Even Homer Sleeps

According to the ancient Roman poet Horace, even Homer sleeps. What he means is that we should forgive poets and artists for the odd mistake or inconsistency; after all, they are only human. And I think, in some way, he also meant it quite literally. He urges his readers to practice and work hard in order to become better writers, but how good can you be if you are deprived of your rest and good health?

For that reason, I am closing the books and going to bed. Thanks Horace.

My Thoughts On Plato

DISCLAIMER: As usual, if you are not interested in Plato, I wouldn’t bother reading this post, it is probably really, really boring.

Believe it or not, I had my first encounter with Plato’s Republic today. I am doing a Ph.D. in English so you’d think I’d have read it; but until now I have successfully avoided it. It is interesting — but really problematic. Here’s the deal, if you’re at all interested:

Republic Books II, III, and X are dialogues all about how to properly educate the future rulers, or guardians, of the hypothetical ideal society they (Socrates and his buds) are constructing. These books are of particular interest to literary studies because they are about poetry and art, as acts of representation, and their role in this ideal society.

According to Plato’s Socrates, the education system should be comprised of “exercise for the body and cultural studies for the mind” (49). [As an aside, I'm not talking about Plato's opinion or Socrates' opinion -- it is all spoken by Plato's textual representation of Socrates; a clever way of disavowing responsibility for the opinions put forth]. In the dialogue, they agree that cultural studies should come first, as children are told stories from the beginnings of their lives. What is made clear right from the get-go here is that there is a strong moral imperative to censor poetry and stories for children, as these representations shape their view of the world; and, according to Plato’s Socrates, once a world view or ethical code is impressed upon a child, it cannot be changed. Though poetry may be allegorical, children do not have the capacity to tell the difference between something that is allegorical and something that is not; thus, it is important to shield them from the possibility of corruption by censoring poetry (and other art) that is not “true” and morally good. I put true in quotation marks there because I think that Plato’s notion of truth and morality is rather more ambiguous than he would like it to be. More on that later.

So, what he argues is, ultimately, that “a very great deal of importance should be place on ensuring that the first stories [children] hear are best adapted for their moral improvement” (51). From there he is challenged to define what the boundaries of poetry should be. It is unquestionable that the state’s rulers will decide what can be written and what cannot; but how do the rulers make those decisions? It is here that Plato’s Socrates makes his appeal to a universal morality.

First, he takes issue with the idea that gods be represented as all-powerful and responsible for everything. After all, god is good, and hence cannot be responsible for any bad in the world. Gods should not be represented as performing actions out of ill will, as they often are in the epics of his time. It is okay for gods to punish in poetry, but only if it can be shown that those on the receiving end were deserving of punishment, and only as long as the audience does not see those people suffering as a result of their punishment. He also takes issue with gods being represented as shape-shifters. If gods are perfect (as, for him, they undoubtedly are), then they could only change their form for the worse; and any being who is intrinsically good would not even consider changing for the worse. So not only should they not be represented as such in poetry, but women should also refrain from telling their children stories of gods taking on disguises and spying on them in order to encourage good behaviour. Plato’s Socrates claims that if gods are allowed to be represented as such by poets — as shape-shifters, trouble-makers, or fallible beings who act out of vengeance or emotion or trickery — then the future guardians of the Republic would not grow up as religious people, nor would they strive for godliness themselves.

Not only should poets not create unfavourable representations of the gods, but they should also not represent Hades in a negative light, for that instills a fear of death in children and when they grow up to be soldiers they will not have the courage to die in battle if necessary. The logical following from this is that poets should not represent mourning either, for mourning for the loss of someone else implies that their death is not a happy and courageous moment. There is a strong suggestion here that mourning and sadness is also a weakness; that it is not manly or desirable to indulge in emotions. He even goes so far as to say that representations of laughter are equally bad because they encourage laughter in their audience, and laughter is too emotional. Of paramount importance is that poetry not represent indulgence in any bodily pleasures either, including food, drink, and sex. If these things are mentioned in poetry it should only be to show a hero refusing temptation. These criteria don’t only apply to representations of the gods, but also of human heroes and regular people. So Plato’s Republic is a truly ascetic state, rooted in detached rationality.

When a child is raised with only images of beauty and goodness, then they will inevitably become rational and reasonable. They would learn to love only beautiful things and be necessarily offended by badness or ugliness.

What the dialogue comes to in Book X is that poetry (and all types of artistic representation) is “two generations away from reality” (70) — God creates the true thing, the human manufacturer makes a copy of it, and the artist is only representing the copy. And in addition, representations are always representations of the appearance of things and not things as they actually are. This logic of course relies on the theory of the Idea or the Form: that, of each thing, there is an innate Form or Idea, a type, and all singular manifestations of that type are copies of how the individual creator interprets the Form or Idea. For example, there is the Idea of a table — and there are all the tables that ever were. No individual table contains the complete essence of table-ness. And the artist who paints a table is only representing his own perception of how a particular table looked from a particular angle, through the distortion of his own position. It is a copy of a copy. The audience is the final link in the artistic chain and, by their own perceptions, they further distort the image. So, in the end, there is no truth.

By this logic, poetic representation is merely a form of trickery that plays on our perceptions’ propensity to distort things. His conclusions are such: “a representer knows nothing of value about the things he represents; representation is a kind of game, and shouldn’t be taken seriously; and those who compose tragedies in iambic and epic verse are, without exception, outstanding examples of representers” (74-5). The only way around this problem is the use of reason and rationality — rational thinking, like for instance measuring and counting, cannot be fooled by distorted perceptions.

Not only does poetry provide false representation, but it engages that part of a person who is vulnerable to wrong thinking by moving them to emotion and irrationality. Because of these dangers then, poetry must be banned from the Republic in order to protect the future guardians and provide them a proper moral upbringing. All that Plato’s Socrates would allow would be “hymns to the gods and eulogies of virtuous men. If you admit the entertaining Muse of lyric and epic poetry, then instead of law and the shared acceptance of reason as the best guide, the kinds of your community will be pleasure and pain” (79). What is at stake in this decision is nothing less than the morality of men and the stability of the state.

There are a few things at issue here. First of all, these decisions are all made by the state’s rulers. He even claims that, though poets lie, and lying is tantamount to committing a crime against the state, it is necessary for the rulers to lie to the people to maintain order and peace. This is a truly terrifying totalitarian state. Who places boundaries on the rulers? No one. They are not even subject to the same morality as everyone else as it is deemed okay for them to take whatever liberties necessary to maintain peace and order, otherwise known as control and power. It is the ongoing state of exception in which all kinds of atrocities are permissable if rulers perceive a threat to their state, which inevitably means a threat to their own power.

Second major issue: This all depends on a universal idea of moral goodness. But where is this morality coming from for Plato? It is clear that he refers to the morals laid out by God — but what are those morals? Is there agreement on them at this particular historical moment? I wasn’t around in Greece a few millennia ago, but I seriously doubt it. If there were agreement, these sorts of writings and reflections would have been unnecessary. Or at the very least, Plato’s Socrates wouldn’t find it necessary for rulers to lie to their people to maintain order, for the people and rulers would already agree on the principles of conduct.

At the conclusion of Book X, he says that what is at stake is “whether one becomes a good or a bad person, and consequently has the calibre not to be distracted by prestige, wealth, political power, or even poetry from applying oneself to morality and whatever else goodness involves” (80). I suppose that, in Plato’s Republic, if people are brought up in the way he suggests, they wouldn’t be vulnerable to those things that make the terrible totalitarian ruler. But I imagine that once those people experienced the power that comes with the state of exception, they may not be so impermeable to corruption.

Incidentally, part of my need to summarize the basics here is to make sure that I actually get the basics… So if you are familiar with Plato, and you think I’m missing something, please tell me!

Breton’s Nadja and Everyday Life

DISCLAIMER: This will probably only be interesting for those of you who have read André Breton’s Surrealist “novel” Nadja –

Breton’s Nadja is made up of a number of elements that mark it out as distinct from mainstream novelistic narration. Composed of: a contemplative ‘preface’ where a number of anecdotes of coincidence are recounted and reflected upon; the story of Breton’s various encounters with a woman called Nadja; photographs that relate to this story and to other parts of the text; drawings and other ‘evidence’ related to the text; and a final afterword — Nadja doesn’t add up to a novel. Maurice Blanchot suggests that the main text of Nadja should be seen as a récit, a tale that tells of a singular and exceptional event.

[...]

If, for Blanchot, the novel deals in the everyday, it does so in a way that evades the everyday. On the other hand the tale is the everyday when the everyday is exceptional or marvellous. In its refusal to exercise the rhetorical tropes of the novel and persuade us we are entering a ‘world’, Nadja offers us the marvellous everyday stripped of description. Here places are actual. [...] The ambivalent representation of Nadja’s relationship to the everyday is exemplary of the Surrealist conception of everyday life: she is seen as having escaped the everydayness of the everyday, at the same time as being in danger of falling back into its routines. The gendering of the everyday is made vivid by a femininity out of control; at the same time, another feminine everydayness threatens to engulf Nadja in the domestic.

(Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, 51-52)

The Beginnings of Reading

I am finally making my first real forays into dissertation research. Well, not my first exactly… I have done a lot of compiling of resources over the past little while. But this week marks the beginning of my serious reading. Since I have to study for exams my dissertation reading will be limited for a few months, but for now I’d like to get a start on it so that I can write a proposal.

Today I read a good chunk of Ben Highmore’s book Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. Just trying to get a sense of the theoretical field, since I haven’t actually read all of the primary texts, nor will I be able to for quite a few months. So far I’ve found his discussion of Walter Benjamin the most compelling. Benjamin’s critique of Surrealism was that it failed to use the available tools to mobilize a political critique of modernity, but instead remained in thrall to modernity. Following Surrealism, his project was to find an appropriate form within which to represent the everyday that would capture the experience of everyday modernity and render it meaningful. This form would then make possible a political critique of modernity and of the history of progress. Though his precise politics remains abstract and undeveloped, I find the idea of an appropriate form for critique very interesting. It will be interesting to see if the literary forms of my primary dissertation texts could possibly fall into this category. Particularly Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage. As a novel (or series of novels) that is all about experimenting with form and capturing the everyday life of a modern woman, I wonder if Benjamin would see political potential in it.

What Highmore comes to in his discussion of Georg Simmel, Surrealism, and Benjamin is that all three were concerned with finding new forms to represent the changed and changing experience of everyday modernity. He also notes that all three privileged the urban experience as the true arena of everyday modernity. This then begs the question of what other kinds of modern experience are left unexplored. He continues to ask another more specific question that will be very relevant to my own project, one that I hope to at least partially answer:

How would the everyday lives of women feature in this project? For the most part women are absent. Part of the project of developing ‘theories of the everyday’ is going to be rescuing pre-feminist theory from its gendered orientation. There is much here that may be useful: Simmel’s emphasis on spheres of sociability (the meal, for instance) might be reworked in a way that articulates the gendering of the everyday; Benjamin’s work on interiors might similarly be explored. (74)

I was left with the feeling that I am venturing into an area ripe for research, and that got me pretty excited! I’m looking forward to finishing the book and writing my proposal now.

Initial Thoughts

I think I’ve finally figured out what I’m going to do for my dissertation. It of course depends on what I find in my reading and whether or not my supervisor thinks it’s a good idea. My supervisor seems to have a good instinct for what works and what doesn’t so I trust he will let me know ahead of time if it’s going to be a disaster. Though he claims that I too must have good instincts or I wouldn’t have made it this far. He may be right about that — we’ll see.

The primary literary texts will be authored by Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and perhaps D.H. Lawrence. I knew I wanted to work on Woolf and Richardson but part of my problem thus far was feeling like my choice in authors was going to necessitate a feminist project. I am very resistant to this for a number of reasons. I have done a fair bit of work on feminism and gender already and I haven’t been terribly excited about it since I finished my Master’s. Also, it seemed to me that any feminist reading I came to of the texts would be incredibly boring — it is really hard to say anything beyond ‘this is an example of the feminine aesthetic,’ ‘this is écriture feminine,’ ‘feminine perspectives are different,’ ‘this is how gender is constructed,’ blah, blah, blah. Boring. And already done by legions of scholars before me.

What interests me lately is questions of politics, political resistance, representation, style, and specifically the everyday. It didn’t properly occur to me until yesterday, as I was discussing it with a friend, that I could use the feminist angle as a way in to the everyday. Framing the project with women’s particular experience of modernity, then using it to talk my way into politics, resistance, or aesthetics. I could frame it thus without having to resort to a ‘traditional’ feminist reading. Brilliant! And there is piles of room for that kind of a reading as well considering most feminist work on modernism is banal and uninteresting.

The inclusion of Lawrence would be a way of addressing the gendered experience of modernity without doing a ‘women’s writing’ project. So much of the work on Lawrence is preoccupied with his either being a proto-fascist or a misogynist. It would be nice to shed a different light on some of his texts, particularly Women in Love. Lawrence is the least stable part of the plan at this point though.

My friend made a very valid point yesterday as well — in the eyes of a hiring committee, this would be a very sexy topic. I could market myself as not only being able to teach 20th Century Literature, Modernism, and Theory, but also women’s writing, and from a potentially more sophisticated point of view.

So here it begins.

I’m sure you are wondering why I am writing in my blog about this. After all, not very many people would be interested in reading it. However I find that, if I am writing just for myself, I don’t write. Many journals of mine have ended up in the garbage or stashed in a storage box with only three entries in them. If I think there is the remotest possibility that someone is listening, I feel compelled to share. In turn, I’m hoping that anyone who is reading will also feel compelled to share their thoughts. The lone scholar is a myth as far as I’m concerned, yet in practice we are still plagued by the solitariness of this endeavour. I strongly believe that it doesn’t have to be that way — that the best way to work through these things is to talk them out with trusted colleagues and friends.

You may also be wondering if I am worried about people stealing my ideas. Well, guess what — I am really not. I don’t intend to write my (inevitably) brilliant dissertation online. What I really want is a space to say all the things I won’t actually write down in the finished project. You know, the stupid stuff, the thinking-through of it. If someone wants to publish my stupid stuff, good luck with that, I don’t think it’s worth much to the academic market. That last sentence is not a permission by the way.

The Angriest Dog in the World

The Angriest Dog in the World strip came about when I was working on Eraserhead. I drew a little dog. And it looked angry. And I started looking at it and thinking about it, and I wondered why it was angry.

And then I did a four-block strip with the dog never moving – three panels were set in the day and one was at night. So there’s a passage of time, but the dog never moves. And it struck me that it’s the environment that’s causing this anger – it’s what’s going on in the environment.

–David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, p. 41

Some minds will always be a mystery. David Lynch’s book doesn’t illuminate the enigmas of his work really — but it does describe his attitude toward the art of living and creating quite well. Probably my favourite part is when he says: “Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they’re like poison to the filmmaker or artist. They’re like a vise grip on creativity. If you’re in that grip, you can hardly get out of bed, much less experience the flow of creativity and ideas. You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas” (8).

This, to me, is a pleasant turn away from the idea that the artist has to suffer to create anything honest or beautiful.

Mind you, I don’t know if I should be taking life advice from the guy who brought us Lost Highway.