Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method

The problem with Durkheim is that he knows his ontology and doesn't really care to take a straightforward stance. Halfway through, he declares that he wants to take a course midway between the nominalism of the historians and the realism of the philosophers (read Comte), but the result is hardly a position of moderation. Instead, it is of alternating extremes: the "social fact" defined in the first chapter is a perfect example of realist faith in abstraction, to the point that the society becomes more forceful, more solid, more real than any actual human. But then in the very next chapter he takes up a Baconian empiricism, leading the fight against universalisms (in particular the human universal).

Now, this isnt in itself so unreasonable as it first seems. Just because one is prepared to believe in universals does not mean that one has to accept all universals as real. But the switch in perspective is jarring and uncontextualized--it is hard to tell if Durkheim is aware of any seeming contradiction.

Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel

There is such a great difference between the way that Lukács is discussed (based upon his later Marxism, esp. History and Class Consciousness), and the reality of this book. It isn't hard to notice that he is in a Hegelian pre-Marx mode at this point—even if he hadn't said so in the 1962 preface. But the continuity with Romantic criticism is really striking—Hegel's art criticism, to be sure, but even more directly, Schiller's "On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry"—the ideology of the critique is structured almost identically, even though the tragic fall from unity of world and work is moved into the novel, rather than poetry. It is as if the same theory has been rewritten for an early-twentieth century view back at the nineteenth. This isn't to take away anything from the interest (or lyricism!) of the critique, merely its originality.

One thing that the work does seem to do, though, is to act as a sort of hinge between the older version of Romantic criticism and Hegelian historicism, and the slightly-later works of the émigré philologists. The slight variations between the expression of loss in different national traditions of the novel is expressed by the separate chapters on Don Quixote, Sentimental Education, Wilhelm Meister, and Tolstoy—the matching of an exemplary work (or two) with the literary-historical state of a fixed moment of one united national culture really does seem to prefigure Mimesis at least. Perhaps an accidental feature, but that which is transmitted.

Question: what is the relation of the individual work's standing out as representative of the period to the social form of individual life in mass society? Seems a bit like an attempt to reinstate all that has been lost, in the guise of method rather than content. Is the work of criticism itself a sublimation?

Robinson Jeffers, "Sign-Post"

A fantastic poem, and one of his most famous, I believe. My interest in this reading of it falls on the "poor doll humanity," an image voiced once near the start, and once near the end of the poem. It makes the poem. The doll is--an abstraction. Sort of the point of discussing "humanity" against the human, no? Isn't Jeffers always aiming to become the thing? I.e., the brute, concrete, individual object (be it rock or hawk or human) rather than the ideal? This is a case of particulars versus universals, and as in Ransom's essay on Ontologies, the particulars win out.

The irony of the image, of course, is that the doll--idealized and unappealing abstraction though it may be--is itself an inhuman object, uncanny in a way that natural objects cannot. Is it with this in mind that the return to humanity (once no longer "born of a woman") can work?

Leo Lowenthal, "Sociology of Literature in Retrospect"

Translated and published in Critical Inquiry in 1987, but given in 1981; this is a precis of an intellectual autopbiography. Makes interesting reading after the much earlier essays. LL has apparently continued on the same tracks, though with increasing sophistication...still, all of the studies he reviews are of the large-scale sociology that one, after all, naturally associates with the Frankfurt School. Of interest: an assertion, following Adorno, of the reality of art, without descent into New Criticism--the study of the literary in itself is one of the individual writer's transcendance of ideological and historical context. (This is then recaptured by capital through the dumbing-down of Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, etc. into ahistorical love stories).

Leo Lowenthal, "On Sociology of Literature" (1948)

Lowenthal gives four models of issues for investigation, and four metholodies for use in them. Of note: the sociology being done here is large scale: the writer on one side, and the society in general (or its alternate identities, such as "the reading public") on the other. There is essentially nothing in this particular essay about the social formations of small groups of readers or writers--this is perhaps suitable for literature in modern market conditions, but it is inapplicable to premodern situations.

Also: while most of this is quite smart, there is one hopelessly naive proposal, to "revive" authors by means of questionnaires, the standardization of which will apparently allow clear answers to what authors thought on any number of social topics, even though one is still just reading the texts and apparently making things scientific by having boxes to check.

Joseph Boyden, "The True Sorrows of Calamity Jane"

One of the pieces in the 2009 summer fiction edition of The Walrus, this is also the best Western short story I can remember reading in a long time. Understatement goes a very long way in a genre which often yields to an impulse for rootin'-tootin' purple prose. But Boyden doesn't eschew all genre cliches; consider the ending:

I need to go now. I am the bastard son of Calamity Jane, of the West, and, truthfully, I'm already gone. But you must know this by now. Facts and lies, they are so often the same when all you get is glimpses. But I know the truth. I am her blood. She was my mother.

I am only assuming that Boyden doesn't write many Westerns. (Would The Walrus have invited him to contribute to this issue if he had?) Harping on the mythographical qualities of the genre is itself one of this genre's defining attributes; it may be, though, that in a post-generic age, this kind of ultra-conformity to the standards is something only a greenhorn would try.

Leo Lowenthal, "Sociology of Literature" (1932)

A refreshingly early take on historicizing literary studies--not much that is revelatory, but one is left wondering why this kind of critique had to be reinvented in the early 80's. One can't expect the depth of analysis that comes in the Frankfurt School's later and much longer critiques--but what is here is entirely sensible and intelligent, and is confessionally Marxist without leaning on dogmatism. Part IV is heavily into Germanistik, but the first three parts would make a nice reading for a senior seminar.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

I should probably stop reading Murakami for a while. The weirdness might lose its pique. Nonetheless, some observations from the latest read:

• I am starting to get the feeling that alternating stories by chapter is part of M's standard MO. What is interesting here is that the more realistic of the two threads, that of Kafka, is also the more contemplative and sober; the Nakata storyline is more comic. This is exactly opposite to Hard Boiled Wonderland, e.g., where the unconscious world is the peaceful one. Unsurprisingly, KOTS is most like that novel at the end, when Kafka's narrative turns decidedly fantastic in his hike out to the valley beyond time.
• Kafka's decision to read Soseki's collected works near the beginning of the novel is an excellent example of the reader's problem of never-having-read-enough. Many readers of the translated Murakami will have heard of I am a Cat, but few will have read it. Anyone unfortunately in such a position (such as myself) will be horribly frustrated, knowing that there is something up with the cats, but not knowing what--and, more importantly, not knowing if that what is important enough to justify moving Soseki to the top of one's reading list. One knows that this is neither coincidence, nor the tidy solution to what is much more than a roman à clef. So: not only does one not know how to interpret, but one doesn't even know how to posit the scope of interpretation. Chasing down the technicalities in a Murakami novel is itself a Kafkaesque enterprise.
• Best sex writing ever:
  "Henri Bergson," she replied, licking the semen from the tip of his penis. "Mame mo memelay."
  "I'm sorry?"
  "Matter and Memory.You ever read it?"
  "I don't think so," Hoshino replied after a moment's thought.
• This novel contains one of the best uses of second-person narration that I have ever seen. It is only engaged in in a few of the Kafka chapters, and Murakami slips it in unobtrusively, often after the internal dialogues with the "boy named Crow." Far from the usual effect of the second person in establishing quasi-totalitarian demands for empathy by the reader, it primarily serves to enhance the basic theme of Kafka's multiple possible identities (itself an odd take on the possibilities of youth). The harshness of the vocative lingers only in the undercurrent of suspicion, also developed organically from the theme, that fate precludes even the option of interpretation.
  

Stephen King, Cujo

In Cujo, the father of a young boy scared of the dark composes this "catechism" for him, to be repeated every night before bedtime:

THE MONSTER WORDS
for Tad

Monsters, stay out of this room!
You have no business here.
No monsters under Tad's bed!
You can't fit under there.
No monsters hiding in Tad's closet!
It's too small in there.
No monsters outside of Tad's window!
You can't hold on out there.
No vampires, no werewolves, no things that bite,
You have no business here.
Nothing will touch Tad, or hurt Tad, all this night.
You have no business here.

Compare this with, say, the 大招:

魂乎歸來！無東無西，無南無北只。
東有大海，溺水浟浟只。
螭龍並流，上下悠悠只。
霧雨淫淫，白皓膠只。
魂乎無東！湯谷寂寥只。

魂乎無南！南有炎火千里，蝮蛇蜒只。
山林險隘，虎豹蜿只。
鰅鱅短狐，王虺騫只。
魂乎無南！蜮傷躬只。

魂乎無西！西方流沙，漭洋洋只。
豕首縱目，被發鬤只。
長爪踞牙，誒笑狂只。
魂乎無西！多害傷只。

魂乎無北！北有寒山，趠龍赩只。
代水不可涉，深不可測只。
天白顥顥，寒凝凝只。
魂乎無往！盈北極只。

and so on. (the same structure is also evident in the 招䰟).

Assuming that Stephen King doesn't read ancient Chinese poetry, even in translation, we have here perhaps an argument for general (rather than comparative) literature. Is there something in primordial (childish/"primitive") fears of monsters which itself, translated into ritual, summons up this liturgical structure of warning + elucidation? Does perhaps the depth of consciousness of an Other which is manifested in quasi-mythological fears, having enforced the presence of a binary on the mind, result in an automatic eruption of binarism into the syntactical structure? A question for a future literary neuroscience, perhaps...

...yet is history really obviated here? King's catechism is not of the same order as the Chu lyrics; it is a conscious attempt by a modern pop novelist to evoke the primordial--or, more precisely, to evoke a "primordial" as understood by King and his readers from the vantage point of late capitalism. The question would seem to be, is the contemporary unconscious shaped by an accidental cultural training into something which responds to certain sets of primordial formulae, or does it simply respond in certain ways because of structures in the brain. That is, of precedent and predisposition, which is accident and which is essence?

Murakami Come True

Shabby and rundown, Kabul Zoo is a far cry from zoos in the developed world, but has nevertheless come a long way since it suffered on the front line of Afghanistan's 1992-4 civil war.

Mujahideen fighters then ate the deer and rabbits and shot dead the zoo's sole elephant. Shells shattered the aquarium.

http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSTRE5444XQ20090505

C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew

Perhaps the popularity of Narnia comes from Lewis having just the right sort of imagination. So:

Just beside them was a little, very dark-wooded tree, about the size of an apple tree. The leaves were whitish and rather papery, like the herb called honesty, and it was loaded with little brown fruits that looked rather like dates.

This is what one gets by planting a piece of toffee in the soil of Narnia. It would have been easy enough to say, "toffee tree" and be done with it. That Lewis decides to imagine the tree as a whole, bark and leaves as well as fruits, is rather typical of his powers of conception. The taste of allegory is here too of course, honesty and apples, but it is not Pilgrim's Progress (or Regress). And it perhaps is why these books reach an audience beyond those poised to accept the theology: by offering the details, Lewis offers a theology embodied in something that feels like life, if hardly realism. It is not so much that the moral can be discarded by those who disagree, but perhaps overlooked, as one politely nods at the eccentricities of an evangelical guest even though one would not invite in to tea the traveling evangelist.

Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Been reading WUBC for about a year and a half; finally finished. As usual with Murakami, one is left feeling that this is a roman a clef, sans clef. One gets the big picture, if not the details, through the grand hotel-room speech at the end justifying the allegory: the legacy of Showa history is that thing, not quite like a to-be-aborted-baby, which can be drawn forth either for psychic healing or for a power grab. The details would probably require a knowledge of Japanese pop historiography and LDP machinations, circa mid-80's.

Without access to the specialist's knowledge, though, I am a little befuddled in trying to assess the jacket-blurbs that, quite naturally, call this epic. One does not need to endorse the idea that there can be a transhistorical genre called "epic" to wonder what motivates the NY literary-industrial complex to invoke the term. Is it reducible to length + history? One is tempted to speak of the "sweep" of a text in preparing the way for "epic" designation, but this is of course merely a substitution of one metaphor for another. I am reluctant to turn this into yet one more iteration of the poststructuralist game, though--it would be nice to come up with a provisional description of what is left to the term "epic" now, after the death of literary historiography.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland

• Remarkable how a book dedicated to gender and reproduction, and which anticipates third-wave feminism in its refusal to accept essentialisms, manages to avoid any mention of sexuality. Strategic feminism for Edwardian times?
• Also, the author shows amazing restraint in writing from the male first-person point of view; this could have been bitter satire, but the narrator is treated with such sympathy, one suspects CPG is trying to sway male readers to support political reform.
  

H.M. Posnett, Comparative Literature 1.1, "What is Literature?"

When an author begins an initial chapter with the self-declared purpose of offering a definition of the object of study, and then hedges this definition round, before and after, with qualification after qualification which, in final analysis, do in fact qualify the definition out of all usefulness; and when the author then declares the discovery of uselessness to be the prime benefit of the exercise, one would at least expect him to be deliberately tweaking authoritative expectations. But who is the authority whom Posnett addresses, and why would he feel the need to act like a satirist (albeit without much humor in the irony)? If CL were a doctoral dissertation, then I would recognize the passive-aggressive tone--but I believe that it was written after HMP had his position. Perhaps this chapter was provided at the request of the editors of the International Scientific Series, in their need to justify and explain the presence of the book?

戴天, “岣嵝山论辩”

Dai Tian is encroaching on old territory here. Once the Daoism starts to come through, in lines like:

问题是什么

是山

你说到底

存在还是不存在

道理是什么

是有还是没有

是名词还是

实质

Then it isn't so very hard to jump immediately to Messrs. Ouyang and Su, respectively:

平山阑槛倚晴空。山色有无中。手种堂前垂柳，别来几度春风。文章太守，挥毫万字，一饮千钟。行乐直须年少，尊前看取衰翁。

落日绣帘卷，亭下水连空。知君为我，新作窗户湿青红。长记平山堂上，敧枕江南烟雨，渺渺没孤鸿。认得醉翁语，山色有无中。一千顷，都镜净，倒碧峰。忽然浪起，掀舞一叶白头翁。堪笑兰台公子，未解庄生天籁，刚道有雌雄。一点浩然气，千里快哉风。

Does writing in the vernacular really mean that one has to substitute the prolix "存在还是不存在" for the concise "有无中"? The latter is hardly out of bounds, linguistically, for any competent contemporary speaker of Chinese. But, of course, this is a problem compounded by the subject of the poem. Not only, apparently, "Which is the real Mt. Goulou if they both look the same?" but also, "Is the substance of my Daoist-experience-of-the-mountain functionally equivalent to those of the Song lyricists, when I no longer can (or at least choose to) express it in the same words?" Perhaps this is part of the point here: what is the complaint against prolixity anyway, that it is non-signifying? Hmmm…"Neo-Song Postmodern"?

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Read Jane Eyre for the very first time, in Elizabeth Klett's excellent audiobook version. Lives up to the hype. But St. John Rivers is clearly given short shrift in the popular imagination, compared to Eddie "Pretty Boy" Rochester. Rochester wouldn't be what he is without Rivers; this is a book that reminds one why structuralism had a high point. Two colonialist voyages, one secular and one sacred, one west and one east; two ways of imprisoning a wife--in the attic vs. in heaven; and two mirror-image personalities, the irascible vs. the cold. Hindustani? Jane Eyre? Really?

Philip Larkin, “Church Going”

Recommended by Andrew Sullivan here. Midcentury use of form at its best; curiously, both metre and rhyme announce themselves more explicitly as the poem continues. "Frowsty"="fusty" (OED) from Old French frouste, ruinous, decayed. Usages like that, plus the form, make one want to read metapoetically.

Hua Tong, "Yan'an Seeds"

Cultural revolution fiction: what can one say about an individual piece? Like the individual humans of the time, the individual fictions are lost in the vast sea of the collective. But, taking this one as a proxy for the whole, it is curious how socialist fiction rides roughshod over the Aristotelian conception of literature as a medium between history and philosophy. The constant erasure of personality, individuality, unpredictability, and hence historicity by ideology makes literature less of a medium than a sort of sad, vacant stage on which one hero drags the corpse of the other by the heels.

Wang Zhenhe, "An Oxcart for a Dowry"

A fairly brutal exposition of the economic basis of marriage--or, more precisely, its dissolution. And interestingly, unlike most stories of this genre, there seems to be a lot of sympathy for the economic realism. No romance here. One is happy for Wanfa that he ends up able to eat, at the cost of giving up on a loveless marriage. Most animus seems directed against the social norms manifested in the (rather clumsy and abbreviated) frame narrative, which are unwilling to recognize unorthodox necessities.

Thoreau, Walden, "Reading"

• Curious to note that reading is gendered:

The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer the heroic writers of antiquity.

and again,

The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue...

A very old and standard gendering in itself, matter v. intellection. What surprises is the mapping of this onto moderns v. ancients (or perhaps the fact that no one has previously made such an association?)

• Is this just ignorance? Mistake?

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue...Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor Aeschylus, nor Virgil even.

Hard to fathom that HDT wouldn't have known of Chapman or Pope at least. And yet this doesn't seem metaphorical.

• How is it that HDT manages to be both radiantly inspiring and insufferably snooty? Nice trick.
  

Murakami, "Sleep"

Note that the book which the narrator reads first is Anna Karenina. Her own nightly dalliances are only with books, but the choice of reading highlights the quasi-adulterous nature of her "affair", which needs to be hidden from husband and child. (and is even accompanied by chocolates! can we get this woman on Oprah?)

Borges, "The Library of Babel"

The first paragraph, on close reading, gives a surprisingly nonsensical physical description. Only one of the open sides of the hexagon is described as opening out into another. Does the other side really do likewise, as one would naturally assume? If so, are these sides opposite each other, resulting in a single infinite row of hexagons? (There can be no hexagons to either side.) Then again, how does a single mirror in the vestibule (not in the restroom-compartment?) produce the illusion of infinity? And, for that matter, why would so many restrooms be necessary? (Perhaps the Freudian link between books and anal erotism...)