Margaret Atwood's "Rat Song." Jacques Brel and The New Criticism.

Indian Falls, Owen Sound, Ontario



Let's stay Canadian a bit longer. And in case anyone has fallen into the shakes from an absence of poetry, here is "Rat Song" by Canadian novelist, Margaret Atwood. I didn't know she also wrote poetry, and I kind of like her curious venture here. What do you think?

Rat Song by Margaret Atwood : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.



I'm not sure I'm finished with Jacques Brel, but I know I was long-winded in my Sunday review, so the above is my effort to be brief once again.

Let me add one more note on Brel in case I don't get back to it (your wishes will help me decide). At the risk of becoming obnoxious about The New Criticism, I must toss out something I came across while meandering through Jacques Brel commentary. In the Stratford Program Notes, Lois Kivesto, PhD, writes: “In 1969, Brel himself attended and exclaimed to Blau [who was responsible for the English version]: ‘You have really done it. You have separated me from the work. The songs have a life of their own. I really enjoyed them.’”

Maybe that's all my version of the New Criticism amounts to: both reader and writer recognize that the artist has birthed his baby--his work--into the world. Now he and we must see what and how it goes about being that which it is.

Studies of the author's life, region, period in history, culture, ethnicity, and so forth might be interesting or helpful, but they must not supplant the-baby-the-work as the primary subject. We can have a meaningful experience with a Brel song without knowing anything about Brel the man, or his love life, or Belgium, or the particulars of two World Wars. Conversely, we can know a lot about that background material, but without the song itself, it means little.

For those who have been on this ride with me before, I'll stop and thank you for your patience. But the quotation about Brel is, from my perspetive, just too good to pass up.



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GOTHPUNKUNCLE AND THE NEW CRITICISM

Dialogue








Backward now to my August 11 post and onward, finally, to GOTHPUNKUNCLE (GPK) with apologies for my tardiness and appreciation for his patience. This got long (what a surprise), so I’ll spread it over two days. Stay tuned.

First, here’s a quick and, I hope, unnecessary clarification: when I said "singer," I meant the composer at least as much as the voice of the singer. More literally, I suppose the voice is the bridge between the singer and the song, as it was written. The composer and singer are the makers, the song is the product, the poem. My analogy is apparently more complicated--and more flawed?--than I thought.

Now GPK, here are some of your comments and my responses. Since you were being frisky, I hope I don't sound overly serious here, but your points are interesting, important, and plausible, so I’d rather over-respond than skimp.

GPK: Wouldn't criteria for excellence just be a matter of carefully reading the Norton anthologies with an eye toward commonalities in its selected offerings?

Banjo52: Maybe so, and maybe the Norton is both stuffy and over-esteemed. (On the other hand, my 1973 Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry has 19 pages of D.H. Lawrence compared to 9 pages of Wallace Stevens. If that indicates anything, maybe we've overestimated its stuffiness?)

At any rate, to begin discovering great writing, we have to start somewhere. In the last few decades, why not the Norton, along with some other widely used anthologies? It will be decades before we know which living writers belong in the canon (need I mention Emily Dickinson and her anonymity?), but is that a reason to avoid starting the process?

GPK: I could study . . . Rolling Stone magazine's top recordings of all times . . . and The Billboard charts . . . . I'm afraid that the song has extrinsic value as well as intrinsic value. The New Vaudevillians won a Grammy in the late sixties for "Winchester Cathedral." I'm not sure if anybody even sought Leonard Cohen's opinion on this.

Banjo52: I’m not sure I get your point, but it sounds as if folks cared more about the song (or a rendition of it) than they did the composer? Is that a bad thing? Or it was a bad song and sold well?

How does Leonard Cohen fit in? For me, the answer would be that he wrote infinitely better than he sings, so thanks to The Powers for letting us experience his work--his product--in a variety of voices, some of them better than others.

GPK: Value is dynamic rather than static. Whose stock is worth more now? Does T.S. Eliot mean as much to readers as he did 40 years ago?

Banjo52: “Value”? I hope the marketplace is not the primary determinant of value. If so, poetry is virtually worthless, no matter whose work it is.


Interrupting our broadcast--
This just in: the remarkable video of the guy sliding down a ramp, then flying up and over into an outdoor pool? I’ve just heard from the friend who sent it that he's learned it was doctored—photo-shopped. Is this one more Santa Claus deflation? And one more way to dispute The New Criticism? Or do we say, “That video is entertaining in its own right; how it got made is irrelevant?" In any case, it cued up a ramble from Banjo52.

THE NEW CRITICISM, Part 3, The Biographical Fallacy

The Biography of the Nut? The History of This Nut's Species? The Context of the Nut? What the Nut's Team of Psychoanalysts Said about the Nut?

Or the Nut Itself--Taste, Smell, Touch, Sight, and even Sound?

Regarding The New Criticism--my version of it anyway--the history, context, and so forth, of the nut are of no use, are without nutrition, unless the user has understood and experienced the nut itself. Once the nut has been experienced directly, by one who knows nuts, those other factors might make interesting playthings, but they will not feed the squirrel--who, I repeat--can distinguish a good nut from a rock, without memorizing Herodotus on the Peloponnesian Nut Wars.

Here's some more on the quasi-academic way of saying that.

Surely the “biographical fallacy” is a self-evident truth: good reading does not inject details of the author’s life into his writing. The author or his biographer might have gotten it wrong, might not have understood where a particular creative impulse came from. Or he might lie about it!

Yeats’s love for Maud Gonne, Keats’s love for Fanny Brawne, Nietzsche’s apparently pathetic life in relation to his bold notions, including that of a superman—these putative facts about the author’s life, juicy as they might be, should have nothing to do with the way we interpret or evaluate his words on the printed page. We’ll never actually know the biographical details, so let’s just do the honest, sometimes difficult work of interpreting the text.

Of course there are some qualifications. For example, language has changed since Shakespeare’s time, so we need an occasional footnote about telling “a hawk from a handsaw” in Hamlet or “’Sblood” as a recurring oath. And in Macbeth, it helps to know we can reasonably assume that childless Lady Macbeth’s comment about “the babe that milks me” probably refers to a child who died, given the commonness of infant mortality in eleventh century Scotland. What we must not do is jump to the conclusion that a significant theme in the play is, for example, a Shakespearean obsession with abortion-related guilt or the bard’s mourning the death of his own lost child.

Even the facts about the actual Scottish king should have no bearing on the Macbeth in the play, who is a fictional creation. Shakespeare played fast and loose with the sketchy historical facts available to him, so why should we bring them to bear on his plays, his works of art?

All this seems so obvious to me that I do not understand why the New Criticism has fallen out of favor in the last few decades, unless its proponents grew so extreme that they became absurd. I’m aware that the New Critics are associated with formalism in poetry; but I don’t remember, or never knew, if that was a justifiable connection or one created by their detractors. I see no reason why a New Critic’s careful attention to text—including punctuation and line breaks—should be limited to rhymed or metered poetry. Surely good free verse requires, deserves, and should invite the same kind of scrutiny.

Next, I intend to get back to Mr. Gothpunkrocker. But this should be enough for one day. Enough of what? Be kind. (Rewind?)

New Criticism, Part 2: The Intentional Fallacy

Left: My Grandmother?

The Singer and the Song

So you say you love Faulkner? Me too (or at least I went through a mild Faulkner phase). Therefore, you want to know what he intended by blah blah about blah blah in this or that work? Who was the real Benjy, and was he in fact a savant?

In a PBS interview with Faulkner’s daughter a couple decades ago, when she was middle aged, she talked about being a young girl and trying to stop one of her father's drinking binges—she’d learned to recognize the beginnings.
“Pappie,” she said, “please don’t. Please stop.”
His reply? “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children.”

Although it’s not relevant, I want to add that Faulkner's daughter, all those years later, was dignified and restrained in narrating this tale. Dignity and restraint are valuable weapons.

The point is, artists and writers full of psychopathologies have produced stunning works—Van Gogh, Plath, Sexton, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Nietzsche—the list seems endless. In fact, we commonly assume—don’t we?—that great artists have led unusually troubled, often mean lives, unless we hear otherwise. Presumed guilty (i.e., neurotic) until proven innocent. Somehow that mollifies and elevates our own troubles and meanness, I suspect; we are of a kind with Faulkner, or something like that. Never mind that he'd probably prefer we be of a kind with his characters.

Further irony: don’t we assume that literature offers wisdom, whatever else it might do? Yet we expect this wisdom to come from our looniest fellow travelers. The looniness produces the wisdom. Why else Lear's fool? And from there, it's only inches to: "I am loony; therefore, I am wise."

Of course some of that might be true. The point is, however, in being a good reader, it is wasteful to speculate much about the author’s life or his intentions, titillating as that can be, because authors are not completely aware of the correlation between their intentions and the object they’ve in fact created.

The work is on the page; read it. The writer is dead or dying or too flawed to believe, or simply unaware of precisely what he’s wrought. So what he says about his work is of limited value. Think of his commentary as literary fortune cookies, party favors, mints on the pillow. Do not think of his remarks as the entrée; that’s pointless idol worship. That's Hollywood. That's fawning from the mosh pit. Instead, read the damned poem. Over and over. Out loud. Can you chant it? Why not? Wallow in it. If it's too shallow for a long-wallow, there's your answer about how good the poem is, at least for you; and in arriving at that evaluation, you've probably come to understand it fairly well.

Was that too impressionistic? How about this hypothetical: a writer intends to compose a merely literal chronology of his grandmother’s life, but does it so well that he ends up with a brilliant novel about man’s inhumanity to man. Why should we deny his achievement simply because it was not his intent to produce so grand an object?

Of course the evaluation game usually goes the other direction, with the author trying for canonical greatness, but achieving only a superficial sketch of his grandmother’s life. In either case, his intent is irrelevant. The work product "is what it is," as we say these days; it may or may not be what its creator intended it to be. It sits there trying to come alive on its own terms, begging us to participate in it, not its creator's daydreams or the facts of his life.

More coming? You betcha. (I speak Alaskan).

THE NEW CRITICISM AND THE ANT FARM OF LIFE

As an all-round pile of virtue, I am completely honest about everything. So I’ve been getting militant about what we know, or think we know, or can know, or how we came to know it—or came to think we know it. We know very little; we inch forward. Yet others seem to think we can know so much we can play golf with God.

Among my several ongoing Herculean endeavors, I try to use strategies of literary criticism as a way to get at other problems, the solutions to which might prevent divorce, war and most human injustice.

I have breakfast buddies; one group of four meets every month or so, with the understanding that we have come together because we’ve been called upon to discuss timeless, epic matters, such as education, politics, and metaphysics—the usual suspects. From one perspective, these are merely more freshman dormitory ramblings. From another, better vantage point, however, it's clear that we should never pretend to have outgrown those concerns, for that is when we end up talking endlessly about golf, plumbing, brownie recipes, and babies’ bowel habits.

One Saturday morning the breakfast boys were speaking freely about the author’s life, character, and intentions during the composition of The Get-Down Dirty Frolick Papers. Turns out that Dickens—not Charles, but Big-Lew-Tiny Dickens (BLT to his breakfast pals)—underwent gall bladder surgery halfway through that novel’s composition. The vast majority of reviewers inferred, therefore, that Dickens’s thorough, precise, artistically rendered gore, splattered throughout the second half of his murder mystery, was the result of the author’s daily three-hour study of his own gallstones, which sat in a jar on the mantle, beside a shot glass with a cyst floating in formaldehyde—it had been removed three years earlier and is now widely accepted as the inspiration for Dickens’ contemporary classic, Chicken Fat Floats.

When I asked if they’d forgotten about the New Criticism, my friends stared at me. Puzzled, I gently reminded them of the New Criticism’s rejection of biography as a means to understanding literature. They stopped chewing. They raised their silverware as if to attack. Slim Tim developed a little spittle in the corner of his mouth.

These are smart guys, so their rage led me to wonder: am I the only one who still clings to The New Criticism as an approach to understanding poetry (I'd include all serious literature)—and through that, understanding what one can and cannot know about most things, from religious beliefs to magical popcorn.

The New Criticism was developed at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s and then at Kenyon College in Ohio. It remained in favor into the 1960s (Wikipedia). It still makes complete sense to me, but no one else, it seems.

The New Critics' thesis holds, modestly, it would seem, that readers and critics should look only at the words on the page to interpret a text. Serious readers are interested in the song, not the singer or the auditorium; leave the singer and his venue to the biographer, historian, or architect, not the simply good reader, whose subject is the song.

Stay tuned for more. Sleep well.