Monday, May 20, 2013

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This baby blog's title is from an underappreciated dependent clause by Samuel Beckett in the second sentence of his essay "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce". The picture is of an old hanzi that I took in China because it looked happy.

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Against my better judgement I started reading this book by Harold Bloom called The Anatomy of Influence. I'm reading him to understand him, because I really don't so far and this book is marketed as the most readable defense yet of his theory on influence. (That's some awfully dangerous marketing in my opinion, but that's neither here nor there.)

So far I've audiobooked two books by Bloom: The Western Canon and "Shakespeare's Seven Major Tragedies," a lecture series. In my experience Bloom typically has one or two interesting and revelatory things to say about an author or a character per chapter, but this is a cupcake's worth of material covered with a cake-cake's worth of icing. The icing comes in the form of really bold statements about the achievements of whatever author of character he's focusing on at the time--bold statements which are never quite qualified.

Take this paragraph for instance:

There is an occult relation between Hamlet's long malaise and the play's unique and dazzling enigma, the gap cut in mimesis from act 2, scene 2, through act 3, scene 2. We behold and hear not an imitation of an action but rather representations of prior representations. The covenant between stage of audience is abrogated in favor of a dance of shadows, where only the manipulator Hamlet is real. Destroying its own genre, the play thus gives us an unfathered Hamlet. Shakespeare scrambles after him, but Hamlet keeps getting away, Hobgoblin run off with the garland of Apollo.
There are interesting beginnings of ideas in this paragraph, but in my opinion the general swing of it is needlessly vague. The writer is assuming the reader will jump some gap to an assumed conclusion for which he (Bloom) has provided a sort of diving board. Bloom talks endlessly about the expansive consciousness of Hamlet, but I'm still lost as to what that means. It certainly doesn't just mean how clever the prince of Denmark is, because if that were true we might expect Bloom to have a bit more respect for Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Conan Doyle, which he plainly doesn't. Bloom's talking about something subtler than that which we readers can easily take in from a surface reading, but he never gets to the point of writing explicitly "Look at what Hamlet does here, and compare that with what this other character does in a similar situation, and look at how much more sublime (a favorite word of Bloom's) is. This is literature because xyz." Maybe I'm dense, but that's the stuff I want to be told. And I don't think I'm being ignorant of the inherent etherealness of literature in wanting to know these things.

Unless I'm mistaken. Bloom is a contested legendary critic, but he's still legendary, and widely regarded as the greatest in his profession in English. That's the reason I showed up on his door in the first place: I've been confused by lit crit ever since I started earning Cs in lit classes in college despite rather liking the books I was reading.

This all came to a head just the other day when I was finishing up this book by Will Durant called The Story of Philosophy. The last chapter was on John Dewey, of whom I'd heard but never about anything knew and to whom I was grateful to be introduced. Dewey, it seems, started from the basis that Darwin was right and it wasn't worth his time arguing details--and moreover, metaphysics was a monumental waste of time and his philosophy wasn't going to have anything to do with these fanciful flights of imagination that ultimately did nothing useful for anyone.

In other words: the self-conscious doubts I'd had about metaphysics and the questions of where consciousness comes from and how it relates to matter, etc a la early modern philosophy also existed in Dewey and he, being rather sharper and sure of himself than the present author, threw the whole imaginative mess out the window and redefined philosophy as the practical (or pragmatic) school of thought that it was (we feel) it was always meant to be. In other words, he made philosophy relevant again.

I felt a bit empowered after that chapter. I had the same doubts as Dewey for as long as I knew anything about philosophy, but I never knew much about it at the best of times, and in my ignorance assumed I was somehow wrong for thinking metaphysics and tome-length ruminations on the relation of matter to consciousness were perhaps best left to storybooks and scientists. Dewey and I might both be wrong in the eyes of the majority, but I'll stick with him for the hell of it. Feels about right.

I'm thinking, more boldly now, rather the same about lit crit. It's certainly a system in which your average thinker can excel, and certainly there are wonderful and beautiful things to say about literature, but, if I'm being honest with myself, I can't figure out why an Amazon book review and a properly published and lauded piece of literature criticism need to be considered two different animals. Certainly the one is bigger than the other, and infinitely more verbose, but I also find lit crit essays to be terribly vague for all their prosody. And the various schools of thought extant in the field feel the same to me as any argument over the worthwhiledness of a Stephen King novel.

I can't figure out what it is about lit crit. I'm 30 soon, and I've read and enjoyed even Ulysses. I figure I should at this point be able to write both a beautiful book review and a beautiful essay of criticism, but to me they're one and the same. If there's a difference in my mind, it's that the latter has a page limit and needs to be double-spaced by a due date, so your actual opinion ends up being secondary to the final written form.

So anyways, I'm giving lit crit this one last chance via Harold Bloom: his celebrity makes him a representative to all lit crit, and if there's any clothes on this scholastic emperor I mean to give them a close inspection.

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