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?