HOW IT ADDS UP

Or perhaps 'whether it adds up' might be a more appropriate phrasal gesture at this stage, and I'm indicating here simply a few critical notes and jottings on certain perennially recurring questions of content and form (relevant even, say, to Shakespeare's relative looseness and slapdashness with the strictures of classical metre).

Deming Brown's book, "The Last Years of Soviet Russian Literature: Prose Fiction 1975-1991" (1993) has a useful comment on the climate of literary criticism following 'glasnost':

"A positive aspect of the literary scene...was the development of the semiotic and structural approach to the study of literature and culture, as developed chiefly at the University of Tartu under Yurii Lotman. This, together with the investigations and theories of the late Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) concerning the influence of folk culture on literature, and on the role of the comic and the grotesque, provided a major enrichment to literary study. The particular influence of Bakhtin, with his theories of language and discourse, and his concept of the polyphonic novel and 'carnival' as expressed in literature, became increasingly evident in Soviet criticism." (Brown p.10)

Bakhtin's key book "Rabelais and His World" dates from a phase of Russian Modernism in the decade or so before the doctrinaire reaction of socialist realism became mandatory official policy for the literary arts in Russia (1932), following which numerous Modernist tendencies in concentrated lyricism (the 'Acmeists', including Akhmatova, Mandelstam), in Formalism and Futurism (the radically disjunctive tactics of eg Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov), in Symbolism (eg Balmont, Viktor Shklovsky) were effectively suppressed. The recovery of interest in Bakhtin in the West stems in large part from a reappraisal of this and other oviet Modernist work, fiction, poetry and critical theorising, by the Parisian 'Tel Quel' group of Sollers, Kristeva, Barthes et al in the late '60s.

The 'colourful, hortatory' kind of poetics exemplified by Evtushenko indeed is untroubled by a return to Bakhtin, and the James Joyce whose Modernist word turnings have often been more hospitably received in Parisian than Anglo-Saxon literary circles could without too great a stretch of the critical imagination be appraised a 'Rabelaisian' writer.

Samuel Beckett, on the other hand, Joyce's erstwhile protege, if nonetheless displaying a "very Irish black humour, with clear debts to Sterne, Swift and Rabelais" according to Malcolm Bradbury ("The Modern British Novel" p.295), in many respects proposed to produce a kind of writing precisely what James Joyce's is not, as quoted in a contemporary interview:
"The more Joyce knew the more he could. He's tending towards omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I'm working with impotence, ignorance... I think anyone nowadays who pays the slightest attention to his experience finds it the experience of a non-knower, or a non-canner. The other type of artist - the Apollonian - is absolutely foreign to me." (interview from 'New York Times' 5 May 1956 cited in Michael Sheringham "Beckett 'Molloy'" (Grant and Cutler 1985).

There is also a need, I think, to register comments on Joyce's writing, besides those of Beckett, from leading women Modernists, that is, for instance, that Gertrude Stein said of James Joyce that "He is incomprehensible and anyone can understand him" (this is from Richard Ellmann "James Joyce" 1982 p.529). Virginia Woolf is often taken as one of Joyce's more demanding critics, yet conveying impressions of pre-publication extracts from "Ulysses" seen in 'The Little Review' assized of this material that:
"whatever the exact intention there can be no question but that it is of the utmost sincerity and that the result, difficult or unpleasant as we may judge it, is undeniably distinct. In contrast to those whom we have called materialists Mr Joyce is spiritual; concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame" ('Modern Novels' in the 'Times Literary Supplement' 10 Apr 1919) yet in weighing comparisons she could not find the outcome in this regard in confronting the writer's necessary problem "to contrive a means of being free to set down what he chooses" as more successfully realised than Hardy's final novel, "Jude the Obscure" with which "Ulysses", she maintained, "fails to compare".

What is occurring in Beckett's postwar response to the wake of James Joyce and his critic Woolf, who on the evidence it would appear would rather he were more the materialist and less the spiritualist, I would suggest, is a beckoning fragmentation of the Rabelaisian vision of the 'world', which, though still configurable as a whole entity is nevertheless so many steps beyond the linguistic grasp of being altogether coherently known, familiarised and internalised as different modes of experience resist homogenisation, diverge and scatter deeper into their intrinsic diversities.

An analytic approach to poetics and criticism is one means, then, of trying to make sense of where these expressive differences, definitively let loose in the regimes of postwar liberal democracy, are going, and what their disparate identities and ways with language attest to.

The picture also, I'd have to say, looks a lot less clear at the time than it does in retrospect, to reiterate a well worn truism.

On the impressive and fascinating postings lately from Chris Emery and Douglas Oliver (this is e-mail after all and not 'New Literary History') I could note that I find listings of writers and notions of group tendencies valuable as a critical and orienting tool (and always there are unfamiliar names, titles; and I'm afraid I'm given to read as much again as to speak or 'over'write with celebratory or dismissive opinions), yet what I am perhaps more intrigued by is the issue of how poetic language is put together: this may not be an entirely conscious or deliberate process and yet 'form' of some kind is what results (like mowing a lawn [/or fashioning a shoreline estuary] into neat perpendicular margins or allowing an irregular and overgrown verge to wend out etc).

Will have to leave this to do something more useful and socially redeeming. Any further thoughts in the next week or two I may jot into another post, depending, that is, on how things add up...


PS A few related pieces from the Prynne "Poems" out from Bloodaxe:
'Numbers in Time of Trouble' ("Kitchen Poems"), 'The Common Gain, Reversed', 'A Stone Called Nothing' ("The White Stones").





______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%