Textual Imitation: Making and Seeing in Literature

Making and Seeing in Literature

J. Hart

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781349453511, 9781137301345
• eBook ISBN: 9781137301352
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Textual Imitation offers a new critique of the space between fiction and truth, poetry and philosophy. In a nimble, yet startlingly wide-ranging argument, esteemed scholar Jonathan Hart argues that recognition and misrecognition are the keys to understanding texts and contexts from the Old World to the New World.

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Introduction

Abstract: This chapter sets out a framework that argues that mimesis—representation or imitation—knows many dimensions, poetic, philosophical and political; that it is creative and active and not simply a reflection of the world; and that poetics and representation have social and political aspects and are not only formal and textual. Moreover, the chapter maintains that the poet is a maker and the theorist a seer, that the reader reads and imagines and is someone who makes and sees. The chapter also argues that between the poet or writer and the reader (listener or audience in the theatre or at a poetry reading) is the drama of meaning, a kind of rhetoric that involves the relation between speaker and audience, writer and reader. This general introduction also gives the structure of the volume.

Keywords: mimesis; representation; imitation; poetics; texts; recognition

Hart, Jonathan. Textual Imitation: Making and Seeing in Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137301352.

Mimesis—representation or imitation—knows many dimensions, poetic, philosophical and political. Representation is creative and active and not simply a reflection of the world. Hamlet’s mirror is more alive than the flat mirrors that came into being later in the seventeenth century. A mirror held up to nature is one of historical difference, so that mirror metaphors and views of representation are not static.¹ The Greeks are key to any sense of mimesis or anagnorisis or recognition, but, as I hope to show in this study, poetics and representations of the world in texts, in theory and practice, also change over time. The arc of this volume is from Aristophanes to two key exemplars of recent Asian writing in the West.

Poets make and theorists see and readers make the most of what poets make, and if the readers are students or scholars, they may also venture into trying to look into what the theorists are seeing. This volume discusses how texts imitate and how interpretation is part of that imitation. Poets, and writers generally, represent for themselves but also for putative or possible readers who may become actual. Writers and readers meet in a rhetorical contract between speaker and audience, maker and reader. Here in between, in a kind of temporal and spatial negotiation, writing and reading meet, with give and take (play in that sense), in a drama of meaning. Representation is creative and reflective, and in this refractory process, the production of literature, criticism and theory occurs.

This sense of Europe meeting its own alterity as well as that of others occurs early on, as in Herodotus, and persists in Marco Polo and other writers. Translation is another form of coming to terms with other tongues and cultures, and people themselves are translated, such as Joy Kogawa’s family from Japan to Canada and Bei Dao from China to the United States and elsewhere. Whereas Kogawa writes in English, Bei Dao works in Chinese that is then translated into English. The Greeks traded and met the Egyptians, Persians and others: the world is now global, so tribal, ethnic, civic, social and political bonds are more intricate. Still, ways of making and seeing, writing and reading have strong elements of continuity. Interpretation for writers, readers and audiences shows a strong continuity amid all these changes.

Poetics and representation have social and political aspects and are not simply formal and textual.² Texts together form contexts, and what is between works has implications beyond any single text. Classical antecedents are keys to an understanding of mimesis and poetics in a Western context, but each generation reinterprets, supplements and displaces this classicism. The archive of the past is re-enacted in the present and the drama of meaning possesses aspects of semantics as well as political theatre.

Imitation is, like representation, one of the English translations of the Greek mimesis. The poet is a maker and the theorist a seer: the reader reads and imagines and is someone who makes and sees. Between the poet or writer and the reader (listener or audience in the theatre and at a poetry reading) is the drama of meaning, a kind of rhetoric that involves the relation between speaker and audience, writer and reader. Both the author and reader often write and read in their daily lives and, in or since antiquity, have learned the arts of language through rhetoric and poetics. Despite the influence of Romanticism, in which the poet takes on a Vatic role and individual originality and genius become part of the role of the poet, so much of poetry, and literature generally, has to do with imitating models. Literature begets literature. Poetry imitates poetry as much as the world. Poetic conventions and the language of poetry are necessary to the making and reading of poems. Seeing is part of reading and theory (in the etymology of this last word). Making and seeing are aspects of recognition or anagnorisis, which are so closely connected with the problems of misrecognition. How do we know what we are making leads to recognition and how do we know that what we think we are seeing is what we are seeing? Aesthetics, both the production of texts and their reception, have ontological, epistemological and ethical dimensions.

Our being, knowing and moral choices depend on the identity forged out of similarity and difference, self and otherness, individual and community. We work in our craft of making and seeing, writing and reading, but also sense, intuition, imagination and empathy. The skills Aristotle describes in Poetics related to the making of, seeing of and listening to tragedy and epic in his culture, but the issues of poetry as an illusion and as a moral distraction from the balance necessary for a soul to achieve immortality are something ethical, related to truth, that Plato describes. Truth and beauty, as John Keats wrote, are closely connected, but it is how these are related and interpreted that causes the controversies. Although Plato sees reason and justice, the benefits of philosophy, as universals that displace the poetry of Homer as the center of Greek education, he is not placing the soul in a primarily religious context, as later happens in Christianity. The sublime of Longinus complicates matters further, as making and seeing are always straining at something beyond reason and the everyday. Aristotle understands the catharsis of powerful feelings like fear and pity in tragedy: the tragic poet creates recognition for an audience who experiences the purging of these emotions. The enactment in the theatre creates balance in the minds and souls of the audience as they return to the world. This is an imitation or representation in which making and seeing are intricately and intimately connected.

To return to Longinus for a moment. Like Plato, he sees an ethical dimension to words. In the opening of On the Sublime, he recalls the sage who saw that people most resemble the gods in doing and speaking the truth and says “that the Sublime is a certain eminence or perfection of language, and the greate∫t writers, both in ver∫e and pro∫e, have by this alone obtain’d the prize of glory, and fill’d all time with their renown. For the Sublime not only per∫uades, but even throws and audience into tran∫port.”³ Longinus brings up persuasion, which is, for Aristotle, at the heart of rhetoric, so there is also a rhetorical contract between writer and reader. This contract applies beyond the poets and leads to glorious fame: the writer has motives that bring worldly recognition. Yet there is something more that carries the audience across and perhaps beyond. Marvels are part of this transporting: “The Marvellous always works with more surprising force, than that which persuades or delights. In most cases, it is wholly in our own power, either to resist or yield to persuasion. But the Sublime, endued with strength irresistible, strikes home, and triumphs over every hearer.”⁴ Resistance to rhetorical persuasion and literary delight is possible, but the sublime surprises, strikes in a way no hearer can resist. Longinus says that all this is well known, even in his own time, and beyond invention, order and economy, writing can show the sublime, which “with the rapid force of lightning has borne down all before it.”⁵ This lightning overcomes, so in reading Plato, Aristotle and Longinus, reason and feeling, the mind and soul, come into play in the relation between speaker and listener, writer and reader. How these figures from Greek antiquity interpret making and seeing is intricate, let alone how, in their wake, subsequent ages used that interpretation. Neo-classicists like Nicolas Boileau and Alexander Pope engaged with Longinus’ sublime, so that it was not simply a matter left for Romantic poets like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Philosophers like Edmund Burke, Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant took up more theoretical discussions of the sublime in the context of aesthetics.⁶ The relations among truth, beauty and the sublime become keys to understanding text and context.

Although my study will engage much more with Plato and Aristotle than with Longinus, it leaves this reminder that the imitation of texts has many layers and strands, so that they are dynamic. Even if continuities and affinities exist, the literary text, its makers and audience are always on the verge of, if not in the midst of, being overwhelmed. Longinus mentions the stroke and the lightning and the irresistibility, but Plato has Socrates suggest the banishment of poets who overcome the ethical with the aesthetic and Aristotle finds catharsis in tragedy to purge fear and pity. Plato wishes for the soul to be balanced so it can be immortal, and Aristotle sees the theatre as a way of maintaining balance for members of the audience as they return to the world. Truth, justice and recognition are the aims. “Discovery” is another word for recognition and may involve an uncovering. It may be that Longinus minds less about the power of literary language to overwhelm than do Plato and Aristotle. The art of poetry, or what we have come to call literature, knows multiple ways.

Textual Imitation: Making and Seeing in Literature takes into account that texts imitate the world and other texts. This imitation or representation—this mimesis—is refractive, that is, it is both reflective and creative. Plato knew the creative powers of Homer and other poets, including perhaps of Plato himself, so that he understood the ability of poetry to sway others, to seduce them away from truth and justice—balanced as philosophy—through a kind of beauty. Poetry set the soul off kilter and put it in some peril from its immortal yearnings. Aristotle seems to have been more interested in the workings of mimesis rather than in judging it. His poets—although subordinated to philosophers, who were the most universal in the pursuit of truth—had an important place in the structure of knowledge and an understanding of the world, along with ethics, physics, politics and other subjects.

Despite the uncertainties over the provenance and status of Longinus, who admired Plato, the loss of some of the treatise, On the Sublime, and its apparent disappearance for almost a thousand years and its printing in the 1550s, it is an important work. Longinus, or the figure we call Longinus as an attribution of the authorship of this elusive text, speaks of ecstasy but also focuses, with Plato, on the soul and its magnanimity if not its longings beyond itself. Longinus writes as much about the aesthetics of style as the ethics of being. He cites examples from Homer and Plato and so does not abide by the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Moreover, Longinus also ranges from Aristophanes, the Greek tragedians and Sappho to the Bible and so opens the door to a poetics that combines the Graeco–Roman with the Judeo–Christian. He also gives, as we have seen, some inspiration to Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, so that he is part of the balance and opposition in Western culture between the classical and the Romantic. Longinus speaks about much more than the sublime or elevated style, and even though the work does not seem to have left any traces of impact in the classical world (perhaps they were lost), he is, along with Plato, Aristotle and others, part of the measure and range of literary theory or criticism in the face of the making of the poets and the propositions of the philosophers.⁷ Making is to poets as seeing is to theorists. Readers embody both making and seeing, and that is part of the poetic and rhetorical contract that this study explores, sometimes directly, sometimes not.

One of the central aspects of the book is the assumption of the copiousness and messiness of texts and the world. Although some possible world theorists might wish to have verbal constructions that are complete and consistent, this is a quest for truth that appears to be beyond the horizon.⁸ Until now, the world seems to have no field theory, and its complexity is greater than any human text, including those most intricate ones deemed to be literary works. It is not simply philosophers, like Plato and Seneca, who, although poets and writers themselves at some level, are skeptical and suspicious of the power of poetry to be true and just. That is fair enough. Poetry, and by extension what we now call literature, is doubtful of and troubled by itself. It routinely calls attention to its limits, as Shakespeare does with the choruses to Henry V. One of its great enduring themes that school children have learned for some time is the relation between appearance and reality. There is a great deal of illusion in literature. Those who have written, read and theorized about it have admitted its power to move, and the worry is that it will move people to vice rather than virtue. Literature is conflicted.

The big question that Seneca raises in Epistle 88 is whether the liberal arts can lead us to virtue, truth and knowledge, and in doing so he extends Plato’s concerns. What I have called the drama of meaning represents conflicts between truth and lies and many other clashing and blending opposites. Perhaps a little like the world, literature is still unfolding, admittedly not the 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang, but in some senses since then as we are sentient beings trying to make sense of our world and cosmos. Literature is one way of doing that, as are history, philosophy, music, visual arts, mathematics, sciences and other means. Literature is an opening up and suggests in many ways, perhaps like desire or wishes themselves, and not the hectoring, commanding, humiliating orders of dictatorship, exploitation and pornography. It is multiplicitous. It is the dance before content in form in which one is entwined with the other to create meaning in which author and audience embody or enact the work anew as it moves through time.

Texts know many genres, which allow authors and readers to recreate and innovate on established stories, codes and conventions from the fantastic and erotic through the hermetic to the political and social. Ideology and mythology blend in content and form, story and argument into the story–argument of theory and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Mimesis, Recognition and Culture
• 3  Old World and New
• 4  Poetics and Culture
• 5  Making and Seeing
• 6  East–West Poetics
• 7  Conclusion
• Index