3/12/19
So, if I turn my attention to the major myths as foundations to my readings in a variety of media, the failing to guard against is that every instance simply becomes another example of the same concept. The specificity of the relationship between myth/instance/receiver has to be analyzed. If I play off of Barthes’s tripartite breakdowns where the signified finds a signifier that gets encoded in a sign and the sign (word/work/object) becomes a signifier for the signified (myth) which is decoded in the sign of the mythologist’s analysis, then there’s also a further trio (of allegory) that takes the mythologist’s reading as “signifier” matched to a signified (the cultural work of the sign) that finds its sign in the lyrical history of reception, which is to say that the sign is the coming to consciousness of the formation fantasies and that realizing them, in writing, is the entire goal.
With this approach in mind I have to begin with the mythic sign and move toward the allegory of becoming. This process is personal and individual (hence, the idiosyncrasy) but it is also social/collective because it assumes the general presence and reception of the myth; as critique of the myth the analysis serves a proleptic purpose—a conduit between the past, where the myth was received, the present, where its effects are analyzed, and the future where a possible benefit accrues, not as revolutionary gesture but more as an existential truth, a Sisyphean perpetuation of the burden of knowledge, of the framing of the idea of an emancipatory act. “No exit,” indeed, but that is not a cause for despair if, a good jester, one accepts the joke is on oneself.
Playing with these ideas in my mind at the moment, I see that—to recall my four-part fantasia—ethos would be the comic, the jester’s wit, the ability to laugh at absurdity and to see the cosmic joke in human affairs (how to take people seriously?); pathos would be the heroic, which moves from superheroes to tragic heroes—Christ, Faust, Shakespearean—to antiheroes, Dostoevskyian, in film and fiction; eros would be the poetic—the lyrical—finding its image in woman/the feminine, and having to recognize its presence in oneself: a self involved in rendering the sensual mental sphere which is what I basically find in poetry or at least my poetic heroes; finally, logos would be the narrative principle—uniting novelist and certain film-makers as controllers of the narration/diegesis. It will be seen at once that this change in emphasis, to the theoretical or categorical, lessens the attention to the diachronic, historical approach—the point of autobiographical criticism—but not if I can help it.
My sense of art history, as a sequence of styles and their attendant myths, should keep me focused on the passage of time as an element in reception/conception. (Note: I’m sitting here, now, in the Blue State Coffee Shop on York Street in New Haven, which used to be, when I first moved here, in 1994, a Willoughby’s Coffee Shop—the view out the window on York Street on the rear of Yale’s Sterling Library hasn’t changed much (though there was construction on the outside of the library for many years). I can’t sit here and not remember writing one of the poems I worked on for “At Large,” the poem called “Backseat Driver.”) My point—in that parenthesis—being that the time that has passed from the day of that poem to this—which is to say from the doctorate to now—is not lost but part of the perspective. Time must be contained in the views of the myths, in the allegory of their reception, or I have learned nothing. These thoughts, about the years at Princeton, come from re-reading that Barthes essay, which takes me back to starting at Princeton and the idea that exercised my mind at the time, to unpack the transition from the realist novel to something more subjective, based on an aesthetic response, to see how—again—the impact of history plays into aesthetic experience (a concept I might now see as ‘myth’) as a thematic element of every narrative—which is to say an indication of the author’s choices/assumptions about the “state of the art” and the position of the probable reader/receiver. What kept me from fully embracing Barthes et al. at the time was the sense that semiology was ultimately not concerned with art qua art. In other words, it did not consider the ‘usage’ of the strategies of art—in poetry, in literature—as substantially different from any other form of discourse or media. My “aesthetic experience” claim sought to foreground that particular use value which can only be found in art. With the eclipse of most of my artistic assumptions in the name of ubiquitous media, it’s no surprise that those ideas didn’t garner much support.
The concession, at this remove, occurs on several fronts. First, the situatedness of the critic. The objectivity of theory and history has always bothered me. The claims I make, as a critic, are to some degree performative—which is where both autobiography and lyrical self come into play, as they must, or there is no point in me writing this. My failings in the profession come primarily from trying to write as others do, to appropriate an appropriate voice/stance. If I am to “free my hand” then I’ve got to own the stance entirely, which means “owning up” to the particular idiosyncrasies of the critical gesture. Second: that situatedness has a political dimension because of our surrounding context which interrogates privilege, racial placement, gendered identity and all aspects of the social mimesis. That critical tendency became prevalent as I was finishing at Princeton and was the marked position of the academy at the time—the university as a white male dominated space of intellectual colonialism, an oppression by other means. Because of the steady chipping away at that monolith, any work that arrives as the intervention of a hetero white male with Ivy League antecedents is going to be suspect if not irrelevant. That I can’t help, but I can accept, jester-like, the use of irony. “Hide, fox, and all after” has long been my motto, with all due acknowledgment of its source. The placement of critical pressure on historical accident, the stress on trivial identification factors (whom one’s ancestors were and whom one has sex with and how) as determinant of “position,” is a way of recognizing that the social uses of art, more—its value for social recognition and identification—is all that matters in this period.
The “driven to abstraction” nature of my earliest incarnations take root there as there is no access to that mode of thought by means of those trivial factors. So this—belated—recognition of the social importance—for critical purposes—of that ground is something that the criticism must register. The work on “Between Days” has made that aspect of my past—now told by a self-styled narrator—more accessible and even relevant, particularly where the “myth” of the author/artist is concerned. No doubt a part of that analysis will be of the trajectory of that concept as it plays through my earliest identifications and into the state it now occupies in all its situated banality. What kept me away from biographical/historical analysis of the artist/author before was my sense that such work was essentially gossip writ large. I still believe that, but there is some merit in meeting that view with a grasp of the self-deprecating humor necessary to the form (“who’s he when he’s at home?”). If one can’t countenance the continuity between text and being, between the authority of the author and the triviality of the person, then one becomes a worshipper, an idolater. That I am not.
Third: aesthetic experience as but one factor (even if a “supreme fiction”) in the reception of the everyday fiction of mediated existence. Some version of that argument was contained—at what lengths!—in the transition from modernism to postmodernism and it could be said that my perspective is still a postmodern, “Baby Boom” perspective on the era that I lived through, but, if so, it’s one that has been shaped both by my elders (those born in the ‘30s and ’40s), my contemporaries (born in the ‘50s and ‘60s), and my juniors (born in the ‘70s and ‘80s). The elders come to me through literature, film and rock; the contemporaries share those fields. The juniors—as my stepson’s and my daughter’s generation—inherit them and have their own emphases. The subsequent generation (‘90s and ‘00s) is the student population that may or may not receive the lesson. My locus in that tripartite division is key to my outlook, and it will be key to the historical situatedness of the account. Which is a way of saying that the context—supplied by those who lived through World War 2—is distorted by the elders, moving into the counter-cultural emphases of those born in the ‘40s (who are now our elder statespersons), received—with all due irony and apathy—by those born in the ‘50s and ‘60s (a kind of “lost generation” of its own, but finding—for me—some ready heroes, particularly in rock, less so in the fine arts), moving on to the generation now approaching its fulcrum of middle-age (forty, fifty years old). The true juniors—in their twenties and thirties—are so readily identified with the twenty-first century and its technologies of (so far) benign surveillance and its failing environments and embattled borders as to be largely indifferent to these arguments. So, granted, the target audience is still “my students”—those who were grad students and undergrads in the 2000s. As we move into the 2020s I can only gesture toward what deluge awaits, seeing 2022—100 years after Ulysses—as the place where the record of modernist myth must reach a kind of end-stop. So, then, the myths . . . [Note: I’ve projected spring of 2022 as the completion of the Tarot panels, 12/2/20]
A simple schema would yield ethos as comedy, pathos as tragedy, eros as lyric (whether poetry or song), logos as narrative (in film and fiction). But, while that might work at the schematic level, I don’t think it works in practice. The “comic” as an ethos could be a factor in any genre, as such it’s part of the perspective. Yet I see this as significant, an aspect of my outlook that I may have neglected. The point, then, is to establish the originary myths. The pathos of the hero and the antic comic hero—the value of irony. One would be the hero as redeemed by suffering, another would be the hero whose insouciance carries the day. Another would be the femme fatale of drama and of song; the muse; the model; the artist-hero; the creative ego; the demiurge; the daemon; the various myths of the rock-bard, like the movie star, are deeply invested with a specular identity, but that also serves the scholar-star, the creative genius, the unprecedented talent, the romantic hero; then there’s the trickster, the jester, the fool. The narrator-hero, the observer, the chronicler, the historian, the critic—these are all positions, entities, but the task is to extract the ideology and poetics of these subject positions. And since most of them mark the reception of and identification with the works of lit, music, film, the analysis should take us into the basis of intrinsic conceptions. What I’ve mainly been thinking of, in terms of explication, is my own formation as a critic-subject, a developmental account, but this newer conception puts the critique at the forefront.
Thus, the development is of a series of myths that prolong the ideology of art (as alternative to culture) and invite the poetics of the self-formation that leads to the critique. The end result is not an artwork, nor an artist’s creative ego, but a critical engagement with the perspective made possible by certain interactions and experiences—aesthetic, yes, but requiring an account of what that entails. It’s likely that at any given stage in this diachronic account there will be dominant figures, the unavoidable “new figure” that encapsulates and challenges, that creates the expectation of a further satisfaction. Of course, the line I was considering previously—derived from Stevens’ “Supreme Fiction”—was the abstraction (ethos), change (pathos), pleasure (eros) trio, which still pertains, but at a more meta level. And that level (allegory or supreme fiction) is the vantage point that may be “beyond critique” or “beyond interpretation” as some would have it. It’s the passion for the task that undoes the performance of it. The untamed, untutored essence of need. Abstraction, as I said earlier today, was the necessary lie against bleak reality, recognizing the lack within the particular—so a supplement for the sake of a “higher calling” (a myth in itself); change (pathos) has always been intimate to my vision—what found such fascination in Proust, the realization of time as the tension between “the eternal” (the analogue to an ethos of “the universal”) and the time-bound loss, the impossibility of a fixed value. And that leaves eros/pleasure as the temptation to linger in good feelings, the sustaining attention to sensual satisfactions—seeing, hearing, touching, consuming—where “the work” is a feast, a dance, a spectacle, a trance, a poem. Breaking the trance is the work of criticism, an inscription on a tomb.
I wait in anger and amusement
In my rehearsals for retirement
If I'd have known the end would end in laughter
Still I'd tell my daughter that it doesn't matter
Farewell, my own true love, farewell, my fancy
Are you still ownin' me, love, though you failed me?
But one last gesture for your pleasure
I'll paint your memory on the monument
In my rehearsals for retirement
--Phil Ochs, “Rehearsals for Retirement” (1969)
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