Category Archives: Literary puzzles and arguments

August 23, 2012 · 4:36 pm

When is borrowing acceptable, and when is it unacceptable (and actionable) plagiarism?

The twentieth century and the early twenty-first have not been kind to the notion of borrowing from others in order to create one’s own work.  From Ezra Pound’s edict “Make it New” to the constant reiteration in critical and creative writing courses for students of the priniciple “just do your own work,” the modern (1899-1945) and contemporary (1945-present) eras have put a high premium on originality, that loaded term of terms.

Of course, Pound himself was a great borrower from much earlier works, which he imitated, borrowed from, referred to, and essentially canonized in the more acceptable (read:  non-anti-Semitic) of his Cantos.  So, Pound’s instruction to “make it new” was less an injunction to create ex nihilo, or like Athena’s “springing full-blown from the mind of Zeus,” than it was to revitalize literature by returning to past models and revamping them for modern use.  It’s just that in returning to past models, Pound went further back in time for his models, instead of basing his work on that which came immediately before him.

T. S. Eliot, who had his poetry sculptured and shaped by Pound in Pound’s character of literary patron and advisor, is known to have further muddied the waters of clarity by saying “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal” (from Philip Massinger).  Nevertheless, this statement is qualified by other things Eliot says, such as “[Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor” (from the essential essay for students even now, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”).  He also says “The great poet, in writing himself, writes his time” (from Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca).  Of course, to some extent writers who are very self-aware of their status like to issue shocking or startling remarks like Eliot’s first one quoted above.  But wait–take these three quotes together and with their sources, and I think things become a little clearer again, at least with reference to T. S. Eliot.  We might have considered anyway that Eliot was referring to writers like Shakespeare in the first quote above:  for, Shakespeare regularly stole plots and sometimes whole plays from others, improved upon them immeasurably, and set them in their forms for generations to come, because of his sheer poetic and dramatic greatness.  The problem is, this took place at a time when it was the norm for poets and playwrights to draw freely upon the works of others, both contemporary to their own times and from antiquity.  But our times have insisted upon originality as part of the essence of a truly great work, and upon innovation as a necessary rite of passage in the struggle to turn out a good and creditable work.  It’s no wonder that those people who are genuinely confused by the issue of plagiarism are so taken aback by what seem like competing sets of requirements.

And then, of course, there’s the issue of writing articles and books in the academy.  If you can still find recordings of the Harvard mathematician Tom Lehrer’s hilarious satirical songs anywhere (and let me not wander too far from my topic, but Lehrer is well worth hearing; he’s the John Stewart of his time, in the 1960’s), you’ll run across a lyric about Lobachevsky, a Russian mathematician who evidently wrote things without proper attribution that were at least highly imitative of what others had written.  Part of the lyric reads:  “Plagiarize.  Let no one else’s work evade your eyes.  Remember why the good Lord made your eyes.  So don’t shade your eyes, but plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize–only be sure always to call it, please–research.”  For another quote of this ilk, there’s Wilson Mizner’s “Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research.”  These quotes are not meant to make students who might read my column cynical; rather they’re intended as an airing of the issues involved.  The best advice in the academic life is:  however much you may borrow, either credit the work outright and get consent, or if it’s an occasion between friends where no credit is needed, check that out with the friend or let them see it to make sure.  You can always credit it privately and impersonally for them if they are shy of attention, or can perhaps say something like “as a friend noted some time ago” or variations on the same.  If you’re working for credit in a class rather than writing a manuscript, let your instructor know that you are honest by crediting quotes as you are taught.  The basic rule is: be modest.  Don’t take credit for something which you have found somewhere else, and if it turns out especially that the other fellow or gal beat you to the punch and said what was just on the tip of your tongue (infelicitous mixing of metaphors here, but you get my point), give them credit anyway:  they historically said it before you did, even if the idea is a brand new one which just occurred to you.  If you find out too late to credit it that it was said by someone else first (after you publish or turn in an essay for example), tidy up behind yourself by mentioning (in any new edition or to your teacher) that you were previously unaware of the concurrence of remarks, and give the other person a footnote or mention.  Contrary to what you may believe, it makes you look better rather than worse.

To return just for a moment to Shakespeare and one of the reasons he got by with his extensive borrowings without credit (aside from the traditions of his time, that is) let’s look at the poet John Milton for a quote:  “For such kind of borrowing as this, if it be not bettered by the borrower, among good authors is accounted Plagiarè” (Eikonoklastes).  There have been a number of studies written, only a few of which I’ve even seen or had presented to my attention by my own teachers, that show how Shakespeare immensely bettered the other playwrights and poets he stole from.  So, in the traditions of his own time, in which it was essential to write upon some story that perhaps was well-known anyway, in the same fashion in which a realistic writer of our own time might use as inspiration a story which is covered by all the major news networks, Shakespeare “made the grade,” so to speak.

During the twentieth century also, the scholar and critic Julia Kristeva came along, with her idea of intertextuality, which is a way of referring to the intricate and intertwined relationships literary texts establish among themselves without recourse to authors’ intents.  As this is more a move to put consideration of what the authors’ intentions are out of the picture than an actual stance on plagiarism, it is a more theoretical issue.  It takes place after the fact of composition, however, not before the fact, so I’m leaving it out of account for now (and I’m being a bit lazy here–Julia Kristeva is a very challenging author to read, and I’ve only covered most of one of her books).  I’m just mentioning it because there is some tangential relationship to originality as a topic.

And what about all those columnists in the news in the last ten years who were fired for plagiarizing from other columnists or newspeople?  It’s tempting just to let Peter Anderson settle the issue.  He says, “Quotations are a columnist’s bullpen.  Stealing someone else’s words frequently spares the embarrassment of eating your own.”  Still, as we have seen, this doesn’t really settle the issue, because the columnists get fired anyway, and several of them have declared that the fault was unintentional.  What do we make of this?  Perhaps it would be generous in this discussion to remember the many times in which some of us literary wannabees copied out the words of others in our notebooks or on our computers because they seemed so strongly to chime in with what we ourselves wanted to say or felt.  I’ve certainly had times myself (in the days before personal computers) when I found thoughts scribbled in one of my writer’s notebooks, and said to myself complacently, “Boy, that’s really a good one.  I have to use that soon.”  And in the days before I started also to take the time to copy down the author’s name and possibly the source of the quote as well, I misremembered more than once and assumed the thought was mine, only to have a friend or teacher to whom I showed the idea furrow his or her brow a moment and say something like “That sounds like so-and-so.  Are you quoting or did you think of that yourself?”  It can happen, yes, which is why it’s a good idea always to note down under your quote where it came from and the author, if you know.  It only takes a little more effort, but more effort is what being a good writer is about.  And if it’s just a coincidence, look up the author anyway, and see how they developed their thought that was similar to your own.  This is what truly changes your work from plagiarism to research, which all kidding aside is a noble endeavor.  And there’s no rule that says you have to write only about your own little mud puddle or corner of the world to stay original; most good writers are either knowledgeable already upon some subject they want to write about or do actual research on it (and either directly or indirectly credit their sources).

My solution in fiction, which would not suit everybody, is to have a character mention the name of the author he or she is quoting, or initiate a literary discussion which makes it obvious what issues are being discussed.  In poetry, I give notes to my poems and let my readers know whom I was thinking of when I wrote, if anyone.  Most of all, I try to “just do my own work.”  And I put my whole heart into it, because what everyone on this planet has to say, despite all the many human things we share and the human experiences which join us one to the other, makes them as individual as myriad snowflakes, each one original and different.  Putting your whole heart into being your plot, being your characters, being your style, et cetera, and relying likewise on the best models you can find and the best literary advice is advancing a large step ahead on the path towards real originality.

P.S.  My own investigation of and meditation upon this topic was occasioned by dialogues I’ve had with the blogger at http://thelivingnotebook.wordpress.com/ .  By and large I think we agree, though he is advocating a freer system of borrowing than I feel comfortable with.  I rather suspect that he’s more interested in spurring creativity in others by his remarks than he is in actually encouraging people to steal freely.  He’s a little like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in that he knows enough about what he’s talking about to know just how far he can go without seeming unoriginal (and of course, he turns out a very original column, which I’ve much enjoyed).

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August 20, 2012 · 7:19 pm

“What beck’ning ghost, along the moonlight shade/Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?”–Alexander Pope

There is a corollary to the proposition that there’s more rejoicing over the return of a prodigal son than there is over the continuing excellence of a constant one; that corollary is that it’s worse when a potentially good man goes bad than it is when a bad man continues what he’s doing.  In Kingsley Amis’s book The Green Man, we get a double reflection of this second notion, when we not only meet up with a modern day man of relaxed moral fiber, but also with the ghost of a minister turned evil revenant who confronts him.

In an English tradition descended from the ancient fear of nature and natural forces–for our worship of nature is an entirely different tradition, though equally ancient, which even so recognizes the power of the earth–the “green man” is a sort of roving spirit, sometimes neither good nor ill, sometimes outright malevolent, and sometimes given to testing mankind, as in the medieval tale “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” which many of you will already have read and I hope enjoyed in a literature class.  In Amis’s book, the man of easy morals is an innkeeper named Maurice Allington, who is situated with his wife, father, and daughter in an old inn in Hertsfordshire, England.  Though the elemental force is so strong that there’s almost no bargaining with it, Maurice learns from the evil spectre of the minister’s ghost and a mysterious young man, and makes some sacrifices on his way to learning what evil and good may actually be about.

The book relies on a combination of fear and hilarity, the deep-seated source of a certain intensified response from the reader in both directions.  The book is not unlike other chilling literary/stage/movie experiences I can think of:  for example, the 70’s stage show “Dracula,” with its equally hysteria-inducing combination of the two otherwise opposed tendencies.  We alternately thrill with horror and gasp, then laugh out loud.  A movie experience utilizing this same formula was “An American Werewolf in London,” which used the by now reliable combination of slapstick, horror, satire, and cultural and occult lore that Amis’s book uses.  But Amis’s book preceded these dramatic offerings in time; it was first published in 1969, though also published in the U.S. by an American publisher in 1986.

So, just what are Maurice Allington’s problems?  Firstly, he is dissatisfied with his marriage to his wife, Joyce, and wants to bed the lovely Diana, wife of his best friend, the doctor Jack Maybury.  His father, who is not in the best of health, lives with his family and Maurice is unsettled by him, too.  He also has a massive drinking problem, as his concerned family members and friends constantly remind him.  And he has to decide if it’s his drinking which is causing the most unusual of his problems:  that is, he sees spirits.  He sees spirits and experiences psychic phenomena far beyond the limit of the simple antique ghost tale which is retailed by him to his customers at the inn to pique their interest.  Of course the book deliberately, artfully, and effectively leaves it unclear for the most part as to whether these are genuine manifestations, a result of the door between worlds suddenly being opened, or whether Maurice is actually becoming mentally unhinged and debilitated by the liquor and his own lack of balance alone.  The only being who seems to confirm the sightings he himself experiences is the cat, Victor, who in the time-honored tradition of cats with psychic abilities arches his back, hisses and spits, or runs out of the room and hides when the ghosts come to visit.

Maurice sees not only the sinful and spirit-summoning minister from the past, but also what turns out to have been the minister’s (Underhill’s) wife; an incarnation of a young man who acts something like a modern version of Christ but something more like a modern version of Satan; an apparent manifestation of a twittering bird which makes him wonder if he has delirium tremens; and a large clump of walking devastation of foliage which reads like one of J. R. R. Tolkien’s ents on steroids:  this last is the so-called “green man.”

The dapper young man without a name helps orient Maurice to the experiences he’s undergoing, though the orientation isn’t one conducive to dwelling safely and well in this world.  Others try to help him recoup his losses, such as his doctor friend Jack Maybury, whose wife Maurice is trying to bed on the sly.  His own wife, Joyce, and his son Nick and Nick’s girlfriend are all equally concerned, and are trying in their various ways to help Maurice come to terms with what they mostly regard as a fiction of his overwrought imagination.  His young daughter Amy is in danger of becoming a pawn in the game he is playing with his otherworldly experiences and foes.  Finally, he has trouble keeping track of the time, time having no meaning when he’s conversing with the elegant young man, because his watch and clocks no longer aid him in determining how time is passing when they are speaking to one another.  Worst of all, perhaps, is his difficulty in coordinating daily reality with the supernatural things which are happening to him (in his head?).

For Henry James readers who have encountered some of the criticism written about James’s story “The Turn of the Screw,” this double-barrelled treatment of suspicious happenings, when a character is proclaimed by different critics to be 1) suffering under a real visitation from the other world or 2) suffering from an overactive imagination, a drinking problem, a psychological disorder, et cetera, will be familiar.  James is in fact mentioned in The Green Man.  And though I’m not going to reveal the ending of the book (with its unexpected romantic alliance), I can safely tell you without ruining the reading experience that even up to the very end the suspenseful questions of exactly what happened remain.  After all, part of the time we may be in the mind of a crazy drunk (or is he in legitimate danger of losing his soul?  Or has he squeaked “out from under” losing his soul?).  This is a book well worth the occasional difficulty with theological terminology and concepts; in fact, it is a book that I think Henry James himself would’ve been proud, in our time, to have written.

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August 2, 2012 · 4:06 pm

“Culture is not life in its entirety, but just the moment of security, strength, and clarity.”–Jose Ortega y Gasset

Today I’d like to air a few connected topics, such as the difference between what it is to love and what to own (and when there isn’t a difference); the implications of calling someone else a “primitive,” or a “savage” purely by force of where they come from in the world or what group they belong to; and the connection between my previous two topics.  This will in all likelihood be a sketchier post than usual, because these topics have been written upon by others with so much greater depth and skill that all I can do is point the way to writings other than my own meager post.

Perhaps it would be best to start with my first extensive intellectual exposure to one topic, which was an extremely readable and well-written book by Professor Victor Li entitled The Neo-Primitivist Turn:  Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity.  Alterity means something like “otherness,” as when we experience contact with someone from a society which we at least perceive to be unlike our own.  “Culture” is another term sometimes used to discuss perceived differences; and “‘modernity’ as a conceptual term can be shown to harbour a primitivist logic as well” (p. 153).  In the course of his thorough exploration of these terms, Li discusses the works of other theorists on the topics involved.  Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Marianna Torgovnick, Marshall Sahlins, and Jürgen Habermas are treated in some detail.  But don’t let me scare you away with fears that this discussion is hard to follow:  Li is not only a scholar’s scholar, he is a writer’s writer, and discusses these topics in a manner to be understood by someone who has only previously encountered the above list of names on a syllabus, or perhaps some of them not at all.  Let’s hear Li in some of his own words, from his “Preface”:  “Knowing as we do today that there have never existed peoples untouched by history, why do we continue to believe that such groups of people, by-passed by modern history, still exist?  Why do we still believe in the idea of the primitive when the term ‘primitive’ itself has been increasingly withdrawn from circulation?  Why still harp on the primitive when we have been made aware that primitive society was an invention of the modern West?….We will no doubt notice, especially in these politically enlightened times, that the word ‘primitive’ does not appear in the description.  Instead, acceptable terms like ‘individual cultures,’ ‘ethnic groups,’ or ‘living tribes’ are used….[These] may just be euphemisms inasmuch as they are still employed as concepts opposed, as ‘primitive’ once was, to a globalizing modernity” (p. vii).  The terms of Li’s book are thus fairly easily inaugurated for discussion, and space requires that I leave you to discover on your own Li’s distinctive ability to follow all the ins and outs of his work.  He uncomplicates as much as possible such an innately involved discussion.  Lest we miss the point, however, he comments with wit and insight in the conclusion of his book on Will Self’s short story “Understanding the Ur-Bororo,” in which a fictional tribe is said to identify themselves as ‘”The People Who You Wouldn’t Like to be Cornered by at a Party” (this story can be found in Will Self’s collection of short stories The Quantity Theory of Insanity Together With Five Supporting Propositions).  In contrast with the usual fictions structured around outlandish and/or “colorful” and/or particularly “wise” tribes, the story about the Ur-Bororos is that not only are they a “boring” tribe, but “[t]hey also view themselves as boring.”  They are thus ultimately unsatisfying to theorizing.  Nevertheless, Li sees in Self’s story also the point that though the story “dispels the myth of primitivism…the reader still takes away from the story a sense of longing for the horizon of difference represented by the primitive” (p. 219).  This analysis of the story occurs in Li’s “Conclusion,” which has the accurately pointed sub-title “‘Theorizing always needs a Savage,'” a remark which Li cites as coming from Michel de Certeau.

With this excellent book in the back of my mind, I recently read Clarice Lispector’s short story “The Smallest Woman in the World,” in which an explorer actually locates a person, supposedly isolated by all but her immediate surroundings, from the rest of the world.  We are told that the tribe she belongs to will soon be exterminated:  “Besides disease, the deadly effluvium of the water, insufficient food, and ranging beasts, the great threat to the Likoualas are the savage Bahundes….The Bahundes hunt them….they catch them in nets and eat them.”  The voice of the story is a primitivizing one, which compares the littlest woman (who is pregnant) to a “monkey,” and says “Little Flower [a name given her by the explorer who finds her] scratched herself where no one scratches.”  Of her picture in the Sunday Papers in several countries, we are told “She looked like a dog.”  But intertwined with this first voice, in the complexity of the narrative we soon hear a new voice, making comments about love, both about what so-called civilized people know of it and what Little Flower knows of it.  Some of the readers of the Sunday tabloids flatly refuse to extend empathy when they look at her; others picture only how she would fit into their own society for their own use, as when they imagine her waiting at table, or being a “toy” for the children.  One woman almost honestly considers “the malignity of our desire for happiness,” and “the cruel necessity of loving.”  She thinks of her child who wants Little Flower as a toy as “clever,” “dangerous,” and “ferociously…need[ing] to play”; yet, she loves him “obstinately,” and though she knows her thoughts about her child will haunt her, she decided to buy him a new suit.  In a switch back to the jungle picture, we see Little Flower rejoicing internally and falling in love with the strange looking white man, but not in any “me Tarzan, you Jane” fashion.  Rather, she is as much in love with his boots and his ring as she is with him, and the source of her joy is because she hasn’t been eaten.  “Not to be devoured is the most perfect feeling.  Not to be devoured is the secret goal of a whole life….one might even say [she felt] ‘profound love,’ since, having no other resources, she was reduced to profundity.”  She answer the explorer that it is “very nice to have a tree of her own to live in….because it is good to own, good to own, good to own.”  Here we see both the similarity and the difference between the two “different” cultures.  Both want to own, though because her difficulty of surviving is so great, Little Flower thinks of a tree home as something to own.  She is as greedy in her desire “to own” as the “cultivated” societies are to own her, whether by the invasion of her privacy, the imagining of her as a toy or servant, or the simple turning away from their common humanity.  Yet both share the same desire.  And the story makes it clear:  so often, when we think we love, we actually want to own a person or an experience, or what we think they symbolize.  These are only summary points of a really quite gifted short story, which has to be read to be fully appreciated.  I did, however, want to select not only short stories today but some intellectual background for them which if you take it slowly and carefully is just as good reading, and is very illuminating on its own.

So, to achieving a world of better understanding of each other no matter where we come from, and in favor of doing as little careless theorizing as we can, this is my post for today.  I hope you will enjoy reading these texts as much as I did.  shadowoperator

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August 1, 2012 · 3:10 pm

Albert Camus and the Existential Dilemma, in Two Texts

I recently decided to re-read Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which I first read years ago for a philosophy course, and which made little sense to me then because I had such difficulty identifying with the main character, Meursault.  It’s a classic of existential fiction, however, so this time I persisted in my efforts to understand.  I read the excellent 1988 translation of Matthew Ward, who translated the book following American standards of speech and writing, which was better not because of any political chauvinism, but because Camus himself suggested at the time he wrote it that he was intent upon following the American or Hemingwayesque model of fiction writing.

I started out, as I usually do, by reading the book blurb, to see if I could recall highlights from my previous reading.  I nearly always do this even when I know what the books are about.  In this case, though, I felt the blurb was a bit incorrect.  In order to emphasize the sense of an existential experience which could happen to anyone, the blurb writer speaks of the story “of an ordinary man who unwittingly get drawn into a senseless murder….”  In this same paragraph, there’s also a quote from Camus about “the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.”

The fact is, however, Meursault is not exactly an ordinary man.  First of all, when the prosecutor at his trial accuses him of feeling no remorse for the murder he committed, he says of himself, “I would have liked to have tried explaining to him cordially, almost affectionately, that I had never been able to truly feel remorse for anything.”  This is chilling.  This is surely more of a sociopathic reaction than an “ordinary” one.  Also, he feels no regret for being party to a casual acquaintance’s abuse of the other’s girlfriend.  Yet by ordinary standards, he is implicated in this too.  So he’s not really ordinary in the accepted sense.  As well, unusual atmospheric conditions pertain to his case:  though we are aware from statistics that more violent crimes are committed during excruciatingly hot weather, in Meursault this reaches an extreme–as he thinks just before he commits the murder, the heat of the day and “the sun [were] just the same as [they] had been the day I’d buried Maman….”  This may be the one way in which Meursault is ordinary, i.e., that a death of a near relative is the first (and perhaps not just correlative but also causative) event in the sequence which ends with his execution.  Even in the plain, unvarnished prose of the book, we perhaps can see it as a key precipitating event to his reaching out to other people around him, one of whom, Raymond, is not a good friend for him to have.  Rather, because he is full of “gentle indifference,” as he later says, he suddenly is accessible when Raymond randomly reaches out to him.  Expressions or states of being or mind occurring over and over begin to carry the emotive force of the book; we read of “no way out” (an expression much like Sartre’s “huit clos,” often translated as “no exit”).  Also, there are matters of “chance,” and the “dizziness” in Meursault’s head which causes him to be so bothered by the heat.  He even ends up saying in court that it was “because of the sun” that he committed the murder.  One might propose to oneself to ask what the mother’s death in cooler weather would have produced:  the same “gentle indifference” and submission to “chance,” or ordinary mourning behavior, which others see as lacking in him and which lack they say indicated ahead of time his clearly criminal nature.

It is also not “inadvertently” exactly that he is drawn into the excessiveness of Raymond’s life, but unresistingly, as if he has no limits within him which could be recognized as moral waystations.  He says of himself at the trial at one point, “for the first time I realized that I was guilty.”  Therefore, though the terms of existential and absurdist fiction have been applied to The Stranger, there are also clear signs that these terms don’t mean the same thing as they come to mean rather more directly in Camus’s short story “The Guest,” from his 1957 book “Exile and the Kingdom.”

In “The Guest,” a teacher, clearly not sociopathic but intensely kind in his regard for other people, treats a soldier and the soldier’s Arab prisoner alike with humanity and brotherhood, only to be “absurdly” put in the position to be judged at fault both by the soldier’s regime and by the prisoner’s society.  This story has another “surprise” ending, so for the benefit of those who haven’t read it, I won’t say more of the plot.  Again, however, the physical setting is very evocative of locale and weather conditions, though in this story it is winter which prevails.  To get my point, i.e., how much more truly absurd the fate of the teacher may turn out to be than Meursault’s, one has only to compare the two of them.

The juncture where the two tales meet, however, is at the fulcrum of choice.  For the true existentialist position is that one has an amount of choice (more or less limited by pre-existing circumstances), and one is responsible for that choice.   And this is an observation which holds true in both stories, whether as in the first we see a near sociopath–whose main excuse is the heat of the day–or as in the second we witness a person practicing human kindness, tolerance, and understanding.  As I once was told by an excellent teacher, “You are free, so make your choice.”  We all have a few pre-existing conditions to cope with; what matters is what we do with what we’ve got.

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July 26, 2012 · 1:30 am

A great free website, some copyright terms, and irony (when is it ironic and when is it not?)

One thing at a time, and then in neat order, I hope.  This weekend, I am expecting a wonderful though short visit from family (and I’ll be trying to keep Kathy Bertone’s tips in mind from her new book, The Art of the Visit, which I mentioned in an earlier post).  Therefore, I’m going to write my post for tomorrow (July 25) tonight, so that I have some brief time to prepare for their visit.  Also, I know that many of you will be watching the beginning of the Olympics this weekend and keeping up with them after that, so though I’m going to try to continue to have a post for you each day, for a few days at least they may not individually be the usual generous dollop of opinionated (and I hope also insightful) writing that I may have led you to expect.

I want to start by telling you about a wonderful website I ran across last year, while trying to view some of the fabliaux of Balzac ( a fabliau is a literary racy story, and when wordy old Balzac once got started, he could keep up with the best of Boccaccio, which is going some!).  The address of the website (for once I have a full address) is http://www.readbookonline.net, and it carries a wide list of free reads on the Internet of famous writers who for some reason can be read without your having to buy anything–and I’m guessing it’s an issue of an expired copyright on a particular edition of the work.

To go through a little of the copyright issue briefly while trying not to misinform you, if a work is not available to read for free on the Internet and furthermore posts an “all rights reserved” warning, it means basically that except for what is known by the Library of Congress as “fair use,” which allows the use of short excerpts for purposes of reviews, articles, or lectures and academic purposes, the work cannot be reissued in any form without permission from the copyright holder(s).  (You may notice that on my copyright pages for my novels, which were copyrighted by the Library of Congress before publication, I mention fair use explicitly as an exception I am allowing my readers; I may be quoted from, under fair use principles.)  The copyrights protected by the Library of Congress are still adequate for works later published on the Internet, though what I’ve read on Wikipedia about Creative Commons suggests that their licensing procedures add to the Library of Congress copyright and support it.  It has not yet been replaced, however.  (Anyone wishing further information about copyright should look on the government website of the Library of Congress for recent updates; I’ve not seen them for a while, so you mustn’t expect this information to be conclusive.)

This situation being what it is, and because I was not able to find a complete copy of two of what I regard as companion poems from the poet Louise Bogan’s book The Blue Estuaries:  Poems 1923-1968  on the Internet, I will need myself to observe the fair use policy and refer simply to the points I wish to raise about the poems by short quotes, leaving you to find the marvelous book of her poems in a bookstore or library (she herself was appointed the 4th Library of Congress Poet Laureate in 1945, by the way).

The first poem is entitled simply, “Women.”  The first stanza, which contains the seed of all the rest, reads, “Women have no wilderness in them,/They are provident instead,/Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts/To eat dusty bread.”  The poem goes on in this way, developing the theme of careful need and caution in spending the currency of the heart, until the last two lines, which suggest:  “As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills/They should let it go by.”  My exposure to this poem occurred at a time when I was myself being incautious about which man I loved, and I often rued the day I’d taken up with him.  So, to me, the first stanza spoke faithfully of my sense of captivity in the relationship, and the last echoed the way I often kicked myself mentally for being so stupid.

Well, we had been asked by one of my favorite teachers, a famous poet himself, to bring a poem into class by another poet, a poem we especially liked.  I brought the above poem.  He asked me for my thoughts on it, and when I went into what I thought it meant (without of course revealing my personal connection to the material), he said “Yes, but don’t you think she’s being ironic?”  I wish I’d had the words, the perceptions about the poem which I feel I have now, all these years later, because I don’t think my point of view about the poem has changed; I simply feel that as with many other literature classes both good and bad, instructors are able to freeze students in their tracks by suggesting that something is “ironic,” using that magical, all-powerful word of our time.  Students have sadly gotten used to being told that things they half-intuit, half-understand are “ironic”; it seems possible to me now that it’s an overrated term, perhaps used to rescue a discussion in some cases from the realm of the bathetic (and yes, that’s bathetic, not pathetic, though some discussions in literature classes can rate as both, I know).

One thing’s for sure:  the teacher asking the question was a kind man, and a gifted writer, with a full complement of the qualities needed to make a sensitive teacher.  If I’d only not been stricken tongue-tied by that word “ironic,” I could perhaps have said something like “The poet is showing keenness of mind and perception, but irony?  Plain and simple?  Not for me.  No, I think it depends on one’s perspective just what is ironic and what isn’t.”

For further support of my argument, I might’ve referred to the other poem, the one of Bogan’s which I would like to point to (though there is no external evidence of this outside the sense of the poem itself) as a companion poem of sorts.  It’s called, “Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom” and has in the middle of it the lines “What a marvel to be wise,/To love never in this manner.”  It speaks of the “fire in a dry thicket” which is like the love in “women’s eyes” which men “must return.”  The poem speaks of “dissembling,” which granted is a form of doubleness just as irony is, yet I wonder if the desperation registered by the poem can really be said to be ironic.  Again, I think this is an issue about which even the most civilized of men and women might disagree.

So, we have the dry crust of bread in the first poem, which is the only care the women take for themselves in that poem, and the wildfire in the thicket in the second, also dry, that they feel as love for the men.  Though I might be wrong to hang so much significance upon the one word “dry,” it does seem that the suggestion in both poems, especially when taken together, is of heat and want of water or soothing love, with an arid, all-consuming passion taking up all the available emotional space (or air).  Again, it’s a matter of perspective as to whether or not the correct word for the second poem is “ironic,” or whether something more precise or comprehensive is needed.

Just to close off this discussion of mine with something which I feel is one of the better poetry book blurbs I’ve read, the poet Theodore Roethke says on the back of Bogan’s book, “[She] shapes emotion into an inevitable-seeming, an endurable, form.  For love, passion, its complexities, its tensions, its betrayals, is one of Louise Bogan’s chief themes….”  The one word “tension” (between two opposite or opposed things) is a possible reference to irony.  But see how much more there is to be said about what this poet has so stragetically done with her language!  If only, I tell myself, I’d been able to voice some of my own reaction a little better at the time I was asked!  At least, however, the poems are still around to be appreciated and learned from.  I hope this article will encourage you to read Bogan’s book for yourself, or to re-visit it if you’ve not seen it for a while.

And that’s my post for today.  Everyone enjoy getting ready for the Olympics, and hope for our friends in London and the environs that all is kept safe and copacetic for the visit of so many talented people.

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July 16, 2012 · 5:11 pm

“I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.”–Mark Twain

Yes, it’s a matter of intention vs. action, isn’t it?  Mark Twain points up in a comic way something related to a much disputed philosophical issue, as might be illustrated by one of the differences between the followers of Emmanuel Kant (Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals–a mouthful, isn’t it?) and those of John Stuart Mill (Utilitarianism).

As Kant’s introducer, Marvin Fox, remarks in the Introduction to Kant’s work (stay with me here), “Kant arrives at the conclusion that the supreme principle of morality can be formulated in this manner:  ‘Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a Universal Law of Nature.’  He defines the term ‘maxim’…as the ‘subjective principle of volition’….We must note with care that the categorical imperative is directed toward the maxim, the principle behind the action, rather than toward the particular act itself….Only the maxim can be judged morally.”

Taking the opposite tack, Mill says, “I submit that he who saves another from drowning in order to kill him by torture afterwards does not differ only in motive from him who does the same thing from duty or benevolence; the act itself is different.”  He goes on to clarify (if not to make murkier) the distinction between motive and intention (or motive and “morality”)–“The morality of the action depends entirely upon the intention–that is, upon what the agent wills to do.  But the motive, that is, the feeling which makes him will to do so, if it makes no difference in the act, makes none in the morality:  though it makes a great difference in our moral estimation of the agent, especially if it indicates a good or a bad habitual disposition–a bent of character from which useful, or from which hurtful actions are likely to arise.”  Got that?  This footnote (for this is part of a footnote) appears only in the 1864 edition and was dropped after that.  It does seem to imply, doesn’t it, that even accidental bad outcomes from good intentions may be estimated as otherwise than good, doesn’t it?

Anyone able to shed a gentler and more able light on this issue is encouraged to do so–I for one find it a real conundrum, apt to make me break into the Monty Python “Philosopher’s Song.”  But seriously, I’d like to hear from someone about this.

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