Making and Seeing Modern Texts

Jonathan Locke Hart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351107853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Making and Seeing Modern Texts explores the poetics of texts through a close reading and analysis across the genres of poetry, drama, fiction, non-fiction travel literature and theory. This volume demonstrates that prose, as much as poetry, share the making and seeing of language, literary practice, and theory. Genre, then, is presented as a guide that crosses multiple boundaries. This volume selects different ways to examine texts, discussing Michael Ondaatje's early poetry and examining narrative in Philip Roth's The Human Stain. The book examines images in poetry, narrative in fiction, prefaces in non-fiction, metatheatre in drama, and attempts to see the modern and postmodern in theory, all of which show us the complexities of modernity or later modernity. One of the innovations is that the author, a literary critic/theorist, poet and historian, takes his training in practice and theory and shows, through examples of each, how language operates across genres.

1Introduction

This is not a book about deductive theory but an inductive study. Theory here comes from the close reading of texts, and there is an interplay between the two, one arising from the other and being tested by it, so texts throw up and test the theories they throw up. Texts frustrate large generalizations, and poetics and rhetoric send us in opposite directions simultaneously or in multiple ways. Form and content work together and form means that no paraphrase is adequate or perhaps even possible. No simple definition of a text or of textuality or literature or a history of them is possible, except in partial manners that cannot claim universality or an explanation of the field or all genres. That is a wonderful dream but founders on the text and context (texts together). Mimesis, representation or imitation is creative and active and not simply a reflection of the world.¹ Although the Greeks are central to mimesis, others take up the theory and practice of imitation in poetics and representations of the world in texts, which change over time. Ancients and moderns are both part of the story of mimesis. I use moderns in the old way that Jonathan Swift or British universities might in the naming or making of their faculties, as in modern languages as opposed to classical studies. So, ancients and moderns are makers and seers in a continuum and dis-continuum.

Poets make, and theorists see; and readers interpret that making and seeing. We can be both writer and reader, theorist and practitioner at once or at least in the same person, making and interpreting texts being part of imitation, part of a poetic and rhetorical contract between speaker and audience, maker and reader, often in the same person as we both write and read or attend the theatre. In this time and space between we experience a drama of meaning or a theatre of making and the making of theatre, a spectacle and a shaping, seeing and making in texts and performance. Representation is refraction, a production, a performance in theory and practice. Poetics and mimesis have social and political aspects or perspectives and are not simply formal and textual, but they are expressed textually.² Texts together form contexts, and what is between works has implications beyond any single text, but the individual work also frustrates any attempt to amalgamate it into some theory or context that explains part and whole alike. Even though classical works are vital to an understanding of mimesis and poetics in a Western context, each generation reinterprets, supplements and displaces this classicism, and that is a premise of my earlier work in the area and this particular book, which explores mimesis across genres, one of its distinctive features. The present re-enacts the past and performs the theatre or drama of meaning through making and seeing.

Central to this book is the idea that the poet is a maker and the theorist a seer, while the reader reads and imagines, makes and sees. In this framework, what lies between the poet (writer) and the reader (listener or audience) is the drama of meaning, a kind of poetics and rhetoric that involves the relation between speaker and audience, writer and reader.

In Poetics Aristotle discusses genre, the making of, seeing of and listening to tragedy and epic in Greek culture, but Plato had already described the issues of poetry as an illusion and as a moral distraction from the balance necessary for a soul to achieve immortality that are ethical, related to truth. Aristotle understands the catharsis of fear and pity in tragedy in which the tragic poet creates recognition for the audience to purge these emotions in the theatre, thereby creating balance in the psyche of the audience as they return to the world. In the sublime of Longinus, making and seeing strain beyond reason and the everyday, and, like Plato, he sees an ethical dimension to words. In the opening of On the Sublime, he says: “the Sublime not only persuades, but even throws an audience into transport.”³ Longinus mentions persuasion, which is, according to Aristotle, at the core of rhetoric, and here there is also a rhetorical contract between writer and reader. For Longinus, marvels are an aspect of this transporting.⁴ Like lightning, the sublime surprises in a way that no reader can resist.⁵ A range of moderns – like Nicolas Boileau, Alexander Pope, Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge – engaged with Longinus’ sublime.⁶ The literary text, its makers and readers (audience) are always on the verge of being overwhelmed, as in Longinus’s lightning, Socrates’s banishment of poets and Aristotle’s catharsis. Balance and imbalance vie in poetry, philosophy and history.

In Textual Imitation: Making and Seeing in Literature I assumed the copiousness and messiness of texts and the world and maintained that even though some possible world theorists might wish to have verbal constructions that are complete and consistent, this seems a noble but an impossible quest for truth.⁷ Poetry and literature are intricate, contradictory, doubtful, incomplete and troubled by themselves, calling attention to their limits. There may be an aspect that involves a quest for truth, beauty and justice in poetry and literature. But there is also much illusion in them, so that literature is conflicted.⁸

Genre is also important, and critics like Northrop Frye, Heather Dubrow and Alastair Fowler made a strong case for generic modes in literary writing and Hayden White signaled that genre, as we find it in Frye and elsewhere, could also be applied to historical writing.⁹ Quite rightly Gérard Genette in 1969 and Jacques Derrida in 1980 ask some questions of this long-standing way into literature because they can involve a confusion or overlapping of boundaries or a false rage for order that is a form in poetry or literature but not in the world.¹⁰ Each text or literary work is itself but is part of a larger framework of texts or what I call context, so that texts are individual and cannot be reduced to their context although they are part of a network of texts. Although Genette and Derrida make good minatory points and no genre or study of genre should be a tyranny or a rigid system, their warnings may also apply more in France and Italy where neo-Aristotelean ways, no matter how much they were challenged by Romanticism and various modes of the modern, took root much more than they did in Spain and England. The ragged case of Shakespeare, who sometimes embarrassed John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Voltaire, Samuel Johnson and others, made it hard for others who admired him from Francis Beaumont and John Milton onward to hold him to some kind of strict “classical” or “neo-classical” decorum, which included genre. Lope de Vega, Cervantes and others also made that difficult in Spanish, more so than the fictional worlds of Corneille and Racine. As authors and readers, we need genres for their codes of expectation and their conventions but must not kowtow to them. Innovation, experimentation and the mixing of genres, as we see in Shakespeare as a great example, suggest we can use genre as a way to understand performance (production and reception) in convergence, divergence and between.

Literature is active in its creation, imitation and refraction of texts, and the world in all its messiness is incomplete and not always coherent. Nonetheless, literature always allows us to go on making and seeing anew in our asymptotic performance in the drama or theatre of meaning. Poetics and rhetoric are enduring ways of making and seeing.¹¹ This book examines work across genres and their porous boundaries.

The study focuses on rhetoric and poetics in theory and practice. It examines fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose. It is distinctive because it discusses literary and related texts through affinities and differences and explores language and discourses in many registers, treating all texts from different fields as if they are worthy of close reading or attention. To discuss literature and its “other” is to tell a story of understanding literature though affinities and differences. Somehow, I return to matters of mimesis in history, literature and philosophy, including literary theory. Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Aristophanes, Longinus and others are part of a classical past that continues to erupt into modernity and the present. Unlike Aristotle and Philip Sidney, I am not, as much as I admire their work, interested in ranking philosophy, poetry and history or using the standard of universals to do so. The quarrel between poetry and philosophy, as Plato saw it, continued into the discipline of modern literatures, especially after the Second World War, where theorists, like Northrop Frye and Jacques Derrida, were declaring independence for theory, Frye from the vantage of literary criticism and Derrida from the place of Continental philosophy. The theoretical imagination needed a place in the sun, just as Sidney tried to claim back the primacy of poetry that had been Homer’s in Greek education before Plato. There was in English Studies perhaps more friction over the rise of theory and the challenge to literature than in French Studies or Comparative Literature, which were, understandably, less at odds with French theory. I have often taken the middle way, as I was trained in the history of ideas and in literature, so I liked both historical and philosophical ideas and literary texts to be exciting and challenging. As a poet and writer, I also have the sense that each work is itself and frustrates those who would theorize it as part of a seamless historical or philosophical whole. So, it is in this spirit of the individuality of works and of a collision of texts, of the word and the world, as a sense of openness and possibility that I try to discuss literature in relation to theory, philosophy, history and other fields and do so from the ancients into the moderns and postmoderns.

Disciplines are always interdisciplines or fields cross-fertilize other fields, but texts are themselves so to classify them in one way is not a simple task. History and philosophy are also literary arts, and literature has historical and philosophical dimensions. By paying close attention to texts in philosophy, theory, history and the various genres of literature, I am showing that they all call upon language, and so we need to attend closely to language. There are distinctions between fiction and non-fiction but by examining language across literature and other fields, we can learn a great deal. My method is comparative, but it is also a matter of attending to each text as itself.¹²

Plato and Aristotle may haunt this book as they do so many avenues and byways in the Western tradition, but these philosophers are also points of departure and ways to make pointed departures. If Aristotle departs somewhat from Plato on key points concerning rhetoric, it is no surprise that others take their leave of Plato and Aristotle in matters of rhetoric. Still, to understand where things have gone or are going, Aristotle’s Rhetoric is vital, having, along with his Poetics, widened the horizon for literature and other discourses to prose and beyond, or at least beside, poetry. Political speeches set the tone for prose style in antiquity, and their use of rhetoric is akin to prose style in prose fictions. Tragic poetry and political prose establish the models, with Aristotle’s help, for other kinds of poetry and prose.

Aristotle is the systematic categorizer and analyst who breaks down and relates the parts of a subject to each other and to its whole as well as adjacent fields, as in his discussion of poetry in Rhetoric and Poetics. Rhetoric and poetics are often inseparable. They share tropes and schemes, and whereas poetry or literature claims to be mythical rather than a matter of actual action or lived experience, the mythical or impulse to story being part of the human mind and culture, rhetoric claims to move people for and against something in life. Plato saw the ability of poetry to move people to vice as well as virtue, in which the private threatened the public. Philip Sidney also viewed poetry as having the power to move but argued that this was a concrete power to move the reader, through its images, to virtue. Human desire and imagination contradict and build on human reason. Logic and dialectic meet through rhetorical argument on the road to poetry, and the converse is also true. In Poetics, Aristotle discusses rhetorical tropes that poetry uses, and in Rhetoric he discusses the art of poetry in that text not only demonstrates the overlap between the worldly art of rhetoric and the otherworldly craft of poetry, but it also suggests that both rhetoric and poetics, the world and literature, can be other to each other in different contexts. In other words, rhetoric can be framed within poetry and poetry within rhetoric: rhetoric can be poetic, and poetry can be rhetoric while also being distinct and themselves. Style is one of the concerns of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.¹³

Through theory, I suggest the relation between philosophy and poetry. The friendship between Jacques Derrida – philosopher – and J. Hillis Miller – literary critic and theorist – is a good way to see the relation not just between these remarkable writers and friends but to understand better the nature of philosophy and literature. The quarrel between philosophy and poetry that Plato saw has taken on different forms, sometimes leading to their contention and sometimes their resolution. I focus on language in my book, and so I can draw inspiration from Miller’s close attention to Derrida’s language, for instance in Derrida’s reading of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s Dasein, that is the human as being toward death, Derrida reflects on death as otherness or difference. Miller notices that, for Derrida, Crusoe is the aloneness of Dasein in this world. Death is the deferral as seen in philosophy, poetry, criticism, theory and other forms of writing. They all postpone death. But here, mainly, I attend to J. Hillis Miller’s For Derrida, in which he attends to Derrida’s language, especially in his later work, and he, like Derrida, explores the connection between justice and interpretation in a way that provides another way to the views of Plato in Republic and Aristotle in Politics. Literature need not be at odds with philosophy, and perhaps the rhetorical interpretation of deconstruction is one way to have language bring together philosophy and poetry. Theory is a way of seeing, and Derrida and Miller show us a way to see philosophy and literature as writing, as ways of interpreting. Plato and Aristotle consider philosophy to be more universal than poetry, but perhaps the reconciliation of the philosophical and the poetic can be observed in the relation between two theorists, Miller and Derrida, the one literary and the other philosophical, the same but different, friends who explore self and other, from different backgrounds, languages and points of view. Miller and Derrida have ways of seeing rooted in language. Miller understands the role of language and rhetoric in theory and literature, and Derrida does so in philosophy and literature.

In my book, I discuss the two main modes of expression in literature – poetry and prose – as Aristotle says in Rhetoric. Self and other involve comparison and contrast, so that to know literature more, we must know it in and of itself but also in context. Thus, literature becomes more itself amidst other fields. Ondaatje and Vassanji are Canadian and other, in the age of decolonization, so they are postcolonial writers and exemplars of Canadian writing in its multicultural and international milieu. Making and Seeing Modern Texts begins with language and ends with language, concentrating on the importance of spending close attention to the texts while trying to provide contexts or a prismatic reading in which one text of a certain genre or field refracts another and another. That way, from different angles of refraction, the reader may come to understand each better.

Paradoxically, I am grounding my book in Plato and Aristotle in order to show the outlines or root of poetry and poetics and what we call literature, but also to take up some historical and theoretical questions. So, while I focus on the importance of poetics in the context of rhetoric, particularly in Aristotle, I recognize that Aristotle was writing at a certain time for a specific audience, despite the influence of his work on rhetoric and poetics on subsequent generations in various cultures and literatures. So, by going back to Aristotle, I am not advocating a back to Aristotle. He is a beginning, and we need to understand his texts, especially in modern literatures, as our fellow editors and interpreters in classics concentrate more on his work and like texts. I am certainly not close to being the first to discuss these matters in Aristotle, but what I am trying to do is to continue to discuss Aristotle’s idea of poetics in a book that sees mimesis after him as creating traces and shards in po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. More on Mimesis and Related Matters
• 3. Theatre and World
• 4. Private Public Lyric
• 5. Private Words, Public Worlds
• 6. Translation in English Prose and Poetry
• 7. Poetic Mimesis
• 8. Fictions of Ethics
• 9. Travel Writing and Memoir
• 10. Theory and Criticism
• 11. History, Literature, Theory
• 12. Conclusion
• Index