The unexpected copulation of ideas

Gaddis, in his speech on receiving the National Book Award for A Frolic of His Own:

At any rate, an early review of my work made a point; the reviewer said, this was my first book forty years ago, "What is this book about? Mr. Gaddis doesn't say." And this is Norbert Weiner, if you remember him, on entropy. He says, "We are always fighting nature's tendency to degrade the organized, and to destroy the meaningful. The more probable a message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems."

And this is, I think, part of the danger that I see at work, though I won't name names. But I don't need to, because they make millions of dollars a year, books that are in McLuhan's realm, pretty warm media, requiring no effort whatsoever except some degree of literacy. (The Rush for Second Place, p 130)

(This is not of course itself a particularly original or unusual idea either now or at the time of its delivery; its interest here perhaps lies therefore more with the identity of its expresser.) Following which, wishing but unable to recall where it is one read about people who for great stretches at a go express, and presumably understand, themselves in more or less set phrases and clichés (candidates include It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken and The Ethics of Authenticity), one turns to Steven Moore, "David Markson and the Art of Allusion", in the Barth/Markson "number" (as it calls itself, that number being two, apparently, of the tenth volume) of the Review of Contemporary Fiction and reads that [t]he function of the disproportionately large number of literary references and allusions in the text [of Going Down] is to show how certain artistic works can define, nurture, even ennoble for some characters their feelings of alienation and inadequacy. (p 168) and later, of, but not in these terms, the recently acquired but as yet unread by me Springer's Progress, that the elliptical references function here not only as a representation of Springer's thinking process—a kind of literary shorthand—but as the writer/reader's equivalent for the private references and intimacies that two lovers usually share—literary allusion as pillow talk (p 173; in which connection he gives the quotation fom Samuel Johnson that I have made my title).  To give a bit of the flavor of the ellipticality of the allusions, and the independently worthwhile texture of the prose, I reproduce the snippet of text that Moore reproduces; Jessica Cornford, one might want to know, is Springer's current lover; she away, he is at a bar, having, or about to have, or at least valiantly fighting off, a sexual experience (I wouldn't, not having read the book, know):

Norma Miljus again? Third time he'll spot her in the two weeks. Buttressed bum and buttery boobs, recalls, acres of supplest forage. Requiting wench as well, what's to fear?

Come-hithering hi from Beverly Allerdice also, saloon's aswim in aloneness, third of a nation ill-fondled and ill-humped.

Won't, won't. Toss the drunken dog one bone named Cornford, lifetime's Pavlovian dedication down the stews.

A child said, What is the ass? fetching it to him with full hands.

Final scrotumtightening image of her as elevator swallowed him, altarwise by owl-light in her doorway framed. A grief ago.

Imagining Ohio also, house on a hill. Dappled things, for Christ's sake? And brinded cows?

Ein Jessbetrunkener Mensch. Small rain down, forgot in his letters. (122) (p 172—"(122)" being of course Moore's own annotation as to the page of origin in Springer's Progress of the preceding.)

(I got three—how'd you do? Moore identifies eight—nine actually, but it hardly seems right to count knowing a little something something about who Pavlov was in with the others, since Pavlov's name is right there, and I was taught that that makes it a reference, not an allusion.) Whatever else these allusions might be doing, they seem to be the bits and pieces of verbiage and ideas in terms of which Springer thinks about himself and his surrounding, not just the "private references and intimacies" of two but the more public references one might deploy not just in conversation with oneself but with others in one's circle, who have the same or a similar background.  (It may be true that "the literary references and puns they bandy back and forth are not meant to echo the way people talk—even well-read people" (p 173), but (a) it's hard to tell how much that "meant to" is supposed to be doing here, whether or not Moore takes himself to be denying that that is the way even well-read people talk or just that the goal of the allusiveness is to capture that way and (b) even if that isn't the way even well-read people talk, the difference is one of quantity, not quality; the allusions surely don't come so thick even in one's thoughts, where it's always easier, but they do come, both in conversation and thought, providing the marks by which one proceeds.) That is, it's just what you'd expect of such a person; to hear from Springer some horrendously jejune cliché, say about the strength and effects, ill and well, short- and long-term, of his feelings concerning Cornford, instead of an adaptation of Novalis on Spinoza, would in fact be the less probable, and possibly more informative, of the possibilities.  Here, of course, the fact that one can quite easily describe oneself as drunk on another in egregiously masscult pop-song and perhaps indeed cliché ways (though the fact that none comes to mind may mean that on the last point I'm off, or it may mean I'm just underexposed) means that the only thing saving "Ein Jessbetrunkener Mensch" for high culture is its having the specific form it has—as is also the case, for that matter, with the absence of a hyphen in the otherwise not really remarkable "scrotumtightening". (I can't help but wonder if Moore's description of Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne at the very bottom of the preceding page as "word-drunk bibliomaniacs" was made in anticipation of the Jess- und Gottbetrunkenheit to come.)

So I suspect that Moore's not quite got it all right when he explains that passages like the above are "like extended in-jokes shared between author and reader", in that they would be spoiled if one had to explain that "scrotumtightening" is from Joyce, "third of a nation ill-fondled and ill-humped" takes off FDR, and (this is one I actually recognized) "dappled things" and "brinded cows" are from Hopkins' "Pied Beauty".  (Of course I'd recognize that.)  Because to some extent the point seems to be that the air is thick with allusion, that whatever it is that happens, Springer will refer it back to some cultural thing or other, or at least pluck out its phrases rather than any other to describe it.  The content of these allusions in particular doesn't seem particularly important, and it's that which really would make them the sort of clever in-jokes which would be spoiled by being pointed out.  Which is not of course to deny that there's a sort of pleasure to be had from recognizing the allusion by oneself.

My thinking this may be influenced by the fact that I will put in an allusion just because it comes up as I'm thinking or what I'm saying or writing seems to have a place for that particular shape of expression, regardless of anything else; this actually is a feature of my conversation and even this post, which has an only slightly altered quotation from The Recognitions a few paragraphs up.  It shouldn't be hard to find as the prose suddenly becomes noticeably better, but it doesn't really serve much of a purpose beyond that; even the propriety of getting Gaddis in crosswise to something otherwise focused on Markson is accidental. 

The function of the allusions in Going Down as Moore identifies them, the defining, nurturing, and ennobling (ennobling, yet!) of certain sorts of self-conception are obviously quite positively framed; typically the self-understanding of one whose resources are more limited when it comes to high art and who employs, therefore, clichés and the low is not thought so highly of.  If one is going to make that kind of distinction, there had better be something better about understanding yourself in non-clichéd ways—a sort of internalized version of what we should be grateful for:

Only artists, and especially those of the theatre, have given men eyes and ears to see and hear with some pleasure what each himself is, himself experiences, himself wants; only they have taught us to value the hero that is hidden in each of these everyday characters and taught the art of regarding oneself as a hero, from a distance and as it were simplified and transfigured—tthe art of 'putting oneself on stage' before oneself. (Gay Science 78)

(And cf. Wilde in "The Decay of Lying", and Moore's statement that "despair is for them as much a literary experience as a psychological one":

A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher. … The imagination is essentially creative, and always seeks for a new form. The boy-burglar is simply the inevitable result of life's imitative instinct. He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him is repeated on an extended scale throughout the whole of life. Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. … Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows?

.) And to be ennobling and nurturing the allusions should be more than just the desultory expressions of the way one thinks, something like positive influences thereon; here lurks, of course, the danger of self-deception; and anyway it's not clear yet that the ability to relate one's own experiences back to examples from the illustrious past does one much good, or anyway much more than being able to relate them to examples from contemporary work, or even conventional wisdom.  Each will tell you what sort of situation one is in and how such things proceed and are to be concieved of, after all.

(Throughout I've been ignoring the distinction between the purpose of the allusions for the author and the purpose for the characters who make them, of course, but on the other hand, I still haven't read either Going Down or Springer's Progress and don't even own the former, so, you know, all things with time. Looking over the above it seems an even greater mess than I thought it would turn out to be when I began it, but hey.)

Comments

[Paul Gowder]

Ben, please convince me to read Gaddis. By which I mean "tell me some Gaddis that I'll actually like." I started A Frolic of His Own. I think I made it to page 5. It made me suicidal with boredom.