How I discovered the structure of “Kubla Khan” & came to realize the importance of description

I say discover because I regard the poem’s structure as something existing objectively in the world, prior to and independent of my work, or anyone else’s for that matter. However, I regard that discovery as tentative because it really hasn’t been confirmed. The profession – academic literary criticism – isn’t like that.

But I’m getting ahead of myself with this talk of a discovery that hasn’t been confirmed. Let’s set that aside for the moment. We’ll return to the issue at the end – though that’ll take awhile (you might want to get a cup of coffee, or some scotch, whatever’s appropriate).

This is about description, and how I came to realize the importance of description. That happened through my work on “Kubla Khan” – other texts as well, but that was the Rubicon. I’m going through this once again now because the profession seems to be in the process of discovering, or rediscovering description – e.g. the special issue of Representations (Summer 2016) devoted to it – and is still quite tentative about it. By my reading – and here I’m being polemical – they don’t know what they’re up to.

But then I didn’t know what I was doing either, not back then. That’s why I’m writing this, to emphasize how very difficult it can be to understand what you’re doing. It was only two decades or more after the fact that I came to understand what I had done in the early 1970s.

A structuralist analysis of “Kubla Khan”

In my senior year at Johns Hopkins I enrolled in a two-semester course on Romantic Literature, taught by (the legendary) Earl Wasserman. Keats, Shelley, and Sir Walter Scott in the Fall (1968); Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Jane Austen in the Spring (1969). That’s when I became hooked on “Kubla Khan”, the spring of 1969. I had this idea that the poem attained completeness by asserting its own incompleteness, a formulation that Wasserman loved, and that would have been well suited to the emerging deconstructive dispensation, though I didn’t frame it that way.

I stayed at Hopkins for a master’s degree in Humanities and wrote my thesis on “Kubla Khan”. I had become interested in structuralism and wanted to do a structuralist analysis – I refuse to call it a reading – of the poem, which was dripping with the binary oppositions so central to structuralist thought. Oh, I had other thinkers I wanted to bring to the poem, but I centered on Lévi-Strauss.

Therein lies the problem. It stalked and ambushed me and laid me low. When he began his work on myth Lévi-Strauss pursued the idea that a myth began with a binary opposition – life vs. death, nature vs. culture, that sort of thing – expressed in extreme form and proceeded by substituting successively less extreme forms of the opposition until, with one final substitution, it all but eliminated the opposition. Thus he had an intriguing scheme that explained why myths took the form they did. That’s what attracted me, the possibility of an actual explanation.

But he’d abandoned that scheme when he began Mythologiques. Oh well, never mind. Anyhow, I wasn’t dealing with a myth or group of myths, I was dealing with a poem. One poem: “Kubla Khan”.

Finding binary oppositions was easy – Kubla vs. the wailing woman, the wailing woman vs. the Abyssinia maid, Kubla vs. the maid, the dome vs. the caves, wailing vs. song, maid vs. auditors, Kubla vs. poet. They were all over the place, those oppositions. But I couldn’t see any order to them.

Here’s a fragment from one of my worksheets:

I’d typed the poem out in triple-space and then marked it up. I must have done this half-a-dozen times. Sometimes double spaced, sometimes triple. And I used different colors of felt-tip pens to indicate different aspects of structure.

It just went on and on. And then I gave up.

Of course there was more on my mind than those oppositions. For one thing I had been reading everything I could find on “Kubla Khan” in the Hopkins library. Along with bits and pieces of that scholarship I was also weaving my other core thinkers into the mix, Wittgenstein, Piaget, Merleau-Ponty, and Nietzsche. But it wasn’t working. In the spring of 1970 I stopped typing on page 142. Some time after that, I don’t recall when, I had the idea of treating line-end punctuation as a means of dividing the text into hierarchically ordered units in the same way that parentheses, brackets and braces are used in grouping elements of mathematical expressions. Once I had done that I could see that the punctuation structure of the poem matched the units I that had slowly emerged in my examination of binary oppositions.

Objectivity and Intersubjective Agreement

Consider this an addendum to yesterday’s:

Describing structured strings ofcharacters [literary form]

Let’s start with a passage from my open letter to Charlie Altieri [1]:

I am of the view that the rock-bottom basic requirement for knowledge is intersubjective agreement. Depending how that agreement is reached, it may not be a sufficient condition, but it is always necessary. Let’s bracket the general issue of just what kinds of intersubjective agreement constitute knowledge. I note however that the various practices gathered under the general rubric of science are modes of securing the intersubjective agreement needed to constitute knowledge.

As far as I know there is no one such thing as scientific method – on this I think Feyerabend has proven right. Science has various methods. The practices that most interest me at the moment were essential to Darwin: the description and classification of flora and fauna. Reaching agreement on such matters was not a matter of hypothesis and falsification in Popper’s sense. It was a matter of observing agreement between descriptions and drawings, on the one hand, and specimens (examples of flora and fauna collected for museums, conservatories, and zoos) and of creatures in the wild.

John Wilkins calls that a process of “experienced observation” [2].

Now I want to add Searle on objectivity and subjectivity with respect to ontology and epistemology [3]. Here’s where I’m going: Reaching intersubjective agreement is obviously and epistemological matter. But, and this is where things get tricky, it is possible to reach intersubjective agreement about phenomena that are ontologically subjective and as well ontologically objective. The so-called hard sciences (physics, chemistry, astronomy, perhaps biology, and others) are about matters that are ontologically objective in kind. They exist ‘out there’ in the world completely independent of human desires, perceptions, and thoughts. The human sciences, if you will, (most?) often deal with phenomena that are ontologically subjective but about which competent observers can reach substantial intersubjective agreement (aka objective knowledge). Turn it arount: we have intersubjective agreement (aka objective knowledge) about matters that are ontologically subjective.

Consider the case of color. We know that it is NOT a simple function of wavelength – there’s a substantial literature on this, google it [4]. It seems to me, however, once we start arguing whether or not color is subjective or objective, we’re in a different ballgame. Color depends on the perceiving system. In that sense it’s subject. And what of camera’s, whether analog or digital?

But I’m not really interested in color (oh geez! really? except when I’m a photographer, then I am). I’m interested in describing literary texts. And they take the physical form of strings. But those strings exist for human consciousness. They are meant to be read. The meaning of those strings is thus ontologically subjective, always. For the meaning exists (only) in the minds of subjects (human beings). But, depending on various things, it is possible to reach substantial intersubjective agreement on that meaning (see, for example, Attridge and Stratton, The Craft of Poetry, 2015).

My argument about form and description (e.g. in the post I referenced at the beginning of this one) is that if we focus our descriptive efforts on form, it should be possible to reach such a high degree of intersubjective agreement that we are entitled to think of literary form as ontologically objective. Where there is high intersubjective agreement about a phenomenon, we say that it is objectively real. That’s what experienced observation is about.

References

[1] Literary Studies from a Martian Point of View: An Open Letter to Charlie Altieri, New Savanna, blog post, accessed Sept. 29, 2017, http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2015/12/literary-studies-from-martian-point-of.html

[2] I discuss this in: Experienced observation (& another brief for description as the way forward in literary studies), New Savanna, blog post, accessed Sept. 29, 2017, http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/09/experienced-observation-another-brief.html

[3] John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, Penguin Books, 1995.

[4] And I’ve got a blog post or two, e.g. Color the Subject, New Savanna, accessed September 29, 2017, http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2016/07/color-subject.html

Photographing the Eclipse and the Problematics of Color [#Eclipse2017], New Savanna, accessed September 29, 2017, http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/08/photographing-eclipse-and-problematics.html

Describing structured strings of characters [literary form]

I recently argued that Jakobson’s poetic function can be regarded as a computational principle [1]. I want to elaborate on that a bit in the context of the introduction to Representation’s recent special issue on description:

Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best, Building a Better Description, Representations 135. Summer 2016. 1-21. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2016.135.1.1.

That article ends with six suggestions for building better descriptions. The last three have to do with objectivity. It is the sixth and last suggestion that interests me.

Rethink objectivity? 

Here’s how that suggestion begins (p. 13):

6. Finally, we might rethink objectivity itself. One way to build a better description is to accept the basic critique of objectivity as impossible and undesirable. In response, we might practice forms of description that embrace subjectivity, uncertainty, incompleteness, and partiality. But why not also try out different ways of thinking about objectivity? Responsible scholarship is often understood as respecting the distinction between a phenomenon and the critical methods used to understand it; the task of the critic is to transform the phenomenon under consideration into a distinct category of analysis, and to make it an occasion for transformative thought. Mimetic description, by contrast, values fidelity to the object; in the case of descriptions that aim for accuracy, objectivity would not be about crushing the object, or putting it in perspective, or playing god, but about honoring what you describe.

OK, but that’s rather abstract. What might this mean, concretely? They offer an example of bad description, though the fact that it is placed well after a blank line on the page (p. 14 if you must know) suggests that it’s meant to illustrate (some combination of) the six suggestions taken collectively rather than only the last.

Here’s the example (taken from one of the articles in the issue, pp. 14-15):

In her criticism of the objectivity imperative in audio description, Kleege explains that professional audio describers are instructed to avoid all personal interpretation and commentary. The premise is that if users are provided with an unbiased, unadorned description, they will be able to interpret and judge a film for themselves. Kleege writes, “In extreme instances, this imperative about absolute objectivity means that a character will be described as turning up the corners of her mouth rather than smiling.” For Kleege, reducing the familiar act of smiling to turning up the corners of one’s mouth is both absurd and condescending. The effort to produce an objective, literal account only leads to misunderstandings, awkwardness, and bathos. This zero-degree description is the paradoxical result of taking the critique of description, with its mistrust of interpretation and subjectivity, to one logical extreme. Tellingly, the professional audio describer’s “voice from nowhere” is not only weirdly particular; it also fails to be genuinely descriptive, since its “calm, controlled, but also cheerful” tone remains the same no matter what is being described.

OK, that makes sense. Let me suggest that smiles are objectively real phenomena and so we don’t need to rethink objectivity in order to accommodate this example.

To be sure, there are cases where one needs to know that smiling means “turning up the corners of her mouth”. If one is investigating the nature of smiles as communicative signals one might begin with that bit of description. But that itself is not enough to differentiate between spontaneous smiles and deliberate “fake” smiles – something that has been investigated I’m sure. In that contexts smiles cannot be taken at face value, as it were.

But that’s not the context we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with someone watching a film and describing what the actors are doing. We’re dealing with (images of) the natural context of smiling, human communication. Those configurations of facial features and gestures exist for other people and so it is appropriate, indeed it is necessary, that we frame our descriptions in terms commensurate phenomena under observation (“fidelity to the object”).

But what has that to do with describing literary texts? Texts, after all, are quite different from human beings interacting with one another.

Reply to a traditional critic about computational criticism: Or, It’s time to escape the prison-house of critical language [#DH]

A couple of weeks ago I posted “In search of a small world net: Computing an emblem in Heart of Darkness” [1], which was about a computational procedure for establishing that a phrase we can call the Emblem is ‘central’ to Conrad’s text. Here is the phrase, in one of two slightly different versions: My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my—. A colleague asked me, in the person of more traditional critic: If this were true, why would we need computation to prove it? That is, since I’ve already made an argument in more or less traditional terms, what’s the point of the computational exercise?

To a critic for whom such questions are real, I have no response.

But I am not such a critic.

To be sure, my degree is in English literature, from the State University of New York at Buffalo in ancient days of 1978. But my dissertation was, in a large degree, an exercise in knowledge representation of the sort then current in the cognitive sciences. By the time I had completed my degree I ‘spoke’ both literary criticism and cognitive science with native competence. As a literary critic I can read Heart of Darkness, spot Kurtz’s Emblem, note its ‘centrality’, and make a fairly standard kind of case for it. But for my cognitive science side, what does that mean, ‘central’ to the text? The standard critical argument doesn’t satisfy my curiosity. Thus I’ve suggested the small-world-net exercise to satisfy the cognitive scientist in me.

But that’s not a reason for a literary critic to pay attention to that kind of argument. From my point of view, such a critic suffers from a limited imagination, an imagination confined to the prison-house of discursive criticism [2].

The standard argumentation I’ve offered about the centrality of the Emblem ultimately rest on intuitions about texts and language. What does it mean to talk of the semantic center of Heart of Darkness, or any other text for that matter? What do we mean by center, anyhow? Certainly not the physical center of the book itself. We mean the center of, well, you know, the ‘meaning space’ of the text. And what is that?

The fact is for years critics have been using loose spatial imagery in talking about texts. Texts have insides and outsides, so that some things are in a text while others are not. The text is capable of hiding meaning. It also has a surface, and that surface can be read. Such a so-called surface reading is of course different from a close reading, which is certainly different from distant reading. Do texts also have semantic edges as well? What about a top and a bottom?

We’re so used to this imagery that we don’t notice that it’s pretty much built on nothing. These vague spatial terms constitute our rock-bottom understanding of texts, not as physical objects, but as mental objects. We’ve agreed on these terms and have arrived at ways of using them but, really, what are we saying? There’s very little there.

It may see strange to think of such language as the bars and walls of a conceptual prison, but that’s what it is. It limits how we allow ourselves to think about our craft. We defend this language, not because it’s perspicuous, but because it’s comfortable – and we’ve grown lazy and complacent.

I've you've of a mind, better pour yourself a drink. This is going take awhile.

Beyond the transcendental homunculus: What’s next for literary criticism?

What kind of a future does this standard spatialized literary criticism have? Forget about current institutional pressures for the moment. In purely intellectual terms, what’s the future of literary criticism? Where is there to go?

For years I’ve been reading that there’s been no substantial new development since Barbara Butler and queer theory. I’m not entirely sure that’s true. Does animal studies count? What about eco criticism? Is Tim Morton a major figure? He’s given the Wellek Lectures (2014); he’s touring the world giving speeches these days; Bjork has endorsed his work and I believe he’s completing a general audience book for Penguin. Sounds pretty major to me. And I think he’s brilliant. But – the future of literary criticism?

What tools does discursive criticism have for thinking about the mind? I submit that the most important tools are the texts themselves – a theme to which I’ll return – along with the critics’ ability to spot interesting patterns in the texts. But when it comes to explaining those patterns, what tools?

As far as I can tell, those tools various kinds of mental faculties operated by invisible homunculi. That’s what psychoanalytic psychology (in its various forms) is like–and, by the way, I actually like psychoanalytic ideas and use them in my work [3]. As far as I can tell that’s the most explicit ‘model’ on offer. Ideology? What’s that but a hegemonic mental faculty operated by an authoritarian homunculus, and a transcendental homunculus at that, though we try hard to pretend that these guys (they’re always guys) are immanent. I’m exaggerating of course, but in comparison with the work that’s been done in the cognitive a neurosciences over the past half-century, the psychologies of literary criticism are pretty ghostly.

No, I believe that what we (in my person as a literary critic) have to offer is the texts themselves, and the patterns we spot and describe in them. Consider these remarks by Tony Jackson [4, p. 202]:

That is, a literary interpretation, if we are allowed to distinguish it as a distinct kind of interpretation, joins in with the literariness of the text. Literary interpretation is a peculiar and, I would say, unique conjunction of argument and literature, analytic approach and art form being analyzed.

That’s obvious enough, isn’t it? An interpretation is coupled to the text, and draws its substance from the text. Certainly it draws its claim to authority from the canonical text, not from the critic, who is merely an academic.

Taken by alone, the conceptual apparatus we use in interpretation is thin. Perhaps that’s one of the problems of critique, the ratio of interpreting theory to object text has tipped too far toward theory, resulting in an intellectually thin and unsatisfying discourse. Is it any coincidence that this era of High Theory has also given rise to the star critic who is granted the authority of that same Theory?

Can academic literary criticism thrive and prosper under a regime where theory works hard to pry itself free of literary texts, rendering them mere examples for displays of critical brilliance?

Description

Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best, “Building a Better Description,” Representations 135, Summer 2016, pp. 1-21. In particular, p. 2:

We believe that description is a core, if unacknowledged, method in all scholarship and teaching. In order to proceed, interpretations, explanations, and prescriptions must give an account of—describe—what they interpret, explain, or evaluate. Description makes objects and phenomena available for analysis and synthesis, and is rarely as simple as its critics imply. An elusive object that travels by many names, and sometimes by no name at all, description’s dictionary definitions include representation, drawing, report, portrayal, and account. Description can take many forms, including lists, case studies, sequences, taxonomies, typologies, genealogies, and prevalence studies, and it involves many actions, including observing, measuring, comparing, particularizing, generalizing, and classifying, using words, images, and numbers.

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network Theory, Oxford UP, 2005, p. 136:

No scholar should find humiliating the task of description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement.

Is Description [FINALLY!] Coming of Age in Literary Criticism? [AT LONG FREAKIN’ LAST!]

Description, of course, has been kicking around for awhile. It’s part of a critical quartet articulated by Monroe Beardsley in the 1950s: description, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation. Stanley Fish took it to task in Is There a Text in This Class? where he castigates Steven Booth for asserting that he was but describing Shakespeare’s sonnets (p. 353):

The basic gesture, then, is to disavow interpretation in favor of simply presenting the text; but it is actually a gesture in which one set of interpretive principles is replaced by another that happens to claim for itself the virtue of not being an interpretation at all. The claim, however, is an impossible one since in order “simply to present” the text, one must at the very least describe it ... and description can occur only within a stipulative understanding of what there is to be described, an understanding that will produce the object of its attention.

And that’s where things have pretty much rested until recently.

In 2010 Heather Love published an essay that got a fair amount of buzz, Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn (New Literary History, 41, No. 2, 371-391). After citing Bruno Latour on the importance of description, Love takes a look at Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but NOT to describe features of Morrison’s text. Rather, she’s interested in Morrison’s use of description IN her text. If Latour describes the phenomena that interest him, why doesn't Love do the same? Why does she displace her descriptive desire into Morrison's text?

More recently Sharon Marcus discusses description, interpretation, explanation, and evaluation in the course of analyzing Auerbach’s method in Mimesis in Modern Language Quarterly. She notes (p. 298):

For the past several decades, the most celebrated literary critics have tended to value interpretation, connotation, and the figurative over description, denotation, and the literal, arguing that the latter set of terms names operations that are impossible to carry out. Literary critics often rally around the preferred terms by casting them as methodological underdogs in need of defense against an allegedly dominant empiricist positivism that no longer prevails even in the sciences.

She goes on to show the Auerbach makes frequent use of description while distinguishing it from interpretation (308) and to argue that we value Auerbach because of his use of description (309).

And now Marcus has conspired with Heather Love and Stephen Best to edit an issue of Representations (Summer 2016) devoted to description. What next?

representations

Summer 2016 • Number 135

SPECIAL ISSUE: Description Across Disciplines

Edited by Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best

SHARON MARCUS, HEATHER LOVE, AND STEPHEN BEST – 
Building a Better Description, page 1

LIZA JOHNSON – 

Observable Behavior 1–10, page 22

KATHLEEN STEWART
 – 
The Point of Precision, page 31

LORRAINE DASTON – 

Cloud Physiognomy, page 45

JOANNA STALNAKER – 
Description and 
the Nonhuman View of Nature, page 72


GEORGINA KLEEGE – Audio Description Described: Current Standards, Future Innovations, Larger Implications, page 89

CANNON SCHMITT – 
Interpret or Describe? page 102

JILL MORAWSKI – 

Description in the Psychological Sciences, page 119

MICHAEL FRIED – 
No Problem, page 140