Shoveling Matter
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 “Perceiving the lost subjects of history – the missing and lost ones and the blind fields they inhabit – makes all the difference to any project trying to find the address of the present” (Gordon 195).
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 The irony, of course, is that for decades, the activities of literary scholars have been centered around the concept of digging bones. The need to publish significant commentary on material that has not been done to death has incessantly pushed ambitious scholars toward the periphery of the canon, looking for “lost” texts and forgotten authors to champion as worthy of consideration. Perhaps there has been either an undertone or a façade of altruism in this. We can believe that Raymond Weaver really had faith in his vision of Herman Melville when he worked to recover the reputation of that man nearly forty years after his death. Yet, there is something to be said for the way that Harold Bloom conflates the effort of the critic and the poet, if we consider a central criterion being one of assuring their fame through discerning the “truth.” One sees reality and exposits it in writing. One sees the reality of another’s vision and exposits that in writing. It is similar to the hierarchy discussed by Benjamin in his famous forward on translation. What Gordon suggests, however, in looking to the lost subjects of history, is more in keeping with Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” because of its broad application to the paradoxes inherent in the nature of humanity, its perspectives on time, and the social complications that result from them. The object in this case is one that combines social justice with enlightenment, rather than the aggrandizement of any cause, and it is hard to see any sort of down-side to such a project.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 2 What is interesting is that if I tried to explain what I get out of this prospect of embracing the lost and discovering their homes, it would not be far away from the same effect offered by other theoretical approaches. New historicism, in particular, with its basis in anthropology/sociology (think Geertz’ original exposition of deep contextualization), attempts the very same thing. The difference lies in both method and in the foregrounding suppositions of what it takes to explain and understand the human. Science has a distinguished gravitas. To examine the past through the discovery of facts and artefacts that can be quantified and proven as undeniable has validity that is self-evident to the critical mind. Yet, in Gordon, as in so many of the authors we have visited this semester, there is the overt suggestion that the quantified and proven has a limited intersection with that which we experience as humans. At its most basic level, the assumption that there are elements that become lost cast doubts upon the facts that can be proven. Once proof is in doubt, intuition and feeling take over as the necessary tools for exploring the past and redirecting that insight to “address the present.”
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 Really, what could be more natural than to include affect as the basis of study for what is human? We have heard a million times that “there are more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” but as yet, the wisdom of remembering it, realizing it, eludes us. Reasoning, feeling, being, we stumble along, forever searching for a why, all the while discounting all but the first aspect of self.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 1 Again, so far as irony is concerned, out of the texts we have visited, Ghostly Matters if probably one of the least affective, for me. I chose her quote because I thought she stated the case the most succinctly. It also serves as a model for how affect may be approached without necessarily broaching the line of actually affecting. I would not claim this as a needed boundary, but I think it is an important one to recognize. Examining affect may mean feeling things that you would rather not feel or things that you would pay to feel again. However, it may also mean simply that: acknowledging the existence of possible affect without even an empathic twinge of recognition on your own part.
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 1 I would like to say that it is impossible to find a subset of literature that would not be improved by an application of theories of affect, and I think that is justifiable. In fact, since I look at literature as an expression of the human, I would hate to privilege any given period over another as being somehow more inherently caught up in a “true” distillation of that humanity.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 1 With that disclaimer in the bag, I can now go on to recommend the ripeness of the fin de siècle for a makeover with an eye towards affect. In England, the decadents seem like the obvious targets, so overtly courting the mastery of the senses over reason, backed up by the reasoning reflections of Pater to justify their extravagance. Yet, how much more do the Americans of the period demand the same exploration. The mainstream authors of the states reacted by recoiling from the prurient brush-strokes of their English counterparts, suppressing ever further their own relation with the senses for the sake of morality. Yet, in reaction, are they too not responding to the same inclination?
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 2 Perhaps there are no bones worth digging up any more, per se, in the sense that the term was meant for a critic’s research. There is that possibility. Yet, with the bones of billions turned to dust before me, I trust that worthy shards of feeling await me in the past that will cast a fresh light on my present, and perhaps change the far future. Those that are lost possessed humanity, once. In that supposition, they are more than equal to the paradigms of humans I treasure so highly in literary characters, and so, how can I not make the honest effort to retrieve them? If I cannot succeed in the recovery, then I can, at least, point the way and spread the word of the importance of the task to those that may achieve it. In the meantime, the only way to find that out is to grab a shovel and start to work.
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. Print.
I guess we need to take a more comprehensive approach to this issue; one that understands and accommodate all approaches to literary criticism. I strongly believe that the major characteristic of a literary critic is to go beyond the blind belief of sticking to one (and only one) view of literary texts.