John Bloomberg-Rissman responds to my "RS/OOO literary theory" post

Too long to put in a comments textbox, I'd like to post here John Bloomberg-Rissman's very insightful answer to my outline of  SR/OOO literary theory. Below is the text as delivered to me in an email attachment. As I've said, I will offer concluding criticisms of my own in a later post. Thanks for keeping the discussion going, John!
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Conrad: There's never a shortage of hybridism in contemporary literary criticism: and (if you'll allow the analogy) the root stock from which every new theory derives is, of course, the reigning poststructuralist critique of the text (literary or otherwise). The 'family resemblance' among them is unmistakable. I've recently discovered two very interesting appropriations of traditional postmodernist critique (with dashes of traditional ontology, Husserl & Heidegger) in the forms of Speculative Realist Literary Criticism (SR), and Object Oriented Ontology literary analysis (OOO).  

JBR: historically speaking, SR/OOO distinguishes itself from what you call “traditional postmodernist critique” via the claim that postmodernism has tended to privilege textuality as primary and SR/OOO privileges the “beyond the text”, rendering textuality just one kind of thing among others. It also distinguishes itself from Husserl and Heidegger in that both H’s do ontologically privilege the human, whether by privileging the phenomenal experience or by privileging Dasein. Admittedly, Harman’s stepping beyond Dasein begins in his analysis of Heideger’s tool-being, but Bryant uses Bhaskar’s critical realism as his stepping-stone out of the phenomenal realm into the noumenal, where texts are indeed just another object. There are differences between OOO practitioners as to whether this leads to a “flat ontology” or whether there are still degrees of real … So I don’t think that it’s quite fair to simply assert that SR/OOO derives from “traditional postmodernist critique”. In fact, I think actor-network theory, science studies, and Kant are crucial to rooting SR/OOO – tho of course so is Deleuze … But of course no one who lives after the great age of c20 French and German philosophy can (or should be) “immune” to it …  it might not have been Arnoldian, but the rise of Hitler/Stalin, the war, the Shoah etc would shake one’s humanism to – or past  - its roots …   

It's to the views of Levi Bryant and Eileen S. Joy, as I've discovered them in recent online discussions (here and here), we can turn for a full explication of the principles underlining their SR/OOO analyses of the 'text'. I believe the scope and limits of this new poststructuralist wave can be fairly simply elucidated. 

JBR: see above: I think you need to prove, not simply assert, that SR/OOO is “a new poststructuralist wave” … not saying it’s not, or that what SR/OOO asserts as it’s genealogy is accurate, just that … Oh, and by the way, other SR/OOO practitioners root themselves otherwhere, e.g. Brassier would hate the above to be applied to him, Bogost is rooted in computers and gaming, Grant in Schelling, etc etc …

Firstly, the common denominator in both is the emphasis on 'realism' or a strictly 'object-oriented' approach towards textuality.  

JBR: towards everything. 

And of the text they say, oddly enough, there's nothing before it that can be said to transmit or codify traditional meaning, nothing ontologically nor historically prior from which discussion of 'textuality' can begin. (I'm inclined to read this as a wilful destruction of an Arnoldian humanist tradition). In Bryant's sense of inquiry, "content seems to come after."  

JBR: Conrad, I think you need to distinguish between context and content. Between literature and any particular text. It’s certainly possible to discuss textuality or literature or art or whatever before the fact of any particular text/object (tho of course with the knowledge that the addition of new texts/objects to the body of existing texts/objects will change that discussion – I mean, that’s Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent, right?). But I don’t see how one can discuss a particular text/object avant la lettre … Oh, and I’ve never met or read a word by anyone in SR/OOO who denies history in any way. In fact, Levi explicity mentions that OO Criticism might fall somewhere between New Criticism and New Historicism … 

Presumably SR/OOO proponents will put something in its place: like the 'text' refashioned in some radically newer posthumanist (e.g., cybernetics, avant-garde poetics or systems theory) form or anything that serves as a theory's own operating system. Or perhaps even a more syncretistic view of humanism itself, such as that offered by Joy, will do the trick.  

JBR: what is the antecedent of your “its” in “its place”? Arnoldian humanism, right? Now in what way is that not an OS? And in what way is it privileged over any other OS? 

For Joy 'humanism' as a critical concept is looking, Janus-like, at two directions at the same time, both a "troubling" and "heroic" one:

While we are fully aware that, historically, humanism and the human have a long and troubling history that implicates them in violent exclusions, as well as in deprivations and disenfranchisements of all sorts, we would also aver that humanism (of different philosophical varieties) has also been responsible for heroic acts of psychic and material sustenance, rescue and redemption, mutually-productive alliance and overcoming, and personal freedom. It is not a question of having some sort of scale that allows us to measure whether humanism has led to more atrocities than it has to social and other boons, but rather, of acknowledging that it has done both, in separate times and places, and simultaneously... 

JBR: I certainly agree with Eileen. I think that this is exactly the case. That’s what I tried to make clear in our discussion, and in my postscript. I have to admit to not seeing a single thing wrong with this. 

Secondly, now that the possibility of a traditional source criticism has been abolished, it looks as if we are living in a "Year O" world in which SR/OOO 'post-texts' potentially thrive.  

JBR: Since, apparently, all criticism has an OS, including yours, we are no more in a Year 0 than we ever were, or, better, maybe, we are always already in a Year 0. I kind of think so. Question, why are texts now ‘post-texts’? In any case, whether we are in Year 0, whether texts are now post-texts, as long as thriving is happening, it sounds ok to me. 

But to arrive here the hard work of literary analysis must begin. If the traditional (Arnoldian) text has been 'deracinated', certainly reduced to Joy's troubling sense of humanist tradition in general,  

JBR: Joy is troubled, yes, but what in her troubled state is troubling? I mean, what is there in her analysis of traditional humanism with which you disagree? 

anything we put in its place will have to both cover the Tradition deficit  

JBR: Why is it a deficit? What have we lost, exactly, by critiquing traditional humanism in order to improve it?

and put in its place a new 'Object-Oriented Ontology' of text and reading practice. It is a question of 'origins' in a more radically 'speculative' sense. Bryant proposes an answer to the question, 'What is the ontological nature of things?' in his essay "The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology" (OP) in which he brackets (after Husserl) the very past of philosophical critique so that the look for origins, tentative in nature, may begin anew. As he says,

Faced with such a bewildering philosophical situation, what if we were to imagine ourselves as proceeding naïvely and pre-critically as first philosophers, pretending that the last three hundred years of philosophy had not taken place or that the proper point of entry into philosophical speculation was not the question of access? 

JBR: when you write “he brackets (after Husserl) the very past of philosophical critique” you are absolutely right; and the key words are not “the very past”, they are “philosophical critique”. According to many philosophers and historians, the noumena were present to us (philosophically speaking) prior to Descartes, who thought only God guaranteed the reliability of our senses, and therefore our ability to contact noumena directly. But things went really wrong with Kant, who cut off all contact (Nick Land called Kant’s philosophy something like “the biggest panic attack in philosophical history”). OOO wants to get us out of our heads and back into the world, where we are anyway. It’s about time, after all, given what we’re doing to it (tar sands, global warming, etc etc) Tho every OOO philosopher gets Kant’s argument, and is troubled by it … 

Engagement with the world, textually and existentially, means to meet it and the material objects in it (like literary artifacts) as objects of open-ended enquiry. SR/OOO theorists are, Bryant says, "speculative, neo-pre-critical philosophers [who] will see any secure foundation we might discover as an outcome of inquiry rather than as an αρχή governing our inquiry from the outset". Borrowing terminology from Saussure and Derrida, Bryant gives the "Ontic Principle' in terms of a pre-critical encounter with a world of objects marked primarily by a positive affirmation of their significant "differences" (causes, interrelations and entailments among things to be fine tuned in the course of inquiry itself). The nature of the textual object begins with this basic assumption (αρχή ) of the ontological (metaphysical) priority of significant differences in all discoverable 'things'. A 'thing' like a poetry text 'is' regardless of whatever's been said or thought about it, and so in that sense nothing's come before the text. A poetic text existing simpliciter is, upon encountering it, to make a significant 'difference' to the reader or it simply doesn't exist. 

JBR: Yes, exactly. Except maybe for the simpliciter. Maybe. As far as making a difference goes, I’m reminded of the title of that Kenneth Burke article, “Literature as Equipment for living.” Tho, of course, that’s only part of what Bryant means; he’s also saying that we are unaware of the myriad objects that don’t affect us in any way (e.g. intestinal bacteria when everything’s working right).

Thirdly, since a text is a "thing in itself" existing simpliciter, it's only one among a potentially myriad of things to which must be added the nonhuman, insensate, even robot objects. Bryant's completely undermined any notion of 'humanism' as a superordinate concept where Joy at least can entertain contrasting ideals. There's an unmistakable flattening of the metaphysical playing field here. In this radical 'posthumanity' objects live as 'ontic' equals, materially vital & meaningful to us and to each other only to the extent that they reveal their 'differences'. (We can set aside the technical aspects of this 'flat ontology' inference) 

JBR: Yes, exactly, exactly. OOO is profoundly non- (tho ***not*** anti-) anthropormorphic. Tho, as noted above, not all are agreed on flat ontology. 

 What are the implications for literary criticism? Bryant may have provided his answer to that in the interesting "The Principle of Translation" section of "OP" where he states "there can be no object that is a mere vehicle for the acting differences of another object", destroying at a stroke the notion of authorial agency or any sense in which texts can serve as carriers of meaning.  

JBR: While I have problems with the notion of authorial agency – I’m a traditionalist on this – it seems to me, as a writer, that an author is often the worst reader of her text – and one with no control over its social reception and significance, once it’s out in public, I asked Levi about meaning in a comment left at his blog post and I think he understands something different by meaning than either you or I. I think there’s no doubt that texts do carry meanings, tho it is difficult to say quite what this “means.” See the very beginning of A Thousand Plateaus … 

Tradition goes by the wayside. Since meanings cannot be transported through traditional avenues, literary transmission must be understood as a radicalization of the notion of 'affectivity' that's consonant with Bryant's "Year O" premise. 

JBR: tradition goes by the wayside? I mean, isn’t affectivity via what you call something like “the lyric self’s voice” (which may or may not have anything to do with authorial intention) about as traditional a way of literary (or any artistic, religious, etc) effect as could be imagined? But that may be beside the point. I think your notion of “traditional avenues” is something we never quite got to in our previous discussion. And I feel that it ties into your “benchmarks, or standards” or whatever you want to call them 

More specifically,

‘translation’ should not be understood as a hermeneutic concept, but as an ontological concept.‘ Transportation’ refers to the action of one object on another object. Not all transportations are of a causal variety, so it is important to employ terms capable of both capturing causality while allowing for other sorts of exercises of action. For example, the manner in which I am affected by a work of art differs from the manner in which a flower transports the differences of sunlight. And these manners of translating differences again differ from the manner in which the ocean transports the differences of the moon. 

Fourthly, not just objects in the world but it follows from Bryant's 'onticology' that literary criticisms have been flattened as well. It makes no 'difference' to anyone whether the poem "Second Coming", for example, is seen as a carrier of competing interpretations until those differences are actually encountered.  

JBR: Re: “It makes no 'difference' to anyone whether the poem "Second Coming", for example, is seen as a carrier of competing interpretations until those differences are actually encountered”, I don’t understand how it could be otherwise. 

In fact, to call these literary interpretations in the first place, loaded with all their traditional Yeatsian lore, is to trump "any differences that might be contributed by objects independent of language." The differences in Yeatsian interpretation are not radical enough since any weighing of alternative readings will by nature privilege (or act as if it would like to privilege) one over another.  

JBR: Yes, of course. One of the first problems I had with OOO was over its implications for “politics” – used broadly … Turns out that everyone involved in OOO has very specific “politics”, i.e. an interpretation of, and desire for, reality that they privilege. Ontology might be flat; but that doesn’t mean the end of ethics. When questioned about this the standard OOO response seems to be something like, “of course humans anthromorphize; pencils pencilomorphize, rocks rockomorphize” etc etc – and yes, they know they’re speaking metaphorically, that is, literarily.  

Strictly literary readings of Yeats' poem—by which we mean one that's too human-centric & excludes its possible impact, say, on nonhuman objects, like robots— are too exclusive given the existence (as per the αρχή or the primary 'ontic' principle of an object-oriented ontology) of "inter-ontic relations or all interactions between objects", which is to say that in the act of translating "Second Coming" we exclude the possibility that the poem (enjoying the same 'ontic' status as the rest of the world) can just as materially translate us.  

JBR: I don’t think **any** translations are excluded. Everything translates everything and each thing is translated by each other thing are not mutually exclusive. Poems translate us and we translate poems, at the same time the chair we’re sitting in as we read translates us and vice-versa, and the air we’re breathing as we read translates us and vice-versa and every bit of knowledge in our brain, e.g. Aristotle, Longinus, Arnold, Deleuze, etc etc, translates us as we read and vice-versa, and the war in Afghanistan translates us as we read and vice-versa, and the shape of the book, and the color of the paper, and the ambient temperature, and so on and so on … the deal is, it’s never just an encounter between us and some bare text. 

An encounter with the 'differences' of Yeatsian poetry can spell changes from which we may never recover. 

JBR: I should hope so! Tho he’s not much read in contemporary poetry circles these days, he should be, and will be again (tho I know that’s not what you’re getting at here …)

Here's a meeting of ontology and poetry that I find particularly interesting. There are some problems with the SR/OOO as I've found it (and my reading of the literature has so far been rather limited), as well as some very real methodological strengths, that I'd like address in my next post. 

JBR: The main thing I’m trying to say it that I don’t think we have an either / or here: either Arnoldian humanism and values or no values whatsoever. I think what we have is, as Joy has it, and as I tried to say in my postscript, and attempt to find a better humanism, which keeps what still lives in the tradition (however defined) and tries to improve on it, to further democratize humanism and all other isms (rockism, pencilism), to make life better for ALL of us. To quote Deleuze/Guattari, it’s not or, it’s and.  

SR/OOO literary theory: where ontology meets poetry (perhaps)

There's never a shortage of hybridism in contemporary literary criticism: and (if you'll allow the analogy) the root stock from which every new theory derives is, of course, the reigning poststructuralist critique of the text (literary or otherwise). The 'family resemblance' among them is unmistakable. I've recently discovered (thanks to John Bloomberg-Rissman) two very interesting appropriations of traditional postmodernist theory (with dashes of traditional ontology, Husserl & Heidegger) in the forms of Speculative Realist Literary Criticism (SR), and Object Oriented Ontology literary analysis (OOO). It's to the views of Levi Bryant and Eileen S.Joy, as I've discovered them in recent online discussions (here and here), we can turn for a full explication of the principles underlining their SR/OOO analyses of the 'text'. I believe the scope and limits of this new poststructuralist wave can be fairly simply elucidated.

Firstly, the common denominator in both is the emphasis on 'realism' or a strictly 'object-oriented' approach towards textuality. And of the text they say, oddly enough, there's nothing before it that can be said to transmit or codify traditional meaning, nothing ontologically nor historically prior from which discussion of 'textuality' can begin. (I'm inclined to read this as a wilful destruction of an Arnoldian humanist tradition). In Bryant's sense of inquiry, "content seems to come after." Presumably SR/OOO proponents will put something in its place: like the 'text' refashioned in some radically newer posthumanist (e.g., cybernetics, avant-garde poetics or systems theory) form or anything that serves as a theory's own operating system. Or perhaps even a more syncretistic view of humanism itself, such as that offered by Joy, will do the trick. For Joy 'humanism' as a critical concept is looking, Janus-like, at two directions at the same time, both a "troubling" and "heroic" one:

While we are fully aware that, historically, humanism and the human have a long and troubling history that implicates them in violent exclusions, as well as in deprivations and disenfranchisements of all sorts, we would also aver that humanism (of different philosophical varieties) has also been responsible for heroic acts of psychic and material sustenance, rescue and redemption, mutually-productive alliance and overcoming, and personal freedom. It is not a question of having some sort of scale that allows us to measure whether humanism has led to more atrocities than it has to social and other boons, but rather, of acknowledging that it has done both, in separate times and places, and simultaneously...

Secondly, now that the possibility of a traditional source criticism has been abolished, it looks as if we are living in a "Year O" world in which SR/OOO 'post-texts' potentially thrive. But to arrive here the hard work of literary analysis must begin. If the traditional (Arnoldian) text has been 'deracinated', certainly reduced to Joy's troubling sense of humanist tradition in general, anything we put in its place will have to both cover the Tradition deficit and put in its place a new 'Object-Oriented Ontology' of text and reading practice. It is a question of 'origins' in a  more radically 'speculative' sense. Bryant proposes an answer to the question, 'What is the ontological nature of things?' in his essay "The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology" (OP) in which he brackets (after Husserl) the very past of philosophical critique so that the look for origins, tentative in nature, may begin anew. As he says,

Faced with such a bewildering philosophical situation, what if we were to imagine ourselves as proceeding naïvely and pre-critically as first philosophers, pretending that the last three hundred years of philosophy had not taken place or that the proper point of entry into philosophical speculation was not the question of access?

Engagement with the world, textually and existentially, means to meet it and the material objects in it (like literary artifacts) as objects of open-ended enquiry. SR/OOO theorists are, Bryant says, "speculative, neo-pre-critical philosophers [who] will see any secure foundation we might discover as an outcome of inquiry rather than as an αρχή governing our inquiry from the outset". Borrowing terminology from Saussure and Derrida, Bryant gives the "Ontic Principle' in terms of a pre-critical encounter with a world of objects marked primarily by a positive affirmation of their significant "differences" (causes, interrelations and entailments among things to be finetuned in the course of inquiry itself). The nature of the textual object begins with this basic assumption (αρχή ) of the ontological (metaphysical) priority of significant differences in all discoverable 'things'. A 'thing' like a poetry text 'is' regardless of whatever's been said or thought about it, and so in that sense nothing's come before the text. A poetic text existing simpliciter is, upon encountering it, to make a significant 'difference' to the reader or it simply doesn't exist.

Thirdly, since a text is a "thing in itself" existing simpliciter, it's only one among a potentially myriad of things to which must be added the nonhuman, insensate, even robot objects. Bryant's completely undermined any notion of 'humanism' as a superordinate concept where Joy at least can entertain contrasting ideals. There's an unmistakable flattening of the metaphysical playing field here. In this radical 'posthumanity' objects live as 'ontic' equals, materially vital & meaningful to us and to each other only to the extent that they reveal their 'differences'. (We can set aside the technical aspects of this 'flat ontology' inference) What are the implications for literary criticism? Bryant may have provided his answer to that in the interesting "The Principle of Translation" section of "OP" where he states "there can be no object that is a mere vehicle for the acting differences of another object", destroying at a stroke the notion of authorial agency or any sense in which texts can serve as carriers of meaning. Tradition goes by the wayside. Since meanings cannot be transported through traditional avenues, literary transmission must be understood as a radicalization of the notion of 'affectivity' that's consonant with Bryant's "Year O" premise. More specifically,

‘translation’ should not be understood as a hermeneutic concept, but as an ontological concept.‘Transportation’ refers to the action of one object on another object. Not all transportations are of a causal variety, so it is important to employ terms capable of both capturing causality while allowing for other sorts of exercises of action. For example, the manner in which I am affected by a work of art differs from the manner in which a flower transports the differences of sunlight. And these manners of translating differences again differ from the manner in which the ocean transports the differences of the moon.

Fourthly, not just objects in the world but it follows from Bryant's 'onticology' that literary criticisms have been flattened as well. It makes no 'difference' to anyone whether the poem "Second Coming", for example, is seen as a carrier of competing interpretations until those differences are actually encountered. 'Code' is a word that's often used to designate both the agency & status of those properties in things with regards to which "manners of translating differences" can be registered. Alex Reid even goes so far as to give a literary reading the same ontical status as a "Google search spider", saying

Code is a characteristic that certain objects may have. It results from a particular kind of assemblage production. Other objects (e.g. humans) have the capacity to encode in their relations. This might mean literally marking a code or more abstractly naming objects. Clearly our encoding/naming of objects never fully captures them, but it can have an impact upon them, as when you name an animal your "food." In English Studies we use terms like "text" and "reading" quite liberally. This makes sense inasmuch as we encode the world we see and interact with that code. However, here I want to be more literal and think specifically about interactions between objects that are marked with codes and objects with the capacity to decipher those codes. So this could be a human reading a book, a Google search spider crawling this page, or a supermarket checkout counter scanning a bar code

 To call a reading of Yeats a literary interpretation in the first place, loaded as it will be with all the usual Yeatsian lore, is to trump "any differences that might be contributed by objects independent of language", by which Bryant might even mean Reid's "Google search spider". The differences in Yeatsian interpretation are not radical enough since any weighing of alternative readings will by nature privilege (or act as if it would like to privilege) one over another. Strictly literary readings of Yeats' poem—by which we mean one that's too human-centric & excludes its possible impact, say, on nonhuman objects, like robots— are too exclusive given the existence (as per the αρχή or the primary 'ontic' principle of an object-oriented ontology) of "inter-ontic relations or all interactions between objects", which is to say that in the act of translating "Second Coming" we exclude the possibility that the poem (enjoying the same 'ontic' status as the rest of the world) can just as materially translate us. An encounter with the 'differences' of Yeatsian poetry can spell changes from which we may never recover.

Here's a meeting of ontology and poetry that I find particularly interesting but insufficient. There are some problems with the SR/OOO as I've found it (and my reading of the literature has so far been rather limited), as well as some very real methodological strengths, that I'd like address in a future post. I'll need some time to familiarize myself more fully with 'critical realism' theory.

Svenska Twitteruniversitetet: a radical online university

I thought Twitter would amount to nothing more than a syncopated Facebook: with mainly impulsive & sporadic rapid fire speech from people who've whittled the one-liner down to a significant artform. I'd never have suspected to find in this language-hacking a possibility for anything like interesting academic debate. But I have recently discovered it in the form of a Twitter University. Here's The Swedish Twitter University but one shorn of academia's usual editorializing and chronic vetting, an online format that can be sustained only by views brought generously to the Twitter-symposium: here's a real 'democratic' forum, in short, for discussion begun by impassioned authors and theorists who allow their own ideas to grow & develop through response-tweets. In fact, the textbook's been turned into an active online university.

Perhaps it's not 'university' so much as the embodiment of a 'multiversity' ideal very attuned to contemporary Deleuzian understandings of the nature of things: a celebration, in particular, of the quintessentially open text as Barthes may never have imagined it. Administrator Marcus Nilsson spells out for us a 'concept' of the Twitter University almost as an Oulipo restrained-based exercise, with specific instructions as to number and character limit of tweets and even a recommendation not to allow responses, enjambment-style, to flow without full stops from one tweet to the next. Of which, more below:

The Swedish Twitter University: Mind-blowing Ideas in 25 Tweets

The Swedish Twitter University (@SvTwuni) is a place where interesting speakers — scientists, academics, etc. — tweet about exciting ideas from their respective fields in a certain well-defined format.
The presentation must comply with certain constraints, meant to stimulate creativity and challenge the tweeters to formulate their ideas as effectively and interestingly as possible:

• A presentation will be a maximum of 25 tweets long. Each tweet has a 140 character limit.
• Each tweet must be broken naturally—no ugly enjambement!(sic) That is, a sentence, clause or phrase may not overflow arbitrarily into several tweets. That’s not to say each and every tweet has to end with a full stop — follow the spirit and not the letter of the rule and be creative!

The tweeter should pay attention to questions from the audience for a total of at least one hour from the start of the presentation. Answer tweets do not count against the total 25. Both questions and answers should contain the hashtag assigned to the event by @SvTwuni. Each presentation will be archived together with the questions and answers from this hashtag.

It’s fine to blurt out all your 25 tweets at once and then take questions, but it might be more interesting if you exploit the fact that Twitter is a conversational medium: adding pauses and answering questions as you go breathes life into your lecture, and since answers don’t count towards your total 25 tweets, answering questions from the audience can give you a few extra tweets to develop your idea in further detail.

If we take Eileen A. Joy's December 20th "Notes Towards a Speculative Realist Literary Criticism" presentation (brought to my notice by John Bloomberg-Rissman), simple tweeting conventions turn into a fairly coherent and informative presentation of views on "speculative realist" literary criticism (to be permanently archived at Nilsson's site), comprising of the usual acknowledgments, academic terminology & data points (A fuller explication of SR theory can be found here). The format's rather simple, withTweeter, a STU room and, of course, a Twitter account to get things going.

In general, I'd say I'm impressed more with the 'how' than the 'what' of Joy's Twitter U. lecture (though I was drawn to this place on the recommendation of someone with whom I've been having an equally interesting discussion on the scope, and limits, of the literary work). Though the topic may have any number of diverse meanings and there is no shortage of critical schools to choose from (some of the more interesting newer ones being 'affect-theory', 'onticology', 'OOO' ), it's only as social media that the Twitter U. can allow Joy's views to take shape and find its audience. Certain online conventions may be mandated (as site owner Nilsson obviously makes clear), a format prescribed and a sort of screening process for Twitter presenter-applicants may be put in place but it's to the essential 'aleatoriness' of online communities that that both the attractiveness and efficacy of Twitter University is primarily due.

I might be tempted to say (in a McLuhanesque moment) that the strangeness of recent critical theory is a function of Twitter-like technology. Even a passing familiarity with some of the theory cited in Joy's Twitter lecture, with its talk of "multitudes", "discrete actions" & "propulsive mechanicity", gives it its own uniquely IT character: and doesn't OOO theory title itself rather resemble the on-off circuitry on which all online discourse depend?

"Juan"

In a 10’ X 6’ hovel, strapped on hands and back
  til he’s red Juan said    “In one more chamber, just one”.

He's decades younger, & ficus pure  & he'd have run
  —only he!— bare-footed  against the rocks, for her

Sorted badly under the rumors, the wine and valley,
             & the arroyo heat

only she'd have seen (only she) the cross thru a veil

To redden after prayers is to need it, wrapt in armlets

              A panel each for their love!

Václav Havel dies

 Václav Havel was a poet, essayist and dramatist but also a political figure whose activism and imprisonment in the 70s led to a presidency of the first Czech Republic. In fact, the literary figure and politician blended marvelously in this one individual. Here's someone whose writings chronicled the politics of a nation he helped to liberate from its Soviet oppressors. Here was a poet-prince.

How wrong Plato was!

Halte là ! Pierre Assouline moderates comments

Pierre Assouline

Pierre Assouline has had enough of the blog parasites, trolls and proverbial shit-disturbers who've invaded his very popular les république des livres. As many as fifty comments per day, he says, have to be removed, presumably taking up a too disproportionate amount of his own blogging energies. It's a tough type of balancing act he must perform between safeguarding the ideals of free public expression and having to police the hostile online activities of a handful of savage nay-sayers (poignée de nuisibles) .

Trop de commentaires sans rapport avec le billet du jour, trop de liens hors-propos, trop de trolls, trop de parasites, trop de bavardages privés sans intérêt… Depuis quinze jours, je dois bien en retirer une cinquantaine par jour. Halte là ! Même si tous n’agissent pas en bande dans le seul but de casser l’entretien que nous sommes, et de tuer les échanges sur ce blog, il faut sévir, la liberté d’expression des citoyens de la République des livres dût-elle légèrement souffrir du différé de leurs opinions. Or je n'ai pas vocation à faire la police du matin au soir, parmi les quelque 400 commentaires postés chaque jour en moyenne, entre les robots, les insulteurs et les egos divers et variés.

(Too many comments off topic, unrelated links, trolls, parasites and gossip...I've had, over the past five days, to eliminate as many as fifty comments per day. Enough! If readers cannot stop disrupting the tenor of our discussion and killing blog exchanges, the freedom of readers to express differing opinions will be somewhat compromised. I certainly cannot police,day and night, the activities of bots, chronic nay-sayers and wildly different egos who appear among the more than 400 comments posted here daily.)

It will be necessary to screen out certain (undesirable) types of blog comments. Assouline's reasoning, and I couldn't agree more, is that in no way will the quality of debate & discussion be diminished if he does: in fact, without them the waters become clearer. The few who disrupt and try to kill intelligent discussion can be safely ignored. It's in no way a question of "censorship" either. Assouline seems to be saying the good of the many outweigh the nasty privileges of the few.

Aussi, à partir d’aujourd’hui et jusqu'à nouvel ordre, les commentaires ne seront plus diffusés en direct mais placés en file d’attente jusqu’à ce que le tenancier les ait personnellement visés ou refusés. Nous ferons en sorte que la vivacité du débat, sa véhémence parfois, ne perdent rien de leur sel déjà légendaire, et que son intérêt ne se démente pas. Il n'est pas dit qu'une poignée de nuisibles aura raison de notre goût de la conversation. Ils peuvent toujours dénoncer la "censure", cela n'y changera rien.

(From now on and until further notice all comments will be moderated. I will ensure that the accustomed liveliness of debate, even at its most passionate, continue here unabated, and that interest in my blog never diminish. I will never accommodate a handful of shit-disturbers in the interests of free expression. Denounce "censorship" all you like: it doesn't change anything)

Shades of Ron Silliman! Well, not quite that drastic since Assouline is prepared to sift through all the online chaff for the good discussion points worth publishing. As we know, Silliman's unthinkingly stifled free speech altogether, strangely incapable of compromise of any sort.

 Bravo, Pierre!

"Poeti greci": in defense of ancient literatures

Journalist-blogger Ottavio Rossani has announced at poesia the publication of an anthology of ancient Greek writings titled Poeti greci. Da Omero al VI secolo d.C., a work of ancient poetries translated and edited by the esteemed Greek and Latin scholar Vincenzo Guarracino (August 2011). Rossani's post is more than just a notice for a book launch; it's an important defense of literary classicism, one intended primairly for high school students enrolled in the rigorous classical studies program (Un’opera necessaria, anche per finalità didattiche nei licei classici). The reference to high school studies got my attention.

The liceo classico is an academic course of studies, at the high school level, in which university-bound students between the ages of 14 to 19 learn the ancient Greek and Latin languages and their literatures. It's the contemporary Liceum. Rossani's review of Guarracino's text praises both editorial and marvelous translation work.To include both the major and less well known literary lights is not to invite the teacher and impressionable adolescent to give an approval rating of ancient authors, determining which authors, or types of poetries, failed and which succeeded, and why. With author selections coming from an authorized Antologia Palatina (Palatine Anthology) source, the curriculum objective is to give a balanced literary & historical overview shorn of uninformed critical judgement (English translations mine).

Tralasciamo qui di parlare di poeti consacrati dalla copiosità delle opere lasciate e dalla fama che ne è conseguita per l’altezza della scrittura e per la veridicità esistenziale delle loro intuizioni come Omero, Esiodo, Sofocle, Euripide, Eschilo, Pitagora, Platone e Aristotele (potrebbe essere una sorpresa constatare che anche questi ultimi tre padri della filosofia sono stati anche poeti, autori di epigrammi, inni e odi). Piace invece sollecitare l’attenzione su autori meno noti o addirittura ignoti, ai quali Guarracino da restituito il merito di avere scritto epigrammi di notevole incisività oppure liriche di grande emozione.

( Let's not just talk of poets famous for both literary output and literary excellence and cultural significance, such as Homer, Hesiod, Sophocles, Euripedes, Aeschylus, Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle: it may even come as a surprise to some that the last three-mentioned "fathers of philosophy" were also poets, authors of epigrams, hymns and odes. I'd like to draw attention to the inclusion of authors who are less well known or who've been unjustly ignored. It's to Guarracino's credit that he's portrayed them as authors of epigrams of incisive & lyrical beauty) 

Guarracino's anthology encourages a literary studies that leads to literary appreciation: rigorous language study coupled to history and culture studies can do nothing but usher names like Sappho, Nosside, Archilochus, Anacreon and Pindar into the light of public discourse. Presumably the editor-translator has something like an Arnoldian ideal of cultural transmission in mind, a consolidation in young imaginations of the best from the past, but there's also the matter of literary influences. A young classicist in training may choose to specialize in her postsecondary years.

The classical canon can also be a living breathing influence on a twentieth century poetics ,as in the case of the pattern poems of Simias of Rhodes. Not a case of slavish imitation but, again, of preserving from the past what's best and innovative in the arts & sciences. Even the incisive epigrammatic style of a Karl Krause or Alberto Casiraghy (perhaps even Chesterton, Hitchens) can trace its form & impetus to ancient poets, scientists & thinkers. The principle of literary transmission (what works are worth examining and why) and influence (how they can inform a contemporary sensibility) is a clearly traceable one:

E Guarracino è andato a pescare soprattutto appunto nell’Antologia palatina un gruppo di epigrammisti di grande forza espressiva e di universali concetti che ancora oggi sono validissimi e potrebbero guidare la convivenza civile. Il che significa che in fondo chi scrive alla fine non inventa quasi più nulla, e spesso senza nemmeno saperlo non fa che riscrivere idee e concetti, massime che sono stati già elaborati dai predecessori

(Guarracino has found in the Palatine Anthology a core of epigrammatic writings of such great expressive and universal significance that they're available today as valid models in a contemporary civil society. The writer really invents nothing, and may not even recognize the influence of received ideas, perhaps even unaware that it's all already been said by his predecessors)

To appreciate classical authors is not just to determine how and why the great literary exemplars from the age of Homer onwards work but to see in them imitation models. This is the upshot of Rossani's review of Guarracino's anthology. The classical past is an inexhaustible and rich repository of qualities of love, wisdom, & a true literary sentimentality that never get 'old', even to the iPhone and Facebook generation. With understanding comes reverence for the classical past, and the desire to write (perhaps to be) like them. What wonderful ideals to instil in young minds. What a wonderful European educational model.

"Morning run"

A search through the streets for dawn led me to the track
where the fox who's moon-lit was

To run from that is smart

I meet the split leaf or pine at every bend, and the uncurled
deadly calm, real & gory-eyed, too

like a place where the tear is

I fear the fox in a rut licks a cheap & rusty paw by the time
I turn to it

Fox and daylight spread like topsoil round the circling gate
                             or
inside a star In any two worlds (rut or sky) you like,

fox-hate at dawn looks grotesque as a crow's blur and so
there's isn't any

As clouds thinned and I saw more and more clearly, sun-glad
there just wasn't any

Star and rusty gate

Was Neruda another Pinochet victim?

Pablo Neruda

In her Corriere della Sera blog Italian journalist Alessandra Muglia talks of the Chilean communist government's intention to exhume the remains of Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda to determine if the great poet had been murdered by the Pinochet regime. The green light's been given for a judicial inquiry into the matter of a possible Neruda assassination(translated passages to follow mine):

After the exhumation of Salvador Allende's body in July, Chile finds itself in the midst of another national controversy. "What exactly was injected into the veins of Pablo Neruda, a pain killer for a suffering cancer patient or a lethal injection?" And to answer this question the Chilean Communinist party has requested judicial permission for the exhumation of the Nobel laureate, buried with his wife Matilde Urrutia at Isla Negra, about 100 km west of the capital almost 40 years ago."

The Neruda affair reads like a murder mystery with first-hand testimonies, legal inquiries, conjectures and even a square-off between Neruda's own personal driver and the skeptical president of the Neruda Foundation, Juan Agustin Figuero, who's staunchly opposed to any assassination theory or exhumation plan. Accepting the official version of Neruda's death by prostate cancer, Figuero considers any exhumation plans "a profanation".

What took place on that 23rd September 1973 in Santiago's Santa Maria clinic, 12 days after the Pinochet coup? Manuel Carroza, chief magistrate, has authorized a full judicial investigation.

But the idea of disturbing the remains of the great poet doesn't sit well with many, including Juan Agustin Figuero, president of the Neruda Foundation who refers to the exhumation plan as an "act of profanation".

According to the testimony of Neruda's personal driver, it was the Nobel laureate who told him of an "injection" he'd just been quickly given. And it could very well have been the injection that killed him. In an exclusive Clarin interview the driver recounts how he received a phone call from Neruda telling him of a suspicious injection received while he was receiving treatment. "I was with his wife Matilda," he said, "with her we rushed to the hospital where we found him red, swollen and shaking with fever. A doctor told me to go to the city immediately to a pharmacy, it was a question of life or death". But he was taken by police on the way there and placed in a detention centre used for torture by the dictatorship."

Araya has accused the Neruda Foundation of lying about the poet's death: for him there's no doubt, the Nobel laureate was killed by the Pinochet regime.

The Communist party attorney, Eduardo Contreras, gives corroborating evidence:

Party attorney Eduardo Contreras explains that there's no mention of cancer in the official death certificate but rather of "cachexia, a general wasting away of the body produced after months of illness." He cites the certified declarations of former Mexican ambassador to Chile, Gonzalo Martinez, who was present with the author of the Twenty Poems of Love before his death, as well as others. "Here's proof that in his final hours of life the great poet spoke and walked about freely: not at all in the immobilized state described in the official reports. The papers of the day reported that Neruda succumbed to heart failure caused by shock. We maintain the shock was induced by an injection administered to him, in the stomach, on 23 September."

Given his loyalty to communism and friend Salvador Allende, who oftentimes sought Neruda's advice on political matters, and the near certainty that life as an exiled poet in Mexico, where he was bound days before his death, would have meant a future barrage of anti-Pinochet invective from one of the world's most revered & endearing literary figures, the murder seems all too likely to have occurred. All that remains are the toxicological reports on the poet's remains. And if the results show death by lethal injection, this will go down probably as literary history's most heinous murder.

A warm thank you to Ms. Muglia for a fine article and some interesting historiography.

Why the French do it better: literary criticism, that is

Eliot Weinberger's comment about the dismal state of literary criticism in America (posted here) has prompted me to go to distant shores looking for better examples of critical writing. And with the help of Alan Baker I found Pierre Assouline's blog La république des livres. It didn't take me long to see the differences between this and what I've been accustomed to. There are, of course, first-rate English literary blogs, such as Curtis Faville's Compass Rose, Joseph Hutchison's The Perpetual Bird, and even the odd illuminating ruminations by Ron Silliman. But here's a typically Continental style marked by grace, fluency and command of subject matter. The French writer-blogger has posted an article entitled Quoi de neuf? Baudelaire that I hold up as mirror to the stylistic shortcomings (in my view) of literary criticism everywhere else. I marvel, in particular, at the marriage of style and substance in Assouline's blog writing and the almost effortless ease with which themes of grand literary import can be spun out of what is a book review.

Assouline does justice to Baudelaire and a Baudelairean poetics. That the man and his work can be perfectly fused in a single article is impressive. And it's not even poetry we're interested in this time. A newly published anthology of Baudelaire's journalistic writings entitled Quoi de neuf? Baudelaire is the object of Assouline's blog review. The elegant framing of the Baudelaire discussion within two merging senses of a single title, namely, the newness of a published work and the newness of a revered figure for a contemporary readership, is a rhetorical flourish that doesn't go unnoticed. Here's the great literary figure who is still relevant and who still speaks volumes about the world's stupidities, unimpeded by changing literary doxa. Today, a new Baudelaire discoverable through pages of prose.

... D’ailleurs, ce pourrait être l’intitulé d’une rubrique invitant à lire et relire encore les classiques, non comme des objets napthalinés dignes de respect mais comme des nouveautés. Car aussi anciens soient-ils, ils nous permettent d’envisager les choses autrement, dans notre observation des événements courants, de la marche du monde et de la folie des hommes. Alors disons que ce sera une rubrique : « Quoi de neuf ? …. » Aujourd’hui, Baudelaire.

In keeping with the idea of an always relevant Baudelaire Assouline, literary critic, offers for review a newly published anthology, by Alain Vaillant (Flammarion), comprising of some two hundred rather lengthy and argumentative articles & columns written by Baudelaire journaliste between 1841 and 1866. None of the usual vapid "I approve" or "I disapprove" pronouncements we encounter in inferior blogging: in which every literary discussion is a preparation for some grandiose sea change. Literary judgement is in places like Harriet always the result of catering specifically for the superficial or sensationalist. In Assouline, however, there are nuances and significant distinctions to be made; significant cultural lineages to be traced. Writing must necessarily be more expansive.

The discussion of a Baudelairean revival, for example, comes with a more updated portrait of a multi-sided figure (protéiforme) that's never reducible, at least not without tension, to any one fashionable social pariah or poet-prophet viewpoint (poète maudit et provocateur dans la mystification), and for that a deep familiarity with literary history is needed. The waters are always considerably muddier when great writers are smartly contextualized.Though less well known Baudelaire's journalistic pieces are vital reading if only for the opportunity they give a skilled reviewer to present a Baudelaire fluent in many types of discourse.

Plusieurs livres invitent à le revisiter. Les siens d’abord, qu’il s’agisse de la poésie ou de Mon cœur mis à nu. Ses articles sont peu lus, carence à laquelle remédie une nouvelle collection de poche lancée par Flammarion ; aussi, parallèlement à un Zola et un Gautier, voici un Baudelaire journaliste (368 pages, 8,90 euros, GF), deux mots que l’on n’a pas l’habitude de voir accolés. Cette anthologie d’Alain Vaillant est d’autant bienvenue que son intitulé même casse le double stéréotype qui colle aux basques de l’écrivain (poète maudit et provocateur dans la mystification). Il tient même que, dans sa production journalistique, Baudelaire a été le type même du « polygraphe de la modernité ». Pour la plupart, ses articles et chroniques (plus de deux-cents entre 1841 et 1866) sont longs et argumentés. N’étant attaché nulle part, il publie partout.

Perhaps what Vaillant's anthology celebrates is the birth of a new "journalist-poet" genre in the tradition of Zola and Gautier. It's interesting to note the emphasis on literary transmission & influence. The poet, by wearing a different writerly hat, delineates many of his own theories through an examination of the poetry and prose, art and translations of others. Baudelaire seems to have set the standard for a tradition of literary reappraisal for which Assouline has created his own "La république des livres" blog. Given this kind of journalistic freedom, Baudelaire can range over a wide range of topics, genres, social types, poet motivated not by financial gain (though he could have used the cash) but the need to contribute to a vital ongoing literary discussion which a literary press actively encouraged. This sense of significant discourse, as well as a body of work, is what Baudelaire's (and now Assouline's) passed on. Here's a poet-critic (it seems) of the representations of culture in the Second Empire. And the one theme with which Baudelaire is always particularly qualified to deal is the dirty "naturalism" of his own times(l’écume du quotidien).

Une indépendance qui lui permet de choisir ses sujets en toute liberté.Il touche à tout : poèmes en vers et en prose, fiction, chansons, traduction (les nouvelles d’Edgar Poe) et surtout critiques (ses comptes rendus des Salons de peinture demeurent une référence pour les historiens de l’art), toutes activités qui ne le clivent pas en différents Baudelaire distincts les uns des autres, mais au contraire enrichissent notre image d’un auteur unique et protéiforme, comme ils l’étaient presque tous alors. Ayant la chance de vivre de ses rentes, même s’il vit au-dessus de ses moyens, il ne se commet pas dans la presse pour des raisons financières. C’est simplement que la publication de la littérature dans la presse, avant le passage par la librairie, est un phénomène normal. « Naturel » risque même Alain Vaillant dans sa préface. Il n’y a que lui pour, du quotidien, tirer de l’éternel. Mais comme d’autres, les Jules Janin et Prévost-Paradol, il devient un maître de l’allusion, allant jusqu’à une poétique de l’implicite, pour déjouer la censure du Second Empire (c’est à cette époque qu’a été créé le néologisme d’« allusionisme »). Les genres se mêlent. L’éditeur de cette anthologie voit même en lui l’un des derniers représentants de la poésie-journalisme avec Théodore de Banville et Théophile Gautier en amont et en aval de 1848 : « un exceptionnel moment d’inventivité littéraire où, de façon anarchique, brouillonne et contestataire, la poésie s’est nourrie de l’écume du quotidien ». Toute anthologie est choix et exclusion, celle-ci comme les autres.

His mastery of allusion allowed Baudelaire to escape the censors themselves, but as clever as he was at mixing his genres he never could manage to hide the man in his prose. The eternal truths are never far from the quotidian. To tell the eternal truths from a sordid reality was a novelistic instinct he brought easily to his prose criticisms but, for all that, he is very much his own person. Even in his letters, pamphlets and columns he always appeared to be talking about himself (Baudelaire finit toujours par parler de lui). The quintessential Baudelaire is never a rival to the facts of his own personal life: such as his part in the Revolutions of 1848, translations of Poe, letters to his mother and pamphlet to a hated Belgium (Poor Belgium!) & aversion to the politics of the Academy, all of which describe a poet-journalist with a taste for the muddy and vile. There's no mistaking the mixture of impurities with the celestial in the poet's soul.

Toute anthologie est choix et exclusion, celle-ci comme les autres. Alain Vaillant a voulu refléter tous les aspects de Baudelaire en privilégiant les moins connus, parfois inédits. On en retiendra notamment ses conseils ironiques aux jeunes littérateurs en toutes circonstances habituelles aux gens de plume (argent, éreintements –lui dit plutôt « éreintage »- maitresses, dettes etc), sa mordante théorie du rire dans sa dimension comique (le sage ne rit qu’en tremblant), son engagement républicain dans le lyrisme révolutionnaire de 1848 et sa déception, sa critique de la politique de l’Académie française (à laquelle il ne fut pas moins candidat) et son papier à la fois critique et élogieux des Misérables. D’autres lecteurs feront d’autre choix. Qu’importe le thème puisque de toute façon, qu’il s’agisse de Poe ou des limbes, d’une manière ou d’une autre, Baudelaire finit toujours par parler de lui- et qui s’en plaindrait ? On s’en doute, les Lettres de Belgique à sa mère (224, 16 euros, Ramsay) sont nettement plus tristes (il y est accablé de misères physiques et matérielles) avant de retrouver une vigueur pamphlétaire dans le texte qu’il prépare contre la Pauvre Belgique ! traînée dans la boue pour son « goût national de l’ignoble », une emphase qui n’exclut pas la bêtise et transforme tout belge amateur de peinture en marchand de tableaux obsédé par le prix à l’exclusion de la valeur. 

Citing Michael Edwards' work on poetry and art entitled Le bonheur d’être ici, Assouline draws from his own reading of Baudelaire's journalistic writings a distinction (Edwards makes) between two poets & two poetry avocations stated in contrasting formulas: Claudel's optimistic "le bonheur d’être ici" and Baudelaire's own cynical "n’importe où hors du monde", or the "inexhaustible" as opposed to the "inscrutable" (wherever) source of poetic material. Not that Baudelaire lived in a sort of obfuscating night incapable of finding anything meaningful to say: his sources were more mysterious, a product of the essential l'Inconnu of inspiration. It's a question of bringing one's sources outward where others can gain access to them, too. Perhaps it's an even more important question of choosing the right Master and through the acquisition of learned technique & self-mastery, making your own way into the poetic mysteries.

« La poésie nous fait-elle du bien en exaltant l’ici, en nous soutenant dans nos efforts pour nous rapprocher des êtres et du monde, ou au contraire, en sondant le malheur et en cherchant ailleurs le possible, l’inconnu, le nouveau ? » écrit Michael Edwards dans son dernier livre. Et de résumer l’alternative en opposant deux poètes à travers deux formules : « le bonheur d’être ici » de Claudel et « n’importe où hors du monde » de Baudelaire. Le premier comptait sur la poésie pour fouiller au fond du défini afin d’y trouver de l’inépuisable, quand le second lui assignait de plonger au fond de l’Inconnu (plutôt que l’Infini, mais ça se discute encore) pour en extraire du nouveau. Il faut croire qu’il a fait son choix puisque son brillant essai s’intitule Le bonheur d’être ici (266 pages, 20 euros, Fayard). Peut-être après tout n’est-ce qu’une question de maître. Parfaitement : le maître de nos études, un grand professeur, celui qui nous a éblouis durablement au point, non seulement de décider de notre vocation, mais d’exercer un empire profond sur notre conscience. Il y a comme cela des maîtres dont les anciens élèves se repassent le nom comme un sésame pour entrer dans la secte très fermée des initiés. Ceux qui ont reçu la parole (on se croirait dans les Evangiles !) de Georges Blin (né en 1917) en parlent encore avec des trémolos dans la voix. A croire que c'est aussi grâce à lui qu'ils ont appris à devenir un héros et un saint pour soi-même.

Editors (Robert Kopp) no less than students (Georges Blin, who was Kopp's teacher) pay their mite to the literary Master. What's to be transferred from one generation of Baudelaire readers to the next is, of course, best left to academics and anthologists. Poet, audience & a shared poetic sensibility are the conditions for this sort of cultural transference. Whether Baudelaire the thinker or the aesthete, there is homage above all to a man whose very name inspires a poetics (comme un sésame). The celebrated Baudelairean "elsewhere" literary principle ( ce fameux ailleurs) is still debate-worthy to the present day. Today, a Baudelaire, man, poet and critic who inspires students still with a trembling awe, & all this conveyed in a blog review.

 L’universitaire suisse Robert Kopp est de ceux-là. Comme il n’est pas un ingrat, il vient de payer sa dette en éditant le Baudelaire (255 pages, 26 euros, Cahiers de la Nrf/Gallimard) de son maître. Le livre date pourtant de 1939 et depuis, quelques autres baudelairiens ont versé leur obole au tronc commun. Seulement voilà : l’élève tient que son maître de jadis habitait Baudelaire autant qu’il était habité par lui ; son empathie était sans égale. La tonalité en est souvent philosophique, manière de rappeler que pour lui, Baudelaire est avant tout un penseur. Tout pour la pensée, rien pour l’esthétique. L’essayiste ne méprise pas la forme mais l’ignore. Aussi n’hésite-t-il pas à s’affranchir de toute chronologie pour appréhender son œuvre comme un tout cohérent à la lumière du « goût de l’infini », ce fameux ailleurs. On sent ça et là dans ses analyses, outre l’imprégnation de ses lectures de Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, l’influence existentialiste. Cela pourrait faire craindre le pire mais l’incipit, une citation du poète, nous rassure : « Poèmes à faire : Prisonnier dans un phare ». Georges Blin a enseigné à des générations d’étudiants que la solitude de Baudelaire ne pouvait se comprendre sans une référence au mal romantique de l’Homme Supérieur. Son dandysme prend racine dans le culte de la différence, « stoïcisme aristocratique qui se pare pour se séparer ». Il s’enivre d’humiliation et non d’humilité.

Of course, there's bound to be a final (an even more pronounced) emphasis on Baudelairean legacy in France established by precisely this sort of  hero-worship, one stated in terms of la volonté d’expliquer le drame de Baudelaire comme un mouvement mystique marqué par le refus et l’absence de compromis. Unless it's evident that Assouline is doing more than representing a poet, text and continuing fascination with the enigmatical person, the reader will probably take his initial "Today, a Baudelaire" to stand for nothing but a blog topic, namely, a review of Vaillant's book .What that something more is has been expertly layered into the blog text. With 272 comments to its credit (and I've seen as many as 500 in other places!), Assouline's review's obviously touched a nerve with his readers. It's more than a blog post just as obviously he's talking about more than a recently published anthology. A tribute to a great artist cannot rest exclusively with a review though it ostensively began as one: how he managed to go from one to this incredible portraiture is a matter of writing skill alone.

Son orgueil, sa solitude présente, le soutient dans sa haine sauvage contre les hommes. Un orgueil assis sur le pressentiment d’une haute survie littéraire. Que lui importe de n’être pas aimé puisqu’il sera de ceux dont on se souvient, du moins est-il convaincu. Il « sait » qu’un jour les effets de sa contre-littérature, cette poésie d’intimité qu’il interpose entre lui et le public, s’estomperont pour laisser s’épanouir chez les lecteurs son génie profond. Sans conviction car sans ambition, le dilettante appliqué, qui porte haut le dogme de l’Art pour l’Art, ne méprise rien tant que la littérature socialisante. La démocratie peut-être, où des malheureux tombent « comme un papillon dans la gélatine » après s’être pris au piège de la souveraineté populaire, cette « tyrannie des bêtes ». Voilà, entre autres, à quoi ressemblait le Baudelaire que Georges Blin, qui avait assuré l’édition critique de ses Journaux intimes et qui connaissait sa correspondance comme personne, présentait à ses étudiants, à l’université de Bâle, puis à la Sorbonne, enfin au Collège de France. Robert Kopp a eu la bonne idée d’adjoindre à la fin du texte une cinquantaine de pages contenant leur résumé des cours qu’il donna « en face du Vieux-Campeur » de 1965 à 1977. On y retrouve une même tenue intellectuelle, une semblable exigence que dans son essai : la volonté d’expliquer le drame de Baudelaire comme un mouvement mystique marqué par le refus et l’absence de compromis. Gageons que les anciens élèves de Georges Blin ont retenu la leçon, à commencer par Robert Kopp, qui justifie ainsi, sans détour, cette réédition :

«Georges Blin a été nommé à Bâle en 1946. Il a succédé à Albert Béguin qui avait occupé la chaire de littérature moderne de 1936 à 1946 et qui a pris ensuite la direction de la revue Esprit.  La nomination de Georges Blin se situe dans la tradition d’une chaire illustrée par les études consacrées au Romantisme européen (…) Les études romantiques ont continué à illustrer la chaire de Bâle jusqu’à sa suppression. La republication du Baudelaire est aussi un hommage rendu à l’histoire de cette institution, saccagée désormais par des gestionnaires ignorants qui veulent tout noyer dans d’insipides « Cultural Studies » et oublient qu’une Faculté des Lettres vit d’abord grâce à des personnalités de premier plan et non pas grâce à des prétendus centres d’excellence ou des laboratoires. On confond tout en transposant dans le domaine des sciences humaines les schémas valables en sciences exactes. Georges Blin n’est pas un grand scientifique, mais un grand penseur et un grand écrivain ».

A warm thank you to Pierre Assouline for showing us how it's done. If I were a more fluent French reader, I'd follow his blog more assiduously than I have been recently. But it's sure nice to know it's there, nonetheless.

Ted Hughes in Poets' Corner

A memorial floor stone to British poet Ted Hughes has just been placed in Poets' Corner (Westminster Abbey).

Now what about Sylvia's? Screwed over, again.

I'd like to offer my own memorial (in song) to the all but forgotten Sylvia Plath (the greater of the two poets). Wherever she appears in discussion I'll try not to be too far behind.

 Nobody says it better than Def Leppard.

Poetry and the perils of translation

Tim Parks in his essay Translating in the Dark rightly sounds a cautionary note to poets who would be translators (or perhaps even translators who would be poets) at the same time. I can find Parks's observation relevant even to my own casual attempts at poetry translations. Since he himself is a translation instructor and his concern at the moment is with Swedish poet Thomas Tranströmer, & the most recent translation of his writings by Robert Robertson, the whole essay has the look of infinite regression: a translator commenting on a translator commenting on a translator, etc. until we're left with the impression that 'good translation' is a receding ideal. The discussion is decidedly winding & in the end it's not clear that any reliable guidelines to poetry translation have been established.

“We must believe in poetry translation, if we want to believe in World Literature.” Thus Thomas Tranströmer, the Swedish poet and winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, quoted in a recent essay by Robert Robertson, one of his translators. Robertson goes on to describe the difficulties of capturing Tranströmer’s spare voice and masterful evocation of Swedish landscape in English, particularly if you don’t know Swedish well. Robert Lowell, Robertson tells us, translated Tranströmer with only a “passing knowledge” of the language. Robertson himself describes a process wherein his Swedish girlfriend gives him a literal line-by-line translation into English, then reads the Swedish to him to give him “the cadences,” after which he created “relatively free” versions in English. 

This approach to translation is not uncommon among poets (W.H. Auden gave us his versions of Icelandic sagas in much the same way). Nevertheless, Robertson feels the need to call on various authorities to sanction a translation process that assumes that poetry is made up of a literal semantic sense, which can easily be transmitted separately from the verse, and a tone, or music, which only a poet is sufficiently sensitive to reconstruct.
Thus:

In his introduction to Imitations (1962), Robert Lowell writes that “Boris Pasternak has said that the usual reliable translator gets the literal meaning but misses the tone, and that in poetry tone is of course everything.”

Here the “of course” skates over the fact that tone is always in relation to content: if the content were altered while diction and register remained the same, the tone would inevitably shift. One notes in passing the disparagement of the “usual reliable translator”—the fellow knows his foreign language, but doesn’t understand poetry.

Good translation seems, according to this, to have been out of the reach of even the most accomplished versifiers. Robert Lowell, for example, attempted a translation of Thomas Tranströmer with only a "passing knowledge" of the original & his results were about as good or bad as Auden's translation of the Icelandic sagas. If we take literalness and the cadences of the original language as yardsticks, translations seem to rise or fall by the degree to which translator is a poet, or not, or is intimately acquainted, or not, with a foreign language. Presumably the ideal translator is both.

A translator who both knows her foreign language and understands poetry, acutely sensitive to both literal meaning and tone, is Rosmarie Waldrop. In "Irreducible Strangeness" (from Dissonance) the translator of Edmond Jabès makes (to me the much more interesting) case for the irreducibility of translation to its original source in terms of a hermeneutical 'space' of culture, language & tradition through which the translator must pass at their peril. Presumably, like Waldrop herself, the translator must possess a thorough (almost scholarly) familiarity with the French language & its contemporary literary forms but in the end there's only irreducibility to reckon with. American poet Frank Samperi, on the other hand, with no academic training both read and produced a very competent translation of Dante's Paradiso. Samperi's was the more spiritual 'space' of Catholicism and a Thomistic viewpoint he always brought to bear on his own poetry.

T.S. Eliot is then cited as having warned Lowell not to present his ‘imitations’ of Tranströmer and others as “translations”: 

If you use the word translation in the subtitle it will attract all those meticulous little critics who delight in finding what seem to them mis-translations. You will remember all the fuss about Ezra Pound’s Propertius. 

Here collocating “meticulous” with “little” does the job that Lowell/ Pasternak achieved with “usual reliable”: there are people who always interfere, but don’t understand.
Robertson also calls on the British poet Jamie McKendrick who, he feels, is “surely right” when he says “The translator’s knowledge of language is more important than their knowledge of languages.” How vague this remark is! Does it mean that the translator has one kind of knowledge of how language in general achieves its effects, and another of the nuts and bolts of the different languages he knows, the first kind being “more important” than the second? If that is the case, then to what degree more important? Wouldn’t the two, rather, be interdependent and mutually sustaining?

These perplexities apart, the thrust of McKendrick’s argument is clear enough: we are sweeping aside the objection that a profound knowledge of a foreign language might be required to translate its poetry, or prose for that matter, thus clearing the path for a translation by someone who is an expert in the area that counts: our own language.

Can anyone, after the literalist manner of Eliot, assume that critics of translated works tend not to get it? Is translation work always doomed to fail in this sense? McKendrick's more radical claim of the primacy of knowledge of 'language' over knowledge of 'languages' seems to be a way to avoid Eliot's own denigration of readers who aren't as language-proficient as they ought. I'm rather inclined to agree with McKendrick. The "earish" poetry translations of Robert Kelly, for example, in which sounds count as the only viable translation items, certainly sweep aside this hard competency requirement as do any of its other forms, reserving for the poet-translator more wildly experimental varieties. To call it translation is no more problematical than calling Mac Low's "chance-determined" methods of composition a right way to write a poem.

I really do not wish to nitpick. I enjoy Lowell’s and Robertson’s translations of Tranströmer, and Pound’s Propertius. I am glad these people did the work they did, giving us many fine poems along the way. As a writer myself who has also done a number of translations I might be expected to have a vested interest in the idea that what skill I have in English sets me apart from the “usual reliable” translator. However, and quite regardless of whether we want to call such work translation or imitation, it does seem that a serious issue is being dispatched with indecent haste here. 

Let us remember our most intense experiences of poetry in our mother tongue, reading Eliot and Pound as adolescents perhaps, Frost and Wallace Stevens, Auden and Geoffrey Hill, then coming back to them after many years, discovering how much more was there than we had imagined, picking up echoes of other literature we have read since, seeing how the poet shifted the sense of this or that word slightly, and how this alters the tone and feeling of the whole. And then let’s also recall some of the finest poetry criticism we have read—by William Empson, Christopher Ricks, or Eliot himself—the ability of these men to fill in linguistic and literary contexts in such a way that the text takes on a deeper meaning, or to tease out relations inside a poem that had been obscure, but once mentioned are suddenly obvious and enrich our experience of the work. 

Now imagine that, having a poet friend who wishes to translate these authors, you offer a literal translation of their poems in your second language. Maybe you read The Four Quartets out loud, line by line, to give him the cadence. But does our translator friend, who doesn’t know our language well, hear what we hear when we read aloud? The onomatopoeia, perhaps. But a dying fall in one tongue may not be the same in another, not to mention the echoes of other texts, or simply of voices in the air in our language. Over my thirty years in Italy I have often been told by uninitiated English friends what a beautiful and harmonious language Italian is; but that is Italian as heard by an ear accustomed to English sound patterns. To the Italian ear, and to mine these days, much of what is said in Italian grates. One hears the language differently when one knows it.

And yet for all of a translated work's 'irreducibility' and fitness for experimental variations, Parks repeats Eliot's foursquare resolve to give the utmost importance to language competency, opting for the more enlightened 'literalist' position. Only "when one knows it" can the language of poetry reveal, usually over the lifetime of its reader, its own delicious nuances & tones and rhythms. Eliot might be saying that being a poet and possessing language mastery are each individually necessary for successful translation. And presumably sufficient as well. As if he were addressing Kelly directly, Parks makes even the way sound patterns are registered a function of language mastery: the better it's known the more easily even contemporary Italian can grate on the ears.

Why do those “usual reliable translators” often give us work that we feel is wooden or lackluster, thus inviting the poets to get involved? Teaching translation, I frequently deal with students who write well in their mother tongue, but whose translations into that tongue lack fluency. This brings us to a paradox at the heart of translation: the text we take as inspiration is also the greatest obstacle to expression. Our own language prompts us in one direction, but the text we are trying to respect says something else, or says the same thing in a way that feels very different. We have come to what Paul Celan meant when, despairing of translating Baudelaire, he remarked that “poetry is the fatal uniqueness of language.” All the same, what often frees the student to offer better translations is a deeper knowledge of the language he is working from: a better grasp of the original allows the translator to detach from formal structures and find a new expression for the tone he is learning to feel: in this case, however, every departure from strict transposition is inspired by an intimate and direct experience of the original.

All this to arrive at the obvious conclusion that while expression and creativity in one’s own language is crucial, a long experience in the language we are working from can only improve the translations we make. But having hit that rather easy nail on the head, we can now ask the really interesting question: why are such intelligent writers as Eliot, Lowell, Pasternak, Robertson, and McKendrick unwilling to consider the question more carefully. Is it because, to return to Tranströmer, “We must believe in poetry translation, if we want to believe in World Literature.” There is no point, that is, in examining what we do too closely if we’ve already decided what we want our conclusion to be.

Again, even in the face of the 'mystery' of the real text (post-text?), its space and irreducibility, he acknowledges that "what often frees the student to offer better translations is a deeper knowledge of the language he is working from". Parks seems to have caught himself in a circle: the full rich text offered in translation requires a direct knowledge of the original language but, however competent the translator (and Parks has placed translators on a sort of competency continuum, ranging from "passing knowledge" to "intimate and direct experience of the original": from Merwin's  to John Sinclair's Dante ), it's always likely the finished work's going to be a foregone conclusion. Pound's translation of the "Seafarer" is unmistakably Poundian, for instance. What else could it be?

So why is it imperative that we believe in World Literature? It seems we must imagine that no literary expression or experience is ultimately unavailable to us; the single individual is not so conditioned by his own language, culture and literature as not to be able to experience all other literatures; and the individual author likewise can be appreciated all over the globe. It is on this premise that all international literary prizes, of which there are now so many, depend. The zeitgeist demands that we gloss over everything that makes a local or national culture rich and deep, in order to believe in global transmission. There must be no limitation.

I have no quarrel with the aspiration, or all the intriguing translation/imitation processes it encourages. My sole objection would be that it is unwise to lose sight of the reality that cultures are immensely complex and different and that this belief in World Literature could actually create a situation where we become more parochial and bound in our own culture, bringing other work into it in a process of mere assimilation and deluding ourselves that, because it sounds attractive in our own language, we are close to the foreign experience. Tranströmer remarks:

I perceived, during the first enthusiastic poetry years, all poetry as Swedish. Eliot, Trakl, Éluard—they were all Swedish writers, as they appeared in priceless, imperfect, translations…

Try this experiment: pick up a copy of a book mis-titled Dante’s Inferno. It offers 20 celebrated poets, few of whom had more than a passing knowledge of Italian, each translating a canto of The Inferno. The result is inevitably extremely uneven as in each case we feel the Italian poet’s voice being dragged this way and that according to each translator’s assumptions of what he might or might not have sounded like. Sometimes it is Heaney’s Inferno, sometimes it is Carolyn Forche’s, sometimes it is W.S. Merwin’s but it is never Dante’s.

Then dip into the 1939 prose translation by the scholar John Sinclair. There is immediately a homogeneity and fluency here, a lack of showiness and a semantic cohesion over scores of pages that give quite a different experience. To wind up, look at Robert and Jean Hollander’s 2002 reworking of Sinclair. Robert Hollander is a Dante scholar and has cleared up Sinclair’s few errors. His wife Jean is a poet who, while respecting to a very large degree Sinclair’s phrasing, has made some adjustments, under her husband’s meticulous eye, allowing the translation to fit into unrhymed verse. It is still a long way from reading Dante in the original, but now we do feel that we have a very serious approximation and a fine read.

Why the privileging of Sinclair's more scholar-friendly translation over that of Heaney? To whom does Dante really belong? I suggest the act of translation, especially in regards to the strongest poets, must amount to a sort of literary piety: to be felt in the difference, say, between the way a tourist proceeds through the Propylaea to the sacred precincts of Athena Polias and the way Pericles or Phidias did. There is a cultural divide (Waldrop's 'space') across which the historian, poet, traveller must venture in order to be 'there'. I've walked up those crumbling steps myself & felt the ancient language with a real sense of awe and reverence. Were I to translate that sense into poetry or translation of an ancient Greek poet, who's to say the experience wouldn't be as legitimate as anyone else's, provided only the heart of the devotee be pure & true? Do verses under the amateur-translator's hand necessarily turn into crumbling steps?

I've tried my hand at ancient Latin verses and so has Zukofsky: though based on only a "passing familiarity" (and a great deal of dictionary work!), Zukofsky's homophonic Catullus is an admirable artistic achievement. And anyone who's read even parts of it sees it's very loosely based on the original. Kelly's 'earish' model is a direct descendant of the Catullus paradigm. Bly's translation of Antonio Machado is another example of superb translation work by a great contemporary poet (though his is a more literal reproduction of the original), and I can cite many more. In reading these translations & my own I always detect, much more than linguistic mastery, a reverence for 'language' in McKendrick's sense & the forms of adoration it takes.