Friday, January 05, 2007

Beauty and immortality

This is my comment on Don Brown's thoughtful piece "Getting Serious/Having Fun" (which is in part a response to my essay on Frost):

I keep coming back lately (for various reasons, both positive and negative) to Peter von Matt's "Die verdächtige Pracht." Von Matt describes two important characteristics of poems: they want to be beautiful, and they want to be immortal.

Neither of these desires necessarily has anything to do with meaning or with interpretation. Frost's "The Mountain" marks how the desire for meaning is, in a sense, derivative—always preceded by a desire for pleasure.

But as you suggest, Don, that does not apply to literary criticism. I have often considered "quality" to be the cat that criticism does not want to let out of the bag, but there are two cats in there: quality and pleasure. If they get out, then the project of criticism is ironized, as you suggest, and the critic becomes insecure and rejects the work that has let those cats out.

Von Matt's book is interesting in this respect, too: whenever he begins to do hard-core close reading, he apologizes to his audience, asking them to bear with him while he does a necessary bit of "philology." This allows him, as a friend of mine suggested, to maintain his status as "the one in the know," his professional status. He lets the cats out, but he still wants to hold the bag.

1 comment:

Donald Brown said...

"Von Matt describes two important characteristics of poems: they want to be beautiful, and they want to be immortal.

Neither of these desires necessarily has anything to do with meaning or with interpretation."

Initially I concurred with this, then I questioned it, then I came back to kind of agreeing, but with a change in terms when addressed to "literature" rather than "poetry."

I want to agree that poems don't care about interpretation, that a work of art exists to be itself -- which we can say as "wants to be beautiful." But I decided to go along with your explication, after Stevens, and say: "it wants to give pleasure." This is equalizing, I realize: any writing can aspire to give pleasure (so then Von Matt is right that poetry "wants to be beautiful" because that sets it apart from all other writing).

Ok, so, in lit crit or any writing, pleasure can be present, but not beauty. This means that my ironic stance is out of place (as if my essay has a bumpersticker: "I'd rather be writing poetry").

"Immortal" I caviled at too. What does that really mean? Well, ok, I know: it wants to defeat time, and that is clearly any art's desire.

But during my interrogation of the word I came up with "it wants to be significant"; the idea being that significance endures and opens the door to interpretation as the means of demonstrating significance, or of determining "what is signified." The play of signification in lit theory is the challenge to older ideas of significance as inhering in someone saying something "significant."

So, in my essay, the idea there is A significance in Joyce is treated as somewhat beside the point (even though I do engage with those who ascribe a significance I find questionable and I do show the variety of significance in the representation of Molly's body).

The larger question is what the signficance of the significance one finds in Ulysses (or literature generally) is. My reader and I disagreed on that; I believe Joyce constructed levels of significance to measure up to Dante as the supreme challenge, but that he did it playfully (one might say ironically) rather than earnestly. My reader felt this made Joyce too much a systemizer.

What it comes down to is that I didn't demonstrate sufficiently the signficance of allegorical reading. Why it is significant to me is that essays I write tend to be allegories. That's the problem.