----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Walker" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 5:23 PM
Subject: Re: Dead ends
> <snip>
> I know what you're saying is the conventional wisdom and it sounds very
> sophisticated but finally I think it's nonsense. Let's say there are two
> poems, and criticizing them you say that despite their different styles,
> personae, etc., they're "essentially" about the same thing. Or even that
> they both belong to the "school of quietude," or exemplify a given
> ideology.
> [FP]
> <snip>
>
> What distinguishes an apple from a pear? Is it form or content?
>
> <snip>
> It seems to me that your "instruction manual" analogy argues for my
> position, not yours. The "right way of operating the machine" exists
> independently of the style of the set of manuals; a good style corresponds
> to that right way. [FP]
> <snip>
>
> But what if there's no machine? And isn't that the point, that machines
> are
> implied (Dominic's 'different model') and not just described by manuals? A
> poem is just as ontically and mereologically _there_ as, say, a paper bag
> or
> a group of playing cards. However, we then add something extra. We
> attribute
> to it an ontology, a commentary on its own being, as part of our being
> readers, through the ontological commitments we read into it and through
> the
> use we make of cues within the poem. That's the implied machine.
>
> <snip>
> Content is that context upon which perspectives are altered by the
> appearance of a poem. [FP]
> <snip>
>
> If *content* is to mean anything it's got to be _in_ the poem in some
> sense.
> You can't put Grice in a bottle.
>
> CW
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> 'What's the point of having a language that everybody knows?'
> (Gypsy inhabitant of Barbaraville)
>
I'm probably obtuse and terminally outmoded in my thinking, but I don't see
the point of either of your first two objections. 1) An apple and a pear
are both fruits, foodstuffs, have fructose and seeds, belong to a certain
phylum --- similarities or overlap in content. They're both curved (though
in different ways), may have similar colors --- similarities or overlap in
form. Since they're not art works it's wrong to speak of "style," unless
one's being fanciful. 2) Machines are indeed implied by instruction
manuals. Human societies, values, conflicts are implied by poems. If a
poem is particularly forceful and pertinent, it also *describes these things
in some new (critical, re-contextualizing) way. 3) Agreed. "Content" is
not some extraneous consideration tendentiously yoked to a poem (the way
Lukacs dismissed all modernism as "bourgeois"). But to say that content is
"in" a poem is not to say that each poem embodies an absolutely unique,
monadic content, or that "content" is a dispensable category. 4) To answer
your gypsy: a language that everybody knows may be boring, but a language
nobody knows would not be a language.
|