Monday, May 3, 2010
Saturday, May 1, 2010
"Soul Making" and Paradigm of the Immortal
"Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence-- There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions--but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself." ~Keats
This comment I find most intriguing, granted what I find intriguing about it is not directly related to Keats and what we have been discussing in class per se, but it does hold relevance to my final essay topic, if I do end up continuing with my original plan. (Also, this is several days late as a post... apologies! Many. My brain is... well not back to "normal" but... back to functionality, at least, after... he who mustnotbenamed's thesis assignment.)
Immediately when reading through this remark it made me think of the aspect of Vampire folklore that says that they do not hold a reflection. (I have seen in recient Vampire stories where this notion is considered a lie created by the Vampires themselves to protect their identies as Vampires while among the living. Which I thought was ingenious... haha.) However, if we want to continue believing that they do not have reflections then Keats' comment (atleast how I am perceiving it) implies that the vampire/immortal would not know themselves and so therefore has no reflection, for as to know thyself and thy reflection (oh... crud... Milton thesis reference.... God's creations as images of the self via Lacan and Freud to define "others" and "self-hood") is to know the "self". Before I get too far on this tangent... in Anne Rice's the Vampire Lestat, we see firstly, a narcissistic immortal however, he does not know himself. He spends his immortal undeath searching for the answers as to WHAT he is supposed to be doing, and WHAT existence means when you live forever (I know it sounds cliche now... but in 1985 that was GOLD). Keats' comment suggests that Lestat, and his Vampire aquaintances, do not have a soul for the reason that he does not have an identity.
To me, being fresh from my thesis concerning "othering" and identity, this suggests that Lestat has some how re-entered the (oh the pun!) "Mirror-stage" (the mirror stage is where the child first associates the image it sees in a mirror, with itself and that image becomes the "self" This is also where "othering" begins.... but I dont want to talk about that ANYMORE! Haha.) For Lestat, or ANY vampire to be lacking a mirror image, definitely (at least in my sore mind) indicates a lack of identity and association with the "self"
Coming back around to the original quote by Keats, a being does not have a soul until it forms identity. In the case of the visage-challenged Vampire, identity will NEVER be actualized in the terms that Lacan requires in infancy, and by Keats' musings, will NEVER again have a soul. Which, at least to me, poses a very valid theory as to why the vampire cannot see himself or be seen reflected in a mirror and is considered soulless. (One, if not both, cause and perpetuate the other condition.)
This comment I find most intriguing, granted what I find intriguing about it is not directly related to Keats and what we have been discussing in class per se, but it does hold relevance to my final essay topic, if I do end up continuing with my original plan. (Also, this is several days late as a post... apologies! Many. My brain is... well not back to "normal" but... back to functionality, at least, after... he who mustnotbenamed's thesis assignment.)
Immediately when reading through this remark it made me think of the aspect of Vampire folklore that says that they do not hold a reflection. (I have seen in recient Vampire stories where this notion is considered a lie created by the Vampires themselves to protect their identies as Vampires while among the living. Which I thought was ingenious... haha.) However, if we want to continue believing that they do not have reflections then Keats' comment (atleast how I am perceiving it) implies that the vampire/immortal would not know themselves and so therefore has no reflection, for as to know thyself and thy reflection (oh... crud... Milton thesis reference.... God's creations as images of the self via Lacan and Freud to define "others" and "self-hood") is to know the "self". Before I get too far on this tangent... in Anne Rice's the Vampire Lestat, we see firstly, a narcissistic immortal however, he does not know himself. He spends his immortal undeath searching for the answers as to WHAT he is supposed to be doing, and WHAT existence means when you live forever (I know it sounds cliche now... but in 1985 that was GOLD). Keats' comment suggests that Lestat, and his Vampire aquaintances, do not have a soul for the reason that he does not have an identity.
To me, being fresh from my thesis concerning "othering" and identity, this suggests that Lestat has some how re-entered the (oh the pun!) "Mirror-stage" (the mirror stage is where the child first associates the image it sees in a mirror, with itself and that image becomes the "self" This is also where "othering" begins.... but I dont want to talk about that ANYMORE! Haha.) For Lestat, or ANY vampire to be lacking a mirror image, definitely (at least in my sore mind) indicates a lack of identity and association with the "self"
Coming back around to the original quote by Keats, a being does not have a soul until it forms identity. In the case of the visage-challenged Vampire, identity will NEVER be actualized in the terms that Lacan requires in infancy, and by Keats' musings, will NEVER again have a soul. Which, at least to me, poses a very valid theory as to why the vampire cannot see himself or be seen reflected in a mirror and is considered soulless. (One, if not both, cause and perpetuate the other condition.)
Monday, April 26, 2010
Chameleon Keats #2
I find Keats' description of the Chameleon Poet (sorry, I can't spell it his way) relatable in my own attempts at writing, so I guess I'll look into that.
My own philosophy is that "personalities" for real people are a fiction - the illusion, character, is formed by a combination of natural desires with social rules that a person attempts to self-impose based on their experiences and their current setting. Those rules bend depending on where a person is, who they are with, etc. Like Keats, I find myself mirroring people I am around, to a degree. Basically, I think the illusion of personality would be one of the easiest parts of making an Artificial Intelligence.
So when I write a character, I take a limited selection of rules and desires of my own or of others, and jack the levels up, which in its oversimplification creates the illusion of a "personality" that seems more realistic than if I tried to document every contradictory fragment of my own mixup of desires and rules. They're also more fun in extremes - as Keats points out, there's "as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen."
How Keats seems to interpret this "no identity" experience is that I have been reflecting so many characters - every person I speak with or that I read through or dream through - that I lost track of my identity. This seems just as valid an interpretation as mine; in fact, maybe I like it better and will adopt it as my own from now on... : )
As to how Keats employed the feeling in his own work... it seems to work most clearly in the Lamia, where characters are continually shifting. The Lamia seems to have been a bodiless spirit, was cursed to become a snake (which sort of has that connotation of being treacherous...sorry, guys), then after her transformation into a woman shifts in character from nearly a goddess to a lover to a submissive wife - delighting in all her roles. When she is pinned down she is destroyed. Lycius also shifts from worshiper to lover to dominating husband, roles that he can't seem to reconcile with his former role as student. Apollonius never changes, but he shifts in the reader's eye from epic hero to epic spoilsport and murderer.
As far as the conception of the characters, the principle works as well because none of them seems to have a single motivation.
The only thing that seems strange to me is Keats' deeming the protean nature of a Poet "unpoetical," Why does the "Poetic" have to be unified? It seems there are often matters of high contrast that are poetic...
My own philosophy is that "personalities" for real people are a fiction - the illusion, character, is formed by a combination of natural desires with social rules that a person attempts to self-impose based on their experiences and their current setting. Those rules bend depending on where a person is, who they are with, etc. Like Keats, I find myself mirroring people I am around, to a degree. Basically, I think the illusion of personality would be one of the easiest parts of making an Artificial Intelligence.
So when I write a character, I take a limited selection of rules and desires of my own or of others, and jack the levels up, which in its oversimplification creates the illusion of a "personality" that seems more realistic than if I tried to document every contradictory fragment of my own mixup of desires and rules. They're also more fun in extremes - as Keats points out, there's "as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen."
How Keats seems to interpret this "no identity" experience is that I have been reflecting so many characters - every person I speak with or that I read through or dream through - that I lost track of my identity. This seems just as valid an interpretation as mine; in fact, maybe I like it better and will adopt it as my own from now on... : )
As to how Keats employed the feeling in his own work... it seems to work most clearly in the Lamia, where characters are continually shifting. The Lamia seems to have been a bodiless spirit, was cursed to become a snake (which sort of has that connotation of being treacherous...sorry, guys), then after her transformation into a woman shifts in character from nearly a goddess to a lover to a submissive wife - delighting in all her roles. When she is pinned down she is destroyed. Lycius also shifts from worshiper to lover to dominating husband, roles that he can't seem to reconcile with his former role as student. Apollonius never changes, but he shifts in the reader's eye from epic hero to epic spoilsport and murderer.
As far as the conception of the characters, the principle works as well because none of them seems to have a single motivation.
The only thing that seems strange to me is Keats' deeming the protean nature of a Poet "unpoetical," Why does the "Poetic" have to be unified? It seems there are often matters of high contrast that are poetic...
Regaining Meaning Through the Loss of Identity - Blog for Keats
The Camelion
I had to take a step back in order to think about Keats' view on the lack of identity of the poet. In context, I suppose Keats is attempting to get the reader to ponder the very question that all writers fear in their quest for creation: are the words on the page merely just a copy of what I deem the world through my eyes, or is my writing a construct of what I see at any given moment; therefore, making it authentic and true? This is my interpretation of Keats' purpose for calling a poet "the most unpoetic of all God's creatures." Keats' "Lamia" is a relevant example in considering this because the work as a whole seems to be dealing with the very nature of philosophy and its attempt to separate the life of reason (cold, destructive, fatal) against the emotional life (unreal) -both turn out to be fatal attempts as we continue on through the reading. If the Poet gives up his illusions he will regain personal identity, but losing them would destroy the very nature for his passion of creating in the first place. It is a trap -- a paradox. Perhaps this was the purpose of Keats' letter. Anyone who attempts to separate the two spheres will indeed be disappointed.
I had to take a step back in order to think about Keats' view on the lack of identity of the poet. In context, I suppose Keats is attempting to get the reader to ponder the very question that all writers fear in their quest for creation: are the words on the page merely just a copy of what I deem the world through my eyes, or is my writing a construct of what I see at any given moment; therefore, making it authentic and true? This is my interpretation of Keats' purpose for calling a poet "the most unpoetic of all God's creatures." Keats' "Lamia" is a relevant example in considering this because the work as a whole seems to be dealing with the very nature of philosophy and its attempt to separate the life of reason (cold, destructive, fatal) against the emotional life (unreal) -both turn out to be fatal attempts as we continue on through the reading. If the Poet gives up his illusions he will regain personal identity, but losing them would destroy the very nature for his passion of creating in the first place. It is a trap -- a paradox. Perhaps this was the purpose of Keats' letter. Anyone who attempts to separate the two spheres will indeed be disappointed.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Romantic Cookbook due 5/5
Due 5/5—to be read in class, last session.
Romantic Cookbook
Let’s take one last imprint of British Romantic practice by trying it out ourselves. Write a minimum of 500 words, prose or verse or a combination (for the latter, you might write a letter in, say, the Coleridge or Keats mode, mixing the two).
Use one or more of the moves listed below, bearing in mind that they often overlap and are articulated together—e.g., childhood with Nature with Imagination; e.g., the Sublime with liberty with Imagination, etc. 1-6 are structural nuclei. Following them you have a motifs menu.
Cook it up your way--spicy hot, subtle and elegant, whatever your taste--but try to give it unity.
2 options:
1. Give it a title, a date, a dedication, and a literary style as if you are writing it back in 1798, 1807, 1818.
2. Or move it into today’s context and idiom. That is, write it in a postmodern voice/style.
Structural nuclei
1.Out-in-out: outward view of an aspect or object in Nature appearing lifeless; inward turn to feeling and imagination regarding the object; return to outward view of Nature as animated, flowing with mind and feeling, offering unity, joy, the divine, a “revolution” of mind and spirit.
2. Story of les miserables: description of a peasant, beggar, one of the world’s forgotten and humble people, followed by a deepened appreciation of the person’s worth, what the person teaches about things like oppression and liberty, love and generosity, nature and imagination.
3. The child: the child or one’s own childhood lost and then found again, serving as avenue to recovering imagination, “the innocent eye,” nature, joy.
4. The Sublime: gazing upon the high mountains, the raging sea, or pulled into some vortex of trance or dream, the sublime as avenue to supercharging the sense of imagination and nature, as avenue to escaping the bonds of mental and spiritual imprisonment and breaking through to liberty. Or it moves into the Gothic Sublime—terrifying materiality and mechanical repetition, vacancy, abyss, engulfment, dissolution rather than transcendent-organic synthesis.
5. The journey or quest to wild lands, the sublime in the mix but Oriental and other faraway- Gothic strains accompanying the quest.
6. A pair of contraries are run through their paces and then are resolved/synthesized or brought to a point of impossibility.death/vacancy/disaster.
Motifs
Snakes
Poet
Flowers
Monster, exile, wanderer
Moon and Sun
Clouds
Fire
Dynamics: very soft, very loud
Winds
Revolution
Cataracts, waterfalls
Lovers
Reflections--water, echoes, etc
Mountain top
Journey to the strange, crisis and transformation.
Exclamations
Ruins
London
Hellenism, images of the ancient world
Fog and mist
Nightingale or other bird
Shadows
Fountains
War
Sleep, dream, swoon, trance
Ship
Strings, harps, lyres, flutes
Ghosts, phantoms, fairies
Death
“Orient,” arabesque, non-Western
Guilty thing
Common man
Liberty
Woman—beloved, lost or imprisoned girl, femme fatale.
Imagination
Sorcery, forbidden knowledge, science
Inter-- (fused, etc.)
Vacancy, blank, abyss , oscillation
Absorption, dissolution
Romantic Cookbook
Let’s take one last imprint of British Romantic practice by trying it out ourselves. Write a minimum of 500 words, prose or verse or a combination (for the latter, you might write a letter in, say, the Coleridge or Keats mode, mixing the two).
Use one or more of the moves listed below, bearing in mind that they often overlap and are articulated together—e.g., childhood with Nature with Imagination; e.g., the Sublime with liberty with Imagination, etc. 1-6 are structural nuclei. Following them you have a motifs menu.
Cook it up your way--spicy hot, subtle and elegant, whatever your taste--but try to give it unity.
2 options:
1. Give it a title, a date, a dedication, and a literary style as if you are writing it back in 1798, 1807, 1818.
2. Or move it into today’s context and idiom. That is, write it in a postmodern voice/style.
Structural nuclei
1.Out-in-out: outward view of an aspect or object in Nature appearing lifeless; inward turn to feeling and imagination regarding the object; return to outward view of Nature as animated, flowing with mind and feeling, offering unity, joy, the divine, a “revolution” of mind and spirit.
2. Story of les miserables: description of a peasant, beggar, one of the world’s forgotten and humble people, followed by a deepened appreciation of the person’s worth, what the person teaches about things like oppression and liberty, love and generosity, nature and imagination.
3. The child: the child or one’s own childhood lost and then found again, serving as avenue to recovering imagination, “the innocent eye,” nature, joy.
4. The Sublime: gazing upon the high mountains, the raging sea, or pulled into some vortex of trance or dream, the sublime as avenue to supercharging the sense of imagination and nature, as avenue to escaping the bonds of mental and spiritual imprisonment and breaking through to liberty. Or it moves into the Gothic Sublime—terrifying materiality and mechanical repetition, vacancy, abyss, engulfment, dissolution rather than transcendent-organic synthesis.
5. The journey or quest to wild lands, the sublime in the mix but Oriental and other faraway- Gothic strains accompanying the quest.
6. A pair of contraries are run through their paces and then are resolved/synthesized or brought to a point of impossibility.death/vacancy/disaster.
Motifs
Snakes
Poet
Flowers
Monster, exile, wanderer
Moon and Sun
Clouds
Fire
Dynamics: very soft, very loud
Winds
Revolution
Cataracts, waterfalls
Lovers
Reflections--water, echoes, etc
Mountain top
Journey to the strange, crisis and transformation.
Exclamations
Ruins
London
Hellenism, images of the ancient world
Fog and mist
Nightingale or other bird
Shadows
Fountains
War
Sleep, dream, swoon, trance
Ship
Strings, harps, lyres, flutes
Ghosts, phantoms, fairies
Death
“Orient,” arabesque, non-Western
Guilty thing
Common man
Liberty
Woman—beloved, lost or imprisoned girl, femme fatale.
Imagination
Sorcery, forbidden knowledge, science
Inter-- (fused, etc.)
Vacancy, blank, abyss , oscillation
Absorption, dissolution
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Blog due 4/29: The Camelion Poet, The Sparrow, Negative Capability, and the Vale of Soul Making
Keats inhabits the Romantic dialectic in a perhaps different and quite striking manner. What might be Gothic about all of it? Could it be that Keats, refusing the Wordsworthian "egotistical sublime" and its recuperations, travels the unstable, metamorphic trails of the Gothic Sublime?
Consider Lamia in this light, for a start. Is it only a lesson in the dangerous feminine, or might it be a study in passion--hunting, haunted, losing every gain?
For a blog--due 4/29--consider one of the readings in light of one or more of the formulations below, drawn from Keats' letters:
The Camelion Poet
As to the poetical Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, right or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosp[h]er, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea, and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all of God's Creatures
The Sparrow
I think Jane or Marianne has a better opinion of me than I deserve - for really and truly I do not think my Brothers illness connected with mine - you know more of the real Cause than they do nor have I any chance of being rack'd as you have been - You perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked out, - you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led away - I scarcely remember counting upon any happiness - I look for it if it be not in the present hour, - nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.
Negative Capability
I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
The Vale of Soul Making
Call the world if you Please 'The vale of Soul-making' Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it) I say "Soul making" Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence-- There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions--but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception--they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God--how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them--so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it a grander system of salvation than the chrystain religion--or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation--This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years--These Materials are the Intelligence--the human heart (as distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive--and yet I think I perceive it--that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible--I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read--I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, it is the Minds Bible, it is the Minds experience, it is the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity--As various as the Lives of Men are--so various become their Souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence--"
Consider Lamia in this light, for a start. Is it only a lesson in the dangerous feminine, or might it be a study in passion--hunting, haunted, losing every gain?
For a blog--due 4/29--consider one of the readings in light of one or more of the formulations below, drawn from Keats' letters:
The Camelion Poet
As to the poetical Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, right or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosp[h]er, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea, and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all of God's Creatures
The Sparrow
I think Jane or Marianne has a better opinion of me than I deserve - for really and truly I do not think my Brothers illness connected with mine - you know more of the real Cause than they do nor have I any chance of being rack'd as you have been - You perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as worldly happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked out, - you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led away - I scarcely remember counting upon any happiness - I look for it if it be not in the present hour, - nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.
Negative Capability
I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
The Vale of Soul Making
Call the world if you Please 'The vale of Soul-making' Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it) I say "Soul making" Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence-- There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions--but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligences are atoms of perception--they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God--how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them--so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it a grander system of salvation than the chrystain religion--or rather it is a system of Spirit-creation--This is effected by three grand materials acting the one upon the other for a series of years--These Materials are the Intelligence--the human heart (as distinguished from intelligence or Mind) and the World or Elemental space suited for the proper action of Mind and Heart on each other for the purpose of forming the Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity. I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive--and yet I think I perceive it--that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible--I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read--I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, it is the Minds Bible, it is the Minds experience, it is the teat from which the Mind or intelligence sucks its identity--As various as the Lives of Men are--so various become their Souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence--"
Friday, April 16, 2010
African Embraces: Voodoo and Possession in Keats's Lamia
http://books.google.com/books?id=f9LEVHkCLukC&pg=PA123&dq=keats+lamia&lr=&cd=25#v=onepage&q=keats%20lamia&f=false
A really interesting piece here--a great example of resourceful new-historicist work. Long, but the first section alone is worth a look.
A really interesting piece here--a great example of resourceful new-historicist work. Long, but the first section alone is worth a look.
Monday, April 12, 2010
New blog for Shelley, due 4/17
How about a straightforward blog?
About 200 words--
Track with examples and discuss the significance and function of one of the following in Shelley's Alastor and "Mont Blanc" (the two odes also may offer some possibilities):
Silence
Solitude
Vacancy
About 200 words--
Track with examples and discuss the significance and function of one of the following in Shelley's Alastor and "Mont Blanc" (the two odes also may offer some possibilities):
Silence
Solitude
Vacancy
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Monday, April 5, 2010
Changes and reading asgmts for Shelley
Some changes (reductions) to our readings, coming into Wednesday (maybe) and into next week:
Shelley, for next week.
Monday
1. Alastor
Wednesday
2. Mont Blanc
3. Ode to the West Wind
4. To a Skylark
Shelley blog topics are on the way.
Shelley, for next week.
Monday
1. Alastor
Wednesday
2. Mont Blanc
3. Ode to the West Wind
4. To a Skylark
Shelley blog topics are on the way.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
UPDATE: Page correction Childe Harold and Don Juan
Apologies--I thought I had corrected the page numbers. Here are the correct ones for the readings:
Childe Harolde's Pilgrimage: 617-622; 628 (Switzerland)-635.
Don Juan: 704 (Don Juan and Haidee)-731.
Childe Harold is on something like the Grand Tour--a ritual for Brit young men of family and wealth, traveling the continent for education and pleasure--
And Childe--well, yes, a prince in waiting, but also suggesting a child. Thoughts on how the construction of a child-like sensibility looks here, maybe as compared to Blake's work in the Songs? The passages in Switzerland and the account of the shaping of imagination are one place to start.
It has often been remarked that the Romantics elaborate a poetics of ruin. The scenarios range from ancient castles to fallen monuments of antiquity to, maybe, various ruins and wrecks of humanity. We might catch the Gothic side here--ruins often speak of the downfall of traditional powers and tyrannies (the castles, ruined abbeys, and so on). Ruins may also speak to Gothic interiority--as in Williams' reading of the Mariner, fragmentation and disorientation, a breakdown of self-identity and mastery, some flux of the pre-Oedipal or a similar contact with otherness/alterity. (Terror and especially horror are attendant emotions, closely linked to the Romantic and Gothic sublimes).
Any points of contact in Childe Harold? (Consider Waterloo, e.g.)
Manfred provides a great contrast for Childe Harold.
Another issue. Call it one of sovereignty. A post-Enlightenment subject breaking free from old authority, from Christian religion and hereditary power and privilege. Essentially, the free man of liberty, equality, and fraternity, (as for woman--well, we know it's a complicated tale, starting with Wollstonecraft and Radcliffe).
Man his own sovereign--no god, no master. How does he situate himself now? Does he still need the sacred, or has he given all that up in favor of reason?
We might read Childe Harold performing this free subject, freely traveling, meditating, pondering Europe and history and his own place in the world.
And we might read Manfred doing the same, but in a heightened dramatic treatment and setting.
One potentially frightening and interesting thing--if man is free and sovereign of himself, he makes the rules. And he gives himself meaning. But can he do this on his own or does he still need something beyond himself?
So we get sublime fireworks, spirits and the Witch of the Alps and all the rest. And the role of woman--the notion that as man's other she completes him. With Byron, this may be interesting given his intense attachment to his half-sister Augusta. We have reference to her in Childe Harold and in Manfred we see the incest/narcissism scenario intensify. But is it really narcissism?
Williams would see this as Male Gothic. The Romantic Male Gothic exile, in search of a meaning, of a grounding to his unmoored self, comes to woman. Must "woman" die in some fashion so he can secure an identity?
And of course many things we can say about Byron's voice, style, and language. Compared to Blake or Coleridge, significant differences. His facility with verse and verse forms (the Spenserian stanzas, etc.) was and is impressive, brilliant. So from the technique and craft side, much to consider if you are inclined.
How does the Childe persona get constructed, and how does verse technique play a role there? And the same for Manfred.
Byron's Don Juan offers further grounds for comparison--our reading there is pp. 704-31.
Childe Harolde's Pilgrimage: 617-622; 628 (Switzerland)-635.
Don Juan: 704 (Don Juan and Haidee)-731.
Childe Harold is on something like the Grand Tour--a ritual for Brit young men of family and wealth, traveling the continent for education and pleasure--
And Childe--well, yes, a prince in waiting, but also suggesting a child. Thoughts on how the construction of a child-like sensibility looks here, maybe as compared to Blake's work in the Songs? The passages in Switzerland and the account of the shaping of imagination are one place to start.
It has often been remarked that the Romantics elaborate a poetics of ruin. The scenarios range from ancient castles to fallen monuments of antiquity to, maybe, various ruins and wrecks of humanity. We might catch the Gothic side here--ruins often speak of the downfall of traditional powers and tyrannies (the castles, ruined abbeys, and so on). Ruins may also speak to Gothic interiority--as in Williams' reading of the Mariner, fragmentation and disorientation, a breakdown of self-identity and mastery, some flux of the pre-Oedipal or a similar contact with otherness/alterity. (Terror and especially horror are attendant emotions, closely linked to the Romantic and Gothic sublimes).
Any points of contact in Childe Harold? (Consider Waterloo, e.g.)
Manfred provides a great contrast for Childe Harold.
Another issue. Call it one of sovereignty. A post-Enlightenment subject breaking free from old authority, from Christian religion and hereditary power and privilege. Essentially, the free man of liberty, equality, and fraternity, (as for woman--well, we know it's a complicated tale, starting with Wollstonecraft and Radcliffe).
Man his own sovereign--no god, no master. How does he situate himself now? Does he still need the sacred, or has he given all that up in favor of reason?
We might read Childe Harold performing this free subject, freely traveling, meditating, pondering Europe and history and his own place in the world.
And we might read Manfred doing the same, but in a heightened dramatic treatment and setting.
One potentially frightening and interesting thing--if man is free and sovereign of himself, he makes the rules. And he gives himself meaning. But can he do this on his own or does he still need something beyond himself?
So we get sublime fireworks, spirits and the Witch of the Alps and all the rest. And the role of woman--the notion that as man's other she completes him. With Byron, this may be interesting given his intense attachment to his half-sister Augusta. We have reference to her in Childe Harold and in Manfred we see the incest/narcissism scenario intensify. But is it really narcissism?
Williams would see this as Male Gothic. The Romantic Male Gothic exile, in search of a meaning, of a grounding to his unmoored self, comes to woman. Must "woman" die in some fashion so he can secure an identity?
And of course many things we can say about Byron's voice, style, and language. Compared to Blake or Coleridge, significant differences. His facility with verse and verse forms (the Spenserian stanzas, etc.) was and is impressive, brilliant. So from the technique and craft side, much to consider if you are inclined.
How does the Childe persona get constructed, and how does verse technique play a role there? And the same for Manfred.
Byron's Don Juan offers further grounds for comparison--our reading there is pp. 704-31.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Goethe Vampire Poem, The Bride of Corinth
Another classic example from the German RomanticsThe Bride of Corinth
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
thoughts on the gothic wordsworth
All of it is brilliant, earnest, inspiring, convincing--unlike, say, Coleridge, also brilliant, but with loose ends showing, fragments and rough edges, sometimes protesting too much...
Male-Gothic, according to Williams and others, runs along the following lines--
Core fantasies of maternal horror--anxieties about overwhelming, engulfment, being devoured by the powerful "mother" (this is a fantasy of the mother, of course, based on infancy and early childhood)...
Systems and paranoias--godlike Faustian genius, access to secret knowledge, powers over life and death (compensatory in light of that maternal fantasy-horror?), at the borderline of madness or over it...
Violent, objectifying, near-pornographic fantasies of controlling and victimizing women.... (see The Monk)
Tales of exile, wandering, alienation from family and society (Frankenstein monster, the Wandering Jew, the vampire)...
Homophobic fantasies of persecution and conspiracy (overlap with paranoia).
Horror effects--material, physical abominations--filth, contagion, blood, dismemberment. "Fissions"--things fragmenting, swarming, multiplying (like rats, flies, crowds of faces). "Fusions"--things usually separated are superimposed, overlapped, unnatrually conjoined (monsters and nightmares of many kinds).
The sublime in the Gothic mode--its excesses and intensities unsettling and unmooring self-identity rather than being brought back around to its affirmation.
Fragmented, unfinished, sometimes incoherent texts (Christabel? The Monk, again)
Though Wordsworth's powerfully synthetic literary rhetoric seems to handle various negations with ease, might we still catch traces of the Gothic in his work?
If nothing else, maybe we can mark how the wilder side of Gothic is disarmed and domesticated? As if Wordsworth, tremendously resourceful, can pull the emotive intensities of Gothic into his system and put them to his sort of constructive work?
It would be interesting to find a point or points where such employment doesn't quite take, loose threads in the tight weave he makes...
Dorothy with those shooting-lights wild eyes--the engulfing Nature of his younger years which cannot be painted--the ghosts of sex and violence that haunt in The Thorn (instead of being staged dramatically)... That ravaged/ravished grove in "Nutting"--
Male-Gothic, according to Williams and others, runs along the following lines--
Core fantasies of maternal horror--anxieties about overwhelming, engulfment, being devoured by the powerful "mother" (this is a fantasy of the mother, of course, based on infancy and early childhood)...
Systems and paranoias--godlike Faustian genius, access to secret knowledge, powers over life and death (compensatory in light of that maternal fantasy-horror?), at the borderline of madness or over it...
Violent, objectifying, near-pornographic fantasies of controlling and victimizing women.... (see The Monk)
Tales of exile, wandering, alienation from family and society (Frankenstein monster, the Wandering Jew, the vampire)...
Homophobic fantasies of persecution and conspiracy (overlap with paranoia).
Horror effects--material, physical abominations--filth, contagion, blood, dismemberment. "Fissions"--things fragmenting, swarming, multiplying (like rats, flies, crowds of faces). "Fusions"--things usually separated are superimposed, overlapped, unnatrually conjoined (monsters and nightmares of many kinds).
The sublime in the Gothic mode--its excesses and intensities unsettling and unmooring self-identity rather than being brought back around to its affirmation.
Fragmented, unfinished, sometimes incoherent texts (Christabel? The Monk, again)
Though Wordsworth's powerfully synthetic literary rhetoric seems to handle various negations with ease, might we still catch traces of the Gothic in his work?
If nothing else, maybe we can mark how the wilder side of Gothic is disarmed and domesticated? As if Wordsworth, tremendously resourceful, can pull the emotive intensities of Gothic into his system and put them to his sort of constructive work?
It would be interesting to find a point or points where such employment doesn't quite take, loose threads in the tight weave he makes...
Dorothy with those shooting-lights wild eyes--the engulfing Nature of his younger years which cannot be painted--the ghosts of sex and violence that haunt in The Thorn (instead of being staged dramatically)... That ravaged/ravished grove in "Nutting"--
Monday, March 1, 2010
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Burke on the Sublime and the Beautiful--Pain and Pleasure?
Folks may know this one, but here it is in convenient form
Pain: almost a recipe for Gothic terror and horror in the Sublime section. Maybe we should cook up some texts using it?
Pleasure: the account of the Beautiful is thought-provoking.
The two are sometimes tangled.
Burke fires up on contact with psychoanalysis--and a good portion of literary studies pa works from this material. Astonishment!--see Medusa's Head, Freud. Kristeva: the pre-Oedipal Semiotic, Powers of Horror-- Lacan and Zizek, further afield. Was De Quincey stoned?
Accounts like Terry Eagleton's catch the ideology aspect--the Sublime a distinction of bourgeois taste; a fantasy of the higher, more powerful, for the new ruling caste. (Ideology of the Aesthetic)
Thomas Weiskel's classic account works out the psychoanalytic/deconstruction aspect.
ELEMENTS OF THE SUBLIME - BURKE - FROM THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL, published 1757
THE passion caused by the great and sublime in nature is astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. The mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other, nor reason on that object which fills it. Astonishment is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; its inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect. No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as terror; and whatever is terrible with regard to sight, is sublime.
It is impossible to look on anything dangerous as trifling or contemptible, so that even serpents are capable of raising ideas of the sublime. The sublimity of the ocean is due to the fact that it is an object of no little terror. How closely allied are terror and sublimity we may judge from the Greek language, which has but one word for 'fear' and for 'wonder,' another for 'terrible' or 'respectable,' while a third means either 'to reverence' or 'to fear.'
To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary, for a great deal of apprehension vanishes when we are able to see the full extent of any danger. Night adds to our dread of ghosts; almost all the heathen temples were dark; and despotic governments, founded on fear, keep their ruler as much as may be from the public eye. Clearness, on the other hand, is not the same as beauty; it is one thing to make an idea clear, and another to make it affecting to the imagination.
Indeed, a great clearness is in some sort an enemy to all enthusiasm. Poetry is, therefore, superior to painting as a means of raising the passions, although the latter gives the clearest images. The fact is, that our ignorance of things causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions. In great passages of Milton the mind is hurried out of itself by a crowd of grand and confused images, which affect because they are crowded and confused. The images of poetry are always obscure. To see a thing distinctly is to see its bounds, and cut it off from infinity. A clear idea is another name for a little idea.
SUBLIMITY includes, besides the idea of danger, the idea of danger, the idea of power also. Pleasure follows the will, and we are generally affected with it by many things of a force inferior to our own; but pain is always inflicted by a power in some way superior. Strength, violence, pain and terror are therefore ideas which occupy the mind together. The sublimity of wild animals is due to their power; and the power of princes is not unmixed with terror, so that we address them as 'dread majesty.'
I know that some have said that we can contemplate the idea of God without terror or awe. If I may speak of this without impropriety, I will say that no conviction of the justice with which it is exercised, nor of the mercy with which it is tempered, can wholly remove the terror that naturally arises from a force which nothing can withstand. It has even been said that fear originated the idea of deity, and true it is that, before Christianity, there was very little said of the love of God.
ALL general privations are great, because they are all terrible--vacuity, darkness, solitude and silence. Again, vastness, or greatness of dimension, is a powerful cause of the sublime; and of the three measures of extension, length strikes us least, and height is less grand than depth. The effects of a rugged, broken surface are stronger than those of a polished one.
The last extreme of littleness is sublime also, because division, as well as addition, is infinite.
Infinity fills the mind with that sort of delightful horror which is the truest test of the sublime; and succession and uniformity of parts, which constitute the artificial infinite, give the effect of sublimity in architecture. But in regard to the sublime in building, greatness of dimension is also requisite, though designs which are vast only by their dimensions are always the sign of a common and low imagination. No work of art can be great but as it deceives.
Another kind of infinity also causes pleasure, as the young of animals are pleasant because they give the promise of something more, and unfinished sketches are often more pleasing than the completed work. Difficulty is the true source of greatness, as Stonehenge impresses the mind by the immense force necessary for such a work.
Magnificence, which involves a great profusion of things splendid or valuable in themselves, is sublime, and is exemplified in the starry heavens, whose apparent disorder augments their grandeur. The sublimity of magnificence is achieved by poets who use a dazzling richness and profusion of images.
After extension, colour is capable of raising ideas of greatness, and all colours depend upon light. The rays of the sun, or the flash of lightning, have an effect due to their great strength or celerity. But darkness is more sublime than light. Our great poet spoke of the Deity as 'encircled with the majesty of darkness,' an idea not only poetical, but philosophically just.
[ELEMENTS OF BEAUTY]
BY beauty, as distinguished from the sublime, I mean that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion analogous to it. I also distinguish love, or the satisfaction which arises to the mind upon contemplating anything beautiful, from desire, which is an energy of the mind that hurries us on to the possession of certain objects.
In what does beauty consist? The usual answer to this question has been that it consists in certain proportions of parts; but I very much doubt whether it has anything at all to do with proportions. Proportion is the measure of relative quantity; but beauty has nothing to do with mensuration and, as a matter of fact, the parts of plants and animals which are found to be beautiful are not constantly formed upon certain measures.
Thus, flowers are of almost every sort of shape and arrangement; and though we find in them a regular figure and a methodical disposition of the leaves, yet in an oblique view, when this order is not apparent, the flower retains its beauty. The swan's long neck and short tail enter into a beautiful proportion, but so do the short neck and long tail of the peacock.
You may assign any proportions you please to every part of the human body, and I undertake that a painter shall observe them all, and yet produce, if he likes, a very ugly figure. The same painter shall considerably deviate from these proportions and yet produce a very beautiful figure.
This prejudice in favour of proportion has arisen from an impression that if deformity be removed, beauty must result. But deformity is opposed, not to beauty, but to the complete, common form; and beauty affects us as deviating from the common. The true opposite to beauty is ugliness, and between them is a sort of mediocrity, which has no effect upon the passions.
Neither is utility, or fitness, the cause of beauty. For then the wedge-like snout of the swine, with its little sunk eyes, so well adapted for digging and rooting, would be extremely beautiful. There are few animals whose parts are better contrived, or who seem less beautiful, than a monkey. The stomach and the liver are incomparably well adapted for their purpose, yet are not beautiful. The effect of proportion and of fitness is to produce approbation, the acquiescence of the understanding, but not love.
Neither, again, is perfection the cause of beauty; for beauty, where it is highest, as in women, almost always carries with it the idea of weakness and imperfection. The qualities of mind which most engage our hearts are the softer virtues, and the chosen companions of our recreations are rarely persons of shining qualities.
What, then, are the real causes of beauty?
IN the first place, beautiful objects are small. In most languages, objects of love are spoken of under diminutive epithets. We rarely say 'a great beautiful thing,' but often 'a great ugly thing.' There is a wide difference between admiration and love; and while the sublime has to do with great and terrible objects, the beautiful is found in small and pleasing things.
The next property constantly observable in objects of love is smoothness; I can recollect nothing beautiful that is not smooth. Smooth leaves in trees, smooth slopes in gardens, smooth streams in the landscape, smooth coats of birds and beasts, smooth skins in fine women, and smooth surfaces in ornamental furniture.
Beautiful bodies are never composed of angular parts, nor do their parts continue long in the same straight line. They vary their direction every moment and change under the eye by a continual deviation.
Further, an air of robustness and strength is very prejudicial to beauty; an appearance of delicacy, and even of fragility, is almost essential to it. This may be remarked alike in plants and in animals, and it is obvious in the case of the fair sex, whose timidity is a quality of mind analogous to it.
Of the colours of beautiful objects we note that they must not be dusky or muddy, but clean and fair; they must not be of the strongest kind, but mild in tone; or, if vivid, they must be so diversified that each abates the other, or be mixed with such gradations that it is impossible to fix the bounds of each.
The beautiful, in the sense of feeling, is in almost every respect similar to the beautiful in the sense of vision; for instance, softness, smoothness and a continually varying surface are the sources of pleasure in either case.
[CAUSES OF BEAUTY]
BEAUTY, indeed, presents a remarkable contrast with the sublime; they may sometimes occur together, but they are none the less opposite and contradictory. As for the causes of them, their ultimate cause can never be unravelled by any industry of ours, but we may distinguish certain proximate causes.
The sense of the sublime, then, has its source in an unnatural tension of the nerves, such as is produced both by fear and by pain, and may even be aroused in some degree by mimicking the facial and bodily expressions of fear and pain. Human emotions are very intimately associated with nervous and other physical changes, and the mood of terror may be regarded as an exercise of the finer parts of our bodily system, clearing them of a troublesome encumbrance and so becoming, incidentally, a cause of delight.
Vastness arouses the sense of the sublime by straining the nerves and muscles of the eye; and a similar physical explanation is suitable to the sublimity of the artificial infinite, which is produced, as we have seen, by a succession of similar visual objects. Darkness is terrible for the same reason; we know that as the light diminishes the pupil of the eye is enlarged by the retiring of the iris, and doubtless any great darkness exaggerates this change until it sets up a painful nervous tension.
In every one of its modifications the sense of the sublime has its nervous basis, due to changes which are in some degree painful, and an analogous nervous basis may be discovered for the sense of the beautiful.
For in the latter case, also, the body is affected. When we have before us objects of love and complacency the whole body is composed, and the hands fall idly to the sides; and all this is accompanied by an inward sense of languor. It is impossible not to conclude that beauty acts by relaxing the whole system. The easy gradations of line, and the soft tones of colour, which are proper to beauty, affect the sense by lulling it to repose.
A brief consideration must be devoted, in conclusion, to the effects of words with reference to these passions of the sublime and beautiful. It is commonly supposed that the power of words lies in their raising in the mind the ideas of those things for which the words as 'virtue,' 'honour,' and the like. Nobody, on hearing these sounds, conceives precise notions of the relations which they represent. Their effect is that of sounds, not of representations; but of sounds which have been habitually associated with certain effects on the mind.
A word may produce three effects on the hearer--the sound, the picture, and the affection of the soul; and words like 'honour' and 'liberty' produce the first and third of these, but not the second. Words like 'blue,' 'green,' 'cold,' and still more, words like 'horse,' 'man,' may produce all three of these effects, but their general effect does not arise from their forming pictures.
The power of poetic imagery depends on the affections of the soul produced immediately by the sounds of the words. Consider what is the source of the power in Milton's lines, where he describes the travels of the fallen angels through their dismal habitation.
O'er many a dark and dreary vale They passed, and many a region dolorous; O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp; Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death, A universe of death.
Pain: almost a recipe for Gothic terror and horror in the Sublime section. Maybe we should cook up some texts using it?
Pleasure: the account of the Beautiful is thought-provoking.
The two are sometimes tangled.
Burke fires up on contact with psychoanalysis--and a good portion of literary studies pa works from this material. Astonishment!--see Medusa's Head, Freud. Kristeva: the pre-Oedipal Semiotic, Powers of Horror-- Lacan and Zizek, further afield. Was De Quincey stoned?
Accounts like Terry Eagleton's catch the ideology aspect--the Sublime a distinction of bourgeois taste; a fantasy of the higher, more powerful, for the new ruling caste. (Ideology of the Aesthetic)
Thomas Weiskel's classic account works out the psychoanalytic/deconstruction aspect.
ELEMENTS OF THE SUBLIME - BURKE - FROM THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL, published 1757
THE passion caused by the great and sublime in nature is astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. The mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other, nor reason on that object which fills it. Astonishment is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree; its inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect. No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as terror; and whatever is terrible with regard to sight, is sublime.
It is impossible to look on anything dangerous as trifling or contemptible, so that even serpents are capable of raising ideas of the sublime. The sublimity of the ocean is due to the fact that it is an object of no little terror. How closely allied are terror and sublimity we may judge from the Greek language, which has but one word for 'fear' and for 'wonder,' another for 'terrible' or 'respectable,' while a third means either 'to reverence' or 'to fear.'
To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary, for a great deal of apprehension vanishes when we are able to see the full extent of any danger. Night adds to our dread of ghosts; almost all the heathen temples were dark; and despotic governments, founded on fear, keep their ruler as much as may be from the public eye. Clearness, on the other hand, is not the same as beauty; it is one thing to make an idea clear, and another to make it affecting to the imagination.
Indeed, a great clearness is in some sort an enemy to all enthusiasm. Poetry is, therefore, superior to painting as a means of raising the passions, although the latter gives the clearest images. The fact is, that our ignorance of things causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions. In great passages of Milton the mind is hurried out of itself by a crowd of grand and confused images, which affect because they are crowded and confused. The images of poetry are always obscure. To see a thing distinctly is to see its bounds, and cut it off from infinity. A clear idea is another name for a little idea.
SUBLIMITY includes, besides the idea of danger, the idea of danger, the idea of power also. Pleasure follows the will, and we are generally affected with it by many things of a force inferior to our own; but pain is always inflicted by a power in some way superior. Strength, violence, pain and terror are therefore ideas which occupy the mind together. The sublimity of wild animals is due to their power; and the power of princes is not unmixed with terror, so that we address them as 'dread majesty.'
I know that some have said that we can contemplate the idea of God without terror or awe. If I may speak of this without impropriety, I will say that no conviction of the justice with which it is exercised, nor of the mercy with which it is tempered, can wholly remove the terror that naturally arises from a force which nothing can withstand. It has even been said that fear originated the idea of deity, and true it is that, before Christianity, there was very little said of the love of God.
ALL general privations are great, because they are all terrible--vacuity, darkness, solitude and silence. Again, vastness, or greatness of dimension, is a powerful cause of the sublime; and of the three measures of extension, length strikes us least, and height is less grand than depth. The effects of a rugged, broken surface are stronger than those of a polished one.
The last extreme of littleness is sublime also, because division, as well as addition, is infinite.
Infinity fills the mind with that sort of delightful horror which is the truest test of the sublime; and succession and uniformity of parts, which constitute the artificial infinite, give the effect of sublimity in architecture. But in regard to the sublime in building, greatness of dimension is also requisite, though designs which are vast only by their dimensions are always the sign of a common and low imagination. No work of art can be great but as it deceives.
Another kind of infinity also causes pleasure, as the young of animals are pleasant because they give the promise of something more, and unfinished sketches are often more pleasing than the completed work. Difficulty is the true source of greatness, as Stonehenge impresses the mind by the immense force necessary for such a work.
Magnificence, which involves a great profusion of things splendid or valuable in themselves, is sublime, and is exemplified in the starry heavens, whose apparent disorder augments their grandeur. The sublimity of magnificence is achieved by poets who use a dazzling richness and profusion of images.
After extension, colour is capable of raising ideas of greatness, and all colours depend upon light. The rays of the sun, or the flash of lightning, have an effect due to their great strength or celerity. But darkness is more sublime than light. Our great poet spoke of the Deity as 'encircled with the majesty of darkness,' an idea not only poetical, but philosophically just.
[ELEMENTS OF BEAUTY]
BY beauty, as distinguished from the sublime, I mean that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion analogous to it. I also distinguish love, or the satisfaction which arises to the mind upon contemplating anything beautiful, from desire, which is an energy of the mind that hurries us on to the possession of certain objects.
In what does beauty consist? The usual answer to this question has been that it consists in certain proportions of parts; but I very much doubt whether it has anything at all to do with proportions. Proportion is the measure of relative quantity; but beauty has nothing to do with mensuration and, as a matter of fact, the parts of plants and animals which are found to be beautiful are not constantly formed upon certain measures.
Thus, flowers are of almost every sort of shape and arrangement; and though we find in them a regular figure and a methodical disposition of the leaves, yet in an oblique view, when this order is not apparent, the flower retains its beauty. The swan's long neck and short tail enter into a beautiful proportion, but so do the short neck and long tail of the peacock.
You may assign any proportions you please to every part of the human body, and I undertake that a painter shall observe them all, and yet produce, if he likes, a very ugly figure. The same painter shall considerably deviate from these proportions and yet produce a very beautiful figure.
This prejudice in favour of proportion has arisen from an impression that if deformity be removed, beauty must result. But deformity is opposed, not to beauty, but to the complete, common form; and beauty affects us as deviating from the common. The true opposite to beauty is ugliness, and between them is a sort of mediocrity, which has no effect upon the passions.
Neither is utility, or fitness, the cause of beauty. For then the wedge-like snout of the swine, with its little sunk eyes, so well adapted for digging and rooting, would be extremely beautiful. There are few animals whose parts are better contrived, or who seem less beautiful, than a monkey. The stomach and the liver are incomparably well adapted for their purpose, yet are not beautiful. The effect of proportion and of fitness is to produce approbation, the acquiescence of the understanding, but not love.
Neither, again, is perfection the cause of beauty; for beauty, where it is highest, as in women, almost always carries with it the idea of weakness and imperfection. The qualities of mind which most engage our hearts are the softer virtues, and the chosen companions of our recreations are rarely persons of shining qualities.
What, then, are the real causes of beauty?
IN the first place, beautiful objects are small. In most languages, objects of love are spoken of under diminutive epithets. We rarely say 'a great beautiful thing,' but often 'a great ugly thing.' There is a wide difference between admiration and love; and while the sublime has to do with great and terrible objects, the beautiful is found in small and pleasing things.
The next property constantly observable in objects of love is smoothness; I can recollect nothing beautiful that is not smooth. Smooth leaves in trees, smooth slopes in gardens, smooth streams in the landscape, smooth coats of birds and beasts, smooth skins in fine women, and smooth surfaces in ornamental furniture.
Beautiful bodies are never composed of angular parts, nor do their parts continue long in the same straight line. They vary their direction every moment and change under the eye by a continual deviation.
Further, an air of robustness and strength is very prejudicial to beauty; an appearance of delicacy, and even of fragility, is almost essential to it. This may be remarked alike in plants and in animals, and it is obvious in the case of the fair sex, whose timidity is a quality of mind analogous to it.
Of the colours of beautiful objects we note that they must not be dusky or muddy, but clean and fair; they must not be of the strongest kind, but mild in tone; or, if vivid, they must be so diversified that each abates the other, or be mixed with such gradations that it is impossible to fix the bounds of each.
The beautiful, in the sense of feeling, is in almost every respect similar to the beautiful in the sense of vision; for instance, softness, smoothness and a continually varying surface are the sources of pleasure in either case.
[CAUSES OF BEAUTY]
BEAUTY, indeed, presents a remarkable contrast with the sublime; they may sometimes occur together, but they are none the less opposite and contradictory. As for the causes of them, their ultimate cause can never be unravelled by any industry of ours, but we may distinguish certain proximate causes.
The sense of the sublime, then, has its source in an unnatural tension of the nerves, such as is produced both by fear and by pain, and may even be aroused in some degree by mimicking the facial and bodily expressions of fear and pain. Human emotions are very intimately associated with nervous and other physical changes, and the mood of terror may be regarded as an exercise of the finer parts of our bodily system, clearing them of a troublesome encumbrance and so becoming, incidentally, a cause of delight.
Vastness arouses the sense of the sublime by straining the nerves and muscles of the eye; and a similar physical explanation is suitable to the sublimity of the artificial infinite, which is produced, as we have seen, by a succession of similar visual objects. Darkness is terrible for the same reason; we know that as the light diminishes the pupil of the eye is enlarged by the retiring of the iris, and doubtless any great darkness exaggerates this change until it sets up a painful nervous tension.
In every one of its modifications the sense of the sublime has its nervous basis, due to changes which are in some degree painful, and an analogous nervous basis may be discovered for the sense of the beautiful.
For in the latter case, also, the body is affected. When we have before us objects of love and complacency the whole body is composed, and the hands fall idly to the sides; and all this is accompanied by an inward sense of languor. It is impossible not to conclude that beauty acts by relaxing the whole system. The easy gradations of line, and the soft tones of colour, which are proper to beauty, affect the sense by lulling it to repose.
A brief consideration must be devoted, in conclusion, to the effects of words with reference to these passions of the sublime and beautiful. It is commonly supposed that the power of words lies in their raising in the mind the ideas of those things for which the words as 'virtue,' 'honour,' and the like. Nobody, on hearing these sounds, conceives precise notions of the relations which they represent. Their effect is that of sounds, not of representations; but of sounds which have been habitually associated with certain effects on the mind.
A word may produce three effects on the hearer--the sound, the picture, and the affection of the soul; and words like 'honour' and 'liberty' produce the first and third of these, but not the second. Words like 'blue,' 'green,' 'cold,' and still more, words like 'horse,' 'man,' may produce all three of these effects, but their general effect does not arise from their forming pictures.
The power of poetic imagery depends on the affections of the soul produced immediately by the sounds of the words. Consider what is the source of the power in Milton's lines, where he describes the travels of the fallen angels through their dismal habitation.
O'er many a dark and dreary vale They passed, and many a region dolorous; O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp; Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death, A universe of death.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Jerrod Fogle on Christabel, Gothic Studies
Fogle's article in Gothic Studies argues in sum that anxieties about women's roles--traditional and submissive versus equal and active, following Enlightenment critiques of male privilege such as Wollstonecraft's--are the shaping factor in the generic and formal uncertainties of Christabel's Gothic.
He enlists Kristeva's concept of abjection to characterize Geraldine's horrors, and suggests a phenonenon he calls "abjecting" is a corollary of 1790s anxieties about where women were going in British society.
Is his account too neat, a familiar strategy of seeing the text embodying ideological tensions? Is his use of Kristeva a real engagement with her ideas or more like critical updating without much intellectual substance?
How might Christabel look in light of Williams' theory moves in her reading of the Mariner?
And Kristeva--do we need to think more and look more at what she is about?
He enlists Kristeva's concept of abjection to characterize Geraldine's horrors, and suggests a phenonenon he calls "abjecting" is a corollary of 1790s anxieties about where women were going in British society.
Is his account too neat, a familiar strategy of seeing the text embodying ideological tensions? Is his use of Kristeva a real engagement with her ideas or more like critical updating without much intellectual substance?
How might Christabel look in light of Williams' theory moves in her reading of the Mariner?
And Kristeva--do we need to think more and look more at what she is about?
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Coleridge and Opium and Drugs
Thinking about Coleridge and Opium--
A look at The Early Years bio showed me that already in 1797 he used laudanum to treat a severe eye infection (strange to think about, given the Mariner's glittering eye).
Much discussed through the years--how opium played a role in his composing Kubla Khan, other poems. How it may have helped or harmed him or perhaps was not all that significant. How attributing his creative inspirations and his creative failures to opium may be reductive, oversimplifying, unfair. He had certain interests and dispositions--opium simply fell in line with them.
Some unkind biographers used his opium habit to denigrate his character and his writing.
Coleridge himself worried about it considerably. Opium was an affliction, a curse. De Quincey, in contrast, comes to argue for its overall beneficial effects.
The larger question of drugs and other soft technologies of mind--what do we make of a literary text that was or appears to have been written under the influence (and what about that latter phrase?).
In one respect, our bodies already produce drugs--endorphins, etc. And there are the drugs that aren't looked upon as such--caffeine and so on.
Further--iis there something particularly Gothic about drugs inspiring sublime visions, nightmares, deliria and disasters? As if the self is not the self, losing ground, opium or peyote or LSD usurping one's mastery?
And the Faust aspect of the Romantic genius/villain/exile? Melmoth the Wanderer? Victor Frankenstein?
Is visonary paranoia, with its projections of knowledge and sytems, a useful concept to consider here? The I and the eye, Freud's Schreber case, Lacan's accounts?
A look at The Early Years bio showed me that already in 1797 he used laudanum to treat a severe eye infection (strange to think about, given the Mariner's glittering eye).
Much discussed through the years--how opium played a role in his composing Kubla Khan, other poems. How it may have helped or harmed him or perhaps was not all that significant. How attributing his creative inspirations and his creative failures to opium may be reductive, oversimplifying, unfair. He had certain interests and dispositions--opium simply fell in line with them.
Some unkind biographers used his opium habit to denigrate his character and his writing.
Coleridge himself worried about it considerably. Opium was an affliction, a curse. De Quincey, in contrast, comes to argue for its overall beneficial effects.
The larger question of drugs and other soft technologies of mind--what do we make of a literary text that was or appears to have been written under the influence (and what about that latter phrase?).
In one respect, our bodies already produce drugs--endorphins, etc. And there are the drugs that aren't looked upon as such--caffeine and so on.
Further--iis there something particularly Gothic about drugs inspiring sublime visions, nightmares, deliria and disasters? As if the self is not the self, losing ground, opium or peyote or LSD usurping one's mastery?
And the Faust aspect of the Romantic genius/villain/exile? Melmoth the Wanderer? Victor Frankenstein?
Is visonary paranoia, with its projections of knowledge and sytems, a useful concept to consider here? The I and the eye, Freud's Schreber case, Lacan's accounts?
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