the ramble dump

As a sort of a continuation of this post, which was about the worth of stories beyond entertainment, and possibly linked to this post, which discusses what might and might not count as 'art', I was thinking about the complexity of some stories, with all the metaphors, inferences and allusions that they can be filled with. My main question, as I was reading all about this kind of thing in the introduction to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway for the lecture and seminar next week, was: to what end?

Returning to all the talk in that first linked post of stories being able to suggest, the most obvious answer would probably be that all the figurative language and symbolic descriptions and motifs and so on can, obviously, be used beyond their simple function as poetic narrative to illustrate the kinds of things that a book or film or play is considering, using comparisons that may be effective enough to throw a new light or a different perspective on the subject matter.

Of course, there will always be some manipulation occurring here on the part of the author. This is why, for all the importance of receptivity and open-mindedness when it comes to art, the practice of literary criticism and the like can be a useful thing. The author is likely to be playing with the perceptions, preconceptions or ideas of the reader or audience to illicit a certain response -- this is one of the most powerful features of storytelling -- and it's up to the reader to be equally open-minded and rational enough to be able to identify where he or she might be the subject of this manipulation; and then to decide if the way in which the author is provoking this response might, as the author thinks it does, have something to it. As well as identifying manipulation, a critical approach can be used to mine the worth of a story. After consideration, you might feel that a certain comparison yields some truth; that the alternative perspective offered might just be of some value.

I've already mentioned my wariness of allegory. Allegory is the use of an extended metaphor to get a point across. But if I don't object to the potential philosophical value of figurative language in general, how can I object to allegory? What's the difference beyond levels of subtlety? Well, the extension of metaphor in this way, after representing something in a certain way as all metaphors do, then has the clear intention of drawing a conclusion from it for you. As Tolkien said in a passage I've already quoted, allegory is all about the 'purposed domination of the author' -- it sets out to make your mind up for you. The more subtle use of figurative language and symbology, as I've already said, is not without its potential for manipulation, but there's more freedom for the reader, more room for interpretation. The further you try to extend a metaphor, the less suggestive and the more controlling of the interpretation you're being, and it's much more likely that the comparison is then distorted or oversimplified as a result.

There are other ways in which inference can be abused. When I was thinking about Wilde's opinion of art, I mentioned pretentiousness. That could be applied here in the cases of those who will infer and allude and present empty motifs just for the sake of seeming clever. Poetic pretentiousness can often be found in the use of 'purple prose', by those who attempt to use over-elaborate and extremely flowery language to add prestige or suchlike to their work, and this can then be taken a step further by those who use similar methods to portray themselves as profound. When an author seems to think that the esotericism of a text is an indicator of how philosophically deep it is and rattles off some lengthy, convoluted metaphor supposedly, for example, penetrating the fundamental human condition (or something like that), we would have to question how someone could talk for so long out of their own arse.

Here's another form this pretence might take. For this next one, I'm going to use an example that could be argued either way. I seem to use these films as an example for a lot of things, but anyway: many have claimed that the Matrix films are very 'philosophical' in nature. The story is undoubtedly packed with a thousand inferences, references and allusions to all kinds of philosophers and different schools of philosophical thought in varying degrees of subtlety; but maybe all these things were dropped in merely to give the illusion that the films had philosophical depth (which would have been ironic, considering the subject of the films). Were the Wachowski Brothers trying too hard to make the films seem 'intelligent', or do the Matrix films really give us something to think about?

As fun a game as it might be for us to successfully identify all the various references and incorporated symbology in the films, and as clever as it might make the audience and the filmmakers feel, it may be an ultimately pointless activity. An argument often given in defence of the films is something along the lines of, 'You didn't enjoy the films because you haven't attempted to appreciate all the philosophy behind it', to which the retort is usually, 'You need to get out more.' It's hard to say how much genuine philosophy is involved in the Matrix films and how much is just there to give the impression of it (I'd say it seems a bit of both -- I think it illustrates a lot of philosophical ideas pretty well and gives us a lot to think about, but there are times when it feels like a bit of a symbological overload or philosophy for the look of it).

But in these films, and in many other films and books and so on, why require the audience or reader to have to look for these things? Why bury them so that they have to be dug out? This was already sort of answered by the allegory issue: this way, the 'answer' isn't being thrown at the audience. The fact that the readers of a book or the viewers of a film have to do more of the work invites them in and encourages them to think about it more for themselves. It encourages different interpretations and a more critical evaluation, meaning that, if it's there, the useful and relevant stuff can be properly discovered and appreciated. To use a Matrix analogy (which is, aptly, in itself a reference to something else), tumbling down the rabbit hole and having a thorough look around is surely preferable to having the rabbit come up and give you his potentially biased account.

Labels: allegory, cyberpunk, i am the ramblemaster, language, oscar wilde, philosophy, rabbit-hole theory, the matrix, tolkien

# posted by Chris @ 6:33 PM 0 comments

'Now I must tear my garments, scatter my armour and dash my head against these rocks, and perform other similar actions that will amaze you.'

Don Quixote, or, in full, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, is a novel of approximately 1,000 pages published by Miguel de Cervantes in two parts, the first in 1605 and the second in 1615. It charts the escapades and misadventures of, as the title says, the Spanish Hidalgo Don Quixote, who suffers from a strange sort of madness brought about by reading too many chivalry books. The deluded Don Quixote firmly believes that he is a knight errant and that the universe must work according to the laws of chivalry as he has read them, to the point that he imagines such things as a local farmgirl as a lady, princess and the subject of his affections despite never having seen her; an inn as a castle; and, most famously, the windmills of La Mancha as ferocious giants.

It's taken me about a month to read the first part. The book has followed me across Europe on my own adventures to London, Venice and Lake Garda. I finished it yesterday, and decided, because I had so much to say about it already, that today I'd write about what I've read so far.

Don Quixote begins as a simple, farcical parody of the chivalric romance genre that had been popular not long before the book was first published. It is episodic in format (like the books it parodies), chronicling various humorous encounters that Don Quixote and his squire, Sancho Panza, have as they venture out and in his deluded way Quixote mistakes things for things that they are not. Characters and events more true to reality are forever conflicting with the archetypes of his books, triggering predictable but entertaining conflicts which usually end in the knight and his squire getting beaten to within an inch of their lives.

Cervantes writes a bit like Shakespeare in the way that the language flourishes, befitting of Don Quixote's lengthy declarations of the convoluted specifics of knight-errantry, but also just as impressive when Cervantes is being less tongue-in-cheek. No doubt credit is due also to John Rutherford, whose translation I read. The sentences are always lengthy, especially in dialogue, but even when Don Quixote is talking complete rubbish it can be absurdly captivating, flowing like a strange but fascinating dream, and sometimes I found myself just as caught up in it as the often staggeringly simple and naïve Sancho, who goes along, though often reluctantly, with everything that his master does and says.

As much as I was enjoying it, I did begin to wonder if its episodic format could really last for 1,000 or even 500 pages. But Cervantes, probably realising the same thing, soon introduces fresh ways to poke fun. The first is through having multiple narrators, supposedly historians who are recounting Don Quixote's life. One sequence stops suddenly half-way through as the narrator claims to have reached the end of the written records available, only for it to be continued by another in the next part, who introduces it with his account of how he is someone who enjoyed reading about the adventures so far and was disappointed that they didn't continue, only to then come across further writings by chance while out shopping, which themselves are supposedly written by some Moorish historian, which he then got translated. The story then continues just as it had done, but with Cervantes now able to play with the potential unreliability and conflict that different narrators might result in.

In this way and others, Cervantes plays with the literary conventions themselves as much as playing with the characters. This occurs on many levels, from satirical sonnets in his direct parody of chivalric romance, to detailed reviews by characters of invidivual chivalric books (and later other things); to constant switching between different sidestories, arrived at through the accounts of the people they meet (sometimes hopping between different people for different perspectives) or manuscripts they find - all continually distracting from Don Quixote's adventures and giving the novel a meta sort of dimension. These sidestories are often surprisingly sober compared to Don Quixote's misadventures, and most of the time seem to follow very conventional chivalric or romantic themes, with probably all of them involving some incredibly beautiful and virtuous woman and the conflicts of the men who have fallen in love with her, to the point that the beautiful women start to feel very generic and the stories a bit ridiculous, which is possibly what Cervantes intended. While all these sidestories appear to be delivered in a straight-faced way, it all gets very farcical when, through amazing coincidence, about half a dozen of the stories and their characters converge at an inn and are brought to their happy conclusions, following which the attention of all the characters is then brought back to the madness of Don Quixote.

This occasional sobriety also emerges in speeches made by the characters themselves. Towards the end of Part I, the priest and the canon discuss Don Quixote's madness, which leads them on to their shared loathing of chivalry books, which itself then leads on to deep discussion of theatrical plays (the new popular thing during Cervantes' time), in which the priest describes why he dislikes such popular things because they are made for the ignorant masses at the expense of real, intelligent, thought-provoking art. The fact that the novel so suddenly veers off into this expansive, philosophical conjecturing is something tongue-in-cheek in itself because Cervantes must know he's being so blatant in using his characters to put forward these opinions (in the same way that he cheekily reviewed other chivalric books at the start). They're still thought-provoking moments, though, and in the discussion of theatre it seems as though Cervantes is trying to make a serious point, although it's not always as clear if it's Cervantes' own opinion or if he's just playing devil's advocate.

Probably the most surprisingly lucid comments of all came from Don Quixote himself. In Chapter XXXVIII, as part of another lengthy speech on chivalry, he had this to say:

'A blessing on those happy ages that did not know the dreadful fury of these devilish instruments of artillery, whose inventor is, I feel sure, being rewarded in hell for his diabolical creation, by which he made it possible for an infamous and cowardly hand to take away the life of a brave knight as, in the heat of the courage and resolution that fires and animates the gallant breast, a stray bullet appears, nobody knows how or from where - fired perhaps by some fellow who took fright at the flash of the fiendish contraption, and fled - and in an instant puts an end to the life and loves of one who deserved to live for many a long age. And when I think about this I am tempted to say that it grieves me to the depths of my soul that I ever took up this profession of knight-errantry in such a detestable age as this one in which we are living, because even though there is no danger that can strike fear into me I am concerned when I think that gunpowder and lead might deprive me of the opportunity to make myself famous all over the face of the earth and by the might of my arm and the blade of my sword. But let heaven do what it pleases, for I shall be more highly esteemed, if I accomplish my aim, for having exposed myself to dangers greater than were ever faced by knights errant of centuries past.'

Don Quixote is clearly still under some illusion about the worth of his chivalric acts, and likely misguided with his quest to make himself 'famous all over the face of the earth', but the slightly frightening thing is that after reading that, I suddenly sort of understood his madness. Most of us like to feel that things have some sort of meaning; that we as people have meaning and that we can stand for something, which is increasingly difficult the more impersonal the world feels. The chivalric, noble values and the kind of honour that Don Quixote believes in may well be ridiculous and empty, but so is a world where you and your actions mean nothing and where personal responsibility, dignity or character seem to count for far less, and as Don Quixote (or Cervantes) himself points out, there's a feeling of some injustice in the kind of world that Don Quixote regretted to live in. There's always the danger that we can place too much importance on, and become deluded by, the overly romantic notions or ideals of traditions or past ways of life; but at the same time that Don Quixote's ambitions sound ridiculous, I felt, in this instance, that there was something, if not noble¹, honourable², admirable or praiseworthy, then at least in some way understandable - or even, dare I say it, reasonable - about the fact that he is trying anyway.

Finally, despite starting out as a simple episodic parody written for popular consumption³, through the development of its characters and exploration of its themes, Don Quixote exists as a good example that what can start out as the subject of a few laughs can soon go much deeper than first imagined, and although it is not the most tightly written of novels and of considerable length, it has remained interesting and enjoyable throughout. I'll be reading Part II before long.

^{1 2}Both nobility and honour are themselves vague ideas and prone to romantic illusions of grandeur.

³ Interestingly enough, according to Oscar Wilde, this would prevent Don Quixote from counting as 'art', yet later on, the priest's discussion of popular theatre highlights some views of art that match very closely and specifically with Wilde's own.

Labels: don quixote, i am the ramblemaster, language, literature, oscar wilde, rabbit-hole theory, shakespeare

# posted by Chris @ 5:30 PM 0 comments

Last month I read Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and mentioned that I'd pick out one or two other interesting points of those that it raises. So here's another:

If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question. [...] A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.

Wilde's tone here, not surprising given the events of his own life, would seem to demonstrate a fair amount of scorn towards the attitudes of the general public. At a first read it might also come across as almost self-important, as no doubt Wilde viewed himself as one of these artists, with his dismissiveness of the idea of criticism. But Wilde makes a good point. In describing 'silly views' and 'foolish prejudices', he is not necessarily being dismissive of all the opinions a member of the public might have, but is identifying that such prejudices do exist.

This got me thinking about the way in which people do approach art: novels or films or paintings or whatever. To be 'receptive', do we have to accept absolutely anything as 'art'? Wilde never suggests that everything and anything can count as art, although for him it only seems to stop being art if it starts catering towards the wants of the population. Surely there's more to it than that, though. Is a person doing their own thing irrespective of the public, whatever it is, enough to qualify something as 'art'?

Wilde would seem to be referring to preconceptions and prejudices that might affect our appreciation of art that we have before we've even experienced it, which leaves it open whether or not he believes any kind of criticism can be applied to art (beyond for whom, or for what reasons, it was created) after the art has been experienced. He talks a lot about authority and how that has no place in matters relating to art, but what exactly does he mean by 'authority'? Does he mean that nobody can have an authoritative opinion on art, nobody can decide what counts or what doesn't, or just that any attempts to control art are unwanted?

We all approach things with our own ideas of what they should be, what it is that makes it good, and so on. For example, one might look with scorn upon the idea of techno or heavy metal as 'good music' because they define it in orchestral terms. One person might think that a good plot or realistic characters are important in a novel, whereas another might view the richness of the language itself as more important. I have a friend who gets set to rant every time Tolkien is even mentioned because it doesn't fulfill his own criteria of what makes a good story. An example Wilde uses is judging all literature by the standard of Shakespeare. We all appreciate different things. But that doesn't mean that other aspects of something, other qualities, aren't still there as something that can be appreciated by someone else. But what exactly counts as a 'quality'? This seems to depend on whether or not a person views a feature as something to appreciate. Is everything potentially something to appreciate?

Take, for example, a painting of a soup can. Or a steaming pile of shit. You might appreciate the simplicity, or maybe you could appreciate the irony of some kind of visual statement it's trying to make. In and of itself, it'd be hard to find a way to consider a pile of shit a work of art, but with context, maybe it could represent or show something else, and that would be its quality as art, whether everybody appreciates the statement made or not.

The point Wilde seems to be trying to make is that we should allow 'art' in all its forms, not seek to control it, not seek to define it in our own prejudiced terms. According to Wilde, it seems, everything is something to potentially appreciate, and what's where being receptive comes in. We should let art flourish, free from control through prejudices, so that we are enabling ourselves to truly recognise those things in art that ought to be appreciated.

But, of course, you can only appreciate something that's really there to appreciate. There's still some vagueness about what qualifies as something to artistically appreciate. How subjective is 'art' under Wilde's definition? Does objective quality come into it at all? Wilde's definition of what doesn't count as art is still hazy beyond his for-the-self/for-the-public distinction. What else might stop something being 'art'?

We might consider some so-called 'art' to be pretentious. If a supposed work of art is produced just to promote the artist's superficial image, for example, or if all the talk of irony or representation or whatever is really just about shocking the audience or being controversial in order to get a bit of attention, then maybe pretence is all that's there. While it isn't exactly catering to what the public wants, the art is still relying on the reaction of the public, in which case, according to Wilde, it ceases to be art.

So maybe, looking at it like that, Wilde's distinction is all that's needed in art's definition. Rather than including it in any kind of definition, however, maybe this distinction is put better simply in terms of avoiding anything that can affect our receptivity: for as long as we're attending to the public, more likely than not we're also attending to its prejudices and therefore restricting ourselves. Maybe art is mostly undefinable, or at least defining it is very difficult. There's a whole load of possible subjective and objective reasons for why a person might look at or experience a piece of art and find certain appreciable qualities in it. There's no reason why it has to be either-or. Maybe we shouldn't be trying to define it. The point Wilde is driving at with receptivity, and one that perhaps overrides all discussion of objectivity versus subjectivity, is that we need to be able to keep an open mind to truly appreciate anything.

The moment [the spectator] seeks to exercise authority he becomes the avowed enemy of Art and of himself. Art does not mind. It is he who suffers.

Labels: censorship, i am the ramblemaster, morality, oscar wilde, philosophy, shakespeare, tolkien

# posted by Chris @ 6:52 PM 0 comments

As part of some extra material I was been emailed by my philosophy teacher for the exam today, I read Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism. It's full of interesting stuff. I'll probably pick out some other bits some other time, but here's a big fat one to start off with:

...I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessary dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.

And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure which, and not labour, is the aim of man - or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of every one else. There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

To start with, I was surprised to read this just because it strikes me as a before-his-time kind of thing. The Victorians had made significant technological progress (at least so far as inventing the machines, even if, as he mentions, there were huge difficulties implementing the things), but this kind of stuff is the stuff of your modern-day science fiction. Presumably, if he's talking about abolishing human labour, he has to be talking about machines at the stage of automatons, because otherwise you'd still need humans to operate them.

What's really interesting, though, is the bit about the necessity of slaves. Somebody's got to do the work, after all. In all the accounts of moral philosophers that I've studied in any detail--namely Plato, Nietzsche and Aristotle--there's been a class of 'slaves'. They don't always mean it in the strict sense of labour; usually they mean it at least in part as those who are 'slaves' to their desires and instincts and who consequently can't live truly fulfilled lives or whatever. But Plato, at least, explicitly assigns them as the labouring class, and while I don't remember any specific mention of labour in the other accounts, I don't think that either Nietzsche nor Aristotle had menial tasks in mind for their nobles. It's something that, for me, has always sat uncomfortably. The idea of machines doing it instead is an interesting one.

Wilde has the romantic sort of notion that the future of the world depends on this mechanical slavery, because then in their 'delightful leisure' the freed humans will be able to excel and create wonderful things. But are we humans really so progressive? Maybe this view is too optimistic, and maybe most people will just eat themselves into grotesque and slovenly states. I don't think you need to go as far as Wilde does, though. You don't need to claim a utopia as the outcome. I think the important thing is that the choice is there and that people aren't condemned to the life of a machine. If you don't trust in the progressiveness of human nature, or want to give people the sense of responsibility or other moral benefits that come from work, then give everyone a good education to set them on the right path and then give them some work that's meaningful; something actually productive. This is, after all, about abolishing the kind of menial work that goes nowhere: not all work. We don't live in the same regimented class system that Wilde did, but the classes definitely haven't gone away, and if there are some in the middle-classes and above able to leisure their lives away, why shouldn't everyone have the same opportunity?

Anyway, these are just a few cogitations, and I don't know the ins and outs of the economy well enough to know the wider economic effects or just how radical a restructuring it would require, but it's an interesting thought. And something that's already happening in many ways. Maybe one day something like it will be possible.

As long as we don't make the machines too human, of course.

Labels: i am the ramblemaster, morality, oscar wilde, philosophy, science

# posted by Chris @ 11:39 PM 0 comments