Designs on the Reader

[Jee Leong]

What can I say, sefton, but that it is a wondeful feeling to be understood and disagreed with. Except for this statement which I don't understand (because I am dumb), "it's an empathetic act that started with Keats beauty/truth equation, and has gone on to reveal itself elsewhere (an interest in realism, for example)," your exposition is a model of sweetness and light. I wish I've thought of "complex carbohydrate." Since I didn't, I can only offer a Matisse quote, to put alongside your Damien Hurst shark, "To sum up, I work without a theory. I am aware primarily of the forces involved, and find myself driven forward by an idea which I can really only grasp little by little as it grows with the picture."

[sefton]

All I meant was that my guess is that Keats' original conception had to do with a general idea of apprehension, and it was flexible enough to have applications in other schools of writing as they emerged.

For example, in this day and age, you might take David Mamet to task for something that wasn't on the table when Keats was writing: he plays fast and loose with realism. That is, he seems to want it both ways: he likes to use contemporary settings and issues, but then he (deliberately) stocks his plays and films with unrealistic characters. He has the playwright's problem (everybody delivering every piece of information verbally, as though poker doesn't exist, there are no sins of omission, everyone's articulate, and no one ever lies) and worse, he's very poor at character separation (his two or three leads are usually undifferentiated mouthpieces for Mamet, and his secondary characters are their suckers, an undifferentiated parade of milquetoasts). So you get dialogue that would never, ever go down that way, outcomes that wouldn't really play out the way, and yet Mamet wants to you think he's telling you something about the real world. He's smart, he has lots of interesting ideas, but much of the writing is contrived--with Mamet, every time out you're getting an op ed piece brought to life, and its success or failure hinges on whether you agree with its conclusions.

You could also argue that Mamet's tangle with realism winds up coming back to the idea of writing using the approach of negative capability. It's the difference between having designs on the audience (Mamet's I have an agenda, here's my hero/ine, here are the straw men he/she's going to zip past to my inevitable conclusion) and imagining outcomes from a set of conditions by accepting the "reality" of those conditions and then seeing how they play out (I have a handful of characters, each with different strengths and weaknesses, each with different motives, each with different reasons for existing in this fiction, who have to go through each other to get what they want...now what could/will happen...). The latter requires empathy and (after a point) a removal of what the author wants in favor of what the text is suggesting. It's not Mamet's bag, but thinking in terms of negative capability turns out to be a pretty good way to frame the weaknesses of his plays and film. I think so, anyway.

[Jee Leong]

Thanks, sefton, for clarifying and expanding on that statement. I am not familiar with Mamet's work (shame on me) but your diagnosis of his lack of Negative Capability is consonant with my idea of N.C.

To appease the ghost of Eliot, I thought I'd quote from his "Four Quartets," which is, to me, a far greater poem than "The Waste Land." Cut-and-paste does not appeal to me as much as a sustained investigation, fraught with difficulties and dead ends. The politics of the Quartets is conservative, but the poem questions the politics, and so becomes a great example of Negative Capability.


from "Burnt Norton"

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.


from "East Coker"

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?
Thunder rolled by the rolling stars
Simulates triumphal cars
Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.


from "Dry Salvages"

We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.


from "Little Gidding"

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.