aphasic style (I)

Jack Yeats, "Seek No Further"

In “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” Roman Jakobson famously grouped the varieties of aphasia around two poles: selection/substitution (“the similarity disorder”) and combination/contexture (“the contiguity disorder”) (1152).  According to Jakobson, the similarity disorder makes metaphor “alien,” and the contiguity disorder has a parallel effect on metonymy.  “In a well-known psychological test,” Jakobson writes,

children are confronted with some noun and told to utter the first verbal response that comes into their heads.  In this experiment two opposite linguistic predilections are invariably exhibited: the response is intended either as a substitute for or as a complement to the stimulus (1153).

The children’s substitutive or complementary (predicative) responses were then also distinguished by different aspects, either positional or semantic.  By “manipulating” such connections and aspects “an individual exhibits his personal style, his verbal predilections and preferences” (1153).  Jakobson’s highly suggestive account of the emergence of a “personal style” offers a striking contrast with contemporaneous accounts like Kenneth Burke’s essays in the 1950s and Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Everyday Life (1959), which stressed the scene of style, or Theodor Adorno’s “Lyric Poetry and Society” (1957), which meditated on the nonidentity of language and experience.

“I wanted to feel your soul swaying with langour…”

Writing to Harriet Weaver Shaw in 1916, Joyce provides, with studied casualness, a few “biographical items” that had been requested by his publisher (Ellmann, Selected Letters, 222; the moderately ironic quotation marks are Joyce’s).  Noting that “I suppose that is what he means,” Joyce encloses a brief account of his writing, including a judiciously placed bit of retrospective precociousness:  Under the subheading “Irish Literary Theatre,” Joyce writes that Yeats “invited me to write a play for his theatre and I promised to do so in ten years” (223).  Conveniently, Joyce had begun drafting Exiles in 1913 while living in Trieste.  Whether or not Exiles was anything like the play Joyce had in mind when Yeats asked him to write, Joyce evidently hoped, in 1916, that it would be interpreted as such.

a winter’s tale

Old Tabley Hall (demolished 1927)

On December 9th, 1872, A.J. Munby sent a letter to Charles Darwin, furnishing one of the many heterogenous reports from across the British empire that the famous naturalist would use to theorize emotional expression.  Munby, a prolific diarist, had been collecting images of working-class women for twenty years: sketches, descriptions, and photographs, with varying degrees of critical distance and sensationalizing staging.  His letter, which Darwin appends in a footnote to the revised edition of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, is called “a graphic description of terror,” but it reads today like a case study in the eroticization of class relations and the materiality of affective states in Victorian narrative.  Or a kind of ghost story turned inside out, so that that the mysterious stranger is no longer an enchanting figure we are alternately attracted to and repelled by, but a voyeur-position for a particular sort of observer (a situation I’m tempted to describe as taken, rather than possessed).

Joyce’s Ibsen and “a personal woe”

Stensberg Park, Oslo

On April Fool’s Day in 1900, London’s Fortnightly Review included a review of the recently published edition of Henrik Ibsen’s latest play, When We Dead Awaken.  After observing the massive impact of Ibsen’s work over two generations of thinkers across two continents, the reviewer, a young James Joyce, haughtily predicts how other reviews will begin.  They will undoubtedly start by summarizing what they think are the facts at the start of the play, saying that Rubek and his wife, Maja, are “discontented” (31).  But this is what Joyce calls “a bald, clerkly version of countless, indefinable complexities,” and it wholly misses the overwhelming, sustained efficiency of Ibsen’s play: “There is from first to last hardly a superfluous word or phrase” (31).  The force and concision of Ibsen’s dramatic writing is of a different order than most plays, which “are for the most part reheated dishes—unoriginal compositions, cheerfully owlish as to heroic insight, living only in their own candid claptrap—in a word, stagey” (31).

“what is satisfactory in Darwin” (II)

Manet, Still Life: Lilacs and Roses (1883)

G.E. Moore writes that Wittgenstein concluded his lectures in the May term of 1932 with “a long discussion which he introduced by saying ‘I have always wanted to say something about the grammar of ethical expressions, or, e.g. of the word ‘God’,” but, Moore writes, “in fact he said very little about the grammar of such words as ‘God,’ and very little also about that of ethical expressions” (103).  Instead, Wittgenstein ended up discussing aesthetics in general and texts by Darwin, Frazer, and Freud in particular.  This must have been disappointing, if not entirely unexpected, for Moore, since his own arguments against “the naturalistic fallacy” depended on cutting ethics out of its entanglement with the natural sciences while also keeping it away from idealist accounts that would make it a matter of understanding forms or categories of rationality.

“a species of agony” (II)

George Frederic Watts, "The Sower of Systems" (1902)

In the second chapter of Part One, Sōseki turns to Karl Groos’s taxonomy of forms of play, adapted from his study of imitation in human and nonhuman animals’ children, to describe the “perceptual elements” and “innate tendencies” that “make their way, under the guise of various forms, into the putatively pure realm of literature” (59).   Sōseki admits that this approach has limits, especially when the content reaches a certain level of complexity, but he goes on to provide examples of literary uses of touch, temperature, taste, smell, hearing, and sight.

seeing times and touching concepts (X)

Still from Nancy Andrews, "Phantom Limb" (2010)

On the one hand, Wittgenstein is trying to look at what he calls “the grammatical difference” (grammatischen unterschied), not (merely?) the differences in use between expressions “connected to” and expressions “communicating” kinaesthetic sensations (or pain, or memory-images).  We have language-games in which we ordinarily express our skepticism about our own or another’s pain, and we have language-games in which we ordinarily do not.  Here, Wittgenstein is not investigating how we conflate one game with another, nor is he pointing out likenesses between them in the hope that we can further account for, and hence work through, our use of those words.   He is, in a sense, asking why we do this.

“utilitarian reasons for the employment of judicial torture”

Raja Ravi Varma, "A Portrait of a Foreigner"

In his long “Preface for Politicians,” published in front of John Bull’s Other Island in 1906, George Bernard Shaw blasted the incompetent and inhumane practices of British colonial governance, using the recent floggings and executions in Denshawai to argue that there “is no more sacred and urgent political duty on earth than the disruption, defeat, and suppression of the Empire, and, incidentally, the humanization of its supporters.”  A few months earlier, he had written to the Times mocking the Foreign Office’s ruthless “insensibility to dishonour” and Liberal hypocrisy “bound by the Gladstonian tradition to be indignantly sensitive to outrages on humanity abroad, whilst remaining disastrously reactionary and obsolete” at home (Ford, ed., Letters to the Times, 56).

“the use of strange and obsolete words” (II)

Walter Osborne, "The Fish Market, Patrick Street, Dublin"

Synge concludes his first letter with notes for Meyerfeld about The Well of the Saints by noting that letters will still reach him, and that he would be glad to provide further explanations, even though he will be “moving out to a very wild island off south west coast the Blasket Island, tomorrow for a couple of weeks” (122).  In other letters, Synge relayed that he happily stayed with “the King” of the Island, hiking around the mountains, rowing in curraghs during the day, and watching dances in the evenings, but he admits that he has had some trouble being “thrown back on my Irish entirely” and that he has had even more trouble finding a place to write: he sleeps in a cot in the corner, tries to read in the crowded kitchen, and is often thwarted by the “broken” weather (122-23).

seeing times and touching concepts (IX)

Claudia Mitchell discusses her myoelectric arm (2010)

Section 8 turns from the various forms of observation and perception in the preceding remarks to give the most comprehensive attempt thus far to generalize–despite opposing voices’ qualms and conditions–about the difficult object here under observation.  This opening voice is not trying to isolate the referential or expressive functions of utterances, nor the complexity of experimental and hermeneutic scenes, nor pointing to the narrative infrastructure of our pictures of consciousness and unconscousness.  Section 8 returns us to the tension between the first two sections of “Part II”: how do we reconcile our entanglement in animal forms of “bodily expression” (section 1) with the spatial and temporal dimensions of our language’s identifying functions (section 2)?