editorial: the knowledge contained in poems
My attention was caught by two recent comments in conversation: "She'll never have an orgasm" and "She's neurasthenic on the same scale as Vivienne Eliot" said on the same evening. Round the same time, I received a letter remarking, about another woman poet, "I have heard her former director of studies say things about her which make my hair stand on end. This in the name of loyalty to Y." (Y wishes to believe that N, made very unhappy by his loutish and hysterically cynical behaviour, was neurotic and so the failure is not his; this doxa is then adopted by his academic associates out of male solidarity.) Shortly before, in another context, the comment X has been behaving very strangely" (translation: she was treated very badly about a proposed reading and dared to react). I've never before realised how vacuous the ordinary exchanges of judgments about a woman's character are, what a low quality of information is being traded. She infuriates all the men around and gives rise to a whole library of fantasy. How is she also going to write personal poetry in the middle of all this?
If the intuitive reading of character is largely a mendacious process, this raises serious doubts, not only about my practice as a reviewer,
but about the whole process of reading texts which aren't like papers on engineering. Reading poetry is for me partly, even largely, reading of character, and the poetry I write is descriptive of character and asks the reader to piece details together in an overall schema using their ideas about behaviour. But how can these be epistemologically adequate processes when they're carried out by the same faculty, the same block of circuitry, that decides that Miss X is neurotic because she doesn't seem to be attracted by me?
This is an editorial about standing around in bars. It seems that there is always a majority of men in these bars; which doesn't prevent them from being the markets where poetic reputations are formed. I am filled with revulsion; we go there to exchange information, but that commodity is ordered by decisions based on a bad subjectivity. The attacks of feminists on matters of fact only uncover in poetics a much deeper problem of epistemological status: the possibility of representing other people accurately; a problem solved only in an aesthetic sense.
There is an element in gossip which is self-seeking, fantasized, and partial. The knowledge which the poet possesses seems to me to be largely of this kind. What's in doubt is that any character judgment gets beyond this plane. One experiences solidarity and revulsion. One experiences sexual and economic frustration. It would be nice if there were some cool area where body temperature would go down and one could reach an Apollonian evenness and optical indifference in judging people, poems, and situations. But I can't claim to occupy such a place. To these one could add literary frustration.
Four overlapping situations propose themselves: someone judging an essay, giving someone else a grade and so academic classification; someone, perhaps the same person, assessing someone else for a job; someone judging a poem; someone judging someone else in social life. This so capricious act of assessment is presumably where society meets literature; a sociologist would try to find links between these evaluations of a human being and the way a literary work presents human characters.
It is understandable that the human sciences have so obsessively tried, over the last thirty years, to acquire scientific status; regrettable that so far it is all carried out by imitation on the plane of verbal manners. A blind way out is supplied by the doctrines of Freud. The nineteenth century made great strides in anatomy, including comparative anatomy; it is true that an advance, such as was recently made, in the understanding of how the ankle provides thrust when stepping, applies to all ankles of all members of the species, a wonderful efficiency of investigation; the idea that the psyche has an anatomy, common to all humans, seems to be a mere imitation of physical medicine, a megalomaniac and therefore ludicrous attempt to acquire intellectual wealth. The brain is not so deterministic. The attachment of humanistic academics, ignorant of psychology and of logical method, to these ideas rejected by most psychologists, who do study logical method and do study medicine and psychology, seems like a trade in relics and miracles. There has, after all, to be some set of rules able to disqualify judgments as well as confirm them; the embracing of a fringe science, withdrawn from institutional examination and criticism, points us towards the circular authentication of the whole industry. Academics are validated by other academics, in the bar or in the office. Appropriating sonorous and irrational fringe sciences reduces people's competence to judge by increasing their self-confidence.
The smooth elevation of one's intuitions into objective knowledge, by the use of allegedly scientific terminology, is like the acquisition of institutional power. The teacher can fail the student for arguing badly, but not vice versa. In a relationship, this corresponds to believing that you are always right and that the other person is weak and emotional. The precondition of one's wishes becoming reality, losing subjective status, is possession of social power. Bar opinion attacks the weak because it is easy to do so; unable to acquire allies because one is labelled "neurotic" or "quarrelsome", one becomes weaker. The words of someone whose value is low become insignificant. The emerging pattern is simultaneously socioeconomic, linguistic, and psychological.
Page(s) 90-91
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