tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post984606792300792400..comments2024-03-18T19:05:39.072-07:00Comments on Morphosis: Fallacious IntentionalitiesAdam Robertshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-65584044261083369122016-11-14T15:43:22.558-08:002016-11-14T15:43:22.558-08:0055? You were *robbed* mate. Even from this descrip...55? You were *robbed* mate. Even from this description.<br /><br />I always thought <em>Titus Alone</em>, as novel, isn't able to escape from its initial reveal (the you-thought-this-world-was-all-medieval-like-a-Gothic-Tolkien-but-LOOK-motor-cars-skyscrapers-futuristic-tech-aha thing). It's a great reveal, but the rest of the story can't live up to it. And, yes, in terms of the O.P.: does it make more sense to discuss the novel in terms of Peake's increasingly disjointed life, or to talk about the consequences of the wrenching generic shift from Fantasy to SF?Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-49061846622663652502016-11-14T14:56:01.714-08:002016-11-14T14:56:01.714-08:00Perhaps Byron was the first Poetic Genius as Utter...Perhaps Byron was the first Poetic Genius as Utter Shit - one sign of his firstness being the supposed heroic grandeur of his shittiness.<br /><br />According to Wikipedia 'losing one's religion' basically means losing one's rag or temper, incidentally. Probably just as well for REM that basically nobody outside Georgia knew that.<br /><br />Anyway, I wasn't recommended Wimsatt & Beardsley as an undergraduate, but I rather wish I had been. Midway through a long essay on Mervyn Peake*, I confided to my Director of Studies that I'd compiled a list of characters in <i>Titus Alone</i> which were (or seemed to be) echoed, distorted and transformed versions of characters from the two Gormenghast-set books**, but that I couldn't make up my mind whether to argue that Peake was writing these characters in this way deliberately or unintentionally. (I'd read <i>Titus Alone</i> in the first edition - and compiled another list of changes made in the Penguin, several of which cut out passages that made no sense - so Peake's failing powers at the time were at the front of my mind.) Anyway, this would have been a good time for my D. of S. to mention W. and B., it seems to me now. Instead he looked at me gnomically (as was his wont) and suggested I should have a think about why the question was important to me. I thought this sounded very profound and enlightening, but it didn't really get me anywhere; when I did think about why the question was important to me I couldn't come up with anything, so I submitted the essay more or less as was. It got 55.<br /><br />* A subject of my own choosing; the essay wasn't part of the degree but had been laid on as an extra bit of formative assessment, as they probably didn't then call it.<br />** "The Gormenghast trilogy" is really a misnomer when you think about it.<br /><br />Philhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07009879034507926661noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-15510114429270325092016-11-14T13:58:09.718-08:002016-11-14T13:58:09.718-08:00I'm ashamed to say I haven't read the Barf...I'm ashamed to say I haven't read the Barfield: will remedy that omission. I read (admiring) reviews of Sullivan's book when it came out a few years back, without ever getting around to read the actual book. In fact I'm starting to feel distinctly under-read ...Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-34448668100598703672016-11-14T13:52:14.096-08:002016-11-14T13:52:14.096-08:00So I'd be Blaster and you Master? Seems fair.So I'd be Blaster and you Master? Seems fair.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-64348207206619333912016-11-14T11:43:33.666-08:002016-11-14T11:43:33.666-08:00We should co-author an article about all this, Ada...We should co-author an article about all this, Adam. You could come up with the ideas and write the article and I could add a very long series of pointless footnotes. Alan Jacobshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06777218862490842180noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-13375384276917043152016-11-14T05:15:21.369-08:002016-11-14T05:15:21.369-08:00Here's a purely speculative stab at that, base...Here's a purely speculative stab at that, based on three texts. The first is the point in "What Is an Author?" where Foucault points out a curious reversal: in the Middle Ages scientific texts always had to have an author’s name attached to them to authenticate them, whereas great poems (<em>The Song of Roland, Beowulf</em>) were often anonymous. The second is Owen Barfield’s sadly neglected essay on “The Psychology of Imagination and Inspiration,” which marks the cultural process by which the source of poetic power was redirected from something external to something internal to the poet. The third is Hannah Sullivan’s terrific book <em>The Work of Revision</em>, which describes how we got from Milton’s Muse that “inspires easy [his] unpremeditated verse” to writers who constantly boast about how much they revise. All these forces have the effect of disenchanting the poet, moving him or her from the ethereality of Plato’s <em>Ion</em> to an ordinary citizen with ordinary responsibilities and ordinary control over his or her work. And once you start thinking of writers in the latter way, they really <em>do</em> start to look like assholes, many of them. If you can’t plausibly go back to the psychology of inspiration — and a few do, notably <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/49455" rel="nofollow">Milosz</a> — then you either have to strive to become a better person or else frankly accept your own shittiness. Banville (like, e.g., Faulkner before him) takes the latter course.Alan Jacobshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06777218862490842180noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-42868633643183122042016-11-14T01:34:18.478-08:002016-11-14T01:34:18.478-08:00I agree with all of this, especially your last poi...I agree with all of this, especially your last point. The element that strikes me, as I think about all this, is the way the link between 'great poetry' and 'great poets' has not only been challenged, but completely reversed. The old notion that one had to have a great soul to be a great writer has been largely replaced, counterintuitively, with the idea that artists are by definition shitty people. John Banville recently (in effect) boasted that he'd been a terrible father because 'all writers are bad fathers'. I wonder how that came about? I wonder <em>when</em> that came about? It might be interesting to write a critical history of the notion, from all those noble-looking classical busts of Homer and Shakespeare to <em>Amadeus</em>, Robertson Davies' <em>Deptford</em> novels and Brian Wilson.Adam Robertshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15803399373213872690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5401830411147364284.post-25498066705602446672016-11-13T17:06:29.711-08:002016-11-13T17:06:29.711-08:00Fascinating stuff. I did my doctoral work at UVA, ...Fascinating stuff. I did my doctoral work at UVA, and had three classes there with E. D. Hirsch, whose <em>Validity in Interpretation</em> is generally considered the strongest defense of authorial intention as the proper determinant of valid interpretation. I read his books with great care and, for a time, devotion. Only after some reflection did I realize that his position was a purely pragmatic one. In a passage from <em>Validity</em> that almost no one notices, he writes, <br /><br />“there is nothing in the nature of the text itself which requires the reader to set up the author's meaning as his normative ideal. Any normative concept in interpretation implies a choice that is required not by the nature of written texts but rather by the goal that the interpreter sets himself. It is a weakness in many descriptions of the interpretive process that this act of choice is disregarded and the process described as thought the object of interpretation were somehow determined by the ontological status of texts themselves.” [p. 24] <br /><br />Hirsch’s argument is in fact derived from his understanding of literary criticism as an academic profession. He thinks that we can only have a coherent profession if we have a norm or standard by which we adjudicate rival interpretations, and he thinks that the only reasonable candidate for that norm, the only one capable of doing the work of norming, is the author’s intentions. On the next page he continues, “No necessity requires the object of interpretation to be determinate or indeterminate, changing or unchanging.” We can do whatever the hell we want! Hirsch just counsels that for pragmatic and professional reasons we choose the author’s intention as the object of out inquiries. <br /><br />And once I realized what he was actually saying, I realized, first, that he had identified the only grounds on which a commitment to the author’s intention could be justified, and, second, that I could think several other means by which a professional mode of inquiry could be justified. Alan Jacobshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06777218862490842180noreply@blogger.com