Difference Engine
Regarding the tyranny of voice, although don’t like Acker’s take on the problem, it is still a problem. Especially for a photographer. In a certain sense, you could say that photography involves “cutting up the world” and refashioning it into different pieces. If you look at it this way, just where is the voice? Photography need not be impelled by the desire to communicate a message, nor a desire to discover significance. In the first case photography might speak the ventriloquized voice of the camera operator, and in the second it might be described as listening to some transcendental voice outside the operator—a voice from an otherwise dumb world. Both these notions seem more than a bit self-important; they anthropomorphize the machine.
Maybe a camera is more like a calculator. Cameras demonstrate the difference between what we see and what the camera sees. Images created by the camera are no more what we see than words are the substantive form of what we say. A word cannot smile or wink. Words are far too rigid. I don’t know how everyone else experiences things, but I don’t think in words. Sometimes I try to match word to thought and say it, but the result is always a ghost, a shadow of the full complexity of the thing I hold in mind. There is always a remainder, something left behind—a difference between thought and expression, or sight and depiction.
But we want to possess these things—I think it is unnatural to claim that we surrender our words or our visions by the act of constructing them as something which must stand separate from ourselves. I think the act of making these things is how we define ourselves. I started to read Breton’s Nadia again. The opening words ring.
Fit {x3}
Reading Richard Woodhouse’s draft letter to John Taylor, a response to Keats’s letter of October 27, 1818 which details Keats’s rejection of Wordsworth’s egotistical sublime, I am struck by three uses of the word “fit.”
First, Keats positions his response regarding artistic “identity” as dual indices of the motives of an artist, of the “whole pro and con, about genius, and views of the achievements and ambition and the coetera.” He fits himself into a place that is “everything and nothing”—where an artist has no individual identity. However, he also grants that he has ambition of “doing the world some good” which requires that he have some concept of identity. Keats wonders if this position is merely a role that he plays from time to time that is distant from any normal concept of self—“But even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself; but from some character in whose soul I now live.”
The difficulty of “fitting” between the non-identity-fied space of artistic creation and the real world of identity-fied space is characterized by Woodhouse as a fit of a different sort. Woodhouse identifies poets of several kinds. First, there is the poet who is “purely descriptive confining himself to external objects.” Second, there is the poet who further describes “the effects of thoughts of which he is conscious & which others are affected by.” I would suspect that he would place Wordsworth in this second category. A third kind “will soar so far into the regions of imagination as to conceive of beings & substances in situations different from what he has ever seen.” I suspect Coleridge’s responsibilities in Lyrical Ballads fit there. Others reason through poetry, and others will be witty—perhaps Pope fits in these kinds. “Another will throw himself into various characters & make them speak as the passions would naturally incite them to do.” Browning and Tennyson, after Woodhouse’s time, would certainly fit there. But to speak in tongues is a completely different sort of fit:
February 18, 2005 12:57 PM | Comments (1)
Pregnant Moments
I immediately disliked Kathy Acker’s short story “Humility.” It is written in a twisted third person, often omitting pronouns. It’s partly about her evasion of the Black Mountain poet’s concept of voice:
To her, every word wasn’t only material in itself, but also sent out like beacons other words. Blue sent out heaven and The Virgin. Material is rich. I didn’t create language, writer thought. Later she would think about ownership and copyright. I’m constantly being given language. Since this language-world is rich and always changing, flowing, when I write, I enter a world which has complex relations and is perhaps, illimitable. This world both represents and is human history, public memories and private memories turned public, the records and the actualizations of human intentions. This world is more than life and death, for there life and death conjoin. I can’t make language, but in this world, I can play and be played.
So where is “my voice”?
Wanted to be a writer.
The reason why I dislike it so intensely isn’t because I disagree with the concepts contained in it (although I do), but because it is so forced, contrived, and self-consciously “arty-farty.” The issues, cast in an angry-feminist sort of rant, speak of voice as if it were solely a male construct. I begin to think that it is better to think of the gendered aspect of writing more abstractly. Giving birth to writing casts most writers (particularly literary ones) in largely female terms. There are notable exceptions, for instance Aphra Behn who spoke of writing as her “male part.” The gender confusion and the issues which Acker addresses, I think, are better expressed by John Keats in his letter to Benjamin Bailey of November 22, 1817:
Author > Text > World
Though in one breath Yeats claims the William Blake was an author uniquely concerned with the future, in the next he claimed that the relationship between author, text, and world was not one of obligation. In his preface to the Modern Library edition of Blake’s works he edited, Yeats finds nothing troubling about Fredrick Tatham’s burning of Blake’s manuscripts after his death:
Blake himself would have felt little anger, for he had thought of burning his MS. himself, holding perhaps as Boehme held, and Swedenborg also, that there were many great things best unuttered within earshot of the world. Boehme held himself permitted to speak of much only among his “schoolfellows”; and Blake held there were listeners in other worlds than this. (xl-xli)
Yeats makes a bold move in severing the text from the world, given his corpus of politically activist poems. He holds a different perspective on philosopher/poets such as Percy Shelley. Yeats viewed Shelley as a philosopher who communicated through poetry; citing Mary Shelley’s observation that Shelley’s meanings “elude the ordinary reader by their abstraction and delicacy of distinction, but they are far from vague” (Essays 66). Further appropriating Mary Shelley’s words, Yeats assumes that “It was his [Shelley’s] design to write prose metaphysical essays on the nature of man which would have served to explain much of what is obscure in his poetry” (Essays 66). Indeed, Yeats himself seemed to follow Shelley’s design, providing copious prose to illuminate otherwise obscure poetry. The poet’s duties were not necessarily to the future of this world, but perhaps to some other. But the philosopher has a duty now for the future.
Quote
Every good piece of sculpture, painting, or music evokes the sentiments and the dreams which it sets out to evoke.
Thus Philosophic Art is a return towards the picture-making proper to the childhood of the nations, and if it remained strictly faithful to itself, it would feel its duty to juxtapose as many successive images as are contained in whatever sentence it might wish to express.
Even so we may reserve the right to doubt whether the hieroglyphic was clearer than the printed sentence.
Baudelaire, “Philosophic Art” in The Painter and Modern Life
One cannot be a man or become a writer without tracing a horizon line beyond oneself, but the self-surpassing is in each case finite and particular. One does not surpass in general and for the proud and simple pleasure of surpassing; Baudelairean dissatisfaction represents only the abstract scheme of transcendence and, since it is dissatisfaction with everything, ends by being dissatisfaction with nothing. Real transcendence requires one to want to change certain specific aspects of the world, and the surpassing is colored and particularized by the concrete situation it aims to modify.
Sartre, “Writing for One’s Age,” in What is Literature?
A language is therefore a horizon, and style a vertical dimension, which together map out for the writer a Nature, since he does not choose either. The language functions negatively, as the initial limit of the possible, style a Necessity which binds the writer’s humour to his form of expression. In the former he finds a familiar History, in the latter, a familiar personal past. In both cases he deals with a Nature, that is, a familiar repertory of of gestures, a gestuary, as it were, in which the energy expended is purely operative, serving here to enumerate, there to transform, but never to appraise or signify a choice.
Roland Barthes, “What is Writing?” in Writing Degree Zero
