Puck

Jeanette Winterson, the British novelist, wonders in the Times of London (and which I found via BroneteBlog):

As the floodwaters rose around me and we sank in a summer of rain, I tried a kind of homeopathic charm; what books could I find on my shelves where floods and rain played a part?

Winterson rattles off the usual list of suspects, including the biblical flood story and (weirdly) the movie version of Frankenstein (which movie? and why not the novel?). What’s odd to me is that almost none of the academic eco-criticism types have picked up on climate as at least a viable leit motif for analysis. In my reading of gothic lit, climate and weather are veritable characters. Wouldn’t it be useful (something that is normally very difficult to say about contemporary literary studies) to analyze climate and weather in literature with an eye toward shedding some light on our current crisis, a crisis which, in our inability to do anything concrete about, is surely as much moral and psychological as scientific and economic?

I took a stab at it a couple years ago by presenting a paper at a low-level, regional MLA lit-studies conference. I was met with blank stares, for the most part, perhaps because I eschewed the jargon of the trade as much as possible. Because they could understand all the words I used, the audience may have felt talked down to. Or maybe it’s just a crappy paper. It certainly doesn’t delve deep enough into the implied thesis: that climate is a character or anyway a means of characterizing roles.

In any case, here’s the paper as presented at the conference in 2005. Perhaps it’ll be of some use to an eco-conscious scholar attempting to open the field of climatocriticism. Continue Reading »

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essay by Brian Charles Clark

A secret war has been raging for millennia. The battle lines can be roughly drawn between those who insist that empiricism can answer all our epistemological questions, and those who insist that knowing is fundamentally an imaginative act, one that is forever becoming and shrouded in mystery. Plato is typical of just how “rough” those battle lines are. In the Republic, Plato wrote of the dangers of the imagination, especially as displayed in the poetic consciousness or “divine madness” of inspiration. This is the same Plato whose beautifully erotic love poems grace the pages of the Greek Anthology.

Two thousand years later, in 1817, John Keats would jump into the fray with his eyes wide open. In fact, it was Keats’s viewing of a painting that led him to write a famous letter. (Keats’s letter of December 21, 1817 is quoted in full in, among other places, Rodriguez, Book of the Heart (Hudson, New York: 1993), pages 39-40.) After looking at a painting by the landscape artist West, Keats wrote his brothers that there were “no women one is mad to kiss” in the picture. Nothing in the painting inspired his passion, “there is nothing to be intense upon,” nothing provoked his sense of the marvelous. The hic et nunc flatness of West’s painting admitted no otherness, no “Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without an irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Continue Reading »

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essay by Brian Charles Clark

I. Liquid Manifesto

Like a sacrificial virgin balanced on a ziggurat in an earthquake, Jean Genet step-dances in fits and trances, and in his resolute Fall disavows the validity of received notions of ontological and epistemological positioning. Genet’s narrators are Schroedinger’s cats: undecidably both dead and alive. Genet’s narrators are also liquid. These narrators, as for example Jean in Funeral Rites, rise to the level of their surroundings in a dialogical environmentalism (in the sense that the mental is enturned: en-vir–always already turning again) that has them “communicating” (in the sense that a dance is a communion) with “the other” (a prescriptive term about to be overturned) outside of the space-time continuum of Newtonian physics and Cartesian ontology, but still within the purview of persistent and visionary rhythms. Continue Reading »

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essay by Brian Charles Clark

The character Bradwardine in Walter Scotts’ novel Waverly displays some wonderful examples of what Joseph Shipley describes as the “mingle mangled” speech of the time. Here’s an example of mingle mangle from Waverly. The year is 1745. The speaker is Bradwardine. He’s addressing his guest, the visiting young Waverly, and some of his local noble, friends at a pub. Inebriating beverages have been partaken of in quantity all evening.

‘I crave you to be hushed, Captain Waverly; you are elsewhere, peradventure, sui juris, - foris-familiated, that is, and entitled, it may be, to think and resent for yourself; but in my domain, in this poor Barony of Bradwardine, and under this roof, which is quasi mine, being held by tacit relocation by a tenant at will, I am in loco parentis to you, and bound to see you scathless…’ From this polyglottal sausage of a sentence, he turns sharply to his neighbor, and dropping back into Scots vernacular, says, ‘And for you, Mr Falconer of Balmawhapple, I warn ye, let me see no more aberrations from the paths of good manners.’ ” [Penguin Classic edition (1985), p. 98]

Shipley (In Praise of English, p. 24) shows how this mingle mangle of “scraps of Latin or Italian” comes from the Grand Tour tradition. An English gentleman “completed his education by taking the Grand Tour, which might mean spending as much as two years in France and Italy—where he gave impetus to the saying Inglese Italiano e un diavalo incarnato”, that is, the gentleman became “in full regard the Italianate Englishman.” Bradwardine is a Scotts incarnation of this vocabular tourist.

A modern-day mingle mangler can be found in David Markson’s novel Springer’s Progress [(1977) Dalkey Archive, 1990]. Springer is a blocked novelist who can’t seem to stop stepping out of the bounds of his marriage. Here’s his pick-up line to a young woman in his favorite bar: “‘I owe a cock to Asclepius. You want to pay him for me, please?’”

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