By analyzing the DNA inside ancient bones, Svante Pääbo is able to affirm without doubt that "we have always mixed."

Performative and Constative in Culler

Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory (1997)

Chapter 7: Performative Language

Culler reviews J. L. Austin's distinction between constative language ("The cat is on the mat") and performative language ("I promise!"); "performative utterances do not describe but perform the action they designate." (152) But when we say "The cat is on the mat," we are saying "I hereby affirm: the cat is on the mat" and so every constative is also performative.

There is a notion that all literature is performative language -- Joyce describes Buck Mulligan, and thereby creates Buck Mulligan. Romance stories describe love, and so create love. Literature thus changes the world. But if literature is performative, then literary statements are never true or false, but, like promises, may be "felicitous" or "infelicitous." Having said to one person, "I promise not to do so," then saying "I promise to do so" to another person is not making a false statement, but rather an infelicitous one. What makes literary statements felicitous? This question is tantamount to asking what makes statements literary in the first place -- Culler: what is it "for a literary sequence to work." (side note: Culler clearly means by "sequence" any sequence of literary statements)

Derrida appeals for Austin to consider not just "serious" performative and constative utterances, but also a more comprehensive look at statements in all situations, for the criteria of "general iterability." Looking at political statements, for example, Derrida finds that a constative statement lurks behind the performative statement:

We therefore...do solemnly publish and declare that these United colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states.

The verb "are" contains the performative element; the "ought," constative.

So performative utterances are defended by constative utterances, and constative utterances all contain within them performative utterances; for Culler, this undecidable oscillation, this impasse, this aporia, is reflected in Robert Frost's poem "The Secret Sits:"

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

Religion: Francis Schaefer

A blog post in the recent LA Times Arts section probably hoped I would laugh at Rev. Schaefer's video and dismiss it without even finishing the series. But I see a bit more here than "art-junk," though it is visibly poisoned by Schaefer's sympathy for destruction and -- perhaps even oppression -- in the name of pure salvation, symbolized and reducible to Christ. The view that Christ is crucial to any rational discussion is called "presuppositionalism:"

In Christian theology, presuppositionalism is a school of apologetics that presumes Christian faith is the only basis for rational thought. It presupposes that the Bible is divine revelation and claims to expose flaws in other worldviews. ... Presuppositionalism itself contrasts with classical apologetics and evidential apologetics. --Wikipedia

Sentence: Gloominess

A certain gloominess -- that is to say, a general pessimism regarding literary distinction -- could be called an occupational disease of literary scholars if it were not their primary occupation. With literary form always in flux, and literary publics always on the move, the scholar's sacred duty is to identify the crises of the literary, and to extrapolate from these certain explanations and elaborations of the cultural crises to which we all, as a human race, face in unending sequence. Little wonder, then, that gloom accompanies the analysis of the literary, and even less wonder that in attending to the literary in Chinese, and so faced with the ravaging cultural crises that have wrenched Chinese reading publics in their experience of the twentieth century, the scholar of Chinese literature is occupied with gloom as a matter of course.

What is a sequence (2)

I'm mulling over what the term "sequence" means once again, and this time approaching it from what I've read of Patrick Hanan's most general "scheme of narrative analysis." What I was trying to do was to divide the text into sections that identify the "characteristic means of transition from one section of the text to another." Two means that I already had in mind were the breaks between description into scene (which is common at the beginning of the story); Hanan has it that these are changes at the modal level. The shift between description into scene is that between static elements and the mimesis of action.

I also had in mind changes to the focal level, or "point of view." (18) When we pass from description to scene in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," for example, the focus changes from the setting of Tarry Town, its environs and its history, to Ichabod Crane, his physical features and personal history. Isn't this characteristic shift between sections of the text an example of changes at the focal level as much as or more than the modal level? I suppose that what I am approaching here is the idea that scene sequences begin and end with changes to the text on multiple levels. The identification of these levels and their changes will help students summarize the story, build up the sense of configurative meaning, and, eventually, begin to construct the interpretive meaning of the story.

Book: The Chinese Vernacular Story (2)

Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story (Harvard, 1981)

Chapter 1: Language and Narrative Model
Section 2/3 : A Scheme of Narrative Analysis (16-20)

A level is linear, sequential, extending in space to represent the sequential nature of speech and literature...no fixed hierarchy is postulated...one requirement of a level...is universality; it must consist of elements that are both discernible in the text and that run throughout any and all texts in the same manner as linguistic levels. Such intermittent features as character, image, and symbol therefore do not exist as levels but merely as constituents of one level or another. (16-17)

Every text (and so every story) has six major levels. There is the speaker; in the case of the story, this is the narrator. Another level is the focus, out of which we may determine scenes and sequences because the focus is both what the speaker is seeing and the speaker's perspective, the object and the subject as a common textual artifact. On the level of mode, we have scenes, close-up beats of action, and summaries, which combine beats, or else delve into commentary or description. As we read along switching modes here and there, the reader begins to put together the story at the level of meaning, first constructing a real-time, or serial, meaning, and then linking the serial meanings into a greater configurative meaning, which can both be the basis of an interpretive meaning. Finally there is the sound and/or graphic level, about which Hanan comments little here.

Among the four literary kinds, narrative belongs together with the drama as kinds that narrative events, which is to say they tell of events in time, and so remain close to time and experience, whereas the lyric and the exposition may leave behind the dimension of time to approach more closely the focus, either the lyrical subject or the theme. The idea of theme is abstract, and Hanan also likes Saintsbury's term "stuff-material," though he does not tell us why yet.

Reading list derived from these four pages alone (many, many more in the endnotes):

• Paul Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (1921)
• Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957)
• Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) 
• Genette, "Discours du Récit," Figures III, (1972) 65-282, 203-11, On the "focus"
• Roman Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art (1973) ; look for "stratum of created objects" to help understand configurative meaning
• Roland Barthes, S/Z (1974)