Some of the things I’m thinking about today, somewhat shakily explored:
When I'm reading something I really love, I often have this aching feeling of heartbreak as I approach the end. When I finish it, it will be done. Dead. I've lived with it, been alive with it while reading, but when I am finished it will return to an inert, sterile, reified deadness, and I will only be left with its ghost-self in my self. That I think about texts this way is a product of the sterilizing individuation, the suffocating authenticness and personalness of the Romantic Self, as experienced through the Modern Self. I am thinking of the work as only able to be legitimately generated (parented) by its Author, a completely unique, and completely self-contained Self.
But. If I attempt to ditch this idea – if I attempt to think of the work as not dead, not Individuated and reified, then I have the opportunity to be part of it as a sort of communal life. It's back to the fanfiction thing: without the Author, fanfiction treats its co-notative [more on this word in a moment] works as living, non-individual organisms.
This is possibly also part of the struggle for definition of the author and the Early Modern text. On the one hand, authors increasingly strive to make their texts dead. That is: they want the thing they have produced to be unalterable, forever associated with Ben Jonson The Poet or Barnabe Riche the Soldier. On the other hand, they're still operating within a culture in which dead texts are not the norm. Not only is there the freedom to rewrite or even simply copy – what we now call plagiarism but they simply called good sense – but there is also a terrific freedom with the names of poets themselves! Thomas Lodge subtitles his romance Rosalynde "Euphues Golden Legacy," completely happily associating it with a character (Lyly's Euphues) he neither created nor really deals with in his work. Because Euphues is a living text, Lodge is free to do that – and so were a host of others, Greene most notably, who did the same. And Greene himself was not only "plagiarized" and obsessively quoted, but, as we discussed in class today, several times associated with works he did not even write – a practice that only grew with his death.
And yet, Greene attempted, I argue, to forestall that process – to kill his works and cauterize the wound so that there would be no further living additions to them. He does so by writing a series of "repentance narratives" in which he renounces his former works (while claiming them as uniquely his, products of his personality and experience) and swears to write only holy texts from now on. But what follows are yet more stories of repentance and renunciation, rather than any actively theological works. I argued today that what Greene is doing is a sort of necromancy: he's killing himself off in order to raise himself from the dead as an immutable object – a commodity.
Here's the paradox, though: I'm trying to argue that by making oneself an alienable or alienated thing, a commodity, one stops change. And yet, by its very definition, an alienable object or a commodity is defined by exchange. It has to keep circulating or at least potentially circulating, or it isn't a commodity anymore. So I guess what I'm saying is that textual circulation is not at all the same thing I'm describing as "living textuality." That what we think of as very "selfy" works (like Jonson's, for instance) are actually alienated works, wherein the self, by being so very, very defined, becomes completely untranslatable to another person.
That's the deal, isn't it? To translate, to transmogrify or transmute is to graft, blend, miscegenate1. It creates a new, combined, textual life whereas before there were two separate ones – author and reader. And it makes the text, which "should" be a dead thing, into a living one. It makes an idol of the text. [oops! Risky and unsupported step! I lost a life-point there.]
So how can I apply this to the text that's (supposedly) the center of my paper for Renaissance Prose Fiction, Barnabe Riche His Farewell to the Military Profession? I think it's something like saying that Riche is attempting, in his hermpahroditizing, alternately seductive and violent, personal and communal, high-handed and low-brow prefaces (there are two) to make his book both living and dead. He wants to claim Authorship for himself. He has, after all, put the thing in print, and he refers conspicuously to his other publications, rather than letting anonymous eulogizers do it for him. But he also wants to put it in living relation to its audience, because that's the tradition he's working from. One of the striking things about the stories in Riche His Farewell is their complete generic freewheeling. They draw from existing stories of all types: folktales, Italian romance, biblical sources, classical stories – pretty much anywhere, anytime, any way. And they are in turn adapted freely – by Shakespeare, most notably. And I think Riche realizes that what he has here is a paradoxical situation. He both wants to claim sole ownership for his work and wants to write a book that makes sense in his popular culture. He doesn't take the step that Greene and Jonson take of staging his own death so he can resurrect himself as a commodity. Instead, he manages to make a text that straddles the line, that is both living and dead, both male and female, both popular and learned. And, moreover, he chooses the ultimate hybrid form for it: prose fiction, which is neither poetry nor drama nor sermon nor treatise nor jest-book nor fireside tale nor any number of other things, but all of the above.
Whoa. It got wild there. It also has gotten (once again) real long. Oh! I've just found an article that backs up a lot of my thinking about dead texts – it's legal terminology! Which fits right in with copyright being an essential part of this stuff: see, for once I seem to agree with Scalia. I had kind of forgotten about the theory of the constitution as a "living document," which I of course learned in Civics class. According to wikipedia, the term was pioneered by Howard McBain in his 1928 book, The Living Constitution: a consideration of the realities and legends of our fundamental law.
So only one final note – about the word connotation. I've realized suddenly, reading chapter 3 of P. David Marshall's Celebrity and Power that the connotation – or, really, co-notation – is the word I've been missing for describing a certain type of writing. It's the type that simultaneously writes itself for more than one canonical explanation. It's not entirely "living," but it is more multifarious than a very traditional, dead text. It's a text that sets itself up to be "co-noted," that is, read by at least two different reader-groups at the same time. I've needed the word to talk about things I thought were slash-ready intentionally, where the subtext was almost not sub, but co – like Xena.
1 An interesting fact. After I used this word, I went to the OED to look it up and, guess what? It didn't exist previous to 1863! Apparently, it was "coined by David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman in an anonymously published hoax pamphlet circulated in 1863, which implied that the American Republican party favoured mixed-race relationships." The quotation from said pamphlet reads "Miscegenation: The theory of the blending of the races applied to the American White Man and Negro." So this means, previous to 1863 there was no word to indicate precisely the mixing of "black" and "white" "races" (excess quotes to substitute for lengthy aside on constructions of race in US cultural history). The OED notes that "amalgamation" could be used with the same meaning, but again, it's a mid-nineteenth century usage – first recorded is 1837!
Of course, what was used previous to this were the various terms for products of mixed-race unions – mulatto, etc. ("Mulatto" is a properly 16th century term, although, again fascinatingly, it first seems to refer to people who have one white parent and one Native American parent. Is it called into use in English because of the ideological difficulties posed by encountering New World native peoples?) But that's different from the term for the act itself. There's something going on here about a solidification of a particular idea of race that I don't quite have a handle on.
There's also something very significant to do with the idea of mixing of contraries in the Renaissance. My usage of "miscegenated" to refer to texts that operate in living co-notation with their readers is anachronistic – and I think it indicates that I'm retroactively reading too much anxiety into this paradigm. What I'm dealing with when I look at a Renaissance text that I think is "living" or attempts to balance the "living" with the "dead" is a text that isn't exactly amalgamated but perhaps hermaphrodite. It's not that it represents an anxiety-provoking collusion of things that social constraint requires be separated. It's more that it is unplaceably both/and from its conception.
When I'm reading something I really love, I often have this aching feeling of heartbreak as I approach the end. When I finish it, it will be done. Dead. I've lived with it, been alive with it while reading, but when I am finished it will return to an inert, sterile, reified deadness, and I will only be left with its ghost-self in my self. That I think about texts this way is a product of the sterilizing individuation, the suffocating authenticness and personalness of the Romantic Self, as experienced through the Modern Self. I am thinking of the work as only able to be legitimately generated (parented) by its Author, a completely unique, and completely self-contained Self.
But. If I attempt to ditch this idea – if I attempt to think of the work as not dead, not Individuated and reified, then I have the opportunity to be part of it as a sort of communal life. It's back to the fanfiction thing: without the Author, fanfiction treats its co-notative [more on this word in a moment] works as living, non-individual organisms.
This is possibly also part of the struggle for definition of the author and the Early Modern text. On the one hand, authors increasingly strive to make their texts dead. That is: they want the thing they have produced to be unalterable, forever associated with Ben Jonson The Poet or Barnabe Riche the Soldier. On the other hand, they're still operating within a culture in which dead texts are not the norm. Not only is there the freedom to rewrite or even simply copy – what we now call plagiarism but they simply called good sense – but there is also a terrific freedom with the names of poets themselves! Thomas Lodge subtitles his romance Rosalynde "Euphues Golden Legacy," completely happily associating it with a character (Lyly's Euphues) he neither created nor really deals with in his work. Because Euphues is a living text, Lodge is free to do that – and so were a host of others, Greene most notably, who did the same. And Greene himself was not only "plagiarized" and obsessively quoted, but, as we discussed in class today, several times associated with works he did not even write – a practice that only grew with his death.
And yet, Greene attempted, I argue, to forestall that process – to kill his works and cauterize the wound so that there would be no further living additions to them. He does so by writing a series of "repentance narratives" in which he renounces his former works (while claiming them as uniquely his, products of his personality and experience) and swears to write only holy texts from now on. But what follows are yet more stories of repentance and renunciation, rather than any actively theological works. I argued today that what Greene is doing is a sort of necromancy: he's killing himself off in order to raise himself from the dead as an immutable object – a commodity.
Here's the paradox, though: I'm trying to argue that by making oneself an alienable or alienated thing, a commodity, one stops change. And yet, by its very definition, an alienable object or a commodity is defined by exchange. It has to keep circulating or at least potentially circulating, or it isn't a commodity anymore. So I guess what I'm saying is that textual circulation is not at all the same thing I'm describing as "living textuality." That what we think of as very "selfy" works (like Jonson's, for instance) are actually alienated works, wherein the self, by being so very, very defined, becomes completely untranslatable to another person.
That's the deal, isn't it? To translate, to transmogrify or transmute is to graft, blend, miscegenate1. It creates a new, combined, textual life whereas before there were two separate ones – author and reader. And it makes the text, which "should" be a dead thing, into a living one. It makes an idol of the text. [oops! Risky and unsupported step! I lost a life-point there.]
So how can I apply this to the text that's (supposedly) the center of my paper for Renaissance Prose Fiction, Barnabe Riche His Farewell to the Military Profession? I think it's something like saying that Riche is attempting, in his hermpahroditizing, alternately seductive and violent, personal and communal, high-handed and low-brow prefaces (there are two) to make his book both living and dead. He wants to claim Authorship for himself. He has, after all, put the thing in print, and he refers conspicuously to his other publications, rather than letting anonymous eulogizers do it for him. But he also wants to put it in living relation to its audience, because that's the tradition he's working from. One of the striking things about the stories in Riche His Farewell is their complete generic freewheeling. They draw from existing stories of all types: folktales, Italian romance, biblical sources, classical stories – pretty much anywhere, anytime, any way. And they are in turn adapted freely – by Shakespeare, most notably. And I think Riche realizes that what he has here is a paradoxical situation. He both wants to claim sole ownership for his work and wants to write a book that makes sense in his popular culture. He doesn't take the step that Greene and Jonson take of staging his own death so he can resurrect himself as a commodity. Instead, he manages to make a text that straddles the line, that is both living and dead, both male and female, both popular and learned. And, moreover, he chooses the ultimate hybrid form for it: prose fiction, which is neither poetry nor drama nor sermon nor treatise nor jest-book nor fireside tale nor any number of other things, but all of the above.
Whoa. It got wild there. It also has gotten (once again) real long. Oh! I've just found an article that backs up a lot of my thinking about dead texts – it's legal terminology! Which fits right in with copyright being an essential part of this stuff: see, for once I seem to agree with Scalia. I had kind of forgotten about the theory of the constitution as a "living document," which I of course learned in Civics class. According to wikipedia, the term was pioneered by Howard McBain in his 1928 book, The Living Constitution: a consideration of the realities and legends of our fundamental law.
So only one final note – about the word connotation. I've realized suddenly, reading chapter 3 of P. David Marshall's Celebrity and Power that the connotation – or, really, co-notation – is the word I've been missing for describing a certain type of writing. It's the type that simultaneously writes itself for more than one canonical explanation. It's not entirely "living," but it is more multifarious than a very traditional, dead text. It's a text that sets itself up to be "co-noted," that is, read by at least two different reader-groups at the same time. I've needed the word to talk about things I thought were slash-ready intentionally, where the subtext was almost not sub, but co – like Xena.
1 An interesting fact. After I used this word, I went to the OED to look it up and, guess what? It didn't exist previous to 1863! Apparently, it was "coined by David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman in an anonymously published hoax pamphlet circulated in 1863, which implied that the American Republican party favoured mixed-race relationships." The quotation from said pamphlet reads "Miscegenation: The theory of the blending of the races applied to the American White Man and Negro." So this means, previous to 1863 there was no word to indicate precisely the mixing of "black" and "white" "races" (excess quotes to substitute for lengthy aside on constructions of race in US cultural history). The OED notes that "amalgamation" could be used with the same meaning, but again, it's a mid-nineteenth century usage – first recorded is 1837!
Of course, what was used previous to this were the various terms for products of mixed-race unions – mulatto, etc. ("Mulatto" is a properly 16th century term, although, again fascinatingly, it first seems to refer to people who have one white parent and one Native American parent. Is it called into use in English because of the ideological difficulties posed by encountering New World native peoples?) But that's different from the term for the act itself. There's something going on here about a solidification of a particular idea of race that I don't quite have a handle on.
There's also something very significant to do with the idea of mixing of contraries in the Renaissance. My usage of "miscegenated" to refer to texts that operate in living co-notation with their readers is anachronistic – and I think it indicates that I'm retroactively reading too much anxiety into this paradigm. What I'm dealing with when I look at a Renaissance text that I think is "living" or attempts to balance the "living" with the "dead" is a text that isn't exactly amalgamated but perhaps hermaphrodite. It's not that it represents an anxiety-provoking collusion of things that social constraint requires be separated. It's more that it is unplaceably both/and from its conception.
Labels: audience, death/mourning/corpses, idolatry, reading, representation, writing
remind me to give you a couple of essays to read.
i've recently (in the past few years) been interested in the reactivation of texts, too. like raising the dead, or like litearture-as-The-Turn-of-The-Screw... we can talk more about this in person. btw, 1. how was last night? did you see CK drunk? and 2. come tomorrow.