Showing posts with label literary criticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literary criticism. Show all posts

Saturday, February 27, 2016

Word drunk philosophers


204011
POSTMODERNISM
or
The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism

Jameson is a Marxist literary critic and it seems he has another goal in addition to discussing the why and the why-not? of a fluid philosophy that seems to undermine any sense of "fixed" areas of knowledge that might otherwise give a culture a sense of itself, an identity, ethos and larger purpose that makes the past acceptable, the future brimming with a promise yet to be fulfilled, an entrenched optimism that makes the present tolerable or, at least, a condition where apathy is the preferred stance; he is intent of maintaining the authority of Marxist methods of discerning the economic superstructure of capitalism and, as well, holding on to the progressive notion that properly executed critiques and political actions based on them will further us along to Marx 's and Engle's prophecy that after the revolution, after the dictatorship of the proletariat has been established and operating for an unspecified amount of time, the State will eventually, naturally wither away , as men and women have, it's assumed, been restored to their natural state before the foul distortion of capital fouled every thing up; that is, we will have become, to paraphrase a famous promise, fishers, and farmers in the morning, poets, musicians, and artists in the afternoons, scholars and philosophers at night. That is to say, we will no longer have occupations, our labor, informing us who we are and destroying our potential of being much more.
This is a key book for those struggling to comprehend the verbal murk that constituted the postmodernist theory, which is a shame because Fredrick Jameson cannot help but add his own murk to this occasionally useful overview of a directionless philosophical inclination. He certainly brings a lot of reading into his digressive discussions and reveals how much the idea of postmodern strategy--Lyotard's notion that the Grand Narrative that unified all accounts of our history, purpose and collective sense of inevitable autonomy over the earth and those outside our culture has been shattered, eroded or made unpersuasive in a century that has known the horrors of 2 world wars and the overwhelming emergence of new technologies and the efforts of populations outside the margins of acceptable culture to claim their rights as humans , first and foremost--has usurped preceding and established ideas in areas of literature, architecture, movies, the arts, philosophy itself.

Free to be you and me, as the philosopher Marlo Thomas would have it, which is essentially the same promise made by libertarians , a cult of free-market zealots who believed that more of us in the culture would be more fully realized examples  of human potential if, quite literally, all trappings of the socialist state were gotten rid of and the conditions of society were laid to the workings of uninhibited capitalism. But here we find something interesting, as both scenarios, the success of the socialist revolution and the replacement of the State with a pure free market , seem modeled after the most basic tenet of Christian theology, that the world will make sense and those who are fully prepared with achieving the best lives they could have when the Savior returns to earth with the keys to the kingdom of Heaven. All three involve better days deferred; all that remains is for us is wait and distract ourselves with work, however, packaged the labor comes to us as. Is that postmodernism? 


Merely noticing the formula for competing Grand Narratives isn't especially new, since there have been critics and theorists in the older modernist wing of social critique who've noticed more similarities than differences in absolute scenarios involving cures for our ills and the sources that make us sick. But that was a matter of one idea trying to bankrupt the other. There are, to be sure, more specific arguments of the differences between modernism and postmodernism, all of them utilizing more opaque language than  my excruciatingly vague rant here, but it would be a safe guess to assert that modernist still had a view of a whole universe and various sorts of slavishly detailed theories to express the causes, conditions, and direction of that unity, and that postmodernism, as a rule, was the kid we all know who could take radios, clocks, computers, bikes and such things apart and have no idea about how to put any of it back together. 


The postmodern inclination undermines the metaphorical structure and linguistic devices philosophies use to make their systems persuasive; Derrida and Baudrillard were smart men with much influence over the Left who had their own discourses that argued that every argument contains the seeds of its own counter-assertion. Jameson doesn't seem to want any of that and proceeds to write as densely as the thinkers he seeks to critique, often times stalling before coming to a major point he seemed to be traveling toward in order to indulge himself with clarifications about terms being used, ideas and artifacts that have been used as examples of opaque references . There is much the notion of the word-drunk in this volume, the idea that Jameson is thinking out loud and that the writing is a species of verbal stream of conscious wherein there is the assumption, an act of faith actually, that the longer the associative chain, the more inclusive the argument the analysis becomes and that in this process there will come the connecting conceit that unifies what might have been mere intellectual drift into a bravura performance. I can't shake the idea that Jameson is stalling here and is, honestly, out of his depth in his discussions that are not directly involved in parsing the creation and use of narrative forms as political tools in a problematic culture. There is value here, though, and I would suggest reading the opening essay, "Culture", where one gets the choicest ideas and insights has in this volume. For the rest, it is a reminder of just how bad a writer Fredric Jameson is.

Saturday, July 18, 2015

Untangling a good yarn



Commentary Magazine has a  provocative think piece on line that seeks to answer the question about Why College Kids are Avoiding the Study  of Literature.  My unfairly brief and brutal precis of the piece, which should be read for a a wealth of subtle discovers about the reason in the decline of interest in studying the canon of their  own and other cultures, is that there is a fantastic lack of will to do so. So much many novels , plays, poets over so many centuries, so many critical studies, abstracts, so many genres, so many opinions and torturous analysis to kill the joy of a good yarn. Are things really that different than when I was a literature major in the seventies and eighties?  I liked to drink a lot and I liked to think a lot at that time. I still think recreation-ally these days, and the joy was in finding out what I could make of something that might other wise have been merely a passing distraction.The abilities to both read for enjoyment and analyze the components of a story that make it art are not mutually exclusive. I majored in Literature both as undergrad and graduate student and found pleasure in discussing the finer points in narrative art. 

It is a fine method to learning to think critically as a matter of habit, and the habit of thinking about literature analytically most certainly helps a great many people make better decisions after an informed study of the cases made in front of them. Theory is fine, over all, if it provides a frame work for which to place a poem, novel, play within and to help a reader reap subtler, richer veins of intent operating under the surface of an attractive prose; theories are only useful if they are flexible to account for ideas or notions the theorist might not have counted on. Otherwise, literary theory becomes a marsh of deferred discovery: strong interpretation, the pleasurable part of writing criticism and reading it as well, ceases and the conversation becomes about the undecidability of a text, that the center of a story is not fixed, that literature is a foul process for indoctrination into ever-invisible powers that be that pull the string. 

The deconstructive, post- structuralist relativism that has prevailed for the last few decades--lately on the wane, I have read--is, in fact, a gutless, shallow, uncommitted liberalism that rolls over and plays dead when statements about the Human Condition need to be made; really, it just backs away from debate, ducks behind an opaque jargon, and frankly encourages you, the reader, to just accept that questioning authority is a waste of time. That won't do, of course. greed, and the point of any kind of criticism that is useful is in establishing why literature is distinct from other kinds of text. Reducing everything to "text" and subjecting them to a clever system of rationalized buck-passing in terms of developing an arguable point of view regarding the meaning and quality of a book is a cowardly . On the face of it, a proponent of this kind of hermetically sealed blather would insist that what's at stake is the coming to grips that narrative structure of any kind is a power play in which absolute and fixed cosmologies are positioned favorable , with storylines coming to inevitable conclusions and moral lessons, all done so under the guise of but with the more sinister purpose of basically maintaining a coercive influence over the reader, over the population. 

This, of course, is a rather tepid reiteration of Marcuse's idea of "repressive tolerance" and Guy deBord's notion of the carnivalization of our fears in popular media in his book "Society of the Spectacle"; although the intent that is claimed is the final and permanent liberation of populations from the Capitalist master narrative and , as if awakening from some kind of mass bi-cameral slumber, are able to see the world on terms unsullied by a concentrated and well money center of power. This, I remember , was the goal of Modernists in and around the turn of the century and through the first and second World Wars, a good amount of that energy , both intellectually powerful and seductive, came from right wing extremes, Nazis and Italian fascists both , who wanted to preserve the pure and actual as they defined it, to rid the world of the false gods in art, religion and commerce, and restore an Eden that existed only in their fever dreams. 

Millions paid for such reductionist folly with their lives. The task of criticism is to inspect, take apart, under stand moving parts in a work of art and the relationship and influence it has on the world around it. Even Marcuse would have argued that criticism and the use of theory was to discern what was worth noting under the surface of things like poems,novels, paintings, movies that gave us pleasure and how they made our existence better, fuller, more thoughtful. It was a means of allowing the reader to talk back to the writer who might have been making an arguement that would other wise be contrary to a reader's sphere of reference or taste. Criticism was about assessing quality and establishing conditions for praise and damnation, but it was also a means of keeping the conversation from settling into tired exchanges of manifesto ultimatums

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Dylan joins the Canon?


Cambridge University Press,is coming out with booked titled The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan , the intent being, one supposes, that august institution wants to enshrine Dylan at last, accepting him into the Canon. No doubt I will purchase the volume and read closely what a generation of critics reared on Dylan's lyrics will have to say as they make their respective cases for him being a poet worthy of being placed alongside Milton and Eliot. I fear, though, that a good many of them will miss the point of what's been exciting about Dylan's work, that it is, after all, rock and roll. Rock and roll is always worth discussing at length , through as many different filters as possible, but one fears that too many critics, desiring to sound academic , ie, "legitimate" as they bring their learning to an analysis of the songwriter's work, will forget to achieve that state of accelerated insight one discovers in the best of Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs and instead convert their passion to tenure-seeking jargon.

The problem with a number of literary treatments with Dylan's work , I find, has the error of sticking too closely to Dylan's lyrics and attempting to align him with the supreme examples of our poetry. Although these articles are fancifully argued much of the time, Dylan winds up suffering, as there is, I believe , more that contrasts than favorably compares. His language, in itself, hasn't the stuff that sustains a reading that would seek a system of allegory and metaphor that approaches Blake. The lyrics are a bit flat in that sense, limited in dimension, mainly because the writing we consider is not poetry, a medium that can achieve verbal effects on an unlimited number of levels. Dylan's words are lyrics, and their effectiveness, their power lies in the music gives them life.

A straight reading of "Desolation Row" would give the feeling of some intriguing surrealism sadly constrained by a sing-song rhyme scheme. The song , though, changes everything, from the steadfast, aggressive strum of the acoustic guitar, Dylan's vocal performance (snarling, dead pan, phrases bitten off in reserved disgust), guitarist Mike Bloomfield's bittersweet improvisations and the careening harmonica solos add a power not attained by a close reading of the lyric sheet. Greil Marcus, who has been guilty of summary vagueness on the subject of Dylan's Greater Importance, is , nonetheless, superb when he confronts specific Dylan songs, convincingly getting across how the conflated traditions Dylan brought together--folk, blues, Tex Mex, rock and roll and Symbolist Poetry, produced something new, strange and transcendent. He could grasp at how these things worked together for their artistic power. I am afraid, though, that the Cambridge Companion could suffer from a surfeit of specializations that too often have little to do with edification. There are some writings on Dylan's work that are as exotic as the singer's most intangible imagery. An example, cited by the Boston Globe and on Ron Silliman's blog, suggests a turgid time awaits even the most faith Dylan partisan:

"Dylan's lyrics construct an author-reader relation posited on the model of an irresolvable enigma which is both the incitement to and the perpetual frustration of readerly desire."



One had reason to think that rock and roll lyrics were truly the poetry of the age, but hindsight reveals the hubris of youthful assumptions. Far, far too little of the work by even the best lyricists have approached the wealth of expression and style that page poets have managed, even up to the current day. Dylan is not Wallace Stevens, Tom Waits is not Blake, Leonard Cohen is not Shakespeare, Joni Mitchell is not Auden. What needs to be developed is a critical language that can discuss, at length, the work of these songwriters as songwriters who assimilated aesthetic values from poetry. Otherwise I think we're all missing the point and blowing so much smoke up each other's pant legs as we drone in platitudes about how rock lyrics are the poetry. It misses the mark entirely. Lyric writing for music is a distinct craft from than that of the tradition of the page poet. There are points, of course, where the traditions converge and perhaps borrow from one another, but not often enough to willy nilly refer to gifted songwriters as poets. The work that really needs to be done in this area is to expand how one discusses the art of songwriting. Dylan, Paul Simon, Mitchell, Costello, et al, are better referenced against the likes of Stephen Foster, The Gershwins, you name it. Dylan, I would say, has had a very minor effect on contemporary poetry--the revolutions we habitually talk about here in modern verse were well under way long before he even picked up a guitar. His real impact is on music, on songwriting, on rock and roll.It's is his profound influence on popular music that helped changed American culture, and it is in this area that his artistic legacy is based. At the end of the day, Dylan remains a musical artist, not a literary one.


It's not every attempt to place Dylan on a par with canonical poets without insight or mired in a nervously applied jargon. Some are superb pieces of critical thinking. Even Christopher Rick's unfairly mocked, high-level inspection of Dylan's work in his book Dylan's Vision of Sin at least speaks to the reader in comprehensible prose, which greatly mitigates the thin air he's attempting to take deep breaths in. Michael Gray's study, Song and Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan , brings a thoroughness to the subject matter, bring focus on a multitude of influences Dylan absorbed and used t create something new. Gray spends his time on the lyrics and performs some impressive maneuvers to make the lyricist a suitable companion for the page poets, but what makes Song and Dance Man especially powerful is the stress on how the music ratchets up the power of lyrics . He writes, in this book, like a Greil Marcus who doesn't get quickly distracted from completing an idea.

The cited sentence has none of that--it seems a foul odor emerging from a long sealed crypt.Dylan deserves better than the crypt, of course, and I'll pay my money to see how the folks at Cambridge did assembling the best thinking they could find on Dylan's hard-to-classify work. Until I buy and read the Dylan Campanion , of course, my question, to risk using a metaphor a third time too many, is whether the songwriter will be illuminated or embalmed.