Author: mathelinda

Coconut is a term of insult used about a black person who is acting like a white person. Darkly brown on the outside, white on the inside.

Reading Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics makes me wonder whether being a coconut is the inevitable condition of the black academic. For all its attempt to critique Western humanism, Mbembes’s philosophy is too intimate with this canon to be able to fully abjure it. We can love even those who hate us.

Europe, which has given so much to the world and taken so much in return, often by force or ruse, is no longer the world’s center of gravity. […] As the history of Europe has been confounded over several centuries with the history of the world, and the history of the world in turn has been confounded with Europe’s own, it follows, does it not, that this archive does not belong to Europe alone?

Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran, p. 188

First, the assertion that Europe is no longer the centre of the world, then, in the next paragraph, claiming ownership of the history of Europe for the world. If each paragraph is a gesture, this is a shove followed by a franctic hug – and so thought clings to what it tries to cast away. This back and forth: enough to drive one nuts.

Criticism is secondary literature.

This means that it has a special relationship to the number 2. In other words: duplicity.

For instance, criticism pretends to be about something else – the primary work that it criticises. And sometimes it may even be the case that reading a critical interpretation will help you discover something new about that work.

However, in that discovery lies a new work. Why? Because the best critical interpretations themselves create the object that they criticise.

What Shelley thought he detected in the language of the eyes was the measure of a person’s soul.

Nathaniel Brown, Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley (1979) p. 15

Nathaniel Brown writes about Shelley’s conception of love, but he clearly also loves Shelley – if “love” is the right word for a stance that is soothingly generous even when Shelley is at his most objectionable (for instance, arguing that women who do not have “soul-inwoven” eyes are not worthy of being loved).

Even in a more precise sense, what other than love can motivate a critic to so carefully reconstruct the philosophical and historical contexts of another person’s writing as Brown does Shelley’s? And if Brown loves Shelley, do we not have it in common – this love?

This is why the question that Brown’s book inadvertently poses makes me fear for myself: are critical evaluation and love-struck affirmation always mutually exclusive? And is this the reason why we as critics have to hide our passion behind “methodological rigour” and impenetrable prose? Why we are too afraid to love our work, openly.

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The phrase “extraordinary ocular endowment” is Brown’s; how not to love a writer who chooses such an innuendoed circumlocution to state that Shelley had big eyes? Which is also a reminder that the language of the eyes is not something we learn by looking at someone’s iris; rather, its medium is the written page – this is whence words enter our eyes, this is where we can take the measure of a writer’s soul.

A circumstance even more troubling than my poetological conservatism: I find writing about what poetry is infinitely much more interesting than actually reading it.

I am a woman of troublingly conservative tastes, at least when it comes to understanding poetry (which is a metaphor for all lived things). So I find little to add to Cleanth Brooks’s 1949 definition of poetic structure:

The essential structure of a poem (as distinguished from the rational or logical structure of the “statement” which we abstract from it) resembles that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern of resolved stresses. Or, to move closer still to poetry by considering the temporal arts, the structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme.

The Well-Wrought Urn (1949), p. 203

This illustrates exactly why poetry is a metaphor for all lived things, for what is life other than learning to balance and resolve and harmonise all the things that stress us out?

This is very well concluded, given that Cleanth Brooks and the New Criticism with which he was associated are primarily known for divorcing poetry from life. The well-wrought urn is a window-less monad, untouched by the messy matter of being human.

Literary criticism is perhaps not very different from dream interpretation. The people you encounter in a dream have their allotted space within the structure of the whole, much like characters do in a novel. It is a choreography. And as in any performance, the setting also matters. Attention lingers on certain details, estranging common objects while impossible things appear in passing, taken for granted. Time moves, contorts, is also a dancer.

Some critics puff their own arguments with a ‘had I but world enough and time’ gesture, saying that someone ought to conduct further study on something or other which will, for reasons of space, remain a footnote in their own work. That is a dishonest gesture. Just like someone being too busy at work to make time to see you is just not that into you, so the ideas that one does not make space for in a monograph are just not that interesting.

Good writing slows down the skimming gaze, either because it forces you to think, or because it forces you to sound.

Every silent reader contains a sotto voce reader, undoing the distinction between talk (putting out) and reading (taking in).

Mary Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading, p. 30.

Jacobus is here thinking the mouth as a site where words enter and exit our body; in other words, a form of border control. In general, at the border, one wishes for the queue to move as quickly as possible and to get past the officer without incident. So it is with much of my academic reading, trying to get through it as quickly as possible, adding the critic’s analysis to my store of knowledge without being overtly challenged. And yet for all that, the critics whose work I value most are not the ones who are fastest to read but, on the contrary, slowest. I used to think that their words were so beautifully thought that they force me to pause and reread. Ponder. But, in fact, some critics construct arguments so musical in their movement that they demand to be read out loud. Like a poem or phonetic transcription.

 

 

It is flattering to think that when someone writes me something, even something as trivial as an email, then they have selected each word especially for me. But in fact writing is claiming: not only does it make claims about the world, it claims words for its own sake. Thus, even what I write for you remains my own writing.

It is a professional embarassment that I have no working definition of close reading, especially since it is quite clearly the silver spoon in the mouth of literary criticism. But given that it is scientific to quantify our work numerically, I now wonder whether close reading could be accurately defined as citing the same passage twice (or even better: thrice) within a paragraph of critical prose. Ideally, the latter should be an example of close writing, defined as the use of a critical register whose concepts have two or even better three senses at once.