Ghostlier demarcations

An Honest Ghost

A Novel

by Rick Whitaker

 

A book that furnishes no quotations is no book — it is a plaything. Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. How frequently the mere purchase of a book is mistaken for the appropriation of its contents.  Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage.

 

This book consists of quotations and nothing but quotations.  They are ordered according to a rigorous system of semantic relationships, which like an invisible hand guides the seeker to his "lucky” find.  In this case, a love story with a somewhat bizarre and morbid twist. 

 

But isn't that what David Markson did (for longer) in This Is Not A Novel?  No. Not at all. This book is different, for all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.  Here's a guy who has turned his genre into a vehicle for serious ideas and serious emotion--and has never, unlike Markson, been tempted to write more than necessary.  Markson hesitates to label his work "experimental" and instead characterizes his novels -- both "literally crammed with literary and artistic anecdotes" and "nonlinear, discontinuous, collage-like, an assemblage" -- as "playful."  There is no linear (or nonlinear) sequence of events to exploit with a wink-nudge because there is no novelistic time employed at all, no events that would require such sequencing.

 

Whitaker deserves more credit.  What he’s doing is harder.  And much more entertaining.  More like Christian Marclay. Watch the Clock.  Time, so to speak, is everywhere in the movies, and the delight of the experience is that the grab bag becomes a fun house: you never know what’s going to pop up.

 

A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves - all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.

 

But what else is love?  Words heated originally by the breath of others.  The value of a sentence is in the personality which utters it, for nothing new can be said by man or woman. The hidden life of love is in the most inward depths, unfathomable, and still has an unfathomable relationship with the whole of existence. Call those works extravagance of breath, of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer.  And bid them love each other and be blest.

 

 

Automatic ciphers

First something obvious, and then a meta-comment.

One thing I sometimes post are duh-moments: instances of the obvious that weren't obvious to me. Here's one from the other day. In Paradise Lost Adam describes to Raphael his first experience of experience, his finding himself in the world. There he was:

But who I was, or where, or from what cause,
My tongue obeyed, and readily could name
Whate’er I saw. ‘Thou Sun,’ said I, ‘fair light,
And thou enlightened Earth, so fresh and gay,
Ye hills and dales, ye rivers, woods, and plains,
And ye that live and move, fair creatures, tell,
Tell, if ye saw, how came I thus, how here! (8.270-77)

I'd long realized that Wordsworth ("And, O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, / Forbode not any severing of our loves!" and Shelley ("Show whence I came, and where I am, and why") must both be remembering this moment (and other resonating moments in Paradise Lost).

But what struck me the other day was the idea that this is perfectly autobiographical, that what Milton is describing here is poetic vocation, the combination of ease (of style) and wonder (about existence itself, including the fact of ease) that make a poet a poet. He can describe the world as he found it, including his own being in the world, and the fact that he can describe the world. Unlike Wittgenstein's self, his blank, Sartrean opacity is part of his world too: part of the world a poet thinks about (even when living a skeleton's life).

As I say, completely obvious, and yet I'd never realized this before, being too absorbed in the plot, and also perhaps in my own memories of my 1.75-lingual childhood: I remember one day noticing that I could understand Yugoslav, noticing, then, that it was a different language from English, and noticing therefore that I could understand English as well.

----

So my meta-comment is this: there's a way in which everything you see in a poem should be obvious when you see it, should be a duh!-moment. Even if you can't or didn't readily name it in your first or fifth or hundredth reading, that would have been a failure of attention, not of intelligence.

That's what Stanley Cavell means by "the ordinary," the things that escape notice because you just don't pay attention to them, because it's an essential, ordinary part of what they are that you don't pay attention to them.

One place that I think you can see this at work is in canonical titles, the way they become "automatic ciphers." Why, for example, Reservoir Dogs? Well that's easy: it's the name of Quentin Tarentino's movie. It's called Reservior Dogs. Before you see the movie, you assume you'll understand the title when you see it, so that's fine; and after you see the movie, you know what the title designates: that great, violent, grueling picture you've watched. But at no time does the meaning of the title explain itself. The title is always ordinary, in Cavell's sense: always just the perfect, obvious, transparent designation of the movie. Similarly, who's Hoon in Stevens's "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon"? His answer to Norman Holmes Pearson (I wonder if he knew that Pearson had been a leader in the O.S.S.):

You are right in saying that Hoon is Hoon although it could be that he is the son of old man Hoon. He sounds like a Dutchman. I think the word is probably an automatic cipher for "the loneliest air", that is to say the expanse of sky and space.

For Cavell, the late Wittgenstein (and J.L. Austin) is like the Kant of the Third Critique in paying attention to the ordinary. One of Cavell's great insights is that aesthetic judgment shares with Wittgenstein's grammatical remarks (Bemerkungen, as he always calls them) the fact that you can't prove something beautiful or sublime (or whatever). There's no philosophical argument for beauty. It's something you have to see. In the same way, ordinary language, ordinary things, aren't amenable to an analysis that moves beyond the visible or apparent. The visible or apparent is all that counts, all that can count.

So all you can do is pay attention, and the idea is that if you do pay attention it might be obvious to you too. That's how reading should work, and how I think it does work in the great critics: they draw your attention to the automatic ciphers, which (as Kant says of the "pure reflective judgment" that is aesthetic experience, experience which isn't the application but the observation of a judgment) will then just decode themselves to you, and make you happy.

Sudden lit crit

I am thinking of some of the greatest short moments of literary criticism I know. I would mention Twitter, but that would corrupt the idea, and besides you tend to need the quotation, the literary sample, before the remark. Herewith a few such moments:

A scrap from Dickinson, about Antony's great speech in Antony and Cleopatra:

                            Since Cleopatra died,
I have lived in such dishonour, that the gods
Detest my baseness.

He's heard the (false) report of her death only about ten lines earlier. Dickinson writes three words: that engulfing since.

Empson on Hamlet, an absolutely great essay:

What is reckless about the speech is that it makes Hamlet say..."I have cause and will and strength and means / To do it", destroying a sheer school of Hamlet Theories with each noun.

Blanchot on Kafka, who in his journals describes the necessity for a writer to devote oneself to writing all one's life. "Toute sa vie." Trois mots exigeants.

Blanchot again on The Iliad. Achilles, remembering his own father, whom he will never see again, allows Priam to take Hector's body. Then he seeks to feast Priam (as the laws of hospitality demand), but Priam refuses. Achilles tells Priam, in a tone of quiet menace (say I) that he had better eat, for fear that Achilles should forget himself and kill Priam if he doesn't. This is the most elemental of alternatives: ou la parole, ou la mort. Either you accept human connection (as Achilles has done) or all there is is death. This is the meaning of the laws of hospitality. Blanchot's two word judgment of Achilles's speech: Parole sublime.

Proust on Flaubert, long by these standards but worth it: un homme qui par l'usage entièrement nouveau et personnel qu'il a fait du passé défini, du passé indéfini, du participe présent, de certains pronoms et de certaines prépositions, a renouvelé presque autant notre vision des choses que Kant, avec ses Catégories, les théories de la Connaissance et de la Réalité du monde extérieur.

(This is all by way of celebration. The great negations are really all about The Excursion. Francis Jeffrey's This will never do. Mary Shelley after she and Percy read it aloud to each other: He is a slave.)

I think that in the twentieth century, a certain kind of novel learned to reflect on itself this way. Fitzgerald was particularly great at that, especially in Tender is the Night. This sort of self-reflection was arch in the nineteenth century (Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, for example), but became real literary criticism later on. Thus this moment from Tender is the Night:

The foregoing has the ring of a biography, without the satisfaction of knowing that the hero, like Grant, lolling in his general store in Galena, is ready to be called to an intricate destiny. Moreover it is confusing to come across a youthful photograph of some one known in a rounded maturity and gaze with a shock upon a fiery, wiry, eagle-eyed stranger. Best to be reassuring--Dick Diver's moment now began.

Denis Johnson does something very similar in The Name of the World. Mike Reed, the narrator, reflects on his narration and what he should say next, in the subtlest but most lucid of ways. These were originally Johnson's own notes on his MS as he was writing, and their incorporation into the narrative intensifies its narrator's exploration of the strange, and literary, experience that is all that is left to him.

I think Virginia Woolf might have originated this, maybe in Jacob's Room? The third person narrator reflecting on her materials, on the situations and settings of her novel.

Choriambic observation

Iambic pentameter lines in English often begin with choriambs, in which the first two feet go:  / _ | _ /  [stress, no, | no, stress]. Thus in Keats's "To Autumn" "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" begins with a choriamb, as does the first line of Hyperion: "Deep in the shady sadness of a vale"; the first line of The Triumph of Life: "Swift as a spirit hastening to his task": and the first line of Book III of Paradise Lost: "Hail, holy light, offspring of Heaven first born." (Also Book IV: "O for a warning voice...") That's just what immediately comes to mind.

Anyhow, yesterday I was thinking about the phrase "smit with the love of sacred song," a little later in the Invocation to Book 3:

                                         Yet not the more
Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt
Cleer Spring, or shadie Grove, or Sunnie Hill,
Smit with the love of sacred Song...

A student had read that to mean that Milton (or the Muses: the ambiguity is important because whichever of the the two the participle is modifying, each meaning entails the other: how the Muses feel is how Milton feels)--; I say (I revel in my own disgust for that Victorian, indeed Arnoldian pickup after a parenthesis)--; a student, I say, paraphrased that to mean that Milton had finally come to a place where song could be sacred. He's smit by the love of a certain kind of song, that kind of song we could call "sacred."

How was I to answer that student? The Derridean dodge is right: "song insofar as it is sacred," which just preserves the ambiguity. But later it occurred to me that it's the stresses that make it clear that sacred modifies the concept of song, rather than picking out some songs instead of others. As in Leonard Cohen's "holy game of poker": the game of poker is always holy.

Generally, in iambic pentameter, the five stresses can be ordered in intensity, and there are some loose but real rules as to which of the five can be stressed the most. The last stressed syllable is a candidate for strongest stress (it's often a summation, after all, which is what makes Byron's "Laureate"/"Tory at / Last" rhyme funny: the summative intensities of the stressed syllables in the rhyme don't match except through a readerly force of will or body English). So is the penultimate stress: "and all our woe"; "the ways of God to man." Bolded here means more stressed, if only slightly so, than the other stressed words (woe, ways, man). You may not agree, and maybe shouldn't but it's a plausible reading, because the stress in the fourth foot can be most prominent, as can the stress in the fifth foot, and indeed the stress in the first, especially in a choriamb:

                                         Mee of these
Nor skilld nor studious, higher Argument
Remaines, sufficient of it self to raise
That name, unless an age too late, or cold
Climat, or Years damp my intended wing    [45]
Deprest, and much they may, if all be mine,
Not Hers who brings it nightly to my Ear.

Line 45 is amazing. Probably first syllable gets the most stress, though Years might as well. But unstressed damp seems more stressed to me than even Years does. The least stressed of the syllables in strong position is my, which only receives its official stress by contrast with the in (inintended) that it precedes.

Oh, once you start embarking on the description of metrical effects, there's no end to it, so I won't say anything more about this extraordinary passage. Let's return to "sacred song." The meter makes it virtually impossible, and certainly risible, to read the line so as to give sac more stress than Song. (The capitalizations are almost certainly not officially Milton's, but on the other hand they may well record how he recited the line to his amanuensis-daughters.) The choriambic start to the line gives its center a metrical topography in which the stresses have to go something like this, with 5 as the most stressed syllable, 1 as the least stressed:

  3                       5         1             4               2
Smit with the love of sacred Song; but chief...

Some interchange is possible, but I feel certain that sacred gets the least stress in the line. After the two unstressed syllables in the middle of the choriamb, love is particularly marked (it doesn't even need capitalization!), and so the instantaneous resources of our sobvocalizing capacity to stress what we're reading are momentarily depleted, depleted for a beat, until we get to Song and the pause, the semicolon, that contributes its own brief, summative finality to the stress. This is the rhythm of meter itself; I suspect it follows something like a pink noise pattern, a kind of miniature version of the rhythm of cinematic cuts, and perhaps of a wide range of phenomena. It seems (I continue to speculate wildly) related to hyperbolic discounting, to a temporal rhythm of attention to and desire for stimulus including that of stress and the cognitive information that stressed syllables tend to offer. It is part of what we call style, part of a great poet's style, to convey meaning through the rhythms of stress itself. That's what makes song sacred.

At any rate, that's why I think my student was wrong, and why even the songs in hell, therefore, are part of the sacred category of song, making hell grant what love did seek.

Rhyme and meter, part 4b: Childe Roland

The second in a series of fairly frequent, short(ish) followups to Part 4 in this series.

"Childe Roland to the dark tower came"comes from Edgar's song in Lear, and then is to be found again in Browning's poem titled " 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.' " Note that the quotation marks and the sentence-ending period are part of the title --




-- and that this is confirmed by the running heads in the original:




Browning's title is a quotation of Shakespeare's line, and the fact that it's a quotation matters. In Shakespeare the line doesn't rhyme; and yet it feels like a line that must rhyme in the song of which it's a fragment. At least it feels that way to Browning, whose attributional parenthesis under the title is: "(See Edgar's song in Lear.)", also with a period at the end (I could be convinced that case matters to, but I don't think that here there's any harm in the mild difference between our titling conventions and Browning's):



Then, at the end of Browning's poem - it's not the song Edgar is singing; rather Edgar must be singing a song based on Roland's adventure, which, Bloomianly, transumes the song - at the end of Browning's poem, we get the line in both quotation marks and italics --



-- as Roland achieves the italicized otherness, timelessness, of the original. Italics were invented by Aldus in the fifteenth century (and supposed to imitate Petrarch's handwriting, so a great authority's annotation or addition to a printed text.  They stand, originally, for something that comes from elsewhere, something that doesn't belong to the original, to the utterer of the text we are reading, but to which that text is sufficiently relevant that it is entitled to demand or to entreat the italicized words. They are words granted or permitted from elsewhere. The italicized words in the King James Bible are the translators' clarifying additions, permitted, but only under that flag, by the sublime austerity of the original, its sublimity reflected in the italics that the supplementary words must display; the italicized words in quotations (italics were far older signs of quotation than are our inverted commas) were the words of another that for a moment the text wishes to display while not presuming to take possession of them. We put titles in italics to show that their title belongs to some other, that we are not the originators of the phrase. Italics and quotation marks have a similar genealogy and have leap-frogged each other in their somewhat out-of-synch history, but the point is whatever quotation marks have ever done, so have italics, and vice versa.

At the end of " ' Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. ' " the quotation marks are for Roland himself: here are the words I uttered. But he didn't quite utter them: he blew them (in proper Shelleyean manner) through the slug-horn, both horn and slogan (the origin of the word), so that what he blew became the self that was that quotation. And if the quotation marks are his, the sign of his breath through the horn, his utterance of words come from elsewhere, through the trumpeting of the prophecy that the words constitute, the italics denote Shakespeare, or Edgar, or Lear (the play), or the source that makes Edgar's song a quotation of a line from elsewhere. That last most of all: Shakespeare quotes them from elsewhere, and now Browing is quoting them from that same elsewhere.

What does this have to do with shortish accounts of the rhyme? Only this: that we feel the rhyme must rhyme (that's why it's from a "song"); and Browning makes it rhyme (with "flame" and "frame"), and yet the line still stands alone, rhyming with some word in a context orthogonal to the poem and to the song, a kind of signal from that other world of the rhyme we'll never know, but a rhyme that we know the line we do have nails, know it simply through the fact that Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.

The Unimmediate Stages of the Erotic

I claimed in my last post that people are needlessly confused by "When the Lamp is Shattered." But that's not quite right. The poem is confusing, the way the fate of love is confusing. It's confusing because, as with love, you lose track of the pronouns.  So it's worth looking at them carefully.

Here, again, are the last two stanzas:

When hearts have once mingled,
Love first leaves the well-built nest;
The weak one is singled
To endure what it once possessed.
O Love! who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier?

Its passions will rock thee,
As the storms rock the ravens on high;
Bright reason will mock thee,
Like the sun from a wintry sky.
From thy nest every rafter
Will rot, and thine eagle home
Leave thee naked to laughter,
When leaves fall and cold winds come.

The important thing to remember abut Shelley is the supernatural delicacy of his effects ("Ah, sister, desolation is a delicate thing"). You can see that delicacy in the mingled interchange of reference.  As the opening stanzas make clear, this poem is an example of a particularly  Shelleyan version of allegory. "The light in the dust lies dead" can't quite mean that you can see light in the dust of the ground (as though the oil were still burning), because the light is dead. It almost means that, but it means that only if you understand that "the light in the dust" also and more deeply means: the light of life and love that animates the dust that we are, to which we will return. We've lost our spark, alive but loveless. The light in the dust that is still biologically alive has been extinguished.

Allegory figures through externalization, so the allegorical figuration of that is light actually lying dead in the dust, as on a battlefield, exteriorized. This is not quite an image, though it sounds like one. It's a verbal substitution for an image, a verbal form which can never be imagined as a pure image, since you would have to imagine light and its extinction at once. I do imagine that, but only by personifying the image of light prone and dead somehow in the dust, light still but dead, like Burke's not quite imaginable "angel of the Lord."

This is the mode of the last two stanzas as well. After love has expressed itself (when the hearts have mingled and mingle no longer, "when the lips have spoken), it does not last. Not for both: the weak one still loves though love is over. This is the meaning of the self-discrepancy of the light lying dead in the dust. Love is dead, the weak one still loves.

The well-built nest decays when love leaves it. Who leaves? The one who doesn't love anymore, and so: love departs. Who stays? The one who loves, debilitated by loss, and so: love stays. It does both at once.  Each is the equivalent of the other.  Love's departure brings out the love felt by the one who's lost all, and from whom love can never depart.

Love doesn't return to its eagle home; its only nest now is the place where the weak remains forlorn since love is gone. Love is gone, and what's left is love. Allegorical exteriorization is just the right figure for this discrepancy within experience: what is inside can only be seen now from the outside, and that fact tells powerfully and devastatingly on inner experience and brings us back to inner experience.

So in the last stanza, the pronouns are only hard to fix if you think they have to be fixed. "Thee" is Love, addressed already in the second person in the previous stanza: "Why choose you the frailest / For your cradle, your home, and your bier?" So "its passions" are the passions of the "weak one" who must "endure what it once possessed."

And yet: it's the passions of love that must be rocking the weak one, who endures it. The change in antecedent this reading implies is confirmed by the shift from "you" ("Why choose you the frailest") to "thee," the weak one.

The final, deepest allegorical figure of love is the person whom love abandons, leaving that person to be love's image, the frail and sorrowful personification of love's frailty. What's left when love is faithless and abandons you is the truest image of the faithfulness of love, faithful love.

"What may I do when my master feareth, But in the field with him to live and die? For good is the life ending faithfully."

Poetry and the contagion of affect

Balaustion (Browning's Balaustion) prefaces her by-heart recital of Euripides' Hecuba with these words, which can form a kind of motto for the practice of rapturous quotation:

                                 no one of all the words
O' the play but is grown part now of my soul,
Since the adventure. 'T is the poet speaks:
But if I, too, should try and speak at times,
Leading your love to where my love, perchance,
Climbed earlier, found a nest before you knew —
Why, bear with the poor climber, for love's sake!

I think Browning is remembering -- and so he, too, is speaking -- the words that end Shelley's "When the Lamp is Shattered":

When hearts have once mingled,
Love first leaves the well-built nest;
The weak one is singled
To endure what it once possessed.
O Love! who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier?

Its passions will rock thee,
As the storms rock the ravens on high;
Bright reason will mock thee,
Like the sun from a wintry sky.
From thy nest every rafter
Will rot, and thine eagle home
Leave thee naked to laughter,
When leaves fall and cold winds come.

These lines have occasioned much unnecessary confusion.  What Shelley meant, and what Browning saw, was that the personification of Love ("thee") opens it to the experience of all human beings: abandonment by love.  Love itself experiences the loss of love.  (Personifications of love, from the Symposium onwards, will often have this strange effect; it may indeed be in view of this effect that love is so often personified, standing on the burning deck reciting "Casabianca", hiding his face among a crowd of stars.) Balaustion's beautiful inversion of this fate leads us back to love's nest: her love for Euripides encouraging our own.

It may be too that in remembering Shelley Browning is remembering Dante, and the strange affection between shades that Statius and Virgil feel for each other.  In Purgatory the saved Statius tries to embrace the unsaved Virgil's feet, but Virgil reminds him that they are shades that that they are seeing shades.  Statius replies that his love for Virgil was so great that he forgot this unforgettable fact: that they are dead.

Virgil returns the compliment at the beginning of the next Canto (Purgatorio 22):

                                          "Amore
acceso di virtù, sempre altro accese,
pur che la fiamma sua paresse fore;

onde da l’ora che tra noi discese
nel limbo de lo ’nferno Giovenale,
che la tua affezion mi fé palese,

mia benvoglienza inverso te fu quale
più strinse mai di non vista persona,
sì ch’or mi parran corte queste scale.

-----

                                              Love,
Ignited by some power, spreads its flame
to others, if its fire flares above

The surface, vividly. When, Hellwards, came
Juvenal to Limbo, joined us there, and
made me know your love, I felt your claim

On my benevolence, by far more fair
Than any had yet felt for unseen persons,
so now it seems with ease I climb this stair.

Virgil loves Statius because Statius loves Virgil's poetry, loves it right, loves it deeply, loves it as should be loved: loves a shade.  There is nothing remotely self-absorbed about Virgil's love for Statius. Rather the poetry he wrote is, like all poems, an invitation to loving something together: something, to put it in the most banal and yet the deepest terms, quotable.

And indeed that's what Statius is about to to do: he quotes from the Aeneid to explain his own salvation.  Virgil's bitter critique of the corruption that gold produces among all humans wakens Statius to clearer thinking about avarice and prodigality, and he narrowly escapes hell, thanks to his master, who does not.  The words have a life of their own, like Love.