Overview of Semiotics So Far.

The purpose of my blog is to outline the progress of my work in semiotics throughout the various disciplines I have studied. 

The first entry spoke to my introduction to semiotics when working with music theory at the University of Iowa in the 1980s. My advisor at that time was W.T. Atcherson who let me progress toward my own goals unimpeded by too many distractions. The one anchor I held onto was the study of the History of Music Theory, including a review of techniques employed at that time. These techniques proved to be wide-ranged. Allying semiotics to those contemporary theoretical techniques sometimes appeared nebulous at best. 

I think the one thread that bound my study of semiotics to music theory was the writings of Umberto Eco who had written a textbook on the subject of Semiotics. Eco lauded music theory as the agent of semiotics in the aesthetic world, for indeed what is taught as basic music theory portrays an interplay of one event signaling the next event in a progression that holds certain agreed-upon standards. In standard Western music theory since the 18th century, the IV chord has certain accepted options of progression before a landing on the V chord which then has certain options before "completion" to the I chord (the tonic), etc.

Eco finds standard music theory a validation of his emphasis on semiotics, but the music theorist can turn that idea around. Semiotics can provide a new type of analysis for musics that do not adhere to the standard Western tradition. I used this type of thinking and tried to apply it in a practical analysis of a collection of non-Western music. Thus I entered the world of semiotics.

My second step in the academic process of applying semiotics came when returning to academia to pursue English literature. My theory and methodology included healthy doses of postmodernist theory from the 1960s, especially that of the French semiotician Roland Barthes and his American champion Susan Sontag. In true counterculture style, they turned away from what they considered a repressive Modernist style of analysis of literature emphasizing "greatness" of literature according to the implements of "structure." Instead, they heralded an immediacy of moment wherein the commonplace was viewed as having as much value as anything considered theretofore as "great." 

I employed this in my study of Henry James' work in the attempt to show an immediacy of gothic tropes within works that may not at first be considered gothic. But if we view such works of literature in terms of an immediacy of moment which has a recall to gothic tropes, then gothicism must enter the analytic picture.

Finally, I use the semiotic analysis of literature as a stepping stone to an investigation of the complex process of defining the need for literature, and all humanities, as an ethical process within a holistic human society. This need for an "ethics of literature" becomes complex because the idea can so easily be misused. Proponents of book banning, for instance, can ally themselves with their own ethical base. The result is a type of censorship, something for which I stand against. I stand for what the philosopher whom I most follow on the ethics of literature trail  calls for in the subtitle of one of her books, Martha C. Nussbaum's Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.

I define the ethics of literature in this way because I believe that "democracy needs the humanities." Individuals in a democracy need to be employed in the investigation of the humanities, especially literature, the written expression of the humanities. Taking the cue from Nussbaum, such an ethics of literature means studying the emotions which literature arouses as a link to the ethics behind these emotions. Nussbaum, an Aristotle scholar, advocates for the alliance of emotions with ethics, as both are human value judgements. Thus, the science of "ethics and literature" bleeds over into the area of affections and literature, and an affect theory of objectivity -- how does the object that is an individual's body become affected by aesthetics and ethic . 

The entrance of "objects" into the conversation again harkens back to semiotics, signs and symbols as objects and representative of objects. The interplay of sign, aesthetics, ethics, and object is academic in tone. Yet only by studying this interplay can we become effective in our search for why literature plays such a large part in our ethics. Aesthetically, we can replace literature with visual art, music, drama, film, etc. But a basic core of literature readers should define how society perceives itself, both individualistically and as a whole. The presence of a prolific literature, and a prolific percentage of the population that appreciates literature, can help define the ethics of the individual as well as the umbrella of culture which defines the society.

 The Signs and Symbols of Hud.

Patricia Neal in Hud, 1963.

        My mother knew the Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal when they were children, though not well and only for brief periods of time. They both were born in coal mining towns in Whitley County Ky in the early 1920s. Neal was born in the small hamlet of Packard, a town which does not exist anymore, dried up with the Depression years. Neal moved to Knoxville, TN early in life, but visited relatives in KY every summer. My mother was born in the railroad town of Corbin. My mother's relatives were scattered through Whitley County in places like Rockholds and Redbird and Jellico Creek. The Whitley County families would, during the Depression years, collect together in these various places for two reasons, so that the children could help out with the summer farming for two weeks in each locale, and for the accompanying revivals hosted by the local Baptist churches. Here is where my mother knew Patsy Neal. Everyone knew Patsy Neal. My mother says that every time Patsy entered a room, even the chaotic slain-in-the-spirit country revival services, all the attention shifted to her, she was that charismatic. No one was surprised when she became a movie star.

    Neal portrays her rise through New York and Hollywood as an up-and-down rollercoaster of fame and scandal in her 1988 autobiography As I Am. After a more or less fallow period of movie-making in the late 1950s, she admits to the wonderful opportunity she had when offered the role of Alma, the housekeeper on the ranch in the film Hud, an adaptation of a Larry McMurtry novel about the harsh conditions of keeping a cattle ranch alive in the age of modernism and its angry-young-man manifestations that threaten to disrupt the concept of family. The film is a bleak, widescreen black-and-white. The characters are often lost within the framework of a harsh, wide-open space background. Neal's all-knowing stares betray her knowledge of the conflicts of the men who inhabit the house, lost in their petty arguments over control and morality in the face of a larger-than-life landscape of a bleak time and place.

    Hud will always signify to me the connection of my mother, a schoolteacher in the poverty-stricken area of coal-mining towns in southeast Kentucky and the greater world of fame and notoriety that was Hollywood in the mid twentieth century. This adds to the McMurtry-esque themes of how post-war American modernism with its suburban values and puritanically ethical expectations become, inevitably, at odds with the rough character formed by humans as America becomes more and more gentrified and the "frontier" values turn into myths that hold little reality.

    The images of Hud are both cosmic and personal to me, as they can be to everyone. Perhaps the brief acquaintance my mother had with the Oscar-winning actress in their childhood adds a bucolic touch with which most people would not identify. But everyone can identify with the changing world that loses day by day some aspect of the overwhelming grandeur of the larger landscape. Hud becomes a symbol of this change, no matter which direction the change occurs. We can all feel the diminishing of the lost world, complete with both grandeur and loneliness. The loss of this world, signified by images such as those in Hud,  create a further loneliness all their own as we watch the individuals battle to hold on to their dignity in the face of overwhelming circumstances.

 

Sontag’s work on Barthes in my analysis of The Golden Bowl

My analysis of Henry James in a master’s thesis reflects the semiotic ideas of Susan Sontag mentioned in my last blog. Though I delve into different genres, music and literature, I attempt to keep the kernel of the semiotic idea consistent as much as possible. Sontag is a constant influence. In “Writing Itself” from 1981, she attributes her love of sign and symbol to the writings of Roland Barthes: “Teacher, man of letters, moralist, philosopher of culture, connoisseur of strong idea, protean autobiographer…of all the intellectual notables who have emerged sine World War II in France, Roland Barthes is the one whose work I am most certain will endure” (425).  I use Barthes heavily when analyzing the work of Henry James, as I did in an MA Thesis in Literature in 2009. The Barthes I incorporate into my analysis of The Golden Bowl shows Sontag’s words -- “the would-be science of signs and structures” and “the writer organizing…the theory of his own mind” (426). In my study of The Golden Bowl, signs and symbols work together with delving into psychological and cultural issues. The Golden Bowl is psychological in character with long interior monologues and obsessions over symbols such as the titular gold bowl forming the basis of each character’s actions.

The dual natures -- signs and psychology, symbols, and culture -- arise from the central figure of the novel, the bowl made from a single quartz and gilded with gold. The object could be of immense value except that it has a hidden flaw in its structure – the quartz has an almost imperceptible crack. This symbol reflects the very class structure of the wealthy Americans and Europeans in the novel, desperately trying to hold on to the values of wealthy individuals who have virtually nothing to do in a society that appears idyllic but is riddled with a basic flaw. The less wealthy classes figure hardly at all in the novel, yet they are always there because the flaw of the golden bowl hangs over everyone, that symbol of the flawed class system that allows the frivolous behavior of the rich while the world toils around them in an unseen, ignored cry for equality.

The Golden Bowl is a story that takes place in the parlor rooms of the wealthy. It uses frivolous romances between the four major characters to show the hidden ills of a flawed society. The characters spend much time thinking inside their own heads, none more so than the wealthy patriarch Adam Verver. He wants nothing more than to collect the riches of the world; therefore he, an American, has come to Europe in the early years of the twentieth century in the first place – to buy these objects and transport them to America for display in the grandest of museums. When his daughter Maggie gets the idea to induce Adam to marry her friend Charlotte, an American living off the charity of friends in Europe, Adam does so willingly, thinking of Charlotte as yet another one of his conquest of objects. Everything in the story turns to the objectivity with which the characters view the world. Even people, such as Charlotte, become objects in the eyes of the wealthy.

The odious quality of this objectivity accounts for the decadence of the society of wealth argued over between Americans and Europeans in 1900s Europe. The need for Europeans to grab on to the wealth of Americans becomes a much-used device in the class-conscious stories of the early parts of the decade, devices still used in contemporary renditions of this much-debated class system. Everything from Upstairs, Downstairs to Downton Abbey to the class-oriented murder mysteries of Agatha Christie and P.D. James, among other queens (and kings) of crime, uses the objectivity imposed by the wealthy on the “lower” classes as fodder for the abhorrent nature of objectifying others and the devastating consequences such objectivity can bring. Stories such as these use symbols of murder weapons, opulent parlors, and all the “Golden Bowls” with all their cracks to show how class consciousness has inevitable and deadly results.

Turning from the cozy murder mystery to the parlor dramas and satires of Henry James, my intentions in studying James in the first place were to show how he could not give up the attraction to gothic elements which he had so brought to its heights with the most classic of all Victorian ghost stories, The Turn of the Screw, even after he officially turned his attention away from the supernatural. The Golden Bowl shows how James could not give up the interior monologues that betray a psychological analysis, inherently Freudian, that permeate The Turn of the Screw and other James’s ghost stories. These psychological elements make the reader question whether the supernatural exists or is only a manifestation of a mind obsessed by desire. Though the ghosts of The Turn of the Screw are presented as real from the governess’ point of view, the reader questions her need to create these supernatural elements in order to give herself a means to impress her employer, so great is her attraction to him. This question of the reality of the supernatural as opposed to Freudian psychology forms the heart of James’ ghost stories.

My thesis is that this thematic opposition is there in James’ late parlor dramas also. Yet in these works, such as The Golden Bowl, the threat comes in the form of adultery, a symbol in and of itself of the decadence of the society that pretends to abhor it, but that allows it in apparent abundance. The plot of The Golden Bowl, such as it is, concerns the gossip of the parlor room whispers that would constantly charge Adam Verver’s wife, Charlotte,  as a possible adulteress. The same is true for Maggie’s husband, the Italian prince Amerigo, who has married into the Verver family for their fortune. The reader spends enough time with Charlotte and Amerigo to know that they secretly knew each other as lovers, unknown to Maggie, before Maggie introduced Charlotte to her father. The implication arises that Charlotte and Amerigo may be embarking upon a renewal of their former relationship. This threat of adultery looms over the plot of The Golden Bowl through various symbols that betray an abhorrent atmosphere: spooky cathedral spires, black clothing in foggy shadows, costume parties with Cleopatra regalia, a trip by the two without their spouses to a country house weekend of fun and games in the dark, and, perhaps most of all, the constant array of riches collected  by Adam and studied by Charlotte to the point of her leading tours through their opulent home.

Does adultery substitute for the supernatural? I would not go as far as that. But the atmosphere of oppression and gloom that adultery brings to the story reflects the uneasy atmosphere of abjectness that inhabits the gothic. In both instances, garish opulence casts a long shadow over the individuals involved causing a psychological uneasiness that leads to the point of nervous disruption and possible mental breakdown. This neurosis, symbolized by the supernatural in the gothic and the breakdown of gender values (marriage) in the parlor drama, becomes the most poignant symbol of all.

 

The MA thesis I refer to is Harris, Nicholas. “Gothic Elements in Henry James’ The Golden Bowl: A Postmodern Perspective” MA Thesis. Union Institute & University, 2009.

Comment by Sontag, Susan. “Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes.” A Susan Sontag Reader, ed. By Elizabeth Hardwick, Farrar, Straus, Giroux. 1982.

For symbol in Henry James, I would suggest Johnson, Lee McKay. Finding the Figure in the Carpet. Vision and Silence in the Works of Henry James. New York: Universe, Inc. 2006.

For objectification in The Golden Bowl, refer to Nussbaum, Martha C. “Objectification.” in Sex and Social Justice. Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 213-239.

 

 

A Note from Moser (and me) on Sontag’s “Art of Protest”

Susan Sontag’s “Art of Protest” (a moniker I am assigning to her themes) began as purely aesthetic, an attempt to understand the work of French symbolists that she studied in her brief time in Paris. She, like them, was attempting to speak to society through an examination of popularism and not through political protest. But the popularism was a protest all its own. Benjamen Moser, in his Pulitzer winning biography of Susan Sontag, makes note of the indifference to politics which the young writer Sontag displays in her 1950s and 1960s work (Moser 199). Sontag is more concerned with turning away from the modern. 

Moser uses T.S. Eliot’s modernism as the target of Sontag’s critique. The followers of Eliot saw their criticism as forming a “shield against the pollution tainting everything they held dear. The culture they defended was the culture that despised and rejected anything too easy, too popular, too in thrall to money and image and success” (225). To modernist sympathizers, Sontag works against the desired outcome of societal taste. “The idea that someone could write on science fiction films, or happenings, or a homosexual style known as ‘camp,’ and still wish to be taken seriously as an intellectual, was unsettling.”  Sontag attempted to bring the commonplace into the realm of artistry. Modernists had spent decades trying to divorce a concept of true artistry from the commonplace. “The elders saw their carefully drawn distinctions being carted off to the rubbish heap.” When Sontag works “Against Interpretation,” she is trying to point out the need to avoid the modernist distinctions. Modernists revel in the distinction. Herein lies the crux of Sontag’s protest, apolitical yet speaking to the deep-rooted culture of a society.

Sontag gives a battle cry to her protest, so I think “The Art of Protest” is a correct generalization of her work. In her essay “Against Interpretation,” say writes, “The world, our world, is depleted enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have” (99). This is one of my favorite quotes from Sontag. I use it often when analyzing any work of communication, be it literature, film, or public speeches. This quote is an attack on the modernist principle of interpreting art through a strict structuralism, something which was commonly taught in the 1960s when “Against Interpretation” was written (and, indeed, is still taught in many schools as the proper method of interpretation). Sontag calls for a more relevant means of interpretation, an anti-interpretation wherein the thing is not abstracted into forced structures but is appreciated for what it is to the observer in the immediate moment. Interpretation becomes a series of immediacies and visceral reactions.  Protest becomes the innate implement of cultural existence, of “what we have.”

 

Moser, Benjamin. Sontag: Her Life and Work.  Harper Collins, 2019.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” The Susan Sontag Reader edited by Elizabeth Hardwick, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984.