Narrative Moments

When we open up Kalidasa’s Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection we’ll ask a simple but important question: what is the process by which the King enters the hermitage? It’s a pretty simple context: if the king doesn’t go into the “tranquil place” of the hermitage, he’ll never encounter Sakuntala. I won’t necessarily ask whether the hermitage itself is significant as a setting, though it may matter, as the hermitage is a “tranquil place.” As we all know from stories, tranquil places are a great places to get the heart thumping.

Wild rice grains under trees
where parrots nest in hollow trunks,
stones stained by the dark oil
of crushed ingudi nuts,
. . .

I’ll ask the students to consider how the king progresses from outside to inside.

I might ask about about the hunt, as hunts are great metaphors for conflict and narrative development. The hunt has a subject. The hunt has an object. The hunt has ritual. The space in Kalidasa’s work is ripe. The king is hunting at the top of the play and within the circle of the hunt is the grove wherein is the hermitage, which will be penetrated by the king, and once inside the hermitage the king will assume a different shape and he will penetrate still deeper into the circle taking us with him. Prior to entering, the king says, “We shouldn’t disturb the grove.” He tells his charioteer that he shouldn’t enter the hermitage with his hunting gear. At the appropriate time, the king says, “This gateway marks the sacred ground. I will enter.” Ah, the crossing.

Hopefully the students’ reading of the Mahabharata will assist them in their reading of the king’s thinking about entering the grove and his little twinge: ” . . . do I feel a false omen of love / or does fate have doors everywhere.” Sometimes we wonder about the significance of our actions, especially when we don’t know what’s beyond the door. If nothing of consequence occurs, no worries; if consequence follows, then we have narrative importance.

On Sleep No More

Mark Bernstein on Sleep No More:

This was extraordinary theater, an unforgettable penetration of the fourth wall. It is also extraordinarily difficult. It’s not improv: the story, it turns out, is scene 21 of Woyzeck. You’re acting across from a stranger. A different stranger every night. In a closed room. The rules are unclear, we’ve just started. It seems that anything can happen. And there’s no distance at all; the acting and the sets have to work from the back of the room and they have to work if you’re standing right there, reading the slip of paper someone left on the dresser, feeling the actress stroke the back of our neck.

This sounds really exciting.

RIP Knickerbocker

When Knickerbocker was a puppy, he’d dash around and knock the hell out of our older terrier X, Arrow, unmindful of her own age and ricketiness. Like all Labs he couldn’t help but fling himself into everything. He had a few good years after a serving of diabetes, back troubles, and arthritis and eventually couldn’t cope with his own size, and eating wasn’t that easy either. He’s passed the fun onto two cats. And so a toast to Knickerbocker, 1998-2009.

RIPKnicky.jpg

Chasing the English Department

Mark Bernstein writes, concerning William Chace’s article in The American Scholar and in reference to a relevant tweet on knowledge about books and, in addition, “whether there could be a single correct answer to any of the important questions that one might ask of an English professor:

Harvard and Tufts and BU and Brown and Brandeis are right down the street, and they all have English departments who, in principle, know a lot about the structure of books. Or maybe not.

This uncertainty has a deeper consequence for students: if any answer might be defensible, if the whole question is how adeptly you defend your position, then grading is arbitrary and capricious.

Stacy Mason has also weighs in on the article and subject with a narrative response. She writes:

And, indeed, there is a prejudice against “soft” degrees. My parents were furious when I decided to abandon a stable future as a programmer to pursue English. Luckily, that programming background has served me well in the pursuit of electronic literature, and these days I’m proud that I ended up with an English degree.

At the College, we’ve been working on establishing content areas we think are shared by most of the literature courses we teach (in our English Department, we do literature and composition). These subjects fall into broad categories: history, analysis (critical processes), aesthetics, and genre. We struggled with the notion of critical theory but felt that critical approaches, rather than setting them off as a subject category, fit better under the analysis region or rubric. We want to provide some measure of a floor plan in literary studies for students wishing to pursue this later in their educations. Of course, from a practical and biased point of view, I urge students to consider double majoring.

Furthermore, we’re asking lots of questions: how significant is form; how much should we lean on figures of speech; how significant is innovation in genre and style; what are the significant texts? Does anything go? I don’t think so. In graduate school, I made the decision to avoid seeking a Ph.D. Instead I took my MFA, computer science, history, literature, and science background into the work and teaching world in Connecticut. I wasn’t a great fan of critical methods in my literature courses as I wanted to pursue literary sources not philosophy or theory. I didn’t want to study critical theory (neither did many of the faculty, which they would admit to me personally in their offices). When DeMarinis chastised us for writing like literary critics, I understood exactly what he was talking about and had to shake my head (at myself).

My primary educational influences were not in the English Department, though, but rather in Creative Writing (which should be in Art Departments) and the Western Cultural Heritage program at the University of Texas at El Paso, under the tutelage of Lawrence Johnson and Robert Wren, where we worked early on with computer forums in instruction. WCH was a comprehensive program of study in ancient to present day influential texts, from the Enuma Elish to A Short History of Time, and emphasized critical reading and study in a range of disciplines and their relations and significance in shaping human institutions and culture. How influential was Augustine? What about Aristotle and Lucretius? Thus I’m not the best to ask on the state of the English Department as Chace views it even though I teach in one. Nor do I think Chace evolves problems beyond those already examined by Edward Said in his interesting Humanism and Democratic Criticism, which, in my mind, is required reading. I really don’t see the logical connection Chace suggests between championing books and students’ perception of economic goods in the job market context. Chace writes:

. . . at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself.

How would such a solution affect the economic situation for the Major directly if, hypothetically, championing books increased the graduation rate? As a whole, Chace really doesn’t really address this issue as internal changes to the framing of the English Department would do little to affect the job market, even the market inside the College or University. I’m not disagreeing with the merits of reading Shakespeare. I disagree that English Department curriculum can adjust real opportunities in the market place.

To be fair, later in the essay, Chace explains this championing:

No sense of duty remains toward works of English or American literature; amateur sociology or anthropology or philosophy or comic books or studies of trauma among soldiers or survivors of the Holocaust will do. You need not even believe that works of literature have intelligible meaning; you can announce that they bear no relationship at all to the world beyond the text. Nor do you need to believe that literary history is helpful in understanding the books you teach; history itself can be shucked aside as misleading, irrelevant, or even unknowable. In short, there are few, if any, fixed rules or operating principles to which those teaching English and American literature are obliged to conform.

Chace is correct, I think, to address the question of philology and expresses fairly his experience in school. He concludes the first part of his assessment with a taut summary of external causes of ED decline, then leads into part two

These, then, are some of the external causes of the decline of English: the rise of public education; the relative youth and instability (despite its apparent mature solidity) of English as a discipline; the impact of money; and the pressures upon departments within the modern university to attract financial resources rather than simply use them up. On all these scores, English has suffered. But the deeper explanation resides not in something that has happened to it, but in what it has done to itself.

What has the Department done to itself. Chace writes,

Amid a chaos of curricular change, requirements dropped and added, new areas of study in competition with older ones, and a variety of critical approaches jostling against each other, many faculty members, instead of reconciling their differences and finding solid ground on which to stand together, have gone their separate ways. As they have departed, they have left behind disorder in their academic discipline.

Chace continues with a more imagistic lament:

. . . it turns out that everything now is porous, hazy, and open to never-ending improvisation, cancellation, and rupture; the “clean slates” are endlessly forthcoming. Fads come and go; theories appear with immense fanfare only soon to be jettisoned as bankrupt and déclassé. The caravan, always moving on, travels light because of what it leaves behind.

What would a return to presumed coherence do, as I suggested above, to the nature of the University or College as a whole and its mission? What might expansion of the Canon do for the Department, as Chace I think confines scope to American and English literature? What about Lucretius? Note the very name English Department is just bizarre. These are interesting questions, as I feel that still English Departments are struggling to define their scope beyond the practice of “theory,” a term I’ve never understood in relation to the Humanities and critical studies.

As a final observation, I disagree with Mark about the notion of uncertainty. I think he would agree that the kind of analysis one might bring to proving via proof 2+2 is different than addition as a matter of a pure solution and that applied mathematics is loaded with interpretive approaches. I agree: some things need to work, but a poem works for often unfathomable reasons, and often upon abilities that are impossible to learn in a classroom. Despite that, we know that poetry comes with lots of fun and interesting objective and concrete elements, such as lines, form, and image, which, to me, are just as important as interpretation.

Failure as a Tool

In my FYE course I’ve been insisting that students make games that challenge people to fail. This is a core element of games: if there’s no real challenge, there’s no real reason to play and no fun. Via FB, Beau Anderson links to this article in Scientific American titled Getting it Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn. I don;t know why it’s such a surprise. Here’s a quote:

People remember things better, longer, if they are given very challenging tests on the material, tests at which they are bound to fail. In a series of experiments, they showed that if students make an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve information before receiving an answer, they remember the information better than in a control condition in which they simply study the information. Trying and failing to retrieve the answer is actually helpful to learning. It’s an idea that has obvious applications for education, but could be useful for anyone who is trying to learn new material of any kind.

I’m a little skeptical about the applicability or relevance of the studies’ conclusions across disciplines. When did we forget that challenge is a good thing?

2666 and Some of its Parts

2666.jpgRoberto Bolano’s novel 2666 is a turbulent structure. The reader may be interested after reading “The Part about Archimboldi” to go back to “The Part about the Critics” to rethink the timing of events–when do the critics venture to Mexico in their hunt for Archimboldi? And where is Archimboldi while the critics are in Santa Teresa, chasing ghosts?

In addition, The “Part about the Crimes” demands a re-read because we are re-introduced to Klaus Haas, Lotte’s son, and Lotte’s Hans Reiter’s little sister, and, of course, Hans Reiter is the great Benno von Archimboldi, whose story is told in The Part about Archimboldi.

2666 indicates its structure through titles. The novel is broken into Parts and Parts provide a frame for thinking about how each character, each section, and each story is associated. The reader can read 2666 as a history of accumulating relations. Appropriately, 2666 begins with Pelletier, the French critic, “discovering” Archimboldi. The Part about the Critics begins with a series of Archimboldi discoveries and these discoveries form the link between Pelletier, Morini, Norton, and Espinosa. The sequences of discovery goes like this: Jean-Claude discovers Archimboldi (Reiter) in 1980 at Christmas; Piero Morini in 1976; Liz Norton reads Archimboldi in 1988. Manuel Espinosa’s discoveries are treated differently. We know he wrote his dissertation on Archimboldi in 1990, but we aren’t told when he first reads Archimboldi, but we do know that he comes to Archimboldi by way of other failed enterprises.

Bolano wants the reader to consider dates, as he persistently glues the narrative with them. He also wants us to know context: what was the date, what was the circumstance. In “The Part about the Crimes” each revealed murder comes with circumstance, but these have nothing to do with solving murders (circumstantial evidence leads nowhere, typically) but everything to do with what detectives are doing day to day. This leads to an interesting question: how does one “solve” mass murder? In “The Part about the Crimes” finding the murderer or murderers comes off as a trivial expectation, as it does in “The Part about Archimboldi,” as the meaning of World War II’s murderous scope and all other mass murders in history become frames of reference not events “to solve.”

The reader is thus provided with a way of putting sequences of events together for later association. We can conclude that Pelletier’s Christmas discovery is a contiguous part of the world contained and developed in 2666. Each revealed part adds to the world’s puzzling complexity; they reveal more puzzles. This additional knowledge does nothing for the other characters, whose vision is limited by their own field. Take Lotte as a case in point and the reader. Lotte lives most of her life knowing very little about her son and her brother. Likewise Archimboldi knows very little about Lotte and his nephew. The critics, who are well versed in Achimboldi’s novels, don’t know the writer’s given name, Hans Reiter. This is only one of 2666’s great jokes. But it’s an interesting joke, as the joke is also on Reiter, who alters his identity to avoid charges for murdering a civil servant, who, during the war, dispassionately killed hundreds of Jews. The reader knows nothing about Archimboldi’s novels, though can infer much about them from his experience of the world in “The Part about Archimboldi.” The reader understands that the critics are members of an enamored academic club but that it’s their private lives that form the energy of this first part of 2666, which is entirely absent of romance conventions.

For a while, Ezpinosa and Pelletier wandered around as if possessed. Archimboldi, who was again rumored to stand a clear chance for the Nobel, left them cold. They resented their work at the university, their periodic contributions to the journals of German departments around the world, their classes, and even the conferences they attended like sleep-walkers or drugged detectives. They were there but they weren’t there. They talked, but their minds were on something else. Only Pritchard [a love interest of Norton’s], the ominous presence of Pritchard, Norton’s constant companion. A Pritchard who saw Norton as the Medusa, as a Gorgon, a Pritchard about whom, as reticent spectators, they knew almost nothing about.

After reading “The Part about Archimboldi, there will be no recognizing the Archimboldi of the Serb (The Part about the Critics) to the Reiter of “The Part about Archimboldi,” as these parts are causally indeterminate. 2666 is not a novel to read for deterministic plot. The very notion of causation is made strange in the novel, a curious human concoction.

We know when the critics becomes critics. We know when and the circumstances behind their meetings and movements. Norton’s and the other critic’s internal landscapes are rich, wondrous, and frightening. The critics won’t gain meaning from their studies, however, or from their professional connections. They can’t be intimate with Archimboldi, which is a privileged knowledge reserved for Mrs. Bubis; they have difficulty being intimate as friends. A reader may be left wondering what true intimacy might mean for them. We’re left at the end of “The Part about the Critics” with ironies so think, the puzzle is nearly impossible to solve:

“Archimboldi is here,” said Pelletier, “and we’re here, and this is the closest we’ll ever be to him.”

and Norton writes to her friends

I don;t know how long we’ll last together, said Norton in her letter. It doesn’t matter to me or to Morini either (I think). We love each other and we’re happy. I know the two of you will understand.

Pelletier and Norton are wrong on several counts. But this is exactly why they’re fantastic.

It bears more consideration, but Bolano, in 2666, has written a novel that’s a kind of opposing force to Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. In Marquez frail love and intimacy are ripe as fruit; in 2666, love is out there somewhere, but it’s escaped us.

Sonnets and Hypertext

I’ve been thinking about sonnet sequences. Why? Because I’ve been thinking a lot about links, linking methods and aesthetics, and other forms of possible digital signatures. Here’s what I mean by signature. Most people who’ve read classic sonnets can tell the difference between Shakespeare and Sidney:

With what sharp checks I in myself am shent,
When into Reason’s audit I do go:
And by just counts myself a bankrout know
Of all those goods, which heav’n to me hath lent:

Sidney’s sonnet 18 of Astrophel and Stella bears a certain stylistic signature. After several studies of the work, Sidney begins to sound like Sidney. The sonnet as a form has a lot going for it, mostly its definitional restrictions: rhyme scheme, numerical line requirement, just to name a few. Within those rules, there are very few limitations: imagery in the sonnet is limitless.

On Silliness

I had an interesting set of exchanges with the company that installed my boiler. It’s a three year old installation. It’s time for a second cleaning and so I called the company and asked to schedule. They asked if I was a customer. I said yes. They said, not according to our computer. I said, I purchased the boiler from you, therefore I’m a customer. They affected ignorance concerning this definition of customer. They wanted to know if I was an oil delivery customer, which is what they meant by customer, but not outright, implied rather. They said, as I was not a customer, they’d charge exorbitant for cleaning. I basically told them to take a leap and that I’d call the company who provides us oil for the cleaning, which I did, and will soon get, for a third the price. I told “the company” that they’d lost a customer and that they “should” care about that.

I guess I don’t understand the definition of customer. What the company doesn’t seem to understand is that ethical action dictates up-front definition of the extent and limits of service. They don’t, however, define customer because they know that they’re practice is unethical, only servicing boilers that they install if the customer agrees to purchase their oil, which is fine only if this written in service agreements. Such a service agreement would sound pretty silly.

For business or corporate concerns to assume a central place as a dominant ethic in governance of the country is suspect. Sure, Connecticut is not very friendly to commerce. But it works both ways, too.

Irony

Today Rio won the Olympics bid. The media narrative has taken a variety of positions as a response:

1. Why would Obama risk support?
2. What is the meaning of the right wing response?
3. What does the loss mean in the context of America’s standing in the world?

None of this makes much sense in logical terms. In Connecticut, I wonder what I might about know about the credibility of Chicago’s bid? Or even Rio’s? All of this I would leave to the judgement criteria of the Committee, as I would know very little about how to determine why it does or doesn’t make sense.

Today, Rep John Boehner issues this statement:

Instead of coming to their senses, Democrats are pressing ahead with, among other costly proposals, a national energy tax and a government takeover of health care. Make no mistake, these initiatives would destroy jobs and place additional burdens on working families and small businesses.

We have some knowledge about how complicated opinion is. It’s also pretty clear that the above is crass distortion, as, by definition, a public option is not a government takeover and that to suggest “regulation” as a takeover principle would be to suggest that the government has already taken over bottling and tobacco companies. In addition, there’s also the charge that Democrats are “senseless” and that counter-positions are a “mistake.” Yet, earlier in the statement, Boehner asks that Democrats act in a more bipartisan fashion, which may be impossible to do if one is “senseless,” meaning unable to feel or irrational. I’ve argued before that the language of politics is a language of irony, meaning that what Boehner says out loud suggests an opposite truth, value, or imperative.

It doesn’t take that much work–a few seconds–to wave rhetorical illogic away.