In the earlier version of this post I impatiently criticized arguments I had yet to establish, the result being a brazenly inaccurate or deeply stupid account of the argument Knapp forwards in Literary Interest. I promise no assumptions’ll be prodded until after I proffer his argument in toto.
He articulates the short version of his argument at the end of the fourth chapter:
The object of literary interpretation is necessarily the meaning intended by some agent or collectivity of agents. But the object of literary interest is not an intended meaning; in fact, it isn’t literally a meaning at all. The object of literary interest is a special kind of representational structure, each of whose elements acquires, by virtue of its connection with other elements, a network of associations inseparable from the representation itself. (104)
Floating there alone, far from the arguments which substantiate it, that claim surely strikes readers as the conventional formalist claim for the autonomy of the literary object. Its “representational structure” closes in upon itself such that being interested in the regicide in MacBeth is “not to be interested in regicide as but in regicide as set in its “galaxy of symbols"--regicide, that is, as suggesting, and suggested by, the thoughts and emotions appropriate to daggers, and crows, and naked babes, and so on” (104). The previous version of this post jumped the tracks by overemphasizing the arguments Knapp proposes and dismisses as he updates Wimsatt’s notion of “the concrete universal.” Here they are:
The intended world of an author like Milton should allow “his reader to imagine states of affair whose interconnections would be tight enough, for example, to sustain an inference from Eve’s speaking to Eve’s having a mouth; or from Adam’s standing to Adam’s being in contact with the ground” (9). If he succeeds, his intentions can be divined. If he fails, his intentions can be probed and critics can attempt to supplement the work with whatever it needs to achieve coherence, e.g. the Romantics reenvision Milton’s intentions and in so doing create the coherent Miltonic world Milton himself could not. But Knapp insists that “one’s interest in the problem of Milton’s authorial agency can go beyond an interpretive interest in figuring out what action milton performed or failed to perform” (27). Therefore
an interest in analogies between poets and their poems, or poets and readers, or readers and poems is hard to account for in either theoretical or interpretive terms. But [his] claim is not that a non-interpretive and non-theoretical interest in analogies is for that reason anomalous or mistaken. On the contrary, it is precisely for this kind of interest that I propose to reserve the adjective “literary.” (29)
Via Keats’ Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil and Kant’s Third Critique, Knapp then discusses the possibility that aesthetical ideas, as represented in metaphor, are suggestive without being meaningful in any predetermined way. Metaphors brim with “negative capability” because they communicate only indirectly. Whatever cognitive content a metaphor possesses, it also possesses aesthetic attributes which cannot be conceptualized. The metaphor is “can never yield a definite cognition, since the content of the representation...remains an ‘illimitable field’ of associated effects, that is, ‘sensations and and secondary representations’ for which no definite verbal expression can be found’” (42). The author and reader collaborate in this speculative enterprise unlike the economic case in which the speculator gives up an immediate payoff for an immediate payoff for an anticipated but uncertain future return. “In the aesthetic case, what one gets in return for a surrender of immediate agency is not a later benefit but a certain mode of experience or consciousness” (40).
As was the case with the coherence of the intended world, here again Knapp insists that authorial intention is irrelevent to the production of literary interest. It
isn’t necessary to for a metaphor’s author to intend each assumption that belongs to the set of assumptions the metaphor is intended to commnicate. The reader is free to extrapolate on the basis of what the author has explicitly indicated. But such extrapolation...will only continue to count as interpretation as long as the interpreter has reason to think that what she arrives at continues to belong to the content intended by the author. (48)
Knapp sees “no reason why the activity triggered by a poetic metaphor--or indeed any literary representation--should take the form of an attempt to interpret the representation” (47). (I strongly disagree with the principle here but, as promised, will hush for the time being.) Still, he acknowledges that “what remains to be explained is why a speculative interest that goes beyond an interest in a representation’s meaning should nevertheless remain bound...to the representation that excites it” (48). The representation that excites, i.e. the author, remains bound because, historically, readers have folded the author back into the literary object, have shifted attention “not from the object to the representation itself but from the object to the agent of representation (from the matter of poetry to the poet)” (51). Knapp thinks this a mistake, both for the reasons I’ve already outlined, and one additional one: Socrates long-ago exploded the notion that basking in the greatness of another is a rational activity.[1] Literary interest avoids the object-of-representation/agent-of-representation circuit by recreating “the concrete universal” through an authorless and intentionless oscillation between types and universals.
These types appear in literature as signs and representations clustered
around a literary object. These clusters or constellations of signs
produce, to use Knapp’s example, the experience of the type or concept
Chevalier for Jean-Paul Sartre:
To decipher the signs is to produce the concept “Chevalier.” At the same time I am making the judgment: “she is imitating Chevalier.” With this judgment the structure of the consciousness is transformed. The theme, now, is Chevalier. By its central intention, the consciousness is imaginative, it is a question of realizing my knowledge in the intuitive material furnished me. (37)
With “the concept ‘Chevalier,’” Knapp contends,
we have arrived at the notion of a particular feeling experienced on a particular occasion, but a feeling that at the same time possesses the irreducible generality of a concept, since it necessarily involves a reference to other feelings on other occasions (whether those other feelings are remembered or only imagined. We have arrived, in short, at something it apparently does make sense to call a “concrete universal.” [...] Sarte’s example concerned the imagining of an absent person, but his account applies equally to the perception of persons as such. For persons, in a crucial sense, are always absent. To perceive a person is always to perceive a particular body as the present incarnation of an identity that is distributed across a range of particular occasions now absent. (77-78)
Having, he believes, answered the Platonic charge of patent irrationality, Knapp wonders whether literary interest has value for activities outside the production and consumption of literary objects. He queues the usual suspects and finds them all wanting. A discussion of Ronald de Sousa’s axiological theory--which entails the testing of scenarios, one against the other, until one “restructures one’s emotions by ‘consciousness raising’"--is followed by the de rigueur deflation of de Manian notion “the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations.” He saves his positive platform the final chapter, “Collective Memory and the Actual Past,” the subject of tomorrow’s follow-up post on Literary Interest.
I believe I’ve eradicated my inchoate criticisms from this version of the post. At the very least, I’ve bitten my tongue bloody muzzling my yap this time through, so this should represent a presentation of the strong form of his argument up to Chapter 5. Tomorrow I’ll cover and critique Chapter 5 while swinging wildly through the material I’ve presented today.
Unless, of course, I’ve flubbed it again. (Crosses fingers. Prays. Looks around, sees no one, prays harder.)
[1]In Ion he informs the eponymous rhapsode that Homer’s poetry only excites the lower faculties, the passions of his audience, and that it does so from a position of substantial intellectual vacuity, since the content of poetry is so universal as to be utterly devoid of content.)
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