Thursday, August 13, 2015

nevertheless



When I opened a Dorothy Richardson biography in the library yesterday without reading the name of the biographer and saw, near the bottom of the page on my right, the word "nevertheless," meaning that something was true, "nevertheless" another thing was also true in opposition to the first thing, then my heart exclaimed, "Fromm," and it was Fromm.

By the last page she had decided that Robinson and D.H. Lawrence were not as whole as Woolf and James Joyce (two teams of two, one boy one girl, and I became distracted, for what if, in this book and in no other place, symmetry was necessary, and all arguments should consist of symmetry first and foremost and could this biography of Dorothy Richardson be the mental door to a place where all good things are symmetrical, all faces exactly the same right & left, etc?) – they were not as whole because they couldn't keep "life" out of their books, they kept muddling art with life, whereas Woolf and Joyce had detached themselves purely and determinedly into "art." The second team had made a greater commitment and a more important sacrifice: that was the biographer's conclusion.

The distribution of success and failure is clear but is it illuminating?

Richardson and Lawrence's muddying-with-life usually comes in the form of apparent impatience – they want to push against things and argue – and Woolf and Joyce have placed themselves away from that physical punch-up mode, therefore Lawrence and Richardson have roughly-formed books, pulling away into lumps of lecture or hatred, while Woolf and Joyce have artly-formed books, integrating their arguments coherently, without the blasting, ranting irritation. Whatever feeling they have, they like you to think that they're putting it to work. Whereas Lawrence and Richardson are willing to give you the impression that they are worked by their feelings.

And Woolf might have been thinking along similar lines to Fromm when she said that Richardson was flawed because she wrote from one self-boundaried perspective, that of Miriam Henderson. She was not universal and she did not have a wide view.

I believe it is good to have these lumps of hate and gnashing in books. I am in favour of Lawrence and Richardson. I do not think that they are inferior.

Lawrence and Richardson trusted themselves to the veracity of their lumps, and Lawrence at least was a believer in the "under-consciousness so devilish" (as he said of the United States) and in the eviction of all under-consciousnesses from their chrysalis cases: "many a dragon-fly never gets out of the chrysalis case: dies inside." And he will get out.

To remove the lumps because they are lumps would mean submission to the alien thing called art that they do not entirely trust. They have seen that it can be wielded against them. The biographer says that they have not achieved a coherent art, but they have eyed tidiness and decided against it. That is not art, for them.

So I was in an argument with Fromm, and I wanted to bring up Margaret Grainger, the editor who wrote the introduction for The Natural History Prose Writing of John Clare, in order to say, "Here is somebody who does not write symmetry or "nevertheless," and I prefer her –" but then I would be creating a two-team system, like Fromm, and I would be putting one person against another and ticking off their differences, like Fromm, "The two women wrote introductions, nevertheless Grainger was …" and I would be Frommian, as I was when I wrote the paragraph beginning with "Richardson and Lawrence's muddying …" – absolute pure Frommianism, my God.


17 comments:

  1. another perspective: all art is an attempt to communicate something; if not why is it there? the author needs to have experienced something new or revealing in order to create a viable work. can the medium be artistic without enlightening? does "art" consist of strictly that medium or must it convey some sort of truth? both together would seem to be the ideal in a prose work, no? how it's done and what is conveyed might be the criteria of critical analysis... is this too basic? comparing different authors in terms of their styles of communication might seem to be comparing apples and oranges, no?

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  2. All art is form, and all form communicates something because it is the exteriorisation of an otherwise ineffable state. To say that communication is the reason for its existence is, I think, conflating a form's state of being with its intention. I'm not sure that those two different ideas can be mashed together so easily.
    As for the rest – yes, "how it's done and what is conveyed might be the criteria of critical analysis" is essentially the idea I was thinking of: this is Graingerism, and the other way is Frommianism.

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  3. had a long conversation with the wife(masters in eng. lit.)and she managed to get thru to me about why looking at literature from a geological or zen point of view is basically meaningless and that my comments were pretty silly. so, as interesting and provoking as your essays are, i guess i'll reserve my interruptions for the future unless i read something that really grabs me like the woolf series did. thanks a bunch for your ongoing efforts.

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    1. I like your interruptions. Your interruptions are fine as far as I'm concerned. Thinking zen about literature might be a problem if you're going to write formal or academic essays, but blogs don't have to be like that.

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    2. Like John Cage said:
      “nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music
      nothing is accomplished by hearing a piece of music
      nothing is accomplished by playing a piece of music
      our ears are now in excellent condition.”

      I think that applies equally well to literature. "meaningless" is meaningless.

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    3. oh good! john cage was one of my favorites, especially his silent concerto for diverse instruments, which involved the musicians sitting on stage with their instruments for a while, not doing anything. i had a brief career as a classical clarinetist, so became familiar with music as such...

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    4. have you read any davenport, "form is function"? very well written, explicatory prose analyzing some of the biggies in the poetry field. he was a college prof. in some southern institute.

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    5. Guy Davenport? I've read some of his work, but not that.

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  4. Interesting post, and fundamental question. I swing between both points of view. The idea that you must somehow withdraw from direct confrontation to achieve the true perspective on a situation is often promoted in life by health professionals and bureaucrats, who consider you to have proved yourself to be misguided if you show anger, even, and perhaps most forcibly, when that anger is justified.
    I remember also the great short story writer from Cork, Frank O'Connor talking about meeting Joyce, who he felt exhibited a mania for associations (I paraphrase dangerously from memory). The example he gave was of a picture of Cork (birthplace of Joyce's father & O'Connor's home town) that Joyce had had framed in cork, a pun that JJ was inordinately proud of.
    This associativity seems related to that sense that good things are symmetrical rather than skewed, even though the world is clearly skewed beyond distortion. (I'll stop now before I distort beyond any meaning. It's the middle of the night and I would be better served sleeping)

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    1. When I think of Woolf's drive for clean, fair wholeness, for literature that does not complain or accuse (that withdraws from direct confrontation), then I remember her speech about "killing" the Angel of the House, and I wonder if the Angel inside her was really as dead as she thought. "She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life" -- and this is droll, this is biting, in context, but Woolf's novels are also "charming" ("she writes with great care [...] and sometimes with astonishing beauty," states T.S. Eliot in the essay Scott mentions below), and they would rather be all-encompassing than selfish (the ex-soldier has a role; so does the wealthy man; so does the bitter governess), and they "excel in the difficult arts of family life," in that they want to make everybody feel included and valued and sympathised-with, and they want everybody to sympathise with others, and not abuse or hurt or mangle or attack anyone: for we all suffer and feel transcendence, even if we are a lady buying flowers.

      The Angel probably reckons that Mrs Woolf goes too far when she makes that poor silly horrible man fall splat out of a window, but the effect of smoothing and brightening is something she would have understood very well.

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  5. It's funny that Fromm opposes Richardson/Lawrence with Woolf/Joyce, while the Eliot essay you linked to lumps Lawrence and Woolf together in the box of shallow-but-appealing-failures. One of the weaknesses of literary criticism is always the need to compare and contrast, but I guess there are no other yardsticks, no Platonic literary forms against which to measure fiction.

    I tend to see Woolf as actually a pretty emotional writer; she just expresses those emotions in a different way than Lawrence, working them into different elements of her narrative. In both writers, I will claim, the narrator feels a strong emotion, but in Woolf the narrative seems to become emotional, whereas in Lawrence the narrator seems to become emotional. But in both cases it's an abstraction.

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    1. That's a nice distinction.

      You could pick the whole group of writers up like a pack of cards and shuffle them in different ways; you could announce that Lawrence, Richardson and Woolf are all alike, because they invent characters who feel transported by transcendent emotions while they're looking at inanimate objects. They pause; they reverence that effect. And then Joyce is on the outside. Or Richardson, Woolf and Joyce belong together because they use the stream-of-consciousness form as a "woman's sentence." Then Lawrence is on the outside. Or you can say, no, they're so utterly different, this is pointless, what are we doing? Or no, they're all the same because they're all Modernists and let's look at them like that.

      The one thing you can agree on is that they've all uttered something. But what have they uttered?

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  6. symmetry is an important concept in physics, geometry, and quantum mechanics. it is inseparably connected to the chemistry of reality. in some way i see woolf as creating work in an effable relation to this, or at least attempting to do so. waving a fist at the sky may make the perpetrator feel better, but it is not a very good way to communicate anything except one's own frustration. it seems to me...

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    1. But one's own frustration can be other people's frustration as well, and then (if you're judging a piece of writing on the worthiness of its communication) it can become a clarifier, a flashpoint; what about the wife who feels frustrated, doesn't know why (her husband is pretty nice, why does she experience this terrible, untouchable, invisible, stressful pressure to perform and submit?) and then one night she's in the audience with Virginia Woolf in front of her, finding a name for the pressure that she had felt as a writer, "The Angel of the House" -- and giving herself permission to kill it -- my god, says the wife: that's it! That's what I've got! And I'm allowed to kill it, you say? Electrifying!

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    2. good point. but considering the vagaries of human interpretation, i should say that the writer must in the interests of clarity, make the episode perfectly comprehensible to any and every possible reader if the communication is to be understood in the way it was created. even face to face, it is so easy to misunderstand what another person is saying... lawrence has a wonderful gift for describing scenery and his poetic instincts are superb, but i admit to wondering what in the world he's talking about half the time; the pitfall occurs, i think, when a reader tries to understand what is written on varying levels; mixing up metaphors and other language tools can lead to confusion even when the author is trying to be crystal clear in his or her intent. what do you think...?

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    3. I think a) that making any piece of communication perfectly comprehensible to every human being at every point in time, is not possible, and b) no one can say what a writer "must" do, and c) the interests of clarity are not necessarily the interests of literature.

      Anecdote: I once told a group of university students at an art museum not to touch any of the paintings and within minutes one of them was hovering his finger over a canvas and asking me, "But can we touch this one?" Moral: there is no sentence, no phrase, no diagram, that will totally defeat the desire of other people to interpret you whatever way they want.

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    4. i hear that. i can also make an argument opposite to my last one. what defines human reality: emotional reactions in large measure determine how man behaves. in the muddy ground between acting and thinking, the more accurate and subtle the language, the more possibility of communicating something meaningful. how to react in a given situation is not a given; experiencing states of emotion through reading can allow the reader to develop a larger realm of reality and a more accurate ability to deal with unforeseen events in ongoing existence. possible methodologies of behavior increase enormously when people are exposed to meaningful and significant literary explications. learning maturity can be enhanced by reading supposedly "difficult" books that are created by authors with special insights or knowledge. anyone interested in self improvement or even self understanding could greatly benefit through contact with the larger and more intellectual works created by savants in any particular field. plus that, new and unusual prose may stimulate ideation and growth in many a reader who is stumbling in the dark. so what do i really think? well...

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