On 19 Mar 2003 at 2:33, Mike Shipley wrote:
> In a message dated 3/18/2003 9:07:43 PM Pacific Standard Time,
> [log in to unmask] writes:
>
> You are basically suggesting that the exact same poem has
> different value depending on who wrote it.
>
>
> Yes, exactly....since the "value" of the poem is in our reaction
> to it, and not in any intrinsic value of the work itself. A poem
> is just words...it has no power except as we give it wings to fly.
> Value lies in the reader's mind, and is a choice made by the
> reader.
As stated this is trivially true and seriously false. It is certainly true that
an unread poem has no "value"--a word that should always be avoided
in aesthetics--for the set of all its nonreaders. The process of valuation
taken in the widest sense requires an emotional and aesthetic reaction.
But to consider a poem just a haphazard heap of words thrown together
without any intrinsic formal capacity to shape the reader's response is, if
I understand the remarks above, quite false. Valuation may lie
ultimately in the reader's mind, but it's not a perfectly free choice like the
decision to eat a Big Mac rather than a spinach salad. It takes good
poets the devil of a lot of work, as Yeats once said, to fashion words
into a form that gives them the capacity to evoke and condition a deep
reaction in us. Aesthetic valuation is not a branch of rational choice
theory. I know of no sensitive reader who experiences a poem and then
says to himself, "OK, this satisfies me in some way that has nothing to
do with its inherent verbal structure, so I make a choice to stamp it with
a Parnassian status denied some other wordheaps that don't satisfy me
for equally vacuous reasons."
The whole of Pseudo-Longinus' "On the Sublime" is a testament to
intrinsic power of words to transport the reader out of himself into a
higher plane of emotional experience. Not all poetry, of course, aspires
to "hypsos" (literally 'elevation'), which is just the extreme case of what
all good verse does in its own way: summon a manifold of intellectual,
emotional and aesthetic experience that may allow us a wide latitude of
interpretation but is not hermeneutically infinite. The ability of poetry to
do that is not accidental. The author of the treatise, as most Greek
critics, argues very persuasively that a "tekhnh" underlies this quality of
"hypsos," and if it underlies sublimity, it must in some fashion underlie
all superior poetry.
> It is the reader or the viewer that gives value to a work of art,
> and our perceptions of the creator's character and motives
> strongly affect our reaction to it.
If one takes the fallacious view that poetry is just a wordheap, then any
accidental feeling we may attach to it can color our reaction. It need not
be something to do with the author's unsavory biography. Virtually any
transient feeling, like that dull burning sensation left by the Big Mac in
our stomach, will affect our reaction. Having stripped the poem of all
intrinsic power to move us, every form of sentient twitch can change our
estimation of verbal pleasure.
> I think that the analogy of a great poem written by Hitler holds
> true. We would probably refuse to read it at all, and any academic
> who proclaimed admiration for Hitler's literary skills would be
> scorned and scourged into silence...or even into an apology.
If Hitler had written a great poem, say a kind of "Todesfuge" in negative,
a hymn that succeeded in erasing Celan's the same way Leverkuehn
tried to erase a predecessor's great spiritual work, it would certainly be
read and studied. There might be some attempt to limit the audience
and availability, but one wouldn't need a Department of Hitler Studies
for wide analysis and study. And we have in fact a very good parallel
with Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 masterpiece "Triumph des Willens," which
documents the Sixth Nuremburg Party Congress. Until at least the
1980s it was very difficult to get a 16mm print or tape. I managed to
secure one about 1985 for a class session on propaganda and led them
through it, to their growing and almost irresistible fascination, as an
object lesson in the power a work of aesthetic manipulation could
achieve. Now of course the film is easily available and often taught in
film classes. My students' reaction, as the reaction of nearly anyone
who sees it for the first time, disproves the claim that inherent aesthetic
structure plays no role in our responses.
> To suggest that we would accept and love a poem written by Hitler
> despite the author's hideous biography seems mildly dishonest...or
> at least unrealistic.
The issue is not our "love" for the Hitlerian poem, but our engagement
with its hypothetical enargeia. We have a lot of decent, occasionally
even great, poetry written in very bad causes. Auden's attempt to
banish "Spain 1937" from his canon is one example. The thousands of
encomia written to Stalin, including one by Mandelstam to save his life,
are others. We have fascist poems and communist poems of every
sort, not a few of which are worth reading. Our job is not to shirk their
study but to warn students what dangers can await us in art.
One cannot indict Spenser, then, just on the basis of his actions in
Ireland. The overwhelming import of his work, taken in its totality,
militates against this. If, however, Shipley could show that the ethical
lapses of his behavior (which I take to be proven) had a subtle,
corrupting influence on his ethics in the major works, that they somehow
corroded and trivialized his presentation of the human situation, that
they blunted his human sympathies, that they led to a simplification of
our moral options, that they produced a kind of allegorical pastiche, then
he might make a case.
======================================
Steven J. Willett
Shizuoka University of Art and Culture
1794-1 Noguchi-cho, Hamamatsu City
Japan 430-8533
Tel/Autofax: (53) 457-6142
Japan email: [log in to unmask]
US email: [log in to unmask]
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