Well, we've reached the end of the line, classwise. I have actually been very stimulated by this course and have learned a great many things about literature, and life in general. I began this semester pondering the status of critics, wondering if they were comparable to people who wanted to be artists but couldn't draw. I'm not sure if this observation is completely untrue(particularly regarding much of the idiocy that attempts to pass for authentic criticism), but I have to understand that there are different possibilities for what criticism can be: attempts to articulate why art and beauty and stories matter like they do, and how it is possible to be touched by them.


But the class closed with an important observation that both critics and those who disparage critics(which means the rest of us)would do best to note: You cannot make something mean whatever you want. Meaning must be able to have some bearing or relation upon the work itself. Because then that results in anarchy, in which nothing has any order. And if there is anything which one has learned this semester, it is that rage for order is blessed.

Harold Bloom describes Edith Grossman in his introduction to Don Quixote as the "Glen Gould of translators". It was nice to learn that Glen Gould is a pianist well-known for his very precise, very detailed treatment of classical composers, particularly Bach. The analogy is therefore made clearer.

Having a very precise translator certainly helps with a book which is one of the first(if not the first) works of meta-fiction(that is, where the narrative is constantly exposed as fiction and discussed as such), which might also be described as tangent texts, being as tangents make up a great deal of the content; in fact the tangents can sometimes tell more of the story than the story proper. The Manuscript Found at Saragossa and Tristram Shandy are other examples.

These are often thought of as literary approaches that one would find in Post-modernism, which privleages irony above all else. And yet we find them in Don Quixote, but with an interesting dimension: Don Quixote has no irony in him, but there is irony in how Cervantes regards him.

The incident on pg. 518, with Sancho attempting to mislead Don Quixote into beliving that Dulcinea del Toboso is a coarse peasant girl(being unable to find the real Dulcinea, since she doesn't exist) is a case in point. Eric Auerbach wrote an essay about this episode entitled The Enchanted Dulcinea. A point he stresses as being of great importance is that Sancho Panza picks up and uses the rhetoric of chivilary from Don Quixote; the modes and language of storytelling obviously is being passed on and learned.

A few quick notes; for the test, which we will be preparing on Wednesday, we need to have one question about the first part of Don Quixote, which should also be quoted/refrenced at least once in our 3-5 page Apology, along with some reflections on the previous Apologists. The Apology is due the same day that we deliver our short oral report on it.

I also think that I ought to see The Fall now, and know that Philip Pullman recommends Wallace Stevens' poetry and The Art of Memory.

And I'm a bit late on it, but here are two of my touchstones, with more potentially up for bloggage.

"O God, I have an ill-divining soul. Methinks I see thee now thou art so low as one dead in the bottom of a tomb. Either my eyesight fails or thou lookest pale."

-- Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Act 3 scene 5.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."

--Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, last paragraph chapter 1.

Today was a very stimulating day, I thought. We mentioned Frazer's The Golden Bough as an important text in the history of studying literature(though it's technically an anthropology text), particularly in regards to rituals relating to the story of dying/resurrecting God.


This lead into a discussion that has recieved a great deal of (shallow)discussion in the press at large, the debate between Philip Pullman and CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. But is there really a point of debate to be had on the level of form? Most discussions/comparisons of these writers tend to become dualistic in nature, and dualistic argument gets us nowhere. Northrup Frye would say that Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia have an Apocolyptic view of religous archetypes(that is to say positive) and that His Dark Materials has a Demonic view(that is to say negative)of religous archetypes. Which ties in intriguingly with the use of the "daemon".

It's been talked about how daemon is the component of one's soul that is the better angel of our nature; but suppose it were one's evil twin instead(I find this is certainly the function of Mrs. Coulter's golden monkey daemon in His Dark Materials) ? Or really, that it is both of them at once, and that trying to rid oneself of the potential dark side of your nature will not lead to anything good(exemplified by the General Oblation Boards intercision operations in The Golden Compass). Also, I did not know that this same notion was to be found in Egyptian mythology; there the word is the ka.

And this leads into the discussion of the necessary co-existence of the good God and the wrathful God(which Frye would say is necessary for the good God to exist). William Blake's evil God is called Nobadaddy, but is also the same as the "good" God, Urizen. After all, the Satan that appears in the book of Job is presented as a cynical member of the heavenly court, and inflicts all of the torments upon Job with God's permission.

And really, Pullman is really more like a Gnostic, who saw God(the creator of the material world) as the Demi-urge, and views the Serpent as the real God. The reason for this is that the Serpent broght liberation from ignorance; and Gnostics believe that holiness arises from knowledge, in fact privelaging knowledge over belief.

This was something that piqued my interest as I was reading Frye's Myths chapter, especially regarding how we touched on religon yesterday. It's in the passage where Irony is being discussed.

"The satirist may feel with Lucian that the eliminating of superstition would also eliminate religon, or with Erasmus that it would restore health to religon. But whether Zeus exists or not is a question; that men who think him vicious and stupid will insist that he change the weather is a fact, accepted by scoffer and devout alike. Any really devout person would surely welcome a satirist who cauterized hypocrisy and superstition as an ally of true religon. Yet once a hypocrite who sounds exactly like a good man is sufficiently blackened, the good man also may begin to seem a little dingier than he was." (Anatomy of Criticism, pg. 231--232)

This actually makes me wonder if perhaps there are what Frye would call "really devout" people today practicing "true religon". If there are they're being crowded out by those who cauterize hypocrisy and superstition. But there probably are, and then I get to thinking "Then what is 'true religon'?" perhaps true religon arises from the same level of conciousness where anagogy is begun to be comprehended. I don't know what that level exactly is or could be designated as(and I'd probably doubt anyone proclaiming at the top of their lungs that they were the ones who knew). But if authentic faith can be helped by those who poke moking fun at human constructs, then let's bring out some more noble wits to do just this.

Or I could just be babbling.

The four critics who spoke today were Helen Cixous, Wolfgang Iser, Sigmund Freud and Edward SaId. We all have to post on our blog at some point in time the one essential thing about our critic(courtesy of the exam).

After a brief timeslot allowing for thoughts on the election(during which I voiced my general-but-hopefully-still-pertinent opposition to stupidity), we discussed the the importance to our lives of intellectual excitement and adventure, two of the main springboards for finding which are art and song.

We then went on to Matthew Arnold, who described poetry as "criticism of life", and felt that poetry as a substitute for religon. This naturally leads into intriguing discussions of what is or is not provided by religon in the first place, but if Arnold is talking about a feeling of the Sublime, or of something greater than ourselves and yet at the same time of ourselves, then I'd say just from my own experiance I tend to have such encounters through art rather than institutional religous avenues. But this is another story for another blog perhaps. But there was a quote from Nietzche today that I think ties into this in an interesting way : "Truth is a mobile army of metaphors."

We also have been assigned by Friday to come up with a touchstone piece of literature, for us. Or principly a passage that we find ourselves always coming back to and enlightened by. I see what I can find(or have already found rather).

The critics presented in class today were Giambattista Vico(the "truth is constructed guy again), Eric Auerbach(who greatly influenced the perception of realism), Coleridge(who, among other things, coined the phrase "willing suspension of disbelief)and Hayden White(who was influenced by Vico, and dealt in master tropes).

There was a discussion of the by now some-what stereotypical view of the artist as a raging ego-maniac who desires primarily to live forever through literary fame, but how this can be thrown together with the Keatsian notion of negative capability, whereby the creation of authentic art dissolves the individual ego. Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials(of which I am a big fan), apparently digs negative capabilty, which actually doesn't suprise me that much. He writes some of the best fantasy literature to come along in ages, and has been quoted elsewhere that he himself isn't a big fantasy fan.

The Freudian idea of the fight between the pleasure principle(what we want to do) and the reality principle(what we know we ought to do), and how it relates to Don Quixote was brought up, as was the two big things that are necessary components of myth for Frye: the Apocolyptic and the Demonic. One of which is positve and the other of which is negative. We also talked about the displacement principle, which for Frye is what characterizes Romance; striving for things the way they ought to be rather than the way they actually are.

And to conclude, two interesting words: kenosis, which means emptying out and plerosis, which meand filling up.