Wednesday 29
th April 2015: A journey to
Brighton, desperately reading
Derek Attridge’s new
The Work of Literature for
The Meaning of Form, an odd prelude to
my Hi Zero reading… Another post
here tells the story of that reading, but
these notes will tell another, interior narrative, of my engagement, I hope my ‘hospitality’,
to this book, as I read it on trains, in the sunshine in Brighton, where I
seemed to be for a moment, appropriately ‘staged’ in the background of a short
scene from the TV drama
Cuffs. ‘That’s
a terrible title,’ I told the girl who held me back while they filmed it again.
And reading more in the bar of the Euston Tap, and on the train home to Liverpool.
The title of Derek Attridge’s book is accurate to his
concept of the act-event of reading, and to the distinction between the text
and work, both of which I think are newly emphasised concepts since his seminal
The Singularity of Literature which
forms a critical bedrock to my work
The
Meaning of Form. (See
here for the manifold links to this work on this blog.)
Indeed, it was an encounter with Attridge at a two-day conference in Salford, perhaps
as long ago as 2000, where I was road-testing my Levinasian reading of Tom
Raworth, that informed both the chapter on Raworth in
The Poetry of Saying and the essay on poetry and ethics in
When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry,
that introduced me to the thinking in
The
Singularity. Derek Attridge kindly promised me a copy of his latest essay the next
day, and lo! and behold! it (and he) appeared. (All I had at that time to give
him was a copy of
Far Language.) This sneak-preview prepared me for
The
Singularity of Literature which – when I discovered the New Formalists,
from whom Attridge keeps a respectful distance – merged with their thinking
(and with others, like Leighton and DeBolla and even Michael Wood), and laid
the ground for the theoretical framework of
The
Meaning of Form. Therefore a new book on these theoretical groundings is
both an excitement and a challenge. Arriving as it has at the point where
(apart from the tracking down of typos, the elision of solecisms) I like to think of the book as ‘finished’,
it would clearly be difficult to deal with complete changes of direction, but
that is not in fact what I have found.
Attridge describes the book as both a ‘supplement’ (11) and
a ‘fuller account’ (Attridge 2015: 11) of the argument of the earlier book, and
indeed there are changes of emphasis rather than complete changes of direction.
At certain points, a judicious quotation from the new book might operate as a
supplement or fuller account of my own formalist readings, but I think I need
to resist the urge to pepper the typescript with footnotes to it. Indeed, where
I reference Attridge’s book on Coetzee, I think I will add a brief account of
the new book and indeed declare that it was published in the final draft stages
of writing the book. (Indeed, Attridge himself faces this dilemma: Badiou has a
walk on part in The Singularity and
Dewey is a new encounter in The Work of
Literature. He also quotes Ranciere and uses the same quote I do; of
course, there is a small and not very open part of myself that wants to claim
having found that independently and not through
this new book, and have the need to say so. I’ve said it. But on the other
hand, this proves that this supplement is supplementary. We’ll get to the one
disagreement later.) Attridge’s
intervening book, The Forms of Poetry appeared
in 2013 and I was able to integrate that work into still evolving critical
debates. Here the supplement will be doubly supplementary (which is probably a
good way of putting it).
He agrees with the ‘against method’ tendencies of the New
Formalists, the sense that there isn’t a strong
method. As Attridge says: ‘A critical method should be no more powerful
than is absolutely necessary for the task it is called to carry out.’ (162)
Why? Because: ‘The more powerful the critic’s technique, the less reliable the
critical judgements it is used to make.’ (162)
What follows is a series of notes on particular aspects of the
new book that add something new, and which might be smuggled into my text or
appended as footnotes (where appropriate, and the level of appropriateness
might be sensibly gauged as I progress through them). This is not a review or even a summary of the
book. (Read it!)
The account of otherness seems strengthened, to remind us
that otherness is ‘unencounterable’. (Attridge 2015: 55). It is still, though,
‘a dimension of the literary experience that manifests itself as surprise or
unfamiliarity, whether massive or minimal’. (55) It also ‘refers to the work of
art’s challenge to existing frameworks of knowledge, feeling, and behaviour’.
(219) Singularity is ‘the welcoming of alterity’. (143) It is openness to
change. ‘The singular work does not have a bounded and unchanging identity; on
the contrary it’s open to change and reinterpretation.’ (56) But it’s also ‘a
constellation made possible for both creator and reader by habits of
interpreting, thinking and feeling’. (140) (The trio of ‘alterity, invention and
singularity’ is emphasised in a way I don’t quite remember from The Singularity, and I think I might say
so. Of course it is completely under
the signature of these two books to say that the re-experiencing (or
re-forming) of the first will be in-formed by the act-event of reading the
second (in fact that’s already proved or I wouldn’t feel the imperative of
making these notes.) OK: so ‘invention’ the third term, is ‘always the invention of the other’ (220).
These three things depend upon the engagement with the text,
of course. I’ve always borrowed from reader-response theory the notion of the
active reader. I wrote somewhere that Lee Harwood’s work forces us to engage with it, to become active. In the TLS, Peter Robinson
rightly corrected me, and pointed out that Harwood’s work is the least coercive of works (which
is way I now write of the ‘gentle art of collage’). Attridge may help here. In The Singularity he insists upon the fact
that genuine literary engagement (that is when one is reading
non-instrumentally) is both an event that occurs and an action that the reader does, that is both passive and
active. ‘The coming-into-being of the work of art is, I’ve been arguing,’
Attridge argues, ‘both an act and an event: it’s something the artist does …
and something that happens to the artist’. (220) Creation and reception are similar: ‘I use the term
“act-event” in order to capture the strange duality of this process in which
active and passive are not clearly separable – whether we’re talking about the
work or the person responding to it. In this way, the work is remade each time
it is read’. (247) (This definition I might
invite into the text, offer it hospitable re-definition.) Reading is a ‘willed
passivity’. (2)
Music is dealt with briefly and Attridge makes a remark very
close to the way I’d already adapted his thinking to talk about the
music-poetry collaborations of Geraldine Monk (which I’d written about at great
length on this blog as preparation for the concise but phenomenological
‘reading’ of the resultant ‘text’ (though now I must be coaxed into thinking of
it as a ‘work’). He remarks: ‘Our active listening to a musical piece is a kind
of performance of the performance we are hearing’. (68) And so I might add are
my revised posts. (Here’s
one.)
Attridge makes the distinction between a ‘text’ which is
simply text (words or whatever) and the ‘work’, which is when it is elevated to
being read in a literary way ‘as distinct from other cultural practices’, as he
puts it. (98) I agree with this, but I’m not sure it isn’t too late to police
every use of the words in my book. This distinction is for later. Or never. Attridge
himself has ‘my engagement with the text,’ on one occasion when he is referring to a text that becomes a work. (302) It's a difficult distinction to maintain in ordinary critical discourse (unless one is writing about Barthes, of course, who also, but differently, uses this binary).
Both Adorno and Susan Stewart talk about exclusions in terms
of literary creation. It is one of the scenes of guilt Adorno advertises, and
Stewart reinforces the notion that any aesthetic choice (‘Mespotamia’ is in
prose) presupposes what could have been otherwise (‘Mesopotamia’
as a verse-novel!). (I can’t find quotations to deal with this. As can be seen,
it is covered from other angles in my book already.)
Notions of form are vital to Attridge’s argument, although
he doesn’t say a lot here. ‘The event of the literary work is a formal event, involving among other
things, or rather among other happenings, shifts in register, allusions to
other discourses … the patterning of rhythms, the linking of rhymes, the
ordering of sections, the movement of syntax, the echoing of sounds: all
operating in a temporal medium to surprise, lull, intrigue, satisfy’. (117)
‘What’s traditionally called “form” is one aspect of this moving complex,
inseparable from what’s traditionally called “content”.’ (117) This isn’t a
surprise after my assimilations of his thinking for The Meaning of Form but
underlines eventness as a element of form, so that this quotation might appear somewhere in my
lightly revised text. The interinanimation of form and content is well-covered already in my book, but this might be interesting to new readers of this blog. The idea
that form stages the encounter with
the text is present in the earlier book, and quoted in mine, but this
particular formulation seems a powerful way of presenting the point: ‘It’s
through formed language that we’re invited to participate in its
emotion-arousing capacities; this means we feel the emotions, but always as
performances of language’s power.’ (267) Responding to this handling of form
makes it literature.
Ethics, when it appears, seems to be related more to the 'ethical turn' of The Poetry of Saying than to the present
study, my 'formal turn', as I put it in my introduction. (My first and last footnotes trace this congruence. Here.) I might also skip over this while
acknowledging the extraordinary account of responsible reading on page 147 in
the chapter 3, ‘Singularity’. The final chapter on hospitality is a brilliant
exposition of a post-Levinasian late-Derridean ethics; indeed, after Derrida,
Attridge reminds us that ‘ethics is hospitality’.
One of the themes that I picked up from Peter DeBollas’ Art Matters is that – unlike Guinness –
art may not be (automatically) good for you. Attridge reminds us of this too
(and it is salutary reading for those who want to argue for instrumentalist
functions for the arts in terms of wellbeing, including some in my own
university). ‘Otherness is otherness: there is no way of knowing in advance
whether its advent will be beneficial or disastrous,’ Attridge says. (149)
‘There can be no absolute guarantee that this change will be for the good, but
without this risk – minimized, fortunately, by the operations of the norms of
conditional hospitality (including ‘a system of norms and conventions’ (p. 149))
– there would be no genuine openness to the other and no possibility of doing
justice to the singular work of literature. (305) Maybe worth tempering the De
Bolla with that. After all:
we’re at a love poem
that causes you to think
war with just about anyone
it bristles with
implication as you touch
its forms you form it in acts
of forming not
tricks and triggers upon
the wall of cognition for the forms
know a thing or two and not one
might be good for you as
a voice slaps across the screen
(My poem ‘Trigger Warning’, dedicated to my students and
included
here.)
The conclusion to the book is worth quoting, because
it neatly wraps many themes within it, especially the last two expressed above:
‘The outcome of a hospitable reading … is a change in the reader, perhaps not
only in the way he reads other works but more widely too. Without hospitality
to what is new, other, outside the borders of my comprehension and comfort, I
will put down the poem or the novel, or leave the theatre, just the same as I
was before my engagement with the text. There can be no absolute guarantee that
this change will be for the good, but without this risk – minimized,
fortunately, by the operations of the norms of conditional hospitality – there
would be no genuine openness to the other and no possibility of doing justice
to the singular work of literature. (305)
(I’ve another passage marked in my journal for what it
speaks to poetics, of the art of writing, which is always a sub-stratum of my
critical work. Another post here soon!)
This makes it seem (as is largely the case) that I have only
found confirmation rather than challenge in his new book. This is not so at
all, but I have a particular interest in establishing continuities of theme.
The reader (if there is one) may be pleased to find a disagreement with the
text, one that comes out of the fact I found my own answer to a question he did
not deal with in the earlier book, but which is raised elsewhere in the new
formalist canon.
This ‘argument’ (if that’s what it is) haunts The Meaning of Form: form thinks; forms
think. The question is raised by Peter de Bolla and Simon Jarvis, as well as by Robert
Kaufman to a lesser extent and also by Michael Wood (whose work is now only a footnote,
after publisher’s readers’ comments; you can read a post here soon). It’s an
interesting, surprising, perhaps counter-intuitive, question, and although
Attridge doesn’t answer it in The
Singularity of Literature, he does turn to the issue in The Work of Literature.
I came to my own conclusions about this. This was to regard form
or literary artefacts as embodying 'extended mind', as in the thinking of Lambros
Malafouris. I explained the thinking in outline
here and in detail
here, but also in the final
‘tight little paragraph’ which (oddly) few people have read, and which might be
the best place for a reader to reprise my argument.
Here. (Though a longer
piece accessible
here, expresses my extended thinking on extended mind.)
Malafouris says: ‘For active externalism, marks made with a pen on paper are
not an ongoing external record of the contents of mental states; they are an
extension of those states.’ (Malafouris 2013: 74) It follows that ‘cognition
has no location,’ or no fixed location between mind and things. (Malafouris
2013: 85) The same goes for form, I conclude (whilst still acknowledging the
conjectural nature of the thinking about
form that I examine). Malafouris himself - we exchanged emails - is interested that his thoughts should
be useful to the literary scholar.
Although Attridge opines that ‘When a work seems to be
possessed of its own capacity to think, to question, to harbour knowledge, so
much so that we call on metaphors that supply it with a brain, a will, a
consciousness, it’s a sign of both its otherness and its inventiveness,’ (Attridge
2015: 253) this apprehension (he dubs it ‘anthropomorphism’, or ‘metaphor’
(Attridge 2015: 242)) does not alone account for an artwork’s cognitive aspects
(will and consciousness is not an issue here). For Attridge, ‘Works
of art don’t “know” or “think” … though they can involve the viewer, reader or
auditor in a performance of knowing or thinking.’ (255) This doesn’t deal with the
embodiment Malafouris argues of human artefacts. Even though
‘Every work is a knowing work, every work smiles enigmatically, because there
is no way we, or it, can satisfy the thirst for knowledge that it generates,’
(257) this does not do justice – to use one of Attridge’s key terms – to the
cognitive material engagement that an artwork summons into activity.
As ever, Attridge has gifted to the literary (and, I’d say,
the creative) world (see a post here soon), a fine account of how we read a text as a
literary work. From my point of view, form is central (nothing can be staged or
performed unless it is formed) and this book helps to access that mystery. The
final chapter on hospitality, as I’ve said above, brings my two theoretical
critical works, The Poetry of Saying and
The Meaning of Form in Contemporary
Innovative Poetry (to give it its full new title) together. My strictly
literary critical Odyssey seems rested. It looks like, feels like, Ithaca
ahead, but is it? Could it be a mirage, a phantom of some spell-binding enchantress? It could almost be part of my ‘responsibility not to give the reader
something that is wholly and immediately intelligible, but to leave a space
open for individual interpretation,’ that signals my need to arrive in disguise, and disappear. (304)
Works Cited
Attridge, Derek. The
Singularity of Literature. London and New York: Routledge,
2004.
Attridge. Derek. (2015). The
Work of Literature. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Malafouris, Lambros.
How
Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. Cambridge,
Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 2013.
A brief summary of the theory of
The Meaning of Form project may be read
here (and a 200 word version
here), but the best place to start is probably the hub page of links to all the working posts towards this book,
here. Though there is a later post where a paragraph from
The Work of Literature is highlighted for its contribution to writerly poetics,
here.
