On The Romantic Swerve

"Men are governed by intelligence, women by swerves of emotion." Now women please do not succumb to a misandric induction in which you find this quotation (and myself) to be misogynistic. What I would like you to do is spend your attention instead focusing on the most important word inside this quotation: swerve. Sexson, in one of his rhetorical gambles (you will notice as class goes on that his storytelling is not merely a reiteration of other's stories, but that he turns his class [the students, himself, the stories, the man behind the curtain] into a story in which all the lectures are episodes in a romance in which you shall find...but I shouldn't tell you that) he gave me a book entitled Rereading Frye and to pay special attention to the chapter entitled Frye and The Art of Memory. Rereading gives off a funny simile since the art of memory is in fact the art of re collection. Every time you re read a story it becomes more fully remembered, more fully understood. Now, and I hope to not lose you here, we come to believe something when our experience tells us that "it" is true. The more often this experience repeats itself the more ingrained the belief becomes. Add to that that a thought is the firing off of its particular receptor in the brain and we can see that grooves begin to form inside the brain. If we are a vessel then let us become a vehicle, a truck. There is roads you've never been on (that untrodden path), and there are dirt roads, and there are icy roads, and there are short cuts you've learned in traffic for certain times of the day, and there are traffic jams, and there are also roads that have been cut like valleys into the mountains. Belief's then, would be those valleys, these, Hamlets. While I am of course referring to Hamlet the play by Shakespeare (which we will not even bother exploring in this blog, or tyrade as Leubner prefers to describe my style) it is the definition of Hamlet that I would like to get into. A Hamlet is a small village inside of a valley (and those character's that makes up that fiction you call an "I" is the villagers). Stories, unlike our natural experiences, are artificial. Art is certainly derived from artificial (or perhaps the other way around) but the reason we have never been able to define what art is, is because art never exists purely in the is state. We can certainly use is to describe what state art exists in though. Art is a process. Art is being, but it is distinct from a "life" being. I do not say "natural being" because the process of art in its final culmination seeks to place us back into the state of natural being, back into "life" being. Yet, we have fallen into quite a conundrum in which our lives begin imitating the art around us. Certainly after reading a novel or a poem you have an eerie feeling of events in your live synchronizing to the literature you've been reading? (and if not I pity your lack of imagination). And there are those books where you have finished them and you literally feel changed. To change is a successful process of art- a full revolution in which you picked up something that was not "real" and through your reading of this artificial substance you gained an experience. Yet the artificial experience is much different from those we experience in living, but only in its reflexion of process. For art, you go about learning everything from the experience before it is experienced so that when you reach the point of experiencing it you have already undergone the (often times painful) knowledge of what is going on. Whereas in life, when our innocence breaks because of this new experience (since their has been no artificial supplement) we are forced to painfully learn about the experience as it sheds its light in the darkness (so to speak poetically). Now you may be asking yourself (and you should be) what happens when someone becomes stuck in the artificial state of existence? This is your state. This is the whole state of the world. Sexson made that statement that life imitates art far more often then art imitates life. What does it mean then to be stuck in an artificial being- to be living a life in imitation of art? This is what Bloom calls the anxiety of influence. Bloom? Where the hell did he come from? I think it would be beneficial for everyone who does not know of this critic to hear a little about him, but it is necessity for all those who have. Bloom is the most well-known successor of Northop Frye's criticism and theory, and because of his genius he is reviled by most everyone. In Sexson's lecture earlier he commented on how you could not take notes on Frye- "it's impossible." He went on to speak about Frye having a dialectic in his writing. This is true. The dialectic is the romantic relation between him and literature, and this is directed to his audeince by his rhetorical style, the lecture. Without you ever knowing or needing to know it you are being placed into his structure-consumed into his intuitions because the act of reading it is as much a tool of his as understanding the structures specifically. You needn't necessarily understand him deductively, and very possibly you can't fully. This is because the structure is your thought. This is much different then the way most academic books are put together with their horribly abysmal writing merely placed their to lead the reader crudely to the formulas they must memorize! Bloom is his opposite, but to provide distinction of what he does based on my description of Frye would involve me creating tropes that are far to removed from Bloom to provide a clear picture of what he does. Frye is uplifting and kind. Bloom is degrading and often times apparently malevolent. But Bloom is the eliptical side of Frye's structure. Whereas Frye goes about explaining things in a seemingly deductive manner (wherein his deductive steps are made from inductions- similar to the logic of Descartes Meditations. i.e. I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am) Bloom attempts to explain the intuitive, the inductive steps of the structure. You may be asking yourself, and this is our culture's state, "How the FUCK do you explain intuition?" and in your question lies the answer. That Fuck, that placement of a vague (and do not think ambiqious) definition is in fact you emoting something. We live in a culture which while literate on a certain level, it is only high enough so that they can serve the community. To be highly literate is to be an individual. You can see this with your friends who makes the oddest commonsensical errors because they have neither the vocabulary nor the perception to explain phenomena's they see around them (and these almost always cause habitual acts of error in their lives). The rise of literacy and the extreme output of knowledge that began happening because of the printing press and the advancement in fields of knowledge in the ensuing centuries caused people to know so many fields of knowledge, but so very little depths in each, to the end point that people did (do) not even know if they knew (know) what they were (are) talking about; at which point they attempt to "emote" in place of their lacking depth. So when you respond what the fuck? to my statement that Bloom attempts to explain the intuitive side of Frye's structure, you are emoting what you would like to say, and if, possibly only because it has become engrained into your vocabulary; a traditional and habitual response (slightly less ingrained then that of a belief). Emotion plays an enormous role in Bloom's Theory which is the Anxiety of Influence. The anxiety of influence is poetry. That statement is descriptive as well as metaphorical, more distincticly it is tropological because of his intense tautology which finds connection in everything. He defines literary criticism as understanding the hidden pathways between literature. In that statement, and in his theory, we can see a synchronisity that connects everything. Certainly that is what intuition schematically could be called? when you intuite something it is often epiphantically and you have no idea how you've done it or how to explain to another since the steps you went by are unfounded in the current philosophy of analysis. Bloom never states that he is explaining intuition, nor that it is the elliptic of Frye's structure. Instead he goes about explaining how poems are in conversation with other poems constantly (poem being a trope again). It is through six swerves, based upon Lucretius's clinamen, that a poem responds to another poem. You will remember from the first lecture of class Sexson speaking of The Satanic Verses by Rushdie in which the two men are falling to earth. He remarks that similar to their fall Lucretius describes our existence as atoms falling to which a swerve happens giving us meaning, and more disctincly being. He will go on to remark that the two gentleman falling are Ovid and Lucretius having a discussion. Similarly we have a discussion, a dialectic that exists within Bloom's writing between himself and his great precursor Northrop Frye. Bloom describes his anxiety of influence as an age of drowning in which we have existed since Shakespeare, and that very likely existed an age of generous influence beforehand. The anxiety of Influence is caused by the aspirations, the agony, the competition of new poets to battle againsts their precursors, beginning with Milton attempting to dethrone Shakespeare. Time does not exist in poetry (and you should begin to realize by now that if we become stuck in habitual actions we know not of, then we are prisoners of a time before). since time does not exist in poetry every poet since Shakespeare is in constant battle with shakespeare. This competetition creates an anxiety which is only won through agony (agony coming from agon, meaning a competition, i.e. a dialectic). Bloom goes out of his way to receptively explain to you that you cannot escape from this anxiety. He does this because he wishes to influence you. You can either accept what he says and drown (in the ocean of streams of stoires), at which point you will have failed to learn from the experience, or you can understand that he is inspiring you- inspiring being another word for influencing. Whereas Frye immediately integrates you into his structure without your acknowledgement, showing you the deductive steps (that is the points, the mandalas, the archetypes), Bloom goes out of his way to influence you into a competition in which you are trying to break into his structure. And certainly you cannot ever escape from the anxiety of influence since when you do that you has been forever changed from what it was. And this is where it gets painful. Bloom is purposefully degrading since his style is demonic. Frye's is angelic or full of ascent, leading you as you are from point to point on the structure. Bloom's style is that of descent wherein he provokes all repressed emotions that cause you to be incapble of seeing the inductive structure. You're repressed emotions are embedded as memories/images that prescribe an emotional response if the experience has not been fully acknowledged, learned, and understood to be an incorrect analysis. This is certainly why it is an agon, an agony, since in order to see, as in to think this way, you have to be purged of error (error being those hamlet's in which your minds processes travel). it is this anxiety bloom wishes to help you escape from, but because of his style (and because it was the only way) he goes by a way of damning you on all the literary modes of his eloquence save one. that of sublimity (which i will return to later when i explain the female swerve of emotion). The anxiety of influence is the state of being stuck in an artificial being- a state in which life is stuck imitating art- that is telling and retelling the story, like horatio, incapable of making that mysterious mental maneuver that would jettison us from defining ourselves by the stories we tell (belief being those stories we continually tell, and retell only to ourselves. So what's the use in telling stories that aren't even true? To help to escape from living lives that are only an imitation of life. it is through freeing the village people in the Hamlet's that this is done. And you will think yourself mad as you do it. only to find that the feeling of lunacy was true reality pulling you from your wanted maddness. To be continued.... but really i'll probably find something better to do.