You can't get it from here

Nearly a year ago I offhandedly suggested that Hegel's Phenomenology be considered as a shaggy dog story; in the past few days this interpretation, such as it is, has grown on me (as has the idea, which is not in competition with it, that the reason the "Absolute Knowing" chapter is so hard to understand is that, obviously, we haven't attained absolute knowing yet—once that happens, we'll all go back to our books and think "of course! It's so obvious now!"—we'll at that point be able to understand it better than Hegel himself, of course, since even he, writing when he did, could only see it as through a glass, darkly), to the point that I am prepared to claim, or at least prepared to pretend to claim, that the Phenomenology is an even better example of a literary shaggy dog story than "A Hunger Artist".

I previously claimed that the trouble with the written shaggy dog story was simply that one can read faster than listen, which is true enough. But that hardly gets at the essence of the problem; if it did, simple length would resolve it. But that ignores two further features of such stories that, because normally they are told aloud, and told at a leisurely pace, are often obscure: first, the teller's control over when the punchline is delivered, and, second, the possible relevance of all the material up to the punchline. "A Hunger Artist" is longer, as a story, than most shaggy dog stories I've ever told, but it doesn't really meet either criterion, and for the same reason in each case: namely, that one can simply flip forward to the end at any point. In the Phenomenology both features are won by the same method, and you might think that I've actually just described the same feature twice, but a consideration of an incompetently told spoken shaggy dog story should disabuse you of that notion; in such a case, the audience is still at the mercy of the teller as far as when the punchline is delivered, but will have figured out before that moment arrives that nothing they're hearing is actually relevant to it: they can identify the joke-in-progress, after a certain point, as filler. So really the way "A Hunger Artist" fails to have the second feature is in virtue of its failing to have the first: if you fail to be captivated by the story, and just want to find out what happens at the end, thinking that there's nothing to be won by continuing to read, you can at any point check. (It has to be this way, since after all in practically no shaggy dog story is any of the material that intervenes between the introduction—the setup proper—and the conclusion actually relevant to the latter; that material serves only to manipulate the audience's expectations and keep them as high as possiple.)

Hegel, in his shaggy dog story, hits upon an ingenious method of ensuring that the reader cannot simply flip to the end, and thereby retains control over the delivery of the punchline, and he does this by as much as asserting that the only way to even understand the punchline is by slogging through the whole damn book. The value of the punchline is path-dependent, so that even if you think, partway through your reading, that you basically see how things are going and can we just get to the bloody end already, you can't check your guess: Hegel has inoculated himself against your finding the story unamusing if you do that by telling you outright that each episode in the joke builds on the last until we get the big payoff at the end. In an orally delivered shaggy dog story, you can keep the audience engaged by varying the delivery, inserting mildly amusing bits into the story as you go with the promise that they'll contribute to even greater mirth somewhere down the road, or, if need be, just saying something like "bear with me; this'll all be worth it". Hegel, by contrast, wins the audience's loyalty first by having the initial sections build on each other in fairly clear ways, so that it becomes plausible that the whole thing really will end in hilarity (it's a sign of his true mastery of the genre that, as the book progresses, it becomes much less clear from formation to formation how formation n+1 had to arise in just this fashion from formation n: since later formations can shed retrospective light on earlier, it becomes possible to claim that any confusions you have now will be lessened in the future, so that there's really a double anticipation: first, everything is building towards this great climax, so you look forward to it; second, the climax will clarify just what it was that was building towards that very climax, so you look forward to it—this is a real coup), and second by including various historical and literary allusions and references into the text, which, though they may not contribute to the forward motion of the story per se, do serve to periodically refresh possibly flagging interest.

It may be, though, that the relative shortness of "A Hunger Artist" works to its advantage, despite its theoretical flaws: even if one does think he knows the score, it's a short enough story that he might decide to stick it out anyway, but long enough still to have an effect. Much more research ought to be done in this area.

Comments

[Daniel]

Damnit Wolfson, I saw that little paragraph at the end sitting at the bottom of my screen, but I was good and didn't skip ahead to it. And then you go and write a post about shaggy dog stories that is not itself a shaggy dog story. Motherfucker. Maybe the lack of a shaggy dog ending is itself what constitutes this post's shaggy dog story-ness? Wolfson, you meta-level scoundrel.

The PhG sounds plausible. The Encyclopedia system just ends with a paragraph-long quotation from Aristotle, in Greek. Skipping to the end there really did not tell me much.

[ben wolfson]

Shamefully, it didn't even occur to me to make this very post into a joke or shaggy-dog story.

[arthegall]

I too was convinced that this post was a shaggy-dog story.

In fact, it was only Daniel's comment which convinced me that there wasn't a punchline in that final paragraph.

[ben wolfson]

I paid Daniel to leave that comment. In fact, there is a punchline there, but it's very subtle. The average incubation time is three days. You'll know it's hit because your liver will be destroyed.

[abc]

i miss the blogroll links, used to go to other places from here routinely

[abc]

my routine is broken because the blogroll links are missing

[horus kemwer]

Heck, if this counts, why not the Tractatus?

[ben wolfson]

I couldn't say.

[ben wolfson]

Though doesn't the structure of the Tractatus imply that you could just read propositions one through seven directly, if you were so inclined?

[horus kemwer]

The punchline is the throw away the ladder line. He's led you through a sequence of specific logical steps, only to tell you none of it meant anything. Ergo: the middle was irrelevant. Plus, you're kept guessing cause if you skipped to the ladder line, you wouldn't know what the ladder was . . .

[ben wolfson]

But the ladder is 6.54, not 7. If you just read props 1–7, you wouldn't even know there was a ladder you missed out on.

Hence my comment of 8:50 supra.