Notes on Notes

/ðɪdɔɡzbark andðɪkaravanmuvzɔn/ (Truman Capote)

Figuration

The fundamental components of any literary articulation — as a babbling in sound or a squiggling in ink — are phonemes or graphemes, verbal or visual figurae. Two phonemes: a voiced dental fricative and a schwa. Three graphemes: a standard-bearer’s wooden pole and cross-bar; a little hut with a rounded roof and a tall chimney; a tadpole, or maybe a smiley muppet head seen from the side. The word The. The babblings and squigglings may be pretty or ugly, may carry certain associative meanings, (I think “e” is sort of… endearingly cute as a visual figurae, in its smiley muppetyness,) but these figurae are mostly just jabber and daubings until they’re built-up into morphemes, the smallest units that can have meaning. The word “babbling” is itself made up of two, the unbound “babbl(e)” (unbound because it can be used as a word in its own right) and the bound “-ing” (bound because it can only be used as an affix).

Mostly just jabber and daubings, I say, because while many of the visual figurae of various languages have their roots in pictograms, in English these figurae can now safely be described as arbitrary. In phonaesthesia however, some simple combinations of phonemes (like “fl-” in English) have taken on a degree of meaning in their own right, if not iconic (with “fl-” resembling a sound associated with the flick, flap or flourish, the fluttering flight of the fleeting, flouncy flibbertigibbet,) then at least conventionally symbolic (as with the cluster of words in English associating “gl-” with glistening, glittering glints of gleams we glance or glean.) Given that, and simple associations we might have with the hiss of sibbilance, the guttering of gutturals, and so on, it’s worth noting that even pure babble may have a layer of iconic meaning. Drop the “b” in “bark” and shout the /ark/ — “Ark! Ark! Ark! Ark!”. Take out the /r/ and roll it, extend it, drop a /g/ in front of it and you have a grrrrowl.

Faced with a figuration like the one at the top of this entry, an articulation of figurae in two strings separated by a space as a pause, our first act is to try and parse it into morphemes. /ðɪdɔɡzbark andðɪkaravanmuvzɔn/ becomes /ðɪ dɔɡz bark and ðɪ karavan muvz ɔn/ as we sort the babble. Or to put it in the conventional visual figurae of written English rather than the patchwork of Roman alphabet and IPA it’s in above, “The dogs bark, and the caravan moves on.” At this point it’s tempting to see each morpheme as a sign within a system of signs, since morphemes are “the smallest units that can have meaning” and “having meaning” usually implies signification. But I’m more interested here in exploring a notion of meaning that is not based in signification. To that end, I’m going to treat these morphemes as notes in a system of notation.

Notation

Notes are not to be understood as signs — signifying symbols arbitrarily ascribed to signified ideas in a code, a game of differentiation where the meaning of each sign is determined by its not being the other signs in the system, where its usage is delimited by its difference from them. Not yet. Signs are the content metaphor in disguise, words as frames of meaning even if our perspective is flipped inside-out, even if that frame (of determination, of delimitation, of definition) is seen as excluding rather than including. Signs are the object metaphor, and that is always already collapsing into the content metaphor.

So the word “note” is chosen for its root in the Latin nota, meaning “mark”, for the sense of an imprint, an impression, because the type of note we mean here is not an object but an action. When we talk of a note, we mean this as we would talk of a punch, a kick, an impact. It is not that signs are objects with content inside (or with an IOU signed by Derrida.) Rather when the figuration is heard or read, when these notes occur — /ðɪ/ and /dɔɡz/ and /bark/ and so on, or “the” and “dog” and “bark” and so on — that action has import. Surface import and deep import.

Surface Import

Surface import has, potentially at least, three components: 1) the subvocal articulation of the verbal morpheme into an inner monologue of figuration in the mind’s ear, so to speak; 2) the articulation of representative icons into an imaginative montage; 3) the direct aesthetic response to the phoneme pattern and montage of images.

Some clarifactions:

1. The inner monologue may be muted by focus on our perception of the actual figuration and/or on another component. We’re unlikely to notice the monologue as a process in our mind’s ear when it’s manifest in our actual ear, or when we’re accomplished enough at dealing with scribblings not to have to sound out /dɔɡz/ in our head when presented with “dogs”. Unless we are reading for the poetic qualities of the babbling — rhythm, rhyme and other such formal patterning in the verbal figuration — the articulation may not just be subvocal but subliminal, maybe even wholly absent. Particularly with narrative we may well seek to ignore the babbling to the best of our ability, immerse ourselves in the imaginative articulation, turning a tin ear to the butchering of the Muses.

2. Where we talk of representative icons this is not to be taken as implying that the note /dɔɡz/ (or “dogs”) functions as a signifier for some abstracted icon of *dogs* as a signified idea. These are representative icons only in so far as these imaginative simulacra are modeled on sensations of referents in the real world. The term “icons” is being used in the semiotic sense, including not just images, but sounds, smells, etc.. Reworkings of memory or original artifacts in the multi-media project of the imagination, these icons are to be understood as notes themselves, actions in response to actions. The aesthetic responses are only separated out here as notes that do not represent but simply present themselves. Both are fundamentally notes that occur in conjunction with the note /dɔɡz/. Which is to say, the icons and aesthemes are co-notations… connotations.

This is the crucial point of treating meaning as import rather than content — which is, admittedly, the approach of a poet rather than a linguist. Rather than an icon of *dogs* as a signified idea, that montage of connotations may include not just icons of dogs, but of wolves, puppies, cats, squirrels, kennels, leashes, sticks, bowls, bones, the sound of growling and snarling, the smell of wet dog fur, the wagging of a tail, the pain of being bitten, anything that is connotated with the note /dɔɡz/. Much of this may be subliminal. With narrative, much of it will be clear and coherent, articulated into a vivid, albeit vicarious, experience.

If we are tempted to bring back signification at this point to explain the coherence as determination, narrative offers reason to hold off. Where readers ignore the babbling in order to immerse themselves in the imaginative montage, it may not just be poetry they are oblivious to but logic. The prose of one of the most popular books in recent history, The Da Vinci Code, is not just ugly but oxymoronic in places. On the first page of that book, we’re presented with the line, “On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.” That this is a self-contradiction — to freeze while turning one’s head — speaks to how much the figuration is, for many readers, simply a means to an end. That many readers would not even notice this is of more interest though, suggesting that the articulation of the montage of icons may be a creative act on the reader’s part, the connotations an imaginative material which they themselves render coherent, with scant regard to the content we imagine encoded in the figuration as signification.

They are not determining content. They are making sense of import.

Deep Import

Where the figuration is less narrative and more cogitative, that streaming montage of icons is, of course, of less import. (Being import does not mean being important import.) What we likely focus most of our attention on with ruminations like this is the deep import which this stream of notes and connotations, icons and aesthemes effects as: 4) an abstract articulation of ideas, a cognitive stream of connotations in the form of notions; 5) an affective response to all of it. There’s not much in this scribbling you are reading right now that’s conducive to iconic representation. When I use the word “icon”, I’m not inviting you to imagine James Dean or a Russian religious painting. When I use the word “articulation”, I am inviting you to picture a flexible structure of jointed segments, a physical form of articulated articles, but I expect that image to be barely registered by many readers. The poet in me does prefer words with a bit of iconic import, but in a scribbling like this it’s the stream of notions that counts.

Yet — and again particularly in narrative — that cognitive stream may be muted or so wholly bound to the stream of notes, icons and aesthemes that it is indistinguishable from that experience, cognition itself taking the form of a flickering daydream of simulated events. Even in this I’m not sure that the most abstract word like “abstract” doesn’t evoke a subliminal montage of Kandinsky paintings, geometric sculptures, a summary section on a research paper, a blue sky. I’m not convinced that the deep import is not, in fact, entirely constructed from surface import, with any apparent distinction between the experience of reading and abstract cognition of reading simply a matter of the usual stream of personal thought being maintained as a distinct articulation of symbols, icons and aesthemes in its own right, running in parallel, with the focus staying on that instead of being surrendered to immersion in the experience. This could just be the poet in me again, right enough, and the one who’s read “The Man With the Blue Guitar” far too many times. It does have my favourite lines in any poem:

Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.

What I’m suggesting, I suppose, is that we view the notion as the sublimation of the notation, imagine the act of abstracting as the extracting of the “at” at the heart of “notation”, as if specificity were an impurity to be boiled away in a boiling down. What I might well be suggesting is that this is what all thought is, what language is, where it is not (if it can ever not be) a game of symbols and ideas defined, delimited and determined by difference (if symbols and ideas can ever be so bound).

An Example

“The dogs bark, and the caravan moves on.”

I read that sentence and I hear — in my mind’s ear, so to speak — /ðɪ dɔɡz bark and ðɪ karavan muvz ɔn/. I see the scribbling on the page but I also see, in my mind’s eye, two dogs barking. I see them as short-haired, middling-sized, with dark-brown fur. Because they’re barking most likely, I see them as mongrel curs, as fighting dogs — a mix of bull-dog, doberman, rottweiller. I see them as junkyard dogs, guard dogs chained up in a backyard, agitated to anger and aggression, circling outside kennels that sit to their right. It’s night and their heavy steel chains reflect the moonlight. Behind them is a wooden fence beyond which, under the full moon that dogs howl at, sand dunes or arid hills rise as low mounds and a trail of lights marks the jangling, clattering departure of the caravan. And the caravan itself? This is a composite of liminal images, of a line of loaded camels, of horse-drawn Gypsy caravans, of the modern “caravans” that an American would call trailers, pulled by cars and trucks, a circus of carnies and freaks, a carnival leaving town. Traders and tricksters who refuse the security of a settled existence. There’s an air of American Gothic to it all, of a Ray Bradbury story, of Carnivalé, of the Tarot’s eighteenth Major Arcana card, the Moon. An air of mystery and romance.

“The dogs bark, and the caravan moves on.”

This is what that sentence means to me — its import. If you think I’m reading too much into it, building an elaborate fancy around the bare bones of its actual content, I say there is no content other than what we place into it as readers. If “dogs” offers an illusion of simplicity, an instantly identifiable signifier for an instantly identifiable signified, “caravan” explodes that illusion. We might assume Capote wouldn’t be using the term in its British sense, but is it a Persian camel train trudging or a Gypsy wagon trundling? What is the connection between the barking dogs and the moving-on caraven, left unarticulated in the simplicity of the “and” conjunction, and aren’t we invited to supply it ourselves? The answers to those questions asked by the sentence are its import. The import is its meaning, its full meaning, to us as readers.

Too much of this is lost when we slip into the metaphors of objects, of Saussure’s signifiers and signifieds — or Pierre’s signs, objects and interpretants — as things set down upon a draughtsman’s blueprint, white circles drawn round them in chalk, arrows marking out their relationships, pointing from here to there. We could imagine that those five components are discrete things brought into one-to-one relationships:

1) note
2) icon
3) aestheme
4) idea
5) affect

We could perhaps relate the note to Saussure’s signifier, Pierce’s sign, relate the interwoven icon and idea to Saussure’s signified, Pierce’s interpretant and object. But this is to imagine a determinacy that does not exist. The subvocal note /dɔɡz/ is not bound to a singular icon but rather evokes a montage of many — bull-dog, doberman, rottweiller — overlaid like the images of an experimental film. Context controls the montage, corrects and directs it, /bark/ revoking any icons of, say, a collie catching a frisbee or a labrador rolling onto its back for a tummy-rub, priming us to employ icons of the types of dogs that bark. There are many types of dogs that bark. We might select excited dogs, happy dogs, dogs at play, but the context “and the caravan moves on” tells us that what they are barking at is not a boy with a ball or stick, not a visitor with tasty treats in their pocket. In telling us what they are barking at, the context tells us why, what kind of barking this is; it specifies that these are the sort of dogs who bark at traffic, at noise in the distance at night, at things they consider strange and wrong… intruders on their territory. These are dogs as defined by Heraclitus when he said, “Dogs bark at what they do not know.”

The important thing is that there’s no one-to-one relationship of note and connotated icon, but rather a one-to-many relationship unique to each context. The montage of icons does cohere into a sort of meta-icon perhaps, of dogs that are (for me) short-haired, middling-sized, with dark-brown fur; but this is… a sort of cubist collage of perspectives that spills out beyond its casual frame, each dog a Cerberus with three heads superimposed one over the other, snub-nosed and long-snouted, ears pricked and flattened, slavering and not slavering. Every one of us will construct our own unique montage for each unique instance of the note. The note /dɔɡz/ effects four connotated icons it is impossible for most of you to share: you never knew the first dog I remember, Nye, the Eater of Socks; or the dog I grew up with, Captain, Guardian of the Millionaire’s Shortbread; or Bonny, the Duchess of Kilwinning; or Koré, who cannot be described in such terms because she is the term that describes. And these are only a few. You have our own.

Notion

The idea of *dogs* is the palimpsest of all these montages. It is the product of each montage of icons evoked by each instance of a note, laid down one over the other over the other, over-writing but never entirely obscuring. Or perhaps rewriting is a better metaphor than over-writing. It is as if each cubist collage of connotations is itself only one perspective to be integrated into the multi-faceted mosaic that is the idea of “dogs”. In that integration the montage may be largely subsumed, or it may claim a place at the very centre, command a radical overhaul of the idea. The montage of icons evoked by the “dogs” in a stream of words such as “the dogs tear at the little girl’s throat” might well have a distinctly revisional effect for a five-year-old girl whose idea of “dogs” was largely a palimpsest of montages evoked by “dogs” in more positive contexts, such as “the dogs wagged their tails happily”.

I say that the idea is the palimpsest, but this is only my perspective. Others might argue that the idea is not actually this palimpsest of icon montages, but rather an abstract concept bound to it, informed by it but formulated in some other media of cognition, a mentalese. The difference is that between a view taking its lead from Hume, in which all ideas are built from senses, and a view taking its lead from Plato, in which ideas are pure morphology. Like a class defined in Object-Oriented Programming, a CDogs class which has, as its main attribute, an array of objects of the class CDog, and which has a method, a function that objects of this class can carry out: CDogs.Bark(). But the class is only an abstract set of protocols for storing and processing information, an encapsulation of functionality. It is not an idea as we experience ideas, not an object in ideation itself, but the schematic instantiated in an object. Not a concept bound to a palimpsest, but the protocols for accessing it and any connected palimpsests (of wolves, puppies, cats, squirrels, kennels, leashes, sticks, bowls, bones…), in order to produce a montage in any given context.

Even if we’re inclined to the Platonic view, unless we’re going to follow him into the metaphysical mists in which thought is a sort of soul-substance, we’re still dealing with ideas that are instantiated in a media, concepts that are constantly formulated and reformulated. What we are dealing with, I’d argue, in this programming metaphor, must be a constant compiling and recompiling of the palimpsest-as-concept into mentalese as a sort of cognitive machine code. The end result is the same. For the little girl, the incorporation of that new montage into the palimpsest, whether this is all that takes place or there is an extra step of compiling the palimpsest into mentalese, still results in a fundamental revision. That extra step would mean the addition of a method to the class CDog: CDog.TearAt(objThingBeingTornAt as Object) with that method specifically accommodating objects of the class CLittleGirlsThroat as a parameter.

That these ideas or concepts are ever shifting, being formulated and reformulated as they are invoked leads me to prefer a term with less Platonic connotations. Ideas can be fixed. Concepts can be proven. What we’re talking about here are notions. And it should be pointed out that when the note /dɔɡz/ is struck, with all the montages of icons it effects of wolves, puppies, cats, squirrels, kennels, leashes, sticks, bowls, bones, and so on, it is not only one notion that comes into play but many, not just the notions of *wolves*, *puppies*, *cats*, *squirrels*, *kennels*, *leashes*, *sticks*, *bowls*, *bones* and so on which are distinctive but those of *mongrels*, *curs*, *hounds*, *pooches*, *mutts*, *canines*. Where one notion ends and another begins may be hard to discern.

Denotation

So, our model of five components needs to explicitly recognise the pluralities:

1) note in context
2) montage of icons
3) aesthetic responses
4) notions as palimpsest of montages and/or cognitive class structure
5) affective response

The generation of deep import, of a notion and an affective response, does involve a concretion of all that surface import into a coherent unity. This allows us to imagine we have a signifier, /dɔɡz/, and a signified, *dogs*, as things being brought into a referential relationship with one another, that /dɔɡz/ is being made a pointer to *dogs*. But a note in this model is not a sign or signifier but rather an action of signaling which engenders multiple icon responses. What we have is not discrete objects but processes: the procedure of signaling within which /dɔɡz/ is just one action; the procedure of imagining which articulates icons and is constantly revised by ongoing signaling activity; the procedure of interpreting which navigates the connotations as a cognitive stream.

It seems fair to say that this last does result in a formal structuring of notions as things in relation to each other, a structure that is mapped back to the notes as things in equivalent relations. In binding *dogs* to /dɔɡz/ the relationship of signification comes into effect this thing being signified by that thing. But this interpreting is a summation of meaning which can only work by the rejection of connotation. It is a decision, a constant decision with each notion and note, that of all the connotations effected by the note — of all the variant notions of *dogs*, *mongrels*, *curs*, *hounds*, *pooches*, *mutts*, *canines* (and all their associated notions of attributes) — that only this *dogs* binds to /dɔɡz/. The word “decision” is chose for the connotations in the root sense of the term (echoed in “incision”, “concision”, “circumcsion”, “precision”), the sense of cutting-off. This is a removal of meaning, a removal of notation, a de-notation… denotation.

Contention

Is denotation always the point? Are we always aiming to flense the rich complexity of connotation and find the bare bones, to parse structures of signifiers into structures of signifieds? Or can the interpreting find its way through the connotations without bringing the knife to bear in the name of denotative certainty? Here’s some cod-Joycean shenanigans:

moongrowl curss gruffrough and rowl, raurk raurkas they rowl the clunkyard, rowl snarlavery agrrestive at thee, night carnivan of straingers hauksters ratscal roogs — roogs! — clarterinkling on ye aways a way outer ur town.

It’s by no means impossible to interpret that in denotative terms, split the portmanteau words back into their roots — “moongrowl” as “mongrel”, “moon” and “growl” — take coinages as new signifiers for new signifieds — “rowl” as a combination of “prowl” and “growl” — and so on. But this babbling doesn’t really invite us to translate it into a nice neat formal structuring of signifieds all sitting here and here and here in relation to each other on the blueprint, each with an arrow drawn to it from its signifier over there and there and there. Rather it’s a construct of connotations which invites us to navigate through it, constructing a notional summation of meaning as we go — a cognition of mongrel curs in a yard at night, making a ruckus at the departure of travellers regarded with deep distrust — but to understand as we do so that this is only a chosen path through a wide valley of meaning.

Something similar is true of, I’d say, “The dogs bark, and the caravan moves on.”

Still, this denotative interpreting is how we ultimately arrive at — or at least think we arrive at — content, the cognitive stream processed into two core components: 1) the articulation of denotations; 2) the implications of purpose. (Implications of purpose may even be excluded from content, considered as a subtext of the articulation rather than text.) This “content” is denotation which is a crude gloss on the full meaning of an articulation, a coarse hacking away of import. Bound within its metaphor of vessel and substance content interprets the articulation from an almost wholly referential viewpoint, characterising meaning as residing “within” the words (and the relationships between them), all too often essentialising this situation of meaning as inherent (such that an articulation has a definitive meaning). If it can be seen as adding a hypothetical reconstruction of rationale — why that content was “put into” that specific form and communicated to us in the first place, what we are meant to “get out of” the articulation — this is actually, I suspect, born of the same act of decision, the same act of denotation applied to the connotations I have barely touched on — the aesthetic and affective responses.

It is a folly, this content, an act of contention, as much a conceit as the object metaphor that sustains it. In the imagining that we can “get out” what was “put in”, all we are really doing is cutting-off import in the hope that when we have cut enough off we will be left with a hard certainty. We cut away this connotation, that one, another, saying that this is *wolves* and this is *puppies* and neither of these are *dogs*, insistent on the notion that these can be separated. Still we find that when we cut into the notion of *dogs*, the host of connotations “within” it spills out, all those *mongrels*, *curs*, *hounds*, *pooches*, *mutts*, *canines*. And if we reach the core of the notion of *dogs* all we find is a note, pointing to all that we have cut away, saying “Look for the content in those to find what I am not.”

If I were Derrida, I might coin a term diversience here, for content, meaning neither divergence nor diversity nor diversion, but all three. Divergence because the content is the end-point of separation. Diversity because the content is the end-point of assembly. Diversion because the content is the end-point of redirection. None of these because all three act against each other, divergence and diversity implacably opposed but equally directed, diversion by its nature deflecting all aims. The term itself, as a note rather than a sign, connoting all three and their various combinations (and so embodying diversity), refusing to act as synonym for any one of the three (and so embodying divergence), refusing denotation in favour of a gesture to those three terms that it is not (and so embodying diversion). I’m not sure if that would be deconstructionist or zen though.

Sweet News

As I just found out, Vélum has been short-listed for the Prix Europeén Utopiales 2009. Awesome!

The full short-list is:


Le Déchronologue de Stéphane Beauverger, éditions La Volte
Le Livre de toutes les heures, Vol. 1. Vélum d’Hal Duncan, éditions Denoël
En panne sèche d’Andreas Eschbach, éditions L’ Atalante
Gagner la guerre : récit du vieux royaume de Jean-Philippe Jaworski, éditions Les Moutons électriques
Roi du matin, reine du jour de Ian McDonald, éditions Denoël

I only know the McDonald sadly, as a paltry monolinguist, but that in itself is stiff competition, I'd say. So I ain't getting my hopes up. But tis well cool to be nominated. This is pretty much the Big One in European strange fiction, as I understand. Hell, it comes with a cheque!

I is a happy bunny todays.

On Mimetic and Maieutic Fiction

Some thoughts on recent conversations on the blogosphere.  You may have to read the "Notes Toward a Theory of Narrative Modality" entry to get what I mean by "quirks", "warp" and suchlike.  But, hey, taking that stuff for granted I managed to keep this down to 2K.  And most of it is quotes.

1. Mimetic fiction is to strange fiction as instrumental music is to any music with lyrics — choral / a capella or with a whole lot of instruments backing the vocals.

There's a minor tradition within the science fiction community of using mimetic and mimesis to mean the opposite of the fantastic. The oldest such uses that I could find (with a quick and profoundly less than exhaustive search) date to the early 1970s, and the casual employment of the term in those contexts makes me suspect that it has a longer history within the SF world as a way to point toward what more generally gets called within that community "mainstream" or (less frequently) "mundane" fiction. (Matt Cheney, The Mumpsimus)

Mimesis: Any narrative may maintain an alethic modality of “could have happened” (or “could be happening” or “could happen”, according to the tense of the narrative). This process of mimesis entails presenting nothing that is contrary to the strictures of logic, the laws of known nature, the details of known history, or the limits of known science. Purely mimetic fiction may have warp in other respects, but it excludes alethic quirks. (Me, ”Notes Toward a Theory of Narrative Modality”)

Almost all genre fiction, of course, depends on the suspension of disbelief, so if we accept Sukenick's definition, then the vast majority of SF is, in fact, mimetic… This use of the term makes sense to me because it does two things. First, it does not deviate significantly from how the term has traditionally been used -- mimetic fiction in this sense seeks to give the reader a feeling, at least while reading the text, that there is a fundamental reality to the world conjured by the words. (Matt Cheney, The Mumpsimus)

Weft (or mimetic weft): Where warp is introduced into a mimetic narrative by an alethic quirk, the alethic modality of “could have happened”, “could be happening” or “could happen” may be said to persist in effect, in so far as suspension-of-disbelief continues despite the quirk, or to be restored with a return to mimesis. The disrupted process of mimesis woven through the narrative can therefore be considered a binding (mimetic) weft. (Me, ”Notes Toward a Theory of Narrative Modality”)

Note:

Realist fiction: If we’re mapping “the fantastic” to alethic quirks (a dubious correlation given the muddled conventions surrounding “fantasy” and “the fantastic”; I prefer to use terms like “alethic quirks” precisely to avoid the complications and contradictions that arise), we need a value-neutral term for that wholly/purely/uninterruptedly mimetic fiction that excludes this type of feature. Terms like “literary” and “mainstream” are useless as neither actually exclude credibility warp. The term “mundane” does exclude the alethic quirks but also suggests an exclusion of determinacy or equilibrium warps; this is why it carries a pejorative sense of “dull”. The term “realist” is strongly associated with particular schools with a distinct philosophical slant, but it does fit a fiction dealing only in actual/material possibility without excluding the quirks of, say, tragedy or comedy. Until such time as a better term arises, (and suggestions are welcome,) it seems pragmatic to use “realist” in this general sense and distinguish the more ideological modes as Realist.

2. The introspection of “literary” realist fiction is a fundamentally rationalist approach.

In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" (Lacey 286). In more technical terms it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive" (Bourke 263). (Wikipedia, ”Rationalism”)

The thing is, in all these stories, by numerous authors of literary fiction, characters have this hyperreal awareness of their own misery, and comment upon it... That's a problem: subtext is not the end-all and be-all of human experience. You wouldn't know this to read the pregnant prose stylings of Amy Hempel. Every single character is almost crushed under the weight of the sea inside their own minds, where an emotion is spilling out. ((J.M. McDermott, Blog)

Different degrees of emphasis on this method or theory lead to a range of rationalist standpoints, from the moderate position "that reason has precedence over other ways of acquiring knowledge" to the radical position that reason is "the unique path to knowledge" (Audi 771). (Wikipedia, ”Rationalism”)

Academic fiction is constructed around a set of life experiences that are not universal. For instance, utter self-awareness is common among the hyper-literate examiners of life, but uncommon among the people that actually have a pretty good life, working, watching TV, and playing with their kids. (J.M. McDermott, Blog)

Note:

Reflectivity: The stories and substories of some narratives may be best described in terms of psychological dynamics, internal conflicts, the mimetic weft of the narrative focused on representing thought and memory — introspective reflection. Even where the emotional force of the fiction is intense it is under study, present in extreme because it is the focus of attention, the domain of the “real” that is to be detailed and made sense of. This rationalist approach falls within the project of realist fiction and is therefore prominent in those fictions labelled “literary” as part of the discourse of abjection surrounding warp in literature. However:

3. Reflective realism is only one subset of contemporary “literary” fiction.

In broad terms, literary fiction focuses more on style, psychological depth, and character, whereas mainstream commercial fiction (the page-turner) focuses more on narrative and plot. (Wikipedia, ”Literary Fiction”)

For starters, most of the Spanish-language lit fic that I've read is much more extrospective than the Anglo-American counterparts. While there are moments of introspective moodiness, the stories in general tend to turn to outside events. (Larry, ”OF Blog of the Fallen”)

What distinguishes literary fiction from other genres is somewhat subjective, and as in other artistic media, genres may overlap. Even so, literary fiction is generally characterized as distinctive based on its content and style ("literariness", the concern to be "writerly"). (Wikipedia, ”Literary Fiction”)

It's not a turning inward to explore an imagined person's reaction to a past that will capture readers in most cases, but rather that turning outward and including others, making them feel a part of the story, that tends to lead to more favorable reactions. (Larry, ”OF Blog of the Fallen”)

Note:

Academic fiction?: Reflectivity may be a substantial thread in the mimetic weft of a work of strange fiction, regarded as “genre” and therefore as not “literary” by the Academy, but quite possibly regarded as “literary genre” by the subculture of “genre” readers. Further, much (post)Modern fiction that argues with realism and its rationalist aesthetic is afforded the label “literary” by dint of its channels of distribution, regardless of its concern (or lack of concern) with reflectivity. Given the aspect of rationalist study entailed in reflective realism, the subset of “literary” fiction described above might be described as academic fiction. This is no less problematic than “literary” however, due to the implicities of the term, its associations with irrelevance and privilege. Nevertheless, “literary” is a dysfuntional term.

Literary vs Genre: All fiction is written. All fiction is in a genre. The terms have been appropriated to the historical and territorial discourse of mutual abjection, but abjection is, by definition, a horrified revulsion at that which is recognised as having been (or still being in some respect) a part of oneself. Neither “literary” nor “genre” fiction can ever truly, wholly, exclusively be that which they are derided as or that which they pride themselves as being. On examination of each we will invariably find the features that are the focus of abjection, rendering any attempt to treat these as genres nonsensical. “Literary” fiction will contain the “generic”. “Genre” fiction will contain the “literary”. Otherwise, we would not be identifying them as such.

4. The rationalist approach in reflective realism, at its extreme, renders it maeiutic fiction.

Maieutics (pronounced /meɪˈjuːtɪks/) is a procedure of pedagogy. It is based on the idea that the truth is latent in the mind of every human being due to his innate reason but has to be "given birth" by answering questions (or problems) intelligently proposed. (Wikipedia, ”Maieutics”)

Substory: As story is further abstracted to a general articulation, the result is a metanarrative of themes and subtexts, of which the story is considered a demonstrative example. This is substory. Substory becomes distinct from story where it is abstracted enough from specifying detail to acquire an alethic modality of “can happen”, when “This did happen to resolve this conflict” becomes “This can happen to resolve this type of conflict”. (Me, ”Notes Toward a Theory of Narrative Modality”)

By its part, Maieutics is based in the theory of reminiscence. It is that if the Socratic Method begins from the idea of a prejudice, Maieutics is based in a knowledge that is latent in the conscience and that is necessary to discover. (Wikipedia, ”Maieutics”)

Dewey's description: "Reflective thinking requires the continual evaluation of beliefs, assumptions, and hypotheses against existing data and against other plausible interpretations of the data" (King and Kitchener, 1994, p.7). An individual engages in reflective thinking to "perceive the state of her own mind." (Reflective Thinking Literature Review by student)

Note:

Maeiutic fiction: In some reflective realist fiction, this rationalism becomes an axiom of the substory. Introspective reflection is the subject of a theme or subtext that: experience is only the raw stuff that is to be observed and commented upon in order to reach understanding; it is not to be surrendered to as a direct source of knowledge, of gnosis. In maieutic fiction, the protagonist is faced with a problem that requires a reflective reevaluation of self, with resolution achieved not by action but by realisation, in an epiphany that is not gnosis but rather logos.

Reason vs Passion: Maieutic fiction begins in the abjection of the “self-delusional” aspects of romance by which the Rationalist/Realist/realist novel is, in part, constructed. Don Quixote’s final realisation of his own folly might be taken as a good starting point. This rationalism is dimissed by the Romantics, and in the Gothic fiction that develops from Romanticism. Their abjection of “realism” leads in the first instance to genres based on artificially heightened determinacy and equilibrium warps where introspective reflection may be accepted — fantastique and the “sensation novel” — but as it extends to popular dime novels and penny dreadfuls we see an abjection of “intellectualism”: experience is to be experienced, not reflected upon. The rationalist side of the dialectic responds with the abjection of this “sensationalism” by which “(proper) literature” is constructed. This is carried over in the 20th century in the abjection of “genre” by which “literary” fiction is constructed. The ultimate end-point of this, on one side of the dialectic, is maieutic fiction.

A Theory of Modes and Modalities

In literary fictions the plot consists of somebody doing something. The somebody, if an individual, is the hero, and the something he does or fails to do is what he can do, or could have done, on the level of the postulates about him by the author and the consequent expectations of the audience. Fictions, therefore, may be classified, not morally, but by the hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same. (Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 47)

Frye goes on to lay out his classification of five classes — or phases might be a better term: mythic, where the hero is superior in kind to the everyman; romance, where the hero is superior in degree to the everyman and empowered over his environment; high mimetic, where the hero is superior in degree to the everyman but subject to his environment; low mimetic, where the hero is of equal status to the everyman; ironic, where the hero is inferior to the everyman. Essentially, his model offers us five types of hero we could label god, demigod, overman, everyman, nobody. While he relates these phases loosely to particular modes — high mimetic to epic & tragedy, low mimetic to comedy & realism — he spends more time exploring the modes of tragedy or comedy evident in each phase.

Where he maps this to a perceived cycle in Western literature, beginning with Medieval mythic and ending with Modern ironic, it’s an intriguing metanarrative, but I’m more interested in the implications of that phrase, “what he can do, or could have done” — which invites us to apply the notion of alethic modality — and the composite measuring of the protagonist in relation to both society and environment — which invites us to view the hero’s “power of action” in terms of two distinct relationships.

Frye’s god of myth is a protagonist who is an alethic quirk in their own right. (See the "Notes Towards a Theory of Narrative Modality" post for what I mean by "alethic quirk" and suchlike terms.) Whether or not they are subject to their environment is a matter of the worldscape that they inhabit, the alethic quirks that construct it. When Inanna descends into the Kur, she is entering a worldscape beyond her power, constructed from quirks far more powerful than her. And in terms of society, that worldscape may well include an antagonist of equal or higher status — Zeus’s Kronos, Prometheus’s Zeus. The worldscape of myth is one with the value of everyman shifted up to god. So Dumuzi may become a chimera/arcanum as he transforms into a gazelle in his bid to escape the demons pursuing him, but relative to his society and worldscape he is disempowered, a humble shepherd, a boy crying for his mother — a nobody. This potential of the protagonist being a quirk but in relation to other quirks means we might better treat myth as an extra dimension, with each phase having two forms — mythic and non-mythic romantic, mythic and non-mythic high mimetic, and so on.

But Frye’s characterisation of romance invites a similar decomposition:

The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established.

What he is talking about here is base-shift dewarping, of course, the dislocation of the narrative to an elsewhere/elsewhen in which such things “could happen”. What’s interesting here though is the characterisation of hero as numen (generating affective warp by doing what “should” be done) and the characterisation of their worldscape in terms of alethic quirks. The demigod of romance is empowered over his environment by those arcane, exotic, chimeric objects and animal helpers. The alethic quirks are predominantly on the hero’s side. Ultimately, in the form of Fate and the divine, the romantic worldscape itself may be fundamentally on the protagonist’s side. But the presence of “ogres and witches” in such a worldscape points to a complement: what if those alethic quirks are predominantly set against the protagonist? This is, in effect, the worldscape offered by gothic/horror, where ultimately, in the form of Fate and the diabolic, the worldscape itself may be fundamentally set against the protagonist. Between these two, in fact, is the range of possible tensions that construct the warped worldscape of legend, where some alethic quirks are for the protagonist, others are against the protagonist, but many simply are.

As the antagonist of myth may also be a god, as myth deals with, in effect, a society of gods, so in legend the value of everyman is shifted up to demigod. As the cliché says, it’s all relative. The protagonist of legend can be seen as, relatively speaking, the overman of high mimetic or everyman of low mimetic, while the protagonists of gothic/horror may be seen as, again relatively speaking, everyman of low mimetic or nobody of ironic. So romance also unravels, becomes a flipside of gothic, with legend between them as an ordinal position in the mythic dimension. What we have then is high mimetic, low mimetic and ironic, each of which may take a mythic, legendary or non-mythic form, according to whether the protagonist is an alethic quirk (myth), a human agent in a worldscape of alethic quirks (legend), or a human agent in a worldscape devoid of such exotica and arcana (tale).

Where the worldscape is fundamentally for or against the protagonist, we might well appy Clute’s narrative grammars of Fantasy and Horror with their Thinning and Thickening, understanding these as essentially grammars of romance and gothic. (Where Frye talks of the elegaic mood found in romance, of “associations with the sunset and the fall of the leaf”, of a “diffused, resigned, melancholic sense of the passing of time, of the old order changing and yielding to a new one,” it is hard not to see Clute’s Thinning.) Taking legend as the baseline however points up the absence in the middle-ground, the narrative grammar of legend, characterised by something other than Thinning or Thickening, something better described as Twisting — the grammar that we find where the protagonist must navigate a course of adventure and mystery, not knowing who or what is for him or who or what is against him, often finding that his assumptions were wrong, the apparent friend a traitor, the apparent enemy an ally.

What we have is, in effect, a plane of potential credibility warp which we can picture ourselves standing on. The centre-point is the protagonist as human in a worldscape of alethic quirks. Behind us those quirks multiply to the point where even the protagonist themself is one, the god of myth. Ahead they diminish, dissipate into realism. To the left, the worldscape becomes innately malevolent, permeated by monstra, a gothic mire of Thickening; its aesthetic is grotesque. To the right, it becomes innately benevolent, permeated by numina, a romantic meadow of Thinning; its aesthetic is idyllic. In the centre-point those two aesthetics clash in the legendary maze of Twisting; here the aesthetic is baroque.

This model is not, it should be clear, taxonomic. There are no borders drawn upon that plane: romance and gothic are only nominal labels for extremes; Thickening shades into Twisting shades into Thinning; credibility warp is slowly muted as alethic quirks become more sparse, as legend becomes tale; legend and myth blur where the protagonist’s quirk of a talisman becomes the quirk of a talent, the invulnerability of an Achilles, the strength of a Heracles. The demigod is often part god — half-god in the case of Heracles, two-thirds in the case of Gilgamesh.

Separating out this stratum of credibility warp in which myth and romance are only loosely bounded zones, we’re left with Frye’s modes of high mimetic, low mimetic and ironic, where the hero is defined in social terms as overman, everyman or nobody. What we are dealing with here is equilibrium warp — the weight the protagonist bears in terms of duty (authoritative warp) and the weight they can bring to bear in terms of will (affective warp). The overman’s superior status comes from dealing with more forceful deontic modalities and from responding with more forceful boulomaic modalities. They have the duties of the leader they are, and partly this is because their strength of will has placed them in that position. The everyman is dealing with the duties that any human being might, and doing so with a weaker will. Conflicted, uncertain, they are essentially a protagonist rather than a true hero. Strip them still further and we arrive at the nobody.

The nobody is a more interesting case though, with multiple facets. In the basic form, where low status translates to low duty and low strength-of-will we might see them as the comic scapegoat, the pharmakos, but more dramatic potential seems to be gleaned by subverting this form: the alazon or miles gloriosus pretends to a duty they lack the strength-of-will to enact; the picaro is indifferent to any sense of duty, is strong-willed in terms of desire but generally weak-willed in terms of controlling it; where they find that strength-of-will and set themselves at odds with the deontic imperatives of their worldscape, the picaro may become an out-and-out antihero. In effect, all these rogues and fools are basically antiheroic subversions of the classic combination of the dutiful, resolute champion.

What we begin to see here is not a simple schema of relative social status — overman, everyman or nobody — but rather a set of protagonist types defineable by the interrelations of the deontic modalities that act upon them and the boulomaic modalities they enact. High mimetic is not a phase but a heroic register (and one we might well argue turns romance into epic and horror into tragedy). Low mimetic is likewise a non-heroic register, a register of realism in the representation of an individual’s relationship to society. Ironic is an appropriate name, but this is perhaps best seen not as a register in its own right but as the set of all those antiheroic registers achieved by subverting the champion. If we are thinking of mode as a location in a zone of potentials, credibility warp considered in spatial terms, we need to think of it also as a priming of that location with a complex pattern of equilibrium warp, a register that may have preset configurations but which is ultimately as flexible as society’s capacity to create duty and an individual’s capacity to respond with will.

The result is not a historical schema, a taxonomy of modes as phases, but rather a model of narrative dynamics grounded in the potential variances of credibility and equilibrium warps. While Frye’s grand metanarrative of Western literature cycling through these five phases is appealing, we might ultimately see this more as the involution found in any such dynamic system where writers are reacting to one another or to audience expectations, following fashions or setting them. Two large-scale patterns of drift — away from alethic quirks and towards a non-heroic or anti-heroic register — are discernable as having led to a contemporary literature that maps to Frye’s ironic, but it does not seem difficult to relate these to historical circumstances: with the growth of Rationalism as an ideology we can expect an antipathy to credibility warp and heroic register; the expansion of the known world has made geographic base-shift dewarping less and less effective, the chimerae harder to accept as exotica (which may in no small way explain the shift to temporal base-shift dewarping); the democratisation of literature that began with the printing press and went production-line in the 20th century will logically lead to anti-heroic fictions by, for and about people who view the dutiful, resolute champion with the cynicism of the disenfranchised.

Frye’s metanarrative is a well-made myth, but it’s an orrery built to describe an ecosystem. This is not to rubbish it. The conceptual framework is presented as something far more flexible than a static taxonomy of discrete modes, and Frye makes a point of the transitions and resurgences, the way writers working in one will refer back past the previous mode to the one previous to that. This isn’t just a turning cycle of myth, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, ironic and so on. But it is a broad structuring of literature that, I think, we can rearticulate in dynamic rather than mechanistic terms.

The Fiddler and the Dogs

1

The man came from his caravan,
In barking of dogs. The strangers stood.

They said, we have to move you on
From what has been and what has gone.

The man replied, there’s nothing gone
But what you’ll lose not moving on.

They summoned writ: but move you will.
We’ve bricked a scheme for you, a dream

Of things made new by tick of tock.
We are the shepherds of the flock.

2

A click. Twitch cord to calm a light
Caught in the flicker of its fault,

To fix the sink, the bath, this vault
In limpid power-saving white

Here in my toilet, half past three,
The plug-hole’s clogged with matted hair

The rippled mirror warps my stare
The funhouse magic of the fair

For free; and on the other side
A dog barks to a fiddler’s stride.

3

These lives of genre to the core,
Content to do what has been done,

They said, it’s all been done before,
We know some like that kind of thing.

But we’ve no interest in what’s done.
What’s done is done, so you must bring

A clockwork head to shock a king,
And in a terraced house of chintz

You’ll work new marvels we decree,
But leave the fiddle and the dogs.

4

The caravan and carousel,
Mechanics of escape, will rust

In brambles, while robotic bust
Drones on its fortune telling spell,

In whirr of futures, stratagems
Of chess, computing rook and pawn;

Or gossip news in gloam of morn,
On breakfast show of golden dawn.

A thousand novelties you’ll shape,
No painted ponies, now you’ll make

Gadgets to rouse a kingdom’s mob
To work. This is a worthy job.

5

I have no words but his, no say,
This mirrored rake another’s mask;

But in his tousling love I bask,
Red neckerchief around my throat,

And sniff the weird upon his coat.
He sips a draft from pewter flask,

His action answer to the task,
As mine is but a show of teeth,

A sullen growl. It is his choice;
I only bark to fiddler’s voice.

6

So you’ve no interest in what’s done?
No sonnet’s iron taste in blood?

Are you so bored of ballades and
So restive roundels shout no sun

For you, hacked off with haiku,
Scathing scorn for all sestinas too?

Your jaded air won’t wind the springs,
But bring my dogs to mark your door

And bark as dogs have done before —
But you’ve no interest in such things.

7

I move as you stand still and mouth
Your rote refrain of moving on

The house half-built’s already gone,
The stripling of your studies dead.

So burn the corpse, the rotting head
On kitchen table of Scrabble games.

Set your slow flesh on fire and you
May scry wild history in the flames.

And as you burn your lives, your names,
I’ll fiddle the deep song in blue.

8

The song is deep, the song is blue
And never owned by me or you,

The author dead, the critic too.
But every singing rings it new

For chanting child and rat newborn
In ghetto slum. The song is worn

But stitched, a patchwork artifice
Of mystery, history and myth.

The song is deep, the song is blue,
And every lie in it is true.

9

Questions to ask a critic’s grief:
Can you admire an iamb’s beat?

Pentameter, the goatherd’s feet,
The lines sprung tight as catgut, fleet

In regularities of rhythm, rhyme?
Does classic cadence leave you cold?

Is free verse all so bought and sold?
And snapping Beats? And concrete words?

You know there’s cities to be heard
Where dogs bark at the flourish of birds?

10

There’s no dark lady’s dress, they said,
For that which was is now in shreds,

The blind man’s fallen seraph dead,
His trophied armour on display;

Each dying generation’s work
Is numbered in our ivory vaults,

Museumed safe for all its faults
And stacked in memory of its quirks.

The classic forms are finely placed
But they’ve been done and all decay.

11

So we must drive to pastures green
Where novelties evolve the taste.

Phrasings of fourteen lines have grace,
But there’s no volta truly edged,

No blade that shines, still slaughter-clean
And sharp. No, all are tarnished, blunt

With time and thug’s abuse, dull red
With grime of blood, desire and must,

So we discard them to the dust,
And urge you to new tools of lead.

12

Once in a foreign life and death,
He said, a dog had hate for breath,

A prick dipped in a cretin’s beer,
A fuck-you to a hack, backed up

With balls and swagger, jagged flash
Of switchblade wit and bestial sneer.

Last in a line of cuntish queers,
He swore new idioms — to fly

Into the fevered sun and die!
That cur moved on; so turn your eye.

13

Trumpet your folly. You presume
To judge what’s left, what’s to be done,

To scoff at snarls of feral hope,
The lineaments of untold scope.

And if cold fourteen lines should come
A volta’s kiss to twist your gut?

You hire your hangman, braid the rope.
A boar in blinkers at the trough,

Grunting at swill not rich enough
And shitting pearls as gaudy slough.

14

They: Can you claim commands misguide,
Demanding genesis anew,

When measured light must judge and right
The pandered passions of the mob

For empty teraphim of gods
And fiddles tuned to drunken dogs?

You raid an ossiary of dukes
For meatless bones and echoed lies —

Theft in a mock of gypsy guise,
That fleeces followers of crooks.

15

He: Do I frame the howls as sheep
A herd of woolen thoughts that graze

In idyll’s green consoling daze,
No, shepherd, it is you who bleat

That sonnet’s barb is obsolete,
Fence all in pricking wire of sneers.

In trenches sandbagged with denial,
Dismissing signs for peasant style,

You gouge your eyes out, eardrums pierce,
And weep me dark and silent tears.

16

It’s not, in any mode, the form
That has been done, but what’s done with

That form is all. You walk the road
Of footsteps’ fall that trudging swarm

Has trod to dust, but April rains
Pound as a drum till all is mud

To splash, the rain a beat of blood,
Your walk a hop, a skip, a prance,

That leaves the print of a new dance,
And this is all, but all is much.

17

Pastiche of flowers, archaic tongue,
Parodic ode to fag-ash urn,

Is pageant pony, joke told twice,
A jump of fence — the twist is trite.

But scratched with Biro, Bic or quill
Still there’s uncharted straits of love

To navigate, deep sounds to map
In hammock’s sway, in swell and slap

Of waves, matelotage at night,
Jade isles that sleep beyond our sight.

18

Some thieves come sneakily, craftily slip,
Into Arcadian eclogue’s frame

To show who’s also here, His game,
Scraping an antique blade to strip

A scale of paint on plaster frieze,
Reveal the pale of Death beneath,

Chloride of lime as soldier’s pall
The mud and meat of trench’s wall.

And if not, is it only schmaltz,
The swagman’s solace in a waltz?

19

Ignite the crucible of scrap
To sublimate the bent and botched,

But spires of scrit smoke as you say,
The blade is done, has had its day.

Talk trebuchets and tanks. Be heard.
But rattled cage won’t hatch the new,

As tyrant’s don’t is tinker’s do,
A call to weaponry of words,

To shatter sonnets as they choose
Or strap the volta to the blues,

Strum steel guitar, no Eton guns
But rifles, bayonets for scum

On missions from their gods of clay
To murder chaplains as they pray.

20

A hot-house of hymns, of fanfares,
Worshipping flocks, incense of prayers,

These are mere rituals, death in life.
Collections of coin or kudos

Out of time, unchanging dramas
Honouring sideshow salves of strife,

Betray dull care for craft of knife,
But there’s no duty of desire,

And fresh blood on an aged blade
Makes payment full upon the pyre.

21

To deconstruct and demonstrate
The glory in a neutron bomb

Is to be scribe of Bacchic rant,
Anatomist of head on plate.

You call your king’s machine as fate
To summon madness to his halls

Of bias-bolstered ivory walls,
To say I must move on, ignore

What’s done a dozen times before,
What will be done a dozen more.

22

All orreries as carousels
Of worlds and moons spin round a sun,

As clockwork seasons turn, return.
The tinker moves from horse to horse

To take the pennies from each corpse
Riding around its death for fun.

Rhapsody, rapture, waking sleep,
The fiddler’s song is not for sheep,

For shepherd’s fancy of a flock.
Disdaining schemes of ticking talk,

It whirls wild arcs beyond all cogs
And we but howl for him, we dogs.

Candy Floss on a Shitty Stick

Dear Anonymouse,

I fear I may be about to be a bit brusque with you. I’m not even sure this is entirely necessary, to be honest, given that I’m going to be, for the most part, simply reiterating what I’ve already said in response to your comment to Sulla on my archive post, “The Homosexual Agenda”. There are even, in fact, some aspects of your comment that I find sort of charming, like your comparison of the disgust you feel in the face of homosexuality to being “grossed out by beans and onions”. You do recognise that “lots of people love those,” that it “doesn't mean there's anything wrong with them, or that it's gross or not beautiful and terribly romantic in God's eyes and many people here on earth as well. the love that is, not beans and onions.” The babble is inane, but its heart is in the right place. You even go so far as to say, “the real main thing is that no matter what ‘grosses us out’..it is not our place to place judgment on an activity between two consenting adults who have feelings that they can't change and must have been sent by God.” That’s a worthy sentiment, and while I find the talk of God somewhat stimulates my own retch reflex, it does make me feel kindly disposed to you.

But you did have to post two days after the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, didn’t you? And you did have to say that “Homosexuality IS inherently disgusting to a lot of straight people...more even than the way we generally use the word inherently, I mean it is REALLY inherent, in that it is positively biological, at the very core of psychology for some (not all) straight people....and personally I believe that only a small part of that is society no matter how intolerant and evil society is, and most of it is just natural biology of the brain.”

At the very core of psychology, you say? Natural biology of the brain?

It’s nice to know that this inbuilt imperative of hatred isn’t something you’ve allowed to rule you, that you “used to think all homosexuality was pretty gross, but much more with gay men than women” until you “got a little bi-curious”. So now, you say, “although I'm not sure I can ever picture myself being with a woman, and still prefer men as a romantic partner, I can fantasize about women in romantic situations and I can watch lesbian love stories without flinching like I used to, it's actually nice.”

How lovely.

You go on: “I too am a girly girl and I like women that look like women, not men, maybe just a tiny bit spicy, if you know what I mean, but at the same time very very feminine looking.” And on: “When it comes to men though, where my romantic dreams still lie, I prefer men who are fairly masculine looking and acting, just not huge beefcakes or cavemen.” And on: “I don't really go for feminine type men though just because I like girls a little now.” And on: “I like it one way or the other, I don't really go for androgyny (which I believe that some people that classify themselves as "gay", as liking either men or women, REALLY in truth prefer people that are somewhere in the middle, sometimes even smack dab-but I guess there's no word for that yet).”

I know it’s just mean of me to say that your self-absorbed witterings are a riveting study of (I'm guessing late-adolescent?) vacuity. I know that this is needlessly snarky. But you did have to post two days after the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, didn’t you? And you did have to say that “Homosexuality IS inherently disgusting to a lot of straight people...more even than the way we generally use the word inherently, I mean it is REALLY inherent, in that it is positively biological, at the very core of psychology for some (not all) straight people.”

And you did have to say this in response to Sulla, who had valiantly taken a bigot to task for a specious claim that there was “no record of homosexuality being ‘celebrated’ or ‘embraced’ or even ‘tolerated’ until very recent history”. You did have to say this in response to Sulla’s simple factual statements pointing to clear examples of homosexuality toddling happily along without being subject to bigotry, both in the animal kingdom and throughout human history.

And as much as you may have “got a little bi-curious”, you do have some way to go. What is it you say? “[A]lthough I'm slightly more comfortable with the idea of gay men, and even in some tv shows or movies or whatever I can be dragged into the romance of it...if there is anything to [sic] explicit, even especially passionate kissing, I still feel very very uncomfortable and grossed out. And that will probably never change completely. I don't know if it's because I'm jealous that I could never be a part of that (I believe when we watch movies, a big part of it is putting ourselves in the characters shoes)...or if it's just some sort of biological reaction.”

See, now I’m confused. Or rather, you’re confused. You were so very certain that the disgust “is positively biological, at the very core of psychology for some,” but now when it comes to your own reaction, you “don’t know.” It might be a “biological reaction”. But maybe you’re just jealous. It could be natural or it could be a culturally conditioned prejudice. But hey ho. Whatever. It will “probably never change completely”. Personally, I’d be inclined to say it will almost certainly never change completely if that’s your attitude. I’d be inclined to encourage you to change that attitude, not to blithely accept prejudice as the “facts of life”. And definitely not to blather brainlessly to others that they should do the same.

Not to post your prattling piffle on the blog of THE…. Sodomite Hal Duncan!!, two days after the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, saying that “the main thing is that gay people at some point will just have to understand that reality for a lot of straight people.”

Not to meander merrily into a comments thread under the watchful eye of the queer cur Behemouth, and tell the good citizen Sulla that he shouldn’t be calling a bigot on his bullshit, that “if I were you I wouldn't waste my time trying to change them or even argue with them.”

Not to end your vacuous drivel with an empty-headed “peace.”

Peace?

Anonymouse, with all due respect, it's very nice that you've made some baby steps towards not vomiting out your small intestines at the thought of -- shock! horror! -- two men kissing. And I do applaud the fact that you recognise your feelings as only that, rejecting the moralistic poppycock of the bigot that Sulla was responding to. But your peace 'n' kittens sentiments become candy floss on a shitty stick with this apologist balderdash about homosexuality being inherently disgusting.

So it just "IS", is it... for some anyway? Do you actually, I might ask, have any evidence for this assertion? Have you perhaps carried out some scientific studies the rest of the world hasn't heard of? Have you even the remotest idea of how the human nausea response works in relation to visual stimuli? Or are you just blithely and ignorantly excusing bigotry as a biological imperative cause you, like, think maybe it could be, f'rsure? Validating homophobia as an innate disgust that, well, we faggots just have to learn to live with? Telling me that "gay people at some point will just have to understand that reality"? Telling me that I just have to learn to deal with it, to suck it up? And telling Sulla not to get my back when the bigots come around? Just two days after the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots?

Let me buy you a fucking clue.

You say that "we would all do well to understand each other a bit better." Yes, these are very nice words. You might want to try understanding how a mixed-race couple would feel if you proclaimed on their blog that some people do just have an innate revulsion of miscegenation. Or how a Jewish person would feel if you said, well, those Fascists were just born with a natural hatred of the Jews. How a black person would feel if you said that, hey, some white people can't help joining lynch mobs. Some people are just naturally convinced that Gypsies steal children and put curses on people. You just have to accept that. Let them be. Don’t bother standing up to them. Don’t bother defending someone they’re attacking. There's just no point arguing with them.

Go away and think about that. Please. Think about that, and about whether you really want to sound like an apologist for hate crimes with a head composed entirely of… what? Is it air or is it bone? Or perhaps shit?

And after you've thought about it, if you do come back here, do not ever use my blog to tell someone who is arguing with a fucking bigot not to do so. Not to bother.

Is that clear? Am I making myself clear here?

Bigot posts hate-screed on my blog. Sulla shows his cojones by calling out said bigot for his bigotry. You tell Sulla, "if I were you I wouldn't waste my time trying to change them or even argue with them."

Well, in the name of every faggot in the world who's ever had someone stand up for them, and every faggot in the world -- and by fuck there's so many of them still out there -- who's never had someone stand up for them, thank fuck that Sulla is happy to "waste his time" standing up against bigots where people like you are not. Thank fuck that he is not you. Thank fuck that I'm not you. Thank fuck that there have been, and are, and will continue to be innumerable people around the world that aren't you.

Frankly, the world would be a much better place if you weren't you.

But you know, all it would take is for you to understand why, and then you wouldn’t be.

Peace out.

Critique From HereNow

The Fan and the Last Man

By way of Larry of OF Blog of the Fallen, by way of Jonathan McCalmont of Ruthless Culture, quoting from Mark of K-Punk, here’s a quote I want to get my pointy little teeth into:

“In many ways, the academic qua academic is the Troll par excellence. Postgraduate study has a propensity to breeds trolls; in the worst cases, the mode of nitpicking critique (and autocritique) required by academic training turns people into permanent trolls, trolls who troll themselves, who transform their inability to commit to any position into a virtue, a sign of their maturity (opposed, in their minds, to the allegedly infantile attachments of The Fan). But there is nothing more adolescent – in the worst way – than this posture of alleged detachment, this sneer from nowhere. For what it disavows is its own investments; an investment in always being at the edge of projects it can neither commit to nor entirely sever itself from – the worst kind of libidinal configuration, an appalling trap, an existential toxicity which ensures debilitation for all who come into contact with it (if only that in terms of time and energy wasted – the Troll above all wants to waste time, its libido involves a banal sadism, the dull malice of snatching people’s toys away from them).”

The most interesting features of this quote to me are actually the capitalisations of “Troll” and “The Fan”. All words are significant; but some are Significant. Like the Namings of the Enemy. These are the soft underbelly of polemic, the place where a well-aimed bite will bring you to the innards. We find something similar here, in another quote from the same K-Punk post — in the capitalisation of “Last Man”:

“Smirking postmodernity images the fan as the sad geekish Trekkie, pathetically, fetishistically invested in what – all good sense knows – is embarrassing trivia. But this lofty, purportedly olympian perspective is nothing but the view of the Last Man. Which isn’t to make the fatuous relativist claim that devotees of Badiou are the same as Trekkies; it is to make the point that Graham has been tirelessly reiterating – that the critique from nowhere is nothing but trolling. Trolls pride themselves on not being fans, on not having the investments shared by those occupying whatever space they are trolling.”

McCalmont challenges the expedient strategy of dismissing criticisms with the meta-argument that “they are in breach of the rules of proper engagement”:

In other words, not only is being a fan an acceptable state to be in, it is also the only meaningful position from which to engage with anything. To properly engage with a text, you must attack it from a particular theoretical and/or aesthetic position. To fail to possess such a position is to be little more than a troll.

I’m not sure I buy this rearticulation though. It’s a little ragdoll that I get the feeling will come apart at the seams with just a little shaking. There’s a simple case here after all: 1) Smirking postmodernity is a distinctively anti-fan position, characterised by an abjection of said fan as pitiable trivia-fetishist; 2) While pretending to a “lofty, purportedly olympian perspective”, this attitude is actually shallow and self-serving posturing; 3) The combination of argumentative critique and proud disdain for the emotionally-invested fan is the essence of the troll; 4) Critique born of this trolling, “critique from nowhere”, is worthless.

Fuck, you can just bite the head off this right away. It’s extending the argument to read this as saying that the only meaningful position is therefore to be a fan. This is to gloss over one simple alternative: not giving a flying fuck; being neither Fan nor Last Man. An argument that the anti-fan stance is wrong does not translate into an argument that the fan stance is right, not if we allow for a non-fan stance. This rearticulation turns the Last Man argument into a Straw Man: an argument that invalidates all critique but that of the Fan. Easy to torch.

The Ivory Watchtower

To be fair, of course, this Last Man argument has some problems in its own right. There’s a sweeping assumption at the last point there for a start. So the great white snark never picks a target that deserves the Darwin Award, eh? Doesn’t taste the blood, notice the ineffectual thrashing of the feeble swimmer way out of their depth? That hunter-killer critique can never be right? I could shore up that case a little, bolster it with an argument that the Last Man’s opinion is likely to be distorted by the prejudice associated with the abjection of the Fan, transfering that irrationalism to anything loaded with signifiers of fan appeal: but that would be me now extending the argument. Bollocks to that.

The case is flawed in another respect anyway. If I were to modify it would be to tear off the loose limb — the whole “troll” assertion. The analogy doesn’t sit comfortably, as McCalmont points out, with the academic’s consistent application of theory: “When an analytical philosopher attacks an idea, he does so whilst committed to certain theories and postulates.” Actually this is sort of implicit in Mark’s assertion on K-Punk, that “[t]he best critics do not pretend to offer value-neutral judgements from nowhere – as Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and Lacan have shown in their different ways, no such place exists, although the fantasy position of something like Analytic Philosophy is to pretend that it does.” The true troll has no such fantasy position, no high-rise hidey-hole of mock objectivity to snipe from; the troll is a grunt on the ground, running this way and that, chucking whatever wank grenade happens to be handy, through whatever doorway happens to be ajar. The troll’s critique is critique from everywhere and anywhere.

But if we chew off the fat of points three and four, maybe we are still left with a Last Man of sorts, defined by the first two points — the anti-fan, scorning the emotional investment of the devout, allowing that scorn to cloud their judgement. Critiquing from a “nowhere” that pretends to be a somewhere, a precarious construct of “theories and postulates”, a house of flashcards inked with empty signifiers. This is the latent myth of the Last Man, why it is capitalised like “The Fan”, because it is a symbol every bit as much as is the Fan. A bogeyman whose critique comes from the nowhere of nonsense, from the Ivory Watchtower of Academia, the Spire of Dreaming; it is a metaphor that pervades the discourse. There’s “investment” and there’s “investment”. That disavowal of the fannish emotional investment, that “posture of alleged detachment”, is not incompatible with an intellectual investment in that “fantasy position” of ironic oversight. It’s just that this mode of philosophical investment refuses the sincerity of sentiment, apes objectivity. Sounds like the old Reason versus Passion dichotomy to me. Head versus Heart. Rationalism versus Romanticism. Intellectualism versus sensationalism. Elitists versus populists. Last Man versus Fan. Maybe this’ll be more obvious with a bit of symbol flipping:

Sullen countermodernity images the academic as the snide sophistic Last Man, pathetically, defensively retreated into what – all good sense knows – is pseudo-intellectual flummery. But this ballsy, purportedly grounded perspective is nothing but the view of the Fan.

It’s juicy rhetoric from both angles, the Fan against the Last Man, the Last Man against the Fan. But let’s strip it to the bones.

Squabbling Siblings

So, the core of that K-Punk piece is a criticism of the “Last Man” attitude as a stance in and of itself. Not as the lack of a “correct” stance but as a stance handicapped by its prejudicial hostility. That stance is characterised by its disdain of investment, but the issue here is actually the “Last Man” treating this as “a virtue, a sign of their maturity.” In the context of the emotional nature of the fan’s investment, the Last Man’s affectation of distance can be seen as an intellectualist abjection of the sensational. This, the argument goes, is a form of investment in its own right, and a neurotic one, an abjection of the fan inside. How so? It is an “adolescent” affectation, “this posture of alleged detachment, this sneer from nowhere”. Why? “For what it disavows is its own investments; an investment in always being at the edge of projects it can neither commit to nor entirely sever itself from.” Map that “smirking” to the callow irony of a muso who derides a kick-ass rock band because they’re on the cover of NME, of a sophomore who thinks he’s “above all that” precisely because he’s bought into a solipsistic self-belief. Each is abjecting their own past naivety in an attempt to prove they’ve overcome it.

Is there anyone out there who doesn’t find that principle instantly recognisable, who doesn’t remember at some stage of their infancy or adolescence scorning the “childish” things they once cherished, abjecting them in a ritualistic disavowal of the embarassing naivety of that joy?

Does the Last Man exist within this subculture? It hardly seems likely that they wouldn’t, to be honest; why on earth would this subculture be any different? And rejecting that “posture” does not mean that the only valid response is the other extreme — the infantile investment of the fanatic, scorning all critique that denies his passion, even when it’s entirely reasonable. Not that I’m denying that extreme is one response. Does the Fan exist within this subculture? That’s another no-brainer as far as I’m concerned. But that doesn’t mean it’s either/or.

Of course, maybe I’m being too charitable in my reading of this Last Man argument. Maybe that is the contention — that it’s Last Man or Fan, and the Last Man is just a goddamn phony, so you have only one option if you want to be a good critic. If so, I don’t buy it. I don’t buy the binary logic that sets up the extremes of Fan and Last Man, disacknowledging anything between. Or more accurately, anything after. I do think these extremes are evident in the discourse, sometimes as Straw Men, raised up as symbols for the factions on each side, projected on to any disagreeable critique, but sometimes as actual positions. The dynamic seems a little like that of two siblings at times, the younger throwing infantile sulks because the elder derides their taste as childish, the elder aping adulthood but demonstrating their own adolescence in each callow disavowal. If I’ve been focusing on the latter in all the recent blather, by the way, it’s because I think the “you’re just a jealous poopy-head” balderdash is largely obvious and acknowledged, while the “meh, that’s so jejune” piffle is not.

Critique Going Nowhere

McCalmont’s post acknowledges the problem, in his references to academic training in critique that “gives birth to a belief in certain universal laws of not only logic but also argumentative discourse.” He has a highly pertinent comment, to my mind, when he notes that “[d]ebate in analytical philosophy is not directionless. Rather it stems from a belief in certain universal strictures.” As I commented in response — and as I touched on in the Ethics and Enthusiasm post — the key danger I see is of those strictures turning into a tick-list. Prescriptivism is a sophomoric mode of thought, the recourse to absolutism as the bolsters and barricades of an immature philosophy; it is a bedsit built of books, a safe haven in an uncertain world. And the tick-list is a crib sheet that makes the Last Man’s need for such stability apparent.

Ironically, the more methodical the review the more superficial it may look, even when it has substantive points well-argued, because it ultimately reads as critique-by-numbers, a ritualistic analysis in accordance with received wisdom learned by rote. Prose, setting, plot, character, theme, conclusion. Or drop “prose” and throw in “influences”. Drop “character” and throw in “eyeball-kicks”. Drop “theme” and throw in “kittens”. Says Johnathan: “Many is the paper I sat through which would be debated in terms of ‘simplicity’, ‘intuitiveness’ and even ‘cleanliness’.” Translate those to Populist terms like “accessibility”, “immersiveness” and “transparent prose” and it’s not hard to see how tick-list critique happens on one side of the fence, I think. Translate them to “verisimilitude”, “reflectiveness” and “rich prose” and you have a different value-set that’s all well and good but not necessarily the most relevant in reviewing a pulp fiction work for a pulp fiction audience.

But the point is not that it’s wrong to apply those values, not if you’re reviewing a work for an audience that shares them; rather that a tick-list critique on that basis, for all its literary standards, transforms those “universal strictures” into a formulation of a “good novel” every bit as blinkered as the philistine’s template of a “good story”. Even when the values are an individual’s own, their home-made aesthetic built from a ferocious interrogation of one’s own tastes, there is an air of convention to them. Another Hendrix poster on another bedsit wall. Another trafic cone in the corner. Another copy of Nietzsche, Marx, Freud or Lacan. You can smell the damp and dust of a rented aesthetics decked out in ornaments of individualism but still not really a home. Makes me want to cock my leg and piss in a corner.

But does this actually invalidate the critique? No, not at all. It can still be substantive, still be of value to the audience that shares those tastes. This is not critique from nowhere. The Last Man is not a troll. The targets picked from the Ivory Watchtower may be valid. The Last Man’s ruthless sniping may serve as a culling of the herd. And ultimately his aim may be true. But this does raise the questions articulated by McCalmont:

When we argue about the failings of a book’s prose style or the lack of narrative coherence or the weak characterisation or the poor structure, are we invoking an imaginary set of universal principles?

Yes, even if they are general conventions.

are we effectively attacking works from nowhere and with nothing?

No, because they are general conventions that mostly make sense. It’s just that in pulp fiction, with the exception of narrative coherence perhaps, these are often secondary to the dynamic qualities peculiar to that pulp idiom. The turgid prose of Epic Fantasy may be required for a thick weft of worldbolstering and worldbumphing. In the Romantic aesthetic of old school Space Opera, “strong” characterisation may be bold rather than subtle. And if you fail to consider factors like these it’s like treating a musical as a play, judging it with a tick-list of “acting”, “script”, “narrative coherence”. Which is fine until you’re addressing yourself to an audience that includes a whole lot of Steven Sondheim fans. “As for the experimentalist strategy of disrupting the narrative with song? The playwright is clearly striving for Dennis Potter style moments of rapture; sadly he achieves only a bizarre and unintentional effect of Pinteresque non sequitur.”

That may be critique from somewhere, but it’s critique going nowhere.

Of Pulp and Preachers

But here’s the key point:

are we being simply trolls?

No, but you’re going to piss people the fuck off if you can’t rein in a) the tick-list critique that takes academic method as formula b) the assumption that you know better. Because where that analytic mentality reads as utterly procedural thought, it serves as marker not just of sophomoric methods but of the stereotype of science fiction fanthink — that rigidity of thought locked into system — invalidating any air of superior nous. And then you get a critic who is, “in effect, attacking from the position of a fan even though he himself does not necessarily recognise that he is merely a fan or that his devotion to a particular position is all that he is defending.” You have someone who’s “attacking from the point of view that certain values are either actually universal or they should be.” You get the devoted, defensive advocate of dogma.

More to the point, you get a reader who knows fine well that what they’re dealing with is a fan turned aesthetic ideologue — turned demogogue actually, given that they have a platform, a pulpit — the balcony of that Ivory Watchtower from which one preaches to the masses. It’s not trolling, but it is a political act, where the reviewer is genuinely seeking to exert sway, where you are stepping into that Last Man role — or even where you just appear to be because your style of reviewing hasn’t matured yet, you haven’t quite found your voice, so the academic tone still echoes in your words. Maybe you’re not the Last Man. But that’s how the Fan is going to see you the second you curl your top lip into even a hint of a sneer at their taste. And this is what you’re going to be doing. As McCalmont acknowledges in a thread on OF Blog of the Fallen:

Book reviews are not just purchasing recommendations, they're also part of the fashioning of genre's identity and that feeds back into the books that the genre will produce in future.

And in relation to authors of works that don’t fit with the progressive agenda, authors of “core genre” works:

In fact, I don't actually think that critics should be in the business of patting those kinds of author on the head either. One of the roles of the critic is to stir the pot by situating works in a wider context and part of that stirring of the pot is saying "this is good... it moves stuff forward" even if it is down blind alleys.

Don’t get me wrong. Personally, I’m all for a peer-group discourse of mouthy opinionated bastards pushing their own idiosyncratic agenda. (Mea culpa.) I might ask, with a slight arching of the eyebrow and a wry smile, whether you think critics should be in the business of patting other kinds of authors on the head? I mean, the right kinds of authors? The ones that are good little doggies, walking to heel and feeling all toasty inside when the master rewards them with that pat? I might ask if you seriously don’t expect to get bitten by the feral mutts among us who are not interested in playing sheepdog in your fantasy of “shepherd of the genre flock”? By the readers themselves who are far from sheepish, when you try to steer them this way or that with a tap of your little stick? Even a breeze of the stick flicking past them, a glimpse of it in the corner of an eye, and they’re going to try and take it off you, snap it in two and ram it where the son don’t shine.

If you’re going to be an agitant, don’t for the love of Dog be surprised at the “baroque” accusations that result when you agitate people.

The people who disagree with your agenda are going to respond. Somebody telling you your tastes aren’t legitimate? That you should be enjoying something written on entirely different principles? When they’re apparently blind to their own fanthink? To most readers of pulp fiction that’s going to automatically read as just another example of the — how I hate this word — “elitism” of those devoted to the contemporary realist genre, to the exclusion of all else. And given the social qualities of that sort of interaction, it’s going to read as a mechanism of abjection. Sadly, the general autoresponse seems to be to come out, guns blazing, with the exact same strategies of dismissal and delegitimisation, but — also sadly — that’s entirely predictable and not really that unwarranted when you step into the role of Last Man.

Writing that reaction off as defensive groupthink is defensive groupthink. It’s a nice, safe, consolatory but ultimately self-defeating fallacy to dismiss that reaction as the irk of Fans invested in their precious precious, lashing out blindly in their sense of belonging to a community that’s under attack. No, it’s about the community belonging to them. Which is to say, it’s about the community not belonging to you, not as far as they’re concerned. So you apply for the post of genre gatekeeper, guardian of the ghetto, and they ask you, in no uncertain terms, who the fuck do you think you are? No shit, Sherlock. Suck it up. If you really, honestly want to effect change then you’re going to have to get over that cosy little fantasy of the “dumb” “ovine” “mob”. You’re going to have to recognise that some of them are foxes in their cunning, bulls in their belligerence, lone wolves in their individualism. You want to push the envelope? Get into their heads and figure out how to talk to them, how to treat them as people rater than sheep, so they won’t end up turning your Last Man stance into one big motherfucker of a Straw Man, swarming round it en masse, and putting it to the torch while you scream, “Oh, Jesus Christ! Oh, Jesus Christ!”

Otherwise you’re just bleating.

So saith the rabid dog Behemouth.