Edgar Lee Masters

YE who are kicking against Fate,
Tell me how it is that on this hill-side,
Running down to the river,
Which fronts the sun and the south-wind,
This plant draws from the air and soil	5
Poison and becomes poison ivy?
And this plant draws from the same air and soil
Sweet elixirs and colors and becomes arbutus?
And both flourish?
You may blame Spoon River for what it is,	10
But whom do you blame for the will in you
That feeds itself and makes you dock-weed,
Jimpson, dandelion or mullen
And which can never use any soil or air
So as to make you jessamine or wistaria?

Interesting

An honest thought experiment that requests an honest response.

The Incredible, The Incredible Mr. Limpet

This promises to be the most challenging piece I've ever written. For in it, I will try to arrest into a readable exposition, the weblike and fecund themes of one of Hollywood's most cerebral philosophical accomplishments. I will try to assay The Incredible Mr. Limpet.

Let's dive in. The plot: An aloof fringer named Henry Limpet is preoccupied -obsessed- with fish and makes a living as a bookkeeper. He is rejected by the navy even as his friend is accepted for service. Depressed, he falls off a pier near Coney Island and is inexplicably transformed into a Tilefish.

There are allusions to Jonah and other tales. Jonah rejects his calling and while trying to escape, a fish swallows him. In the story of Henry Limpet, Limpet is himself rejected, and instead of being swallowed by a fish as he sinks to the depths, becomes transformed into a fish. This is Kafkaesque. There is a significant inversion to this too, however. Gregor Samsa's transformation isolates him and closes him off from human society. As the metamorphosis progresses, he is increasingly isolated from his family, becomes unable to provide financially for them and invokes their ire.

Henry Limpet on the other hand, is just the opposite. As human, Limpet has already drawn himself away from society. He frustrates his wife with his reticent behavior and has trouble meeting financial needs. There is even an illusion to conjugal shortcomings. His ultimate rejection is by the Navy, barring him from participating in the world of man and its affairs of war.

"There you are Mr. Limpet... I suppose we'll be losing you to the Navy soon, then?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Really?"

"No, my eyesight. And a few other things. I'm classified -F."

"Everybody can't be a hero, Mr. Limpet. We need men like you at home too."

"Why?"

"To give to the blood bank, of course."

"They don't want my blood."

Like Gregor, everything changes with his transformation, but the other direction. As a fish, he is able to rejoin the society of mankind, no longer a burden thanks to a newfound special ability. He can create a large underwater noise which locates Nazi U-boats, making him a secret weapon for the U.S. Navy. Accepted into the Navy, he advances rank and is able to support his wife financially and enjoy the camaraderie of his old friend, George Stickel.

Once the war ends, he begins to realize his role in society was dependent on his ability to add value to society. When they lack a purpose for him, he grows purposeless himself. Interestingly, he falls in love with a female fish of the same species, named ladyfish, during his role in the war. He finds that their species is rare and needs a male to help ensure their proliferation. By the end, he rejects mankind- his friends, his wife, the navy- everything. He has rediscovered, primely, all the roles he couldn't fill as a man in the role of a fish.

There is another detail I neglected. The movie is actually a flashback. It occurs because some Naval officers are reopening up the file of Mr. Limpet. There have been curious reports of super-intelligent porpoises and they suspect Mr. Limpet is teaching the porpoises, training them this way. There is no indication whether or not the porpoises are hostile, however. That matter is left cleverly ambiguous. We are left to wonder about Henry Limpet's motivations. Has he fashioned himself as a Poseidon of sorts? An existential hero deified by his ability to create intelligence in sea creatures and propagate his species as some sort of uber-fish-kind? We do not know.

Once the movie flashes back to the present, we see an army boat lowering a microphone into the water, vainly entreating Mr. Limpet. The only response is an aggressive sound, "THRUM." Then credits begin to roll with the song, "Be Careful How You Wish."

Very deep.

Bonhoeffer

Was at Barnes and Noble the other day and purchased a booklet called "Christ the Center" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  It's not a piece of his writing, but rather a compilation of lecture notes he used to teach a course on Christology in 1933.  It's incomplete and very brief, but tastes like a crisp apple in autumn.  Later, when I have the text in front of me, I'll post a sample.  

In an Ongoing Consideration of Literary Criticism

A methodology for reconciling the contents of the last two posts, as well as every other encounter I've had with the discipline of textual criticism is as follows:

I have a friend who is from Finland.  I met him, along with some other friends, while in London.  He's a a very interesting fellow who has extensively studied wine, spending years learning the craft of wine tasting at a college devoted to this purpose (Europe is in some ways, very cool.)  

I bring this up because I think this goes a long way in reconciling the very strong disagreements I find in reading literary critics such as Bloom, Kruger, and others. And I don't mean disagreeing with their opinion, I mean disagreeing with their right to exist as literary authorities.  My Dad is an Engineer.  I am not.  The echoes of his analytical personality are still very much alive in me, though I approach it in a different way entirely.  What charms me about wine infuriated me about literary critics.  And perhaps I am just now understanding why.  

When I read literary criticism, I would be irritated by how they make assumptions I thought unfair, unscientific, and wholly improbable.  "This fellow said he loved Keats, but in reality he was completely instructed by Tennyson.  Hear this cadence, here? Tennyson all over it!"

What was obvious to me about wine (that there is a high level of subjectivity to its appreciation) wasn't obvious to me about the written word.  I wanted to be told with certitude that this poet was good, and that this one was not.  With wine, there is at least an element of physicality involved.  Wine is made up of atoms and molecules that may be retained or qualified by the soil, the climate, the aging process, etc. Even with these scientific considerations the art of wine-tasting is nowise a science.  How much more so, the world of thought, ideas, and interpretation.  

What literary critics are observing instead, is how certain references, ideas, motifs, conceits, schemes, meters, etc.  are striking them, rather then influencing the author.  I think there is some level that you can be precise.  Shakespeare wrote sonnets.  Sure.  But concluding that Shakespeare wrote sonnet A, half of sonnet B, and 2/3 or sonnet C, D, and E, is opinion and could be severely effected by whether someone had just read Milton or Spenser 5 minutes before the Shakespeare, 10 minutes, an hour, etc.  It's the subjectivity of wine times 3 million.

So is literary criticism useless? No way!  Should it be trusted?  Certainly not always, no matter how qualified the source.  My experience with my Finnish friend and wine is illuminating in one other way. 

I asked him if he'd like to go and taste some wine sometime and, if he was feeling generous, teach a no-nothing about wine tasting.  He agreed and once we both sat with glasses of wine before us (types of his recommendation), he started giving me the lesson.  He told me how to swirl the glass, cleanse the palate, enjoy the color of the wine, the texture, the nose and how to sip for maximum flavor exposure.  I sipped it and he looked at me, expectantly.

I had absolutely no idea what to say.  I didn't taste much else but wine.  After a little reluctance, I told him as much.  He seemed to expect that and then revealed the most important lesson about wine tasting.  "Keep a journal," he said "and for each entry, record the wine, vintage, etc.  Then, when you taste it, try your best to apply a flavor to the taste.  If you decide something tastes like plums, look for that flavor again in the next wine you taste.  In this manner, your taste will be refined."

When you read literary criticism of any kind, realize you aren't reading a scientific analysis.  No matter who they think they are, it is not a scientific analysis.  Not even the most vacant-eyed, white-washed anthropologist is presenting a scientific analysis.  They are presenting their interpretation of the text they have encountered.  They are presenting you the text, defined by their vocabulary and set of precluded assumptions.  Also remember they are telling you how to enjoy the text.  The metaphor quickly breaks down here, because interpretive methodology quickly starts to become opinion, but they still teach how to enjoy it.  I disagree with Bloom about T. S. Eliot, utterly.  But when I see the way Bloom enjoys Shakespeare, I can apply a similar satisfaction to Eliot.

This isn't relativism.  I think there is good wine and bad wine, good poetry and bad poetry.  But it does meant there is some ambiguity on these matters.  Now on the topic of substantive issues, (e.g. the Bible) this still applies.  What I mean is that as a member of the invisible Church, a believer in the inerrancy of scripture and all that comes with that, I begin with a certain assumption: my faith. 

From that perspective I approach the Bible, and that really makes all the difference. Additionally, I fully believe that the perspective of this faith in the Judeo-Christian God, and this perspective only, presents an internally consistent framework for understanding and interpreting reality.  And the Bible.  

I really do love wine.  And I think this post sounds way more deconstructionist than I mean for it too.  But it will be refined, perhaps.

Literary Criticism

There is a phrase, one which I think sums up the entirety of literary (as well as modern biblical) criticism:  

"The poems were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name."

I am an author and I hate you.

Writers, literary critics, and worst of all, literary critics who call themselves writers are guilty of one fault especially: boiling people in a vat of pseudo-psychology till they can present their vision as fact. This is an excerpt of a novel by Ian McEwan.

There were things she did not know and was interested to learn. She knew little of the poet's [Milton] life, and, amazingly, it seemed that it was not part of her studies, to consider the circumstances of his times.

Earlier, the protagonist, his mother, and his father are fully distilled in an Oedipal quip that McEwan undoubtedly thought clever. Here, he himself criticizes the fictional girl's lack of insight into Milton's craft. The trouble was the girl hadn't realized Milton was not an observer of some truth, but merely an assembler of inputs and physical stimuli. And only the inputs that the critic can easily see or clumsily (and with some bias) infer.

So I'll take back part of what I said. It's not merely applying psychology. It's relying on nature and nurture observations that were very tired before Skinner and Freud took the big sleep. It's dimly illuminating, and worse, casts shadows that mislead more than they guide. But perhaps as good postmodernist disciples, it's their intention.

And why the gloomy faces? Why must all modern authors have gloomy faces? Couldn't at least one of them be driven mad enough by their lugubrious perspectives to present some variety? Couldn't one of them dress like a hippopotamus? Their undeviating frowns and precisely furrowed brows and gently tousled hairs have more in common with the ubiquity of junior highschool cliques than independent thinkers on independent roads to truth. In every instance they seem desperate to say, "we are serious thinkers saying serious things you should listen to seriously."

Unless... despite their directly opposed philosophies and manners, they have somehow revealed a fundamental truth about their lives: their ideas aren't half as original, interesting, or honest as they would dearly like everyone to believe.

Yes, with a little bit of vocabulary, psychology can support any opinion under the sun. An aside: Cormac McCarthy gets props because he went on Oprah, and no one who takes himself too seriously can do that.