topic/literary-theory
Terry Eagleton,
Jean-Paul Sartre,
James Wood,
Zadie Smith,
Annie Dillard,
George Saunders,
Ben Lerner,
Richard Seymour,
Jon Baskin
What is valid for the elements of artistic creation is also valid for their combinations. The painter does not want to draw signs on his canvas, he wants to create a thing. And if he puts together red, yellow, and green, there is no reason why this collection of colours should have a definable significance. [...] they never express his anger, his anguish, or his joy as do words or the expression of the face; they are impregnated with these emotions; and in order for them to have crept into these colours, which by themselves already had something like a meaning, his emotions get mixed up and grow obscure. Nobody can quite recognize them there.
Tintoretto did not choose that yellow rift in the sky above Golgotha to signify anguish or to provoke it. It is anguish and yellow sky at the same time. Not sky of anguish or anguished sky; it is an anguish become thing, an anguish which has turned into yellow rift of sky, and which thereby is submerged and impasted by the qualities peculiar to things, by their impermeability, their extension, their blind permanence, their externality, and that infinity of relations which they maintain with other things. That is, it is no longer readable. It is like an immense and vain effort, forever arrested half-way between sky and earth, to express what their nature keeps them from arresting.
weird but kinda beautiful
[...] We are within language as within our body. We feel it spontaneously while going beyond it toward other ends [...]
I really like this for some reason (kinda Wittgensteinian)
Thus, it is not true that one writes for oneself. That would be the worst blow. In projecting one's emotions on paper, one barely manages to give them a languid extension. The creative act is only an incomplete and abstract moment in the production of a work. If the author existed alone he would be able to write as much as he liked; the work as object would never see the light of day and he would either have to put down his pen or despair. But the operation of writing implies that of reading as its dialectical correlative and these two connected acts necessitate two distinct agents. It is the joint effort of author and reader which brings upon the scene that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. There is no art except for and by others.
On the one hand, the literary object has no other substance than the reader's subjectivity; Raskolnikov's waiting is my waiting which I lend him. Without this impatience of the reader he would remain only a collection of signs. His hatred of the police magistrate who questions him is my hatred which has been solicited and wheedled out of me by signs, and the police magistrate himself would not exist without the hatred I have for him via Raskolnikov. That is what animates him, it is his very flesh.
Such optimism was at the opposite extreme of the writer's conception of his art; the artist needs an unassimilable matter because beauty is not resolved into ideas. Even if he is a prose-writer and assembles signs, his style will have neither grace nor force if it is not sensitive to the material character of the word and its irrational resistances. And if he wishes to build the universe in his work and to support it by an inexhaustible freedom, the reason is that he radically distinguishes things from thought. His freedom and the thing are homogeneous only in that both are unfathomable, and if he wishes to readapt the desert or the virgin forest to the Mind, he does so not by transforming them into ideas of desert and forest, but by having Being sparkle as Being, with its opacity and its coefficient of adversity, by the indefinite spontaneity of Existence. That is why the work of art is not reducible to an idea; first, because it is a production or reproduction of a being, that is of something which never quite allows itself to be thought; then, because this being is totally penetrated by an existence, that is, by a freedom which decides on the very fate and value of thought. That is also why the artist always had a special understanding of Evil, which is not temporary and remediable isolation of an idea, but the irreducibility of man and the world of Thought.
his writing makes no sense but damn is it pretty
[...] We hope that our books remain in the air all by themselves and that their words, instead of pointing backwards towards the one who has designed them, will be toboggans, forgotten, unnoticed, and solitary, which will hurl the reader into the midst of a universe where there are no witnesses; in short, that our books may exist in the manner of things, of plants, of events, and not at first like products of man. We want to drive providence from our works as we have driven it from our world. [...]
[...] The writer, in opposition to bourgeois ideology, chose to speak to us of things at the privileged moment when all the concrete relations which united him with the objects were broken, save the slender thread of his gaze, and when they gently undid themselves to his eyes, untied sheaves of exquisite sensations.
Free verse and rhyming poetry are often said to be in opposition. But, really, they are just different versions of what poetry does. Just as a rhyming poem is built up out of a pattern of repeating end sounds, in some pattern or even irregularly, a poem can rhyme conceptually: that is, through ideas that relate in some way, obvious or hidden. Through their redness, “rose” and “fire truck” rhyme conceptually, as do “deconstruction” and “deep sea diving” (Jacques Derrida and Jacques Cousteau). It can not only be fun to conceptually rhyme, but also be good practice to write formal poems that use conceptual, as opposed to sonic, rhymes. A poem that seems too static because it is locked into a single idea, or a rigid expository framework, can often become both looser and also more true when the poet allows ideas to rhyme conceptually. Conceptual rhyme is not merely a pleasure for poets, but very close to the purpose of poetry, to provide a place for associative thinking.
I should say that, at the time and for many years after, I received almost nothing from this class. I remembered almost nothing, consciously, that Bloom said about all the poems we’d read. My marginalia is incomprehensible and almost worthless; the notebook long since lost in an attic. Only when I’d completely freed myself from academia and abandoned all hope of an academic career, even an academic life, did I return to those poems, again not even consciously, and find not just pleasure in them but meaning, which is also too earnest and defined a word to say what I discovered. And then in those moments I don’t hear Bloom’s voice at all, but I’m aware that the — pleasure is too soft a word — insight I receive from, say, Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” or John Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended” takes place in a Bloomian universe: gnostic, agonistic, a beauty with terror in it, clashing structures and strange cohabitations, a poem as a play in as many acts as the poet needs.
If you got the Bloom experience at the right time of your life, as a poet or a person who loves poetry, then he could be perfect. At a crisis moment for such a person, he might also be terrible. There is something to be said for teaching that has no “deliverables,” for which the only answer to the evaluator’s question about what was learned is: “Ask me in five years, then again in ten, then in twenty.” In 1998, I had vague feelings for poetry that I didn’t know were at odds with the academic persona I was trying to cultivate. I put poems into meaning machines linked to my ambition and ground them into dust. Years later, once I’d relinquished the need to definitively interpret anything in such a way that it could be professionally recognized and circulated, in ways that credited the originality and rigor of my interpretations, the poems came back to me as poetry and I could hear them: sometimes as poems that did not transcend themselves; sometimes as individuals marked, as we are, by others living and dead.