A Slip

My students kindly pointed out to me that a Judith Butler article I said was published 10 years ago, in 1993, was actually published 20 years ago. Somehow 93 does not seem twenty-years ago to me. I think of 73 as being about 30 years ago, too, though obviously I will admit that is is 40 years ago, if you really want to insist. I think I lost years of my life to depression and frustration. I am doing very well now, though, and I must have held it together a little bit, at least, to be where I am now.

External Critique

I find my Graduate theory students prefer to make an external critique to an internal one. In other words, they are interested in what a particular theorist does not mention. If a theorist does not mention something, they conclude that their theory does not "cover" what is omitted. That is the student's main criticism of the theoretical article. The students are especially hard on theorists for not predicting the future, failing to account for things that have not yet happened.

An internal critique would tease out the inner contradictions of an argument, its incoherences, the inherent weaknesses of its argument.

I am guilty of external critiques myself. It can be a convenient way of "clearing the ground." Absences do speak loudly. Yet I find them also too easy, a bit cheap, as it were. You don't really have to look very hard to find an error of omission.

The external critique I am most fond of is when critics assume that the novel is the only significant genre. Then it is easy to see what the introduction of essay, poetry, and theater does.

7 kinds of relation

In a dream my students were doing an exercise where they had to compare Lorca to three other writers. When I got up and got in the shower I couldn't reconstruct their brilliant presentations, but I remember Chesterton figured in somehow. I've never read him so don't ask me.

In the shower I decided there were 7 kind of people you could cite in relation to Lorca. Imagine this charted on a huge poster, with Lorca at the center. I think I had 8 categories but one disappeared by the time I got to my office.

1. Influences flowing into him. Góngora, Darío, Nietzsche, Chekov...

2. People he influenced. Spicer, Motherwell, Valente...

You'll notice on your chart that there could be a huge spread in both directions.

3. Lorca's immediate contemporaries. Guillén, Cernuda, Neruda, Dalí, Falla...

4. Lorca's contemporaries that he didn't know about, or that didn't know about him. Pound, Pessoa, Cavafy... People engaged in a parallel enterprise.

So the chart expands horizontally too.

5. Writers with no direct relation of influence or simultaneity, but that you'd still want to compare Lorca to.

6. Lorca critics and scholars.

7. Other critics and theorists, who never thought about Lorca, that you might want to cite to make other points about Lorca.

Now put another writer at the center of the chart.

Ego

Ego is usually associated with thinking one is great at things. This is not really the case. A big ego is often manifested in people who think they "suck," and thus cannot enjoy other people's achievements. The pathetic person in the comment I link to (which I found in turn from a comment yesterday on Clarissa's blog), cannot enjoy guitar playing because he thinks he sucks at playing guitar. He cannot enjoy a movie with a good screenplay because, in his mind, he could have been a great writer himself. If he really wanted to not suck at the guitar he could practice for ten years and get good at it. At 34, he would still be young. He could learn to write if he wanted to, but I suspect his ego gets in the way. If the results are not immediately perfect, he gets frustrated.

So ego is not about thinking you are great, but about assuming you should be able to be great with very little effort. It is the egotist who has a kind of empty self, projecting his insecurities onto other people.

Bland and Spicy revisited

Here is a post in which I compared two styles.

Let us now consider the relevance of this ability to the current state of modern pluralistic democracies surrounded by a powerful global marketplace. First of all, we can report that, even if we were just aiming at economic success, leading corporate executives understand very well the importance of creating a corporate culture in which critical voices are not silenced, a culture of both individuality and accountability

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Now picture one kind of “bad” student. This child is obsessive, inflexible, a bad listener. Prone to daydreaming, preferring her own company, idiosyncratic in her tastes, she is a solitary, possibly discontented child. In one way, she is a classroom problem, with disorders of attention or attachment. She is also an eccentric; an artist; perhaps a “genius”; in any case, an economic burden, a proto-elitist, with the capacity for generative unhappiness. One might go so far as to call her a natural humanities major.

Notice the difference in the use of adjectives. The second and to my mind better passage uses just as many adjectives, but uses them better. They are unexpected, startling, statistically improbable (generative unhappiness). Nussbaum, the kind of defender the humanities could do without, thinks exclusively in "collocations," so we have "current state," "modern pluralistics democracies," "corporate "culture," "powerful global marketplace," "leading corporate executives," "economic success," or "critical voices."

There is nothing wrong with such collocations, but to use seven of them in two sentences betrays an unhumanistic mind. She is not thinking in and with her prose, but letting the language speak her.

Conventional Wisdom

The perpetually astute Vance Maverick in a comment on this blog compared the belief in the inefficacy of adverbs and adjectives to the conservative belief in "small government." In other words, this belongs to a curious kind of folklore impervious to empirical evidence. There is a kind "folk grammar" pitched together from a little Orwell, a little Elements of Style, a little half-remembered what-my-English-teacher-told-me. This is a folk-grammar not of the folk, but of the highly educated academic or the cranky auto-didact. There's an odd puritanism, too, this idea of being able to do without superfluous verbal ornamentation or foreign loan words. Those long words might confuse people! I'm all for concision and elegance, but I also believe there's room for some baroque exuberance. And there's a kind of confusion between truly excellent writing and the mere avoidance of rookie mistakes like using the passive voice in every sentence as default.

Here is Guy Davenport reviewing a biography of Stephen Crane:

Stephen Crane is an intractable subject because so much of his emotional life is an impenetrable surface. Benfey has hard weather of it with the love affairs, and even with Cora, who remains a blur. Only Conrad’s account of knowing Crane (the preface to Beer’s biography) gives us any sense of what the man was like, and Conrad’s words are so finely nuanced, so ironically reserved, and so obviously shaped for effect, as to be a Conrad story, a kind of “Secret Sharer” in a different key. One hopes that Max Beerbohm was tempted to make a drawing of Conrad telling Crane, all of a long evening, Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. What other writer would have asked to have it told, and what other writer would have obligingly told it?

Davenport is one of my favorite prose stylists; look at the mileage he gets out of three parallel adverb / adjective combinations, or from the echo of intractable / impenetrable. I haven't bolded words like "any" or "other," or the adjective in titles like "secret or "humaine," just the straightforwardly descriptive and restrictive adjectives.

Psychoanalysis and Foucault

Foucault's treatment of psychoanalysis is not particularly sympathetic. The first volume of The History of Sexuality, for example, takes aim at the "repressive hypothesis." This is a pretty direct hit on Freud. Not only to write a history of sexuality without Freud's help, but to begin the whole enterprise by turning Freud on his head. I find whole swaths of Foucault's history rather problematic, but that is for another day.

Anyway, Paul Julian Smith, one of the major Lorca critics I have to tackle in my book, uses both Freud and Foucault. His Foucauldianism lets him not deal with Lorca much as a biographical subject at all, but as an author-function. So far so good. But then psychoanalysis is not attached to any human subject at all: it becomes a free-floating hermeneutic tool. That's great, because it is lame to psychoanalyze Lorca as though he were on the couch a few feet from you. On the other hand, it makes psychoanalysis even more arbitrary than before, because it is not a theory of anyone's mind anymore. What is it? What is it doing?

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Where do people without blogs essay their ideas? Or those who use their blogs but don't talk about the ideas they are working on?