Yes, as of yesterday afternoon. It lasted barely over an hour, and everyone was astonishingly pleasant. Hardly anything was said about the chapters on actual poets, so it's possible, and far from unheard-of, that no one read the thing, but the conversation we did have was still excellent, so I have no particular complaints. I got some major and meaningful compliments on both the book -- that what I'm saying about Eliot, for example, is genuinely new, particularly because of the context of the other poets with whom I'm associating him, which indicates that the work seems to hang together (though that's outlined in chapter one, so, again, no evidence anyone necessarily read beyond that); that my highly unorthodox theory about myth is actually right; that I could teach queer theory, even though I don't even identify as a queer theorist, per se. This last came from my advisor, and since QT is his bailiwick, where his reputation is, that was a surprising and very positive casual comment for him to make. I'm not really capturing it. People said a lot of excellent things, and I'm so uptight about anything positive happening to me that I'm not even comfortable typing them out.
They also asked some very real questions, including starting right off by asking me what I mean by "the irrational" and suggesting that this might not even be the right term for my concerns. I, uh, would have liked to have had someone raise that 4 or 5 years ago, when I first began framing this project in precisely those terms, but I guess bringing it to the defense is better than never addressing it at all. (I guess. Oy.) I got an excellent suggestion from Don Revell, whom I asked to be an outside reader (and who was great -- I don't know him beyond liking his work and having seen him speak at a couple conferences, but that was enough to ask him if he'd read my diss, and he did, and turned out to be an awesome asset). He pointed out first that the concepts to which I hew are -- I used the word myself -- phenomenological, measurable, issues of scale, and that measure has a lot of resonance in poetry. Then he suggested that what I'm after might be something more like the disruptive rather than the irrational; on first blush, I was too busy thinking, oh, shit, this is such a key term for me and I don't know how I can afford to punt it, but he's so right. Plus, key to me or not, I'm using it in a different way than poetics usually does; poetry as irrational usually invites a lot of fruity crazy-person bullshit about intuitive and how you can't analyze poetry because it's about synthesis and I don't even know what all useless non-statements. I have no wish to be confused with those people, so I do want to sharpen my language, and what I'm talking about, those inarticulable experiences of confronting death, desire, the natural world, connections to others (and Otherness), etc., are of interest to me for their disruptive character.
I did not, however, have an immediate answer for how I could rework the manuscript to trade out talking about the irrational for talking about the disruptive. Fortunately, no one on my committee asked me that, but I was already asking myself as the meeting went on. Toward the end, my advisor, who is, well, not a math person, asked me something like, "irrational numbers, isn't that a thing in math?" He's right -- and much righter than he could probably have guessed. Dig:
- Irrational numbers are those which cannot be represented by a fraction or ratio. Inapt to proportion, division, reason; they are inarticulable by ordinary numbering systems. (And the articulate is that which is jointed, divided, cut into pieces, and only therefore spoken; the unspoken/inarticulate is silent and also whole. As pain. As I've said before.)
- We have to invent ways to represent them -- pi, e. Draw an immediate parallel to catachresis or at least to innovation broadly conceived.
- If we do try to represent them numerically, they extend the system beyond its own bounds, nonterminating, nonrepeating.
- They progress (nonterminating) but their progress cannot be predicted (nonrepeating).
- Compare 22/7, one of the common approximations for pi. Inexact, but functional; doesn't change the reality of the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, but lets us bring it into mathematics, albeit in a deformed form.
- Compare also the succession of ways we've approximated pi: 25/8 (Babylonian), 3.141666 (Ptolemaic), 3.141864 (ancient Chinese), a sigma equation called the Madhava-Leibniz series (Indian and German independently), various later series, and the familiar 3.14. Each came to be through a different approach; each serves different ends, e.g. accuracy vs. convenience, well. Data points around an attractor.
- Compare then death. The statistical likelihood of dying from a given cause or at a given age, biochemical descriptions of the body in decay, psychological descriptions of grief and coping with loss, even religious systematization (rationalization) of death's meaning -- none of these have anything to do with the experience of actually confronting it, as a future for oneself or the manner by which one loses another. They might be called approximations.
A number of other thoughts came up, several more about clarifying or doing more with some of my key terms -- materialism, community, movement (as transfer, now, as metaphor), sense (which hinges between logic and somatic experience). I got some platinum advice about how to position myself within major questions in modernism, which has always been a struggle for me. About all I can come up with is that I trouble the idea of modernity as new, and instead focus on its connections to its history, vexed though they are; as a corollary, I then trouble the whole idea of novelty that's ruled our critical and pedagogical practice for the past century -- which is accurate, but not a thing you really say to people. Coherence and synthesis look old-fashioned & totalitarian when you're invested in novelty and difference, which most 20th-century lit people are. My take is that there's a lot of unexcavated possibility, in Ovid as much as in Eliot, but no one hears that; they just hear that you're skeptical of the new and they discount you for that. I've tended to look at other people writing on the period's poetry & said, ehhhh, I'm not even really arguing with them so much as doing something different from them, & then looked at people writing on myth & I'm really doing something different from them, and given the whole problem a big, dissatisfied shrug.
One of my committee members said that he'd like to see what I'd say if I took up, e.g., the Frankfurt school -- who write about myth tons and take it seriously, but who treat it as ineluctably and perniciously conservative. That's precisely why I'd shrugged them off, but he's absolutely right that I could probably tease out all kinds of interesting and useful complications and divergent illuminations within that body of thought, and, disagree with them over myth or not, I love those people. Or, well, I love the younger, more literary ones. Not so much the more directly political ones, but still. That should be a great tack to follow.
The biggest, though, I've saved for last, and not only because it was the last thing we talked about. Someone, I forget which person, asked me how I position myself vis-a-vis queer theory. There is kind of a lot of deviant sexuality in my dissertation -- I mean, when Tom Eliot is the straightest poet you have on hand, that is a queer batch of people. That wasn't intentional, though; it was just that the poets whose work seemed to be doing the things in which I was interested also had nonnormative gender identity positions. The big reveal is in my Spicer chapter, the last one, where I argue that poetry itself is kind of queer, the paradoxical but actual experience of being both inspired, receptive, yielding control, and of having mastery not only of craft but at the level of ontology, to create this thing that didn't exist before. I argue that it's especially legible in Spicer because of his poetry's content and its context in his life, but that this is a necessary condition for what I ended up calling Orphic poetics. Right. If I'm right that myth and poetry share their project of articulating the disruptive, approximating it aesthetically/verbally, though, and I think I am, then I'm actually saying that mythmaking is queer in these same ways. How crazy is that? I love it! This plus the Frankfurt school on myth, if I can get enough read to write about them well, will give me an awesome afterword, which is one thing I was hurting for.
The committee were fully satisfied with what I have and told me I was done, which also supports my suspicion that they didn't read the whole manuscript, because I know one of the Eliot chapters (I ended up with two) is riddled with typos. The other probably is, too, and since Spicer was rewritten from scratch and Crane only really written for the first time in the last three months before I handed it off, I imagine they may be similarly sloppy. Since I scheduled myself six weeks between defense and the graduate school's deadline, I want not only to fix those things, but to see how much of the rest of this I can get a start on, too. It's not like I'm busy otherwise -- largely because burying myself in what turned out to be a 364-page manuscript fairly well broke all my other bonds, responsibilities, and interests. If it weren't for job applications, I don't think I would even have known what to do with my brain this past month.
We also talked about a possible additional chapter. One problem here is that academic presses apparently want manuscripts around 90k-100k words, which is IMO tiny, if you want to do anything right. This makes my dissertation already about 100 pages long. It's always easier to cut than to add usefully, but cutting 100 pages out, woo -- that'll be a bear. If I write another chapter, it'll be a bigger, angrier, more muscular bear. I do want to, though, because one of my primary goals for Apostate is to demonstrate that mythopoesis is a live activity, right now, with all sorts of salutary aesthetic and sociopolitical potential. I want therefore to bring the book's historical scope forward to the late 20th century, early 21st if I can
I've been thinking for a while that Derek Walcott's Omeros would take that niche, and have been ruminating over a notion of recolonizing the canon, some kind of redirection of the technologies of colonial power back at the empire. Part of this, cynically, is that it would be nice to have someone in my book who isn't white. Such is the scene. However, I recently reread Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red and I was flipping through her Sappho a while ago, and, man, stylistically and thematically, she's so much more in line with what I'm doing and so much more exciting a poet for me. There's queer erotics, bodily monstrosity, acting from the margins -- plus she does such interesting things with absence, and that's something I haven't yet dealt with much. There are things to say about her, I think, through notions of privacy and elision and silence, that would end up making some interesting claims about how and whether we engage texts so ancient they aren't only about myth, but partake of myth in their own being. One of my committee members also brought up Nate Mackey, who of course is another poet whose work I just love, and at one point I had thought he'd be the dissertation's final chapter. I'm not currently sure I could say much about him that would be all that distinct from what I say about Eliot, and since I wouldn't be overturning a lot of misreading in order to make those statements, they wouldn't be as interesting made about Mackey as they are about Eliot.
Not that I've sat down and done the least bit of real work on any of these poets, though. What I'd like to do, if I can land a job that will afford me the support to do it, would be to work up articles and/or conference papers on all these people, see how well I like the possibilities for writing deeper treatments of their work, and look at how any of them would reconfigure the manuscript as a whole. Being able to establish my erotic Orphic poetics, via Spicer, will be a much more powerful move if I can then go on to show someone around today who's doing it and doing it spectacularly. It'll also make disregarded/demodernized Crane seem suddenly more relevant, let me show the aesthetics I see H.D. championing in action long after her day, etc. Word count or not, then, chapter the next is something I want to do. Need to find out how.
I'm happy with the dissertation, and with the time to make it one step better. Very happy with the tenor of my defense. In order to stay that way, I have to refrain from thinking about any other aspect of my life, which, unfortunately, is hard to do since the dissertation was the main thing I've been using to keep from having to think about the rest of my life.
I passed, though. Ten and a half years of my life tied themselves up and became the past. Whatever comes next, I'll never go back there; it's not even possible, and that's a loss that's cause for at least modest ecstasy.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment