Category: tPA 1.0

POV

The great and continuing nuisance perpetuated by the term “point of view” is that it does nothing to discourage the conflation and confusion of two distinct aspects of narrative practice. Those two separate aspects are:

1. The orientation we infer to be that from which what gets told is told

2. The individual we judge to be the immediate source and authority for whatever words are used in the telling.

Those two aspects have been summarized in the two distinct questions “Who sees?” and “Who speaks?”

Now of course in many narratives, orientation and discourse-authorship are sourced in a single individual. But speaking / thinking and seeing need not come from the same agent. We need to allow for cases where another person sees or has seen.

Michael J. Toolan Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction

Toolan uses orientation, rather than Genette’s focalization to describe the same distinction in narrative practice. His reasoning is close to I.A. Richards de-visualizing of metaphor. Focalization is a nearly photographic term, just like “point of view,” and carries with it visual metaphors. Toolan violates his own disclaimer that orientation need not be visual, when he summarizes the aspects. “Who sees?” could also be paraphrased as “Who hears?” or “Who feels?”

I think the core confusion rests in the repetitive who? Is orientation a function of identity? If it is, then the collapse of these distinctions by those dreadful Anglo-Americans is entirely justified. However, it occurs to me that the conflation rests on a perception of unary identity. The collapse of these terms might be more of a quasi-romantic world view, rather than an Anglo-American one. Explosion of the quasi-romantic self into a multicultural social-self, motivated by a land of whats as much as a land of whos, better supports the distinction. The question of what, rather than who forces a particular orientation might be more fruitful. We need not infer an identity for a potential agent, as much as an expected response to the whatness of the orientation based on cultural more than individual proclivities.

When I quote people, or images, I do so not with the expectation that they reveal much about who sees or hears the kernal of truth I do, but rather that they reveal a certain position, or orientation if the meaning of the citation is coincident with something, not in an individual, but in a life-experience or cultural background. Is this the same as identity or personality? I don’t think so.

There is, in most of what I write, a sort of expectation of limited overlap in orientation with those who would choose to read me. However, there is no expectation of overlaps in identity. Separating orientation from identity seems crucial, and the locus of activity need not be visually metaphoric. In a certain sense, orientation is often conveyed by repetitive tropes of citation and response, where the currency is a shifting cultural mythology, based on stories told and retold— each time with a subtle shift in orientation. What motivates the shift in orientation seems to be more deeply of concern than the who, which separately gives the narrative its authority, that is, if Genette’s distinction is to be worthwhile.

Rather than just a simple distinction in character function, I think this separation might also be made in supposedly monologic discourse. The schizophrenic nature of deep monologues, betrays a separate universe of programmed cultural responses— orientations — which should be considered as covalent, and yet not equivalent, to identity. Zooming in on them presents a certain seductive beauty, which exists within each identity, and yet is not identity.

Repetition changes things. Not so much because the repetition is filtered through identity, but because it is filtered through context and orientation. These aspects of narrative behavior seem very important. Social deixis seems to be more easily determined by focalization, rather than identity. I think conflating them is a mistake.

Another Song from STC

Through veiled in spires of myrtle-wreath,
Love is a sword which cuts its sheath,
And through the clefts itself has made
We spy the flashes of the blade!

But through the clefts itself has made
We likewise see Love’s flashing blade,
By rust consumed, or snapped in twain;
Only hilt and stump remain.

Something tells me that besides being so opium addled he was repeating himself, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was slightly bitter regarding marriage. The myrtle-wreath wasn’t kind to him. I prefer the epigram he used as preface for love poems in his collected works: “Love, always a talkative companion.”

In many ways does the full heart reveal
The presence of the love it would conceal;
But in far more th’ estranged heart lets know
The absence of love, which yet it fain would shew.

The ironic tension between the title and the epigram speaks volumes regarding the problem of conjugal desire. Silence (as anyone who has ever been married can tell you) does speak with intense volume. It occurs to me that I was living on Myrtle Street in Bakersfield, California, when it blew my mind.

Superman (II) was flying when I woke up.

With Lois Lane on his back, far away at the North Pole, Superman renounces his power. The fog lifted from my eyes to reveal some basic tropes of American culture. Power demands secrecy. Love prefers disclosure. Love is incompatible with power. Exposure = weakness. And the grand moral of them all, ‘tis better to be powerful in pseudonymity, than a groveling weakling— even if it means giving up on love.

A divisive economics, to be sure: not unlike the modernist division between form and content, or better still, the division between explanation and understanding. The distanciation between text and author fits in the same sort of binary logic. Texts have power— authors have only love. I write that, reflecting on Diotima’s thoughts on love in Plato’s Symposium. Love is the desire for immortality; in a real sense, literature stems from this same fountain. Beginning students of literature resist explanation of the text, favoring instead understanding of the author. They resist because they seem to believe that understanding (love) is incompatible with explanation (power). They resist mapping the lines of power behind a text, as instructors flex their muscles, proclaiming that power is the best.

The problematic part is desire. I’ve heard it a thousand times: “I really enjoyed the book until the teacher explained it.” In “Explanation and Understanding,” Paul Ricoeur has brought me closer to what’s going on. It’s the difference between cause and motive. Explanation is a fairly scientific pursuit, which reveals the causes behind actions. There doesn’t have to be a motive behind a causally related sequence. A text can be explained in terms of effects and their causes, which may or may not be motivated by the nebulous construction of an author behind that text. Indeed, in New Critical thinking, questioning intentionality is strictly verboten. Explaining things concentrates solely on causes, not motives. Desire is something that exists completely outside the text, and lust is pushed into a Victorian closet.

Understanding, on the other hand, requires that questions of motive be addressed. Communication is an intentional act. We bring the sex-toys out of the closet and dress them up. Understanding is built upon a flirtation with belief, a surrender to the world constructed by the text, a slow seduction by the author which pulls you into his world as you imperfectly reconstruct it. It’s no wonder why students resist explanation when it is reduces that carefully constructed world to a web of causality. Causality is not nearly as sexy as motive.

Motive is force, but motive is not synonymous with power— motive springs from desire, and desire, often from powerlessness. There are two contentious desires: the desire for power, and the desire for love. Are they as incompatible as our myths proclaim? Must the empathy which love brings be buried in order to make the story acceptable?

The reader’s interest is addressed, not to so-called underlying laws, but to the turn taken by this singular story. Following a story is an activity that is entirely specific, by which we unceasingly anticipate a subsequent course of events and an outcome and adjust our anticipations as the story progresses, until they coincide with the actual outcome. Then we say we have understood.

This starting point of understanding differs from that proposed by the theory of empathy, which completely overlooks the specificity of the narrative element in the story recounted as well as the story followed. This is why a theory that bases understanding on the narrative element better enables us to account for the passage from understanding to explanation. Whereas explanation appeared to do violence to understanding taken as the immediate grasp of the intentions of others, it naturally serves to extend understanding taken as the competence to follow a narrative.

For a narrative is seldom self-explanatory. The contingency that combines acceptability summons questions, interrogation. Thus, our interest in what follows— “and then?” asks the child— carries over to our interest in reasons, motives, causes— “why?” asks the adult. The narrative therefore has a lacunary structure, such that the why proceeds spontaneously from the what. But in return the explanation has no autonomy. Its advantage and its effect are to allow us to follow the story better and further when the first-order spontaneous understanding fails.

Ricoeur, “Explanation and Understanding”

As I see it now, it seems that Psychology is the land of “who,” Philosophy is the land of “what,” Science is the land of “where,” Literature is the land of “when,” Theology is the land of “why,” and Rhetoric is the land of “how.” Explanation and understanding both seem contingent on how narratives work. Maybe it’s just my dirty-mind at play, but I feel certain that desire has a lot to do with it. This question seems inadequately addressed by all three of these disciplines, due to a residual Puritan ethic which forces sex out of schools, and into the closets where some think it belongs. But I think there can be no real explanation or understanding without addressing just what makes some texts, and authors, sexier than others.

Now, where did I put that kryptonite? That chaste myth of the American Superman has got to go!

Guilt by association.

I pulled out a tape I hadn’t listened to in a long time on this last trip— Brighten the Corners by Pavement. Something alarming struck me. I don’t really care that much for “stream of consciousness” writing. I think that it’s a misnomer for the way that consciousness works. It’s more like a lake that pebbles skip across, leaving elliptical ripples with each idea that crosses it. The idea that consciousness might stream also implies that it is coming from somewhere, and going somewhere. In my case, I know that is seldom true. Usually, ideas usually skip across, with the force of a slap or a kiss, depending on the angle of attack and force behind them.

An idea, just like lunch, is never free— so I resist “free association” as well. There can only be association, which is directly plonked in your path, or the glancing dance of sidearm throws. It scared me to think that somehow, lately, I’m starting to write rambles down a shandy lane like songs I’ve heard. I suppose it’s a glancing thing, depending on how you inflect.

A welcome to my friends:
This house is a home and a home’s where I belong
Where the feelings are warm and the foundations are strong
If my soul has a shape, well, then it is an ellipse
And this slap is a gift
‘Cause your cheeks have lost their lustre
You know, your cheeks have lost their lustre
You know, your cheeks have lost their lustre
You know, your cheeks have lost their lustre, lustre, lustre, lustre
Take it back — send return out of time
Tape machine needs to be aligned

Aloha means goodbye, and also hello — it’s in how you inflect
Put the bark in the dog, and you’ve got a guardian
When the capital’s S, it is followed by a T — and it’s probably me
And the tones are grouped in clusters
You know, the tones are grouped in clusters
Well the tones are grouped in clusters
You know the tones are grouped in clusters, clusters, clusters, clusters
Take it back — kiss me into the past
Lately never gonna last

“Blue Hawaiian”

Thank you, Stephen Malkmus.

What wounds me are the forms of the relation, its images; or rather, what others call form I experience as force. The image— as the example of the obsessive— is the thing itself. The lover is thus an artist; and his world is in fact a world reversed, since in it each image is its own end (nothing beyond the image).

(A Lover’s Discourse, 133)

Hardcore Theoria

For me, things always seem to reduce themselves to position and desire. Tom’s recent question, drawn from an insightful reading of the article Kierkegaard’s “Mystery Of Unrighteousness” In The Information Age, resonates:

Weinberger offers the vision of a more intimate communion, via the Net, liberated from the tiresome vapidity of the public as media-construct. But if Kierkegaard were to charge that such intimacy is still an evasion of the concrete responsibilities of the face-to-face encounter?

Possible resolution of this question can be addressed in two ways. As I’ve argued before, the deixis of a speaker is a key concern. Without an implicit positioning of the speaker, the utterance cannot be decoded adequately. This to me, is the central problem that causes ambiguity on the web, rather than the larger concerns of identity. Kierkegaard is really on target, regarding its ties to face-to-face interaction. But I also like Weinberger’s theorizing regarding the growth of consubstantiality due to the indirect, pointed nature of web discourse.

Exploring some finely tuned linguistic assumptions points out one potential reason for demoting Kierkegaard. From the perspective of semantic or pragmatic analysis of discourse, deictic expressions are anchored to specific points in a communicative event. According to Lyons:

The grammaticalization and lexicalization of deixis is best understood in relation to what may be termed the canonical situation of utterance: this involves one-one or one-many, signaling in the phonic medium along with the vocal-auditory channel, with all the participants present in the same actual situation able to see one another and to perceive the associated non-vocal paralinguistic features of their utterances, and each assuming the role of sender and receiver in turn . . .There is much in the structure of languages that can only be explained on the assumption that they have developed for communication in face-to-face interaction.

The problem in analyzing web discourse is that the “canonical situation of utterance” represents a space where all face-to-face bets are off. Consequently, the function of deixis is even more complex. The idea of “concrete responsibilities” is remote, in a world which exists only as words on a screen. However, the paralinguistic features of utterances are still intact, and struggling for resolution in a situation where there is only a recent canon of web writing to draw from regarding appropriateness behaviors. In an important sense, we are adrift in a sea of texts, with little in the way of tradition to build from. The closest analogous situation, I think, is in the rise of print culture in the 18th century. But it is dangerous to rely on history alone, to explain the problem of deixis on the web.

There is another way of looking at this positioning problem: through the lens of desire. Few people have looked as closely at that problem as Roland Barthes:

I am caught in a double discourse, from which I cannot escape. On the one hand, I tell myself: suppose the other, by some arrangement of his own structure, needed my questioning? Then wouldn’t I be justified in abandoning myself to the literal expression, the lyrical utterance of my “passion”? Are not excess and madness my truth, my strength? And if this truth, this strength ultimately prevailed?

But, on the other hand, I tell myself: the signs of this passion run the risk of smothering the other. Then should I not, precisely because of my love, hide from the other how much I love him? I see the other with a double vision, sometimes as object, sometimes as subject; I hesitate between tyranny and oblation.

Thus I doom myself to blackmail: if I love the other, I am forced to seek his happiness; but then I can only do myself harm: a trap; I am condemned to be a saint or a monster: unable to be the one, unwilling to be the other: hence I tergiversate: I show my passion a little.

(A Lover’s Discourse, 41-2)

The reluctance to reveal one’s identity, one’s position, one’s deixis, can also be taken as a sign of love. It is the dual position of lovers, who both desire to reveal themselves, and to hide as a sign of their mad love in a new, exciting, and desirous situation where they now can meet the world, through their words. Position, and desire, are complicated indeed. Weinberger’s utopian optimism need not be dismissed at the first introduction of fear into the equation. There are many kinds of fear, and many of them are proudly positioned at the forefront of new desires. All the same, it’s hard to dance with a partner when you don’t know where they are. I suppose I prefer to read the anchor position, the defining social situation on the web, as closer to the perverse logic of love rather than fear.

I suspect that Kierkegaard’s worry that fear is a flaw is largely unfounded. Without the dangerous exhilaration provided by fear, love would not be as strong. And the distanciation brought out by anonymity and pseudonymity could be just another part of the lovers dance, as it flirts with the possibility of new social situations. Sometimes the road is dark, and people hesitate to show the full force of their desire.

More from Eliza Haywood

How glorious a Privilege has Man beyond all other sublunary Beings! who, tho’ indigent, unpitied, forsaken by the World, and even chain’d in a Dungeon, can, by the Aid of Divine Contemplation, enjoy all the Charms of Pomp, Respect, and Liberty! — Transport himself in Idea to whatever Place he wishes, and grasp in Theory imagin’d Empires!

Unaccountable it is, therefore, that so many People find an Irksomeness in being alone, tho’ for never so small a Space of Time! — Guilt indeed creates Perturbations, which may well make Retirement horrible, and drive the self-tormented Wretch into any Company to avoid the Agonies of Remorse; but I speak not of those who are afraid to reflect, but of those who seem to me not to have the Power to do it.

. . .

Conversation, in effect, but furnishes Matter for Contemplation;— it exhilerates the Mind, and fits it for Reflection Afterward:— Every new thing we hear in Company raises in us new Ideas in the Closet or on the Pillow; and as there are few People but one may gather something from, either to divert or improve, a good Understanding will, like the industrious Bee, suck out the various Sweets, and digest them in Retirement.

. . .

To know ourselves, is agreed by all to be the most useful Learning: the first Lessons, therefore, given us ought to be on that Subject.

The Female Spectator, Book IV (1745)

I do dearly love to suck out sweets, though I sometimes tire of studying alone. I’m too young for retirement.

Walker Evans in the De Luze cottage

Walker Evans visited Truro, Massachusetts, in 1930 and stayed in the home of a family named De Luze, rented by his friend Ben Shahn. In the cottage of this Portuguese fishing family, his mature vision really began to take shape.

Had a wonderful dream last night. Where in hell do all those details come from. Really, literature, all the greatest descriptions I know are so much watery smudge to the least of my dreams. I suppose the best about dreams is the abolition of time. After one like last night’s I spend the day tasting the tail ends of lovely unearthly moods without a headache. I think my powers lie mostly there, in dreams.

Walker Evans, Letter to Hanns Skolle, May 13, 1930

Evans’ photographs of the De Luze cottage mark a profound turning point in his career, not because they were particularly successful, but because they show Evans’ deepening dream detail. Though interest in the mundane is common among modernists, it’s the complexity of detail that sets Evans apart. These photographs are a bridge between densely formalist experiments, and later photographs which show both this richness of detail, and the compositional complexity of Evans’ early work. Life is found in details.

Continue reading “Walker Evans, Pt. 9” →