It’s your monthly manah manah!

Whiskey has thrown down the gauntlet! The time has come for all those to give a reckoning who in the course of human events have ever launched one or more “off-hand and backhanded comments to the effect that what a poem says cannot be said in any other way than the way it is expressed in the poem.” After many long and sleepless night of meditation on what in future times will surely be remembered as “The Disputation of the Tomato Season,” the impassioned advocate of the primacy of univocal speech entered the field, wearing, as it seems, the very armor of the Philosopher himself, crying out with a mighty cry:

I argue that [metaphorical speech] ads nothing on the side of the intended object, but adds on the side of the intending subject. When I say that Sarah Palin is a bulldog with lipstick, I have not captured the reality more accurately than if I say she is a tenacious and no-nonsense woman. But what I have done is invested the situation with humor and pleasure. What changes is not the content of what I am saying, but my relation to that content.

Put another way: the translation of a poem to prose looses nothing objective — nothing regarding the state of the world. What is lost is personal: the crafted relation of the reader to that state of affairs.

Having cast about in this warlike fashion, Whiskey looked to left and right with a fearless eye and called out, “What do you think?”

Dwight, who too had his part in the Disputation of the Tomato Season, did not hesitate but stood forth at once and answered:

a pitbull is named by a metaphor, in which the dog is yoked to the notion of “pit” and “bull,” each of which lends something–and not just something extra, but essentially true–to one’s notion of the dog. I could go into all of the ways in which “pitbull” presents something different to our minds than a more prosaic description of the animal by height, weight, nasal and labial structure, etc., but I won’t–that’d be tiresome.

Nor can I stand shaking behind the lines, but I too must fling myself into the fray:

I don’t believe, Dwight, that you’ve adequately demonstrated that the word “pitbull” cannot be replaced by a literal paraphrase which catalogs the complete set of relations (however long such a list might turn out to be) suggested by the word understood as a kenning. I think that such a demonstration will turn out to be impossible: you won’t be able to show the limitedness of any given catalog of significations except by pointing to yet another signification, which can easily be drawn into the compass of a revised catalog, until we arrive at an explication of the phrase which is fully conscious of everything it signifies. Perhaps, however, the necessary length of such a paraphrase would satisfy all parties that there is indeed no one word to replace a metaphorical term in any given case.

However, Mr. Whiskey, it does not follow that “what a poem says [could] be said in [some] other way than the way it is expressed in the poem,” for the simple reason that the nature of the poetic is to harbor a dalliance between such so-called “poetic devices” as metaphor and the objective signification. In other words, poetry occurs and is heard only in a fragile mood that will tolerate the saying of things which are not so, which under shall we say prosaic circumstances would immediately be taken as not even saying what they are saying, but rather pointing to an objective ground.

Poetry is the deferral (which is not to say final rejection) of the judgment which jumps past what is said to what is meant. This judgment operates on the ordinarily quite justifiable and necessary presupposition that language is representation, and that what is said really has no intention whatsoever except to deliver itself over to what is meant. This understanding is so pervasive that we may even take the word “say” as a substitute for “mean” as though saying were in the end nothing but meaning. “What the poet is really saying…” is a common locution in the explication of poetry as well as in other contexts that call for paraphrase. So little do we in the midst of our everyday affairs tolerate the prospect that in some way the poem really is saying what it says.

Incidentally, to describe the manner in which poetry says what it says as “literal” would be just as inadequate as calling it “metaphorical,” for this very reason: that the problem with interpreting poetry as metaphor is precisely the fact which you have correctly noted, that “metaphorical speech depends on univocal speech.” What poetry says is no more literal than it is metaphorical, because its manner of saying takes place exactly in the play between these two (which are really only one).

Scrawled in a free, impassioned hand in the ample margins of the poem “Epistemology” in G.W.F.Hegel’s copy of the Collected Poems of Richard Wilbur, we find this brief interpretive memorandum:

The question of the immateriality of the soul has no interest, except where, on the one hand, matter is regarded as something true, and mind conceived of as a thing, on the other. But in modern times even the physicists have found matters grow thinner in their hands: they have come upon imponderable matters, like heat, light etc., to which they might perhaps add space and time. These ‘imponderables,’ which have lost the property (peculiar to matter) of gravity and, in a sense, even the capacity of offering resistance, have still, however, a sensible existence and outness of part to part.

The conclusion to our “Julius Caesar is Your New Bicycle” series expounding the secret double mind of William Shakespeare is embroiled in difficulties which have more than anything to do with my hours of compulsive and insubstantial editing of the first sentence. In the meantime, those of you who await this denouement will have to satisfy yourselves with the following morsel of a quotation, which I offer as a decisive rebuke against those who deplore the “decontextualiz[ation] of…different pieces from…different literary works:”

So saying, the honest man departed; and his lantern gleamed along the street, bringing to view indistinct shapes of things, and the fragments of a world, like order glimmering through chaos, or memory roaming over the past.

Batman is no Julius Caesar, whatever Rachel Dawes might think. The latest film certainly makes a show of honoring an elitism which is for the masses, but the display itself, as I argued last month, betrays this loyalty; for it ruthlessly critiques the naive hopes which maintain common decency, while reducing the elite itself to reliance on the same common illusion (hence Alfred’s burning of the letter). The argument of Batman: Dark Knight, considered in light of this display, amounts in the end to the conclusion that only the masses are for the masses, and that the elite stay true only if their eminence is limited, only if they are kept somehow common.

Now there are those who might say that Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar makes the same case, and this might well be so if the play ended with Act III, scene i. We would then see Caesar glorying at the peak of his rise to power. We would see an argument: that the correlative of unlimited power is the enslavement of the masses; that for the sake of these people this power must be limited; that it still can be limited, because Caesar is still a man like any other man (in fact, the fact that it can be limited is the keystone of the argument that it should be; because Caesar is a man and not a god he must be deposed). Finally we would see a dramatic vindication of this argument in the success of the conspiracy against Caesar. In this way, the play would present a version of the story of Julius Caesar familiar and popular enough that a mass film like Batman: Dark Knight could easily allude to it. Indeed, many people are baffled by the fact that Shakespeare’s play continues far beyond the end of what is commonly understood to be the story of Julius Caesar, and yet keeps the name “Julius Caesar,” rather than, say, “Marcus Brutus.” What has to be shown, then, in order to explain the name of this play which is only half over when its title character dies, is the manner in which Shakespeare’s history of Caesar exceeds the common history. Stay tuned for this and more.

Here’s the little son of a gun who has been slowing down all things Grackle since Tuesday morning:

We’ll be back online soon. Coming up next week:

• Disappearing Ink: Who Remembers Peter Rugg?
• Julius Caesar Is Your New Bicycle
• Some other third thing!

Tender Mercies

My wife’s copy of Pride and Prejudice falls open naturally (that is, by a second nature in which its reader has thoroughly trained it) to a certain page near the middle of the book, in Chapter 35. This pivotal chapter consists almost entirely of a letter from Fitzwilliam Darcy to Elizabeth Bennet, in which he explains the motives of his actions in such a manner that Elizabeth’s judgment of him is overturned–along with her judgment of herself. All along she has prided herself on her keen and unperturbed insight, on commanding a clear view of the hearts of men. The letter from Darcy is a letter of introduction, which introduces Elizabeth to two men she thought she knew, and above all to herself. Her reflections on the letter culminate with the exclamation, “Till this moment, I never knew myself.”

This pattern of reflection from the subject of a text to its reader, that is, from Darcy to Elizabeth, is further reflected upon anyone who takes up the book; for the typical reader of Pride and Prejudice will go along with Elizabeth’s self-understanding throughout the first half, all the while maintaining a confidence in his ability to interpret the character. The discovery of Elizabeth’s failure to read herself is at the same time an indictment of the reader’s failure to read. This indictment is exactly what makes the book worth reading, and why adaptations and sentimental evaluations of it are doomed to rob it of its treasure.

This passage of self-discovery is undeniably the crucial event of the novel, and as the broken spine of many a copy attests, it is eminently re-readable. So nothing could be stranger than declaring that it would better be destroyed and forgotten. But that is exactly the course which Mr. Darcy advocates towards the end of the novel. Elizabeth consents, indicating that the letter itself is an empty document, and at another point even says that her former feelings were best forgotten. The letter of introduction has done its work, and now that Darcy and Elizabeth have by its mediation come to know themselves and each other, there remains no need for it.

Yet the letter does remain, and even constitutes the most impressive passage of an impressive book. The paradox this fact sets up between the argument of the book and its presentation is not resolved simply by observing that the letter is preserved for readers of the book rather than for Elizabeth, because, as indicated above, the worth of the book for a reader is inextricably bound up with the fact that the reader is implicated in the same movement as the heroine. What is about the self-discovery effected by reading the novel that, far from destroying the letter of introduction to ourselves, rather compels us to re-read it?

It’s your monthly Manah Manah!

Despite the urgency with which the need presses upon me of continuing my line of thinking about Julius Caesar, or of responding in some way to Patrokleia’s recent article on postmodern poetry, and the discussion of it on the blog of frequent Grackle adjunct Rimwell, or of contriving new failed schemes to expand the readership of Grub Street Grackle, I feel compelled to write here regarding Batman. Don’t worry, I promise this isn’t about how scary Heath Ledger is as The Joker. It’s the theme of the elite over the masses which I found so irresistible that I am casting everything else aside to chase down the scent.

But I find myself unable to write about the theme of a drama without immediately getting entangled midstream in the stirrups of my other hobbyhorse, which is the question of whether and in what sense a drama makes an argument. This problem is thoroughly unavoidable in the case of Batman: Dark Knight. For if this movie makes an argument it is something like the following: there exists a class of men whose strength is such that it requires them to rise above the law, whether as wanton opponents of order or as its dedicated and principled auxiliaries; if a man puts his elite strength at the service of good by combating evil, this kind of heroism will be interpreted as villainy by the masses, whether or not he is successful in vanquishing evil; for the elite champion of order invites the presence of his chaotic counterpart; by supplementing the law with his own force, he makes a case for the illegitimacy of the very order which he is working to uphold, and can always be interpreted in terms of a gruesome and not-at-all-funny parody of his true character; confronted with this exposure of the limitations of law, the masses who take spiritual shelter in law will be led to despair; the only thing that can preserve them from utterly losing faith in the legitimacy of order and morality is the image of a white knight, one who keeps his elite strength within the bounds of laws both conventional and natural, and yet remains efficacious against crime; so that if this man, too, crosses outside the limitations prescribed by law, if his purity becomes tarnished (which it will), nothing can save the masses but a lie: no one must know what happened; the elite man whose action brought about the situation in which the white knight was indispensable must take on the blame for the white knight’s error; the hero must become a pharmakos, the dark knight; only this illusory arrangement can preserve order.

The above argument is not only worked out by the action of the film, but also made explicit in the concluding speech of Commissioner Gordon. It is practically impossible to deny that the above series of statements both summarizes the action of the drama in general terms and outlines the conclusion to be drawn from the action (not without reason the summary of the action of a narrative is traditionally called an “argument”). However, at the same time as the action of the drama makes this argument, the very fact of the drama contradicts the argument. For Batman: Dark Knight is unquestionably a movie for the masses. Everybody goes to see this movie. It presents the argument manifestly to the very masses who, according to the argument, cannot keep faith without the illusion. But in the course of making this proposal to the masses, it necessarily destroys the very illusion which it claims they need.

This contradiction puts the film in an egregious debt to the masses which is either financial or moral. For either it belies its own argument, in which case it is nothing but a bare-faced lie (and the public should get its money back), or it takes away the illusion which they need to preserve their condition, while withholding the strength to live in the bare and unsheltered world outside the law.