MATTE BLANCO & LITERARY CRITICISM : (Tooth Is Beauty)

 

This essay was written for the Freud Museum Conference in honour of the Centenary of Matte Blanco : 8.11.8.

 

 

SECTION 1 : INTRODUCTION           

 

In the not-infinite space of 30 minutes, I hope to persuade you of the worth of some of Matte Blanco’s ideas to the discipline of literary criticism. Gourmands speak of a well-digested meal repeating nicely. Interpretative reading should be like that and not like having your teeth pulled. Alas, it is a contentious realm. Just consider James Wood’s description of his experience of being among Booker Prize judges:

 

“But the absurdity of the process was soon apparent: it is almost impossible to persuade someone else of the quality or poverty of a selected novel (a useful lesson in the limits of literary criticism). In practice, judge A blathers on about his favourite novel for five minutes, and then judge B blathers on about her favourite novel for five minutes, and nothing changes: no one switches sides. That is when the horse-trading begins.”     [Guardian : 6/9/8]

 

Recall your last dozen pub or dinner-party conversations about a book or poem. You see how quickly aesthetic criticism forgets its own basics and becomes a mire of intemperate emotion, often quite enjoyable even if quite useless.

 

So once in a while, it is important to try to focus on what lit crit is and isn’t. Here is my blathering. I will propose distinctions between types of writing, types of literary criticism, types of reasoning and suggest how Matte Blanco’s ideas help.

 

SECTION 2 : TYPES OF WRITING

 

Let us begin by distinguishing between non-literary writing & literary-writing.

 

a) Non-literature aims to direct action by using unambiguous, easily translatable, language: eg the computer manual, the police report, etc.

“Press Ctl, Alt And Dlt.”.  “The red corvette hit the blue bus”

 

b) Literature invites contemplation of its beautifully shaped & truthfully ambiguous presentation of the ambiguities of human desires and their expression: whether a fragment as in a short poem, or connected incidents as in drama or the novel. Hesiod & Dante intended to inform & direct but didn’t choose the most efficient, undistracting way to do this: they chose the most beautiful. “The Love that moves the Sun and the other Stars”

 

The second distinction is between the two types of judgment involved in literary criticism.  For this I will use the concepts that are forgotten every August during the celebrations & castigations of exam results. Whatever the size of the cohort, marking can be either criterion-referenced or norm referenced. Governments wishing for high pass-rates can set shamefully low criteria that most will attain.

                                                                                                                                          

Only last month, the former chief schools inspector, Sir Mike Tomlinson, remarked that  “A-levels strangle scholarship and are not fit for purpose"  [Independent 8/10/8]  Norm-referencing better reflects the range of human ability: so the markers say only five percent of any cohort will get Grade A. The murder metaphor – strangle - shows how quickly we all get worked up in judging.

 

 

Literary criticism is partly descriptive and partly evaluative.

 

a) Descriptive literary criticism is criterion-referenced. It describes the elements of the piece of literature. If a piece of writing has these (for contemplation) it is literature.

But as Matthew Reynolds observed “the history of poetry is a history of revolutions in what counts as poetry.”  [LRB 9/10/8 ].  Someone does the counting. The greatest is Aristotle’s Poetics where he gives the elements, the DNA ,of any set of connected incidents – a story. These are Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Song and Spectacle.

Diction opens out as literary devices : rhyme, rhythm, plain-repetition of words or word-types, phrases, the yoking of opposites, contraries, non-sequitors, nonsense words, and patterns like simile and chiasmus and noting the acoustic & affective weight of words.  It treats the literary-work as a machine to be described.

 

 

b) Evaluative literary criticism is norm-referenced. It begins from the belief that most of what is intended or paraded as literature, in any culture, in any generation, is only minimally so: and that there is a comparatively tiny but ever-growing canon of great literature to guide judgement. To say that a work by Pam Ayres is doggerel or only verse, but not poetry, is to say that her use of rhythm, rhyme, metaphor and thought is of negligible complexity & subtlety when compared to Plath.

In the words of the great poet-critic Eliot:

“Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other works of art” [Eliot 1920 : My emphasis]

 

It is important to state that the realm is open-ended. The Greeks observed the unities of time, place and action in their dramas and produced works of astonishing truth and beauty. Though they asserted the necessity of these unities, the Elizabethans smashed them, and also produced works of staggering truth and beauty. Comparison is intrinsic to the discipline, but grading between greatnesses is pointless.                                                                                                         

                                                                                                                   

SECTION 3 : TYPES OF LIT CRIT

 

I will stick to two types : pre-psychoanalytic and psychoanalytic lit-crit. As a bit of light relief, I will give laconic summaries of unnamed stories which I will discuss later. You can play at guessing these if the rest of the paper palls.

 

1 : A man comes to believe he is guilty of a crime he didn’t commit.

2 : A writer, an aristocrat & a migrant woman torment each other with sexual betrayal.

3 : A woman’s corpse is discovered stuffed up a chimney.

4: After being bitten by a dog, a man consults his dentist.

 

It is worth noting that these sentences are very close to being non-literary: almost like police reports. Take example 2:

A writer, an aristocrat & a migrant woman torment each other with sexual betrayal.

 

Pre-psychoanalytic descriptive criticism begins with the descriptive part, giving the plot and naming the literary structure used to display the plot.

30 stanzas : Sonnet form: fourteen-line iambic pentameter : Non-Petrarchan rhyme scheme.

 

The evaluative criticism aspect appraises whether Shakespeare’s new rhyme-scheme, and literary devices, puns and metaphors etc, are both beautiful in the form (sight and sound) and truthful in presenting sexual longing in its ambivalences.

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action  [Sonnet 129]

Speaking this aloud, one is struck by the perfect aptness of the sibilants to the sensation of expelling disgust. One might think of snakes and Eve. One might reflect that pre-Christians like Ovid have a different conception of spirit.

 

To take another couple of examples, though there is no plot or character development in Quenneau’s Exercises in Style – The argument on the bus -  it is magnificent because the reader has to attend, almost scientifically, to how grammatical tense changes the emotional charge of the repeated story.                                                                                    

                                                                                                                       

 

Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue”  - The chimney corpse – like Hamlet’s speech to the players -  includes directions to the reader on how to judge its style of thinking. Of the Prince himself - the misogynist legalist - Eliot famously remarked that there was no objective correlative in the play, its various situations, for the Prince’s hysterical responses. Though he didn’t use that word, it is implied by the idea of disproportionality. It is crucial to see that this is a comparative judgement, implying other plays/novels where there is a perfect fit eg for Eliot Aenid.

 

Psychoanalytic Criticism

 

This type of interpretation begins from the belief that behind the manifest content of the incidents of the story, even the manifest spoken desires of the characters, there are undescribed & unspoken yet comprehensible latent desires & thoughts.  Freud launched psychoanalysis with precisely this distinction in his analysis of the often strange stories in human dreams. He proposed that from infancy we all carried dynamic desires & anxieties of such intensity that they could not be held in one’s conscious: and so were held in an unconscious where they behaved according to their own unusual principles: “condensation, displacement, timelessness, non-contradiction, replacement of exterior by interior reality.” [Freud : Dreams]

 

Once Freud points it out, the Oedipal crux of Hamlet seems blindingly obvious. Even when he knows consciously that he has sufficient proof of Claudius’s guilt, he hesitates because he knows unconsciously that he envies Claudius’s sex with Gertrude. Moments later he goes into demented detail about their sex life. This interpretation adds to and does not diminish the play’s truth & beauty. Similarly one could say that the saintly orphan Dorothea’s choice of the pompous academic Casaubon in Middlemarch has Elektral traces. 

 

Freud knew that poets knew more than they knew. For millennia they have produced such characters as the person who disavows a desire or fault in herself, and sees it endlessly in others. eg Boccaccio’s St Anthony or Tom Buchanan moralizing on adultery to Gatsby. Psychoanalysts described this mechanism as projection, and went on to delineate its corollaries and complex varieties. This deepens our understanding of how characters relate to each other.

 

Perhaps the hardest character to write is the person who knows he hasn’t committed a crime, but feels he has. The anguish he feels at this inescapable feeling – what Freud calls unconscious guilt - deepens until he commits a pointless crime in order to feel the guilt makes sense. Kafka is the master of this misery.

                                                                                                                

 

SECTION 4 : MATTE BLANCO

 

Before proceeding to Matte Blanco, let us summarise. We have distinguished between non-literary and literary writing: between two phases of literary criticism – descriptive & evaluative. Finally we have seen how psychoanalytic ideas enable us to name latent thoughts and feelings behind manifest actions.

 

Earlier speakers have explained clearly the features of ordinary thinking fore-grounded by Matte Blanco, from Freud & Klein.

 

1 : Emotion is an appraisal  : “Mmm – nice, good, eat”   and “Urrg – horrid, get rid-of”

 

2: Words bind affect/emotion,& by doing so, they lower anxiety & clarify desire.

 

Recall the first time your child comes screaming to you in the middle of night, saying that she had ‘seen’ monsters. You say “That (night-sleep-story) is called a dream: a bad dream. Sometimes there are nice dreams”.  She is calmed. This one word ‘dream’ binds a vast amount of unbounded distress. Even in adulthood the mechanism is the same. At my consultation at the London Dental Hospital , I was given a multiple choice questionnaire, with questions like:

“Is the pain -

a) Stinging,

b) Rasping

c) Sawing

d) Throbbing

 

Even this little mental effort had a subtle anaesthetic effect, getting me, momentarily, out of the prison of pain..

 

3:  From infancy, we are disposed to sort & connect objects, thoughts & emotions into groups/sets/classes & to reason & to generalise.

Reasoning requires at least two elements: single-words, sentences, gestures. We can’t not-reason. We need to know how the elements connect: we are distressed until we work it out.

 

a)  Gloucester ’s two statements “Yes, I killed your husband”  “Marry me!” leave Lady Anne with a terrifying puzzle in Richard III.

 

b) Peter Cook famously recited A Hard Days Night like Olivier’s Richard III. Here he is as author-manque to dim-Dud. After missing each other on different floors of the National Gallery, they finally meet:

Dud : Here have a sandwich. My feet are killing me!

Pete : What’s that got to do with the sandwich?

Dud : Nothing. I just said it afterwards.

Pete: Well you shouldn’t just say things together, it could confuse a stupid person.                                                                                                                           

                                                                                                                   

This sublime passage illustrates the ordinary human disposition to find meaning by linking and also how easily confusions arise. Dud doesn’t pause the micro-second necessary to separate the thoughts & allow a linking thought. Pedantic Pete is plausibly comedically baffled!

 

Matte Blanco’s originality lies in his observations:

 

a)  The five characteristics of Freud’s unconscious could be given a logical rationale.

 

b)  There are five levels of human experience, each with a different proportion of rational thought (proper logic), symmetrical logic and affect.

 

c)  Certain patterns of words, and certain images, indicate that a person is thinking at a higher level than the 3D perceptual given by our biology.

 

HOW DOES THIS HELP LIT-CRIT?

 

I will show that it enriches three aspects.

 

a) It provides a way of describing how literary devices function.

b) It deepens the psychoanalytic interpretation of the behaviour of characters.

c) It helps us to think about the ordinary fascination with the idea of infinity and the unnameable. Most human thinking & feeling is either a movement towards or a movement away from the infinite.

 

But first let us remind ourselves that the literary critic must begin by taking the piece of writing as encapsulated & anonymous: and not as a mere symptom of the author’s psycho-pathology.

 

Literature begins at, comes out of the Second Level of Experience, where similarity rather than difference is emphasized : and attention is drawn to shared characteristics between objects and between actions. Aristotle famously gave the capacity for metaphor as the criterion of creativity.

 

“O’ my love is like a red, red rose”  [Burns]

“Your Majesty is like a streak of bat’s piss”  [Python’s Oscar Wilde sketch] 

“Our hearts’ charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s Lord.” [Manley Hopkins]

“Thalidomide, O half moon”   [Plath]

 

In the last two examples, the connecting word ‘like’ is dropped. Freud noted that the absence of connectors is a feature of the Unconscious.                                                                              

 

SOME LITERARY DEVICES

There is only time to look at a couple of received literary devices from Matte Blanco’s point of view

 

1 : REPETITION

Neither the Highway Code nor the Driving Instructor says “Stop at the red, red light”.  The learner would feel disturbed if they did.

If to the Instructor’s command “Break, break break”  the Learner said “Tennyson” and drove on, she wouldn’t pass!

Why can and does Burns repeat ‘red’ ?  It is an attempt to bind in words the sense of boundless joy he feels both when he sees the rose and his love.

Interestingly there is a limit to repetition. Baldrick’s famous war poem in which the single word “Boom!”  is repeated ten times is idiotic not poetic.

 

 

2: ABSTRACTION/PERSONIFICATION

One  device which seems to illustrate the principle of generalization is abstraction/personification. Freud saw this as an atavistic impulse.

 

“The projected creations of primitive men resemble the personifications constructed by creative writers;  for the latter externalize in the form of separate individuals the opposing instinctual impulses struggling within them”  [Freud quoted in MB: 1988 p.119]

 

Matte Blanco moved from such a phylo-genetic line to assert “at certain depths the unconscious tends to treat anything as it were human”  [MB 1988 p.182].

 

Keats is fond of this: but it is easy to lose control of the dramatis personae that one has God-like created.

 

 

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die; 

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips 

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, 

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips: 

Ay, in the very temple of Delight         

Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine

[21-26]

 

It is a distractingly cluttered tableau.

 

3: CONTRADICTION

This is a curious form of repetition. When contraries or opposites are yoked then it is as if both words appear twice – four synonyms!  This is a perfect example of Matte Blanco’s point that in some states – and poetic inspiration could be one of them – a person thinks and feels as if converses are true, and opposites are synonyms.

                                                                                                                   

(i)  The phrase known unknown in:

“O known Unknown! From whom my being sips

 Such darling essence

 [Endymion II: 739-40]

 

(ii) The phrase noiseless noise in :

...then there crept

A little noiseless noise among the leaves,

[I Stood Tiptoe : 10-11]

 

To spell it out: the phrases “a noise” & “a little noise” and the word “noiseless” all have a sensory referent: reading them, we might recall an experience that they describe. But one is instantly puzzled by “noiseless noise”. Even translating it to “silent noise” doesn’t help. Were the phrase to appear in prose, history or journalism, one would mock the writer for being unclear and precious. But when seen in poetry, one continues to try to make it fit in the broader meaning of the poem. The effort to find a sensory referent is abandoned: one realises one is the realm of non-sensory intellectual abstraction and the affect appropriate to that.  (One might say the visual correlate would be a Picasso painting with two/three/four ‘contradictory’ or impossible eyes.)  As I describe above, Matte Blanco further elucidated the logical structure of Freud’s unconscious: in which there is no contradiction. A poet dips his attention there, finds an experience: but given our conscious mind cannot find a sensory correlate for it, we get just a strange repetition. For the reader of poetry, the will to receive the phase in the context of the poem, and to find sense, also produces a charge of emotion. The very non-sense gives greater pleasure. By adding ‘little’ to ‘noiseless noise’ Keats heightens this process.

 

Negation would seem to be the perfect form of asymmetrical thinking: ‘this’ not ‘that’. Presidents, who can’t separate either from the ‘other’, might be toppled. So, Cigar Clinton:

“I did not have sexual relations with that woman”.  But even a woman might split pubic hairs. Having promised the Madonna that she would never again see the man she loved, Stendhal’s  Marchesa of Palma only ever meets & fucks Fabrizio after dark in an unlit room: so she could say in her marital prayers :

“I did not have visual relations with that man.”  

 

EXTREME REASONING

I think it would be valuable to have a look at the reasoning of some of Matte Blanco’s patients and subjects. Two of the most interesting case histories feature teeth. We should keep in mind that for the infant its teeth and anus are the first weapons to express aggression, more so than fists.                                                                                                              

 

 

a) PATIENT 1

 

“After he was bitten by a dog, a schizophrenic went to consult a dentist” [MB 1988 p.47]

I’m sure you can work out, or recall from the earlier talks, the symmetrical sophistical thinking here: When troubled by any kind of biting, visit the teeth specialist.

 

b) PATIENT 2

 

A teenager is slowly recovering from a demented father who forcibly circumcised him at five and later often teased him about castration. But then his dad comes to the dancehall and orders him home. The next day the boy walks to a pliant dentist and has his healthy front tooth extracted. After which he goes psychotic. This is clearly a pre-emptive, appeasing self-castration. The madness is a defence against knowing the pitiful madness of the gesture. It is so poignant when Matte Blanco reports: “He spoke of the tooth as though he were in love with it, as though it were a person, and would enlarge on its beauty and strength and the admiration it provoked from girls.”  [MB 1975 p.428]  

The phrase enlarge on its beauty seems mischievous as well as puzzling : did the memories & fantasies of the tooth produce an erection!.

 

  

c) THE  SPACE/INFINITY RESEARCH GROUP

 

We’ve seen that he repeatedly reminds us of our tendency to misconceive space. “The mind is not a bag”  [     ]  But here again is Hamlet struggling to think:

O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell         

and count myself a king of infinite space

were it not that I have bad dreams.                     

 

We could call the sense of boundlessness of pain an experience of negative infinity, from which we recoil. One of the most fascinating pieces of research that he conducted was on the experience of space during orgasm:  by definition, the ultimate infinite physical pleasure. He begins by observing that : “when sexual feelings are extraordinarily intense, the corresponding physical actions are a most imperfect expression of their intensity: action and even fantasy is insufficient to express them”

 [MB 1975 p.440]

This draws of line of ineffability. Here is a medley of quotes from his subjects who, unlike the former pair, are not ill:

“At the moment of orgasm I felt something like an identification with space …an image of constellations of stars, each one of which is my own self but not as identical…a strange half-mad constellation of circles black and blue and red and gold - infinitely large, then receding to a thin point... a sensation of being high among rolling dark blue clouds…but the whole of you on both places – the clouds and the bed…time itself is stretched out, I may drift along forever in a sort of time-river yet remain the same place..

                                                                                                                      

The circles remind one of Dante’s spiritual bliss. This is a rarely discussed genre. Neither Faber nor Penguin have published a collection of Orgasm Poetry. The nearest example I could find was from the writer whom the present Poet Laureate compared to Shakespeare :

 

 Gypsy gal, you got me swallowed.

I have fallen far beneath….

On the cliffs of your wildcat charms I'm riding,

 

CONCLUSION

 

Freud spoke of the great cultural achievement of the fort-da baby. Perhaps the next great cultural achievement for it is to attain Yeats’s concept:

The fascination of what's difficult.

 

Matte Blanco, the happy hairsplitter, found this in Freud and Klein (and Russell). For me, only Bion and he are great enough to join their company. His ideas provide a genuinely new tool for analyzing metaphor and for conjecturing/interpreting what latent multi-dimensional image/idea lies behind the manifest repetitions, condensations and displacements in the text. Literature’s most famous converses using abstractions close Keats’s Ode on A Grecian Urn :

 

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

 

This is instantly meaningful and meaningless. It is difficult to know what Matte Blanco’s patient thought was beautiful about his tooth. Given his teasing dad, perhaps he had never known the benign relationality known by the five-year-old girl Klein overhears on a bus. “My mother is beautiful” she brightly tells a stranger. As they get off, Klein sees the mother, and is shocked to see a plain almost ugly, woman. So the child wasn’t speaking truth enlarging on its beauty: but of course she was!

 

 

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FURTHER NOTES & QUOTES : THESE WERE NOT GIVEN AT THE CONFERENCE

 

1: Lit-Crit Bollox Vox-Pop

 

Here is a thesis I’ve been testing.

 

 

So far I have asked :

a) Cambridge Uni and Open Uni lecturer (age65)

b) A-level school-teacher (37)

c) Maths graduate doing OU English Lit degree. (39)

 

They all agreed instantly that of the 100 such literary-types that they know, most would fail! Then they felt shocked.

 

2: Criterion Referencing

 

See also Cook’s magnificent Miner sketch.

“I just never had sufficient of the Latin to get through the rigorous judging exams. So I became a miner instead. I managed to get through the mining exams. They’re not very rigorous. They only ask one question. They say ‘Who are you?’ : and I got 75% for that.”     [Cook: Tragically I Was An Only Twin]

 

3: “The Limits of Literary Criticism”

Cf : The recent spat between Prof Hughes and Prof Greer over the artistic worth of Diamond Dog Damien.

 

 

4: “The red corvette hit the blue bus”

Pop fans will work out this refers to : Prince, The Doors and The Beatles.

 

5: What Counts as Lit?

Young children are taught the basic distinction – Poetry rhymes, prose doesn’t : and, as one has to find rhymes, which can be quite hard in English compared to Italian, poetry is given more worth. Thus Dylan’s larky lines:

“I’m a poet.

I know it.

Hope I don’t blow it!”  [I shall be Free]

 

But like Moliere’s Bourgeois Gentleman one might be proud to discover :

“Goodness! then I've been talking prose these forty years without ever knowing it”

 

Then at Big-School we are told, rhythm not rhyme is the criterion of poetry & fine prose. We realise that far more skill – aural and visual - is required to sort poetry from not-poetry  and lahdedah writing from ordinary writing.  Even this can happen unconsciously, because the iambic pentameter is close to ordinary speech-rhythms, and can annoy some people.

 

ORLANDO

Good day and happiness, dear Rosalind!

 

JAQUES

Nay, then, God be wi' you, an you talk in blank verse.

 

Then it is the presence of rhetorical figures, metaphor chiasmus or even inventing new ones, and new patterns of words, phrases and sentences in a paragraph or speech, which distinguishes literary from non-literary. The Ancients, the Irish Bards and the Elizabethans, in their apprenticeships as writers, learned & mastered many rhetorical devices and patterns: like practising scales or the barre. These invite contemplation and admiration for the skill of the author: both the technical skill and the psychological acumen of finding this precise pattern to express this complexity & nuance of human emotion.

 

Consider the pattern of phrases in Hamlet’s speech to his skoolpals:

“I have of late, but wherefore I know not…”

Their riptide nature expresses his longing to open up to once-innocent shared-hearts and his growing suspicion of them.

 

 

6: Standards & Comparisons

Again one has to see this as axiomatic to the method of proper lit-crit or one is lost in blather-wars. In the realm of story one might say:

 

a) There are the six Aristotelean elements : plot, character, diction, thought, song spectacle.

 

b) Each element might be present in a story at a complexity of 1-10. So, logically, a text might have a total complexity of 60 or just 1.

Man is not only the measure of all things. Humans can’t not-measure. They find ways to: they say This shall be a metre/foot/pound.

And they say things like: “That wasn’t  the best book I’ve ever read!”  : but they very, very, rarely give the precise qualities of their best book.

 

c) We must propose two texts which provide the reference points for all others:

eg: Oedipus or Hamlet as being the perfect reference point (60): with excellent plot character etc.

 

d) Now we can compare any other text saying:

“If Shakespeare’s Hamlet shows the skilful presentation, with the truth to human complexity, of the element of character, of rating 10, then we judge Jeffrey Archer at rating 3. We might add Archer’s plot-rating as 6, his diction (language skills) rating  at 2 etc. We might say Beckett has a plot-rating of 2: but a thought-rating of 9.

 

Bloom argues “The meaning of a poem is another poem!”

 

 

7 : How to Speak the Speech

When Hamlet entreats the Players to “speak the speech [thus]”, he also offers rudimentary lit-crit or at least a philosophical sociology of literature. Among the things literary geniuses do is to introduce & institute a new way of reading, audiencing, videoncing, & discussing.  

 

Poe begins his Rue Morgue story, which he knows will have one of the most astonishing plots in world literature, with a digression on types of imagination and analysis – speaking of games (chess & cards) as well story-telling. The skill in card-playing and psychoanalysis is to observe the player or patient’s tell  : the unconsciously shown physical sign which betrays the crucial emotion that must be hidden.  

 

In a recent episode of Numbers, maths Professor Epps, daunted by a seemingly tell-less poker genius, goes to great lengths and arranges a work-place puzzle for his opponent.

He bricks up & papers over his office door: and installs a hidden camera. This is to see the man at the precise moment of private discovery of difficulty. He finally sees his opponent’s tell.  

 

Poe also wrote “The Tell-Tale Heart”!

 

 

8 : Lit-Crit Gym

 

Every Autumn, Professor of Maths & Science complain that they have to spend the first university term getting undergraduates to know by heart the basics.  I recall, from a dozen years ago, seeing the degree thesis of a Humanities under-graduate, with shockingly feeble & error-strewn prose. Current teachers of English say the situation now is even worse. Imagine the following English Studies class : Year 7. The teacher enters and says.

 

 

 

9: Before Reaching for Psycho-Analytic Criticism?

 

It is so tempting to use the concepts of psychoanalysis to declare: “We can finally say clearly how mentally disturbed the author was, how she came to be so, and why such a person would write such a text with such brave new people in it.”

 

But I advocate always making some time and space (and emotion) to see the text as late-found as an ancient text: without author’s biography, notes on intention, early drafts etc. Of course this is another ‘absurd’ willing suspension of knowledge: brilliantly mocked by Flaubert & Walter Benjamin: 

“Few people can guess how despondent one has to be in order to resuscitate Carthage .”

 

One knows too much: so one must use it.  One must compare this text with other known texts of the time, as well as with our chosen reference lit-crit texts. There is a significant amount of describing of the elements of the text that can and must be done: especially of the formal literary devices. It takes years to master these and develop the literary ear. I think this is much harder to do than learn seven types of  Americo-Franco theories of reader-writer dialectics. School and college fails to do this. Few Lit-Gyms exist!

 

The other danger fore-grounded by Eliot, Knights et al is abstracting characters from their position as formal elements in a literary whole, and treating them as our acquaintances and friends, just like the author, just like us:  How many of Lady Macbeth’s children had the Oedipus complex?

 

With that preparatory effort and with those provisos, one can properly see Freud’s great contribution is to that aspect of literary criticism that is concerned with the truth of the author’s presentation of human motivation. He offers the mighty concepts of unconscious desires & anxieties, especially an unconscious guilt that will subvert conscious efforts to fulfil desires and succeed, even choosing criminality and self-harm. Klein further emphasized the unbearably powerful, yet almost unnameable affects & defence mechanisms of infancy -  envy, gratitude, projection, introjection -  that remain latent in adults. These ideas will take one a long way in lit-crit.

 

There is an open seam to be further developed concerning if and how certain patterns of words, patterns of sounds, patterns of meanings, or blocks of sentences, correlate with certain affects : and if these correlations are fixed in time in one language and if they are shared across languages. As with almost everything, Aristotle opens the debate (Rhetoric & Poetics).  Matte Blanco offers the next significant development of analyzing reasoning in high emotion.

 

How and why a human being chooses to write stories or poems for private and shared contemplation & pleasure (as opposed to instruction/direction etc) can be illuminated by psychoanalytic theories. One might enter the debate of whether language structures the unconscious or vice versa. (See Psychoanalytic Criticism : Theory in Practice : Wright, E : Metheun 1984)

 

10 : The Safest Dentist in the World

This was Professor Harris. It was one of the great healing experiences of my life. Almost God-like, in a very brief consultation, he gently and generously created time and space and permission. At the very moment he suggested to me a tiny exercise for my wounded jaw that he knew to be effective, I heard an inner voice say: “ No! I won’t do the exercise, but I will be well: as you have made me, now”. Ever since, I have lamented - If only one could bottle his technique, how much suffering & money would be saved  in medicine and psychoanalysis.

 

11: Dud’s Southpaw.

I don’t want to shred the comedy by ponderous scalpel. We do know that though Dud is usually bested and even mocked by Pete, he needs and is fond of him. He brings food to offer cordially. Though he says it doesn’t matter that Pete had possibly misdirected him, causing pointless walking, it clearly does matter. His aching feet interrupt and spoil the food offer. He would have liked an apology from Pete: and still does. Vain Pete refuses to see this and goes to the surface illogicality of Dud’s two connected statements.

 

Most of ordinary life is managing or failing to manage instinctual impatience: the desire to do or to have done, or to say or to have heard, two or many things simultaneously: even when we know that this is impossible for creatures in linear-time! Here is a charming example. Celia tells her best friend Rosalind (in male dress) that she has seen Orlando :

 

 

ROSALIND

Alas the day! what shall I do with my doublet and

hose? What did he when thou sawest him? What said

he? How looked he? Wherein went he? What makes

him here? Did he ask for me? Where remains he?

How parted he with thee? and when shalt thou see

him again? Answer me in one word.

 

CELIA

You must borrow me Gargantua's mouth first: 'tis a

word too great for any mouth of this age's size. To

say ay and no to these particulars is more than to

answer in a catechism

 

12 : Junkets

More on Keats and Mate Blanco this can be found in my essay on Keats on this site.

 

 

13 : Hamnut : Body Spaces

 

On my fortieth birthday I found myself in the dark, cramped dungeon of Elsinore Castle .  Earlier, in the ballroom overlooking the sea, I read, without looking up once, the entire magnificent play. But it was imprisoned below that I felt the symbolic equivalence of my future.

 

A) SEXY METAPHORS

 

 

COMMENT

As we know better from Stoppard’s play, the lackey lords are out of their depths. So is the Prince, for different reasons. This exchange is interesting for the way  male fear and anxiety is deflected through sexual innuendo. But that strategy is soon exhausted and the verbal joust continues.

 

 

B) CHOP LOGIC

 

 

                                                                                      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

COMMENT

A friend would respond to their friend’s declaration, that they feel their world is like a prison, with sympathy and care, not logic-chopping. But R&G have already, out of fear and vanity, rather than concern, already disavowed their friendship with Hamlet. This is not a seminar on monarchy or ambition. There is a fight for mastery. The emotions of fear, envy, hatred cause the various illogical moves.

Hamlet remains more open.

 

14: DYLAN & GRAMMATICAL SPACE-VOICE

 

English has a (plain) active-voice which takes an easily constructed passive-voice

The whale swallowed Jonah. – ACTIVE

Jonah was swallowed by the whale – PASSIVE

 

Here Jonah’s intentions are not in play.

 

But imagine a suicidal Jonah who declares.

I will get the whale to swallow me. - ACTIVE

His friend reports to the Elders:

Jonah chose to get a whale to swallow him – ACTIVE

Jonah chose to get himself swallowed by a whale – ACTIVE MAIN CLAUSE with  PASSIVE SUIBORDINATE CLAUSE

 

Punjabi has causal verbs : to cause someone to act.

He caused me to drink some rose-water -  ACTIVE-CAUSAL

But these function more as marking courtesy than compulsion.

The above description is seen as more gracious of the host than merely:

He gave me rose-water to drink. – PLAIN ACTIVE

 

Gypsy girl, you got me swallowed

I have fallen far beneath

This is a brilliantly original voice of ambiguity, surpassing the usual lover’s voices:

 

You have captured me.

You have stolen my heart.

Keep me inside you

 

Logically it means :

Gypsy girl you have caused me to be swallowed by someone else.

But of course she is the swallower. He imagines a place lower than the unfixed beneath.

The whole passage is a beautiful rendering of the experience of love & desire taking one to a realm without familiar coordinates.

 

Gypsy gal, you got me swallowed

I have fallen far beneath

Your pearly eyes, so fast an' slashing

An' your flashing diamond teeth

The night is pitch black, come an' make my

Pale face fit into place, ah, please!

Let me know, babe, I am nearly drowning

If it's you my lifelines trace.

 

I been wond'rin' all about me

Ever since I seen you there

On the cliffs of your wildcat charms I'm riding

I know I'm 'round you but I don't know where

You've slayed me, you have made me

I got to laugh halfways off my heels

I got to know, babe, will you surround me

So I can know if I'm really real.

 

============================================================

 

 PRAISE MATTE BLANCO!

 

I have just reread Aristotle’s Ethics. My first reading, 35 years ago, should have been rigorous, as befitting a philosophy student. Alas it wasn’t!  But what amazed and delighted me recently was the realization of how powerfully Aristotle’s method had embedded itself, transforming how I thought & felt about thinking for the next four decades.

Particularly:

 

a) the distinction between opposites & contraries

b) the idea of connecting concepts along a (at least a three point) spectrum, with extreme positions and a mean

c) the fact that there are ordinary behaviours, along the spectrum, for which society has not yet, for whatever reason, given a name.

d) one dares to state a set of criteria and then to defend it.

e) that it matters that (a)-(d) are in one’s memory & blood.

 

I thought almost everything I have written is informed by this method. Consider the essays on this site.

 

Similarly I have failed as a scholar of Matte Blanco: but I do feel as if some of his ideas, about sorting, similarity & difference, develop Aristotle, and are now bedded within me.

I think & sleep better.