain things on their natural terms and not by resorting to the divine as a principle of order. However, we could also “go Greek” in our reading of Aristotle. He writes in the awareness of a shift from an all-encompassing “mythology for life” to a more practical commercial way of life. Art and life have become somewhat more distinct by his time. Therefore, when Aristotle goes back to tragedy, the stuff of mythology, though of course in Sophocles and Euripides that mythology has been highly reworked and reinterpreted, he is to some extent to paying homage to the ancient stories that have shaped Greek life and thought. He certainly values them. He treats the ancient myths as the means of achieving a “usable past,” as “equipment for living,” as Kenneth Burke might say. Perhaps Aristotle is revaluing the old forms of thought and life, bringing them into his own present day. It may well be, too, that Aristotle well understood the nature of the clarity that Greek audiences derived from tragedy—one surprisingly ambivalent about their standing with regard to the cosmos and the gods. Aristotle never says “don’t worry, be happy.” I’m not at all convinced that he is simply a scientist who means to turn poetry into a perfectly vulgar “useful thing.” It is even possible that Aristotle is interested in tragedy because of its capacity to make an uneasy peace with the old terrors of early Greece —its tyrannical gods and powerful furies, before the scientific method began to hold sway in intellectual life. Don’t the old gods and myths give us insight into the limitations of our understanding, our powers of reason? This view would make Aristotle a recuperative figure, not merely a sunny analytic scientist. His Poetics could be an honest admission of his philosophy’s limitations, an admission that there is more to the human animal than rational philosophy can account for. Aristotle likes to study complicated things, and the human animal is complicated.

In sum, we come to Aristotle laden with other people’s interpretations as well as with our own desire that everything should make sense. This may cause us to misunderstand the nature of the object Aristotle is studying as well as the conclusions he arrives at concerning it. My reading of Aristotle could at least lead us to see that his philosophical methods are processive, that they consist in a project of overcoming limitations by recognizing them. In this way, Aristotle begins to look like the kind of system-builder that Friedrich Nietzsche admires; he sees that intuition and abstraction are both necessary, that we cannot entirely separate them without falsifying the validity of each.

Footnotes

Footnote 1: Pleasure and Pain: Aristotle says that we get pleasure from seeing otherwise unpleasurable things represented—we can enjoy the sufferings of Oedipus, for example. That’s because it satisfies a fundamental instinct for learning. But what about the pleasure we take in films like The Silence of the Lambs? Does the pleasure derive from the same source—love of learning? Or is something else at work here? You could argue that we delight in the aestheticization, the making-beautiful, of violence. Why is that? Is it that we are violent creatures, and therefore take delight in the adorned representation of violence? I wonder if there isn’t a dark side to Aristotle’s claims about what we get from art—he makes it all sound so rational, so intelligible. All Apollo, not much Dionysus. I’m not so sure. Identification with some other element within ourselves may also be at work—how else did Hitler get all those people to salute at the same time, to identify themselves with the Volk, and so forth? The Third Reich might well be described as a diabolical work of art in which every approve German could participate. That sort of thing has absolutely nothing to do with reason.

Footnote 2: Aristotle’s view is far more complex than can be rendered by the sometime translation of mimesis as “imitation.” In Aristotle’s view, we can appreciate the formal properties of a work of art even if we aren’t familiar with the original. In this sense the work becomes a “presentation,” an original in its own right—not a representation in the sense of mere copying. That sounds a bit like formalism, but Aristotle isn’t a modern formalist because he insists that art is a representation of something—we aren’t dealing with a theory that says art is absolutely autonomous, free of any ties to the world outside the text, canvas, or other media. That’s a modern notion.

Footnote 3: Similarly, a character should be constructed so that he or she behave and speaks true to type—otherwise, no intelligible pattern will emerge from the words and deeds of that character.

Footnote: A Nietzschean caveat—if things actually don’t make sense, then we are enlisting criticism and philosophy to falsify things, not clarify them. Or rather, it may be (sometimes) that to clarify is to falsify.

Page-by-Page Notes on Aristotle

91. “Our topic is poetry in itself and its kinds….” Aristotle treats art scientifically, classifying it in terms of medium, objects, and manner. Art is a species of representation, and tragedy is a subspecies of art. Plato wasn’t interested in this natural science method.

93. “Representation is natural to human beings from childhood.” Learning satisfies a primary instinct—we learn by imitating when we are children. Since imitation is a valid way of seeking knowledge, and poetry is imitation, poetry yields knowledge. So much for Plato’s condemnation of poetry on ontological grounds. Since we delight in engaging with representations, Aristotle’s theory at least partly recuperates pleasure, too. Apparently, seeking pleasure is a universal characteristic of human nature. But Aristotle will have more to say about this pragmatic or audience-oriented issue. (Pity and fear lead to catharsis.) The pre-historic Lascaux Caves of France , as one of my professors at UC Irvine suggested, are good evidence that Aristotle is correct about our instinctual need to imitate. Aristotle shows concern for the formal coherence of works of art, too: a representation need not produce pleasure on the basis of its accuracy. If I haven’t seen the thing or person represented in a painting, I can appreciate it as a presentation. Aristotle isn’t interested in narrow ideas about verisimilitude. See 114: if someone paints a female deer with horns out of ignorance, the viewer might still judge the painting good for its formal coherence—”because of its accomplishment, colour, or some other such cause”—rather than for its strict accuracy.

95-96. “Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action….” The deeper ontological or mimetic argument appears in Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as the imitation of a complete action. What is the plot imitating or representing? Not simply events. The incidents of ancient Greek tragedy are almost always mythological—you couldn’t imitate them in the strictest sense because they never happened. Rather, Aristotle implies that the dramatist arranges the particulars or incidents of his plot in accordance with probability and necessity to present us with a complete action. This “action” reveals something fundamental about the nature of things. Examples: the action of Oedipus the King is that of a man fleeing the truth about a prophecy who finds that the prophecy will be fulfilled in spite of his best efforts. Antigone’s action involves the clash of competing rights—Creon’s political order and Antigone’s familial and religious order. In Dickens’ Great Expectations, as Albert Wlecke of UC Irvine says, we can see a universal, intelligible pattern emerging in that various hopes are exposed as rooted in illusion: people hope on the basis of illusions, and after that hope is frustrated they must give it up. Aristotle says that life’s aim is an action: what we do matters more than our character type. Our actions will fit into a larger intelligible pattern, and will render us happy or unhappy.

96-98. “So plot is the origin and as it were the soul of tragedy, and the characters are secondary. Moreover, poetry is more universal than history. A drama links its incidents according to the probable and the necessary. History cannot derive intelligible patterns because it is limited to what actually happened: “poetry tends to speak of universals, history of particulars” (98 top). (A modern historian would suggest that history writing, too, requires emplotment.) If we are to learn anything from a tragedy, the protagonist’s slide downhill must occur in a way we can grasp: the action must have a properly linked beginning, a middle, and an end, along with recognition and reversal. A well-rounded plot gives us a complete action. The unities of time and place aren’t very important here. Aristotle doesn’t assume, as Plato does, that an audience needs to be taken in or fooled by the representation. Rather, for Aristotle a play is a learning experience that requires critical distance, not total immersion. We must explain what he means by “pity and fear” after this point.

98-99. “Among plots, some are simple and some are complex….” Recognition and reversal are logically structured plot-points, events on the way towards self-knowledge or knowledge of one’s standing with respect to the gods. Probability and necessity reign here—the movement of the plot should seem inexorable, and what happens should develop organically from within the sequence of events. So if all is well done, the audience experiences catharsis, a medical term meaning purgation.

100. “We must perhaps discuss next what {poets} should aim at and what they should beware of in constructing plots….” Characters are types; they are admirable but not perfect. They must “make a mistake” (hamartano), “miss the mark,” do something by which they become miserable. They will commit an error that we ourselves might commit were we in their position, though of course we know we aren’t in their position. So we will pity Oedipus or Antigone—might we not do as they did, if presented with the same dilemmas? This empathy will make us shudder because something equally terrible could befall us. Aristotle is still interested in the issue of “critical distance,” I would add, even when it seems we are most immersed in the play. Self-control and openness to experience are conjoined virtues for him. A question posed by Albert Wlecke—why arouse pity and fear simply to achieve catharsis or the purgation of pity and fear? Isn’t that like asking to be beaten because it’s enjoyable when the beating stops? Perhaps it makes more sense to say that we learn something about an action by our emotional response to it, and that we learn something about pity and fear, too.

102-03. “Regarding characters, there are four things at which {the poet} should aim. Character is subject to typification; probability and necessity reign here, too. We should preserve and ennoble the type. Characters should be good, appropriate, life-like, and consistent. Otherwise, if we can’t categorize them, we will draw no lesson from what happens to them—no pattern will emerge. Aristotle’s formal demands are in the service of his interests as a pragmatic critic: a tragedy succeeds by achieving certain formal effects. If it does that, it induces catharsis.

104. On 104 bottom, Aristotle writes, “As far as possible, [the poet should] also bring [his plots] to completion with gestures. Given the same nature, those [poets] who experience the emotions [to be represented] are most believable…. [T]he art of poetry belongs to the genius or the madman; of these, the first are adaptable, the second can step outside themselves.” This passage provides a scientific, dispassionate view of the notion that poetry is a species of madness; the idea doesn’t seem to bother Aristotle in the least. It’s interesting to see this notion in a critic who praises formal coherence and close attention to structure—the point seems to be that once these things are taken care of, the poet is free to invest genuine, even extreme, emotion in completing the representation with appropriate words and feelings.

105. “Part of every tragedy is the complication, and [part] is the solution…. By ‘complication,’ I mean the [tragedy] from the beginning up to the final part from which there is a transformation towards good fortune or misfortune; by ‘solution,’ the [tragedy] from the beginning of the transformation up to the end.” This passage shows that Aristotle thinks of a drama as an experience (for the perceiver) like the tying and untying of a knot—it provides the kind of satisfaction that comes when one deals with some difficulty. His expectation is that if the plot is tight and worthwhile, it will induce the proper tragic emotions. There’s much sense in his argument since, as anybody who has ever seen even a thriller or tear-jerker film can attest, art (along with other types of performance, such as political speeches, etc.) has little trouble generating predictable emotions even in a sophisticated audience. Which is why Elaine of Seinfeld is my hero for resisting the sentimental allure of that interminable movie The English Patient: “Just tell your stupid story about your stupid accident and DIE!”

113. “Impossible [incidents] that are believable should be preferred to possible ones that are unbelievable, and stories should not be constructed from improbable parts, but above all should contain nothing improbable; otherwise, it should be outside the plot-structure.” Aristotle is more flexible than prescriptive. His preference for adhering to what will seem probable to an audience is clear, but at the same time he admits that on occasion something improbable may need to make its way into a drama. In that case, the aim will be to avoid such an appearance from being integral to the action.

114. “[If] impossibilities have been produced, there is an error; but it is correct, if it attains the end of the art itself.” Aristotle also writes, “The error is less, if [an artist] did not know that a female deer has no horns, than if he painted without representing [anything].” That is, if through ignorance an artist paints a female deer with horns, and the painting pleases us because of its fine formal qualities, it might deserve some measure of praise—the error wouldn’t necessarily overwhelm our ability to enjoy the painting. The error committed would, as Aristotle had explained earlier on the same page, be an error in some art other than poetry itself—today we would say that the poet observe nature more closely or even take a course in zoology or whatever discipline would tell you how to distinguish male and female deer. If a poet knows the look of the thing to be represented and fails to draw or describe it properly, Aristotle has less sympathy: that is an error “in the art of poetry itself.” It’s a bad representation, a failure to execute.

114. On 113, Aristotle had written that a poet “is necessarily representing one of three things, either (a) things as they were or are, or (b) things as people say and think [they were or are], or (c) things as they should be.” On 114, he points out that “if [the poet] is criticised for representing things that are not true, perhaps he is representing them [as] they should be….” These statements show considerable subtlety on Aristotle’s part, and his further reference to Sophocles and Euripides reinforces this nuanced approach: we wouldn’t judge Sophocles the “ought” man in the same way we would judge Euripides the “is” man: we would take account of what we thought they were trying to do, and judge them accordingly. It is acceptable and even noble to represent what ought to be, even if our “representation” isn’t a straightforward description of things and people as they really are. If the poet wants to give us a vision of an improved humanity, that’s a laudable goal, not something to complain about. None of what Aristotle says in The Poetics should be taken as slipping away from a representational theory of art, but it’s also easy to see that he’s quite flexible and not rigidly prescriptive when it comes to what, exactly artists should represent. As he says on 116, there are five basic criticisms to make against a work of art: it’s “impossible, improbable, harmful, contradictory, or incorrect in terms of [another] art.” All of these criticisms, we may presume, are to be offered only in the spirit of helpful objectivity: there are no fewer than twelve “solutions” to the problems that may arise, and some of them amount to what we might call “extenuating circumstances” based upon the artist’s aim.

116. Epic poetry is wonderful stuff, but it appears that for Aristotle, tragedy takes the palm. Epic is too much of a “baggy monster” (as a critic once described Tolstoy’s novels) to permit of unified actions, while tragedy accomplishes the same essential tasks as epic without sacrificing unity. The vividness and concentration, the intensity, of a drama, in Aristotle’s view, make it a superior experience for an audience. The epic, he thinks, simply cannot move its hearers the way a tragic play can, or with the same goal of inducing catharsis. I’m not likely to agree with Aristotle that drama is “better” than my beloved copy of Homer’s Odyssey, but I understand what he’s getting at: drama suits his idea of art’s proper emotional impact and its social purpose more closely than epic narration.

Page numbers refer to The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York : Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

Week 02, Plato

2009-02-09T14:09:00.001-08:00

Notes on Plato.

The Republic, Book 2.

49. “The most important stage of any enterprise is the beginning….” Education is vital because young minds must be molded properly—that sounds much like our concept that early learning is the most important kind. Plato says that children’s minds are quite impressionable—the stories we tell them make an impression, most likely a permanent one, too. We will choose apt future guardians or phulakes—agile-minded, teachable children in whose souls we can leave a good imprint that will generate predictable results and a stable society. Everyone will lead an orderly life, do one appropriate job well, and love the Good and Reason as far as possible given his or her capacities as nurtured by sound education. Here we find Plato’s pragmatic emphasis—art can shape morals and maintain social control.

The Greeks generally considered poetry and music the primary instruments of paideia, or education. (See Werner Jaeger’s multivolume Paideia.) Plato doesn’t try to do away with poetry as a means of education since everyone in Greece treated Homer and other poets the way modern Christians treat the Bible—something to be relied on for an apt line or a moral precept, appreciated for its beauties, and so forth. This was the tradition. Still, Plato insists upon reforming poetry as a vehicle of education so that its effects may be controlled more effectively. After all, the State will be in charge of education; it won’t be simply a matter of children imbibing stories about Chronos trying to eat his children or Zeus dallying with nymphs. What we want is to shape minds for a lean, if not mean, Utopian State (one like Sparta)—not the corrupt and luxurious polity that Plato dislikes so much.

50. “Even if these stories are true, they ought not to be told so casually to young people and people who lack discrimination; it’s better to keep silent….” Only philosophers may suppress the truth or even lie because they do it for the people’s good. Philosophers-as-state-planners must restrict scurrilous tales about the gods to the ears of the very few who can avoid being corrupted by them. This is censorship, of course—but Plato’s goal is not freedom for modern bourgeois individuals; it is a sound moral collectivity.

51-55. On page 53, Socrates says “any spoken words or composed works will have to conform to the principle that God is not responsible for everything, but only for good.” The divine realm must be purged of obscene portraits of the gods and made to serve as the source of moral and intellectual integrity. This would be necessary even if the gods actually were just as Homer describes them. I would say that the old religion helped the Greeks to endure in a world that sometimes seemed unjust, but Plato rationalizes religion and expects it to adhere to his notions of ultimate truth. For Plato’s purposes, the Divine Realm must be purged of its rascally particularities—there’s just one Divine (though there may be many gods), and from it flows only good. This Divine Realm or “God” will serve as a principle of moral intelligibility and, at the highest level of Plato’s philosophy, will be closely associated with Reason and the Good. If we were to need a fictional affirmation of this realm’s existence, so be it—the wise must draw the future guardians and auxiliaries onwards to appreciate the Good.

Of course, the issue of making art triumph over the Real and Reason and common human sentiment could be raised at this point: “isn’t that what the Nazis did?” would go the argument. They turned politics into aesthetics—the state was considered a work of art (to borrow a phrase from Jacob Burckhardt), so a fiery defeat in battle might be glossed as The Twilight of the Gods straight out of Wagner, the murder of innocent millions translated into the “purification” of a mythic Herrnrace, and so forth.

An aside—while the old mythology of the Greeks helped people endure a harsh cosmos (as Homer’s Apollo says near the beginning of The Iliad 24, “an enduring heart have the fates given unto men”; τλητὸν γὰρ Μοῖραι θυμὸν θέσαν ἀνθρώποισιν), Plato would have it serve as a principle of moral and ontological clarity: a way of claiming that there is an eternal realm of Beauty and Goodness beyond this mess we find ourselves in. The ancient myths dealt with what Christian theology calls the “problem of evil” by not trying to deal with it: the gods did what they wanted to, and were beyond our standards of justice or fairness. But if you claim your god has the status of Jehovah in the Hebrew scriptures, you must directly confront the problem of who is responsible for evil. Plato shares that problem with Christianity and several other religions.

Well, this all leads to a general point for the course: a major use of art has long been identified as the shaping of an audience’s morals, the molding of individuals from their youth up into a unified collectivity that has come to agree about matters of right and wrong. Art can, in this view, partly generate and strongly reinforce moral consensus.

Alternately, some moderns would claim that art should reinforce ethical norms already in existence: we might refer to arguments about, say, Robert Mapplethorpe’s bizarre visual art being shown in galleries receiving money from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Some middle-class people object to tax-funded radicalism. They probably do not see art as a vehicle for challenging values upon which they see little or no need to reflect, and it offends them if you say that art should “afflict the comfortable” or that it should “disturb and disintegrate” (Wilde’s phrase) views and practices they hold dear. Even though I am not exactly a political animal in the classroom, I have sometimes seen this attitude in college students in direct response to assigned material: “I don’t like Dostoyevsky or Freud or Marx; they say things I don’t understand and that sound disagreeable.” My question to them would be, “is education for finding out about new things and ideas, or for getting our prior belief systems validated by people with fancy degrees?” Of course, this “Culture Wars” struggle has been blunted of late, at least with regard to the arts—I recently saw Dana Gioia, a poet and the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, talking about how the most alarming matter for America’s cultural health is that around half of the public doesn’t read literature at all. One might as well add in Wildean fashion that large numbers of the rest of them read it rather badly….The point is, this is baseline stuff—there’s no point talking about art being dangerous if nobody is capable of engaging with it. The Culture Wars focus has shifted to the struggle over the War on Terror, the long-continued Iraq venture, and so forth.

Later “bourgeois” versions of this usefulness-claim would have us all formed into one big consensus-happy public sphere, where right moral sentiment and the normative ways of doing everything prevail. Plato is didactic in the way he handles the value of art as education: it should form us into what we ought to be as members of a collective society, and help us find our proper place to serve others in the community. For him, art isn’t a vehicle for self-development, expression, or free individuality in the modern sense.

The Republic, Book 3.

56-57. “We will implore Homer and the rest of the poets not to get cross if we strike these and all similar lines from their works.” Emotionally effective poetry is especially harmful and contagious. The guardians might think tears and fears are fine, while what we require from them is firm adherence to reason, just as we need from the auxiliaries or soldiers blood, sweat, and obedience. After all, John Wayne isn’t supposed to play Macbeth, is he? (The old Greeks of Homer’s day would find restraining tears downright un-Greek. Homer’s heroes are often wailing about something or other.) Plato might agree with Sir Philip Sidney that art should give us “speaking pictures” of virtuous men and women, so that we will want to think and act like them. Plato insists on what has been called the “contagion theory of art”: when we see something, we will want to do it, too. Look at the way he describes the soul as tripartite in Phaedrus 245ff: the soul’s pilot is reason, and it must control the two horses or steeds that pull it towards an object. Modesty and temperance must prevail if there is to be no wreck. This metaphor construes human beings as powerfully moved by desires of various sorts—and if the lower or sensual desires prevail, we shall be led to immodesty and ruin. Things we see and hear have a strong effect upon us, for better or for worse.

58-59. “Clearly lying should be entrusted to doctors, and laymen should have nothing to do with it.” Lies are dangerous when uttered by the wrong people, by subordinates. Only those whose “craft” is philosophy—who know the good end and the proper way to achieve it while working with the given material—can be allowed to lie. At this point—one shouldn’t take this too far—truth begins to sound like a ruse of statecraft. Order is the first necessity, not truth. Plato isn’t so “un-Greek” as to be less than frank on this point. But ultimately, when he comes around to ontological arguments in Book 10, he returns to the issue of poetry’s truth status, and finds it lacking.

59. Socrates asks, “and aren’t the most important aspects of self-discipline, at least for the general rank and file, obedience to those in authority and establishing one’s authority over the pleasures of drink, sex, and food?” Reason and temperance outrank sensual pleasure and fiction-making. Food, sex, poetry: all are dangerous if handled badly.

61-62: This section resembles The Symposium in its advocacy of education as a leading-out of youth from the senses towards the adult’s fuller appreciation of the beauty of reason and goodness. For political purposes, Plato recognizes that humans are passionate creatures, that they have appetites and bodies as well as the capacity to reason their way to an apprehension of truth. That practical concern leads him not to dismiss poetry from consideration as he builds his word-State, but rather to reform its role in traditional paideia. He says that we must smooth the way from childhood to rational adulthood and citizenship, keeping away from children anything that might impede their progress towards love of the good and right. So we need to attune young minds to harmony in language, music, dance, everything. True craftsmen must surround children with a virtual Sesame Street environment of beautiful objects and harmonious sounds and actions, putting them in a region of health and beauty so complete that when they become adults, they will greet the beauty of reason as an old friend, without, perhaps, even realizing how it came to be so familiar. We move almost imperceptibly from Big Bird to Big Brother: the Good. Plato is a spiritual reformer in education, as Werner Jaeger might say. So the goal in educating children is to smooth their progress from the material to the nonmaterial kind of good, from belief towards knowledge, from the unexamined life towards the examined life.

Cultural education is vital to Plato. As Marcus Aurelius will say in his Meditations, we should come not even to “think in inmost thought” what would offend our fellows. The goal here is temperance and self-restraint in all things. It’s interesting, however, that for all his reputation as a stern banisher of poetry on ontological grounds, Plato seems rather passionate about Reason. Or at least he sees that in practical or pedagogical terms, our early passionate, unreasoning attachment to beauty and harmony is vital to our subsequent development into mature citizens. Ion isn’t a proper craftsmen, but someone working under a philosopher-king could generate quite an effect in the Republic’s children. The teacher must accept our initial dependence on the senses, on ordinary pleasures, and use it as an instrument for our moral and philosophical advancement. It seems we must transcend the senses by first being educated with their aid. Pleasure in material objects will be replaced by pleasure in non-material goodness. Education is vital, and must be reformed: Plato sees “human nature” in a realistic way, but isn’t satisfied with us au naturel. He’s no individualist, but he shows the humanist’s dissatisfaction with what is founded merely upon nature or even “human nature” as is. We seem to be perfectible. Plato’s doctrine, at least in Book 3, is an early version of what Schiller will later call “the Aesthetic Education of Man.” Education includes art, and so art is vital to the task of civilization. But of course Plato will not add “individualism” or “freedom of the individual” or “freedom and variety of situations” to his list of necessaries, as von Humboldt or Schiller and his fellow romantic philosophers would. Still, art is a formative and shaping power, and is integral to being “civilized.” Even in Homer, there is a negotiation between the wild and the civilized.

The Republic, Book 7.

This book is partly about the teacher’s command of truth, of the Forms as opposed to the world of sham and appearance. Education involves an acclimation to “beholding” the Intelligible realm. The Allegory of the Cave’s simple point is that this world of sensible things is a prison. The uneducated adults are in chains, looking only straight ahead. These adults, the ordinary citizens of a democratic commonwealth like Athens (in whom Plato puts little trust), become hostile and threaten to murder the returned Promethean bringer of light. The parallel to Socrates is obvious—he had been executed in 399 BCE, a quarter-century before Plato wrote The Republic.

So Plato offers us an allegory about the power of philosophy and the risks that truth runs when it makes itself available to the profoundly ignorant. He suggests that the world runs on illusions and that it’s no easy matter to disabuse people of their illusions, built as they are upon sensory experience and a deep need for certainty. Plato’s problem with art is that it doesn’t even try to disabuse people of their illusions; only philosophy and “cultural education” crafted by philosophers can disabuse us without bringing the house down on our heads.

One could say that Plato’s sentiment here is genuinely Greek—we must be able to bear the weight of vision, of knowledge. Homer says, after all, that the fates have given us enduring hearts. Still, if you strip away people’s illusions too quickly and you blind them with truth, they will hate you. Our prisoners have built a whole system of reward and punishment, an integral society, out of their own perceptual and intellectual errors. See Nietzsche’s “Truth and Falsity” essay on this power of abstraction-making to stabilize the world and make it seem livable. See page 67: if our truth-seer is so uninterested in coming back to the Cave, doesn’t his reluctance undermine Plato’s attempt to build an ideal Republic? In other words, doesn’t The Republic end on a note of alienation between philosophy and life—one that art has taken on as a mantle, as in Symbolism and romanticism at its most “satanic”?

The Republic, Book 10.

In Book 10, Plato looks at poetry more sternly from an ontological standpoint, so he sounds more dismissive of it here—it turns out that poetry isn’t true craft like the craftsmanship in the lean, healthy state; instead, it merely copies copies, generating something like the effects of the Allegory of the Cave’s “shadows on the wall.” It only convinces people that their illusions are truth and have the gods’ sanction.

67. Now all imitative poetry must go; this is a shock since it was formerly alright to present carefully crafted images of virtue.

68-70. Plato is in full onto-throttle here: there is the Idea of “Bed” (its form or pattern, design), the material object made by the joiner, and the bed represented by the painter, who merely imitates the joiner’s bed. So the painter makes a copy of a copy.

74-76. The painter or imitative poet satisfies the ignorant multitude, who want nothing but copies in any case. He’s a democratizer in the realm of pleasure. He confirms and even multiplies ordinary people’s confusions and contradictions in the sensory realm, where they are content to remain.

76-77. Poetry counteracts reason and public necessity. Notice the panopticon tendency in Plato: the self, as far as he is concerned, should remain a public construct. This public construct is rather like Freud’s “superego,” the power of parental authority and collective wisdom, or what passes for it.

77-78. Poetry appeals to the lowest element of our nature, Plato says. It appeals to the petulant side that gives reason so much trouble, and not to the “intelligent and calm” side. It stirs up the multitude, creating amongst them a bond in their lowest passions. Note that at 78 top, Plato directly links imitative poetry and demagogic ruffians’ control of politics.

78. Worst of all, poetry not only miseducates the young, it corrupts even the good.

79-80. Plato’s Socrates will admit only “hymns to the gods” and “eulogies of virtuous men”—supposedly non-representational poetry that is not made solely for the pleasure of hearers but that instead reinforces a productive moral.

Notes on Plato’s Phaedrus. (Not assigned for E301)

Is writing a remedy or a poison? The Greek word pharmakos means both remedy and poison. Also, supplementarity comes into play—either this term indicates the supplying of a lack, or an addition to something already whole. Well, as Derrida says, it means both in philosophical writing, and any attempt to reduce this complexity generates all sorts of mischief, most particularly bogus certainty.

Socrates says that Thamus sees writing as sanctioning forgetting. That’s vital since for Plato learning is anamnesis, an unforgetting of what the timeless soul always knew, or has long known.

Speech, here, is closer to truth, to our own consciousness, which has the capacity to apprehend truth. Speech maintains its relationship to inner consciousness and intentionality, and can always refer back to these realms for validation. Speech is contrasted with the dangerous disseminative power of the written word, which is much more obviously a public code, a set of signs that function in the absence of the writer’s consciousness. A concrete example would be to write a word like “dog” or “umbrella” on the blackboard—how could the word be interpreted unless you don’t have to depend on direct access to the mind of the author? In the case of writing, it’s painfully obvious that meaning multiplies promiscuously with no firm standard of reduction to stability.

Plato says elsewhere that politicians always want to write. He connects writing with democracy: the promiscuous dissemination of power amongst the unworthy. Plato, we should remember, is considerably younger than Socrates, so he has really taken the lesson of Athens’ fall in the wake of the disastrous Peloponnesian Wars (431-04 BCE) with Sparta. A democratic-spirited people became too full of themselves, we might say, and their leaders (Pericles foremost) marched them off a cliff. Plato was an aristocrat by birth, it seems, and he simply didn’t trust the common folk to make intelligent decisions. In this sense, his view of human nature is probably much darker than that of Socrates.

On the issue of writing and speech, Derrida’s view is that the privileging of speech, with its supposed link to absolute truth, has been the trick of philosophy for millennia. In the service of unitary meaning and theology-grade stability, philosophical discourse effaces itself as writing, trying to come at us as pure speech conveying systemic truth. But the same thing is true of speech as is true of writing: it can only mean something if we do not rely on direct access to the speaker’s supposed intentions. Speech is a public code, too, subject to the same indeterminacy and unfinality as is writing. The opposition between speech and writing is false; they are both similarly diffuse, sliding, drifting, and cannot give us final meaning or ultimate truth. Rather, they work by potentially endless deferral and difference. That we believe we manipulate speech as a code does not do away with its similarity to writing. I can’t explain my intentions for every sentence I utter—that would in effect privatize my speech in a deferred manner; neither can my gestures take me outside this process of signification since gestures are themselves signs that must be interpreted.

Our view of speech posits a unitary “consciousness” that then links back to and validates speech as true (cf. Derrida on Husserl’s phenomenology). We speak, referring our words back to consciousness for validation or authentication. But consciousness itself is perhaps an effect of speech. Intentionality is an ex post facto construction. If this Nietzsche-like point is valid, perhaps we can test it simply by listening to our own internal dialogue: I don’t believe in intentionality, at least not in the most direct sense: ask “where do my words come from?” and you will be able to perceive that in your own inner dialogue, they don’t seem to come from anywhere or to be commanded in some a priori manner by consciousness. Again, consciousness may well be an effect, not a cause. (This may be an overstatement since research on certain kinds of brain damage, I believe, has sometimes called into question the primacy of speech in the formation of consciousness—I once saw a television segment on a fellow who had sustained an injury and had come to “think” in images rather than words, for example.)

The point is not to condemn “meaning” and “consciousness” as useless illusions, but rather to suggest that illusions are not without consequence even if they are necessary. It’s possible to build systems in philosophy or politics. And it’s dangerous either to leave them in place or to tear them down, especially since you must work with the components of what is in the process of being torn down.

So what has all this talk to do with literature and literary criticism? It offers us insight into certain kinds of literature and methods of interpretation. For instance, take romantic poetry, which tends to efface its status as written word in favor of lyric utterance. With the romantics, this isn’t just a polite convention as perhaps it is for, say, Philip Sidney or Thomas Wyatt. The romantic symbol or poetic word is supposed to work its magic upon our spirits, carrying alive into the heart the poet’s passions and expressive truths. The therapeutic power of poetry depends in part on their model of consciousness and speech. Words, as in Christian theology, are the bearers of spirit and culture, or at least they point us in that direction. They reinforce or even partly create our humanity in its deepest sense, and have a vital bond with the natural world. Imagination and symbol are beyond ordinary language.

A further point: anybody who claims privilege for a certain kind of consciousness—unified, a sanctuary for truth whether its ultimate source is inside the mind or external to it—must efface the operations of writing, or the link and the spell will be broken. Any act of criticism would separate itself into a unified consciousness or perspective, maintaining a certain distance from the object it creates in the process of positing itself. So it must reduce the operations of textuality, must disclaim participation in or contact with the process of signification that is the text. But surely the relationship is less straightforward than that. (An easy way of putting this, for initial reference, is that “criticism constitutes its preferred object.”) Criticism that ignores the effects of writing ends up repeating or otherwise affirming the ideology and illusions—the project—of the texts it studies. If you go to the text trying to reconstruct the project of the movement, the poem, the author, etc., you must know that you are part of that project, that you are involved in positing a “there” where there’s no fully prior “there.” Carry this insight about effects of the code farther back, and you see that the author, text, movement, did not have a lock on its own “intentions,” no matter what explicit declarations it makes. Intention is a unity-making post hoc construction.

Week 01, Introduction

2009-02-09T14:08:00.001-08:00

Welcome to English 301, Intro to Literary Theory and Criticism

Spring 2009 at Chapman University in Orange, California

Instructor on The Tempest

2009-02-01T16:19:00.001-08:00

Notes on Shakespeare’s The Tempest

General Notes on The Tempest

Northrop Frye says that the basis of tragic vision is Being in time, the sense of the one-directional quality of life, where everything happens once and for all, where every act brings unavoidable and fateful consequences, and where all experience vanishes, not simply into the past, but into nothingness, annihilation. In the tragic vision death is not an incident in life or even the inevitable end of life, but the essential event that gives shape and form to life. Death is what defines the individual... (Fools of Time, 3). By contrast, if we take our cue from Frye, the romance pattern is cyclical, not linear; death does not define life but rather the characters in the romance will have a chance to redeem themselves and the order within which they function. The social order goes in cycles of regeneration, just as the seasons do.

But I make romance sound a little too much like comedy, whereas it seems to me that romance is somewhere between tragedy and comedy. Both comedy and romance depend partly on the renovation of a corrupt social order by temporary removal into a green world of nature where magic rules and people can turn things around. The ancient seasonal myth is very much a part of both comedy and romance, though it is even more pronounced in romance. What distinguishes romance from tragedy and comedy is probably its ambivalence—for example, although The Tempest has a happy ending and Prospero is a benevolent ruler both on his island and, we presume, when he returns to Milan , it is easy to see that he is potentially a tyrant and might or could misuse his powers. Death, disorder, and tyranny are real threats in The Tempest, even though things turn out for the best. The quest motif is very strong in romance—all you have to do is think of Spenser’s The Faery Queen, with its Knight in pursuit of a Lady. Love is a prominent theme of exploration, and the sense of magic and strangeness pervades the romance genre. Exploration in itself is matter for exploration, which explains why certain critics have seen Caliban’s circumstances as similar to those of native people colonized by Europeans. Shakespeare’s romances are Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

Scene-by-Scene Notes on The Tempest

Act 1, Scene 1

The first thing we see is that authority is the matter in question—the boatswain is not interested in paying reverence to King Alonzo; he has more important things to do at the moment. Gonzalo already appears to be a philosopher—he keeps his council even in a crisis. The storm, therefore, functions as a great leveling influence, at least at this point in the play. Still, Shakespeare is not about to ratify anarchy; this is a romance play, and the basis of the social order is about to be scrutinized. The civil order has broken down and the characters have been compelled by Prospero to the island where things will be sorted out.

Act 1, Scene 2

In this scene, we see that there is need for a movement from ignorance to knowledge on the part of Miranda, Prospero’s 15-year-old daughter. She does not know that her father was the Duke of Milan, and they have been on this island since she was three years old. Miranda possesses sympathetic power of her own—she feels the suffering of those who have been shipwrecked. But Prospero says that no harm has been done and that the shipwreck was arranged for her sake. The question is, how to come by one’s legitimate identity? Miranda must learn about her former place in the social order and prepare for her future role.

As for the status of Prospero as a magician, we are being set up for an important consideration: Prospero has been stripped of civil power by his exile, and he has put on a different kind of power signified by his magic robe. What kind of power is it that he now possesses? What is the source of that power? We should not think that this power will ultimately be self-sufficient—a return to the civil order looms beyond the framework of the immediate dramatic situation.

Prospero is not entirely without blame for his own exile—he devoted himself to secret studies in the liberal arts, neglecting the needs of his own kingdom. That is why he gave Antonio his brother control. Antonio learned the ropes of governing and began to scheme against him. Prospero’s brother is a Machiavellian of the bad sort, but even so he stands for political realism. One of Shakespeare’s ideals is that a good King must be both magnanimous and active. In consequence, poet-rulers such as Richard II must be deposed as surely as evildoers like Richard III. Prospero wanted to lead the life contemplative or vita contemplativa to the neglect of the life active or vita activa. The relative merits of the two was the subject of much debate during the Renaissance, and is well memorialized in Thomas More’s Utopia. Renaissance education was intended to make a person fit for public life, for a life of active virtue—it was about developing one’s capacities to the fullest extent. Prospero seems to have sought knowledge for a much more personal and private reason, one not closely enough allied with the charitable exercise of power. Antonio at least understands that a ruler cannot simply keep the name of prince or king or duke and expect the authority to remain with it—that was one of King Lear’s mistakes, and it is also Prospero’s. To keep the title, you must exercise the power and others must know you are exercising it. To fail in that regard is to encourage disorder and wickedness. Antonio apparently schemed with Alonso the King of Naples to get rid of Prospero, which was more than enough wickedness to result in Prospero’s loss of authority in Milan.

Prospero is not an independent actor in his own chance at redemption—he admits that divine providence brought him ashore and that Gonzalo charitably furnished him with rich garments and the books he still values above his dukedom. Prospero will need to learn how to wield the knowledge in these books to get himself back to his former state and do some good for the people, just as he has used it to make life tolerable on the island.

Prospero admits that an accident or fortune has brought his enemies within his power. With this fortunate accident, he begins to operate on his own under an auspicious star. As always, “there is a tide in the affairs of men,” as Brutus says in Julius Caesar, and Prospero must act now or lose his chance forever. He is satisfied that the spirit Ariel has done his bidding, appearing as St. Elmo’s Fire (a natural phenomenon) and striking the crew of the King’s ship with madness during the storm. The aerial spirit has also dispersed the crew about the island, separating them into logical camps. Ferdinand, the King’s son, is alone, for he above all is to be tested as the future successor to Prospero’s kingdom.

Prospero reminds Ariel that he had been imprisoned by the witch Sycorax, who died and left him in a pine tree. Prospero has made a sort of contract with Ariel to free him from human control at the end of a certain time. Since Ariel seems to represent imagination or the finer and more sensitive of nature’s powers, we begin to see that the play is in part about how humanity is to maintain control over the natural forces within itself and beyond itself. Prospero threatens Ariel in a way that suggests potential tyranny: around line 295, he threatens to imprison the friendly spirit for another twelve years, just as Sycorax had done. This is not a democratic island—as always, Shakespeare is a good royalist. Ariel is much better (and much better off) than Caliban (Sycorax’s son and therefore the natural heir of this island kingdom), but both feel the power of Prospero.

Next we see Caliban at his best, cursing Prospero but submitting to him because, after all, he must eat his dinner. Caliban has sometimes been seen as a native set upon by white Europeans. Shakespeare’s was a great age of exploration, and European countries were busily colonizing and exploiting the New World . There is some sense in this view of Caliban, although I don’t think it’s appropriate to turn the play into an allegory about colonialism. Caliban says that the island is his to inherit from Sycorax. Prospero associates him with the devil, or perhaps with the unregenerate natural man. It is true that Caliban is controlled by his own appetites as much as by Prospero, but he is not without ability—notice that his complaints at times approach downright eloquence. As he says, Prospero has taught him how to curse. And he was good to Prospero in time of need. His crime was to try to violate Miranda’s honor—another natural impulse he does not regret. Caliban is not appreciative of the gift of civilization Prospero has supposedly given him. I would say that Prospero is somewhat unfair to Caliban—indeed, to say that Caliban is “capable of all ill” is to say something of him that is true of humanity in general. Caliban is not simply “malice,” as Prospero calls him. The things with which Prospero threatens him are entirely natural—pain and suffering—but Caliban is afraid of Prospero because he believes that the old man’s art can control even Sycorax’s God, Setebos. (Robert Browning’s poem “Caliban upon Setebos” is a fine character study of Caliban, covering his resentments and religious sentiments.)

Meanwhile, Ferdinand is enchanted by the music of Ariel and drawn on by it. Ariel sings that Ferdinand’s father has suffered a sea change into “something rich and strange.” Of course the song is not true since Alonso is not drowned, but the song signifies the transformation wrought by death. What is the point of bringing up such change here? Is it to distance him from his father’s death? Certainly Ferdinand must undergo his own transformation here on the island.

Ferdinand’s first question to Miranda is whether she is a virgin—that is certainly a question with institutional significance. He wants to make her his queen. But Prospero knows that the prize must not be won too easily and that Ferdinand has not yet earned the right to reenter the social order and succeed him. So he will test Ferdinand. He uses the same Machiavellian terms of political intrigue that got him exiled from Milan . He claims, that is, that Ferdinand wants to usurp power on the island.

As for Miranda, she still needs to learn the difference between appearance and reality since she says that the handsome prince Ferdinand could not possibly mean anyone harm. She will need to understand this lesson to become a good queen when the time comes. That she shows promise is obvious from line 498, where she says her father’s speech gives a false impression of his true gentility.

Act 2, Scene 1

Gonzalo is an honest old counselor, a quality which shows in his trust in providence. We must weigh our sorrow with our comfort, he tells his hearers. However, Gonzalo is surrounded by people such as Sebastian and Antonio, who do not necessarily appreciate his wisdom. The problem is that wisdom is separated from rank, whereas both are required to keep firm order. Gonzalo will offer his own utopian vision, but it will not equal Prospero’s magic and foresight. So this little group of stranded citizens of Milan doesn’t have all the answers. Perhaps Gonzalo is a little too ready to live within the confines of his natural surroundings rather than transforming them into something more civil. Sebastian makes fun of Gonzalo, ironically crediting him with the power to “carry this island home in his pocket and give it to his son for an apple,” as well as being able to bring forth more islands. Note also the reference to Amphion building the walls of Thebes with his musical instrument. Shakespeare may be poking fun of himself in these conversations filled with witty exchanges—Antonio, Alonso, and Gonzalo are spending a lot of time making puns and quibbles, and not getting anywhere. But Gonzalo is observant—he has at least noticed that their garments are strangely dry, and we are thereby reminded that a certain wizardry is necessary to the founding and maintenance of the social order.

Alonso despairs over the loss of his son Ferdinand, but Francisco tells him that the boy may be alive, recounting his heroic attempt to survive. Sebastian reproaches Alonso for having married off his daughter to the king of Carthage , an adventure that he considers responsible for the shipwreck.

Gonzalo’s utopia is a silly pre-technological communist fantasy; he would undo the punishment of original sin. No one needs to work, and there would be no sovereignty. Sebastian is right to point out that Gonzalo “would be King” nonetheless. Sebastian is encouraged by Antonio to usurp the place of his brother the king. What we are seeing in this camp of stranded Mariners is first of all a false utopia and then political intrigue. Antonio is quite certain that Ferdinand has drowned. Antonio, using as an example his own usurpation of the dukedom of Milan from Prospero, wants to seize the occasion of this shipwreck since Claribel, who should inherit the kingdom, is far away in Carthage and knows nothing about the wreck. Antonio sees only the operation of random chance in a storm, and does not of course understand that Prospero has used Ariel to generate the tempest. As always, the category of nature is not to be taken simply in Shakespeare—we are not dealing with an ordinary natural tempest; it is a thing of nature brought on by human and superhuman magic. It is even associated with providence since Prospero himself was steered after his own shipwreck by divine providence. Antonio mistakenly sees his friends and potential subjects as passive men just waiting to take orders, but his scheme is foiled by Ariel, who warns Gonzalo to awaken King Alonso. Now awake, they all set off to look for Ferdinand.

Act 2, Scene 2

Trinculo and Stefano have their own ideas about paradise—they assume everyone else has perished in a storm, so this island is theirs, so far as they know. Trinculo meets Caliban and later joins with Stefano to turn him into a willing subject on the basis of drink, which seems to be the god of this nascent kingdom. Liquor provides shelter for Stefano, just as an ordinary garment serves to clothe Trinculo. This section acts as a parody of the previous scene, which was about misguided intrigue. Caliban sees the arrival of these two drunkards as a chance for freedom. The scene had opened with Caliban describing his reaction at the torments Prospero visits upon him because of his misbehavior, and we get a chance to see how Caliban perceives the island’s order. On the whole, Act 2 is about false attempts to set up a new kingdom upon the wreck of the old, with Antonio and Sebastian trying to seize the opportunity to make their own “providence,” and Stefano and Trinculo (along with Caliban) trying to set up their own crazy government. Act 3 will transition to the more legitimate attempts at self-discovery on the part of Ferdinand and Miranda; this focus will, in turn, gesture towards a regenerated dukedom in Milan, even though the play ends with everyone still on the island.

Act 3, Scene 1

In the third act, the developing affection between Ferdinand and Miranda is central. Ferdinand performs his difficult labors mindful of Miranda and in hopes of better times. For him, love makes labor redemptive—it is not something to be avoided so one can set up a fool’s paradise. By his patience, Ferdinand shows the potential for nobility. The word Miranda means “she who is to be looked upon [with wonder].” Prospero’s daughter is virtuous, and her virtue is part of the island’s special quality. Like Adam in Paradise Lost, however, Ferdinand will need some warning not to be overly fond of Miranda’s charms. They have some negotiating to do, and must move from the language of innocent courtship to a permanently enduring union—after all, they are the future of the state, and cannot remain in paradise forever, if indeed one wants to say that’s where they are at present.

Prospero blesses the union to himself since he is apparently convinced that Ferdinand and Miranda will prove compatible. Still, he must not allow premature erotic relations between them. Language will prove essential to a proper match between the two lovers, and marriage is an institution, not a simple declaration. Prospero must go back to his books and work up an appropriate spell to delay this courtship.

Act 3, Scene 2

Caliban, meanwhile, is courting Stefano as his lord and master. Caliban is too easily won over to servitude. To him, government is essentially a protection racket. We notice that he describes itself rather like Prospero—as someone exiled by a tyrant and cheated of his inheritance by evil powers. Stefano, as usual, is spinning a storyline from his own base desires—once having seized Prospero’s books and murdered the man, he thinks, he will be free to marry Miranda. They all serve their bodily desires. Ariel is looking over them even as they make their plot. The would-be ruler ends up following Caliban, whom both Stefano and Trinculo call a monster.

Act 3, Scene 3

King Alonso is ready to give up the romance quest for his lost son Ferdinand. Nature seems to have won the battle. Again, Gonzalo sees that the island is much more than simple nature—though the inhabitants are monstrous, they are more gentle than many humans back in Naples . This comment of his follows the appearance of shapes Prospero has summoned to set up a banquet. The wonder of exploration is part of romance—as Antonio says, “travelers never did lie, though fools at home condemn them.” The banquet itself, and the appearance of Ariel as a harpy, has a classical precedent in Virgil’s Aeneid. Ariel has set them a fool’s banquet—and he explains sternly to them (some of whom attending are plotting against Alonso) that they have been driven here to be punished for their sins in exiling Prospero. They are threatened with “lingering perdition.” That would mean a futile repetition of the romance pattern, one stripped of meaning and redemptive quality. At present, they still think Ferdinand is dead, and Prospero has no intention of telling them otherwise just now. He goes off to see Ferdinand and Miranda. This decision in itself has a powerful effect—Alonso feels bitter remorse at the loss of his son.

Act 4, Scene 1

Prospero insists that Ferdinand should not behave like Caliban and spoil the honor of his daughter. There is much play here about the value of language—Prospero says Miranda will outstrip all praise, and then says that Ferdinand has spoken fairly and will have his daughter. Ceremony is important for the obvious reason: it is necessary to bless this socially and politically significant union. Marriage is part of the magic of civilization. Prospero bids Ariel bring the rabble (an important word here in terms of governance) so that he may give the young couple a demonstration of his powers. Iris and Ceres—the latter a fertility goddess—will provide the lovers a gift. Ceres offers the gift of regular seasonal change; that is, she offers abundance in perpetuity and, therefore, a secure future. Together, these goddesses call upon nymphs to celebrate the marriage contract.

Breaking in to this celebration is Prospero’s remembrance that Caliban and his new friends are plotting against him. But we still have unfinished business, so the celebration is a false ending in accordance with classical comic structure. Consider lines 148 and following—Prospero sums up what his wizardry has accomplished: he has demonstrated that we are “such stuff as dreams are made on.” This remark has sometimes been taken as Shakespeare’s farewell speech as a dramatist, even though The Tempest isn’t his last play. In any case, there is clearly a parallel between art and life to be drawn here: art has much to tell us about life, and it is a kind of magic. Then Prospero professes himself vexed and weak, an enfeebled old man, to get rid of Ferdinand and Miranda so he can deal with Caliban. The island is not paradise after all, and the consequences of human fallenness impend even here.

Act V

I must expand this section, but a main point is that in contrast with King Lear, insight doesn’t come in The Tempest at the cost of power. Prospero is able to give up his magic books and powers without losing his chance to recover the dukedom he lost. His concluding wishes are of interest in that what he really seems to desire is not so much to exercise great power again but instead to practice “the art of dying well.” The main promise of things to come is the impending marriage between Ferdinand and Miranda, who will, we may presume, carry on in a regenerated social and political environment.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. (Folger Shakespeare Library.) Washington Square Press, 2004. ISBN-13: 978-0743482837.

Instructor on King Lear

2009-02-01T16:19:00.000-08:00

Notes on The Tragedy of King Lear.

Act 1, Scene 1.

Kent and Gloucester agree that it seemed most likely the King would favor Albany over Cornwall. But now they aren’t so certain, so the play opens with a note of uncertainty that becomes ominous later when we realize how much better a person Albany is compared to Cornwall. This is a new, strange state of affairs, in which merit must demonstrate itself by means of rhetorical skill. Gloucester says his legal son is no dearer to him than the illegitimate Edmund. Lear enters at line 39, saying that he has decided to divide his kingdom into thirds, and “shake all cares and business” for the remainder of his life. His declared intention is to “prevent future strife” and to confer royal authority on “younger strengths” (40). He means to assist the process of generational renewal, passing on matters of state to younger and more energetic kin while “preventing future strife” and leaving himself the private space necessary to practice the art of dying well. Each daughter will receive a third; the only question is how opulent that portion will be (86).

The question of authority is a main item in King Lear. Kent may be responding in part to the King’s unwise disparagement of Cordelia on the spot, but his line “Reserve thy state / . . . check / This hideous rashness” (149-51) may owe something to his shock at the very notion of an absolute king’s decision to divest himself of his unitary power, keeping only the name and perks of authority. I don’t know that there’s really a coherent political theory during Shakespeare’s time; I would only suggest that Lear is confused because he goes off on a private mission while at the same time trying to retain symbols that he confuses with power itself. This is not to say that Shakespeare is criticizing monarchy per se, but I believe he’s always aware that no human system is perfect (not even one that claims divine ordination). The questions are, what are the consequences when things go wrong with social and political systems, and what happens when they go right?

It’s true that the King’s “natural body” is wearing down, and one can feel only empathy for him on that account, but what about the King’s political body, the one that isn’t capable of death? Can he actually abandon his responsibilities the way he does, without causing a disaster? What has he given up? He has given up the “power, / Pre-eminence, and all the large effects / That troop with majesty” (130-32). Another way of stating this is that he has ceded the “sway, revenue, execution of the rest” (137) aside from what he retains, which he specifies as “The name, and all th’ addition to a king” (136), which addition is to be embodied in the person of the stipulated “hundred knights” (133). He makes a distinction between the name and pomp of kingship and the executive, effectual power of a king. So we might ask, how does he expect to give away all his power and yet hold on to the “addition” of a king? Do the symbols and privileges and “name” really mean anything, apart from the power wielded by those who claim them?

With respect to Cordelia and Regan and Goneril, what does Lear want? He wants a public declaration of their affection for him as a loving father. The public and private in Renaissance kingship were of course inextricable; royal absolutism of King James’ sort always made hay of the idea that the King was “the father of his people,” and James’ model was the scriptural patriarchs. He believed that his subjects owed him the reverence due to such a father. In practice, as I’m sure Shakespeare understood, the intertwining of public and private in powerful families makes for a great deal of coldness, sterility, and alienation, even in settings beyond the monarchy: read biographies of some of our presidents and the modern royal family of Great Britain, and you’ll hear a tale that is at times painful to read: mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters for the most part looking on at the spectacle of one another’s lives, never knowing what to consider “acting” and what to accept as “real,” and finding it difficult to sort out personal loyalties from official duties and the demands of power.

Well, Lear has no trouble demanding in the form of public spectacle what would for most families be a purely private display of affection. Perhaps this isn’t entirely unreasonable on his part. Neither are Goneril and Regan necessarily to be blamed for giving the old man what he wants; they know his nature, and this is the sort of thing they have come to expect from him. The point is that he’s the king, and he finds this public display of affection necessary. Why can’t Cordelia do something even better than did Regan and Goneril, bearing with her father and making a generous allowance for his weaknesses? Isn’t it sometimes acceptable to be a little insincere when regard for another person’s feelings requires it? But she won’t work at it, and even if there’s an austere beauty in the figure of Cordelia speaking truth to power, it’s fair to suggest that she is in her way as brittle and abrupt or absolute in her temperament as her frail old father: “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth” (91-92). She can’t verbally express the genuine affection she feels for Lear. Cordelia isn’t capable of flattery; she lacks (to borrow from another play, I Henry IV) Prince Hal’s ability to say to a joker like Falstaff, “If a lie may do thee grace,” then let’s carry on with the lie, at least for a while. Learning to be a good ruler may involve a certain amount of play-acting and feigning to be what one is not. Cordelia sees both monarchy and marriage as consisting of specifiable bonds or reciprocal obligations. So when Lear demands that she declare her “love,” she understands the term in something like the sense of “obligation, duty, attention.” Obviously, a woman who marries must balance her duties as a wife with her duties as a loyal daughter; she cannot “love” her father altogether and spend all her time with him.

But it may be that Lear’s demand isn’t as all-encompassing as she supposes, and it’s fair to ask how someone like Cordelia could rule a kingdom if she is incapable of getting beyond the king’s simple request for a bit of affectionate flattery. As Regan later says, “‘Tis the infirmity of his age, yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself” (293-94), and Goneril chimes in with “The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash” (295-95); both daughters see that Lear is being somewhat absurd, but they aren’t surprised and are willing to gratify him, especially given the great reward he is offering for so little. But so as not to make them seem generous, which we know they aren’t, Goneril admits to knowing the King’s casting off of Cordelia is unfair; it shows, in her words, “poor judgment” (291). Rashness is a charge commonly made against Lear, one made by Kent and two of his daughters. And those two daughters correctly recognize, I think, that the King’s unkindness towards Cordelia represents a threat to them as well: “if our father carry authority with such dis- / position as he bears, this last surrender of his will but / offend us” (304-06). The King’s surrender, they understand, is not really a surrender but a shifting of responsibility, and he will continue to play the tyrant, taking his stand upon the privilege of majesty and great age.

As for the question of whether power can be divested and divided, well, I suppose a monarch can do these things, and there are historical precedents for it from ancient Rome onwards, but it seldom seems to work. Almost nothing goes the way Lear thinks it’s going to go, once he gives away what was formerly his power to wield alone: in the first place, he had thought Albany and Cornwall would be in charge of their respective thirds, but as it turns out, neither man can stand up to those two strong-willed daughters. It is Regan and Goneril who immediately take charge of state affairs, not their men. Moreover, Lear’s conduct after giving away power is anything but responsible: he charges about with his hundred knights behaving more or less like a “lord of misrule.” His presence with either daughter, it seems, would inevitably create a public perception that they are not in charge. Lear wants to retain far more authority than he has any business keeping, now that he has stepped aside to let those “younger strengths” do the hard work of governing and maintaining order.

Lear is partly a tragedy about the terrors of growing old, of feeling slighted, neglected, weak, and useless as you make way for the young. Knowing that you must do so doesn’t necessarily make doing it any easier. In this way, it’s true that in King Lear as in other of Shakespeare’s plays that involve monarchy, “a king is but a man.” This somewhat broader frame probably accounts for the fairy-tale quality of the play. We see the disintegration of a “foolish, fond old man” (4.7.59) who evidently doesn’t understand the nature of genuine affection or the nature of the power he has been wielding for many of his eighty or so years. Cordelia, too, may appear as something like a Cinderella figure: surrounded by a pair of evil sisters, she cannot make her inner virtue known to the powerful, shallow authorities who determine her fate. Well, at least the King of France is able to discern the purity of Cordelia’s virtue, discounting her lack of Machiavellian wiles.

Banished Kent will pursue his “old course in a country new” (187). As it turns out, the “country new” is Britain. Lear’s refusal of responsibility has created a new dispensation of power, radically transforming the nation into a cauldron of anarchy and the pursuit of selfish desire for satisfaction and advancement.

Act 1, Scene 2.

This scene begins with Edmund’s soliloquy from lines 1-22, the upshot of which is that Edmund believes he has all the right qualities to rule his own house, and lacks only “legitimacy”; by contrast, the King has given all his power away and expects to hang on to his legitimacy. He stands upon rank as if it in itself constituted inner virtue or fitness to rule, whereas Edmund sees this legitimacy as a function of mere custom, of “the curiosity of nations” (4). Yet as this same soliloquy reveals, Edmund is nearly obsessed with what others think of him; he repeats the word “legitimate” several times, and can’t seem to let it go. We will see that later on, his undoing will stem from this concern for that which he seems most to despise. A most unhealthy selfishness—”I grow; I prosper” (21)—also drives him on first to victory and then to destruction. Edmund demands that the gods ally themselves not with custom but rather with natural qualities and ripeness for rule. Old Gloucester his been taken aback by the King’s strange behavior, which to him seems unnatural—this view makes him susceptible to the scheming of his illegitimate son. In a world turned upside down, what could make more sense than that a man’s legitimate son and heir should betray him without compunction, all appearances of goodness and history of virtue between the two notwithstanding? Edmund declares his father’s belief in astrology “the excellent foppery of the world” (118) and insists, “All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit” (184). He will trust in his dark vision of nature as a place that rewards the most savage and cunning predator. Tennyson (who before composing In Memoriam had become acquainted with the work of Sir Charles Lyell and other pre-Darwinian natural scientists) described this kind of nature as “red in tooth and claw.” Edmund is a human predator, and thanks to King Lear, he now has an opportunity to use his predatory skill to remake a formerly stable, human order into one that suits him best. Lear hasn’t made him what he is, but he has given him an opening to thrive. If legitimate authority doesn’t know itself, this is what happens. Perhaps, in terms of political theory, Lear early in the play assumes too easily that there is an automatic connection or concordance between the two “bodies” of a king—the perishing and erring mortal one and the immortal and immaterial political or corporate one: he follows his desires, makes unwise decisions, and then is surprised to find that his decisions as an erring human being have deranged his kingdom. Others in this play see more clearly the Machiavellian point that the exercise of power generates an authority all its own.

Act 1, Scene 3.

Goneril is alarmed at the King’s disorderly conduct. At line six, she complains that “his knights grow riotous,” and devises a stratagem whereby Oswald will make the King feel the weakness of his position by slighting him. Goneril gets to the heart of Lear’s error when she calls him an “Idle old man, / That still would manage those authorities / That he hath given away! (16-18)

Act 1, Scene 4.

Kent begins to serve the King, professing to the old man that he really is what he seems to be—a trusty middle-aged servant who knows authority when he sees it, which quality he says he “would fain call master” (27). Evidently he sees this quality in the visage of Lear, even if Lear has lost command of himself. The Fool, we are soon told, has “much pined away” since Cordelia went to France. He is Cordelia’s ally. Kent earns his keep by giving Oswald a rough education in rank, or “differences” (86). Lear’s own words begin to speak against him: he had said to Cordelia, “nothing will come of nothing,” and now the Fool responds to a similar utterance (“nothing can be made of nothing”), “so much the rent / of his land comes to” (134-35). Lear has given away not only the executive function of his office, but even the title, according to the Fool, and now retains only the title of “fool” that he was born with. At 160, the Fool says the King split his crown in two and gave it to his daughters; the implication of this remark is that power is indivisible and cannot be handled in this way. “Thou gavest them the rod and put down thine own breeches” (173-74), says the Fool, drawing a clear picture of Lear’s childishness. At 194, he applies the word “nothing” to the King, and this application may remind us of Hamlet’s similar mockery—”the king is a thing,” says Hamlet in 4.2, “of nothing.” Like Lear, too, Hamlet is confronted with the inevitable downward slide of even the greatest to what is most common: “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away,” as the Prince says at 5.1.213-14.

Around line 218, Lear begins to ask key questions about identity. ”Are you our daughter?” he asks Goneril, and she tells him to “put away / These dispositions which of late transport you / From what you rightly are” (220-22). Finally, the exasperated Lear asks, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (230) and is answered by the Fool with “Lear’s shadow” (231). When Goneril tells him he ought to be surrounded by men who sort well with his age-weakened condition, he swears her off altogether, and by line 266, Lear suggests that Cordelia’s brittle response to his demand for love has deprived him of his proper judgment. His judgment of Goneril that she should, as he does now, “feel / How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child” (287-89) identifies what he believes to be the source of his troubles. But the question of proportion now comes into play because what Goneril has done far outstrips anything Cordelia may have done to offend the King.

The first mention of “plucking out eyes” occurs when Lear addresses Goneril as follows: “Old fond eyes, / Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck ye out, / And cast you, with the waters that you loose, / To temper clay. Yea, is it come to this?” (301-04) Lear now transfers his stock to Regan, and threatens to reassume the majesty he has cast off. At 341, Goneril refers to her husband Albany’s “milky gentleness” as ill-suited to the times; his sententiae, such as “Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well” (346), don’t bode well for his ability to manage power, as far as she is concerned. They seem more like passive judgments than active principles by which a kingdom such as Lear’s could be governed.

Act 1, Scene 5.

Lear sends Kent to Gloucester with letters. He begins to see that he has done Cordelia wrong, and his anger shifts to Goneril and her “Monster ingratitude” (39). The Fool points out something Goneril had said earlier: “ Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise” (44). Lear is out of joint with the “seven ages of man”—he has never really attained to years of wise discretion and so is unprepared to practice the art of dying as he proclaimed at the play’s beginning. His kingdom is now paying the price.

Act 2, Scene 1.

Edmund practices his villainy on Edgar, and by the end of the scene, Gloucester has made Edmund his heir apparent. Regan insinuates that Edgar was associated with the “riotous knights” in Lear’s service, a claim that Edmund seconds. Cornwall takes a liking to Edmund for his “virtuous obedience” (113). The affinities of the wicked in this play are beginning to make themselves known, as if the bad characters come together by nature as well as by circumstance.

Act 2, Scene 2.

This is a counterpoint-style scene in which Kent recognizes Oswald for the knave he is, unlike Gloucester with his evil son Edmund. Kent’s putdown “Nature disclaims in thee: / a tailor made thee” (54-55) is a classic—Oswald is, after all, a man of artifice who gilds the ugly, base version of nature upheld by Edmund, Goneril, Regan, and Cornwall. But Kent as “Caius” gets himself into a bad fix in this scene when he finds it impossible to explain his hatred for Oswald to Cornwall, who takes him for an arrogant and affected inferior, a man who has learned to get praise for his “saucy roughness” (97). At line 125, Cornwall for once takes the lead, ordering that the stocks be brought. While in the stocks, Kent mentions around lines 165-70 that he has a letter from Cordelia—she is aware of the King’s distress.

Act 2, Scene 3.

Here Edgar disguises himself as Poor Tom the Bedlam Beggar, who will “ with presented nakedness outface / The winds and persecutions of the sky” (11-12). For this role, he says, “The country gives me proof and president ” (13). His model of the natural man comes from neglected humanity in the English countryside; it is hardly a mere invention on his part. Poor Tom is not a mere negation when he says, “Edgar I nothing am” (21), which means “I am no longer Edgar.” Poor Tom will be the “something” that rescues Edgar from the “nothing” forced upon him, and that serves as “president” (i.e. precedent) to King Lear in the storm.

Act 2, Scene 4.

King Lear is outraged when he sees Kent in the stocks, and becomes increasingly obsessed with this slight as the scene continues. He is sensitive to the shift in tone of his keepers—Gloucester’s ill-chosen remark that Cornwall has been “inform’d” of his demands drives him to an incredulous, “ Dost thou understand me, man?” (99) But his summons to Regan and Cornwall sounds pathetic by this point: “Bid them come forth and hear me, / Or at their chamber-door I’ll beat the drum / Till it cry sleep to death” (117-19). This intemperance earns him only the Fool’s mocking tale about the cockney woman’s attempt to quiet live eels as she made them into pie (122-26). Lear is at the mercy of his passions, which have no outlet in action. Suffering is inevitable, suggests the Fool’s wisdom.

Turning to Regan for comfort, Lear gets only the following counsel: O sir, you are old, / Nature in you stands on the very verge / Of his confine. You should be rul’d and led / By some discretion that discerns your state / Better than you yourself. Therefore I pray you / That to our sister you do make return” (146-51). It would be difficult to strip an elderly man of his dignity any more cruelly than this, and already we may begin to sense the change in attitude that marks a leap beyond “ordinary mean” to the “hard hearts” beyond anything we had thought possible in nature—the transition Lear asks about later, in Act 3, Scene 6. At 177, Lear still believes, apparently, that there is a world of difference between Regan and Goneril: “Thou better know’st / The offices of nature, bond of childhood, / Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude: / Thy half o’ th’ kingdom hast thou not forgot, / Wherein I thee endow’d” (177-81). The phrase “offices of nature” indicates that to Lear, nature is something civil and beneficent—it is to be identified with the properly functioning family unit.

But Regan’s request is along the same lines as her previous remark: “I pray you, father, being weak, seem so” (201). Then comes the reverse bidding war between Regan and Goneril over the number of knights Lear is to be allowed, ending at 264 with Regan’s question, “What need one?” Lear offers them a remarkable comeback: “O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is cheap as beast’s” (264-67). Humanity must not, he insists, be reduced to natural necessity; we are creatures of excess, artifice, and, symbol. Nature as a concept enfolds all of these qualities. It is not to be sundered from decorum, either. Then Lear offers a contradictory prayer to the gods, asking for both patience and anger. He is soon to rage in the storm (mentioned in the stage directions as “storm and tempest” at line 284), but for the moment he denounces his two present daughters as “unnatural hags” and declares almost comically, “ I will do such things— / What they are yet I know not; but they shall be / The terrors of the earth!” (280-82) Regan’s cruel sententia to worried Gloucester is her justification for exiling Lear into the storm: “O sir, to wilful men / The injuries that they themselves procure / Must be their schoolmasters. Shut up your doors” (302-04). It’s true enough that the unwise learn, if at all, only by sad experience—perhaps that is a fundamental point in Christian-based tragedy—but mere decency should have been enough to instruct Regan that this is not the time for such sententiousness. Her cruel excess (along with that of Edmund, Goneril, and Cornwall) is the demonic inverse of the generous excess Lear had invoked in exclaiming, “O, reason not the need!” The play affords scant opportunity for finding any middle ground between these two extremes—between that which is almost infinitely above nature and that which is a great deal more savage than nature. The “patience” and acceptance that Edgar will counsel Gloucester and that loyal Kent has been practicing with Lear goes some way towards building a bridge, but the outcome of their efforts is not heartening.

In Act 2, the families are sundered, and like affines itself with like, both indoors and out of doors. Lear has brought up the issue of the heavens—which side will the gods take in this great confrontation between house and house, between one group of sinners and another, far worse, group?

Act 3, Scene 1.

Kent’s question when Lear is abandoned to the “fretful elements” (4) isn’t about grand political theory or power, it is simply about who is attending the frail old man: he should not, thinks Kent, be left alone and at the mercy of the weather. The Gentleman informs him that only the Fool is with Lear, “labour[ing] to outjest / His heart-struck injuries” (16-17). That is a generous way of describing the Fool’s job in this play—we know him to be a teller of discomfiting truths, sometimes in a bitter way. But then, it isn’t comfort that brings characters insight in this play—that would not suit its tragic mode. Albany and Cornwall have fallen out by this time, and both are following events in France. At line 38, Kent excuses the King’s fall into madness unnatural, attributing it to the “bemadding sorrow” caused by the bad conduct of Lear’s two evil daughters.

Act 3, Scenes 2, 4, 6.

In 3.2 and 3.4, the storm is clearly a metaphor for Lear’s internal discord, for the howling madness in the king himself. As the Fool has told him, he has turned his daughters into domineering mothers, and in a sense he has done the opposite of what he declared he wanted to do—recall that he said he was dividing the kingdom in part so he could go off and practice the art of dying well. His daughters were to exercise power while Lear would be free to “crawl towards death.” But instead the old man clings to life, trying desperately to maintain control and clinging to his dearest daughter Cordelia. Even after he has cast them all off, he remains obsessed with them. What we have in King Lear is in part the “tragedy” of growing old and being unable to deal with the changes and the loss that must come since, as Claudius in Hamlet says, reason’s constant law is “death of fathers” (1.2.102-06) James Calderwood of UC Irvine, applying a philosophical thesis of Ernest Becker, wrote a book called Shakespeare and the Denial of Death. Lear is a death-denier in spite of his claims of willingness to accept his demise, and his daughters represent perpetuity to him. This denial may be in part what’s behind Lear’s raging in the storm, and even at the storm in a confused way:

I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness,
I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children,
You owe me no subscription. Then let fall
Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man;
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That will with two pernicious daughters join
Your high-engender’d battles ‘gainst a head
So old and white as this. O, ho! ‘tis foul” (3.2.16-24).

As his rage rolls onward and takes aim at the “great gods, / That keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads” (3.2.49-50), his insight is summed up in the sentence, “I am a man / More sinned against than sinning” (3.2.59-60). This broad realization seems to go beyond a specific grievance involving his treatment by Regan and Goneril; it sounds more like an indictment of the universe than anything else. With these words, Lear claims that he feels his “wits begin to turn” (67), and shows compassion enough for Poor Tom to accept the offer of shelter.

But as Lear’s angry conversation with the elements (as quoted above) suggests, the storm is also a natural phenomenon not entirely reducible to the King’s inner disharmony. In this capacity, it is beyond his control, just as the decay of his body is. He calls the storm the “physic” of pomp at 3.4, the only event and setting that allows him, as a half-naked octogenarian, to make contact with what is common to all human beings. He has learned something in this storm that exceeds his inward tempest: as is said in other Shakespeare plays, “a king is but a man,” no matter what the courtiers or the lore of kings or the theory of kingship may say. But Lear isn’t alone for long in the tempest—the Fool is with him for a time, as is Kent, and it’s the place where he meets “Poor Tom.” Such weather isn’t to be endured long. Nature is outdoing itself for ferocity.

In 3.4, Poor Tom plays a significant role with respect to Lear, who says to him, “Thou are the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, fork’d animal as thou art” (3.4.106-08), the very lowest level to which a man may sink. Poor Tom attests to the rightness of Lear’s baring himself to the effects of the storm, but it isn’t good for a human being to be “out in the storm” permanently—shelter must be sought, we must return to a more “accommodated” model of humanity where we can abide. Poor Tom has already learned this himself, and King Lear, when he calls Edgar “the thing itself,” is in fact looking at a man’s artistic construction, a willed madness that he has probably begun to cast off even by that point, as indeed we see him declare forcefully at the end of 3.6: “Tom, away!” Lear doesn’t seem to understand Tom’s situation fully, but he learns from this supposed madman nonetheless.

In 3.6. comes the great “trial scene,” with Lear, the Fool, and Poor Tom serving as judge and jury against some hapless joint stools enlisted to substitute for Regan and Goneril. The causes Lear derives for his misery, his lines are confused but also genuinely moving. He had been told he was no less than a god, and in the storm he has found that he’s just a miserable old man. He abandoned his only true identity when he cast off Cordelia. He keeps coming back to Regan and Goneril, those willful daughters who, he thinks, have done nothing but indulge their shameful lusts and follow their primal hunger for power. What sort of “justice” now prevails but a system of spiraling oppression and hypocrisy, one that he has loosed upon himself and others? Virtue at present is nothing more than a device to facilitate the evil now afoot. Lear’s horror at a degree of cruelty beyond what he had thought possible shows in the question that wells up from the bottom of his being towards the end of the mock trial: “Then let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart. Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?” (3.6.76-78) When we have renounced our limits, what, if anything, can reestablish them again, aside from exhaustion unto death?

Act 3, Scenes 3, 5.

Edmund had said earlier, “Now Gods, stand up for bastards.” He’s obsessed, understandably enough, with the distinction between baseness and legitimacy, between nature and convention. Now he seizes the opportunity Gloucester has given him for further betrayal—Edmund will tell Cornwall that Gloucester is going to help the king. Lear unleashed Edmund upon the kingdom by his unwise actions and irrationality—indeed, Edmund is inevitable since, thanks to Lear, there seems to be nothing between anarchy and the generosity and tact that maintain human dignity and shore up the frailty of our nature. Shakespeare is apparently aware that “human nature” is not a given—it is actually something we must work at and maintain, and if we sink beneath it, we are “worse” than any violent predator in the animal kingdom since such predators don’t add superfluous cruelty to their bloody actions. Edmund is in full throttle evildoer mode at present, but later he will find that he can’t permanently jettison the trappings of convention: security requires order, it requires something like a social contract.

Act 3, Scene 7.

In this scene, Gloucester is interrogated and then blinded. Gloucester’s bold justification of his secret trip to Dover in aid of the king is, “Because I would not see thy cruel nails / Pluck out his poor old eyes.” To Gloucester, the phrase represents the worst thing he can imagine, and is purely metaphorical. Not so for Regan, who has been interrogating him, or for Goneril, who, in the presence of Regan, had already uttered her preference even before the current exchange: “Pluck out his eyes” (5). For them, the literal punishment seems entirely appropriate. Sophocles didn’t want his audience to see Oedipus blind himself with those pins from the dress of his wife Jocasta—it was reported to the audience, but not shown. Shakespeare, however, serves up the sickening spectacle along with the unforgettable lines, “Out, vild jelly! / Where is thy lustre now?” (83-84) This is the lowest point in the play, the nadir of cruelty into which Lear’s initial mistake made it possible for others to descend.

Act 4, Scene 1.

Blinded Gloucester has abandoned any notion of a just moral order rooted in nature (see pg. 1329); he has understandably lost patience, and declares, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, / They kill us for their sport” (36-37). Edgar, who believes that the gods are just, must bring his father round to patience again, to acceptance of the predicament that his own foolishness has at least in part created.

Act 4, Scene 2.

At last Albany asserts his own virtuous will against Goneril and her evil compatriots, telling her that she isn’t worth “the dust which the rude wind / Blows in your face” (30-31). But Goneril doesn’t care what he thinks—she is too busy thinking passionate thoughts about her lover Edmund, the newly created Gloucester. Albany is not to be gainsaid, however, and calls Goneril what she is: a “tiger” and a “fiend” rather than a human being; he realizes that the anarchic violence she and her sister are participating must either be stopped or destroy the kingdom altogether: “Humanity must perforce prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep” (48-49).

Act 4, Scenes 3-4.

Kent hears news from a Gentleman about Cordelia’s actions and frame of mind, and Kent asserts the traditional view that “The stars above us, govern our conditions” (33). Else how could such differences be between three sisters of the same king? Cordelia, meantime, is ready to take on the British whom she knows to be marching against her.

Act 4, Scene 5.

Regan shows her jealousy over Goneril’s desire for Edmund, and tries to enlist the fop Oswald on her side: “My lord is dead; Edmund and I have talk’d, / And more convenient is he for my hand / Than for your lady’s” (30-32). Oswald is also told that he should, if possible, put the old “traitor” Gloucester out of his misery, lest he incite the people to compassion against her and her allies.

Act 4, Scene 6.

Gloucester had abandoned his virtuous son Edgar at the bidding of a knave. He was too willing to suppose that the world had been turned upside down, and his fear of betrayal made him most susceptible to it. Now Gloucester’s attitude verges on unacceptable despair as he implores Edgar to lead him to a Dover cliff where he may end his life. Edgar, still disguised (though as a rustic, not a madman) does for him what Cordelia would not do for her father: he graces Gloucester’s way forwards with a lie, telling him, “You are now within a foot / Of th’ extreme verge” (25). Some may take Edgar’s long maintenance of his rustic disguise as somewhat excessive, but in this play, extreme actions are sometimes required as homeopathic remedy for states of extreme error. That’s the kind of “remedy” the king’s rash behavior has helped to make necessary, although we shouldn’t blame him too harshly for others’ downward spiral into utter depravity. Regan, Goneril, Cornwall, and their ilk are responsible for their own misdeeds. There is some comedy in this scene since, of course, Gloucester’s “fall” is only onto the bare planks of the stage. The old man’s fake descent turns out to be a “fortunate fall” since it persuades him to have patience even in his almost unbearable condition.

In this newfound patience, Gloucester is confronted with a flower-decked King Lear, who apparently hasn’t recovered his wits as well as he had thought. Edgar calls him “a side-piercing sight” (85), adding a Christ-like aura to our vision of Lear as a suffering, dying, universal man. Lear asks if Gloucester is “Goneril with a white beard” (96), and reproves his former ministers for their flattery: “they told me I was every thing. ‘Tis a lie, I am not ague-proof” (104-05). Everywhere he looks, Lear sees demonic sexuality as the base of things: “Let copulation thrive” (114), he bellows, and declares of women, “Down from the waist they are Centaurs” (125). This rant culminates in a dark vision of systemic injustice and hypocrisy:

[A] dog’s obeyed in office.
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back,
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whip’st her. The usurer hangs the cozener.
Thorough tatter’d clothes [small] vices do appear;
Robes and furr’d gowns hide all. (159-64)

This is as strong a view as we find in William Blake’s “London”: “the chimney-sweeper's cry / Every blackening church appals, / And the hapless soldier's sigh / Runs in blood down palace-walls. He has finally accepted the Fool’s old offer of the title “fool,” and his eloquence peters out in an exhausted, enraged repetition of the word “kill”: “And when I have stol’n upon these son-in-laws, / Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!” (186-87)

The sixth scene ends with Edgar putting an end to the rascal Oswald, who has stumbled upon Gloucester alone and tried to kill him for the prize Regan has offered. In Oswald’s purse he discovers Goneril’s treasonous letter to Edmund, imploring him to kill her virtuous husband Albany.

Act 4, Scene 7.

Lear recovers his wits, and says to Cordelia, “Pray do not mock me. / I am a very foolish fond old man. . . . Methinks I should know you” (59-63). He fully understands the wrong he has done her—something he had begun to sense earlier, even as far back as 1.5.24. Lear expects only hatred, but Cordelia mildly tells him there is “no cause” why she should hate him. Lear had to seek into the cause of his other daughters’ “hard hearts,” but for Cordelia’s loyalty, she is suggesting, he need not trouble himself to find the reason why. As Portia says in The Merchant of Venice, “The quality of mercy is not strained”—it is a thing divine and not to be sifted or parsed.

Act 5, Scene 1.

In this scene we find Edmund, Goneril, and Regan locked in a vicious struggle for supremacy in love even as they prepare to fight Cordelia’s invading Frenchmen. Edmund plans to use Albany as a front while the fighting is on, and then dispose of him afterwards as useless baggage and a bar to his advancement.

Act 5, Scene 2.

Edgar is disappointed to find his father abjectly depressed during the confusion of battle, and tells him, “Men must endure / Their going hence even as their coming hither, / Ripeness is all” (9-11).

Act 5, Scene 3.

The worst of the worst win the day, and Lear and Cordelia are taken prisoner. Lear’s reconciliation with Cordelia is brief but supremely fine:

Come let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds I’ th’ cage;
When thou does ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out—
And take upon ‘s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th’ moon. (8-19)

The old king predicts that he and Cordelia will participate in God’s mysterious knowledge of all things, knowing the ins and outs of his secret dispensation of affairs and men. But all this eloquence is too much for Edmund, who ends Lear’s words with a harsh command: “Take them away.” Political and military events have outstripped the process whereby King Lear has discovered his mistakes and recovered his identity and his affiliation with Cordelia. It is simply too late for a reconciliation of more than a few minutes’ time, and in the worst of circumstances. Edmund’s blunt order completes the triumph of literalism and matter-of-fact depravity over legitimate power, virtue, and (here) prophetic rhetoric. Lear is rehumanized and endowed with new insight into what is right and wrong, what is human and what is not. But he and Cordelia are crushed because they are a threat to Edmund, and he determines that they must go.

But things aren’t so simple for Edmund. Albany has nothing but contempt for him, which bodes ill for his hopes to wield tremendous power in the new order of things. His presence in the army camp provokes a life-and-death struggle between Goneril and Regan for his hand, and Albany arrests him and Goneril for “capital treason” (83). No sooner is this declared than Edgar shows up and challenges him to single combat. Edmund, worshiper of animalistic nature and the “Regan Revolution” though he may be, is now trapped into securing his ill-gotten gains, his newfound legitimacy as bestowed upon him first by Gloucester and then by Cornwall after Gloucester’s blinding and exile. He must accept Edgar’s challenge, and ends up hearing the legitimate son’s pious declaration that “The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us: / The dark and vicious place where thee he got / Cost him his eyes” (171-74). Regan, meanwhile, has been poisoned by Goneril, who then takes her own life when she sees Edmund slain.

Edgar has found time to reclaim the honor of his title and to avenge Edmund’s betrayal of their father, and to some extent he has reasserted the principle of a divine moral order. But the Gloucester and Lear plots do not come together: Lear and Cordelia have run out of time, and not even Edmund’s surprising last-minute act of repentance can save Cordelia from being hanged or Lear from dying of grief over her lifeless body. Their only permanence is death.

In later-C17-18 versions such as that of Nahum Tate’s 1681 revival of the play (http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/tatelear.html ), Cordelia actually thrives as Queen, married by a beaming Lear to Edgar. Neoclassical critics and audiences found the actual Shakespearean ending an intolerable violation of representational ethics: the good must be rewarded, and the wicked must be punished. Here is Dr. Johnson’s pronouncement on the matter in Rambler #4:

“In narratives where historical veracity has no place, I cannot discover why there should not be exhibited the most perfect idea of virtue; of virtue not angelical, nor above probability, for what we cannot credit, we shall never imitate, but the highest and purest that humanity can reach, which, exercised in such trials as the various revolutions of things shall bring upon it, may, by conquering some calamities, and enduring others, teach us what we may hope, and what we can perform. Vice, for vice is necessary to be shewn, should always disgust; nor should the graces of gaiety, or the dignity of courage, be so united with it, as to reconcile it to the mind. Wherever it appears, it should raise hatred by the malignity of its practices, and contempt by the meanness of its stratagems: for while it is supported by either parts or spirit, it will be seldom heartily abhorred. ”

In Cordelia’s death, the justice of the heavens is not at all apparent. It is true that vice is thoroughly disgusting in King Lear, but virtue is by no means shown triumphant. We must endure the old king’s “going hence” in unbearable agony and near incoherence, as he bewails Cordelia’s death and laments, “my poor fool is hang’d” (306), which may refer to our old friend the Fool, who disappeared at 3.5 with the line, “And I’ll go to bed at noon” (85). Nobody really wants to rule this blighted kingdom anymore: neither Albany nor Kent will take the reigns of power, and it seems as if all is left to Edgar. His concluding lines are oddly unsatisfying:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say:
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

If the play has been a quest for the restoration of authority, Edgar is hardly the quester who heals the Fisher King and makes the waters flow. But this play is, of course, a tragedy and not a romance. What it may have taught us, in the end, is that the deepest kind of insight into humanity does not accompany the workings of earthly power: as so often in tragedy, the cost of such insight is an untimely death. Edgar can’t do much more than repeat the stale “truism” of his father Gloucester: better days have been. There’s no easy accommodation, or magical reconciliation, no middle ground to occupy—just a pair of departed royal visionaries and a remnant of confused and disillusioned people repeating unconvincing truisms. Much of the play has been about trying different strategies of accommodation, recognizing the constrictions of nature, mortality, political power, and language, but no satisfying arrangements have emerged. No one has come to terms with what it means to be mortal and yet not identical with the workings of raw physical nature.

Finally, even though King Lear has pagan trappings, I treat it as tinged with Christian principles, and it seems that within this framework, tragedy is constituted by the enormous gap between wisdom and felicity. Much human suffering is preventable, but at the deepest level, sorrow and loss are the only true teachers. And at this level, even a great man like Lear is the “natural fool of fortune” (4.6.191). All along, the Fool had helped prevent Lear from falling into a hopeless state of self-pity, and had helped the audience from over-pitying the king. The Fool had stood for the possibility of artistic redemption, what with his playful songs and insouciance. He knew that Lear was at least willing to listen to him speak the truth in an eccentric form, unlike Regan and Goneril, whose stern authority he feared and whose disregard for his rhymes stemmed from their obscene literalism and savagery. But comfort is cold in this play—at a certain point, the Fool simply had to disappear, leaving Lear to face what he has done to Cordelia and the impossibility of setting things right.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. (Folger Shakespeare Library.) Washington Square Press, 2004. ISBN-13: 978-0743482769.

Instructor on Othello

2009-02-01T16:17:00.000-08:00

Scene-by-Scene Notes on Othello

Act 1, Scene 1.

1.1.65ff. Iago may not be acting from world-historical outrage, but he sets forth two reasons for his hatred of Othello: first, his sense of injured merit because Othello has given the lieutenant’s job he coveted to Cassio, and the possibility (in his view, as stated later in 1.3) that his wife has slept with Othello. Iago is interesting because he’s a self-conscious Machiavel and a consummate actor (like Shakespeare’s Richard III or Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus). As he says to Roderigo on 1252, “I am not what I am” (65)—he may be Othello’s trusted underling, but that isn’t how he sees himself “five years from now,” to borrow a phrase from the corporate interview playbook. Iago may be comfortable in his own skin, but he is not at peace with himself. There’s something impish about him, too, something of the downright evildoer—he seems to enjoy stirring up trouble for the hell of it, and he shows no regard for the destruction he brings to Desdemona, whom he knows to be innocent. He maneuvers with diabolical skill in the gap between what he seems to be and what he is, turning everything that happens to his own advantage. (1252)

Act 1, Scene 2.

1.2.62ff. Brabantio accuses Othello of witchcraft: “thou has enchanted her,” he tells the Moor; otherwise, he insists, the girl would never “Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom of such a thing as thou—to fear, not to delight!” He can’t even imagine the attraction of the foreign or the exotic. To Brabantio, Venice is the world. (He’s strangely provincial given that Venice is a cosmopolitan sea empire that had long since known how to cut a deal or two with Arabs and Turks to protect its interests.) Brabantio immediately accepts Iago and Roderigo’s reductive, grotesquely abstract “devil” and bestial “ram” characterization of Othello. Othello hardly lacks charm, and he is a Christian just like Brabantio, but the father welcomes Iago’s stereotypes. (1254)

Act 1, Scene 3.

Othello carries the day when summoned to Venice because of his military bearing and chivalric eloquence. When the Italians accuse him of witchcraft, he promises to deliver a “round, unvarnished tale” (90ff, pg. 1256 Riverside ); but then he romances them with his beautiful, moving words. Othello cuts a dashing figure, and he is aware of his effect upon others. He is proud of his conquest, like a soldier who has won the prize fairly. The tale he delivers is, of course, anything but “unvarnished.” It is filled with romantic extravagance. True enough, perhaps, he has been sold into slavery, fought tremendous battles, and seen many remarkable sights. But did he really see “Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” (144-45)? No, these are tales he’s picked up and remembered the better to build up an image of himself as an adventurer. He exploits Desdemona’s “seriously inclin[ing]” (146) towards such stories, crafting from that propensity a contract-in-hand to “beguile her of her tears” and to “dilate” his life’s journey. What sanctifies Othello’s dilatory works of art? Well, the fact that he sincerely loves Desdemona—he means her only good, so it’s acceptable to incorporate some “make-believe” elements into an already exciting account of himself. Othello is rather like Sir Philip Sidney’s good Christian poet, whose “feigning” of “notable images” shouldn’t be condemned just because it isn’t literally true.

It would be an oversimplification, therefore, to say that Othello is a “noble, naïve cultural other.” He is not the strong, silent warrior type, either. Rather, he’s a poetical and romantic man with tremendous self-confidence (at least until Iago shakes him to the core). Perhaps his tragedy is that he just can’t imagine anyone wielding such poetical power for anything but the good reasons that motivate him in his courtship of Desdemona, or in his speech to the Duke and Senators that frees them to return to considerations of State rather than dwelling on private grudges and love affairs. His way of “seeming” (i.e. embroidering his life story) is so pure that it’s simply folded into the essential goodness of his being. In a sense, all poets are liars—Plato tells us so, right?—but some feigning and pretending is nobly done and not engaged in as a means to do evil, as it is with Iago. Othello’s naivety, then, isn’t that he’s unable to speak anything but plain truth; it’s that he can’t conceive of a man who willfully spins lies for base purposes. A good man is free to “gild the lily,” so to speak, but a wicked man ought to show himself for what he is. In this sense, it’s fair to say that Othello proves tragically unable to deal with the difference between seeming and being. Then, too, Othello may be poetical, but he’s not John Keats’ poet of “negative capability,” the kind who can throw himself into doubts and uncertainties as if they were his own proper element. Othello’s feigning seems much more tactical and less supple, more task-oriented, than that of the Keatsian “chameleon poet” who really wants to escape from his own skin for as long as possible.

Both the absolute otherness imposed on Othello by men such as Brabantio (who can scarcely process the Moor at all, as his acceptance of Iago’s ridiculously impoverished epithets suggest) and the charismatic appeal of the man’s bearing and language are at work early in Othello. Perhaps both, taken together with the sad events later in the play, go a long way towards demonstrating how difficult mutual understanding between cultures can be. In spite of Othello’s wondrous gifts of bearing and speech, he is easily destroyed by Iago, a man with exactly the sort of knowledge of Venetian society Othello lacks. Generalized virtues, it seems, cannot permanently trump an intimate knowledge of local cultural practices, symbolism, and assumptions, at least not if someone is determined to use these specifics against an outsider. Othello is a classic tragedy in that a good man is destroyed by the very virtues that have won him admiration -- his inability to comprehend how devious and selfish others can be. It’s true that Othello follows his personal desires, and we might suppose that he’s putting Venice at risk if a tumult ensues or his leadership is questioned. But he deals so forthrightly and honestly with the Venetian authorities that the whole thing blows over in no time, and he is free to return to his honorable work for the general welfare. How, he might ask, could others be so petty as to bring him down and damage the general welfare for purely private reasons, like those of Iago? This is inconceivable to a man like Othello.

1.3.180ff and 248ff. Our first glimpse of Desdemona shows us a very strong-willed, noble young woman who is not afraid to act boldly and speak her mind, even in the presence of her powerful father and Venetian statesmen. Her strength accords well with Othello’s soldierly virtue. She is by no means a pale, retiring victim. I suppose Desdemona is simply in an impossible position—on the one hand, her considerable aplomb doesn’t translate into an ability to charm or fast-talk Othello out of his suspicions; her goodness works against her. But on the other hand, with the devilish Othello working against her, it’s hard to see how anything she says, no matter how skilful, would help. Terse protestations of virtue and fancy talk alike would no doubt fail to overcome the “ocular proof” by which Iago has falsely damned her. (1256-57)

319ff. Iago’s creed is worth noting. To Roderigo’s passive, faux-suicidal blubbering about the defects of his “virtue” (in this usage, it means “nature”), Iago blurts out “Virtue? A fig! ‘tis in ourselves that we are / thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the / which our wills are gardeners…” (319-21). In terms of Renaissance psychology, this means that while we are subject to the pull of our appetites (which belong to the “sensitive” part of human nature), we can control these appetites. We can let our choice-making power, our “will,” be informed by reason and thereby control the effects of appetite. (The elements of the rational part of human nature are “understanding” or reason and “will” or rational appetite, the inner power of motion that can incline towards God and reason or towards our lower appetites.) Iago is suggesting that while the body and the appetites may hold sway for a time in Desdemona, she is bound, in due time, to become sated with Othello, and then her rational element will lead her to despise this older man whose appearance and culture are so unlike hers. (See pg. 1259 Riverside , 1.3.342ff; see also pg. 1262, 2.1.225-31.) Like will return to like, he promises Roderigo. Well, Iago hardly puts Renaissance psychology to the noble uses of Pico della Mirandola, who implies that the grandest goal of humanity is to transcend itself for the greater glory of God, but he knows how to craft a cunning scheme from its premises: Roderigo need only “put money in his purse” and wait for Desdemona to turn again to Venice.

386-404. Here Iago’s second motive comes to light: he’s heard that Othello may have slept with his wife Emilia. And although he may be patient in devising his wicked schemes, he shares Othello’s disdain of long-continued suspicion: the mere supposition that Emilia may have cuckolded him demands payback; the matter must be resolved. He will wage a pre-emptive war against this man who has already frustrated his hopes of advancement, and who may also have insulted his marriage as well. In some rather cold, calculating way, he himself is subject to the cat-like “green-eyed monster” jealousy, and his way of dealing with the discomfort it’s caused him is to pass it along. That there’s also something to the “baseless evil” charge often leveled against Iago, we may see from his brazen determination to “plume up” his will “in double knavery” (303-04).

Act 2, Scenes 1-2.

This scene turns on “trifles”—some innocently witty banter and a perhaps mildly flirtatious kiss, a drink or two or three in response to Othello’s generous insistence that his men enjoy a time of revels, a lost handkerchief with a fanciful history: how easy it is to weave an unflattering tale, and take advantage of others’ weaknesses and deep insecurity. (1261 Riverside , line 167ff.) As Iago will say of the handkerchief in 3.3, “Trifles light as air / Are to the jealious confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ” (322-24). In the second act generally, Cassio, who much values his martial reputation and is loyal, is easily typecast by Iago first as the genial soldier, then as the quarrelsome drunkard, and finally as the importunate suitor. Iago himself doesn’t see much virtue in Cassio, by the way—as we see from 236-41 of Scene 2 (pg. 1262), Iago credits the Florentine with nothing more than Hamlet’s “indifferent honest” disposition; he’s neither better nor worse than the average lout, and a clever man may steer him at will.

As for Desdemona’s virtue, well, innocence can seldom defend itself, certainly not as eloquently or convincingly as evil can. This seems to be true even when the innocent person is as intelligent and capable as Desdemona. One remembers Yeats’ line in “The Second Coming” that “the best lack all conviction” while “the worst are full of passionate intensity.” In Shakespeare, it isn’t usually true that the best people lack conviction—what they sometimes lack (consider Cordelia in King Lear as an example to set beside Desdemona) is the right phrase, the moxy to take advantage of opportunities to advance their good cause. And even if our good folks have considerable linguistic capacity and courage, the disposition we call “goodness” seldom, if ever, gains by rhetorical sleight of hand—the problem seems quite intractable. Lear’s daughter Cordelia may be a bit stiff and clumsy as a speaker, but we all feel the rightness of her lament, “What shall poor Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent.” Or consider Machiavelli’s characterization of the problem: to paraphrase what he writes in Il Principe, “those who try to be virtuous in all things must come to grief among so many who aren’t virtuous.”

Act 2, Scene 3.

Othello is an absolutist in matters of honor, which is always a concern for him. Once honor is lost, it’s impossible for him to recover his trust in another person. Honor is an ideal that Othello can’t reconcile to the messy, ethically dubious world of Venice . Shakespeare explores this rigid idealism often in his plays, and seems to consider it a trap. For example, Brutus in Julius Caesar, or the title character in Coriolanus (and, I suppose, Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, since his “eastern extravagance” is merely the obverse of strict Roman honor, disables him from combating the machinations of the clever Octavian), or, on a lighter note, all those hopeless idealizers in the comedies (Orlando in As You Like It comes to mind). There are many shades of gray, many nuances, many roles a man or woman might and sometimes must play, any number of imperfections and exigencies to deal with. Idealism is noble, but it is a disabling quality in a saucy, ever-changing world. Iago plays Othello like a fiddle in this scene, and the final lyrics of the tune are, “Cassio, I love thee, / But never more be officer of mine” (249-50). And now Othello thinks even more highly of Iago than ever, unsuspecting of the diabolical scheme the man announces near the end of 2.3, with its promise to advance Cassio’s suit by Desdemona’s earnest pleading and thereby, as her husband looks on with horror, turn her “virtue into pitch” (360, pg. 1267 Riverside).

Act 3, Scenes 1-3.

At 3.1.71, we hear that Michael Cassio’s very usefulness in Othello’s own suit to Desdemona now plays against him—he had, after all, served as go-between in furtherance of their secret, forbidden love. Why might he not pursue the lady himself? The thought is ungracious, but not unreasonable.

We should hear alarm bells in Othello’s admission of his great fondness for Desdemona: after she makes her case in behalf of Cassio and exits, Othello says, “When I love thee not, / Chaos is come again” (91-92). Chaos—yes, that’s exactly the aim of Iago’s decreative schemes. Once Othello begins to suspect, he will be thrown completely off balance until the very end of the play. Iago makes the Moor draw “the truth” from him, and reinforces the Othello-principle that we must all be what we appear to be: “Men should be what they seem, / Or those that be not, would they might seem none!” (127-28) Iago knows that Othello lacks (to borrow from Keats’ letters) “negative capability”—he can’t exist for an extended time in the midst of uncertainty. If there’s a problem, it must be dealt with presently, not left to fester. Othello is the kind of military man who insists on gathering hard evidence and rendering a firm decision, court-martial style, the way he judged Cassio. His lack of knowledge about Venetian mores and subtlety (an English stereotype for the Italians generally—subtle, devious, sly) makes him anxious, easy prey to the overblown trifles in which Iago trades, and very susceptible to the honest-sounding counsel his deceiver offers: “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy? / It is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock/ The meat it feeds on” (165-67, pg. 1269 col.2 Riverside ). Othello is also older than Desdemona, and he is a black man (perhaps sub-Saharan rather than the more familiar Arab) in a white culture—both facts that Iago exploits masterfully. At base, Othello seems to be uncertain that even his great charm and rhetorical skill can hold his wife’s loyalty (2957). How can he, when (if we are to believe Iago), “In Venice they do let [God] see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands” (202-03)?

Act 3, Scene 4.

With its articulation of the handkerchief device and the “prayer vignette” in which Iago kneels along with a murderously earnest Othello, this scene is perhaps the height of Iago’s villainy. Othello is practically mad with jealous rage by now—”Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore” (359)—and so the fact that Cassio has been seen to “wipe his beard” with Desdemona’s handkerchief easily passes Othello’s current standard of conviction. Much has been made of the scene in which Iago swears undying fealty to Othello, but I think it will do to suggest that Iago’s damnation consists in swearing by Christian symbols to do the devil’s work; his words are pious, but his intentions transform them into the markers of a black mass. Perhaps there’s savage irony in his swearing by “yond marble heaven” (460) since, after all, the audience may see him swear by a painted image of the sky in the theater and some torchlight, and not the heavens or the stars themselves. In any case, he’s now attained part of his end: he has become Othello’s lieutenant, and is even engaged to murder Cassio while Othello plans Desdemona’s demise.

Othello expects the same romantic extravagance from Desdemona as he lavishes upon her: the handkerchief, he tells her, is an emblem of the romantic magic, the charm, that underlies his erotic fidelity and should underlie hers. Its loss is catastrophic now that it has come to symbolize her chaste loyalty. (We should note that Othello had casually dropped it at the end of 3.3. thanks to the headache caused by his agonized thoughts about Desdemona; from there innocently Emilia picked it up and gave it to Iago, who planted it with Cassio). Othello is a romantic idealist as well as a military idealist. At lines 58-64, Othello gives us a version of the handkerchief’s history—it was given him by his mother, who herself got it from a female Egyptian sorcerer, and Othello claims that its possession guarantees the loyalty of the possessor’s lover. It’s fatal consequentiality is further underscored by the claim that it was “dy’ed in mummy which the skilful / Conserv’d of maidens’ hearts” (74-75). (Later, in trying to justify his murder of Desdemona, he will claim that his father gave it to his mother—does that indicate dishonesty, forgetfulness, or a little slip on Shakespeare’s part? I don’t know; see 5.2.216-17.) Desdemona, of course, doesn’t have it, and is forced to temporize by dissembling, while Othello’s vocabulary finally moves towards perfect accord with his obsession: “the handkerchief!” repeated several times.

Act 4, Scene 1.

Othello, already driven into what seems like an epileptic fit at the loss of the handkerchief, will now be subject to one further “proof”: Iago engages Cassio in a conversation which, thanks to a bit of low-talking at the right instant, the Moor takes for lewd and contemptuous talk about Desdemona when in fact Cassio is only making jests about his relationship with the prostitute Bianca, who is overly fond of him. And, of course, Bianca brings in the handkerchief, making Othello think Cassio has given it to her out of contempt for Desdemona. Othello beholds this spectacle, and becomes positively deranged with contradictory impulses: “O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!” and “I will chop her into messes. Cuckold me!” (196, 200) And when he strikes Desdemona, Lodovico, who has come with a letter announcing that Cassio has been installed in Othello’s place as commander in Cyprus , is there to see it and make the reasonable inference that Othello is an abusive husband and a man with little control over his worst impulses.

Act 4, Scene 2.

Although Desdemona has shown a touch or two of famed Venetian subtlety, we have no cause to suppose that anything but piety and honesty are the hallmarks of her character. By now, however, Othello has been warped by Iago into taking such signs of virtue for their exact opposite: evidence of pitch-dark whoredom and vile cunning. From now on, everything she says “can and will be used against her”; she is under arrest, so to speak, without even knowing it until very late in the play. Her self-defense, while moving, is also rather feeble: “By heaven, you do me wrong” and “No, as I am a Christian” (82, 84). To be charged with a fault like adultery, it seems, is sure to put one in the position of being considered “guilty until proven innocent”; simply being accused of certain offenses so strips a person of others’ good opinion that it’s tantamount to conviction. (One thinks of Kafka’s The Trial or the trials of 1984 and shudders—to come under suspicion is to be already a person with no identity except that constituted by one’s presumed malefactions, with no possibility of appeal.) It’s common in Renaissance plays for virtuous characters to prove themselves helpless when abused by the wicked and the cunning. Iago is still at work, egging on the already angry Roderigo to murder Cassio to keep Othello in Cyprus , along with Desdemona.

Act 4, Scene 3.

While Desdemona can only sing a sad song of frustrated love (“ Willow , willow”), Emilia proves less helpless; a fit opponent for her husband, she advises her younger mistress as a kindly Machiavel should, though to no effect. From 65-103, Emilia tries to temper Desdemona’s moral absolutism, which rivals that of Othello. Desdemona’s reply consists in a declaration of unstinting loyalty to Othello—an attitude she will maintain even as Othello strangles her. Emilia’s bawdy pronouncements on gender relations are the very stuff of Shakespearian comedy (one thinks of Portia and Nerissa’s “ring scheme” in The Merchant of Venice, for instance), but here they only deepen the sense of impending tragedy.

Act 5, Scene 1.

Iago arranges for Roderigo to kill Cassio, but the bungler only manages to wound Cassio in the leg, and Iago stabs Roderigo to death lest he blab the truth.

Act 5, Scene 2.

Othello makes himself an example in all strictness, preventing the wheels of Venetian justice from rolling. In the end (after a few moments of unseemly waffling and denial around 95, right after he strangles Desdemona), he doesn’t look around for someone else to blame. (This is not the case in one of Shakespeare’s main sources, the Italian author Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, in which the Moor makes his escape, only to die shamefully later on.) Othello bills himself extravagantly as the example of a man who “loved not wisely but too well” (350-52). His eloquence in word and elegance of manner reassert themselves in his final struggle. Othello’s death seems right to most readers, I should think, since his words and manner, as he apparently understands, cannot make up for the disparagement and destruction of a faithful wife. His epigrammatic description of what he has done indicates a desire to control others’ interpretation of his downfall; perhaps that’s a tragic hero’s right (we recall Hamlet’s plea that Horatio should live on to tell his story truly), but this doesn’t keep strip the ending of its disturbing quality. We may remember the occasions on which Othello had let loose with the incredulous question, “Ha, ha, false to me?” (3.3.334, 4.1.200) with seeming emphasis on the word “me,” as if it were especially egregious that he, of all men, should suffer the indignity of betrayal. My sympathy goes to Desdemona, not to Othello, in spite of his apparently sincere repentance.

Othello’s complexity as a tragic hero is in keeping with the fact that the moral quality of Shakespeare’s protagonists varies a great deal: there are the unrepentant villain Richard III and the more introspective one Macbeth; the conspirators against Julius Caesar with their respectively mixed motives running from the petty to the grand; Romeo and Juliet who die more because of pitiable misunderstandings than from any character flaw; King Lear’s confusion between his public and private selves; Hamlet’s sometime dawdling and sometime arrogant rashness, etc. Shakespeare is bound by no particular theory of drama, so he is free (as in fact were the great Greek dramatists, whose work preceded Aristotle’s theory, after all) to follow his own genius instead of adhering to the notions of Aristotle or anyone else.

Shakespeare, William. Othello. (Folger Shakespeare Library.) Washington Square Press, 2004. ISBN-13: 978-0743482820.