<snip>
The useful aspect of that is that the 'appeal to the higher authority', to
wit science, that some of Prynne's advocates insinuate, is subverted. So
then Prynne becomes a matter of take it or leave it poetry, which is the
only demand any poetry has a right to, rather than a poetry somehow
justified on Higher Grounds. [Dave B]
<snip>
I see it as the depredations made by a _supposedly_ higher authority being
resisted. That is, the issue is how to retrieve the connotative
(expressivity, feeling) from the claims being made upon it, regularly,
overwhelmingly, by the _denotative_. Although you put stress on *science*
the sources of what I'm calling depredation are quite various. However, they
do have this in common, that the denotative is anonymous (owned by steadily
multiplying disciplines of which it is the expression) and always (eo ipso)
it fragments; it classifies and sets boundaries. So the lexes of the
sciences are exemplary. (The connotative, by contrast is owned and
personal; it aspires to a fullness, or an unboundedness, which it can never
quite achieve.)
At any rate the opacity with which the reader is presented isn't (or doesn't
have to be) that of some arcane, hieratic *truth* which now awaits decoding.
Rather it's the effect of shifting away from an _enforced_ exteriority in
whose face we (including JHP) are rendered passive and towards a way of
speaking to which we (the readers) are external simply because we are not
JHP, and because our own subjectivities are ours (of course) and not his.
I'm tempted to suggest at this point that whereas *privacy* used to require
the creation of private space by processes of enclosure, it may now require
the opposite: some sort of breaking down of boundaries which are enforced
upon one from outside, the creation of commonality from (as it were) within.
And in that respect there's a problem.
CW
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'To write and eat at the same table' is harder than it sounds.
(J H Prynne)
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