Comments on: Left of Karl Marx (Part II)

By: john

john — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:05:21 +0000

De Man’s wicked history seemed resonant in a discussion, the occasion of which is the attempt at a recovery from historical oblivion of a Stalinist poet. De Man’s unconfessed past particularly invites psychological readings. I do find metaphors of “innocence” and “evil” as descriptors of reading to be lurid and neither intellectually rigorous (to use that metaphor so fetishized by the deconstructionists) nor illuminating (not to bring religion into it . . . ).
But, yes, I agree — this does not negate your broader point — that poems hold historical and ideological interest as well.
“Aesthetic value is something of a mystery.” Yes!
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:51:54 +0000

No problem — I own up to being a pain in the ass!
I certainly didn’t mean to foreclose the possibility of aesthetic response — only to note that the point of Mark’s post seemed larger than such a response. Didn’t mean to scold, ya heard?
Of course I acknowledge my aesthetic interest in poetry — it seems tautological to do so. Who, who reads poems, doesn’t read them for aesthetic pleasure? I do think, though, that what “aesthetic response” is is a complex &, uh, overdetermined question, worth, uh, interrogating. I don’t think it’s transparent. Aesthetic value is something of a mystery.
It seems to be required to drag up de Man’s fascist-sympathizing credentials whenever he’s mentioned. I have nothing original to say about that tired debate. It’s certainly possible that there’s a relationship between his insistence on “the absolute randomness of language” & the “evil” instantiated by reading & his having written in support of evil when he was young. But I do not believe it negates what he says in the passage I quoted.
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By: john

john — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:25:09 +0000

p.p.s. Noting that Michael’s subsequent comments and discussion with Emily and Don weren’t scolding at all.
I apologize for “pain in the ass.” But it’s true! Has anybody here never had a teacher who wasn’t a pain in the patootie?
I’m thinking now that Lucia’s comment wasn’t exasperated or polemical, but teasing. Imagine it being said in a bar.
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By: john

john — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:57:18 +0000

p.s. Not disagreeing with Michael’s less hyperbolic point that reading is always theoretical and determined.
But a person’s aesthetic response is always of interest as well. That was Lucia’s initial comment. Michael adopted a somewhat scolding tone in response, arguably disregarding the validity of having an aesthetic interest in the poetry.
Michael may not have intended to produce a scolding tone, or to foreclose the possibility of holding an aesthetic interest in the poetry as well as an ideological and historical one; he may have simply hoping to be opening the field of interest to include ideological and historical concerns in addition to aesthetic ones; but it’s unclear. We know that Michael has aesthetic interests in poetry too, because he has shared aesthetic enthusiasms on Harriet. So I’d be inclined to think that he wasn’t trying to foreclose on aesthetic interest, but I would understand why someone might think differently.
Lucia responded, understandably, in an exasperated fashion, and Michael hauled out an unconfessed Nazi collaborator to scold her explicitly.
“Overdetermined” is a funny word.
Teachers can be such a pain in the ass.
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By: john

john — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:34:34 +0000

The idea that reading “is the starting point of all evil” is so melodramatic, so hyperbolic, so purple, that it might be funny, if it hadn’t been a Nazi collaborator who said it. Knowing that de Man wrote anti-Semitic articles in occupied Belgium for a collaborationist newspaper, it sounds either chilling or semi-consciously semi-confessional. In any case not generally applicable.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:59:06 +0000

Well, yes, & I’m being polemical back. Because, as you know, the real question she’s asking is decidedly not whether you need a PhD to read a poem — she knows perfectly well you don’t. Rather, she suggests that the above discussion engages in over-analysis (PhD synecdochal for intellectualization of the transparent act of “reading a poem”), & by implication that “reading a poem” is a totally straightforward & innocent act that can just take place between the poem & reader without a bunch of theory & criticism intruding. I think that’s a fair paraphrase & reject the terms of that assertion. I believe Paul de Man is right to insist that “the act of reading is [not] innocent. Far from it. It is the starting point of all evil.” This is why I said that the asking of these questions is ethically urged on us. “Reading a poem” is already an overdetermined act, not something that one does in a vacuum, disconnected from all other acts & beliefs.
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By: Emily Warn

Emily Warn — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:17:01 +0000

Questioning whether you need a Ph.D. to understand a poem is anti-intellectual? Lucia is being, uh, what you might call polemical.
What we really need is Claudia Jones’ poetry. I’ve ordered the Carole Boyce Davies’ book and hope that will help us find it. After that, we turn to the Freedom of Information Act website.
Emily
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:48:12 +0000

Lucia, I don’t think an anti-intellectual tone helps the discussion. If you’re not interested in these aspects of poetic reception, that’s fine. But do you really believe that these questions don’t exist or aren’t of concern to others? Is Bourdieu just full of it? Does poetry occur in a vacuum, removed from all social relationships & economic arrangements?
At any rate, I happen to believe that an intellectual engagement with arguments like Bourdieu’s is ethically urged on those of us who love poetry, but I don’t believe anyone’s forcing you to feel the same way. The answer to yr question is no.
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By: Lucia

Lucia — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:08:53 +0000

Jesus, all I want to do is read some of Claudia Jones’ poems. Do I have to have a Ph.D. to do that?
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By: Al Filreis

Al Filreis — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:52:46 +0000

I’ve posted a reponse to this discussion here:
http://afilreis.blogspot.com/2008/07/as-i-prepared-to-write-book-on.html
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:41:42 +0000

I hope Mark will forgive one last comment to the effect that, without his publishers’ having urged such poets upon Johnson, Wyndham Lewis & Charles Lee might not have encountered such luminaries as the delightfully named Thomas Sprat, for whose omission The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse would be much the poorer:
On His Mistress Drowned
Sweet stream, that dost with equal pace
Both thyself fly, and thyself chase,
Forbear awhile to flow,
And listen to my woe.
Then go, and tell the sea that all its brine
Is fresh, compar’d to mine;
Inform it that the gentle dame,
Who was the life of all my flame,
In th’ glory of her bud
Has pass’d the fatal flood.
Death by this only stroke triumphs above
The greatest power of love:
Alas, alas! I must give o’er,
My sighs will let me add no more.
Go on, sweet stream, and henceforth rest
No more than does my troubled breast;
And if my sad complaints have made thee stay,
These tears, these tears shall mend my way.
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By: john

john — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:36:33 +0000

When I want to unleash the hounds of pedantry, I cry, “Sic ‘em!”
I didn’t know that about Doc Johnson’s book — so, thanks!
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:08:23 +0000

Michael, the Latin tag… [sic]? … was deployed to underline the point that it really wasn’t Johnson’s Lives, though inevitably the prefaces have come to be known by that title. So… no poke intended – just pedantry, as advertised!
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:22:34 +0000

&, for the hat trick, I just realized I did indeed use the phrase “what the culture values” in my initial post. my bad.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:20:33 +0000

oh, or is it because I referred to Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets as Lives of the Poets? well, you did say you were going to be pedantic — & for me to complain about that . . . well, pot/kettle.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:18:01 +0000

Don, quite right — as I should have mentioned. Though I still think Lives works as an example if only because the question (for Bourdieu) is not necessarily whether “the culture values them” but whether they are part of the field of production, whether others in the field are aware of them even as objects of derision — something that inclusion in Johnson’s work ensures.
I do not, however, understand why I am to be poked with a Latin tag when I use the title often appended to his name, even by his contemporaries — unless it be because, following American usage, I abbreviate it with a full stop?
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:48:43 +0000

Just a tiny pedantic point about Dr. Johnson’s [sic] Lives of the Poets – folks probably know that he didn’t choose the poets he wrote about, the project’s publishers did, at a time when the so-called canon of English lit was being formed. The publishers were influenced by a number of factors in coming up with the list that included the names Michael mentions here – it’s not necessarily the case that the culture valued them, so much as the culture was being sold a bill of available (depending on rights, and so on) goods. For much more about this, see Thomas F. Bonnell’s The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry 1765-1810. I think that Michael’s general point still stands, but the Lives… is a complicated example.
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:23:36 +0000

Yeah, it’s Bourdieu’s concept of “refusal” that’s confusing there. I should’ve provided more context. Basically, he’s saying that one can’t analyze or interpret a work of literature unless one understands the literary field within with &, crucially, against which that work was produced: every poem registers the effects of authors & field-circumstances the poet is aware of & confronting & struggling with: the effects of the poet’s refusals of certain authors, styles, strategies, reputations, &c. This context is usually mostly forgotten, because most of the poet’s contemporaries’ work has been forgotten.
To read Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets is to realize how much of what a culture values fades away: who now reads Roscommon, Sprat, Fenton, Yalden, Tickell? And yet perhaps to understand what Pope wrote we must understand (as much as we can of) the field within which he wrote. Bourdieu’s passage I quoted earlier continues: “This is never clearer than in the case of a writer like Flaubert who was defined by a whole series of refusals or, more precisely, by an ensemble of double negations that opposed antagonistic doubles of styles or authors: thus his refusal of Romanticism & realism, of Lamartine no less than Champfleury.”
Cary Nelson’s Repression & Recovery is very powerful on this subject — it’s mindboggling how much bad verse was produced under the aegis of the IWW — although his faith in a direct correlation of political poetry & political change is hard to take.
Obviously there are many reasons to read poems, & each reader will have several. But I assume that we are all interested, here, in the historical conditions under which poems are produced.
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:06:41 +0000

For some reason I think Ron Silliman’s dictum that “there is no such thing as poetry, only kinds of poetry” can be applied to this thread – but I confess that I’m not sure how to do it.
As for the texts of Claudia Jones’s poems, maybe somebody will have to file a Freedom of Information Act request to see them…?
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By: Emily Warn

Emily Warn — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:34:01 +0000

Michael,
I agree that it’s important to read the work of poets irrespective of its “aesthetic value.” Perhaps the word “appreciate” would have been more apt. Afterall, people have dedicated their careers in literary theory to understanding the relationship between “aesthetic” and “value.”
Reading a work, though, to understand its “historical field of production” has no more or less value than reading it to decide if one enjoys it. The former is the task of literary theorists, the latter that of some readers who might not have enough time or training to read the texts to arrive at such a comprehensive historical understanding. Or some might read them and decide to work at unionizing Wal-Mart workers. None is more or less valuable than the other, and some would say all are necessary.
Given differences among readers, would you mind paraphrasing what this sentence means for those not schooled in literary theory, or perhaps all I or they need is the pronoun references clarified:
“They can only register, unaware, the effects of these authors they do not know on the authors that they claim to analyze & whose refusals they take up on their own account. They thus preclude any grasp of what, in their very works, is the indirect product of these refusals.”
Does this mean that works, which have been ignored because the literary establishment has not deemed them aesthetically valuable, still affect one’s reading of sanctioned works without one’s knowing it?
Also, I find it ironic that Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Reznikoff used factual evidence about the workings (or lack thereof) of governments to great effect in their poems, but that the government used Claudia James’ work as evidence against her.
Emily
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By: Michael Robbins

Michael Robbins — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:07:57 +0000

It is quite important to read such poets completely irrespective of the “aesthetic value” of their work (which is often negligible), as Cary Nelson has cogently argued. It’s a matter of understanding the historical fields of production in which more familiar names bloom: as Bourdieu puts it, they who “know only those authors from the past recognized by literary history as worthy of recognition, are destined to an intrinsically vicious-circular form of explanation & understanding. They can only register, unaware, the effects of these authors they do not know on the authors that they claim to analyze & whose refusals they take up on their own account. They thus preclude any grasp of what, in their very works, is the indirect product of these refusals.”
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By: Lucia

Lucia — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 17:41:23 +0000

I’d like to see more of her poetry, so I can decide for myself about the aesthetic value of her work.
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By: Emily Warn

Emily Warn — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:38:24 +0000

Mark,
Thanks for bringing the life and work of Claudia Jones to my attention. In “googling” her, I found many reference about her, but no references to her poetry or other literary work. Has she become the object of study, while her work, which was used as evidence against her, gone out of print?
Thanks, Emily
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