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)

Graphic: How Big a Backyard to Live off the Land

I saw two or three great graphics this summer but did not save them here, and now can't remember what they were of. Resolved: save interesting graphics if at all possible.


Home Solar Power Discounts - One Block Off the Grid

What is a "Sequence"

I'm interested in the term sequence as used by Patrick Hanan, for example on p. 31 of The Chinese Vernacular Story: "...the story is realized in six major scene sequences." "Sequence" as a term in narrative theory is defined neither in Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, nor Kellog and Scholes, The Nature of Narrative. It does appear, though in Robert McKee's Story: Style, Substance and the Principles of Screenwriting, where we see a definition perhaps peculiar to the screenplay:

A SEQUENCE is a series of scenes -- generally two to five -- that culminates with greater impact than any previous scene. 

*  *  *

There is also the term "literary sequence," as in:

'Characters' are by definition in determined contexts (i.e. they are parts of a literary sequence involved in a plot)...

--The Routledge dictionary of literary terms

We can see here that plot can be defined as the set of all sequences in a short story. I think "sequence" is even more useful than "plot," because sequences are the units of the short story that the author must have seen. They are the equivalents of scene changes in drama, but in fiction we can have shifts in object of description (update: Hanan's focus) other than changes of scene, such as in Xizao chapter 4, which has Yun Nan shifting his gaze towards different characters in a big meeting. I would say that the entire scene is made up of short sequences that take as their objects the different characters, their physical appearances and hints about their role in the upcoming story. UPDATE: Nope, that's not what Hanan had in mind (return to p. 31-2), so I was off the mark in this initial analysis. (I preserve it show wrong I can be!) The scene sequence is represented by the entire chapter, with Yun Nan's tardiness illustrated, then explained, then resolved.

*  *  *

Another useful clue pointing the way towards my definition is from a book on "lyric writing," which gives "sequence" as

"a series of similar constructions that begin with the same kind of word -- a verb, adverb, adjective and so on..."
--Sheila Davis, The craft of lyric writing

Books: 洗澡 part 1/3, chapter 4/12

Yang Jiang, Xizao 洗澡 (Baptism, 1987)

Chapter 4

In October, 1949 the "Beiping Institute of National Learning" 北平國學專修社 is to be re-christened as "the Literature Research Institute" 文學研究社. Ma Renzhi serves as director, and the number of students and faculty both increase.

Yun Nan is late to the official establishment ceremony because he changed his entire costume; at first he wore a blue uniform, but at the last minute decided to wear a Western suit. As the last person to arrive at the big meeting, he looks around anxiously. He observes his fellow faculty members and thinks briefly of what he knows of them.

One professor who had been around since Yao Jian's time, Ding Baojia, knows that he might face conflict with the new director, Ma Renzhi, because he made anti-Communist remarks to Ma before the war ended. Ever since Ma had been Yao Jian's assistant, he must have been an underground CCP member.

Yun Nan also spots Yao Mi, noting her delicate disposition and dark, intelligent eyes.

The meeting concludes, and new institute is established.

Poetry Magazine: The Manhattan Project by Spencer Reece : Poetry Magazine

James Franco in his next role as a lonely gay man with intimacy issues (practice makes perfect!)

My favorite poem in the July/August 2011 Poetry was :
The Manhattan Project by Spencer Reece

First, J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote his paper on dwarf stars—“What happens to a massive star that burns out?” he asked. His calculations suggested that instead of collapsing it would contract indefinitely, under the force of its own gravity. The bright star would disappear but it would still be there, where there had been brilliance there would be a blank. Soon after, workers built Oak Ridge, the accumulation of Cemesto hutments not placed on any map. They built a church, a school, a bowling alley. From all over, families drove through the muddy ruts. The ground swelled about the ruts like flesh stitched by sutures. My father, a child, watched the loads on the tops of their cars tip. Gates let everyone in and out with a pass. Forbidden to tell anyone they were there, my father’s family moved in, quietly, behind the chain-link fence. Niels Bohr said, “This bomb might be our great hope.” My father watched his parents eat breakfast: his father opened his newspaper across the plate of bacon and eggs, his mother smoked Camel straights, the ash from her cigarette cometing across the back of the obituaries. They spoke little. Increasingly the mother drank Wild Turkey with her women friends from the bowling league. Generators from the Y-12 plant droned their ambition. There were no birds. General Leslie Groves marched the boardwalks, yelled, his boots pressed the slates and the mud bubbled up like viscera. My father watched his father enter the plant. My shy father went to the library, which was a trailer with a circus tent painted on the side. There he read the definition of “uranium” which was worn to a blur. My father read one Hardy Boys mystery after another. It was August 1945. The librarian smiled sympathetically at the 12-year-old boy. “Time to go home,” the librarian said. They named the bomb Little Boy. It weighed 9,700 pounds. It was the size of a go-kart. On the battle cruiser Augusta, President Truman said, “This is the greatest thing in history.” That evening, my father’s parents mentioned Japanese cities. Everyone was quiet. It was the quiet of the exhausted and the innocent. The quietness inside my father was building and would come to define him. I was wrong to judge it. Speak, Father, and I will listen. And if you do not wish to speak, then I will listen to that.

Prose poetry is poetic language that comes in blocks justified on both the left and the right. If there is any deeper difference from poems not labeled "prose poem" ("poem poem?"), then I suppose it is in the subordinate position of metre. But that does not mean that other elements of prosody are not fully present; it doesn't even mean metre is not important. More thoughts on this, I hope, to come.

Side Note: Funny, I just saw Howl, starring James Franco as Allen Ginsburg, and now I learn one of Spencer Reece's other poems, "The Clerk's Tale," "is currently being made into a short film by actor, James Franco." So Franco intends for the elevation of poets and poetry to proper cinematic subjects to be a continuing project. Bless him!

Books: 洗澡 part 1/3, chapter 3/12

Yang Jiang, Xizao 洗澡 (Baptism, 1987)

Chapter 3

We learn the history of the "Beiping Institute of National Learning" 北平國學專修社 and how it has entered a new era of transition. The "Institute" started up and established, more or less, by Yao Jian 姚謇, a literature professor who failed to flee Beijing as the Japanese invaded. He, his wife, his assistant Ma Renzhong, Ma's wife, a few other teachers and three students occupied a few rooms on Yao's old family property, which by wartime had mostly been sold or leased away. The Institute is a secluded community that collectively spends its time punctuating the Historical Records of Sima Qian. Or rather pretending to, as most folks prefer to sit around chatting and drinking tea.

Yao Jian has one daughter, Yao Mi 姚宓. She is 19 years old in 1945. Her father unexpectedly passes away, and her mother, already unstable, is plunged into deep melancholy. Yao Mi drops out of college, uses her small inheritance to send her mother to a German sanitarium, and takes up a low-paid position as librarian at the Institute.

In 1949, Yao Jian's former assistant, Ma Renzhi, takes over as director and prepares to re-establish the institute under Communist control. Yun Nan joins the faculty.

Books: 洗澡 part 1/3, chapter 2/12

Yang Jiang, Xizao 洗澡 (Baptism, 1987)

Chapter 2

Remembering advice and money given her by her mother-in-law, Wan Ying prepares for separation from Yu Nan, but Miss Hu unexpectedly finds a better male consort, and so Yu Nan is left behind as the Communists take control of China. Thanks to Wan Ying's good memory, Yu Nan is able to accept a job offer at a literary institute in Beijing.

Book: 洗澡 Part 1/3, chapter 1/12

Yang Jiang, Xizao 洗澡 (Baptism, 1987)

With consolidation of basic military and political control of the China mainland the Communist Party leadership faced a problem...a small political elite committed to social and economic change saw its revolution threatened from both peasant conservatives and the life style of a small urban skill group. As Mao Tse-tung and his supporters phrased it in the mid-1950s, "Rightist conservative ideology...presents a most serious threat to our Party." (268-269)

--Richard H. Solomon, Mao's revolution and the Chinese political culture

Yang Jiang's only novel is divided into three parts, each with many short chapters; part 1 is called 采葑采菲 : "collect the chaff to collect the wheat."

The year is 1949, and educated Shanghai dwellers watch anxiously as the Chinese Communist Party consolidates control over the region and forces the Nationalists out. Anti-Communist teachers and writers all try to leave if they can.

We meet Wan Ying, who is facing hard times in these circumstances. Her husband, the rather dastardly and deceitful Yu Nan, is carrying on an affair with the eminently practical, if conniving and manipulative, Miss Hu. Yu Nan hopes to abandon his wife in Shanghai and leave China for a job obtained by Miss Hu.

Film: Two Strikes and a Hit

Trawling Netflix instant on packing days, resulting in

Strike 1:



Strike 2:



Actually, that one seemed to work well enough for me. But Adam voted it down. And then a hit!



Winner, best film about a poet I've ever seen. Now to see a second one...

Books: "Traditional innovation: Qian Zhong-shu and modern Chinese letters"

Theodore Huters, Traditional innovation: Qian Zhong-shu and modern Chinese letters, (PhD dissertation, Stanford, 1977)

Crisis after crisis afflicts the minds of men aiming to build and preserve cultural unity, moral unity, linguistic unity; the search for unity plagues Chinese history. Such is Huters's gloomy theme in the first section of his doctoral dissertation (Chapter 1, part I, pp. 1-38). A few of the major propositions involved in this perspective on shifts in literary value:

The most ancient gesture of breaking cultural unity is the emergence of literary language out of epic. The world of the epic is unitary, while the world of the literary is one author's view of things, and so in the moment of transition culture faces a crisis.

In China, this crisis occurs when the system of the rites 禮 yields to the system of the written word, but Chinese masters do not admit of transformation between epic and literary, between constative and performative. Rather the very choice of what to canonize -- laws and miscellany, rather than myth -- reveals the effort to make the Chinese literary 文 "produce what is meant," though it does not.

And yet, strands of subjective perspectives exist, as we can trace from Wang Yangming. It's just that there is always a conservative reaction, such as the Qing empiricists, who take objective perspectives to "paper over" the gaps between the constative and the performative. (14)

Confucian humanism decided that man created civilization and language, but can't quite explain why they don't work. The effort to explain is an obstructionist historicism, the well-known Chinese tendency towards archaism. Chinese literature always, always was cornered into commentary; pure literature ever remained "a light residue in a didactic mass." (18)

And yet, private forms did develop; most notable is the lyric poem 詩. Zhuangzi privileged privacy too, or at least the sense of intuition. But again the Chinese subjective is vulnerable to attack by thinkers who say all language should be right and true and belong to no one. 言公 (22)

In the West, the early gesture of severance sheared the literary from other things, eventually resulting in our genre concept. The Chinese "mechanical sense of genre" gives one form per age, and treats the novel as "non-entity." (26) The Chinese novel languished in the form of "the masque:" procedural, essentially conservative.

Wang Yangming's "left wing" subjectivity was developed by his follower Wang Ji in the concept of innate knowledge 良知. Li Zhi went to prison for his own elaborations on innate knowledge. In the wake of this, the three Yuan brothers cultivated a marketable sensibility of "primitivism." It was shallow, though. (30)

The Tongcheng thinkers faced the dilemma of approaching literary affect severed from constative statements once again. And failed again.

The dream of writing like the Wenxuan, like the Han -- like the most ancient of ancients -- is a final, poignant attempt to keep written language 文 performative.

The central crisis of Chinese literature arrived before the Westerners. (36-7)

Selected reading list:

• Lin Yutang, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1930)
• Zhou Zuoren, 中國文學的源流  (1934)中國文學的要求 (1930s?)
• Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford, 1953)
• Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957)
• Scholes and Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (Oxford, 1966)
• Wolfgang Iser, "Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response in Prose Fiction" (1971)
• Iser, "The Reality of Fiction" (1975)

Cooking: Search for a Cabbage Recipe

Rhonda Lauret Parkinson, The everything college cookbook: 300 hassle-free recipes for students on the go. (Adams Media, 2005)

These days I'm looking at a lot of books like this so that Adam and I can eat home-cooked food even though we are busy now and will shortly become very, very busy.

So far I've only seen p. 78 of the Google eBook, but I'm not impressed with a page that suggests a) to back the hell out of cabbage and b) it's better if we eat the cabbage raw. Isn't Rhonda suggesting we not cook the recipe she has printed, but instead look somewhere else?

Books: "Polygamy and Sublime Passion" (2)

Keith McMahon, Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity (University of Hawaii, 2009)

To begin, McMahon introduces us to Chinese literature as a story about the evolution of polygamy, though perhaps it's better to say that it's not polygamy or even sexuality that he is interested in so much as what the characters in love stories -- especially male consorts and remarkable women -- represent in terms of social and philosophical value.

Chapter 1, "Sublime Passion and the Remarkable Woman" begins with the general proposition that the rhetoric of qing in late Ming and Qing fiction is the rhetoric of a "radical subjectivity," as we can see from the "evanescence" of the female characters, all of whom are remarkable women. The proposition is similar to one in Lee Haiyin's Revolution of the Heart (Stanford, 2007), but McMahon focuses on the egalitarian streak that, in his interpretation drives, male consorts to toward femininity and receptiveness and remarkable women towards agency and service as ontological focal points for anxious males.

He proposes that the figure of the "wanton woman" (yinfu), best exemplified in Jin ping mei's Pan Jinlian, is a type of remarkable woman as much as any of the honorable courtesans or women warriors, because wanton women steal male energy. The point is that the remarkable woman as a narrative unit symbolizes men's ontological crisis. Courtesans, for example, help contain the nostalgia and longing of fallen dynasties. (In women's hands, though, (as we see in tanci) courtesans supply complaint and resistance, which shows that more than the male perspective is at work. How does this fit in McMahon's larger argument?)

McMahon's readings from Pu Songling's Liaozhai zhiyi illustrate his interest in the representation of ontology in the appearance of the woman, which is always liminal (cf. evanescent), rich in "visible affects," and contains at least one scene of the "frame" of sexual possibility into which she enters, crossing over (as Zeitlin has described) boundaries. The effect of the ontology is on the man, who transforms, as from a blank man to one with sexual knowledge, or the spineless man destroyed by the shrew. According to McMahon, there is a "gesture of severance" common to many types of Pu Songling story that illustrate the close relationship between qing and...nothingness. There is a profound proposition at work in the stories about the "empty core" at the bottom of any individual self. (This implies a Lacanian reading, which he will introduce in time, and to which I frankly have to play catch-up. Skeptical catch-up.)

I'm eager to play with many of these ideas, both to continue setting up my own reading list and to understand how the actions and appearances of remarkable women and male consorts work in modern Chinese writing. Two basic ideas to consider further:

• Yang Jiang self-fashions as a "remarkable woman." How does she transform and adapt "gestures of severance" to yield agency for herself? (Is that even a good question?)
• Yang Jiang sketches Qian Zhongshu as imbued with "foolishness," a plain fact that connects with McMahon's discussion of foolishness which Paul Rouzer alluded might exist in a conversation last year: "Marriage or love only work in Liaozhai if the man is in some way foolish and blank, the best example of which occurs when a woman literally bestows sexual capacity upon the man." (29)

Reading list from chapter 1: 

• Comments on qing by Wang Yangming, Li Zhi, and Feng Menglong
• Selected Liaozhai stories
• Jinü, "The Weaving Girl," for the luminescent erotic image, framed, its entry, and the mistake the male makes to lose her. (Also there's a horny homosexual old lady -- a new motif of interest!)
•  "A Bao" and other stories which feature "foolish" men
• "Le Zhong" for its non-sexual sublime passion which McMahon leaves us as a teaser

Chinese: dried meat for teachers

Idea: sublime passion and nationalism

Posting soon