Comparison of A.S. Byatt and Thomas Hardy’s conflict of society and individual, Pt. 1.

The Game.

The purpose of this essay is to compare the interpretation of Thomas Hardy’s novels that I have made in my 2024 blogs with interpretations of more recent novels, namely those of A.S. Byatt. Byatt’s style reflects Victorian prose with a contemporary sense of individual characters’ psychological transcendence of story. The importance of character, and the contemporary interpretation of characters from past times  (especially the emotional side of the Victorian era) renders the novel’s forward momentum more complex and more under the microscope than traditional formal views of structural writing.

For simplicity’s sake, I shall in this brief introduction to the Hardy/Byatt comparison examine Byatt’s early novel The Game. Byatt’s novel reflects the themes of individual in angst with society, and character involvement with both the intellectual and the emotional. I find these these themes have much in common with Milan Kundera’s exploration of The Art of the Novel (19  ). Kundera’s emphasis on the novel’s ability to convey multiple perspectives – a character’s need to confront an oppressive society coupled with his/her need to declare their own identity --  is echoed in Byatt’s multilayered narrative techniques. Lisa Steiby examines Kundera’s transformation of character determined by self versus society in “beyond Modernity” in Kundera and Modernity, especially Chapter 10, “The End of Modernity, the End of the Novel?” (207-226). Byatt frequently constructs her novels with shifting points of view, alternating between historical and contemporary perspectives, and between different characters’ inner lives. In The Game, the historical perspective is the created world of “the game” the sisters invented as children, a game that echoes themes from the Biblical Eden, themes or good and evil as well as lust and purity.

The Game concerns two sisters. Julia is a novelist who has married a robust figure of a fisherman named Thor. Incongruously, Julia is the deterministic one of the two, a cynical rationalist, while Thor exhibits total immersion in romantic emotionalism. In contrast to Julia is her sister Cassandra, enthralled with a scientist, Simon, whose examination of biology is totally rationalistic  while Cassandra, who, as a science lover, should be also that impersonal, cannot escape the angst of emotion that she felt in her youth, largely due to the psychological games she played with her sister.

My posts of 2024 interpreted Thomas Hardy’s novels The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure in terms postmodern ideas of reader approach theory, especially that reminiscent of Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” in which immediate feelings by the reader to the impact of the text become the important aspect of the reading experience. This reader’s impact confirms the “absence” of the author theory of Roland Barthes that influenced Sontag. Barthes writes, “There is supposed to be a mystique of the text. – On the contrary, the whole effort consists in materializing the pleasure of the text” (58). Thus, the author’s mystical purpose becomes secondary ot the reader’s immediate pleasure. Applying the sense of immediacy to the reading of classic deterministic novels such as Hardy’s makes the reader question the sense of fatalism that Hardy shows society has over the individual. For if the individual is the important thing about interpretation, then the individual and their role of self-determination, no matter how small and/or ineffective it may be, stand out as the important interpretation of the novel.

While Hardy, a 19th-century novelist and poet, is often associated with his tragic portrayals of rural life and the struggles of individuals against societal forces, A.S. Byatt, a contemporary novelist, engages with history, myth, and complex psychological portraits of characters. In The Game Byatt posits a man confronting a woman as a herpetologist with subliminal sexuality, a scientist specializing in snakes. The woman is one of two sisters who create the contrast in theme in The Game. The meeting between this first sister, Julia, and the herpetologist is virtual, her watching him on videotape. The meeting is nonetheless suggestive of an emotional Garden of Eden scenario wherein she is tempted by him as he holds his snake and bemoans the fact that the natural world does not cherish the snake but is repulsed by it. (13-15)

Byatt here chooses to write on Chastity, the decision to refrain from physical passion – she questions the ability of the individual to retain a purity of the spirit, “uninvaded and complete”?

“We shall do better…to think of chastity as purity, a scrupulous purity, and to associate it with innocence, if we are to apprehend at all the moral force either of Lancelot’s sin or of Galahad’s virtue…,” and “We shall do better if we think of ‘that which the maiden would never have again’ as an original innocence.”(16) 

Julia (on pages 13-15) is confronted with symbols of sexuality that she posits from a scientific situation (sexual only in a blatantly unemotional type of way) contrasted with another situation of rhapsody about Chastity (p. 16). This confrontation of the sexual and the chaste concerns much of Byatt’s writing about the human condition. The reading of sexual situations into science and the miasmic meanderings about whether or not to remain chaste in the emotional life provide a stark contrast in human life in Byatt’s presentation of it.

But the other sister, Cassandra, comes forward in the narrative. The serpent plays a significant role in both sisters’ worldviews. Cassandra revels in the poetry of the serpent, ascribing to it many layers of symbol. Cassandra revels in the words of a professor as he describes the snake: “They are worshipped in association with running water and with lightning. As a symbol—for the life, the life that drives us” (22).  Also, “The people here tell me that during the night the anaconda changes into a dark boat with white sails, and skims over the swamp….I don’t know whether the wings and sails turn the creature into a ship of death, or a more ambiguous symbol of some kind of release from the earth” (22).

In The Game, the reader views the Eden symbolism that obsesses the sisters, making them create complex relationships with their romantic and scientific partners. Society denies the sisters the openness in which to pursue this symbolism, so they do so in secret in the guise of a created “game.” Despite their different historical contexts, both Hardy and Byatt explore themes of fate, the tension between individual desire and societal constraints, and the complexities of human relationships.

__________

References

Barthe, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Richard Miller trans., Farrar, Straus, & Giroux., 1975.

Byatt, A.S. The Game. Random House, 1967.

Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. [1986] trans. by Linda Asher [1988], Harper, 2000.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” The Susan Sontag Reader edited by Elizabeth Hardwick, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984, pp. 95-104.

Steiby, Lisa. Kundera and Modernity. Purdue UP. ebook Academic Collection (EBSOhost), Comparative Cultural Studies, 2013. Accessed Feb. 2025.

 

Nicholas Harris

Blog. March 1, 2025.

 

Two Sue’s:  Hardy’s Sue Bridehead from Jude the Obscure in the Context of Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation”

 

Nick Harris, Nov. 22, 2024

 

            Hardy presents the character of Jude Fawley’s love interest Sue Bridehead in the novel Jude the Obscure as a young woman determined to live her life by her own emotional needs and not by constrictions put upon her by British Victorian society. The reader of Jude today cannot but wonder if we should view Sue’s character under the same rebellious conditions. Susan Sontag, in her essay “Against Interpretation” calls for such a reading of any aesthetic work, not by the terms of a restricted view of critical interpretation, but by the emotional impact of each moment the reader receives from the artistic work. If we view Sue’s character as an artistic work, then we may view her likewise “Against Interpretation” in the Sontag manner, especially since Sue’s character longs to live life “against” the restrictions thrust upon her by the judgements of the individuals in the society that surrounds her.

The reader can view Sue Bridehead as the expression of emotional pronouncement over societal pronouncement, over what society demands as proper and aesthetically pleasing. Sue’s attitude becomes synonymous with that of the rebel against aesthetic values, a rebel that Sontag proclaims to be. Sontag’s ideas are an outgrowth of the pragmatism of John Dewey. Dewey writes in Art and Experience:

 

Many a person who writes from a museum conception of art, still shares

the fallacy from which that conception springs.  For the popular notion comes

from a separation of art from the objects and scenes of ordinary experience that

many theorists and critics pride themselves upon holding and even elaborating.

                                                                                                p. 6

 

We may equate the “museum conception of art” with critical “interpretation” for Sontag uses this idea of “interpretation” as something for which she is “against.” The “scenes of ordinary experience,” then, we can equate with emotional and visceral reactions that the critics may eschew as unworthy of “interpretation.” But Sontag’s point is that these immediate reactions are the valid replacement for interpretation. For Sontag agrees with Dewey when she writes of “the sensual and vengeful barbarism that [is] engulfing our culture” (100, brackets mine). Sontag, however, elevates these cheap and vulgar recognitions of immediate emotions to a status of aesthetic validity. Here she likens herself to Thomas Hardy’s heroes. Sue Bridehead, the female hero of Jude likewise elevates the proclamation of her emotional life as valid, even though it may go against the values of what her society considers proper, may even go into the world of the vulgar and the barbaric.

            The reader is first introduced to Sue through a picture that Jude’s aunt owns. The aunt will not give him the picture of the girl “from the inimical branch of the family,” and thus Sue is immediately poised as a symbol of rebellion (Part Second, Chapter 1, par. 5 ). The hazy reality with which Jude views Sue through this picture makes Sue an example of what R.P. Dawson calls a characteristic attribute of the novel, a surreal or anti-realism (“Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy” 654). Because of the heightened extremes of the events in the novel, especially the brutal death of Jude and Sue’s children, Dawson writes “this almost deliberate antirealism” makes the novel a precursor to modernist surreal convention, or even the postmodernist movements of negating the surreal with purposeful confusions of narrative truths (such as in the novels of Fowles or Ackroyd). The reader should not be surprised that Sue, under the view of this lens, also brings a surrealistic quality to her rebellious nature, one that we can only understand by delving into Sue’s immediate motives in each of her circumstances.

            When Sue first meets Jude, for instance, her immediate attraction to him makes her instantly question her intentions, for she is debating, at this point, whether to take as valid the attentions of another, older suitor (Part Third, Chapter7). Sue eventually marries this older man, but when her impetuous nature of independence asserts that she asks her husband to let her go to Jude, he gives in to her request (Part Fourth, Chapter 3). She leaves to have a nonlegal union with Jude, one that produces children and, eventually, discontent and tragedy.

            Sontag, though not speaking specifically to Hardy, tells the reader to view each artistic action with an immediacy of affect. Sontag claims we must ally with Sue as she proclaims her immediate desires as her true reality. This sense of immediacy that Sue exhibits makes her a strong candidate for a Sontag model. Sontag writes, “The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have” (99).These words could be Sue Bridehead’s cry as she leaves her husband. He is a duplicate of reality, an enforced prescription put upon her by society. Her world must be one of more immediate sensation. So she goes to Jude, tragic as that situation is to become.

            Sue’s sense of immediacy defines her character. Her refusal to accept the norms of society as enforced duplicates of reality sends her into the real life with Jude that she craves. It is a life rife with disheartenment, but she experiences each tragedy as a subsequence of joy that she must feel with a desperate immediacy. This refusal of the real defines Sue’s surrealism. Eventually she is met with the immediate reality of the return of Jude’s wife. This ironic development, ironic because Sue genuinely likes Jude’s wife, causes her to go back to her own husband. Each instance of the progression of her life she feels with a desperate attempt to be a part of her real world. Sometimes this immersion is painful. But Sue always feels the passion of each moment of her life, and she acts according to her own sensations, not those of the “depleted, impoverished” world that Sontag rails against.

 

 

 

References

 

Dawson, R.P. “Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy 1895” in Encyclopedia of the Novel, Volume 1, ed. by Paul Schellinger. Chicago: Fitzroy-Dearborn, 1998, pp. 654-655.

Dewey, John. Art and Experience. 3^rd ed. NY: Capricorn Books, 1938.

Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” The Susan Sontag Reader edited by Elizabeth Hardwick, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984, pp. 95-104.

 

 Hardy’s Sue Bridehead and the Irony of Natural Passion

Over the course of these blog posts, I have emphasized human relationships to the environment as shown through ideas of literature and literary criticism (including film criticism). In the case of my posts on Thomas Hardy, especially the novels The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure, I have attempted to show how the human individual relates to the natural world, especially in the realms of personal aspirations including both philosophical and physical/sexual goals and passionate expectations. The female protagonists of both novels show ambiguous and contradictory behaviors through their inherent relationship with the rural environments that define their early years and the urban environments to which they aspire. This essay examines the character of Sue Bridehead, the female protagonist of Jude the Obscure, Hardy’s last novel. Sue is a character the reader never sees in the natural environment. Still, she feels out of place and confrontational in the urban environment in which she has moved and meets and interacts with the male protagonist Jude.

Jude first knows Sue through a picture of her in his rural home, as she is his distant cousin. His mother, upon noticing his interest in the picture, warns him to stay away from her (JTO, Part 2. Ch 1. Par. 5). Sue’s intellect and independence have led her to ambivalent moralities of which the mother does not approve. Jude meets Sue only after his own marriage dissolves when his wife runs away to Australia, and he moves into the urban center of Christminster. There he finds she is entering what is to be an unhappy marriage and is struggling to break free of it; indeed, she finds herself as caught between personal aspirations and societal expectations as is Jude in his unfulfilled marriage (JTO Part 4, Ch 6).

Kate Winslet as Sue Bridehead in the 1996 film Jude, directed by Michael Winterbottom

 

Sue Bridehead is as much a proclamation of nature as Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native who literally breathes in tune with the natural environment around her, or of Hardy’s other heroine who works knee-deep in the mud or the hay, depending on the season, and thus proclaims herself as one with the earth, Tess of the D’Ubervilles. Sue Bridehead comes from rural beginnings, but soon marries into the urban life, though the marriage is abusive. She initially escapes the abuse of her marriage by investigating societal attempts by the female population to overcome oppression. When she meets Jude, she sees a similarly oppressed person, oppressed by a doleful marriage he cannot escape, as well as someone from a similar rural background come into the urban environment to find escape. Sue’s escape to a partnership with Jude is her affirmation of a life more natural than that which society would force upon her.

Sue betrays a preference for emotional connections over societal obligations. She holds a desire to break free from constraints, whether they be imposed by urban or rural human moralities. But the unconventionality of her position aligns her with the wildness of nature. Passion holds a natural element to it, and Sue wants this natural element to dominate over the rules imposed by human society. She admits this to her husband when she visits him on his sickbed (JTO Part 4, Ch 6). The reader sees Sue as a symbol of passion, whether this be a woman’s right to speak freely and passionately, including the right to vote, or her actions regarding the personal realms of the heart.

The couple’s relationship ultimately leads to disillusionment. This disillusionment is one of a series of tragic events, including the cunning return of Jude’s first wife and the death of Jude and Sue’s children, for Hardy shows the bleakest of worldviews in Jude. The reader understands the destructive impact of societal expectations in the face of the tragedies that a wild nature can throw upon the individual. Sue eventually returns to embrace societal norms by going back to her legal husband, disillusioned with the trajectory her relationship with Jude has brought to her. Her personal tragic irony is that she cannot escape the rigid demands of societal norms, no matter how much her passion dictates. Passion fades in the face of continued hard existence, and societal norms overwhelm Sue’s impulse for freedom.

The reader faces many contradictions in Sue Bridehead. By taking these contradictions and ironies in turn, the reader can understand Sue as a passionate thinker, determined not to conform to the societal norms that entrap her. But in the end, she cannot escape them, and she returns to her husband. Even this last ironic act betrays the suddenness of Sue’s decisions and the fatalistic outcomes that result from them.

 

Nick Harris

10/24/2024

Robinson Jeffers, Humanity and the Eagle

“We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.”

 

                                                 Robinson Jeffers “Carmel Point” 13-15

 

            Robinson Jeffers is a poet of the American Western wilderness. Of special interest to him are the craggy cliffs of Carmel in early twentieth-century California and the wild condors and other birds he often saw fly there. He coupled a celebration of the idea of wilderness with a thought-provoking indulgence in myth, tragic stories told in long narrative poems that contrasted to the shorter bullet-shots of his shorter poems, eight to one hundred or so lines of pinpointed sudden realizations. These poems hold an immediacy akin to Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” approach, one that heralds the reader’s priority in immediate visceral reactions over the more modernist concerns of long-range forms or universal notions of “greatness” in art. I will show through investigation of a short passage of one of my favorites of Jeffers’ poems, “The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream,” that direct, blood-boiling actions play a predominant part in overall interpretation, especially in the shorter poems such as those of Jeffers. I began by quoting from one such short poem, “Carmel Point,” a sonnet-like insight into human encroachment in the natural world (fifteen lines instead of fourteen, typical of Jeffers’ Whitmanesque sudden lengthening of poetic normalcies). By going into “The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream,” I will point out a more specific and direct instance of the theme of human versus the wild.

            When I was a child, Jeffers was taught as a counterpoint to Robert Frost with Frost’s comfortable, yet unsettling snowy New England forests replaced by the wild ocean coastlines of California. Jeffers dropped out of favor, partly because the inevitability of human encroachment in California makes his plea to the wild nature of existence inconsistent, that wild nature no longer a constant presence. Also, the Steinbeck idea of “Westering” that Jeffers coincided with became known as a mostly Caucasian construct, one that disregarded the diversity of how the human populations of the AmericanWest in fact arrived there. The Hispanic, African American, Asian, and the hundreds of groups of American indigenous peoples that roamed around the North American continent were not “Westering” so much as drifting in broad circles from all directions. But they all dealt with the natural boundary that was and is the ocean coastline. Jeffers celebrates that coastline and its predominant wildness, even in the face of astounding human interference.

 

 

Condor on the California Coast. Credit:  AP.

 

Turning now to the lines I wish to investigate more closely, here is the excerpt from “The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream” CW p. 185 lines 8 – 21.

 

“The nerves of men after they die dream dimly

And dwindle into their peace, they are not very passionate,

And what they had was mostly spent while they lived.

They are sieves for leading desire; they have many pleasures

And conversations, their dreams too are like that.

The unsocial birds are a greater race;

Gulf-eyed, and their blood burns. What heaped up to death,

The extension of one storm-dark wing filling its world,

Was more than the soft garment that fell. Something had flown away. Oh, cage-hoarded desire,

Like the blade of a breaking wave reaped by the wind, or flame-rising from fire, or cloud-coiled

 lightning,

Suddenly unfurled in the cave of heaven; I am stationed, and cold at heart, incapable of

  burning,

My blood like standing sea-water lapped in a stone pool, my desire-to the rock, how can I speak

                                                                                                                                      of you?

Mine will go down to the deep rock.”

 

The seven lines before these act as a prologue to the remainder of the poem. Notice how, after line twelve, the focus of the speaker turns from the nature of human dreams to the eagle. The remaining lines, and sixty-four more after these, continue the intense death-dream of the eagle. The remainder of the poem describes in beautiful, majestic, and harsh detail the passionate dreams of the dying eagle. The lines I have quoted show Jeffers’ theme, that humans have no concept of the passion of wild things, the living eagle dying, and, by extension, the ever-continuing passion of the “cold-eyed” wilderness itself.

            My thinking is that the immediacy of Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” approach proves itself in these lines. Even without thinking of the larger form, most of the poem’s beauty lies in the dying eagle’s death dream. The blatant exposition of the first seven lines tells of two humans who quickly shoot a caged eagle. Jeffers names the humans, and thus the reader identifies with them, but Jeffers then abandons them in favor of the eagle. The reader takes on the responsibility of the wild animal’s dream by comparing its possibilities to her/his own. Jeffers’ comparison claims that no human can know the passion experienced by the wild thing. This immediate visceral claim is akin to the reader’s own bullet, shot into her/his reason through the violent act of killing the eagle. Jeffers directs his claim solely to these lines, ending with the bleak phrase “Mine will go down to the deep rock.” The “Mine” refers to desire, the limited desires of humans (the “dreams” of lines eight through twelve) in comparison to the long-reaching desire of nature, with nature fated to prevail. Though nature, represented by the dying eagle’s dream, will be celebrated in the remainder of the poem, the reader takes this moment, this immediacy to confront the hard-hitting theme that the idea of wilderness contains within it the short-sighted brevity of human interference.

            These descriptions are violent, a violence that Jeffers celebrates as inevitable when humans confront nature. According to Robert Zaller’s The Cliffs of Solitude:  A Reading of Robinson Jeffers, the confrontation of human violence and fated natural violence is predominant in Jeffers: “extremes of violation (violence) were both a means and an effect of Jeffers’ quest for psychic autonomy and poetic form” (68). Humans, in “The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream,” long for psychic autonomy, but only the Eagle can comprehend such a visionary experience. Jeffers’ poetic form, then, is also an attempt towards a natural perfection that humans can only partly realize. The natural world holds this poetry as well as the connection to something supernatural. Humans writhe in their meager attempts to achieve both a natural and a supernatural connection. The eagle succeeds.

            The reader can view the remainder of the poem as a series of immediate moments also, though explaining them as such is not my purpose in this essay. I only mean to show that Jeffers, a modernist in league with the Western mythos of Steinbeck and the formal concerns of poets such as American modernists like Robert Frost, also proves to be an exemplar of Sontag’s early postmodernist position. Indeed, a reader or viewer can apply Sontag to most anything, but with Jeffers, the process works wonderfully to open up a poem such as “The Caged Eagle’s Death Dream” to other, even more blood-curdling interpretations, or, rather, “against interpretations.” Jeffers interprets the natural world and its connection to the supernatural through violence erupting in sudden, impactful moments. The sudden impact is the only gateway the mere human readers of his poems can fathom both natural and poetic forms.

 

Nick Harris 

blog post 10.16.2024

 

References

Jeffers, Robinson. The Selected Poetry of Robertson Jeffers. Random House, 1938.

Oelschlager, Max, “The Idea of Wilderness in the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers and Gary Snyder,” The Idea of Wilderness, Yale University Press, 1991, 243-280.

Sontag, Susan.  “Against Interpretation” in Against Interpretation & Other Essays. Farrar,            Strauss & Giroux, 1963, 3-14.

Zallar, Robert. The Cliffs of Solitude:  A Reading of Robinson Jeffers. Cambridge University Press, 1983.

 Nick Harris

10/10/2024

A Century of Cinema Revisited

            According to Philip Lopate’s Notes on Sontag, Susan Sontag’s most successful work was possibly her early writings on film. She challenges film viewers and critics alike with the heralding of the French New Wave of the 1950s and 60s, the campiness of slapstick, and an inherent sense of feminine ownership. Her later essay (1995) “A Century of Cinema” encapsulates her views by centering on a few important films to her theory of what film could be to contemporary culture. These films include, though not in a major fashion, Antonioni’s L’Avventura from 1960 which I have commented on in my early blogs in this venue. I am always quick to point out the influence of Sontag to my thinking in terms of ethics applied to art, whatever the medium. This was especially true in my comments on L’Avventura, wherein I spoke of image as symbol creating a visceral reaction from the viewer. These blood-churning reactions to images as they reflected on large screens in dark halls enhanced Sontag’s view of film criticism, making her aesthetic one both of popular shouts and whistles and of critical mind-bending philosophies.

Sontag writes seriously of cinema and its loss of meaning to contemporary movie-goers.  She attacks the concept that cinema-as-art and cinema-as-entertainment should be separate considerations as they are in the contemporary world (“A Century of Cinema” 1090). What she terms “Cinephilia,” or love of film as artistic beauty, is not a part of most contemporary movie-going experience because movie viewers of today do not agree with the basic tenet of film-as-beauty.  “For by the very range and eclecticism of its passions, cinephilia cannot help but sponsor the idea of the film as, first of all, a poetic object”  (1096).  Sontag is seriously investigating the meaning of film viewing; if the “movie viewers of today” were to do the same thing, Sontag’s position most likely would be their reluctance to go any further than film as metaphor or catch-phrases such as “This film stands for freedom.”

The irony of her attitude is that Sontag is a herald of postmodernism.  The film movements she mentions prominently in her essay include those of the mid 1950s wherein the  financial accreditations of Hollywood were aschewed by a new wave of Italian and French diretors. The social films of Italians such as Bertolucci and Rossellini and the French New Wave films of Godard and Trufaut and, an especial favorite of Sontag’s, Brossard. These were stark black-and-white films made on small budgets using crude plots, often from dime novels, to show a reality that Hollywood had been running away from for decades and which was running the studio system of Hollywood into oblivion (see “A Century of Cinema” 1094). But Sontag saw these films as heralds of an era. It was the 1950s European experiments with surreal narrative and complex realism that created an atmosphere wherein “going to movies, thinking about movies, talking about movies became a passion of university students and other young people” (1094). Experimental forms with narrative were a herald of modernism, but in these films, that modernism began to take on a new perspective, one which turned against the commonplace Hollywood cinema and its obsession with “greatness” and more toward the gritty yet surreal lives of everyday people caught in harsh situations that defied the faux-worlds of Hollywood.

Her seminal work “Against Interpretation” argues that traditional modernist views miss the point of artistry by concentrating on obscure concepts of content and not celebrating visceral reactions to form (3-4).  Even in this early work Sontag relies heavily on cinema.  Making her point in respect to the filmmaker Alain Resnais, she says, “But the temptation to interpret Marienbad (Last Year at Merienbad, 1963) should be revisited.  What matters in Marienbad is the pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy of some of its images, and its rigorous if narrow solutions to certain problems of cinematic form” (9).  Hers is a serious postmodernist viewpoint.

            In her 1963 innocence, Sontag became not so much an attacker of modernism as a foreteller of postmodernism (MacFarquar par. 6). Later in the Sixties she would interpret the films of Godard with phrases like “rapid turnover of styles and forms”, “daring efforts at hybridization”, “insouciant mixtures of tonalities, themes and narrative methods” (Sontag, 1968 236).  With these words Sontag could have been defining her own brand of postmodernism.  In “A Century of Cinema” she explores the history of film and film’s beauty by such a mixture of tonality, theme and narrative, and thus confirms the characteristic postmodernism of her writings.

            Sontag’s viewpoint of the moviegoer, therefore, is not one of condescension, as her attitude might suggest, but rather a call to action of the power of the viewer.  In “A Century of Cinema,” the reader discovers a message on film aesthetic that speaks to the casual viewer.  True art is not dependent on any relationship with a cheesy metaphor but comes about through an independent process based on the comfort of one’s own attitudes. 

            Critics such as Larissa McFarquar describe Sontag as peculiarly ambivalent, loving pop culture, but for loftier philosophical reasons (MacFarquar par 4).  Even in “A Century of Cinema” she presents a quick overview of a popular idiom but does so by calling forth its most esoteric elements, foreign to the pop culture of many contemporaries, including her readers. But she seriously investigates the love of film and defining a film aesthetic that reflects a societal aesthetic.  Her postmodernism encompasses the range of pop culture and complex aesthetic philosophy. Film is a pop phenomenon and a serious means toward poetic statement, and this is not, as McFarquar would have it, a negative criticism.

 

References.

Lopate, Phillip. Notes on Sontag. Princeton University Press, 2009.

MacFarquar, Larissa. “Premature Postmodern” Nation Oct. 16, 1995 261:12 432-36.  review of   Liam Kennedy Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion.  retrieved on 12/03/07              http://galenet.galegroup.com.proxy.tui.edu/servlet/GLD/hits?r=d&origSearch=true&o=D            ataType&n=10&l=d&c=2&locID=vol_m761j&secondary=false&u=CA&u=CLC&u=DL            B&t=KW&s=1&NA=Sontag&TX=postmodernism  

McGowan, Jack. “Postmodernism” in Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism       Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins Press 1994. 

Sontag, Susan.  “Against Interpretation” in Against Interpretation & Other Essays NY: Farrarr,    Strauss & Giroux 1963 3-14.

                        “A Century of Cinema” in Norton Reader Peterson and Brereton, eds. 11^th edition             NY: Norton 2004 1090-1096 (Originally written for the German newspaper Frankfurter           Rundschau in 1995.)    

                         

 

 

Peter Singer’s Popular Ethics

Nick Harris, 9/16/24

Peter Singer’s Ethics in the Real World (Updated edition Princeton 2023) presents a popularist view of serious matters of ethics. According to Singer, the idea that moral judgments carry objective truth became unpopular in philosophical inquiry in the 1930s (8). From this position, Singer starts with this thesis of “logical positivism,” a discipline that arose to declare that the truth of moral judgments is something no one can prove in a logical manner. By starting with logical positivism, Singer can move forward to tackle personal views of ethics as valid sentiments and view how we can ward off illogical as well as nonsensical ethical relativism.

In the world of logical positivism, moral judgments are nothing more than personal attitudes defined by faith or emotions. We can set up faith and emotions as two separate lines of inquiry. The faith argument comes from religion and the individuals therein who view humanity as existing under the laws of God (or without the laws of God) as long as the viewpoint coincides with the faith. Others, and the ones that Singer tries to explain, see moral judgments as expressions of personal attitude. This view plays out in two ways:  either a moral judgment explains the avoidance of agony, or a moral judgment reflects a personal desire. In the former morality, evil is defined as the willful subjugation of physical pain upon another individual. In the latter morality, good results from whatever the individual desires.

The trouble with this two-fold system is that neither view truly considers the good that an individual should try to do to others, if at all. Singer addresses the avoidance of agony, either giving it or receiving it, through the work of Derek Parfit (Reasons and Persons, 2017, as applied in Singer, “Introduction,” xi). Singer’s view of Parfit is that “to live ethically, all one needs to do is obey the generally accepted rules that begin with ‘You must not” (xi). Perhaps Singer’s Australian background puts him in the position of sparking the individual’s sense of accomplishment. His position connects the individual intrinsically to an aesthetic experience, a fulfillment of desire caused simply by putting oneself in a natural environment (what I think of as an Australian norm) and observing what happiness and awe can come of it (373).

Singer’s theses of good and evil touch in most every instance with aesthetic theory, hence why I am interested in it as applicable to literature and postmodernist inquiry. But Singer’s aesthetics is not a lofty pursuit. He grounds ethics and aesthetics in real-world experiences such as the consciousness of animals, the nature of human life and death, and the nature of political rights of the individual to vote, participate in activism, or even simply be a citizen of a political unity. The value judgments of art versus human health bring with them the very headaches in which Singer loves to indulge (the question of monetary donations for instance as explored on p. 201-202).

Perhaps these practical questions interfere with aesthetic readings such as the Hardy novel Jude the Obscure to which I consistently refer in these essays. But I argue that keeping the practical question of Singer in mind creates new vistas while immersing oneself in the tragedy of a man of nature condemned to forever seek out the wonders of the industrial age and the resultant life of the mind therein. Jude goes further and further away from his agricultural beginnings as he seeks the supposed comfort of a life of philosophical inquiry, only then to be confronted with the realities of a hard life of the search for sexual fulfillment coupled with gender inequality and the class system inequality that destroys him. All his lives—mental, physical, sexual, emotional—share an impact that makes Jude question the very inevitability of suffering. The artwork imparts this aesthetic to the reader through the formal and emotional quality of the literature. Singer’s popular ethics reminds us of this hard, naturalistic ethic present in the artistry of Hardy. The art intertwines itself with the reality, inescapable.

 Abjection and Jude

Nick Harris

25 July 2024

Abjection and Jude

Kristeva's theory of abjection outlined in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), examines the human psychological reaction to what is considered impure, disgusting, or taboo. Of special interest in this examination is the role of the 'other' in societal constructs. She asks when “the other” exhibits traits which repulse the individual, traits that make “The other” horrific.

            Kristeva’s concern with application to literature becomes prominent from the beginning of her forming the theory of abjection. Most of Powers of Horror is an application of this idea of abjection to the literary works of Celine. This off-the-wall abstraction of connecting two ideas in a somewhat stream-of-consciousness fashion reflects what L. Kleinman calls Kristeva’s want to “swim through life”:

Kristeva describes herself…as “swimming through life,” that is, not having a plan or direction. This way both of living and of being an intellectual well describes the trajectory of  her life and thought. Par. 7

The literary application of abjection is justified in Kristeva’s defense of her position of swimming without direction. Abjection, dealing with the concept of horror, can be especially instructive in application to gothic literature. But other literatures (such as the novels of Celine which Kristeva approaches) benefit from the abjection lens also. Finding traits in “the other” that make an individual disgusted speaks to how that individual is expressing value judgments, for disgust is a value judgment. Abjection can help define an individual’s concept of bad versus good and, by extension, evil versus honorable.

            My application of Kristeva’s abjection allies it with Nussbaum’s ethics of literature. Thus, when I approach the literature of Thomas Hardy, whether the gothic short story “The Withered Arm” or amore traditional naturalistic novel such as Jude the Obscure, I do so from the point of view of how the characters are influenced by what they think of as disgusting, Jude’s opinion of his wife’s leaving him, for instance. This abjection influences that character’s sense of right and wrong, allowing him to eventually go into a relationship with a woman who is not his wife, who is indeed married to another man whom she has left due to his abuse of her, the suffragette (and Jude’s cousin) Sue Bridehead.

            The second major division of Hardy’s novel concerns the development of this relationship and its consequences to Jude’s goals. When he married, Jude had given up his goals of intellectual freedom, symbolized by the possibility of studying philosophy at the university in Christchruch, Finding himself set free of that marriage, at least in terms of his having to tend to it if not the legal marriage itself, he can pursue the goals once again. But his abjection to the notion of marriage creates the situation where he now finds himself having to support Sue, thus giving up his intellectual goals once again. Jude’s decisions based on an abjection caused by circumstances not of his doing (the leaving of the wife) lead him into a fated situation that will not let him succeed.

            This situation is only the beginning of Jude’s tragedies. But as the beginning, brought on by an ethical abjection, the reasoning to cling to Sue, despite society’s disapproval of married individuals living with each other outside of the legal marriage, is the bedrock of Jude’s tragedies. He is searching for an ethical thing to do that affords him the acquiring of his goals, which includes a life with Sue. He cannot, however, find anything but heartache on his path. He becomes disgusted at his own life, an abjection that overwhelms him.

_______

Kleinerman, L. (2022). Julia Kristeva: Perspectives on Her Life and Work. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 70(4), 763-774.  https://doi.org/10.1177/00030651221119062

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982.