I suppose the epitaphic sensibility of Paul Fry et al., and Mandelstam's Acmeist notion of "domestic hellenism", could be seen as contrasting counterparts. Where Fry regards literature as an emanation from our non-human roots, Mandelstam understands poetry as an active labor of humanization. I suppose they're two faces of the same coin (see M's "Pindaric Fragment").
Christ's Promethean "I have come to cast fire upon the earth" gets domesticated beside the primordial Greek-Russian rustic hearth (the kitchen stove, a sacred object in those latitudes). The poet's breath breathes on culture and humanizes it, acknowledging with gratitude the (Acmeist) earthly "mansion" - thereby perhaps helping establish the terms of ethical life, or civilization. Brodsky : "Mankind was put on Earth for one purpose : to make civilization"(rough quote from memory). "In Him was light, and the light was the light of men." Nature and the round of life on earth - framed by wisdom to the seasonal, psychic dimensions of human experience & destiny.
Showing posts with label Paul Fry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Fry. Show all posts
12.07.2007
Paul Fry's Defense of Poetry really is a defense of poetry, mainly (for me) for its sensitive readings of Wordsworth, Keats & other Romantics. (& he's got me going back to Bachelard, & Wordsworth, & looking for Allen Grossman.) Fry's argument can be understood as an elaboration of Keats's "negative capability" : poetry provides a rest from the "irritable reaching after fact & reason". He quotes Blanchot, who writes that he reads literature to find rest in actuality, the thingness of ordinary things - beyond meaning, beyond reference, beyond interpretation.
His argument is also, it seems, rooted in a disenchanted naturalism. The basic ground of reality is the nonhuman, the inanimate - King Death being the much-evaded terminus, the inanimate to which all dust returns. For Fry the Romantics, especially Wordsworth, are naturalists avant la lettre, or in spite of themselves.
At one point though, in a sort of aside, Fry mentions Blake, as something of an exception to the rule. & I find myself closer to Blake's supernaturalism than anyone else's naturalism.
Naturalism, as a literary atmosphere, succeeded Romanticism, under the pressure of 19th-cent. science, politics, and war. (Symbolism and modernism succeeded naturalism, but only within the restricted sphere of their aesthetic self-enclosure.) Simply put, poetry's role was sidelined and trivialized - penned up in the realm of "culture" and "feeling".
Basically, Science took the place of Religion, and everything else lined up appropriately.
But let's look over at Pope Benedict's essay (see link below). Faith, according to Paul, is the substance of hope, the evidence of things unseen. In Benedict's reading, then, faith is a spiritual something from outside, which we internalize (or already possess) - and such possession makes possible a kind of intuition of a greater goodness or joy which we cannot see yet, but which we hope for. Because faith is a "substance" we actually possess, it is also the evidence which grounds our hope.
As I see it, this spiritual intuition is still active in the world, and provides a way of seeing &/or understanding reality, which has not been displaced by science. And there's a kind of analogy here with the intuitions, the aesthetic discoveries, which guide artists and poets. (& that's the key to my Byzantium)
For Fry, literature & poetry intuit and represent an austere ground of being, in the non-human, the inanimate, the extreme limit of death. For me, I guess, the labyrinth of the human mind and spirit is yet more subtle. At some unspoken level, we recognize and intuit the formations of life & death together (this is actually close to Fry's reading of Wordsworth) : but death doesn't necessarily have the last word.
(I realize my notes might strike some people as a very aggressive and unpalatable confusion of categories... I'm sorry for that. This is how I organize certain categories of understanding, for myself : but my main interest lies in the actual ("shamanic") praxis of the visionary, synthetic imagination...
- & what the heck : I graduated from Blake School, in Hopkins (MN) !)
His argument is also, it seems, rooted in a disenchanted naturalism. The basic ground of reality is the nonhuman, the inanimate - King Death being the much-evaded terminus, the inanimate to which all dust returns. For Fry the Romantics, especially Wordsworth, are naturalists avant la lettre, or in spite of themselves.
At one point though, in a sort of aside, Fry mentions Blake, as something of an exception to the rule. & I find myself closer to Blake's supernaturalism than anyone else's naturalism.
Naturalism, as a literary atmosphere, succeeded Romanticism, under the pressure of 19th-cent. science, politics, and war. (Symbolism and modernism succeeded naturalism, but only within the restricted sphere of their aesthetic self-enclosure.) Simply put, poetry's role was sidelined and trivialized - penned up in the realm of "culture" and "feeling".
Basically, Science took the place of Religion, and everything else lined up appropriately.
But let's look over at Pope Benedict's essay (see link below). Faith, according to Paul, is the substance of hope, the evidence of things unseen. In Benedict's reading, then, faith is a spiritual something from outside, which we internalize (or already possess) - and such possession makes possible a kind of intuition of a greater goodness or joy which we cannot see yet, but which we hope for. Because faith is a "substance" we actually possess, it is also the evidence which grounds our hope.
As I see it, this spiritual intuition is still active in the world, and provides a way of seeing &/or understanding reality, which has not been displaced by science. And there's a kind of analogy here with the intuitions, the aesthetic discoveries, which guide artists and poets. (& that's the key to my Byzantium)
For Fry, literature & poetry intuit and represent an austere ground of being, in the non-human, the inanimate, the extreme limit of death. For me, I guess, the labyrinth of the human mind and spirit is yet more subtle. At some unspoken level, we recognize and intuit the formations of life & death together (this is actually close to Fry's reading of Wordsworth) : but death doesn't necessarily have the last word.
(I realize my notes might strike some people as a very aggressive and unpalatable confusion of categories... I'm sorry for that. This is how I organize certain categories of understanding, for myself : but my main interest lies in the actual ("shamanic") praxis of the visionary, synthetic imagination...
- & what the heck : I graduated from Blake School, in Hopkins (MN) !)
11.27.2007
I wonder if there's not something overly passive in Paul Fry's concept of the "ostensive" moment as the defining characteristic of lyric poetry. I'm not done with the book yet, & I know he has a chapter specifically addressing "negative theology" and quietism in relation to his concept - so I'm probably jumping the gun.) It's as if the political/controversial stakes have become so intense and byzantine in theoretical-historicist literary crit, that eventually some such notion had to be found just to let off the pressure (without becoming, heaven forbid, "a-political"!).
Guess I would tend to think of humankind as naturally, genetically, political - in the sense of creating adaptive orders of social life on earth; and that the a-human or pre-human ("ostensive") reality of non-referential stasis, or "mere being", will always be subject to human adaptation (even if its source, its paradoxical/cthonic power, is non-human).
In my view, the charming stasis or equilibrium of lyric poetry stems from the same root as pastoral - a "peaceable kingdom" hidden within the present & representing a (future) better state of things on earth. It may indeed be a mingling of the human and the non-human, or the human and "nature"; but I wouldn't equate such a state with non-meaning, or some transcendence of, or vacation from, meaning itself. This is too reductive. This state ("quietude?"), along with everything else, will not evade interpretation. Everything is interpretable.
I think one of Fry's main points is that lyric poetry humbles the pride of intellect (interpretation) - restores the balance of actuality and our names for it. I would agree with this (though he might not agree with my spin on his position...). But one can imagine a humbled intellect still active, still interpreting,, still "figuring out" that ultimate global Day of rest.
(& actually, Fry's passage on Virgil's bees (in the Georgics) presents such an image of "active rest". Maybe there's more on this in the chapters I haven't got to yet.)
Guess I would tend to think of humankind as naturally, genetically, political - in the sense of creating adaptive orders of social life on earth; and that the a-human or pre-human ("ostensive") reality of non-referential stasis, or "mere being", will always be subject to human adaptation (even if its source, its paradoxical/cthonic power, is non-human).
In my view, the charming stasis or equilibrium of lyric poetry stems from the same root as pastoral - a "peaceable kingdom" hidden within the present & representing a (future) better state of things on earth. It may indeed be a mingling of the human and the non-human, or the human and "nature"; but I wouldn't equate such a state with non-meaning, or some transcendence of, or vacation from, meaning itself. This is too reductive. This state ("quietude?"), along with everything else, will not evade interpretation. Everything is interpretable.
I think one of Fry's main points is that lyric poetry humbles the pride of intellect (interpretation) - restores the balance of actuality and our names for it. I would agree with this (though he might not agree with my spin on his position...). But one can imagine a humbled intellect still active, still interpreting,, still "figuring out" that ultimate global Day of rest.
(& actually, Fry's passage on Virgil's bees (in the Georgics) presents such an image of "active rest". Maybe there's more on this in the chapters I haven't got to yet.)
11.21.2007
Reading along in Paul Fry's Defense of Poetry. I haven't even gotten to the chapter in which he zeroes in on theology (contrasting the "mere being" of his "insignificant" ground, with traditional via negativa theology). But I get to thinking as I read along that he reminds of John Locke & the other 18th-cent. materialists with whom Berkeley did battle.
Fry dismisses questions of first causes ("why does anything exist? how did it start?") as of interest only to theologians, not to philosophers, scientists, critics etc., since we can have no comprehension of anything which precedes comprehension itself (reflection, mind, intellect, language, understanding, awareness, knowledge, etc.), and, moreover, it's perfectly possible to imagine this unimaginable cosmic substrate has having no beginning whatsoever. And it seems true that all our conceptions (Nicholas of Cusa's "conjectures") are strictly human constructs, and we live in a kind of human-constructed conjectural reality. But if this unsignifiable substrate (Fry has many names for it) is strictly beyond - because other than - human intellect, then the conjectures of theologians (and philosophers) are just as valid as those of Fry's persuasion. Berkeley described Locke's "matter" as an abstraction, a heuristic convenience, a non-entity : for Berkeley, everything begins and ends in Mind. Berkeley perhaps lacked Cusanus' dialectical sense of a limit; he made up for it with paradoxical faith ("the evidence of things unseen").
Fry dismisses questions of first causes ("why does anything exist? how did it start?") as of interest only to theologians, not to philosophers, scientists, critics etc., since we can have no comprehension of anything which precedes comprehension itself (reflection, mind, intellect, language, understanding, awareness, knowledge, etc.), and, moreover, it's perfectly possible to imagine this unimaginable cosmic substrate has having no beginning whatsoever. And it seems true that all our conceptions (Nicholas of Cusa's "conjectures") are strictly human constructs, and we live in a kind of human-constructed conjectural reality. But if this unsignifiable substrate (Fry has many names for it) is strictly beyond - because other than - human intellect, then the conjectures of theologians (and philosophers) are just as valid as those of Fry's persuasion. Berkeley described Locke's "matter" as an abstraction, a heuristic convenience, a non-entity : for Berkeley, everything begins and ends in Mind. Berkeley perhaps lacked Cusanus' dialectical sense of a limit; he made up for it with paradoxical faith ("the evidence of things unseen").
11.20.2007
You might be able to read Olson, Dorn & some of the other like poets, using Fry binoculars (tweaked). That is, the "documentary" in history is also a kind of indication (ostensive).
Simple pointing toward facts (it is what it is) is also tautological, though for the purposes of interpretation & ideology, such indication becomes the primary tool in argument, persuasion (& thus loses its force or gets blurred in verbiage & comparisons).
But perhaps in a "documentary" poem, the facts can get taken in a different direction - aligned or fused with Fry's notion of the submerged prima materia of literature and lyric poetry : the tautological is-what-it-is of "precognitive", "somatic", pre- or non-human "being". A form of irrational or anti-thematic rhyme.
Simple pointing toward facts (it is what it is) is also tautological, though for the purposes of interpretation & ideology, such indication becomes the primary tool in argument, persuasion (& thus loses its force or gets blurred in verbiage & comparisons).
But perhaps in a "documentary" poem, the facts can get taken in a different direction - aligned or fused with Fry's notion of the submerged prima materia of literature and lyric poetry : the tautological is-what-it-is of "precognitive", "somatic", pre- or non-human "being". A form of irrational or anti-thematic rhyme.
11.19.2007
Paul Fry, Defense of Poetry, p. 52 :
"We might willingly enough agree, with many of our colleagues, simply to give up formalist, traditional Marxist, and rearguard humanist efforts to define literature and settle instead for the neo-pragmatist argument that whatever you want it to be is what it is; but that argument leaves an interesting question unanswered, the question why you do invariably want it to be something, and why so many have always wanted to write or speak that something, whatever it is, not just until formal, representational, or vocational aims have been fulfilled but incessantly, with obsessive repetitiveness. From this curious fact it is almost enough to infer... that literature is coextensive with human being in defining human being, over against all other forms of sentience, as that which can never say what it wants to say."
- which reminded me of this post -
"We might willingly enough agree, with many of our colleagues, simply to give up formalist, traditional Marxist, and rearguard humanist efforts to define literature and settle instead for the neo-pragmatist argument that whatever you want it to be is what it is; but that argument leaves an interesting question unanswered, the question why you do invariably want it to be something, and why so many have always wanted to write or speak that something, whatever it is, not just until formal, representational, or vocational aims have been fulfilled but incessantly, with obsessive repetitiveness. From this curious fact it is almost enough to infer... that literature is coextensive with human being in defining human being, over against all other forms of sentience, as that which can never say what it wants to say."
- which reminded me of this post -
I tried to dig down into things this way (which JL thinks about so intriguingly) in the poem In RI. Anny Ballardini (who translated it into Italian) will be making an expedition to Rhode Island next spring : hope to give some readings.
If you read Paul Fry, poetry (according to him) is not so much anti-fiction, pro-history. It's sort of pre-fiction, pre-history. Pre-cognitive, so to speak. Unplaceable.
For these theorists, humanism = anthropomorphism, essentialism. False consciousness. Blinkered by species-solipsism & historical conditioning. An interesting idea, has a lot of appeal for our presently human-battered, overheated planet.
I'm too ignorant of their whole mentality to argue with them (yet). Provisionally however I harbor a couple caveats:
1) if you're going to accept the notion of universal sentience, pan-consciousness (thinking rocks, etc.) then you have to consider the possibility of super-consciousness, a higher sentience.
2) an architect fastens onto the weight-balance of relations. Ecology is a kind of natural architecture. So also human being seems to have a certain symbolic/practical "stature" in the ecology of life on earth - an architectonic. Yes, our notions of that place & stature in relation to other creatures is changing : but I'm not quite ready to accept the idea of NO structure. Even if the human self-concept has to change - from "lords of creation" to servants & stewards of creation (gardeners) - that still leaves us with a certain concrete role in a structured ecology (history, the house in Michigan) of reality/life.
3) and what if history is not the indescribable chaos of scripted fictions/errors of the Yale boys? What if history is an enactment of a growth-process, a manifestation-process, a flowering?
4) a Byzantine, iconic-triadic architecture (Urs von Balthasar's history as "glory") : Mankind as body, mind, and union of the two. Personhood inherently relational (parent & child, self and divine otherness).
(p.s. my little brother Bill is such an ecologist.)
If you read Paul Fry, poetry (according to him) is not so much anti-fiction, pro-history. It's sort of pre-fiction, pre-history. Pre-cognitive, so to speak. Unplaceable.
For these theorists, humanism = anthropomorphism, essentialism. False consciousness. Blinkered by species-solipsism & historical conditioning. An interesting idea, has a lot of appeal for our presently human-battered, overheated planet.
I'm too ignorant of their whole mentality to argue with them (yet). Provisionally however I harbor a couple caveats:
1) if you're going to accept the notion of universal sentience, pan-consciousness (thinking rocks, etc.) then you have to consider the possibility of super-consciousness, a higher sentience.
2) an architect fastens onto the weight-balance of relations. Ecology is a kind of natural architecture. So also human being seems to have a certain symbolic/practical "stature" in the ecology of life on earth - an architectonic. Yes, our notions of that place & stature in relation to other creatures is changing : but I'm not quite ready to accept the idea of NO structure. Even if the human self-concept has to change - from "lords of creation" to servants & stewards of creation (gardeners) - that still leaves us with a certain concrete role in a structured ecology (history, the house in Michigan) of reality/life.
3) and what if history is not the indescribable chaos of scripted fictions/errors of the Yale boys? What if history is an enactment of a growth-process, a manifestation-process, a flowering?
4) a Byzantine, iconic-triadic architecture (Urs von Balthasar's history as "glory") : Mankind as body, mind, and union of the two. Personhood inherently relational (parent & child, self and divine otherness).
(p.s. my little brother Bill is such an ecologist.)
Reading Paul Fry, A Defense of Poetry (1995). Out of or after the Yale School of literary Theory. Kind of fascinating - like trying to decipher foreign language.
Out of Geoffrey Hartman, Derrida, De Man, etc. - but on his own track. He seems to have invented a new interpretive tool or explanation for poetry called the "ostensive" - I'll have to check the etymology of that. The idea in a nutshell - as far as I can see blurredly for the moment - is that Criticism (Theory + Historicism) has deconstructed any "essential" reality of or function for literature - that is, it's all a kind of epiphenomena, really indistinguishable from other epiphenomena, predetermined by socio-historical forces at large. But Fry complicates this (it is a "defense" of poetry) with a new idea : that poetry - lyric poetry in particular - is actually a release from meaning, reference of any kind. It's a sort of tautological non-human substrate (sentient or non-sentient, I'm not sure yet - just started reading the book) - it is what it is, so to speak, and in so doing lets reality "be" what it is, whatever that is... He leans a lot on Wordsworth, Keats & other Romantics ("a slumber did my spirit steal..."; "music of no tone"; etc).
Much of this intellectual milieu - the arcane & ponderous philosophical assumptions & assertions about writing, history, reality etc. - I find pretty doubtful & unappealing. Have made a lot of fun of "Theory" over the years. But Fry's idea ("ostension") sparks my interest... that is I recognize certain affinities with, or new ways of reading, my own poetry themes & adventures.
I guess I'm behind the times, as usual - the book was published 12 yrs ago...
Out of Geoffrey Hartman, Derrida, De Man, etc. - but on his own track. He seems to have invented a new interpretive tool or explanation for poetry called the "ostensive" - I'll have to check the etymology of that. The idea in a nutshell - as far as I can see blurredly for the moment - is that Criticism (Theory + Historicism) has deconstructed any "essential" reality of or function for literature - that is, it's all a kind of epiphenomena, really indistinguishable from other epiphenomena, predetermined by socio-historical forces at large. But Fry complicates this (it is a "defense" of poetry) with a new idea : that poetry - lyric poetry in particular - is actually a release from meaning, reference of any kind. It's a sort of tautological non-human substrate (sentient or non-sentient, I'm not sure yet - just started reading the book) - it is what it is, so to speak, and in so doing lets reality "be" what it is, whatever that is... He leans a lot on Wordsworth, Keats & other Romantics ("a slumber did my spirit steal..."; "music of no tone"; etc).
Much of this intellectual milieu - the arcane & ponderous philosophical assumptions & assertions about writing, history, reality etc. - I find pretty doubtful & unappealing. Have made a lot of fun of "Theory" over the years. But Fry's idea ("ostension") sparks my interest... that is I recognize certain affinities with, or new ways of reading, my own poetry themes & adventures.
I guess I'm behind the times, as usual - the book was published 12 yrs ago...
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