As in a vivid sleep

Here’s an amazing, haunting poem by L.S. Bevington, from 1876:

Twilight

Grey the sky, and growing dimmer,
And the twilight lulls the sea;
Half in vagueness, half in glimmer,
Nature shrouds her mystery.

What have all the hours been spent for?
Why the on and on of things?
Why eternity’s procession
Of the days and evenings?

Hours of sunshine, hours of gleaming,
Wing their unexplaining flight,
With a measured punctuation
Of unconsciousness, at night.

Just at sunset, was translucence,
When the west was all aflame;
So I asked the sea a question,
And an answer nearly came.

Is there nothing but Occurrence?
Though each detail seem an Act,
Is that whole we deem so pregnant
But unemphasizèd Fact?

Or, when dusk is in the hollows
Of the hill-side and the wave,
Are things just so much in earnest
That they cannot but be grave?

Nay, the lesson of the Twilight
Is as simple as ’tis deep;
Acquiescence, acquiescence,
And the coming on of sleep.

It’s one in a set of four – “Morning,” “Afternoon,” “Twilight,” and “Midnight” – and I think the best of those though they are all good. Louisa Bevington was an anarchist (Kropotkin came to her funeral, as did the Rossettis) and atheist poet, well versed (so to speak) in Darwin’s theory of evolution. For Tennyson, for the Tractarians, for many others, evolution by natural selection was an unspeakably depressing idea, but Bevington could think about it in a way looking forward to Wallace Stevens’s “Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu”: “In a world without heaven to follow, the stops / Would be endings, more poignant than partings, profounder, / And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell, / Just to be there and just to behold.”

A world without heaven to follow is one in which the present moment, if it signifies anything at all, can only signify repetition, can only mean its own meaning as a present moment. The possibility of temporary repetition is all it offers. Stevens’s repetition is like Bevington’s “Occurrence.” Things happen and the world is a series (hence the idea of repetition) of things happening. What we, empirical, limited, biological people do is acquiesce, as the penultimate line repeats.

What I find so hauntingly perfect about this poem is what that acquiescence is to. On a first reading it looks allegorical: the coming on of sleep is a harbinger of death, which is always coming on (as in Ashbery’s tonally similar poem “Fear of Death,” with its allusion to Hamlet's very last words). But I think what makes this poem so good is that it doesn’t make sleep a figure for death. It’s not about how we Darwinians have to to acquiesce to our own mortality. Rather our experience as biological beings is the experience of acquiescing to our own experience as natural beings. There is a sort of unmeditated kindness in nature, as simple as it’s deep: the kindness that means we fall asleep every night, as mammals do.

We acquiesce, without any sort of decision, to the part of our nature that is the everyday part of nature. I think what’s most amazing about this is the way that the moment in reading the poem that you realize that it’s about sleep, not about death, is the moment you repeat the experience that it describes. Sleep is real, death is notional. There’s no decision there but simply the fact that we do fall asleep, no working through to a resolution of some ontological anxiety but just a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep. We're fundamentally like all other mammals: we acquiesce as they do to living in the natural world -- the world whose existence we contribute to by being natural beings. The poem doesn’t solve the problem it sets up: it is (as Wittgenstein will say (Tractatus 6.251) about the vanishing of the problem.

Wittgenstein's Cat

Imagine a cat in a box (it could be a duck or a rabbit or even a beetle instead, of course but we will assume without criteria that it's a cat) . She is caterwauling (you might be going to the vet or some such, because the cat is sick) but you can't tell if her cry is closer to "yanny" or to "laurel." At some point she quiets down, which after a while is worrying. You'd stopped at a fabric store on the way to get some soft silk to make the cat more comfortable in the box. The shopkeeper matched the gold fabric which you gave him a sample of to some silk he had on hand. Then perhaps he counted out fourteen inches of fabric (perhaps he recited the numbers from 1 to 14 as he counted out each inch: he counted in just the way we count, in the most ordinary sense). You arrive at the vet and she opens the box in her examining room. I want to say you will see either a dead cat surrounded by the funerary crepe of black fabric or a living cat rolling upon pink to work it in. But what was she doing before that, and was her caterwaul "yanny" or "laurel?" (We assume it has to be one of those.)

Privileging your check.

I am team-teaching a course on the later Wittgenstein this semester with a somewhat skeptical but radically open-minded philosopher. We were discussing language game (2), as it’s called, the one in which a builder says “Slab” to his assistant in just the circumstances where we would say “Bring me a slab.” Wittgenstein wants to show us that “Slab” is no more short for “Bring me a slab” than “Bring me a slab” is long for “Slab.” It is not an elliptical version of our more precise formulation.

 

This is always a very hard point to get right. Anyhow my philosopher-partner remarked that it was interesting how Wittgenstein always goes to chess for analogies to language games, and it occurred to me that he doesn’t go to chess enough. Because here’s what I think is a very helpful analogy.

 

When someone says “check” in chess, you might be tempted to take that word as one in Elliptical, properly translated into English as “your king is in danger.” The etymology of the word, though, shows that “check” meant “king,” from Persian (cf. Shah), via (most recently) the Arabic شَا (šāh). (I am following Wiktionary here: the OED offers some different and very interesting etymological byways, but as is the case with the way language develops, different etymological pathways converge and diverge and reconverge — for Wittgensteinian reasons — and the Wiktionary etymology is at least a big part of the story.)

 

This means that the word “check” means something like “king.” (Something. Like.)  Is that elliptical for “your king is in danger” as “slab” in language game (2) is supposed to be elliptical for the more precise “bring me a slab”? That is, should we say that when I threaten your king and say “check,” I am saying ’”king” as an elliptical way of saying “I am now threatening your king” (or some such more explicit, unpacked, and therefore accurate formulation)? Likewise, when I say “gin” that would mean “all my cards are now in completed sets and so I win the game” (and similarly with mahjong and any other game where the name of the game is also the name of a declaration within the game.)

 

But check is not elliptical for “your king is in danger.” The king cannot be put in danger. (As Pynchon says “once among nations, as in chess, suicide was illegal.”) “Check” actually means that the king must either move or be defended, either by blocking the piece that can move to the square the king is now on or by taking that piece. The king can’t be put in danger because it can’t be taken. If there is no way to get out of check, then the game is over and the player whose king is in check loses.

 

To sum up:

 

1) Check is like slab in language game (2): something that looks like a noun but isn’t one, though our translation of the utterance would contain nouns in our language.

 

2) There is no natural translation of the word that we could give without knowing how to play chess, since the closest candidate to a natural translation assumes the king could be put into danger, when it can’t. (At least “danger” in chess doesn’t amount to the king’s being put in check.)

 

What about “mate”? How do we translate that? Again, we might be tempted to say that mate or checkmate means: “I’ve won, I've won” or “You’ve lost,” or “There is no way you can now get out of check so that I have won [or you have lost].”

 

But the literal meaning of “checkmate” is “the king is dead,” from the Persian مات‎ شاه (šâh mât) (Wiktionary: if they’re accurate, though it doesn’t matter that much, apparently “check” comes from the Arabic but “checkmate,” under the influence of “check” comes directly from the Persian. The actual etymological paths are close enough to each other that; what matters is the meaning of the phrase.)

 

All of this seems to bear Wittgenstein out beautifully in a way familiar enough to us that we can see what would be wrong with trying to find more “accurate” translations for “elliptical” terms like “slab.” Or “check.” Only when you know how to play chess do its terms make sense, and they don’t make sense just because check “means” king.  Check means “check.” Teaching someone I might say, well think of it as meaning “your king is in danger.” But once she knows how to go on, how to play, she won’t understand it to mean that. She’ll understand it to mean that she’s in check.

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.

Set theory for poets / Poetry for set theorists

One modern incarnation of the debate between nominalism and realism is to be found in philosophical arguments about sets.  There are two ways of characterizing a set: intensionally, through description (e.g. the set of all inhabitants of London, to use an example of Russell's), and extensionally, which is just a list of the members of the set.

Quine, as nominalist as they come, objected to the "ontological excesses of set theory" when construed intensionally.  Is there really such an entity as "all the inhabitants of London"?  Yes, there are inhabitants, and we, or God, or Facebook could list them.  Each is an entity him- or herself (let's stipulate, because who wouldn't?)

The problem with extensional sets is that the vast, the utterly overwhelming majority of them would be utterly random, by our lights, like the contents of almost any book in Borges's "Library of Babel."  Those books are all (à très peu d'exceptions près) useless, and so too, more or less, would be thinking about things in sets.  The problem with intensional sets is that they may not exist (what is a set and where do I find one?), and even if some do exist, others might turn out to be impossible, despite seemingly innocuous descriptive criteria for membership.

Nevertheless, set theory is not only obviously useful: it's obviously a way that people think about the world and make sense of it (or it's a formalization of how we think and make sense of the world).  "Natural kinds" for example really do rely on a concept of nature not unlike the nature that we live in, that we evolved to survive in.  And it seems too that we find pleasure in finding sets, or figuring out what intensionally-characterized (or -characterizable) sets seemingly random extensional lists belong to.

Just to reiterate: intensional is more or less synonymous with interesting.  To characterize a set intensionally is to say that its members share some interesting property - interesting enough that you don't have to list them.

But here I want to focus on the converse idea as part of human literary or cultural play (as well as work): figuring out from a list what interesting set would embrace the items on that list.  It's true, of course, that a vast number of different interesting sets might embrace them, so we might want some further criteria of economy (this is also how Freud thinks about mental economy) for what the really interesting set is.  (That kind of economy is something like the criterion for a natural kind, and also for Wittgenstein's ideas about rule-following, which is for another post.)

The criteria would not necessarily be pure efficiency, but a balance between specificity and pith.  Pithy specificity is what we're looking for, and we'll know it when we see it.

Example:

{raven, writing desk}.

 Now we're not really asking about this set itself.  We're asking about the set it's a subset of, but we're still looking for a pretty small set.  So items whose names in English start with the phoneme /r/ won't cut it.  Nor, probably will nouns with the letter n, nor objects smaller than an elephant, nor things that don't taste like rhubarb. They both belong to those sets, yes, and to many others too, but still.

The two terms are, as every school child will remember, from a riddle by Lewis Carroll, which the Mad Hatter asks Alice.  He gives no answer, but later Carroll was prevailed upon to solve it.  He wrote:

Enquiries have been so often addressed to me, as to whether any answer to the Hatter's Riddle can be imagined, that I may as well put on record here what seems to me to be a fairly appropriate answer, viz: 'Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!' This, however, is merely an afterthought; the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all.

As originally invented, then, it was offered as pure extension.

Now other writers offered later answers.  Martin Gardner and The Straight Dope give some of the best, e.g., Poe wrote on both (Sam Loyd). (Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope also explains the misspelling nevar: it's a palindromic raven.)

So the pleasure of riddles, of this kind of riddle, is the sudden collapse of extension into intension.  Sometimes that will require a reconceptualization of the elements in the extension: not "What's black and white and red all over?" no, but "What's black and white and read all over?"  The extension turns out to be the following set of qualities, denotable by adjectives and adjectival phrases: {black, white, read all over}.

What does this have to do with poetry?  Well, in English, anyhow, rhymes are to be distinguished from inflections.  We don't (really) count unity and disunity as a rhyme; motion and emotion are too close to each other.  As Wimsatt argues, the best rhymes will tend to be different parts of speech, and, as Empson points out, the fact that singular verbs but plural nouns end with -s means that we can't generally or easily rhyme subjects with predicates.  So rhyming words tend to be arbitrarily connected.

Consider the set R = {Mahatma Gandhi, the Coliseum, the time of the Derby winner, the melody from a symphony by Strauss, a Shakespeare sonnet, Garbo's salary, cellophane, Mickey Mouse, the Nile,..., Camembert}.  Extensionally there's nothing unusual about it, even if it is, as the kids say, "kind of random."  Not that random though: these all belong to a somewhat larger set of words that can be formed into subsets consisting of rhymed pairs, e.g. {the melody of a symphony by Strauss, Mickey Mouse}.  Rhyming with a member of some smaller set is the principle of inclusion in the somewhat larger set.

Or to put it another way, rhyming provides a principle of one-to-one correspondence between two sets of entities whose names have at least one rhyme.  That's not how I'm defining those sets: that's how I'm characterizing one of many facts about their members.  So the set R (whose membership I haven't fully listed) is the union of those two sets that are in one-to-one correspondence.

Now that principle, as we've seen, tends to be highly arbitrary in English.  The rhyming dictionary is disconcertingly senseless.  But what a poet does, like a riddler, is to find some intensional principle which defines a set given randomly and extensionally.  In this case that principle is that each member of the set R is a member of the set {things that are the top} (I am simplifying the song a little bit to make my point).

Now this distinction between intension and extension is also a distinction between use and mention.  The principle of membership of the two sets whose union forms R is first of all, that is to say, as a matter of poetic craft, a principle which mentions terms, i.e. selects them for the fact that they rhyme.  (The rhyming dictionary mentions words: it doesn't use them.)  But the job of the poet is to take these mentioned words and use them, which means to say something with them and therefore something about the things they signify or refer to.

The solution isn't just economical (as it is with a riddle), isn't just the sudden lifting of a burden through the sudden glory of an elegant summary of its components.  We shunt back and forth between use and mention, intension and extension, admiring at every moment how they fit together: look it rhymes! look, it's the top!

Studies (e.g. by Ray Jackendoff) of the neural handling of music suggest that different parts of the brain have different access to memory.  Some of the cerebral material we use to process music chunks and forgets immediately, so when a theme or motif is played again, it handles it as entirely new.  But other parts of the brain remember that motif or theme, and therefore experience a different relation to the novelty that is still being felt and processed.  That back and forth, that counterpoint, that complex and differently phased experience of music is the experience of music, or at least a large part of it.

I think the same is true about rhyming (and meter), especially since it appears that music actually recruits the cerebral material that processes sounds: vowels are much lower pitched than consonants, and we put words together from sounds much as we put musical experience together.  So I think that we go back and forth, sometimes putting together the longer-term, more coherent intensional sense of the set of rhymes we're given and sometimes testing the always novel extension of the list, and that the delight in doing so is how the abstract distinctions to be found in set theory play out in the pleasures of poetry, and of math.

(At least that's what struck me today.)

Derrida, Austin, Quotation, Evolution

Derrida's critique of Austin isn't an unhelpful one, since it evinces just the sort of metaphysical thinking that Austin and Wittgenstein are concerned to think past.  Basically, Derrida's claim in "Signature Event Context" is that quotation can't be "parasitic" on performative utterances because to engage in such an utterance requires a citation or quotation of the appropriate formula.  (Like everyone else, and I do mean everyone Derrida neglects Austin's distinction between "hollow" and "void" performative utterances, but that's for another post.)  So performative utterances are logically dependent on a practice of quotation.

This is wrong.  It would be far better to say that the very idea of quotation arises out of performative utterances.  Performative utterances -- or Wittgenstein's language games -- come first.  It may be possible to formulate the rules of such games, but those formulations are descriptive, not prescriptive, attempts to formalize what we do.  Performative utterances, and moves in language games more generally, are practices before they are more-or-less-successful attempts to be adequate to some set of rules governing them.

For Wittgenstein these are practices which arise out of what he calls "agreement in forms of life." The supersubtle mechanisms by which such agreement could evolve (see, for example, Robert Axelrod's Evolution of Cooperation) can't and won't have presupposed something so crude as Derridean citation. Quotation in the Paris-is-Burning Jennie Livingston sense, possibly, where quotation is something closer to biological mimesis as Roger Caillois understands it: interaction, gaming, self-exposure to the spatial world. But this has almost nothing to do with Derridean formalism.

But what we could see, and say, is that citation, verbatim quotation, the idea of the verbatim, Quinean inscription, arise from performatives.  Formulae are fossilized performatives, and the idea of a formula (which is of course manifold in rituals and rites themselves dependent on prior belief in the performative power of utterance, a belief raised to a magical pitch) can give rise (see Homer and Milman Parry) to the idea of quotation itself.

So the great, Emersonian literary device of quotation is secondary to performative utterance.  That's what makes it literature: the evocation of a fictive world, where the performances aren't real, and all the more haunting for that reason.  Maybe I should say something about the hollow vs. the void.  In Austin hollow performatives are those which are not "meant," are those which the utterer performs without any intent to back them up.  Void performatives are those which have no standing, no matter how passionately they are uttered.  Fiction or the literary is the region, then, of the void, not of the hollow.  The poet nothing lieth because he nothing affirmeth, but instead gives us some sense of what the void is, next to which our loquacious selves are so precariously perched (to allude to Kenneth Burke).

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

I've been thinking (and hope to do a series of posts about) what we're doing when we think actively. I don't mean how does a thought develop according to its internal logic or potentialities. I mean to try to think about some consequences of the fact that what makes thinking thinking (what makes it discursive and not intuitive) is that it's hard. Its difficulty has something to do with its content, with where it arrives, with what it learns. (I am not much alluding here to the distinction that Daniel Kahneman makes in his great book Thinking Fast and Slow, though it's not irrelevant. More relevant still might be George Ainslie's Breakdown of Will, but I'm not going to say much explicitly about either, except to note that both are interested in the Housmanian fact that thought is irksome, and three minutes a long time.)

By the relation of difficulty to content, I don't mean less that some content is hard than that hardness is something that thinking thinks about. Difficulty of thought leads to thinking about difficulty and what difficulty means about the thinking you're doing. This feedback loop (we avoid the word "dialectic" in this blog: too easy a landing place)-- this feedback loop obviously has something to do with poetic thinking, which is what I want to get to in a later post.

Here I just want to try to note what I mean by making an observation about the rhetoric of rhetorical questions. Why are there such things? Why are the rhetorically effective? There are obvious answers having to do with some aspects of irony and quotation, of ironic quotation, so to speak. "Shall the blessed sun of heaven prove a milcher and eat blackberries? A question not to be asked." (1 Henry IV)

So it's only asked in retroactive quotation marks that the question makes its appearance. Who would ask such a question? The targets of our irony, of the irony nous autres share with respect to the person who doesn't realize that it's irony.

But what I'm interested in is the role that a rhetorical question plays in genuine discursive thinking. It raises a real issue or some consequence of a real issue that has to be thought through (even in the most demagogic situations: without real issues there's no occasion for rhetoric of any sort). And it asks for help in thinking it through. A rhetorical question assumes a listener, and that listener is a sort of check or hedge for thought. To ask a question is to see that thinking is partly social, that the fact that it occurs discursively, in language, is important. Thinking is about judging, and proper judging is or should be always a vicarious, because a disinterested, activity.

When we ask a question with a foreordained answer, it matters that we get the foreordained answer. That ratifies our judgment, vicariously as I say. It ratifies the fact that it is a judgment, that we can ask others and expect them to concur. The retroactive feature of rhetorical questions that I've just noted is a sort of check-bit when the thought is done, making sure that the judgment now seems unassailable, no?

I don't mean that rhetorical questions always constitute genuine thought. But I expect they do whenever they're first formulated. At any rate, they stand for the larger class of ways of guiding thought. "The experience of being guided" (Wittgenstein) is what thought thinks about (it had better), whatever else it thinks about, whenever it thinks. (This is one clear commonality between the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations.)

This has everything to do with what it means to be a writer, in the Blanchotian sense that I so revere.

Two types of metafiction

One might think: if philosophy speaks of the use of the word "philosophy" there must be a second-order philosophy. But it is not so: it is, rather, like the case of orthography, which deals with the word "orthography" among others without then being second-order.
                                                                                                                     --Wittgenstein

I've been thinking about two types of metafiction, or at least metafictional moments: the type we're all too familiar with in recent years, where the metafiction is the point, and the (what to call it?) target fiction is in its service, and another more common, more exhilarating type (as I have come to think), where metafictional moments are actually in service of the story itself.

The first type - let Susanna Moore or Charlie Kaufman, or Borges, or Philip Roth or K. Dick stand for its practitioners - keeps you checking on its coherence. Does the level of self-reflexivity interact coherently with the other level, that which it self-reflexively circles or twists back into and out of? I guess all the paradoxes of time-travel SF form a subset of this kind of metafiction. It's a game, and the game is to see how the first-level fiction can unfold with at least some of its characters, and some putative or plausible audience members, unaware of its metafictional, metaphysical determinants. The fun is to get it, to see how well or how cleverly it works. And that is fun, but only one kind of fun. Of course in Roth or Nabokov or Dick, there are other kinds of fun as well. But somehow the metafictional perfection of their metafictional narratives subordinates all other aspects of those narratives to the self-reflexive theme.

The result is a kind of defensive irony, or at least the knowingness of an endlessly self-aware irony to which all events, characters, hopes, recognitions, resolutions reduce. Nothing really matters as its own moment: it's all the fulfillment of the typological structure of metafiction. The tone wears thin after a few decades of this.

The other kind of metafiction is exuberantly undefensive. Cervantes or Shakespeare "Nay, then, God be wi' you, an you talk in blank verse") are two obvious examples, but we could add Austen (especially Northanger Abbey), Melville, Thackeray, Marías, Bolaño and the more recent work of Steve Erickson (right now I am thinking in particular of These Dreams of You) to the list. There the metafiction is just a quick, convenient, fun, and pre-eminently local part of the fiction. The fiction isn't dragooned into serving the metafictional demonstration; the metafiction forms part of the series of events or incidents that the fiction delights in displaying.

So I guess this is really a post about fictional delight. It takes a long time to learn or relearn to read, and probably to write, fiction which knows about all the ways that it can be made to thematize itself, without being much concerned to show its mastery of such things. It's got other fish to fry - it's got fish to fry, is the point, and metafiction is one fish among others, tasty enough in convenient quantities in a varied diet, but not (as Blake said Swedenborg believed of himself) "the single one on earth that ever broke a net."

Rhyme and meter, part 3: What we can hear, and what they could

I'll want to return to my previous set of examples in a future post; here I want to start by considering one more.  A naive historian of rhyme might think that what doesn't sound like a rhyme to us ("hand or eye / symmetry") would have been more natural in a different dialect or pronunciation.  True we can hear eye as diphthongized (as the unlovely linguistic term has it): the slow-motion pronunciation would decompress it to "ah-ee" (the way Mark Twain or Kate Chopin might write it).  That tweak would turn this into a natural rhyme, which sounds forced only to those who pronounce as we do, here, now.

But it's harder to say the same of the near parallel, and very frequent rhymes on internal "i" sounds.  Shakespeare and Donne, to quote the two most obvious examples, rhyme such words as wind and mind. (The doggerel rhyme to Rosalind in As You Like It in my first example has taught generations of actors how to pronounce her name: majority rhyme seems to win, though I think it would be interesting to go with the early returns that turn out to be the minority: Ind and wind.)

From the east to western Ind,
No jewel is like Rosalind.
Her worth, being mounted on the wind,
Through all the world bears Rosalind.
All the pictures fairest lined
Are but black to Rosalind.
Let no fair be kept in mind
But the fair of Rosalind. 

* * *

If a hart do lack a hind,
Let him seek out Rosalind.
If the cat will after kind,
So be sure will Rosalind.
Winter garments must be lined,
So must slender Rosalind.
They that reap must sheaf and bind;
Then to cart with Rosalind.
Sweetest nut hath sourest rind,
Such a nut is Rosalind.
He that sweetest rose will find
Must find love's prick and Rosalind. 

-----------------

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
            And find
            What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

Remember that Wyatt, too, knows where is an hind, though in a net he seeks to catch the wind.  Nor let us forget Arlo Guthrie's great motorcycle song, which has him, as needed, rhyming pickle with motor-sickle, and die with motor-sigh- / (cul), as his folk rock pronunciation allows.

So wind/mind is okay, but you'll never find (I do not think) weened/mind, though that would seem a closer parallel to eye/symmetry or (say) we/my.

So here's the passage I want to think about, from Sidney, the octet of Atrophel and Stella 86:

Alas, whence came this change of lookes? if I
Haue chang'd desert, let mine owne conscience be
A still felt plague, to selfe condemning me:
Let wo gripe on my heart, shame loade mine eye,
But if all faith, like spotlesse Ermine ly
Safe in my soule, which onely doth to thee
(As his sole object of felicitie)
With wings of Loue in aire of wonder flie....

Note that the rhyme scheme is obvious here abbaabba.  But this isn't inevitable: some of the sonnets rhyme (in their octets) abababab, and if eye can rhyme with me, it would seem that some could argue that the latter rhyme scheme governs here as well. We're facing here an example of the sort of thing that Wittgenstein ponders when he considers the problem of rule-following: there is a rule that can justify any sequence.  (My favorite recent example is the sequence that begins sweetly enough as 0, 1, 2, but whose fourth member (scroll down if this isn't of tremendous interest to you) is

260,121,894,356,579,510,020,490,322,708,104,361,119,152,187,501,694,578,572,754,183,785,083,563,115,694,738,224,067,857,795,813,045,708,261,992,057,589,224,725,953,664,156,516,205,201,587,379,198,458,774,083,252,910,524,469,038,881,188,412,376,434,119,195,104,550,534,665,861,624,327,194,019,711,390,984,553,672,727,853,709,934,562,985,558,671,936,977,407,000,370,043,078,375,899,742,067,678,401,696,720,784,280,629,229,032,107,161,669,867,260,548,988,445,514,257,193,985,499,448,939,594,496,064,045,132,362,140,265,986,193,073,249,369,770,477,606,067,680,670,176,491,669,403,034,819,961,881,455,625,195,592,566,918,830,825,514,942,947,596,537,274,845,624,628,824,234,526,597,789,737,740,896,466,553,992,435,928,786,212,515,967,483,220,976,029,505,696,699,927,284,670,563,747,137,533,019,248,313,587,076,125,412,683,415,860,129,447,566,011,455,420,749,589,952,563,543,068,288,634,631,084,965,650,682,771,552,996,256,790,845,235,702,552,186,222,358,130,016,700,834,523,443,236,821,935,793,184,701,956,510,729,781,804,354,173,890,560,727,428,048,583,995,919,729,021,726,612,291,298,420,516,067,579,036,232,337,699,453,964,191,475,175,567,557,695,392,233,803,056,825,308,599,977,441,675,784,352,815,913,461,340,394,604,901,269,542,028,838,347,101,363,733,824,484,506,660,093,348,484,440,711,931,292,537,694,657,354,337,375,724,772,230,181,534,032,647,177,531,984,537,341,478,674,327,048,457,983,786,618,703,257,405,938,924,215,709,695,994,630,557,521,063,203,263,493,209,220,738,320,923,356,309,923,267,504,401,701,760,572,026,010,829,288,042,335,606,643,089,888,710,297,380,797,578,013,056,049,576,342,838,683,057,190,662,205,291,174,822,510,536,697,756,603,029,574,043,387,983,471,518,552,602,805,333,866,357,139,101,046,336,419,769,097,397,432,285,994,219,837,046,979,109,956,303,389,604,675,889,865,795,711,176,566,670,039,156,748,153,115,943,980,043,625,399,399,731,203,066,490,601,325,311,304,719,028,898,491,856,203,766,669,164,468,791,125,249,193,754,425,845,895,000,311,561,682,974,304,641,142,538,074,897,281,723,375,955,380,661,719,801,404,677,935,614,793,635,266,265,683,339,509,760,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 --

a number with 1,747 digits. But there's a rule for that.*  Wittgenstein wants to know what makes a rule the right rule to follow, when there's no rule that could make it the right rule to follow that couldn't itself be followed in an infinite number of different ways.  His answer, more or less, is practice ratified by the relationship of learning and teaching the belongs to "agreement in forms of life."  Hannah Ginsborg, more or less in agreement with Stanley Cavell, calls such agreement in forms of life "primitive normativity."

Anyhow, back to our example.  Sidney likes partially ambiguous forms.  The famous "night and day" sonnet has only two rhyme words:

Now that of absence the most irksome night,
With darkest shade doth ouercome my day;
Since Stellas eyes wont to giue me my day,
Leauing my Hemisphere, leaue me in night,
Each day seemes long, and longs for long-staid night,
The night as tedious, wooes th'approch of day;
Tired with the dustie toyles of busie day,
Languisht with horrors of the silent night;
Suffering the euils both of the day and night,
While no night is more darke then is my day,
Nor no day hath lesse quiet then my night:
With such bad mixture of my night and day,
That liuing thus in blackest winter night,
I feele the flames of hottest sommer day.

Two rhyme words, but what's the rhyme scheme?  I think it's too easy to stay with just a and b: most sonnets in Astrophel and Stella have four or five different rhyme pairs, typically rhymed abbaabbacdcdee, sometimes, e.g. the sonnet previous to this one, ababababccdeed, and again sometimes, as in the one before that, ababbabaccdccd.  I think it would be better, and more natural, to "chunk" the night and day sonnet as rhymed abbaabbacdcdee: the rule of the sonnet form seems to require that.

Note that we're already chunking by taking homoteleuton (or repetition of endings) as rhyme.  "Night" doesn't rhyme with "night," not even richly.  It repeats the word (as in a sestina, the form Sidney introduced into English).   You might almost call it a duina, at least the part that cycles night day day night night day day night. (On the relation of n-inas to prime numbers, see this short paper which proves that if an n-ina cycles, 2n+1 is prime: 5 in the case of a duina, where n=2. The converse doesn't hold, though.) In Dante, except for the repeated endings on "Christ" - which must not be adulterated by the arbitrary similarity of rhyming words - repetition is always rime riche: this is a principle of interpretation, so that you can understand an ambiguous word (such as torna, palma, and pianta, all rhymed with homonyms in Paradiso IX) as requiring difference in meaning between its orthographically identical homonyms, which can help solve the ambiguity.

The point is that in reading rhymed poetry we assess similarity pretty subtly, and assess as well the difference that prevents similarity from just being identity. Rhymes have a lot of give, but (as with stress) how much give they have is always contextualized by the rhyme scheme that determines them, and by the rhymes that surround them.  Night and day rhyme with themselves because they belong to a sonnet with a familiar rhyme scheme; piante and piante rhyme because they belong to a rhyme schemes that eschews self-rhyming, so that they therefore don't mean the same thing.

And this allows us to return to sonnet 86, where we can have no doubt that the rhyme scheme is abbaabba. Why no doubt?  Why not abababab?  Because the prosodical context and the closeness of sound brings out, here, the difference between I and be, me and eye.  Sidney takes pains to prevent our being misled by the conventional rhyming of, say, me and eye, by making sure that the first, the a, rhyme-pair is homophonic: I/eye. We then have to work to separate them via their different meanings, and that very work of separation (as in Dante) pairs them: very similar but still different.

Sidney's fearless symmetry makes sure we keep track of what's rhyming with what, even when doing so requires some involved and subtle distinction.

And here's the payoff of the always pain-in-the-ass subtlety of following a formal analysis.  Making us keep track of the rhymes, especially in a fairly monochromatic context, is a way of infiltrating our sense of rhyme with a sense of meaning and vice versa.  These are considerations that we're used to understanding when it comes to poetic meter, where the interaction of metrical and semantic stress contributes to our understanding of what's being said.  It's interesting that there's a subtle analogue of this in rhyme as well, which suggests that the interaction, both prosodically and semantically, between rhyme and meter is closer than has usually been suspected.

-----
*viz., 0 followed by 0 bangs = 0; 1 followed by 1 bang (1! or 1 factorial) = 1; 2!! (2 factorial factorial, 2 followed by 2 bangs = 2; 3!!! (3 factorial factorial factorial) = 720! = the foregoing.

Rhyme and meter, part 1: Occasional irregularity

In grammar we talk about irregular verbs (and sometimes nouns: child/children, e.g.). Steven Pinker points out that children learn the past tense of irregular verbs very early, before they learn the rules for forming past tenses. They know that the past tense of "go" is "went" in just the same way that they know that the past tense of "talk" is "talked." When they get a little older, though, they twig to the rule, and start applying it to irregular verbs: "I goed to the playground." They use irregular verbs correctly before we use them incorrectly, and then we have to relearn the irregularities.

Here's how I would describe the phenomenology of this piece of grammatical knowledge: we learn past tense (or aspect) and fully internalize it. "Went" is as fully the past tense of "go" as "talked" is of "talk." Or it would actually be better to reverse the order: "Talked" bears the same, completely transparent, relation to "talk" as "went" does to "go." First we learn transparency.

Then, scientists in the nursery, we develop the rules of this transparency. Not that we specify them for ourselves. The rules are transparent too. They too are natural, and unspecified (cf. Witggenstein on rule following and Hannah Ginsborg on "primitive normativity"). We go for what "sounds right." But then we misapply the natural and give up on an earlier natural, internalized, disposition to say "went." Two natural and transparent rules come into some conflict, and we go with the one that's more recent and has a wider application: that one too sounds right, at least for a while.

But our elders correct us.  We relearn the irregular verbs, and return to a more archaic natural transparency in their use. How much this is a return, and how much a newly internalized rule, can probably not be quite determined, but I suspect that the irregular verbs hang on, like all very basic pieces of language (e.g. the near-universal preservation of the proto-Indo-European word for hand in Indo-European languages), because they occur so early in our own individual experiences of language.  I think that we return with a sort of archaic relief to the familiar irregularities of our early childhood.

It doesn't matter very much whether that's true or not, but if it is, it may shed some light on what will follow in my next post - where I will propose adding a new term to the lexicon of rhyme.

This is the first of a series of short posts about rhyme's relation to meter.

Nous autres, or: The peculiar semi-circular stare

A short post on narratees to keep my hand in, until I get this cursed review off....

It's difficult to find a vivid way of explaining narratees to students.  Well, to explain the last narratee, the figure who corresponds to the first narrator, the author-as-narrator or impressario of the fiction, the narrator not meant to be ironized -- who, if ironic, is in control of the ironies we readers savor.  Obviously history has its own ironies, and authors are often their butts.  But in the fictional world, the final narrator is not ironized - not necessarily the first person narrator in a first person fiction, but the third person narrator who presents the first person narrator to us, the writer, as it were, of the speech prefix to the whole narration.

So who corresponds to this narrator on the receiving end? What is the narratee?  The narratee is the figure not meant to be ironized either -- who, if ironic, is in control of the ironies the narrator offers him or her to savor.  Just as obviously as with authors, narratees and readers may be the butt of some historical joke, but not in the fictional world.  But it's very hard to clarify the distinction between readers and narratees, partly because the distinction is so obvious.  People see that they're not the narratee, and they regard this as a failure, structural it may, be of the author.  Structural because no writer can know me!  I survive, a jolly candidate for a future that the author could not dream of - if only because of the lag time between her writing and my reading.  The author may have gone cool-hunting, but didn't anticipate what turns out to be cool today.  What a n00b!

But the obviousness is misleading.  All reading is vicarious (even of history, even of letters): only a fictional reader -- the narratee -- reads with direct and perfect interest and absorption.  Only a fictional reader imagines herself the addressee of the fiction.

It suddenly occurred to me, reading Nightwood, that one way to make the distinction clear is to think of narrator and narratee as belonging to the exclusive we -- nous autres, and not nous tous.  The narratee seems to use the inclusive we, but doesn't.  This moment in Barnes will illustrate what I mean -- she is talking about Felix and the disturbing element of Jewishness in his presence:

He was not popular, though the post-humous acclaim meted out to his father secured from his acquaintances the peculiar semi-circular stare of those who, unwilling to greet with earthly equality, nevertheless give to the living branch (because of death and its sanction) the slight bend of the head - a reminiscent pardon for future apprehension, - a bow very common to us when in the presence of this people.

Leave aside the question of how ironic Barnes is being, and how ironic history is being at her expense (that is the question of the nature and extent of her own prejudice against "this people").  The us is what interests me here: that "us" embraces nous autres, those who are of a certain aristocratic class for whom "earthly equality" means something, and who think in terms of familial branches (Felix, like his father, passes himself off as a baron); and also those who are male, and who would bow or bend their heads as a token of respect.  Her "us" makes clear who the narratee is -- who the narratee always is: someone who belongs to the same group as the narrator, plays the same language games the same way.  (Language games: we readers of a chess column and its annotations are credited with the exclusive understanding of the significance of moves that the master writing them has worked out for us.)

That "us" is particularly prominent in Barnes, but is to be found passim in Eliot, in Trollope, in Proust most of all.  ("Quand nous aimons une Gilberte, une Albertine....")  It's a genial, empirically philosophical "us" -- read any page of Hume or of Johnson or of Adam Smith to see what I mean.  In a philosophical context it offers qualified people entry into the circle of nous autres: men, say, or Englishmen, or Scotsmen of leisure.  It can of course be ironized even in such contexts: read practically any sentence of Gibbon.  It can be ironized in philosophy and fiction, but it's always ironized, however lightly, in fiction.

I think, paradoxically, that this is why such sentences, containing any form or mode of the word we, are so vanishingly rare in Henry James, that is in his narrators' addresses to the narratee reading the fiction.  He fictionalizes with such radical assiduity that he doesn't want us to confuse inclusive and exclusive we's, as we might if he used them.  The only real counterexample I can think of is a moment at the end of The Golden Bowl, when James's narrator tells us how Amerigo appears to Maggie as she is approaching her final triumph:

he almost pressed upon her, and the warmth of his face--frowning, smiling, she mightn't know which; only beautiful and strange--was bent upon her with the largeness with which objects loom in dreams.

James's tortured, artificial, metaphysical analogies give way, for this once, to an appeal to the experience of the reader.  Objects loom thus largely in all our dreams, dans les rêves de nous tous.  The narratee knows just what the narrator means, and we readers know just how it is that the narratee would know just what the narrator means.  This is an effect all the more powerful and spectacular because James has held it in reserve for, well hundreds of pages and indeed (it is not too much to say) dozens of years.  James's narratees are in general part of the extremely rarefied society of his narrators, those who can trade anecdotes like Henry James.  That's an exchange among an exclusive us that the rest of us take pleasure in following, as the child takes pleasure in the adult conversation of its parents.

One final example of the uses to which this difference may be put, again not from a fictional context, where the difference is always present, but from a sociological one.  In Stigma (and everywhere, but most obviously in Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity) Goffman distinguishes categorically between "us normals" and the variously stigmatized persons he treats as his categories and examples.  But the point of the book is that "at some point in...life" everyone is stigmatized.  There is no such thing as the "normal" individual (useful, to some extent, only as a medical category), only the stigmatized person's belief in that norm.  "We normals" are normal only with respect to whatever specific stigma is under discussion, but in the end we find that it is only the narratee who is normal.  In non-fiction, like Goffman's, there isn't a fictional narrator (the irony is the author's, not the narrator's); but there is a fictional narratee.  That's his point.  To be normal is a fiction.

And in fiction, the narratee is the figure the narrator takes as normal: the two of them are ordinary denizens, perhaps the only ones, of a non-existent world, looking at it with their peculiar semi-circular stare.

Truth in Fiction - I: The State of Things

When I was in grad school, Wim Wenders came to talk about a movie of his, Der Stand der Dinge (the State of Things).  I loved Wenders, and was glad that he was coming.  After the movie I asked him what I thought was a very clever question about what was hidden under some stairs (iirc).  He said he didn't know (which I knew he wouldn't), and I suggested that it was something from Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray is an extremely important precursor and mentor for Wenders).  He looked at me as though I were batshit crazy, said no, it definitely wasn't that, and went on to the next questioner.  I had imagined that he would get the important theoretical point that he was no more privileged as an interpreter of his own film than I was, and that what counted was the penetration of the reading (my reading), not the supposed authority of the reader (an authority that the author could pre-eminently claim).  Literary theory, through its immense (and perennial) philosophical idealism had gone back round to treating fiction as though it were the representation of a true state of affairs, that anyone might be the first to see.

Truth in fiction didn't depend on what the fiction-maker meant.  Its existence was independent of the fictionist's intention.  Of course what made something true in a fiction was the interpretive aptness of the claim (like the notorious nineteenth century claim that Hamlet was a woman), such aptness measured by the insight it made possible.  Insight into what?  Well, into what was true in the fictional world. Such insight made, and could therefore find, the truth it claimed.  Let's say it established truth.  But that's what we do in the real world - we try to establish the truth.

Thus the only difference between the two - a difference which made possible the many-worlds interpretation of fictional interpretation - was the difference the article (the "the") suggests.  In the real world we try to establish the truth, in fiction we try to establish truth.

Kendall Walton rightly argues that "truth in fiction," as D. K. Lewis called it, is a misnomer, since there's no requirement for logical consistency in a fictional world, on pain of deal-breaking incoherence.  Deconstructive readings exploited the fact that most fictions are inconsistent, almost by their very nature, since fiction purports to know and to show things that cannot be known or showed: e.g. people alone with their thoughts, and the thoughts they're alone with (this particular inconsistency, rightly understood, is probably the one most central to deconstruction).  Walton therefore prefers a technical use of the word "fictional": a proposition in a fiction would be called fictional if, as a stand-alone, it bore a relation to the fictional world it refers to analogous to the relation a true proposition bears to the real world.  Fictional propositions don't have to appear in the fiction itself: they can be paraphrases or reasonable deductions or inductions from the propositions that appear there ("Hamlet dies at the end of the play"; and, probably, "Horatio lives on, with Fortinbras as King").  The reason for calling them fictional rather than "true in the fiction" is to suggest that not all their logical consequences are also true in the fiction.  The dead Hermione's ghost appears to Antigonus... Hermione turns out not to have died.  I think it's easier to say that both those statements are true in The Winter's Tale, rather than saying they're fictional in the play, but I've paused to rehearse Walton's argument because it brings out the difference between what I'm calling and will call fictional truth and the truth.

So we can tease out the implications of the difference the "the" makes by saying that our basic view of truth in the real world is Tractarian (i.e. conforms to the arguments of the early Wittgenstein): the consistency of the world will guarantee the consistency of the elementary propositions that picture it. Hence the world is all that is the case.  Whereas our view of truth in fiction would be much more a coherence theory of truth: arguments about what happens in fiction require a reasonable amount of consistency among the various things that are true in that fiction, a consistency that makes it possible to handle the inconsistent parts that themselves contribute to the sense of coherence.

Still, at that time, in those days, the similarities seemed to us more important than the differences: the real world was coherent, and so was the fictional world.  Ideal it may have been, but it shared with reality a presumption of completeness, and anything which made it complete could count as a live hypothesis about the fictional world, just as anything which explains away an apparent contradiction counts as a live hypothesis in the real world.  In the real world, we are taught, we should always prefer the simplest possible account; in the fictional world we also used Occam's razor, but found that his straight edge didn't cut it and we had to plug in the electric one, which made possible all sorts of stylistic choices in the barbering of fictions hirsute with unexplained tufts of incident, character, or description.  The simplest explanation is the best, but it's hard to define simplicity when in principle there's no reality check: it became a question of explaining all the fictional facts with a story supplementing the one we received.  This of course was also what the New Testament did, and Midrash (where was Isaac after the Akedah?) and Kabbalah, and all manner of theologically inspired commentary and complement.  Chandler might not know who killed Owen Taylor, but we could try to figure it out.

Now as the later Wittgenstein points out, there are an infinite number of sequences (of stories) that will explain any data (any fictional facts) that we are given.  Since whatever sequence the author may have had in mind doesn't count more than any other, doesn't count more than the sequences readers may invent; since the logical inconsistencies, however trivial, show that even if we credit the author with authority over the meaning of her fiction,  she nevertheless hasn't specified the whole sequence, item by item (any more than I have specified a whole sequence in my mind when I count 2, 4, 6, 8... that couldn't continue 1000, 1004, 1008, or - my favorite - 0, 1, 2, 720!, a number with 1,747 digits)* we deep readers felt entitled to our own penetrating, sequence producing fictional assertions about what happened offstage in the fictional world.  Addition had no priority over quaddition, no matter what kind of real world type of pragmatism you inevitably evinced.  There was no cash value to pragmatic truth in interpreting fiction - quite the reverse.

But to think this way is to lose the very thing that makes a fiction fiction, the universal literary genre we call fiction.  It is to lose sight of the central law that the truth is what the author thinks it is (or what an authorial narrator, the last in the series, the narrator who has the author's full confidence, thinks it is).  Narrating is one of the most basic forms of human interaction, of human sociability.  "I've got a story": words which promise pleasure to both teller and told.  The pleasures are different: the teller takes pleasure in promulgating, the listener or reader in learning (as Aristotle pointed out already in the Poetics).  No stories without tellers is the moral of this one.

A moral more complicated than it might seem, it plays out differently according to the kind of story being told.  A quick taxonomy would distinguish between true stories and fiction, but we have to add a third phylum: anonymous stories whose origin is lost in the mists of time (folk tales, myths, legends, etc.).  When someone is telling a true story, we're entitled (rude though it might be) to second-guess her interpretations.  Some people always do.  I tell a story about a jerk cutting me off on the 405, but my skeptical listener suggests I might be in the wrong.  He thinks the truth (the single truth) might be different from what my story is suggesting, that there is a fact of the matter and I'm misrepresenting it.  This is true of third person stories as well: I say that Babe Ruth called his shot; she says, No, he was stretching prior to batting, and it just looked like he was pointing.

My skeptical chum doesn't have the same right to say that about a fictional narrative I originate. I get to say what my characters have known, have planned, have anticipated, have done.  If Wenders denies that there's something under the stairs, if his denial is serious, his skepticism genuine, no one is entitled to gainsay him.  It doesn't matter if the author is dead (you know, literally, biologically, dead).  Our sense of her is that what she thought happened happened.  We may not know what she thought happened, but we're still appealing to that category.  Who killed Edwin Drood?  We'll never know, but Dickens sure did.

The third phylum is the tale, which intersects  the other two, and with their common ground.  If you've heard a story, I can think you've heard it wrong, or that there's a way to tweak it to make it better.  It's fiction, but it's like the truth in the sense that it's public property.  No one has exclusive rights to it.  Here the teller is more or less like a literary critic, or an actor: an interpreter of a story that comes from elsewhere.  But her interpretation also gives her the authority that a witness has when it comes to telling true stories: she has a somewhat privileged, but defeasible relation to a public truth.  More defeasible than an actual witnesses would have, since once I know the story I am as entitled to tell it in the way I think best as she was.  There are no rules against hearsay in this phylum: indeed hearsay is obligatory, even or especially with all the hopeful mutation hearsay can introduce.

My interest, though, is in the authority the teller has over the tale, an authority most marked in the second phylum, the one where the fiction has an indentifiable author.  Here the strangeness of fiction - that we care about what we know isn't true - and the importance of the teller are both at their maxima.  And yet, the author is still governed by some coherence-producing restraints.  0, 1, 2, 720! will rarely do (though perhaps that's David Lynch's speciality).  Chandler may not know who killed Owen Taylor, but he would have wanted to know, would have decided and established who did, had he realized that hadn't known.  He doesn't know, and now there's nothing to know.  There is something to know about who killed Edwin Drood, but we never will know it: ignorabimus.

That constraint, like poetic form, can be a goad and a spur to the fictionist.  Lewis Carroll has to come up with the answer to random riddles he's posed - and he does (How is a raven like a writing desk?)  The whole movie in the can, and being shown to test audiences, Hitchcock decides (the audience has a hand in this, as it should) that Cary Grant had better be innocent.  Hitchcock comes up with an ingenious ending explaining away all the Suspicions.  Javier Marías never returns to revise a page once he's done with it: he has to cope with the fictional truth of the fictional past, to explain the drop of blood or the behavior of young Pérez Nuix.  Writers had to do this all the time in the age of serials: TV writers still do, though it's more interesting as in the case of Marías or (I think) Helen DeWitt when you have produced your own constraints.  (DeWitt is endlessly inventive and then endlessly attentive to the implications and consequences of her inventions.  DFW is sometimes like that too.)

Truth in fiction: there is a fact of the matter, but that means there are privileged relations to the facts, authoritative perspectives, certified fact-finders.  (Otherwise no one would need to listen - everyone would already know that the tale referred to the fictional just as Frege says that true propositions refer to the true.)  Even when we tweak anonymous tales, we usually think we're getting back to what they must originally have been, or at least we present them as the more authentic versions.  (Or else we transmute them into something frankly our own, become their announced authors, even if we're anonymous: "by the author of Waverly, &c.")  The risibly clever "fact" I offered Wenders showed that I got right that fiction trades in truths; what I got wrong though, was the way that such truth is in principle only available through the teller and her actions as a teller.  We all trust our own judgment, and all human communication is a comparison of divergent judgment (no matter how small the divergence) - otherwise it's not communication.

But then how can we compare our own judgment about the world she has invented with that of the fictionist?   And how can we know the truths she's left to our own inference - what prevents us from inferring the world we want to infer when we have a chance?

--------------

*In case you're curious, here are all 1,747 digits of the fourth number in the sequence whose first three numbers are 0, 1, 2 written out:

260,121,894,356,579,510,020,490,322,708,104,361,119,152,187,501,694,578,572,754,183,785,083,563,115,694,738,224,067,857,795,813,045,708,261,992,057,589,224,725,953,664,156,516,205,201,587,379,198,458,774,083,252,910,524,469,038,881,188,412,376,434,119,195,104,550,534,665,861,624,327,194,019,711,390,984,553,672,727,853,709,934,562,985,558,671,936,977,407,000,370,043,078,375,899,742,067,678,401,696,720,784,280,629,229,032,107,161,669,867,260,548,988,445,514,257,193,985,499,448,939,594,496,064,045,132,362,140,265,986,193,073,249,369,770,477,606,067,680,670,176,491,669,403,034,819,961,881,455,625,195,592,566,918,830,825,514,942,947,596,537,274,845,624,628,824,234,526,597,789,737,740,896,466,553,992,435,928,786,212,515,967,483,220,976,029,505,696,699,927,284,670,563,747,137,533,019,248,313,587,076,125,412,683,415,860,129,447,566,011,455,420,749,589,952,563,543,068,288,634,631,084,965,650,682,771,552,996,256,790,845,235,702,552,186,222,358,130,016,700,834,523,443,236,821,935,793,184,701,956,510,729,781,804,354,173,890,560,727,428,048,583,995,919,729,021,726,612,291,298,420,516,067,579,036,232,337,699,453,964,191,475,175,567,557,695,392,233,803,056,825,308,599,977,441,675,784,352,815,913,461,340,394,604,901,269,542,028,838,347,101,363,733,824,484,506,660,093,348,484,440,711,931,292,537,694,657,354,337,375,724,772,230,181,534,032,647,177,531,984,537,341,478,674,327,048,457,983,786,618,703,257,405,938,924,215,709,695,994,630,557,521,063,203,263,493,209,220,738,320,923,356,309,923,267,504,401,701,760,572,026,010,829,288,042,335,606,643,089,888,710,297,380,797,578,013,056,049,576,342,838,683,057,190,662,205,291,174,822,510,536,697,756,603,029,574,043,387,983,471,518,552,602,805,333,866,357,139,101,046,336,419,769,097,397,432,285,994,219,837,046,979,109,956,303,389,604,675,889,865,795,711,176,566,670,039,156,748,153,115,943,980,043,625,399,399,731,203,066,490,601,325,311,304,719,028,898,491,856,203,766,669,164,468,791,125,249,193,754,425,845,895,000,311,561,682,974,304,641,142,538,074,897,281,723,375,955,380,661,719,801,404,677,935,614,793,635,266,265,683,339,509,760,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Another grammar, another interlocutor

I was thinking about a post of Jeff's, on the last entry in Wittgenstein's Zettel (since you're no doubt already a FB friend of his, you should be able to read it).  That last entry reads:

"You can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed". — That is a grammatical remark.

It's of some, though only some, importance to note that the clauses in quotation marks belong to the intermittently changing person conventionally known as the interlocutor (the narratee, the person who says what a student might say, or a teacher).  Wittgenstein's interlocutor is of immense importance, not as a straw man or "idiot questioner" (Blake) but as a figure who experiences language and the world and other people as one does, as we do.  Where he goes wrong, sometimes more than other times, is when he starts philosophizing. He tries to systematize his experience, and the value of this attempt is always in the first step that he takes, the immediate experience that he offers as premise for what follows.  (As the minor premise, I am thinking: the major premise is some philosophical truism that will then lead to an equally truistic conclusion.  The minor premise becomes its confirmation.  The syllogistic form would probably be the one called Bocardo.)

So the interlocutor notices -- remarks (bemerkt), that is, observes -- that you can't hear God speaking to someone else. By this he means to show something like a conventional view of privacy.  God has access to the innermost reaches of the soul, and a fortiori those reaches, that innerness, exists, inaccessible to the outside world.  So thinks the interlocutor, and this is the idea that Wittgenstein is undercutting.

For Wittgenstein, God is not a mind-reader.  Or to put it more accurately, he's no different a mind-reader than human beings are (though he might be better, sure).  God can't know, any better than you can, how I'll follow a rule.  (Not that he can't know: he just can't know better than you can know it.)  As Kripke more or less gets right, not only can't we tell whether I'm adding or quadding until our results diverge, God can't tell either.  (I'll note in passing that this is related to some profound remarks of Wittgenstein on forced mates in chess: the only "proof" of a forced mate is playing out all the possible moves.) It's not that mind-reading is impossible. That's what the interlocutor thinks, with God as the name for that impossibility.  No, mind reading goes so deep into the mode of possibility as to come out on the other end, in necessity.  It's something we all do, and all must do, by virtue of being human.

I can know what someone else is thinking, not what I am thinking. It is correct to say ‘I know what you are thinking’, and wrong to say ‘I know what I am thinking.’ (A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar.)

If we couldn't mind read we couldn't learn to speak. We learn to speak because we know what others are thinking.  That's the point of Wittgenstein's saying that the interlocutor's observation is grammatical. It's a remark about what we talk about when we talk about God.  And the point is that God is one of the things we talk about, and neither the origin nor privileged interpreter of our talk.


Which allows for a connection between this post and my previous. Jeff alludes to the great Abrahamic response to God: הנני (Hineni) "Here I am."  That's Abraham hearing God speak to him.  (And of course Isaac clearly hasn't heard God.) But Kafka imagines various Abrahams, including one who can't believe he's the one being summoned:

Aber ein anderer Abraham. Einer, der durchaus richtig opfern will und überhaupt die richtige Witterung für die ganze Sache hat, aber nicht glauben kann, dass er gemeint ist, er, der widerliche alte Mann und sein Kind, der schmutzige Junge. Ihm fehlt nicht der wahre Glaube, diesen Glauben hat er, er wurde in der richtigen Verfassung opfern, wenn er nur glauben könnte, dass er gemeint ist. Er fürchtet, er werde zwar als Abraham mit dem Sohne ausreiten, aber auf dem Weg sich in Don Quixote verwandeln. Über Abraham wäre die Welt damals entsetzt gewesen, wenn sie zugesehen hätte, dieser aber fürchtet, die Welt werde sich bei dem Anblick totlachen. Es ist aber nicht die Lächerlichkeit an sich, die er fürchtet - allerdings fürchtet er auch sie, vor allem sein Mitlachen - hauptsächlich aber fürchtet er, dass diese Lächerlichkeit ihn noch älter und widerlicher, seinen Sohn noch schmutziger machen wird, noch unwürdiger, wirklich gerufen zu werden. Ein Abraham, der ungerufen kommt! Es ist so wie wenn der beste Schüler feierlich am Schluß des Jahres eine Prämie bekommen soll und in der erwartungsvollen Stille der schlechteste Schüler infolge eines Hörfehlers aus seiner schmutzigen letzten Bank hervorkommt und die ganze Klasse losplatzt. Und es ist vielleicht gar kein Hörfehler, sein Name wurde wirklich genannt, die Belohnung des Besten soll nach der Absicht des Lehrers gleichzeitig eine Bestrafung des Schlechtesten sein.

Schreckliche Dinge - genug.

Terrifying things: enough indeed.  Another Abraham who always wants to do the right thing and has the right temperament for the situation, but can't believe that he's the one who's meant, he and his grubby young man.  He has true belief, but fears that on the way with his son he'll be transformed into Don Quixote, and that everyone will make fun of him, that the teacher is punishing him for being the class dunce by exposing him to his fellow-students' laughter.


The very idea of laughter is the social. There is no God without language, and no language without other people.  This Abraham knows that it's a grammatical, not an ontological, remark to say "You can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed."  If he's a bad student he might not get the grammar right ("glamour," as in its original meaning of supernatural or magical powers, is a corruption of grammar, which the literate scholars know). God is a game in our language, and like many games, the one in which God calls on you can be cruel, with the punishment for grammatical error humiliation in front of the whole class.

He feels just like his "schmutzig" son, who risks becoming grubbier still, and so he imagines himself sitting at his schmutzig desk in at the back of the class.  This Abraham fears God and protects himself and his son by refusing to believe in his exceptional, his private importance.  Grammar is about how we speak to others.  He stays in the back of the class, with his son, with the others.

Shakespeare and Milton

I think a lot about both Shakespeare and Milton, and about the Keatsian question: What makes them so different? One thing that does, that differentiates Shakespeare from Dante as well, is the way the tradition of Shakespearean criticism adds almost nothing to our sense of his depth.  There are agreed on versions of Milton and Dante, and woe betide the person who doesn't see a large and always accreting set of truths that have been won from the void and formless puzzlement of their first readers.  They're like Joyce that way: every insight is a piece of the puzzle put down for good and all.  Even when there's disagreement, as between Empson and Lewis, the disagreement takes the form of moral surprise that the other side should so refuse established insight.

I think we could call this accretion of insight about the Dantesque writers (to give them a useful epithet) the establishment of a kind of anthology of florilegium. By anthology I mean that what critics have done is produced a hierarchy of passages which serve as foci and thematic centers of the work.  A new reader might be moved by Paolo and Francesca, but the experienced Danteist will be able to quote those passages of rebuke that apply to any great sympathy for them.  We might be astonished by Satan's grandeur, but the keepers of Paradise Lost will know what later moments show astonishment to be a sign of the very sin the poem seeks to cure. I might like Shem too much, or not enough, but the community of scholars knows how to weigh his actions and intentions.

These Dantesque works are then either the triumphs or the prisoners of their interpreters.  It's not that there aren't major disagreements about them -- I've already instanced Empson vs. C.S. Lewis.  It's that what the disagreements are about has been almost entirely stipulated.  These things change too, of course.  I'm giving a synchronic snapshot, but the point is that at every point there's an agreed agenda that the critics of whatever day debate.

But this is not true of Shakespeare.  We have better texts (or did for a while) than they had before the last century's revolution in textual scholarship; and we also have better glosses on Shakespeare's vocabulary.  What we don't have is better criticism, nor even anything like general agreement on what the issues are.  Sure, there are plenty of issues you can apply to Shakespeare: feminism, absolutism, theatricality, the coming of capitalism, imperialism, anti-semitism, racism.  But none of those things really get you into the plays in any way that makes it possible to have new insights into Shakespeare.  The idea of Shakespeare as author-function, as site for the circulation of social energy, is a kind of tribute to his non-accretive genius.  This is the odd commonality between skeptical attitudes towards Shakespeare in people as otherwise different as Wittgenstein, de Man, Greenblatt, and even Freud.

What I mean by that is that Shakespeare has been seeming to me, over the last couple of decades, more and more amazing, in ways that no theoretical or philosophical approach can capture or systematize.  He's amazing on the level of craft: he makes craft something transcendent, so that he's understanding of the experience of a play, of characters, of language, of communication becomes the real locus of his power: because these experiences -- of human interaction, of their language, of their communication with each other (and with us) -- are the deepest experiences of human life.  Craft of his order just is as complete an understanding of "this complicated form of life" (LW) as there can be.

I don't mean to sound smarmy.  I was thinking of this because I was thinking of an interesting error that it struck me Garry Wills was making in a review of Kenji Yoshino's book on Shakespeare and the law, A Thousand Times More Fair.  Wills takes issue with Yoshino's defense of Shylock, citing an essay by Anthony Hecht:

As Anthony Hecht points out in the most profound essay on “Merchant” (in ­“Obbligati”), modern actors omit (as Olivier did) or play down the most naked expression of hate in the drama, Shylock’s “I hate him for he is a Christian” — a line not quoted by Yoshino. The second most hateful speech declares Shylock’s motive for going to dinner with Antonio: “But yet I’ll go in hate, to feed upon / The prodigal Christian.” Shylock should not be seen as EveryJew. Not all Jews hate Christians — his daughter, Jessica, loves them. Hecht points out that Shylock also hates music — never a good sign in Shakespeare — and Belmont is the land of music, where Jessica is welcomed.

While Wills exaggerates Hecht's focus on hatred in The Merchant of Venice, it's also interesting that Hecht himself is trying to read the play as though it were by Dante: his scholarship reads like Singleton's footnotes, and in fact he ends the piece with a direct comparison to Dante (Merchant of Venice is a comedy in the same way that Dante's is).

But what struck me, and the point of this entry, is that Wills makes a great deal of a word that it's striking, once you notice it, Shakespeare never makes very much of.  It's a powerful rhetorical move to quote Shylock on hatred, and even more effective to repeat the word out of quotation marks (I've bolded those unquoted repetitions).  Will's use of the word, especially his phrases "hateful" and "naked expression of hate," gives it a good Dantesque resonance, as echoed in Shelley's account of Dante returning "to tell, / In words of hate and awe the wondrous story / How all things are transfigured except Love."  It's also Miltonic: "Heav'nly love oudoing hellish hate."

But in Shakespeare the word is strikingly milder.  Even in Merchant, Portia assures Bassanio she's on his side (as he's thinking about the caskets): "Hate counsels not in such a quality."  "Hate" there means "dislike," as it does in Sonnet 145.  Yes, hate will rise to Miltonic or Dantesque viciousness in Shakespeare, but not very often.  Even in King Lear, where Gloucester "callst on him that hates thee," Kent says that to try to save Lear's life at the end is showing a misapprehension of what Lear needs: "Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! he hates him much / That would upon the rack of this tough world / Stretch him out longer."

In fact in Shakespeare "hate" tends to mean something like indifference to the good of someone.  And the same mildness to be found in Shakespeare's use of hate is to be found in his use of love as well.  There's very little of the extravagant (Heavenly Love, Love that moves the Sun and other stars) in Shakespeare.  Love and hate are among the social emotions in Shakespeare: they show how it is we are with other people.  And as long as we are with other people, we're in the realm of real life, and not that of the transcendent embodiment of primal principles.


So the interesting thing is that the two most central of literary words, love and hate, are just not central to Shakespeare.  They can be misleading, people can make too much of them (like Lear), but they're part of our give and take with each other.  What is central to Shakespeare is time and loss and commitment. "Love" and "hate" are highly attractive words for the rhetorician, for writers (like Wills) who plays their cards in order to use them as trumps.  Shakespeare never trumps with them: it's amazing.


So imagine that: the greatest of all writers is really not interested in depicting love and hate, and the reason for this is that he's not interested in depicting principles at all.  He's interested in depicting people.  And the result is that criticism can't really get us very far with Shakespeare.  The thing is he knows an amazing number of people: his characters and also his audience.  He describes them amazingly well.  He sees how they interact, and he sees what gives pleasure in that interaction.  He sees too what they need.

And what they mainly need is time with each other.  It's almost impossible to ruin Shakespeare if you don't cut the apparently extraneous scenes of nothing happening for a long time -- Lear, Kent and the Fool just talking, As You Like It in the forest of Arden, Act IV of The Winter's Tale, and so on.  This is time we can spend with them too.  Burgeoning critical consensus is not going to get you to understand Shakespeare's characters, and their interactions, better.  Spending time with them will, and the trick is to avoid turning them into the representatives of some critical argument as long as possible.  Unlike Dante or Milton, Shakespeare never did.