On classics

I’ve been rereading the Odyssey in preparation for my literature class next semester, and it strikes me that the episodes that people most often remember — the Cyclops, the Sirens, etc. — take up only a small proportion of the work. In fact, they don’t even belong to the main action proper, but only occur in a kind of “flashback” as Odysseus recounts his adventures at his last stop before Ithaca. And while we remember the Odyssey as being primarily about Odysseus’s travels, he’s on Ithaca for approximately half of the poem, albeit with his identity hidden for the most part.

The experience of reading many classics is similar: the most memorable parts turn out to be just a small proportion of the total work, and the bulk of it is taken up by concerns that one hardly remembers at all. One can see this in film as well — who would guess, based on the reception of Psycho, that the iconic murder happens so early on? I always think back to a teacher of mine who assigned us to write what he called a “proportional synopsis,” in which our summary recounted each incident taking up approximately the same percentage of the page as the author spends on it in the work itself. Space doesn’t automatically equal importance, of course, but it seems a useful exercise to graphically illustrate the fact that, for example, Anselm’s “ontological argument” in the Proslogion takes up about the same amount of space as his attempt to reconcile God’s justice and mercy — and it’s also a helpful way to approach new texts, to ensure that you don’t just pick and choose whatever strikes you as important. Hence something like a proportional synopsis has been a go-to assignment for me in my teaching.

So much for my pedagogical approach to this issue. What I really want to propose, however, is the possibility that there exists some universally acknowledged classic that is remembered for something that gives one a totally misleading impression of the work as a whole. This memorable episode or argument shouldn’t even be the opposite of the point of the work, as that would imply too direct a relationship — it should, instead, be more or less irrelevant to what’s going on.

Any suggestions? (My pick is the Bible.)

Give me back the Berlin Wall

The Nation has three articles up, including one by Mikhail Gorbachev, reflecting on the consequences of the fall of the Soviet Union. Perhaps we could take some time to reflect as well.

More painted plates by Lucy Pimber.

Now folks today we’re going to auction off Missus Pimber’s things. I think you all knew Missus Pimber and you know she had some pretty nice things.

The first two sentences of the book introduce Lucy Pimber. She is scarcely mentioned in what follows. The character gets only a couple of lines. If this were a movie, the actress playing her would not have made the credits. Nevertheless, she is everything to the book. And not just because she is crucial to the story. She is the example of how one can create without waste of words. If not Gass as godly author then at least as a magician summoning up realities with nothing more than an ink-filled wand.

Lucy Pimber is the Higgs particle to B(r)acket Omensetter’s omnipresence. Lucy keeps it together.

Miscarriage: a Christian interpretation (Feast of Holy Innocents, 2011)

One element of the wonder, miracle, and mystery of Christmas lies in its tragedy.  Advent ends every year with churches’ Christmas Eve services, often by singing “Silent Night” by candlelight.  Christmas Day, obviously, marks the birth of Christ in a manger; December 26^th is traditionally the feast of the martyr, St. Stephen; December 27^th is the feast of St. John the Evangelist, an important day for Freemasons like myself and is the commemoration of the martyrdom believed to be described in Acts 12.  December 27^th is also my spouse and my wedding anniversary.

December 28^th is the feast of the Holy Innocents in most Western Christian traditions.  The day holds special meaning for me because of the two miscarriages we experienced in between the birth of our two children.

The first one caught us by surprise, primarily because we had absolutely no complications with our first pregnancy, in fact, our son, Christian was born just a few hours before the predicted date of his birth.  The second pregnancy terminated very early.  We were, of course, devastated, but the reality of it hit us when the local hospital asked us what funeral arrangements we would like to have for “the products of conception.”

2011, considered in and for itself

This was a banner year for AUFS. In terms of sheer numbers, we reached a million all-time views this summer, and our total number of views for this year alone are at nearly a half million. This year also saw our all-time most popular post, Anthony’s Hatred of the Poor is the True Cause of the UK Riots.

It was also a ridiculously good year in terms of publications. Three of our authors published books: Dan Barber’s On Diaspora, Brad Johnson’s The Characteristic Theology of Herman Melville, and Christopher Rodkey’s The Synaptic Gospel. In addition, Anthony’s translation of Laruelle’s Future Christ was released in the US, and he also presided over a very successful AAR session on After the Postsecular and the Postmodern, in which several AUFS authors participated.

We held three book events, over my Politics of Redemption, Jay Carter’s Race, and Ted Jennings’ Plato or Paul?. In addition, a reading group over William Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck is currently ongoing.

Finally, at the beginning of this year, Rodney Clapp, a columnist for The Christian Century, named AUFS as one of the best theology blogs. So it’s official now!

What were the highlights of 2011 for you, dear readers? Feel free to link to favorite posts.

William Gass and the Music of Prose

In response to trying to produce a critique of Omensetter’s Luck as a whole, the biggest challenge has obviously been to narrow down which direction to take. As someone who tends to absorb and/or retain art and literature in terms of affect, I’d like to briefly touch on the part of the work of most interest to me psychologically, or in this case, psycholinguistically.

Before I sway too easily into the grave error we’ve been cautioned against that leads down the road of merely looking for insights into characters and ‘moral lessons,’ I’d like to keep just a moment more in regards to Robert’s thoughts on syntax and conceptual music. I have very much enjoyed (coming from a strong music theory background) seeing terminology one also uses in musical structures (i.e. phrase, period, subject, and later assonance and consonance when dealing in sound devises such as those in Frost, Swinburn or Emerson) being employed here.

A couple of days ago, I read a lovely essay by an Italian student at the University of Bologna entitled Dwelling upon Metaphors: The Translation of William Gass’s Novellas. What caught my eye in this dissertation were his thoughts on Gass’s essay in Finding a Form, “The Music of Prose” specifically. In this portion, he sees this ‘conceptual music’ as a type of second syntax:

 Musical form creates another syntax, which overlaps the grammatical and reinforces that set of directions sometimes, or adds another dimension by suggesting that two words, when they alliterate or rhyme, thereby modify each other, even if they’re not in any normally modifying position. Everything a sentence is is made manifest by its music (Gass, 1996).

This sheds an interesting light toward the question Brad previously posed, “Which has more influence over the other: does the note-level aspect inform the larger-scale musicality, or is it more that the larger-scale musicality making possible the hearing of the note-level aspect at all?” I mentioned briefly that I also had wondered this, and on first instinct was inclined to agree with the latter. Would we have even taken the chance to note the more intimate underpinnings of the text (the sentence Brad noted on p. 145, “Omensetter’s stones did not skip on forever…” being an excellent example) without previously taking in the ‘larger-scale musicality?’ I’m inclined to be doubtful.

In defense of the conclusion being the latter, where the larger-scale musicality makes possible the emergence of the smaller intricacies, what immediately struck me about Gass’s literary style even upon a cursory reading was this: simple diction and syntax. Except it’s not simple, not at all. It is what caused me to read and reread Tott’s indiscriminating rants on his imagined travels as metaphor for his pain time and time again. Of the entirety of the work (and I have mentioned it already in an earlier comment) my favorite is as follows:

 His dreams were not embarrassed by clichés, but in each he always knew the precise feel of the air, what  manner of birds were singing, the position of the sun, the kind of cloud, the form of emotion in himself and others, and every felicity of life (13).

I can’t recall ever reading something quite like it. In the complete chaos that surrounds Tott’s rambling, out comes this complete lack of repetition, a conclusively original thought and absolute clarity of mind. Gass’s sentences are so incredibly thick that they insist on being read time and time again. He has been called an unabashed sensualist, to which I feel there can be little dispute. I find it is the sentences-his use of diction and syntax-that ceaselessly hold blame for his linguistic success. Though they are unarguably essential, I feel it is his combination of words, not necessarily his aping vowels or repeated consonants that really render the work.

At the end of the day, we can already begin maneuvering the ins and outs of either side, and I know a good case can be made for both. However, this process could also clearly result in the dog chasing his tail. If we widen our gaze and apply this question to a broader spectrum of art and literature, could we pose it again and come to the same conclusion? Or is this a quandary best left specifically to this subtly explosive form?

The Holiday-Industrial Complex

In the article that I recommended yesterday, one of my favorite parts is a quote from Eve Sedgwick:

The depressing thing about the Christmas season—isn’t it?—is that it’s the time when all the institutions are speaking with one voice. The Church says what the Church says. But the State says the same thing: maybe not (in some ways it hardly matters) in the language of theology, but in the language the State talks: legal holidays, long school hiatus, special postage stamps, and all. And the language of commerce more than chimes in, as consumer purchasing is organized ever more narrowly around the final weeks of the calendar year, the Dow Jones aquiver over Americans’ “holiday mood.” The media, in turn, fall in triumphally behind the Christmas phalanx: ad-swollen magazines have oozing turkeys on the cover, while for the news industry every question turns into the Christmas question—Will hostages be free for Christmas? What did that flash flood or mass murder (umpty-ump people killed and maimed) do to those families’ Christmas? And meanwhile, the pairing “families/Christmas” becomes increasingly tautological, as families more and more constitute themselves according to the schedule, and in the endlessly iterated image, of the holiday itself constituted in the image of ‘the’ family.

The thing hasn’t, finally, so much to do with propaganda for Christianity as with propaganda for Christmas itself.

Christmas is the American master-signifier, the quilting point at which everything comes together — and as such, it’s radically meaningless. Getting into the spirit of Christmas means nothing more than not resisting. The happiness and joy you’re supposed to feel is nothing but the joy of conforming. It’s pretty sinister, and I think it’s become more sinister within my lifetime as the one thing that religion traditionally brings to the table has become increasingly eclipsed: caring for the poor.

The true meaning of Christmas is Christmas

Via Gerry Canavan, I find this incredible post for all the Scrooges among us. Merry Ameri-family-godmas!

On Some Sentences of William Gass

I.
This is a post about Omensetter’s Luck by William H. Gass. It will take the form of a bunch of scattered observations and hypotheses. But first some introduction of the perspective from which I’ve written what follows in section II, et al, and which I’ve gleaned from nearly constant perusal of Gass’s many books of essays since I discovered them a year or so ago.

After reading the essays, one has to notice at least two things: first, that Gass is radically constructivist about fictional worlds and characters; further, that he is a writer of sentences first – of scenes and stories a distant second.

As a constructivist he compares the author to God, and he relates the history of the development of the novel to the increasingly problematic question of the author’s moral relationship to the world he creates within his words. “Before us is the empty page, the deep o’er which, like God, though modestly, we brood.” The historical move from omniscient narrators, for example, into a preference for radically limited perspectives is a move as if God created a world to run according to lawful processes and then used those laws to excuse himself from responsibility for the tragedies that consequently befell his creatures. “Novels in which the novelist has effaced himself create worlds without gods.”

Theorizing about theory and finding religion in the process

Rarely does one get a chance to say this, but there is actually an interesting essay in the most recent issue (79.4) of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. I’m referring to Timothy Beal & William Deal’s “Theory, Disciplinarity, and the Study of Religion: Lessons from a Publishing Nightmare.”

In it, they detail a regrettable story that regular readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription necessary) may already be aware (I am not a regular reader, and thus was not) — of an introductory text on religion & theory they wrote a couple of years ago that had been pretty wantonly plagiarized. Happens all the time, of course as we know. What makes this all the more juicy is that the guilty work, shockingly, not only shared a publisher with Beal & Deal, Routledge, but was in fact a part of the very series their book was the impetus for creating! Odder still, when a major-player journal, TDR: The Drama Review, facilitated a discussion on the controversy, Beal & Deal found themselves under scrutiny for having written the plagiarized work in the first place. Far more mature than I would be in those circumstances, they decided to make good use of the matter and wrote a short response to the response.

The primary criticism made by no less than Judith Butler was that the duo were guilty of over-instrumentalizing theory, i.e., of turning it into an apparatus of mastery that somehow operates in the background, as in this dramatic case, of both religious studies & performance studies. To this criticism, Beal & Deal make an appeal (fairly crudely in my estimation) to another theory, albeit one with a more humble posturing, “poor theory” [PDF].