Notes on AI -- Angels & Insects

Nick Harris

Blog 9/6/2025

 Notes on AI -- Angels & Insects

            Upon returning to A.S. Byatt, my original purpose was to compare her Angels & Insects, a collection of two novellas, with the two-plot structure of William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. The stories in each book are presented differently, Byatt’s as a series of two novellas told fully in succession and Faulkner’s as a single book with alternating chapters going from one story to the other. But each author presents a paradox of theme between two stories that seemingly have nothing to do with each other, but yet mirror each other in contrasts and paradoxes that the reader must wrestle with on their own. This self-wrestling caused by reading each book has caused my purpose to change; I now view the reading of each book as a separate investigation into the nature of morality. Byatt shows, through Victorian models, the misguided attempts of humans to interconnect the physical world with its colonial and Darwinian harshness and the realm of the transcendental and how it shapes the ethics of the individual. Faulkner shows ethical dilemmas in terms of restrictions and freedom, how those who purposefully reject the terms of society for a more liberating life can find themselves involved in tragedy, while those who suddenly find themselves free can ironically long for the sturdiness of a life filled with restrictions.

            Byatt presents two novellas, “Morpho Eugenia” and “The Conjugal Angel.” “Morpho Eugenia” is printed first and complete, a rushing story told without chapter breaks (though smaller asterisked breaks appear) that deals with the paradox of British colonialism attempting to impose order on a wild, unstable world, while itself shows an underlying inability to conform to its own sense of ethics. The first two paragraphs show a juxtaposition of aristocratic propriety and the wildness of the jungle by introducing the figure of a returning world adventurer as he enters a proper British ballroom dance by invitation of an elegant hostess (Angels & Insects, 3). Immediately, and continually thereafter, Adamson, the adventurer, recognizes this juxtaposition: “Nothing he did ow seemed to happen without this double vision, of things seen and done otherwise, in another world” (7). The “now” is the world of the proper ballroom dance, and “another world” is the jungle society from which he has arrived.

            The Alabasters are the very proper British family hosting Adamson, and Harold Alabaster, the head of this family, is the benefactor who sponsored Adamson’s journeys for purposes of collecting rare insects, particularly butterflies. Adamson, though invited into the Alabaster family to further promote his research, feels a juxtaposed symbol to them, as he thrived in the Amazon adventures he undertook with his hard-science entomology and meticulous participation in “Native” society (28). Alabaster sets up Adamson in a laboratory made from a corner of a stable, and still welcomes him into the family by promoting a marriage to his eldest daughter Eugenia. Thus begins the plot of Adamson discovering, little by little, how the Alabasters misuse their position of prosperity and how his own perceptions of society in the wilderness act as a constant call for him to return.

            The second of Byatt’s novellas, “The Conjugal Angel,” immediately follows, but unfolds in a series of twelve numbered chapters over one hundred fifty pages. Like the first novella, Byatt shows an immediate juxtaposition, this time in the first two sentences outlying the two main characters (187). Lilias is all imagination, living within the flights of her fancy. Sophy, on the other hand, must see and hear anything in order to satisfy her “matter-of-fact” personality. They work together conducting seances in Victorian London.

            Lilias repeatedly associates herself with the celestial visions of Swedenborg and “his voyages throughout various Heavens and Hells of the Universe” (191). Sophy would rather watch sunsets as a physical phenomenon, contemplating the relative sizes of the sun and the moon. Eventually she would lead them both into “the delicately arranged world of paid mediums” (195).

            From the first, Lilias and Sophy’s clients set themselves into an ethical battle with the mediums, bringing up issues from the natural world. In their first controlled séance, their patrons bring up a question of the symbolism of the owl, a creature they have found scientifically interesting, even playful, since their son set out feeders for them in his youth – they do not understand the bombardment of owls as symbolic creatures of evil. The natural world and the metaphysical do not align, in their opinion (210). Lilias comforts them with more talk of Swedenborg and his angels and Sophy assures them of the validity of their spiritual explorations as steeped in reality. So the natural world and the world of controlled seances, if that can be emblematic of proper London society, mirrors those concerns from “Morho Eugenia,” at least to some degree. This testing of the physical (especially the “Conjugal” nature of the physical world as the title of the novella suggests) with the spiritual informs the plot of the novella.

            The novellas are full of comparable symbols – the wings of butterflies and the wings of angels, for example. Darwin as the impetus of “Morpho Eugenia” is juxtaposed with Swedenborg as the impetus of “The Conjugal Angel.” Both stories use these symbols of Victorian society to reflect on the nature of ethical reality and its place in the lives of individuals.

            The next step in this complicated process of comparison that I have set up is to bring into question the dual nature of the stories in Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. I shall do this in a second part of this series of notes. But I wish to mention that because of the complexity of these juxtapositions, I consulted the AI tool of ChatGPT. I have not used it so far in these notes, but I want to point out the sentence that AI produced as the final sentence of the five hundred word synopsis of these ideas for which I asked. The sentence reads: “Together, these works invite the reader to inhabit dissonance rather than resolve it—a testament to narrative tension’s capacity to illuminate human complexity.”

            This is a wonderful sentence and one that reflects the theme that I am trying to get to as the heart of these narratives, Byatt’s and Faulkner’s.

            But these are not my words. They are manufactured for me from a question. I asked for in-text references, but the AI tool gave me few. I suppose that those who know AI better than I know that this practice is common. But it does not serve me well, for I wish to be producing original material and giving credit when the words are not mine. So I asked AI further: “Where did ChatGPT get the idea for the sentence: Together, these works invite the reader to inhabit dissonance rather than resolve it—a testament to narrative tension’s capacity to illuminate human complexity.”

AI responded that it had looked at the two texts, then:  “ I [AI is referring to itself in first person] crafted a summary sentence that captures a common thread: both texts resist easy resolution and instead use narrative tension to expose human complexity.

So, that sentence is original critical commentary, not something taken from Byatt, Faulkner, or a critic.

👉 If you need to use it in academic work, you should frame it as your own analysis (no citation required), but you can support it with citations to Byatt’s and Faulkner’s texts (or to critics) to show evidence for the claim.”

            The pertinent information here is that AI claims that I “should frame it as” my “own analysis (no citation required).” I am uneasy about this response because the sentence, as wonderful as it is, is not my sentence. Yet AI says I may offer it as my own.

            The themes of Angels & Insects, which I have started comments on in this blog, and The Wild Palms, which I shall continue in future posts, concern the ethics of symbols. Byatt uses symbols from Victorian British society to show a juxtaposition of propriety and wild behavior, paradoxes in which ethics of human behavior are internalized and questioned. Showing this theme in dual format is significant to a reader because, for one thing, the reader is immediately asked to juxtapose narratives, to invent reasons why the stories might be put side by side or spliced together. Reading these narratives, glorifying the duality of comparison, becomes a meaningful and purposeful experience.

 

            [I will continue with more AI and more of The Wild Palms in a second part of this blog.]

 

_______

Works Cited

Byatt, A. S. Angels & Insects: Two Novellas. Vintage, 1992.
Faulkner, William. The Wild Palms. New York:  Modern Library, 1939.

The AI asked for on 5/9/2025 by Nick Harris through ChatGPT was: “500 word comparison of the two sections of Angels and Insects A.S. Byatt and William Faulkner's The Wild Palms”

 

 

            Upon returning to A.S. Byatt, my original purpose was to compare her Angels & Insects, a collection of two novellas, with the two-plot structure of William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. The stories in each book are presented differently, Byatt’s as a series of two novellas told fully in succession and Faulkner’s as a single book with alternating chapters going from one story to the other. But each author presents a paradox of theme between two stories that seemingly have nothing to do with each other, but yet mirror each other in contrasts and paradoxes that the reader must wrestle with on their own. This self-wrestling caused by reading each book has caused my purpose to change; I now view the reading of each book as a separate investigation into the nature of morality. Byatt shows, through Victorian models, the misguided attempts of humans to interconnect the physical world with its colonial and Darwinian harshness and the realm of the transcendental and how it shapes the ethics of the individual. Faulkner shows ethical dilemmas in terms of restrictions and freedom, how those who purposefully reject the terms of society for a more liberating life can find themselves involved in tragedy, while those who suddenly find themselves free can ironically long for the sturdiness of a life filled with restrictions.

            Byatt presents two novellas, “Morpho Eugenia” and “The Conjugal Angel.” “Morpho Eugenia” is printed first and complete, a rushing story told without chapter breaks (though smaller asterisked breaks appear) that deals with the paradox of British colonialism attempting to impose order on a wild, unstable world, while itself shows an underlying inability to conform to its own sense of ethics. The first two paragraphs show a juxtaposition of aristocratic propriety and the wildness of the jungle by introducing the figure of a returning world adventurer as he enters a proper British ballroom dance by invitation of an elegant hostess (Angels & Insects, 3). Immediately, and continually thereafter, Adamson, the adventurer, recognizes this juxtaposition: “Nothing he did ow seemed to happen without this double vision, of things seen and done otherwise, in another world” (7). The “now” is the world of the proper ballroom dance, and “another world” is the jungle society from which he has arrived.

            The Alabasters are the very proper British family hosting Adamson, and Harold Alabaster, the head of this family, is the benefactor who sponsored Adamson’s journeys for purposes of collecting rare insects, particularly butterflies. Adamson, though invited into the Alabaster family to further promote his research, feels a juxtaposed symbol to them, as he thrived in the Amazon adventures he undertook with his hard-science entomology and meticulous participation in “Native” society (28). Alabaster sets up Adamson in a laboratory made from a corner of a stable, and still welcomes him into the family by promoting a marriage to his eldest daughter Eugenia. Thus begins the plot of Adamson discovering, little by little, how the Alabasters misuse their position of prosperity and how his own perceptions of society in the wilderness act as a constant call for him to return.

            The second of Byatt’s novellas, “The Conjugal Angel,” immediately follows, but unfolds in a series of twelve numbered chapters over one hundred fifty pages. Like the first novella, Byatt shows an immediate juxtaposition, this time in the first two sentences outlying the two main characters (187). Lilias is all imagination, living within the flights of her fancy. Sophy, on the other hand, must see and hear anything in order to satisfy her “matter-of-fact” personality. They work together conducting seances in Victorian London.

            Lilias repeatedly associates herself with the celestial visions of Swedenborg and “his voyages throughout various Heavens and Hells of the Universe” (191). Sophy would rather watch sunsets as a physical phenomenon, contemplating the relative sizes of the sun and the moon. Eventually she would lead them both into “the delicately arranged world of paid mediums” (195).

            From the first, Lilias and Sophy’s clients set themselves into an ethical battle with the mediums, bringing up issues from the natural world. In their first controlled séance, their patrons bring up a question of the symbolism of the owl, a creature they have found scientifically interesting, even playful, since their son set out feeders for them in his youth – they do not understand the bombardment of owls as symbolic creatures of evil. The natural world and the metaphysical do not align, in their opinion (210). Lilias comforts them with more talk of Swedenborg and his angels and Sophy assures them of the validity of their spiritual explorations as steeped in reality. So the natural world and the world of controlled seances, if that can be emblematic of proper London society, mirrors those concerns from “Morho Eugenia,” at least to some degree. This testing of the physical (especially the “Conjugal” nature of the physical world as the title of the novella suggests) with the spiritual informs the plot of the novella.

            The novellas are full of comparable symbols – the wings of butterflies and the wings of angels, for example. Darwin as the impetus of “Morpho Eugenia” is juxtaposed with Swedenborg as the impetus of “The Conjugal Angel.” Both stories use these symbols of Victorian society to reflect on the nature of ethical reality and its place in the lives of individuals.

            The next step in this complicated process of comparison that I have set up is to bring into question the dual nature of the stories in Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. I shall do this in a second part of this series of notes. But I wish to mention that because of the complexity of these juxtapositions, I consulted the AI tool of ChatGPT. I have not used it so far in these notes, but I want to point out the sentence that AI produced as the final sentence of the five hundred word synopsis of these ideas for which I asked. The sentence reads: “Together, these works invite the reader to inhabit dissonance rather than resolve it—a testament to narrative tension’s capacity to illuminate human complexity.”

            This is a wonderful sentence and one that reflects the theme that I am trying to get to as the heart of these narratives, Byatt’s and Faulkner’s.

            But these are not my words. They are manufactured for me from a question. I asked for in-text references, but the AI tool gave me few. I suppose that those who know AI better than I know that this practice is common. But it does not serve me well, for I wish to be producing original material and giving credit when the words are not mine. So I asked AI further: “Where did ChatGPT get the idea for the sentence: Together, these works invite the reader to inhabit dissonance rather than resolve it—a testament to narrative tension’s capacity to illuminate human complexity.”

AI responded that it had looked at the two texts, then:  “ I [AI is referring to itself in first person] crafted a summary sentence that captures a common thread: both texts resist easy resolution and instead use narrative tension to expose human complexity.

So, that sentence is original critical commentary, not something taken from Byatt, Faulkner, or a critic.

👉 If you need to use it in academic work, you should frame it as your own analysis (no citation required), but you can support it with citations to Byatt’s and Faulkner’s texts (or to critics) to show evidence for the claim.”

            The pertinent information here is that AI claims that I “should frame it as” my “own analysis (no citation required).” I am uneasy about this response because the sentence, as wonderful as it is, is not my sentence. Yet AI says I may offer it as my own.

            The themes of Angels & Insects, which I have started comments on in this blog, and The Wild Palms, which I shall continue in future posts, concern the ethics of symbols. Byatt uses symbols from Victorian British society to show a juxtaposition of propriety and wild behavior, paradoxes in which ethics of human behavior are internalized and questioned. Showing this theme in dual format is significant to a reader because, for one thing, the reader is immediately asked to juxtapose narratives, to invent reasons why the stories might be put side by side or spliced together. Reading these narratives, glorifying the duality of comparison, becomes a meaningful and purposeful experience.

 

            [I will continue with more AI and more of The Wild Palms in a second part of this blog.]

 

_______

Works Cited

Byatt, A. S. Angels & Insects: Two Novellas. Vintage, 1992.
Faulkner, William. The Wild Palms. New York:  Modern Library, 1939.

The AI asked for on 5/9/2025 by Nick Harris through ChatGPT was: “500 word comparison of the two sections of Angels and Insects A.S. Byatt and William Faulkner's The Wild Palms”

 

 

           

Nick Harris

Blog 8/8/2025

 

“Young Goodman Brown” enters the Wrestling Arena: Barthes and Hawthorne on the Nature of Good and Evil

In the story “Young Goodman Brown,” Nathaniel Hawthorne critiques both the hypocrisy within Puritan society and the peril of viewing morality as a strict, black-and-white universal. When peering through the lens of the Roland Barthes essay “Wrestling,” the reader of “Young Goodman Brown” understands more clearly the dichotomy of perspective within the story. “Wrestling,” a comment on the artistry of popular cultural constructs in the light of immediate absolutes, betrays Hawthorne’s wrestling of black and white, right and wrong. Readers must question a Puritanical notion of Good, as represented by the “Young Goodman” of Hawthorne’s story, when he confronts its necessary opposite.

A Barthes view, in the realm of the wrestling metaphor, brings to each moment of the story a step in the wrestling match that Goodman Brown has in his contemplation of the world of good and its relation to the world of evil.  Goodman Brown, while journeying through the forest, meets the old woman who taught him the catechism, Goody Cloyse – only she now exclaims the moaning of a witch that has lost her broomstick (Hawthorne 280). He encounters his minister and a deacon on horseback, late for a meeting in the dark forest, presumably with the devil (282). Eventually he encounters a multitude of worshipers of the Devil, including his wife, Faith—whose name he has symbolically used as his grounding against the dark forces, but who he now sees to be in the throes of the Dark Figure who presides over the service: “…ye had hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are you undeceived! Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness” (287). Goodman Brown escapes from this unholy meeting, but only to become, for the rest of his days, “A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man” (288). Each of the steps he takes along the way in the dark forest shows an immediacy of event, as in the throes of wrestlers Barthes wrestling ring. Goodman Brown survives the match, but the experience has forever wounded him, forever disillusioned him.

I am bringing the very French thinking of Barthes, one which defies overall structure in lieu of the immediacy of events, into the American wrestling ring by using the Barthes lens on a classic American short story. This is not a haphazard pairing. Barthes writes that the wrestling match is “a spectacle of excess” in which each gesture carries “a precise meaning, like those of the ancient theatre” (Barthes 17). In “Young Goodman Brown,” the forest is not a realistic space but a symbolic one; the journey through the forest conveys and heightens moral extremes, much the same as in Barthes wrestling arena.  For Barthes, the outcome of the wrestling match is not important; what matters is the clarity of the roles and the satisfaction of the moral drama. “What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself” (Barthes 19). Therefore, the fact that Goodman Brown’s outcome is disillusionment does not dissuade the reader from feeling fulfilled. Though  catharsis is not exactly the sigh of relief that Barthes wishes, the process of experiencing, moment by moment, the wrestling match soothes the readers need for visceral enticement.

Barthes, to American readers, should not be unfamiliar. The American champion of Barthes’ popularist aesthetics, Susan Sontag, brought these French ideas into an American landscape replete with the dominance of structural thinking. Sontag did so first with her proclamation of an artistic interpretation that is “Against Interpretation.” In the essay of that title, along with many others such as her “Notes on Camp,” Sontag professes the insistence of the American aesthete to herald their unique ideas and not to follow the throng of structuralists who would claim to know what makes “greatness” in art. Many American academes refused this call to uniqueness at the time that Sontag presented it (the 1960s), holding on to a traditional idea that structure creates a distinguishing factor for what is artistic and what is not. (For example, the writings of Annie Dillard are replete with this insistence that “the formal relationship among parts is the essential value of all works of art [Living with Fiction  34] -- but Dillard is far from alone).

A Barthes interpretation of “Young Goodman Brown” shows how literature can directly address the question of ethics. The young “Good” man of the story continually addresses head on the “Good” people of his life and finds that they have masks of evil laying behind them. In Goodman Brown’s case, the evil is devil-centered, as befits his Puritanical upbringing. But this juxtaposition of good with evil makes him question the ethics that he has heretofore consistently believed. The deliberation of these ethics, though causing an ironic depression within the protagonist, forms the theme of the story and the impetus for readers to engage with it. The creation of the discipline of “ethics and literature” thus becomes one of the foundational reasons for reading literature, purposes that students and other readers of literature are continually questioning.

---

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “Wrestling.” Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, 1972, pp. 15–25.

Dillard, Annie. Living by Fiction. New York:  Harper & Row, 1982.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Young Goodman Brown,” 1835. Reprinted in Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches. Library of American # 2. 1982, pp.276-289.

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

The image is AI generated from Google Gemini by Nick Harris 8/7/2025 using the prompt "Young Goodman Brown wlaking in forest, realistic trees and fog, small red eyes looking on from behind tree"

Top of Form

 

Charles Lamb, 1775-1834

Nick Harris

blog 07-16-2025

Lamb's Two Presentations of Poetry

 

Charles Lamb presents a relationship he has noticed in reviews of his day, two centuries after the first performances of Shakespeare’s plays, which create a relationship between the texts of those plays, the poetry that is, and the celebrated performers of the plays. He calls this relationship of actor to text, “the introduction of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us of the saddest realities” (313). The poetry, Lamb is surprised to find, is as much a product of its sound and presentation as it is of its text and idea.

Lamb reminds us of a basic fact about poetry that was inherent from its creation in the folk life of the first poetry collections. We can readily interpret this duality of poetic intention in the collections made by the Japanese monk Dogen in medieval Japan (information given in the work of Steven Heine, such as 1997.) Dogen collected both sound pieces, haiku, meant as sound pieces or performances, as well as pieces meant for pure thought, such as koans, small parables told in a form that blended poetics with prosody – prose poems that present a paradoxical idea to a philosophical initiate. Heine, through the study of Dogen, shows that the purpose of poetry has a two-fold character, sound oriented and idea oriented.

Lamb, in his realization of the actor’s role in the validity of Shakespeare, finds that this same two-fold purpose is present in the poetry of the Western world, at least inasmuch as it coincides with drama in verse. Lamb’s purpose, in his essay, is to speak to inherent artistry in an attempt to define what that term – inherent artistry – means. In Lamb’s words, he searches for “what connection that absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man, which a great dramatic poet possesses, has with those low tricks of the eye and the ear, which a player…can easily compass” (314).

The two-fold nature of poetry shown in juxtaposed circumstances such as Dogen and Shakespeare, lends a validity to the aesthetics of prose-poems as an equal artistry to poems meant to be heard, complete with their proficiency in meter and sound. Lamb further eschews the commonplace practice of his day to subordinate the idea-orientation of a poem through a heralding of its memorization and performance: “I confess myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning ‘To be, or not to be,’ or to tell whether it be good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a perfect dead member” (315-316).To Lamb, the idea behind the “To be or not to be” poem is lost to the dominance of its performance quotient. This trend of his society towards the reception of Shakespeare ignores the reality of the excellence of Shakespeare’s poems, poems full of the aesthetic beauty of idea.

Today, we continue to define what the term “inherent artistry” means. By looking to Lamb, as well as to Dogen and other folk-based collectors or the earliest written poetic fragments, we can go beyond the structuralist model that defines performance and modernism, even in its surrealist aspects. We can look to the idea of the words and define the poem by that idea rather than simply a collection of beats and afterbeats and subjectively beautiful melodies.

__________

References

Heine, Steven. “Putting the `fox’ Back in the `wild Fox Koan’: The Intersection of Philosophical and Popular.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 56, no. 2, Dec. 1996, p. 257. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2307/2719401. p. 258.

Lamb, Charles. “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare [sic].” English Essays from Sir Philip Sydney to  Macauley. The Harvard Classics. Vol. 27. New York: Collier & Son 1910. 311-331.

 

 

 

Emotion, Ethics, and Aesthetic Judgment: Reading Literature Through the Lens of Nussbaum, Barthes, and Sontag

Aesthetes such as Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag proclaim the immediate response of emotion  of emotion as an aesthetic reality; this reality reflects the role of emotion as an aesthetic value judgment, a sense of ethics. This convergence of ethics and aesthetics, an aesthetics that betrays emotions, lies at the heart of Martha C. Nussbaum’s assertion in Upheavals of Thought that emotions are “intelligent responses to the perception of value” (Upheavals 1). Thus Nussbaum, beginning her writing in the nineteen-eighties, reflects the model of “against interpretation” that Barthes and Sontag developed in the nineteen-sixties as an argument for the evolution away from structural consideration in aesthetics. For Nussbaum, literature, as one of many artistic endeavors including music and visual arts, does not merely entertain or stimulate emotion—it provides a substantial method of the development of ethics. Literary characters have both emotional and moral responses, and the same is true of readers.

The emotional intensity found in many passionate literary characters not only shows a sense of aesthetics but also reflects deeper truths about human values., including ethical values. Nussbaum argues that emotions are cognitive and include ethical values, a consideration that she points out is as old as Aristotle. Emotions and ethics reveal what we care about and how we understand our place in the world. In this light, a character’s emotional response becomes an ethical issue, shaped by their social context and moral understanding.

One such ethical dimension is Nussbaum’s concern with the objectification of women in literature. In her essay “Objectification,” she presents the compelling idea that women can sometimes reclaim power through a self-conceived objectification. This duality—seeing oneself as both subject and object—can allow a unique moral self to emerge. Nussbaum illustrates this through D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where Lady Chatterley’s self-awareness marks a type of moral agency through self-objectification (“Objectification” 213–39). Lady Chatterley’s act of reclaiming one’s narrative, even in the context of a traditionally objectifying society, intertwines ethical judgments with aesthetic representations and does so with a sense of a new awakening.

This same pattern of ethical reevaluation extends beyond gender to colonial critique. In her essay “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible,” Nussbaum turns her attention to literary portrayals of colonial societies—often depicted as heroic or civilizing—and reveals them instead as ethically problematic (“Finely Aware”). The traditional narrative valorizes colonial figures, but a deeper reading, informed by emotion and ethics, reveals traditional figures of patriarchal colonization as “monstrous villains.” The objectified subject—often a colonized character—must wrestle with an imposed identity in a bid for self-determination. The reader, too, becomes involved, forced to confront their own stance on objectification and agency. The redear creates both an ethical and an aesthetic response to the text through the power of emotional response.

This confluence of response—visceral and moral—is central to how Roland Barthes understands the aesthetic experience. In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes writes, “Does writing in pleasure guarantee my reader’s pleasure? Not at all… [But there is] a possibility of a dialectics of desire, of an unpredictability of bliss” (Barthes, Pleasure 4). While Barthes stops short of overtly linking ethics with aesthetics, his notion of a “dialectics of desire” suggests an overlapping concern with the complexity of response. Emotional and aesthetic pleasure is not neutral, especially when the text confronts readers with depictions of objectification, identity, or power.

Nussbaum’s moral philosophy, linked to an emotional/aesthetic response, corresponds to Barthes’ reader’s search for pleasure in the text, and his student Susan Sontag’s insistence that immediate experience be considered in determining meaning. In her essay “Against Interpretation,” Sontag challenges readers to appreciate culture and literature with immediacy and sensual responsiveness. Her critique of the modernist overreliance on interpretation invites a return to the experience of art itself (Sontag 95–104). For Sontag, aesthetic pleasure need not be subordinated to meaning; it is a mode of understanding in its own right. Nussbaum shows how this consideration links to a more traditional Aristotlean view of ethics and emotions.

Barthes’s earlier work, Mythologies, provides the intellectual bridge between mass culture and narrative myths. His deconstruction of French cultural products of the 1950s paves the way for the American interpretive revolutions of the 1960s such as those of Sontag. While the emotionally charged novels of Hardy or Lawrence may seem a far cry from the polished surfaces of French advertisements or Warhol’s factory images, Barthes’s theories still enable us to approach all text, literary or popular, with a layered sensibility. As he writes in “In the Ring,” myths mask ideology through aesthetic gloss, which readers must work to uncover (Barthes, Mythologies 11–20). By applying Barthes’s insights to traditional literature, contemporary readers can expand their approach to even the most emotionally intense passages with a refined ethical lens.  

Nussbaum calls for such an exploration in the dramas of classical antiquity and the modernist novels of Henry James, among others. She makes her individual viewpoints on the links between art and ethics a central part of her explanation of emotional response. In doing so, Nussbaum paves the way for the further use of the Barthes/Sontag aesthetic in the interpretation of all literatures. In the viewpoints of Barthes, Sontag, and Nussbaum, literature becomes not merely a mirror of life, but a crucible in which the reader's values are tested and transformed.

---

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “In the Ring.” Mythologies. (1957) Translated by Richard Howard and Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, 2012, pp. 11–20.

---. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975.

Nussbaum, Martha C. “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible.” Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford University Press, 1990.

---. "Introduction." Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 1–16.

---. “Objectification.” Sex and Social Justice, Oxford University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, pp. 213–239. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com.proxy.myunion.edu/lib/tui-ebooks/detail.action?docID=272685.

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

 

Nick Harris

Blog 7-3-2025

 

 

Examples of the Pleasure of the Text in Hardy’s Jude

The only method to interpreting a scene from Hardy is to do so with an interpreter’s lens. To do otherwise is foolhardy (fool-Hardy) guesswork at best. Barthes says as much with a load of double negatives. “The pleasure of the text…never denies anything: ‘I shall look away, that will henceforth be my sole negation” (3). In his table of contents Barthes calls this phrase his “Affirmation.” The affirmative betrays itself only through negation, much like light needs dark to achieve its definition. The reader needs the right to look away in order to affirm an interpretation of the text, a pleasure of the text.

Hardy’s description of Jude’s first meeting of the woman Arrabella Donn, who would become his wife, is an affirmation of pleasure, or I think most readers would read it as such.

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that till this moment Jude had never

looked at a woman to consider her as such, but had vaguely regarded the

sex as beings outside his life and purposes. He gazed from her eyes to her

mouth, thence to her bosom, and to her full round naked arms, wet, mottled

with the chill of the water, and firm as marble.

“What a nice-looking girl you are!” he murmured, though the words

had not been necessary to express his sense of her magnetism.

                                                                                    Part 1. Chapter VI. pars 49-50

 

The positive nature of this passage comes apart in the subsequent chapters as Arrabella marries and abandons Jude. Those moments carry with them an immediacy of knowledge of heartbreak at the unattainable, something that Jude keeps experiencing. The reader experiences the heartbreak along with Jude as the passages flow by. The story takes many turns. Sue Bridehead comes along with her own brand of positivity. Jude feels the affirmation in the instance of each moment with her. But Hardy’s explanation of the nature of fate as the irony plays with him makes the reader feel Jude’s pain as each tragedy goes by on the page.

 

Strange that his first aspiration—towards academical proficiency—

had been checked by a woman, and that his second aspiration—

towards apostleship—had also been checked by a woman. “Is it,” he said,

“that the women are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under

which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and

springs to noose and hold back those who want to progress?”

                                                                                                Part 4. Chapter III. par 6

 

These musings on his professional situation in relation to his emotional life betray Jude’s sensitivity to life’s tragedies. He attempts to make a black-and-white sense of cause and effect based on sexual impulses in regard to what he sees as the magnificence of the mind. Many tragedies lie here, including a misunderstanding of women as individuals, something the reader would think Jude would have a better grasp on having been in a relationship with Sue.

But these tragedies are small in relation to what comes later. The later tragedies involving his children progressively wrench the emotions of the reader. Both Jude and Sue are in agony over the death of their children, a death caused by Jude and Arabella’s son who suicides. Upon the discovery of the bodies, both Jude and Sue react. “Jude had kept back his own grief on account of her; but he now broke down; and this stimulated Sue to efforts of sympathy which in some degree distracted her from her poignant self-reproach” (VI.II.par. 32). As for Sue:

She sobbed again. “Oh, oh my babies! They had done no harm! Why should

they have been taken away, and not I!”

There was another stillness—broken at last by two persons in conversation

somewhere without.

“They are talking about us, no doubt!” moaned Sue. “‘We are made a spectacle

unto the world, and to angels, and to men!’”

VI.II.pars. 37-39

 

These moments fall with a visceral pain to the reader. The emotion is immediate and full of sentiment, invoking Barthes’ “atopical” text which leaves the author’s intent behind (Barthes 29). Replacing it is the text of pleasure: “We read a text (of pleasure) the way a fly buzzes around a room: with sudden, deceptively decisive turns, fervent and futile” (31). The pain of Jude and Sue, with its sobs and stillness, its heartaches and grief, hit the reader with an immediate empathy.

In the world of Barthes, the reader endures the ironies of the author without acknowledging them except in hindsight. In the immediate moment, the reader is the fool shunned by the expectations of society (3). He/she must have a singular interpretation of the text, his/her own pleasure of the text, first and foremost. The reader defines her/his individuality only through acknowledgement of this incongruity, an acknowledgement that crowds the reader’s mind in what Barthes calls “Babel” (4).

In the examples of Hardy that I have given, the reader approaches each page with this foolishness. The memories of prior pages linger, but the immediacy of the present page is first and foremost the emotional effect that the reader acknowledges. The umbrella effect of the accumulated pages read previously, as well as the anticipation of the arcs of emotion that are to come, creep in only after the immediate sensation of the pleasure of the text. The sensual positivity of Arrabella exists with its unique sensibility to each unique reader. The reader wonders at the ironies of how human sensation may or may not cause a failing of the lofty goals of the mind, in Jude’s world as well as the reader’s own. The tragic nature of the loss of children hits Jude and the reader hard well before the relationship of these tragedies to life’s journey comes into play in human feelings.

A novel as lengthy as Jude the Obscure can overwhelm a reader with its girth as much as its nineteenth-century sense of fatalism. However, the relevance to the workaday world of any reader, perhaps in any time period before or after our own, appears in the immediate impulses of the imagery, the sensual and visceral reaction of the reader, the pleasure given by the text. The reader discerns a defeat of  Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic, an ethic that Jude holds to vehemently throughout his life, in the confrontation with societal irony.

 

__________

References.

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

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

Nick Harris

Blog 6/12/2025

 

 

Art and Eros and Murdoch and Sontag

Popular aestheticism of the mid twentieth century produced both Susan Sontag and the philosophical writings of novelist Iris Murdoch. Murdoch's attacks Plato's philosophy (in the play Art and Eros for example) by saying that Plato is overly idealistic, placing “goodness” on a pedestal that cannot be broken by any artistic endeavor. Murdoch claims that art is worthwhile, so perhaps she is not as literally Platonic as one would think of a self-described Platonist. But to Murdoch art has its place as reflection and teaching to and by people so that they can know as much about themselves and humanity in general as they can through the perusal of artistry. Furthermore, this act of reflection through artistry is a necessity and not simply a pass-time of members of an idle society. She speaks of a high art, but also of the art of every day. Her search is for what is “good” art, but her ‘goodness’ directly addresses that of Plato and not the Aristotlean equation of ethics and beauty. (Such an equation of ethics and artistry would eventually come bursting forth in the 1980s in the Ethics and Literature debates of philosophers Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum and novelist Milan Kundera, among many others.)

Sontag also embraces high art, admittedly. “I never thought I was bridging the gap between high and low cultures. I am unquestioningly, without any ambiguity or irony, loyal to the canon of high culture in literature, music, and the visual and performing arts. But I've also enjoyed a lot of popular music” (“Against Postmodernism” Par. 5). Here we see that Sontag never admits that “popular” and “low culture” mean the same thing. She does not think so, even while embracing “high art.” Indeed, this message is the focus of her most popular essay “Thoughts on Camp”  from the Against Interpretation and Other Essays collection (her first volume of essays).
 

Sontag is a darling of the 1960s counter-revolution, even to the point of having a well-referenced interview in the iconic Rolling Stone magazine, that harbinger of pop cultural thinking. She, Murdoch, and Kundera produced best-selling novels, though I don’t think any of those works would be classified as “pop” by any cataloger. All of these aesthetes, whether thought of as elite or not, have left a collective influence that makes the individual in today’s society look at reading with a different perspective than the modernist. The modernist who would claim that only certain authors have achieved quality status based on certain prescribed criteria that lay outside of the individual. Sontag and Murdoch, among others, invite us to examine our desires as a part of the reading process, in line with what Roland Barthes would call The Pleasure of the Text.

 

I am a fan of modernism. I love to revel in the structural achievements of Faulkner and the sought-for simplicities of Hemingway. I love that in contrast a reader can find surprising simplicities in Faulkner and absolute chaos in a Fitzgerald narrative long thought of as concise. I love the way that these concerns with form open up texts to new insights that a more sensational reading, concerned only with the senses that is, appear less fulfilling.

But I also love the basic symbolism of Barthes admiration for wrestling as drama and the Sontag celebration of campiness, as well as Iris Murdoch’s middle-class characters searching for self-purpose in the midst of an artless world. And this journey, the post-modern one, leads us to recognize the way the thinking of society turns, against how formal interpretation can devalue the sensory experience. In these days of the necessity of communicating with artificial intelligence, the fear is especially great. Readers need to know how to be “against” interpretation, for the fear of all of us is that we will get lost in the artifice of thinking, the strategic pounding of the artificial combatting our intelligence, rather than the engaging of our senses and our intellect to find our purposes, our definitions.

__________

References.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Richard Miller, trans. Hill and Wang, 1975. 

Chan, Evans. “Against Postmodernism etcetera: A Conversation with Susan Sontag” Postmodern Culture,  2001.

Murdoch, Iris. Acostos:  Two Platonic Dialogues – “Art and Eros” and “Above the Gods” Penguin Books, 1988.

Sontag, Susan, 1933-2004. Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. New York :Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966.

Nick Harris

blog, 5/12/2025

 

Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale and Barthes’ Wrestling

Before likening Byatt to both a Neo-Platonism of her stoic contemporary novelists (if British literature of the late twentieth century reflects this obedience to logic, as I think it does) and the neo-Aristotelianism of the search for Ethics in Literature reminiscent of the work of Martha Nussbaum, but perhaps best used in the context of Byatt’s other contemporary novelist, Milan Kundera, we should liken the reading of Byatt to Sontag’s wrestling, to use the Barthes metaphor, with high culture and popular culture. The entire reading of A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale is an exercise in wrestling. The main character delves into the research of his subject with a juxtaposition of himself onto the object that ends up in a tussle both literal and figurative. The literal tussle is one of form; the author presents the novel in fragmented bits contrasting the biographer’s life with that of his object who is, in turn, a biographer himself with an object of his own. Therefore, a multi-layered swirl of activity arises from the very form of the novel. The wrestling of the points of view around each other lead to a confusion for the reader as to who is literally whirling by at any one time.

Barthes calls this interpretation of narrative as “wrestling” as the purest form of theater. He symbolizes the novel with the sport of wrestling in which emotions are always front and center, even though confounded in a whirlwind of excitement. “The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess” (Mythologies, 15). This spectacle is on display in The Biographer’s Tale from the beginning. “”I made my decision, abruptly, in the middle of one of Gareth Butcher’s famous theoretical seminars…. I’m not going to go on with this anymore” (The Biographer’s Tale, 3). Thus, our biographer abandons his academic pursuits in lieu of a more exciting premise. He pursues academic research, true, but on his own terms, on a vibrant and electric pursuit of the life of another biographer.

But in The Biographer’s Tale, Nansen’s intensity of purpose leads him increasingly into a crazed obsession with Gaston. As the chapters go by, he identifies more and more with the biographer is using as his subject. He finally becomes so disoriented in his cross-referencing of Gaston's quotations and his own notes on Gaston that he hallucinates.

 

"In the day I was trembling, calm and collected. At night I inhabited a phantasmagoria....Erik and Christophe stalked through my dreams, in many guises,

 all appalling...They pranced across the veldt in leopard skins and feathers, they

crawled out of the jungle in enormous penis-gourds carrying pathetic, shrinking, decomposing heads....Once I saw the crucified man Galton had seen—that is I saw

his vision, of a completely identifiable hanging figure in agony" (232-233).

 

He accepts the confusion of Galton's visions with his own. "It was of course my mind, the mind of Phineas G. Nanson that was doing all this work of redesign and recombination. [np] It wasn't nice" (BT 233). Through hallucination Nanson becomes one with his subject, Calton, and with Galton's subjects, Erik and Christophe, in a swirling miasma of grotesque imagery. The wrestling metaphor becomes increasingly pronounced as the images tumble and twirl around each other on the mat of Nanson’s imagination.

 

Nanson has left the academic world, but not the world of high culture. He seeks to find the beauty and the worthiness behind research of a complicated subject. Not only does he question the validity of his subject’s findings, but he also questions the validity of his own work, and it sends him reeling.

 

Byatt thus brings the reader not to resolution, but to further questioning of purpose, questioning of goodness, and questioning of the beauty of interpretation. As an author, she causes her reader to question his own role in the research, for the act of reading is a research tool in itself. Reading a Byatt novel becomes the at of playing a game of interpretation, a game that asks the reader about his/her own purpose, the search for beauty and the search for what is right and good, if readers can equate the concepts of validity and goodness.

 

__________

References

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. (1957) translated by Richard Howard and Annette Lavers, New York: Hill and Wang, 2012.

Byatt, A.S. The Biographer’s Tale. New York: Random House, 2000.

 

Nicholas Harris

Blog 04/07/2025