Sontag on Barthes

            I often preface any semiotic analysis with a predisposition towards the writings of Roland Barthes as championed in 1960s America by Susan Sontag. My reasoning extends from Barthes’ turn away from a more academic structural approach in writings for popular magazines, writings collected in his collection Mythologies. In these short works, Barthes shows how a specific area of popular culture such as the world of pro-wrestling or the use of margarine in place of butter acts as a symbol for a more complicated underlying system of artistic or political thought. The cultural act becomes the symbol, though the act is embodied by a tangible thing. The tangibility of the thing is secondary to the cultural idea, and, therefore, symbology evolves into a more complicated science, that of semiotics.

Symbology does not lose its roots in poetry, even as Sontag evaluates Barthes. Sontag begins her essay on Barthes with an incipit from Wallace Stevens, “The best poetry will be rhetorical criticism” (from an essay of 1899 quoted on p. 425). She paves the way for aesthetics as an artistic value in and of itself, a statement which yields fruit when investigating the criticism on pop culture of Barthes. Not only will Barthes commentaries on pop subjects such as “The World of Wrestling” be a kind of artistry approaching poetry, but the subject matter of these critiques will evolve into a new way of viewing any work of art.

Sontag writes that Barthes will elevate above his usual labels of structuralist or semiotician (426). She goes on further to say that this elevation will occur most likely on account of his penchant for small forms, one which makes him an ideal writer to go to for aphorisms, or small bits of wisdom (427). The narrowing down of attention to essay forms, aphorisms, and moments of instant glory which come and pass quickly, lend his work to develop into her own work on immediacy in “Against Interpretation” (1966).

Sontag’s is a turn away from the constraints of modernist structuralism, especially the constrictions of the New Criticism which permeated literature education in the 1960’s. This is Sontag’s form of radical anti-establishment. Her ideas of immediacy react to the generation before her which she, like many in her day, saw as a rigid establishment intent on imposing sterile values on the new generation. In 1963, she writes, “Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article of use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories” (101). Sontag’s new generation wanted art as a true statement within the moment. Art is doomed to a withering away after the instantaneous moment, but art is worthwhile and meaningful when taken out of an imposed hierarchy of defined values.

This postmodernist reaction to the modernism of the New Criticism is then destined to evolve as the decades pass. When the aesthetic world approaches the 1990s a certain movement emerges in which the concepts of postmodernism become the establishment which needs a way to evolve to meet the demands of what is then contemporary. One of the first ways in which this post-postmodernism is questioned is in the field of positive psychology. The questioning of psychological methods evolves as too negative with a need to turn and focus on the positive. And eventually these psychological methods will come back around to the idea of semiotics, the object or symbol as the center of the idea of positivity.

Though the Sontag/Barthes postmodernist aesthetic evolves, readers can still use the ideas to pursue an intrinsic understanding of a work of art, especially one which passes in linear time such as the reading of literature. In prior blogs, I use the moment-by-moment cultural appreciation to help define the impact of a story such as Thomas Hardy’s “The Withered Arm.” I also use broader implications to speak to cultural umbrellas which hover over major characters in Hardy novels. The use of cultural symbology and immediate impact makes the reader feel an intimacy with the text that a broader critical approach disseminates to a degree with its emphasis on mental logistics within structural frameworks. As Sontag observes, Barthes teaches us to move beyond the confinements of structural aesthetics to “the evangelism of pleasure” (441). Such proselytizing creates a bond between the reader and the text that makes the reading important in a way that a distant mental structuralism cannot. This message defines the concerns of the Sontag/Barthes dialog.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1972.

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

  _____. "Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes." The Susan Sontag Reader edited by Elizabeth Hardwick, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984, 426-446. 

                                                                        Nick Harris, March 2024

 

 The Abjections of Thomas Hardy in “The Withered Arm”

        

                                    The abjections of Thomas Hardy's "The Withered Arm"

The gothic images of Thomas Hardy’s short story “The Withered Arm” correspond to tropes as defined by Anne Williams in her gothic investigations in the study Art of Darkness. Supernatural events, or the threat of them, form the typical elements which make this story fall in the gothic genre, but Hardy’s story is enhanced by looking through the lens of Williams’ use of feminine innocence in the face of monstrous cruelty (Chapter II. The House of Bluebeard). The reader aligns such “monstrous cruelty” with Julia Kristeva’s notion of “abjection,” or that which causes uneasiness, comes to the forefront, and defines the symbols of decadence and the unknown in the story (4). Williams’ innocent female(s) take charge of their situation through confrontation with the abject. In Hardy’s story this emergence of the female in the face of monstrosity is doubly shown using two female protagonists who sometimes see the other one as the threat, and sometimes as the companion in the face of ironic determinism. In either instance, the two female protagonists act as gothic innocents battling to save themselves from their precarious predicaments.

            The struggle to overcome fate and declare oneself as an individual of free will is a common theme in Hardy. Such a theme plays out from his early creation of Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native to Jude Fawley in his final novel Jude the Obscure. Eustacia is a self-assured woman at one with the nature of the heath who still wants to break out of the rural society by marrying the man who has returned from worldly travels, only to find that only wishes to stay in the rural lands. Jude Fawley as a young man sees the natural pleasures of the heath together with its ugliness and determines that he wants to break free by pursuing a life of the mind, something society and circumstance constantly deny him once he gets to the urban areas he once longed for.

            The reader notices this theme of abjection, determinism, and free will  in “The Withered Arm.” Not reading the story as a structured narrative arc, but as a series of immediate affective events lets the reader envelope themselves in the world of each of the protagonists, understanding their struggles at each moment as they face the changing horrific situations around them. . As noted, the theme plays out in the two females, the peasant girl Rhoda, and the newly arrived landlord’s wife Gertrude. Viewing the story as a succession of images and situations informs the reader as to the individual gothic elements of the story, per Williams’ feminist definition. 

At the beginning of the story, the chorus of peasant women comment on the arrival of the landlord with his new bride. Word reaches Rhoda, and she is devastated. She has been waiting for years for the landlord to acknowledge her child as his son, hoping that the result would be his taking her for his wife. The arrival of the new wife positions Rhoda as an innocent fighting against the “abjection” of the new wife. This abjection becomes enhanced when Rhoda dreams of the new wife as a spirit out to do her harm. In the dream Rhoda reaches out to stop Gertrude from harming her, touching the spirit’s arm. Immediately the spirit is in agony and withdraws. The innocent heroine of Rhoda has overcome the abject, at least in the dream.

            In addition to Rhoda as innocent, the story now turns to Gertrude who awakens with a pain in her arm. Unbeknownst to her, it is in the same spot on her arm that Rhoda had grabbed in her dream. The withered arm is distasteful to her new husband, and he shuns her. Sophia must find out what has happened and try to stop it. The confronts her own abject feature by searching out the supernatural in the form on the Wessex County wizard, who happens to be a friend of Rhoda. The two women meet through the symbology of dream imagery and its possible physical effects and the supernatural tropes of the rural wizard and his attempt to seek out the truth of what has happened.

            Not knowing of Rhoda’s son’s parentage, Gertrude aligns with her, and Rhoda returns the empathy when she recognizes the place on the withered arm where she had, in her dream, touched her supposed enemy. The alliance of the two protagonists, brief as it is, creates an emphasis of what Anne Williams calls “the female gothic,” the attempt of the innocent female to take matters into her own hands for purposes of escaping a monstrous situation (3). Usually, this situation is determined by an ogre-like male who has imprisoned the innocent in some way. But in Hardy’s story, the abject situation is the determined fate of the two women. This fate has as its cause the blind rejection by the landlord of Rhoda and her son and his further rejection of his new bride after she becomes afflicted. But his part is secondary to that of the overwhelming umbrella of inevitable loss which hovers over the two women as they struggle with each other’s position in the story. When Gertrude asks the wizard the cause of her injury, he shows her in a scene unshown to the reader. But Gertrude knows that Rhoda is the cause and breaks ties with her.

After years of agony, Gertrude visits the wizard again to see if he knows of any cure to the withered arm. He says he knows of only one. She must touch the afflicted place to the neck of a newly hanged man. This advice furthers the Williams type of Gothicism. The female must take matters in her own hands. She must face an abject horror. Only then can she be free, albeit through supernatural means.

The irony of fate looms in the air once again, though. For when Gertrude receives news of a hanging, she makes a scene by rushing to the dead body and touching her arm to its neck. She is, indeed, healed. The withered arm glows with health. But at that moment the parents of the dead man rush up to here. It is her husband and Rhoda. He has finally recognized Rhoda’s son as his. The shock of seeing the parents together sends Gertrude into a swoon. She collapses and dies. The ending is melodramatic, supernatural, and, at the same time, fatalistic. Rhoda loses her son due to the societal conditioning of the poverty-stricken bastard; he has become a murderer, and action for which he is hanged. Gertrude regains her beauty, only to lose her life.

That the two females end their stories in tragedy is not typical of the Williams female gothic trope. Such a fatalistic ending is very typical of a story by Hardy. Hardy uses the trope of the female surviving using her own wits to show the strong sense of individualism that is typical of his characters. They have a persistent need to fight to escape the fate that twists around them sending them to an inevitable place of loss. In “The Withered Arm,” the means of the fight against determinism involves supernatural tropes that give the story its weird and spooky atmosphere typical of any gothic tale. But the fate of a deterministic universe wins, as it does in so many Hardy works, and the innocents must inevitably give up themselves to it.

The reader catalogs the abjections of the story as they happen. Rhoda faces the abject horror of the specter in her dream, and she survives, even conquers it. Gertrude then faces the abjection of her withered arm. Together they briefly form an empathy, as Rhoda feels she has supernaturally caused Gertrude’s abjection. But then Gertrude faces the abjection of Rhoda as the cause of her injury. The story has a twist at this point, as the storyteller never shows the exact revelation to Gertrude; the wizard simply takes her to the side and something supernatural (probably) happens to let Gertrude know of Rhoda’s involvement. Gertrude leaves Rhoda, returning to the wizard only years later. The reader presumes this hesitation is due to a fear of the outcome, and that proves justified. Gertrude’s next abjection is when she faces the dead body of the hanged man and touches it. The abjection is temporarily subdued as her arm heals. Then we discover her and Rhoda’s final abjection, the death of Rhoda’s son and his acceptance at last by Gertrude’s husband. The horror of the final scene shows Rhoda’s final abjection, the death of her son due to his having turned criminal, and Gertrude’s final realization of the accumulated effects of all the horrors, a realization that kills her.

The reader feels a moment-by-moment realization of each of these abject horrors as they happen. In this way, Hardy’s interplay between two female protagonists comes alive in a back-and-forth dance of emotions that creates an awareness far beyond the story as an arch of narrative or character. The arcs are present, true. But in tackling the story moment-by-moment we see the two women tackle each abjection in its turn. In doing so, they sometimes find a brief empathy with the other. But in the end, they are fated to contribute to each other’s downfall. Reading the events as a series of enveloping moments makes clearer the connection to Anne Williams’ sense of feminine gothic as she outlines in Art of Darkness. The innocent female progresses through the narrative never knowing what is to happen at the next turn, trying desperately to overcome the sense of fatalism that bombards her. Whatever supernatural elements inform this story, they lead to one of Thomas Hardy’s inevitable ironies.

 

 

The image was generated by AI on Bing using the phrase “Foggy background with nineteenth-century peasant woman limping” on March 4, 2024.

 

Hardy, Thomas. “The Withered Arm.” Wessex Tales, Project Gutenberg, Release date: February 1, 2002 [eBook #3056] Most recently updated: February 4, 2021 (original publication date 1888).  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3056/pg3056-images.html

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. tr., Leon S. Roudiez. New

            York: Columbia University Press. 1982.

Williams, Ann. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. University of Chicago, 1995.

 

 

For Thomas Hardy's short story "A Withered Arm":  AI generated Adobe Stock. “A ghost with a spectral form and a haunting expression, wandering through a haunted castle in search of a lost soul.”

         For one further foray into the world of Thomas Hardy, I will enter the eerie world of the mysterious heath in his short story “The Withered Arm.” Hardy depicts two innocents, female protagonists, in this story. Each one at times views the other as a threat. Hardy usually writes of individuals struggling with the concept of fate, lost in a harsh, industrialized world. Introducing a possible supernatural element turns the deterministic meanderings of Hardy into a much more complex maze of themes. Therefore, before going into the story proper, I will try to define “Gothic” as it pertains to Hardy and to the general idea of signs and symbols about which I attempt to write.

The gothic innocent fears coming upon that thing which may frighten or repel. This frightening object might take the form of a supernatural being, such as in the AI generated image. But the object is always a threat, and this threat defines the area we call Gothic.

            This threat constitutes that which Julia Kristeva calls the “abject” in horror; in Powers of Horror, Kristeva terms her basic idea the “abject,” and she defines “abject” in several ways. In one instance she gives simple synonyms—loathing, repugnance, improper/unclean. In another instance she waxes poetic: “A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either” (2). Kristeva defines the abject as that which is undesired, for the simplest of reasons because it is loathsome and repugnant.³ But more complex reasons exist, and with her sentence, “But not nothing, either,” Kristeva launches into the exploration of that which is desired, even within the paradoxical confines of the undesired. In the tapestry of emotions, fears reach out as horrible and unwanted; but the absence of anything, including fear, becomes unwanted to a greater degree. So, the curious attraction of the loathsome continues.

            Characters in stories often feel this abjection. They desire what is lacking in their lives, usually defined as a sense of happiness or beauty. The acquisition of the objects or feelings carries with it the threat of abjection, the threat of not acquiring what they seek. The gothic idea of the innocent finding themselves in another’s world, a strange and foreign world, creates validates a character’s innocence. They feel the innocence, but they feel the threat to the innocence also, the abjection.

            One of Hardy's characters can feel an abjection by means of a dream image, a threatening specter that appears in her sleep to attempt to keep her away. The other of Hardy’s protagonists feels a very tangible threat in the form of a withering of her arm that appears suddenly, scarring her beauty and causing her husband to shy away from her. Hardy’s gothic complexity comes from the two protagonists who feel threatened by their various abjections, yet who sometimes feel a great empathy for the other. I hope to deal with these abjections in a further commentary that focuses on the Hardy story itself. For now, I will continue defining Kristeva’s abjection as a tool for investigating the use of the gothic in a character-oriented story.

            Julia Kristeva, in The Powers of Horror writes that in facing the abject one must go “beyond the unconscious” and confront the ambiguity of facing the “Inside” as well as the “Outside” of the mind (7). To Kristeva, the analyst of literature must use outwardly symbolic references as well as inwardly psychological ones. In her own analysis, she specifically relates this to the work of modernist novelists such as Joyce and Celine. With Celine especially, Kristeva wishes to show how the reader must go both “fascinating, mysterious, inwardly nocturnal” and at the same time “liberating” (133). A postmodern analyst may easily adopt such a stance when confronting various texts such as Hardy’s. The psychological rambling is in the text in full force. But also, the characters face the abject forces that threaten them when they must confront abstract symbols such as dream images or tangible symbols such as a withered arm.

            My point in this brief commentary on Kristeva is to show how an evolutionary idea of symbology can help to define the characters of a story that, for some reason, may not lend itself to an immediate gothic interpretation. In my own work, I have used this type of analysis to redefine the events of the melodramatic and psychological novel The Golden Bowl by Henry James. In these brief comments, I will continue such commentary in my investigation of Hardy, an author usually associated with the struggle for freedom in the face of a harsh, worldly determinism. Gothicism, usually associated with a certain Romantic angst, sturm, und drang, can especially come to the forefront when Hardy himself uses fantastical elements within his naturalistic stories of life on the heath.

 

 

 

To be continued.

 

Hardy, Thomas. “The Withered Arm.” Wessex Tales, Project Gutenberg, Release date: February 1, 2002 [eBook #3056] Most recently updated: February 4, 2021 (original publication date 1888).  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3056/pg3056-images.html

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. tr., Leon S. Roudiez. New

            York: Columbia University Press. 1982.

                                                                                    Nick Harris Feb. 2024 

             

 

 

                                            Hardy's Jude and Weber's Ethic.

Whereas Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native immerses herself in the natural environment of the heath (as I wrote of in my earlier blog), Jude Fawley of Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure, recognizes the beauty of nature alongside of its ugliness and longs to be free of it. In so doing, he finds himself, over the course of the novel, denied the progress of the mind he pursues. He inadvertently attempts to escape into the virtues of a work ethic that can be compared to Hardy’s contemporary Max Weber’s ideas of the edification of the soul through work, the Protestant work ethic. We can compare the humanism Weber calls for through humble work to Jude’s search for a humanistic edification of his character and better understand the transition of society into the industrial age and how that transition affects the induvial for theoretical good or harm.

At the start of Jude the Obscure, Hardy writes of Jude’s own immersion into a oneness with nature that he was born into in his rural roots, expressed in how the land reminds him of its place in the pleasures of life, especially those of a sexual nature:

…to every clod and stone there really attached associations enough and to

spare—echoes of songs from ancient harvest-days, of spoken words, and of sturdy

deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, of energy, gaiety, horse-

play, bickerings, weariness. Groups of gleaners had squatted in the sun on every

square yard. Love-matches that had populated the adjoining hamlet had been made

up there between reaping and carrying. Under the hedge which divided the field

from a distant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers who would not turn

their heads to look at them by the next harvest; and in that ancient cornfield many

a man had made love-promises to a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the

next seed-time….  II. par. 10.

Clearly Jude holds a romantic notion of how this natural environment produced the pleasures of days gone by. Yet Jude longs to go away from this natural environment, escaping into the life of the mind at the distant town where a college sits. He finds this idea preferable to staying with the ugliness which he also perceives inherent in the heath:

The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all round, where

it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s

produce standing in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and

the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family.

“How ugly it is here!” he murmured. II. pars. 8-9.

Jude longs to escape into the world of the human intellect. He thinks the road to this is by getting to the nearest city where he has a friend in the university, hoping that the friend will enable him to be a student, the pathway he sees as his road out of the ugliness of the environment of his youth. Hardy's novel reflects the broader societal upheavals of the Industrial Revolution through the character of Jude, a young man realizing the limitations of the agrarian society  into which he was born. Jude realizes that traditional agrarian communities face disruption in the face of an Industrial Revolution, and he abandons the agrarian world just as the industrialized world urges. But unlike industry, Jude yearns for the development of humanity. Jude uses this humanistic urge, originating in his humble roots and developed through a course of scholarly study, as an impetus for his evolution as an individual in his contemporary world.

Max Weber, writing at the same time of the late novels of Hardy, tells why humanism is preferable to industrialism, especially the morality that becomes inherent in humanism at its simplest level, that of the hard worker:

“We want to cultivate and support what appears to us as valuable in man: his

personal responsibility, his basic drive toward higher things, toward the spiritual

and moral values of mankind, even where this drive confronts us in its most

primitive form. Insofar as it is within our power we want to create the external

conditions which will help to preserve—in the face of the inevitable struggle for 

existence with its suffering—the best that is in men, those physical and emotional 

qualities which we would like to maintain for the nation” (Weber, 1894 speech

before the Evangelische-Soziale Kongress, quoted in Bendix, 44).

What Weber speaks to here is the humanism of workers, farmers in particular, in relation to the landowners and industrialists that are determining the economic and political zeitgeist of the society. The “most primitive form” Weber writes of here is that of human individuals who are farm laborers, the economically simple. These individuals contain the “drive toward higher things” that is truly important for the self-definition of human beings. We “foster and maintain” these qualities “for the nation,” but we do so at an individual level. This individual level is best realized when the economic level of the individual is simple, a life unclouded by the zeal for economic advancement.

            Jude understands the common life of a farmer, the beauty of the land growing from the ground and through the shoes of the individual who becomes one with the land. But he understands the ugliness of that life also, the crude qualities of the muck and the mud, the hunger that comes from physical striving with no immediate reward. Jude imagines the way out of this ugliness is through the development of the mind. But he gets caught in the crudity of the industrial world, the society that tells him he must support himself and those dependent on him or else go hungry. He becomes a stonemason in order to appease this place in which this industrial world places him. But the stones do not hold the beauty that was inherent in the land of his childhood, even though that beauty also held a flip side of ugliness.

            Rest assured, I am not attempting a Marxist review of Jude…, dependent on economics as its only theme. My intent is as ecocritical as the sense of place I associate with Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native. Environment as a theme is Hardy is well documented; see, for instance, Barrett’s “Character and Environment in Hardy’s Fiction” (2012). But Jude’s society will not let him explore the wonders of the human mind as he wants. He cannot, therefore, escape the harshness of the earth, together with its beauty, except to plunge deeper into the squalid life of the worker in the industrial world.

Jude tries to compensate by living out of wedlock and raising a family with the novel’s magnificent female character Sue Bridehead, who is married also. As a suffragette, she accompanies Jude into a world counter to the culture of proper industrial society. Nothing appeases their longing for something better, their need to get beyond the norms that imprison them, and the situation ends tragically.

Because Jude appears to have no hope, or a hope that ever diminishes wherever he turns his head, Hardy’s final novel reads also as his bleakest. The mysticism of the land, which Eustacia Vye never completely abandons, is gone after the first few chapters, and Jude sets himself headed away from Weber’s simple “best that is in men.”

 

Barrett, Charlotte. “Character and Environment in Thomas Hardy's Fiction,”  http://writersinspire.org/content/character-environment-thomas-hardys-fiction licensed as Creative Commons BY-NC-SA (2.0 UK). Published on 15 May 2012. Accessed on 21 February 2024.

Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Project Gutenberg. Release Date: August, 1994 [eBook #153] [Most recently updated: August 28, 2022] [original publication 1890.] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/153/153-h/153-h.htm

Weber, Max. “Speech before Evangelische Soziale Kongres, 1894,” reprinted in Richard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait. Doubleday, Anchor, 1962, p. 44.

                                                                        Nick Harris, February 2024

 

 

Eustacia Vye, the heroine of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, does not, perhaps, immediately come to mind when we think of the concept of Silence. Eustacia Vye is anything but silent. She is the grand expression of transcendental nature worship as well as the desire of romantic exploration. The sense-of-place dichotomy, to be one with nature while at the same time trying to transcend it, lies inherent in Eustacia:

“The solitary figure who walked this beat took no notice of the windy tune still played on the dead heathbells. She did not turn her head to look at a group of dark creatures further on, who fled from her presence as she skirted a ravine where they fed. They were about a score of the small wild ponies known as heath-croppers. They roamed at large on the undulations of Egdon, but in numbers too few to detract much from the solitude.

The pedestrian noticed nothing just now, and a clue to her abstraction was afforded by a trivial incident. A bramble caught hold of her skirt and checked her progress. Instead of putting it off and hastening along, she yielded herself up to the pull, and stood passively still. When she began to extricate herself, it was by turning round and round, and so unwinding the prickly switch. She was in a desponding reverie.” (VI. pars. 17-18).

 

Here we see Eustacia the Mystic reveling in the natural environment that defines her, a “desponding reverie.” As the story progresses, we feel her desire for removal into a new, more exciting place than the lot to which she is born. But these introductory paragraphs define Eustacia’s character at its root essence, the oneness with the heath that can only dislodge herself from its brambles in a sympathetic dance

We who read of Eustacia become enamored of her solitary position on the heath, where even the ponies who roam in groups cannot break the silence, the windy tunes of the wind to which Eustacia pays no attention. Through Hardy’s prose, the reader creates a character of transcendence so imbued in her environment as to become one with it. The initial response of any perceiver, I believe, is to feel uncomfortable that they are having to create the art rather than the artist. But the artist, Hardy in this case, asks the perceiver to do more than that. The perceiver needs to be a mystic along with Eustacia, to travel into the “cloud of unknowing,” to search for the silence.

Eustacia Vye is a mystic. Yet she is the bold conqueror of the world outside of that which she knows. Her irony comes in the fact of her using the power from the love she feels for the hero, Clym, the titular “Native,” as he attempts to return to the environment from which he once fled. She wants him to take her away to the new lands, show her the discoveries he has made, and make further discoveries with him. But he is resigned to returning to his roots. He sees in her the Silence and the transcendence of the Nature he once left, but now wants to re-acquire. Thus, her environment proclaims her in its essence and, at the same time, imprisons her.

The ”Silence” of this early modernist novel (1878) becomes a transition from the angst of Transcendentalism to the preoccupation with “Silence” by the postmodernists of the 1960s. Again, we run into definitions. Lyotard defined his “postmodernism” in the late 1970s but was writing about a development that flowered in the 1960s. The “Counterculture” of that era is, in many ways, an outgrowth of the move away from Romanticism inherent in Eustacia Vye – a move away that at the same time is an immersion. And today, half a century beyond Lyotard, we still read of Eustacia and see the continuing presence of the angst of a place at once loved for its rugged beauty, its predisposition towards mystical immersion, and its impetus as a place from which to flee.

 

                                        The Eustacia Vye rose, a variant named for Hardy’s heroine.

 

Hardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native. Project Gutenberg. Original publ. 1878. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/122/pg122-images.html

 

                                                                        Nick Harris, Feb. 2024

 

The mention of the enigmatic characters of Thomas Hardy’s Eustacia Vye and Jude Fawley led me to write the following poem. Those characters emerge from the fog with a love/hate essence for their land, their environments. I have only been to Wisconsin once. I remember only Milwaukee and the morning mists over the downtown churches. I was there for two days. I felt like Thomas Wolfe unable to go home again, lost in the unknown city though Wisconsin and Kentucky are not that different. The horror novelist Peter Straub, from Milwaukee, became one of my favorites, and thus Wisconsin morphs into images of gothic romanticism as well as the ironies of Vietnam, where Straub served and whose images fill his horrific stories.

 

 

Fog

Wisconsin fog folds over the tops of red brick churches laying in wait in downtowns surrounded by industries and farms. It  chills us from the shoulders down

as we breathe it in to the bottom of our lungs and on down through the legs to the

toes, freezing them as we stand in the icy sludge on the concrete. The fog of Quang Tri does the opposite. It vines up from the ground, chilling the wet feet first, then growing into the legs, the torso, and finally filling the mind to where the land is not distinguishable as field or jungle. No matter. Decades later, the fog takes over permanently. The only fog that remains is that of Hardy’s Wessex…a mist where Eustacia Vye emerges from commune with wet nature -- and a brume obscures Jude in his wanderlust. Such poetries tarry. The Milwaukee cathedrals and thickets of tropical forest fade away, forgotten, as are the deaths and night shifts that we barely recapture.

Image Credit: Inggrid Koe / Unsplash.

 

Silence Revisited

Susan Sontag is inadvertently extending aesthetic thought from the modern world into the postmodern. In her early writings, she makes the following point about how humans perceive art: “Denying that art is mere expression, the later myth rather relates art to the mind’s need or capacity for self-estrangement” (182). The “later myth” is development of the modernist concept into the postmodern, inasmuch as Sontag is attempting to do so. The angst of the artist creates a modern world that is constantly evolving. She calls this state of evolution “the paradoxes involved in attaining an absolute state of being described by the great religious mystics,” or more poetically, “a craving for the cloud of unknowing beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech, so art must tend toward anti-art, the elimination of the ‘subject’…, the pursuit of silence.” The modern movement had moved into art for art’s sake. Now aesthetic thinking by perceivers of art had reached a state where it desired that beyond what art could enunciate. No wonder that Sontag titles her essay, originally published in 1967,  “The Aesthetics of Silence.”  

The composer John Cage had famously creates a “Silence” that passed as musical art in his 1964 piece “4’23” of Silence” wherein the performer(s) begin the piece of music by being silent and continue the silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The point of the performance of such a piece is that the “music” comes from the sounds which surround the performer. The art is constructed by the listener. Yet the title of the piece directs the listener to a search for a nothingness, a Silence.

The New York intellectuals Sontag and Cage reflect a movement in modernism away from the subject of the artistry, whether that subject be aural or not. The responsibility of defining the art falls on the perceiver. Andy Warhol’s infamous painting “Campbell’s Tomato Soup Can” does the same thing. The initial response of any perceiver, I believe, is to feel uncomfortable that they are having to create the art rather than the artist. But the artist asks the perceiver to do more than that. The perceiver needs to be a mystic, to travel into the “cloud of unknowing,” to search for the silence.

John Cage performs “4’ 33” of Silence” in Harvard Square, 1973.

Since the early 1960s, aesthetes have tried to decode the search for silence that Sontag and Cage promote. In the late 1970s, Lyotard looked back on the previous decades in philosophy as a “postmodernism,” not a new term, but one set down with an evolutionary meaning beyond the fragmented modernism of the early twentieth century. Lyotard’s silences were fragmented natures of what once had been grandiose ideas, now shattered and containing cracks. Our job as perceivers has become to look between the cracks, or perhaps beyond them.

I am betraying a simplistic version of the “Silence” of art as these people – Sontag, Cage, Warhol, Lyotard – are defining it within the boundaries of aesthetics. But these are ideas that still mystify people in 2024, half a century later. Humanity’s movement into postmodernism has now turned into a post-postmodernism that reflects on the entire evolution of aesthetic philosophy in the past century and a half. In the face of AI formulating our current speech patterns and devalued humanistic thought amongst the educated populace, we are forced to confront the question of what good is it all, this thinking about art, anti-art, and beyond. The simple is not so simple after all. But neither is it worth throwing away.

 

Nicholas Harris, Jan. 2024. This essay contains my thoughts on

Sontag, Susan. “The Aesthetics of Silence,” reprinted in The Susan Sontag Reader, Elizabeth Hardwick editor, Farrar/Strauss/Giroux, 1982.