Attending to the Literary: The Distinctiveness of Literature [1 ed.] 1032469781, 9781032469782

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ATTENDING TO THE LITERARY

Attending to the Literary: The Distinctiveness of Literature is a foray into current debates about the nature of the literary. What is literary? Is literarity a thing? Are there still aesthetic standards of taste? Is the category of literary aesthetics an obstacle to understanding the uses of literature? What does it mean to count the reading of literature as an experience in its own right? What would be the deficits to human experience without literature? Attending to the Literary addresses all of these questions with a view to challenging the notion of literarity as merely representative of experience. On the contrary, Alan Singer shows how literarity is an enacting of experience. Through close readings of an eclectic repertoire of literary sentences – culled from the genres of fiction, poetry, and drama – Singer demonstrates how syntax stages human capacities for attending ever more consequentially to the world of practical experience. These stagings of forms of attention involve readers in the drama of reason-giving and expand the possibilities of rational imagination. Attending to the Literary speaks to a broad audience of readers for whom the question “Does literature matter?” remains an urgent intellectual challenge. Alan Singer is Professor Emeritus of English at Temple University. He has written extensively in the fields of literary theory, aesthetics, and the visual arts. His publications include Posing Sex: Towards a Perceptual Ethics (2018) and The SelfDeceiving Muse: Notice and Knowledge in the Work of Art (2010).

ATTENDING TO THE LITERARY The Distinctiveness of Literature

Alan Singer

Designed cover image: The Calling of St Matthew, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, (1599–1600), Contarelli chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Alan Singer The right of Alan Singer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Singer, Alan, 1948- author. Title: Attending to the literary : the distinctiveness of literature / Alan Singer. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023007626 (print) | LCCN 2023007627 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032469782 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032469799 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003384052 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Literature--Philosophy. | Literature--Aesthetics. | Grammar, Comparative and general--Syntax. Classification: LCC PN45 .S436 2024 (print) | LCC PN45 (ebook) | DDC 801/.3--dc23/eng/20230607 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007626 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007627 ISBN: 978-1-032-46978-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-46979-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-38405-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003384052 Typeset in Times New Roman by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

In Memoriam Bernard Singer (1925–2020)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

viii

Introduction: Literature as Staging for Human Capacities: Snarling the Allegory

1

1 The Mirror of Attention: Affording Literarity

11

2 Sense and Sentences: Writing the Prose of the World

35

3 Reading for Experience: The Compositional Ethos

62

4 The Potentiality of the Reader

83

5 Literarity and Possibility Bibliography Index

104 128 132

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has benefited from the powers of attention generously endowed to it by colleagues and friends. I am indebted to the amiable and energetic argument and advice of Daniel T. O’Hara, Robert Caserio, Timothy Corrigan, Ross Posnock, and the readers of my manuscript at Routledge Press. Lines from John Ashbery’s Houseboat Days, reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author’s estate. “The Red Wheelbarrow,” by William Carlos Williams from The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939, copyright 1939 by Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. A version of Chapter 1 was originally published in Symploke vol. 28, nos. 1–2, 2020.

INTRODUCTION Literature as Staging for Human Capacities: Snarling the Allegory

This book is a foray into current and sometimes hotly contested debates about the nature of the literary. What is literary? Is literarity even a thing? Are there still aesthetic standards of taste? Is the category of literary aesthetics an obstacle to understanding the uses of literature because it distances us from the world in which human agency is at stake? What does it mean to count the reading of literature as an experience? What would be the deficits to human experience without literature? Such questions presuppose a relatively mysterious object of study. Accordingly, the burden of my argument will be to show how literature cultivates rapport with human capacities for attention. That said, I give precedence to the term “literarity” over “literature” because I want to sketch the ways in which literary texts, by virtue of their essentially syntactical modus operandi, stage those human capacities for attention. Literary texts thereby enhance the prospects for creative agency in practical life. So I begin with the assumption that literature, nameable as it appears to be, wants practical reasons for its being what it is, more than mere recognition of what the name might be applicable to. For this reason, I wish to think less about what literature is and, if I can borrow a phrase and a title from Samuel Beckett, to focus more intently on how it is. Beckett helps me in two ways here. Beckett’s brief text How It Is1 nominally purveys the experience of reading literature. But by its eliding of narrative moments into what appears to be an infinitely extensive present tense, How It Is makes the act of deferring knowledge of what literature could possibly be its own métier. Stuck in a sea of mud, blind, and ostensibly helpless to go on, the narrator of How It Is turns out to be animate beyond his own powers of appreciation: “how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it.”2 Beckett’s de facto thwarting of his narrator’s fatalistically announced teleology of narrative moments – before Pim, with Pim and after Pim – prompts

DOI: 10.4324/9781003384052-1

2 Introduction

the reader to improvise an alternate temporality, the temporality of reading beyond the categorical bounds of “before,” “with,” and “after.” This temporality, unlike the narrator’s, would be one that is not, as Beckett puts it, “already over,” already partitioned, outside of time. The question “What is literature?” – in this case – turns upon what the reader can do in an ensuing moment, e.g. “I say it as I hear it.” It is implicitly a bid for a self-elaborating agency that subsists upon textual features but is not reducible to a finite text. I would say that the question “What is Literature” like the more general questions which it subtends – “What is Art?” “What is Aesthetic Experience?” and “What is beauty”? – almost always founders upon the ambition to locate an essential quality rather than an activity. So, in a Beckettian spirit, I wish to assert that it is not the essence of a distinctive experience that counts for readers of literature. What matters more are the occasions for taking account of the experience that can be staged for readers by literary artists. Such staging presupposes that human capacities for thought, feeling, expression, and valuation are not self-evidently available to human agents without their cognizance of the experiential constraints that warrant human activity. In this regard, any taking account of one’s experience presupposes an agency which knows the conditions under which it can give adequate reasons for its activity in the first place. In other words, it is not that literature (or art generally) eludes our desire to pin down its essence. Rather, our attempts to pin down essences, to muster reasons, to participate in a rational practice of self-understanding, are insufficiently appreciated as essential knowledge in their own rights. The activity of pinning down, given that its very ongoingness would seem to preclude the possibility of essence altogether, eludes the seductive traps of smug thematic knowing. It precludes treating the work of art in terms of a mythos with respect to which we are encouraged to take a passively worshipful stance. On the contrary, the reason-giving practice that I am alluding to here is a self-dignifying enterprise. It is an eminently humane discipline. My reader should therefore not be surprised that the great humanist minds of Duns Scotus, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Schiller, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty guide my thinking in what follows. I will start by honoring the staging ground for literary study that was so stolidly scaffolded by Kenneth Burke in A Grammar of Motives.3 Burke famously captures the notion of the literary work as an act, an activity, specifically a scene/act ratio. The theatrical stage is his point of departure for thinking his way into the literary work. The work is rendered a labor of discernment with respect to an array of prospects for knowing how to act. In the Burkean view, agency is known to itself dramatistically as a predicament. He mines his insights from the Hegelian paradox of substance. The word substance, deriving from the Greek word hypostasis is, significantly for Burke, interchangeable with the word person. He understands personal agency to arise always in relation to what inspires reflection on its conditions for arising as such: according to the constraints of its scenic backdrop. This is a “strategic moment” for Burke. It occasions what he calls “momentous miracles of transformation,”4 and I would add, possibility, a concept that will acquire weight as my argument progresses. Such miracles of transformation subsist upon

Introduction  3

an unresolvable ambiguity: the knowledge that “every positive is a negative.” For Burke however this is not a capitulation to indeterminacy. It bows instead to a contextualizing imperative for thinking about human motivation. As Burke stipulates, this is a modification of the notion of the work “in itself.” It harbors a Spinozian respect for a determination sub specie aeternitatus. That is to say, we know the work in terms of what we can do with it, in terms of the temporal trajectories inherent in the scene/act, scene/agent, and agent/act ratios. The ratios give definition to the literary work. They do so according to our intrinsically mobile positionality, respecting the perspectival variables they animate for us in the course of time. Readers acquainted with recent literary critical schools of thought soliciting greater attention to the surface of the text as a field of readerly action (Best, Marcus, and Felski) will appreciate the prescience of Burke’s thinking here. While Burke’s dramatistic perspectivalism is anchored in pragmatic agency, it bears a perhaps unexpected affinity with Jacques Derrida’s5 very direct, but more strictly Husserlian coinage of the term “literarity.” Literarity is propose by Derrida as an antidote to the thematic and moralistic generality promoted by the more familiar term literariness. Derrida hews to the notion that whatever we count as literature will constitute an “act of inscription and reading.” “Literarity” he says is not a natural essence, an intrinsic property of the text. It is the correlative of an intentional relation to the text, an intentional relation which integrates in itself, as a component or an intentional layer, the more or less implicit consciousness of rules which are conventional or institutional ….6 Derrida’s agency, with respect to literarity, like Burke’s, seeks to check the reader’s susceptibility to the temptations of transcendence. Derrida wards off the readerly temptation to transcend the circumstantial constraints imposed by what we might call the irreducible syntactical imperative of the text, where one thing stands contingently in relation to another. He privileges the noetic or thetic dimension of the work, in favor of the noematic dimension. With the term noema, Husserl points to the features of consciousness that distinguish different kinds of acts. Alternatively, the noematic sense points to the idealization of the object of consciousness. Derrida strenuously resists any temptation to indulge an idea of consciousness independent of an object that denotes its contingency. Derrida discounts such thinking as a thetic naivety. Such naivite loses sight of the functional aspect of language whereby a reader is an active participant, articulating the rules according to which the performativity of reading is actualized. As Derrida avers: “Potentiality, the sine qua non of performativity, is not hidden in the text like an intrinsic property.”7 More pointedly, Derrida explains that “Poetry and literature provide or facilitate ‘phenomenological’ access to what makes of a thesis a thesis as such.”8 He is careful not to make the thinking of the thesis an end in itself. He seems to figure literarity here as striking a balance between a reader’s wish for a punctually referential and precisely un-Burkean substantializing of meaning and a reader’s wish to see the noetic register of a text as an

4 Introduction

occasion for speculating about what possibilities for referential sense-making it occasions. That is, literarity might be grasped most decisively, as the inevitably variable conditionality of its own expressiveness. Thus, for both Burke and Derrida, I want to say that literarity is a knowledge of human capacities, agential capacities in general, before it is a knowledge of how those capacities are most adequately represented. I must add a caveat here however with respect to Derrida’s inability to explain how one moves from the generality of human capacities to the relative specificity of agential capacities. Derrida’s insistence upon remaining on the boundary where noetic and noematic experience meet precludes engagement with the contextual pressures of doing something in the world, even if we are speaking only of the world of the text. My own account of literarity will attempt to make the staging of agential capacities more pragmatic. I wish to link them to the power and existential adventure of reason-giving. I see reason giving as an exigency of composing and of reading literary texts. As I’ve already intimated then, the term literarity in this book will serve more productively than the term literature for the purpose of engaging literary works of art. This will be the case inasmuch as literarity does not depend on a preconceived anatomy of forms. It attunes us more immediately to the experiential constraints of form-giving agency, the circumstantial stagings necessary for exercising human capacities. For the moment however my thinking picks up on what Charles Altieri understands in his valuable book, Reckoning With Imagination.9 In his ingenious Kantian/Wittgensteinian way, Altieri seeks to pre-empt an all too conceptual rapport with literary forms in favor of the experiential intensities that they sustain. Altieri implicitly distinguishes literary experience from literature understood as what can be valued for abstractable reasons. Literary experience effectively takes precedence as a humanistic value over literature. Altieri gets to his point by analogizing literary experience to the way in which agents surround acts with reasons. He admonishes readers against taking those reasons as explanations. He prefers to honor the purposiveness of agency in the comparatively richer terms of what he calls, after Wittgenstein, “display.”10 Altieri’s appeal to display betokens a Burkean dramatistic disposition. This is made clear in Altieri’s appreciation of how Wittgenstein subordinates the goal of knowledge to the human agent’s capacity for recognizing what powers of adaptation inhere in playing roles with respect to shared practices. Altieri’s own adaptation of this pragmatic mis-en-scene to the scene of literature is compelling. It brilliantly exemplifies how literature sustains reading as a self-conscious activity without devolving to a narcissistic preoccupation with consciousness as brute cognitive power. Alternatively, Altieri is responding to Wittgenstein’s insight that wherever we are involved in grasping the world aspectually, as opposed to conceptually, we are resorting to an imaginative capacity. Altieri’s account of display is initiated with a clarion epigraph from Wittgenstein. As Altieri notes, Wittgenstein proposes that saying “‘Now I see it as …’ is related to ‘Now I am imagining that ….’”11 Altieri is keen to stipulate that imagination, in this frame of reference, is no

Introduction  5

less an activity than choosing one angle or another from which to view an object. I will argue that either choice alerts one to the possibility of another choice. I am mindful in this context that Derrida, in his bid to banish the notion that there is an essence of literature, is motivated by a stake in such a possibility. In Passions,12 Derrida maintains that literature is a modern invention. He buttresses the claim by echoing his own definition of literature as an “act of inscription.” But he further elaborates that this modern invention is itself “inscribed in conventions and institutions, which, to hold on to just this trait, secure in principle its right to say everything.”13 Writing that is not literary will say something already warranted. Literature’s warrant to “say everything” is responsive to possibility in a way that interested, rational warrants (which I might call allegorical dispositions) preclude. Of course Derrida’s “everything” is likely to devolve to an infinite dissemination of the signifier. I would prefer to say, perhaps more pragmatically, that literature solicits warrants. It doesn’t satisfy them. I think Altieri makes a similar observation about display. He emphasizes that it needs no epistemic criteria in order to dramatize what it makes appear. This is not to eschew any and all epistemic investments. Rather, to put this in Altieri’s own terms, the act of display models those investments. Indeed, the epistemic stakes of display can only be fully appreciated in relation to the act of making a model. This is distinct from making a copy of the world that a literary artist, e.g., might wish to purvey. What makes the model more conducive to artistic expression as Altieri sees it comes clear from Wittgenstein’s assertion that if a model, like a schematic cube, is acknowledged to possess aspects, instead of meanings, one’s impulse in responding to the model is “… I want to find out what someone else sees.”14 To know an aspect is to know the capacity to discover other aspects, with respect to the way any choice alerts one to the possibility of new choices. It opens the horizon of agency, and as we shall see, it implies a protocol for reason-giving. I began this preface by thinking about literature as a bid for self-elaborating agency. Altieri sees the model in compatible terms as: “… establishing a distinctive role for the maker who wants to elaborate [my emphasis] within the work those decisions that bring out the significance to the person of how he or she responded to the dawning of an aspect.”15 Unlike Altieri however, I put emphasis on the elaboration of decisions more than the mere intensity of the experience realized by those decisions because I see them as reciprocating registers of experience. Altieri is more interested in the intensity qua intensity. For myself, emphasis falls on the putative “maker.” As I see it, the maker is making the conditions of his or her self-sustaining agency. The maker is holding herself accountable to reasons for making the choices that the act of making reveals in time. Literarity in this schema participates in a proliferation of moments in time. Nevertheless, for this particular moment in time, prefatory as it is to the text that follows, I wish to move away from any more speculative gesturing. Now I wish to make an admittedly preliminary gesture towards exemplifying how the purview I have improvised out of the insights of Burke, Derrida, and

6 Introduction

Altieri brings us into rapport with what literarity might be and how we might value it, if we agree that it is not an essence. Since agency is a stake of my argument so far, I take a syntactically over-animated poem by John Ashbery, in tandem with the poet’s own remarks about composing it, as my exemplifying leverage. “Daffy Duck in Hollywood”16 by the poet’s own account, sets off a noetic “avalanche” of strange objects that threatens to bury a reader’s comprehension. I’ll quote just the opening lines: Something strange is creeping across me./La Celestina has only to warble the first few bars/Of ‘I Thought about You’ or something mellow from/Amadigi di Gaula for everything – a mint-condition can/Of Rumford’s Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy/Gonzales the latest from Helen Topping Miller’s fertile/Escritoire, a sheaf of suggestive pix on griege, deckle-edged/Stock …. And so on and on. While inundating the reader in a sea of contextually disjunctive particulars, the poet mischievously appears to toss out what the literary turn of mind so often reaches for: an allegorical life-line. Each of the “objects” teases the reflex literary interpretive effort to avail oneself of what Derrida mocks as transcendence to the referent. For example, a can of Rumford’s Baking Powder can be found on the shelf of the neighborhood supermarket. So, Ashbery is taunting us with the possibility that we can save ourselves from drowning. We can begin to make sense of the poetic experience by seizing upon the buoying objects of an empirical worldliness. But the allegorical life-line in this case is cartoonishly lashed to a red herring. We get a more secure grip of Ashbery’s sense-making métier mid-way through the poem. Our panic at the prospect of being swept along in the avalanche flow of what Ashbery himself calls “strange objects” is snagged on the following quite conspicuously composed and un-transcendable verbal line of the poem. It reads: “The allegory comes unsnarled/Too soon; a shower of pecky acajou harpoons is/About all there is to be noted between tornadoes.” In an interview about what it meant for him to be the maker of the poem, Ashbery allows that the allegory coming unsnarled is probably a good thing. “But too soon isn’t.” I would argue that the immediacy of “too soon” is immediately deferred in the line I am focused on here, by the “shower of pecky acajou harpoons.” It rains down upon a reader a multiplicity of consonantally pointed aspectual vectors that pre-empt the snarl from, in Ashbery’s words, “dissolving into a poetic statement … something that I feel is happening and I don’t want to happen.”17 Allegory almost categorically precludes the kind of experience that aspectual knowing teases out. I would call Ashbery’s energetic invocation of the aspectual realm a modeling, in Altieri’s/Wittgenstein’s sense. The snarling of the allegory, if we think of the allegory as the rough equivalent of a copy, models an activity not a hapless predicament. The “snarl,” so to speak, explains itself by producing the conditions for its self-perpetuation: the inexact deferral of “too soon.” By deferring the “too soon,” the reader participates in a messily unfolding temporality. This

Introduction  7

temporality thwarts what the prospect of knowing the exact time for unsnarling the allegory tantalizes us with: the possibility of knowing the work without working at it. After all, professing to know the exact time for anything in human life is the most allegorical construct of human expectation and presumably the right time for unsnarling the allegory. On the contrary, I want to suggest that inasmuch as Ashbery’s poem sets itself up as the antagonist to allegory, it makes out of the multiplicity of objects it purveys an imperative for aspectual notice. In effect, the reader of Ashbery’s poem must forage for the mind that performs the reading of the poem. It might be fair to say then that literarity, in this case, inheres in the act of mind which features itself as a mode of display. It does so in the manner of the Burkean actor who knows the meaning of the act by potentiating attentiveness to the shifting scene of her action. Perhaps then, it will not be judged too glib a rhetorical gesture on my own part, if I posit that literarity is best conceived of as a kind of rehearsal space for human agency. I say this with the proviso that there will be no final performance. In other words, literarity is a vocation to be taken up in a way that guarantees we will never know our mastery of it. Given my reading of Ashbery above, I feel entitled to assert that the operative hedge against allegorical conceptualizing is syntax. Syntax is typically treated as the source of propositional logic. I will prefer to see its combinatory rules as inferentially rich with re-combinatory possibilities.18 For my purposes, syntax is the dynamis of the sentence. It makes of aspectual notice a compelling perplex, just as the dynamics of life in the street, the inescapably surprising circumstance of everyday life, makes of our experience a scene of action where purposiveness is aroused to perception. Of course the Greek dynamis is the root of Kant’s understanding of the Roman facultas: doing something and, in doing it, changing the world.19 For my purposes, the Kantian facultas of judgment, aesthetic judgment in particular, is most apt for thinking about the irreducibility of syntax, and for grasping the meaningfulness of literarity in our experience beyond literature per se. As I’ve already asserted, literarity is experiential beyond the experience of reading literature. Without the resources of literature I must nevertheless admonish, our experience risks losing its imaginative way. The point is nowhere more pointed than in Kant’s chapter on imaginative genius in section 49 (“On the Powers of Mind Which Constitute Genius”) of the third critique.20 Here what Kant terms “aesthetic ideas” and “aesthetic attributes” are not ordained by a hero of poetic imagination. Rather they are the circumstantial, one might fairly say syntactical, constraints of sense-making without a conceptual template. When I say about Ashbery’s poem that it prompts the reader to “forage for the mind that performs the reading of the poem,” I am speaking, in roughly Kantian terms, about the way in which the aesthetic idea in a Kantian work of genius arises out of a concatenation of compositional elements whose compositional warrant is strictly functional. It is in no way categorical, catering to canonical wisdom. As Kant famously puts it: “I mean a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate though … no [determinate] concept

8 Introduction

can be adequate.” Kant’s meaning here necessitates coupling the definition of the aesthetic idea with the aesthetic attribute: … a presentation of the imagination such that, even though this presentation belongs to the exhibition of a of the concept, yet it prompts, even by itself, so much thought as can never be comprehended within a determinate concept and thereby the presentation aesthetically expands the concept itself in an unlimited way … it makes reason think more ….21 What is exhibited here is not the discrete perceptual item per se, presented as a manifold by the imagination. Rather, we apprehend the mind caught up in the relations of what is perceived, the syntactical links articulating those perceptions. In that experience, the mind is finding its own animus to be of preeminent value. The “mind caught up,” as we will see more persuasively in my reading of Henry Green’s novel Caught, is a mind on its way to a place where the notion of “destination” is insufficient to account for the animus of its purposive directionality. The mind is perceptive but not slavishly the creature of its perceptions. In this regard, the subject of literarity is far from captive in an aesthetic ivory tower. It denotes the Energeia of the tower-building intellect, the irony of Babel notwithstanding. At the same time, it dutifully takes account of the babbling of the perceptible world. That is to say, literarity speaks in ways that are not bounded by words alone but more profoundly by the forms of attention they cultivate. I should note that attention has occasioned much attentiveness in recent literary criticism with respect to the value of literary experience. The recent works of Citton, (Ecology of Attention), Mole (Attention as Cognitive Unison), and especially Alford (Forms of Poetic Attention) are compelling supplements for thinking about how we value literature generally. My appreciation for these works will be reflected at strategic points in my argument. But, as the brief summary of chapters I present below indicates, the direction of my work is also quite distinct: my argument moves from how capacities for attention are elicited by syntactical practices in literary works to how our capacities for attention potentiate our powers for thinking, i.e. reason-giving. This is the experience of literarity I will feature most prominently in the following pages. Chapter 1, “The Mirror of Attention: Affording Literarity,” explains how my use of the term attention guides my thinking. I address two key questions. How is one called to attention by a work of art? How does the notion of “affordancy,” a concept from design theory, give focus to literarity as a threshold of experience? I orient my reader to the significance of attention with respect to finding our place in the world of our perceptions. The phenomenological and cognitive stakes of the argument are initially brought out by a reading of visual art: Caravaggio’s “The Calling of St Matthew”. Readings of Henry Green’s novel Caught and a gloss of sentences by Proust establish the ground for my assertion that within the realm of the literary syntax shapes attention.

Introduction  9

Chapter 2, “Sense and Sentences: Writing the Prose of the World,” elaborates my understanding that syntax functions in a way that is roughly analogous to perception. Thus, it is fair to say that syntax is experiential for the reader. A brief sketch of how scholastic philosophy, specifically the work of Duns Scotus in relation to the poetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins, spells out my investments in the syntactical register of literarity. An engagement with the syntactical practices of William Faulkner in “The Bear” will illustrate my claim that syntax bears directly on acts of mind and the human activities that ensue. Chapter 3, “Reading for Experience: The Compositional Ethos,” juxtaposes the aesthetic theories of Heidegger and Hegel to make connection with a larger framework of aesthetic value. Here I give detail to my claim that the literary work of art is best reckoned with as a scene of action: where human agency might avail itself of the practical resource of reason-giving. This is my basis for positing a “compositional ethos” as the link between the writer’s experience and the reader’s experience. Both share the syntactical burden of figuring out how disparate things go together according to some combinatory-recombinatory logic. Readings of a Basho haiku and Harold Pinter’s short play “A Kind of Alaska” exemplify my aims in this chapter. Chapter 4, “The Potentiality of the Reader” further develops the idea that syntax is a register of experience with respect to reason-giving. Reason-giving is occasioned where intelligibility is stymied. This is the case no less on the page than on the threshold of perceptual experience. I will assert that literarity occasions reason-giving when rational knowledge is not proffered by grammatical rule: when the sequence of words declares its sense independent of grammatical license. My thinking here depends upon the relevance of design theory (most notably formulated by Don Norman in The Design of Everyday Things) to literary practice by writers and readers alike. In the service of this thinking and in an admittedly counterintuitive gesture, I proffer an analogy between syntax and theories of cinematic montage (Balász, Eisenstein, and Vertov). These threads of argument are woven together in a reading of sentences from Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Chapter 5, “Literarity and Possibility” extends my understanding of attention to the realm of imaginative activity in general. Nabokov’s Lolita and William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” help me to explain how literarity generates unique forms of attention and how this cultivates capacities for furthering human experience. My argument here rests on reasserting the relevance of design theory, specifically as it relates to contemporary theories of rational imagination (Ruth M.J. Byrne and Edward S. Casey) and recent literary critical thought about how best to approach the tasks of reading and understanding literature (the theoretical perspective of surface readers like Best, Marcus, and Felski). I conclude by defending the idea that attention is the sine qua non of thinking literature. Even more importantly, it is the prerequisite for thinking of literature as a model for reasongiving in the realm of practical human activity.

10 Introduction

Notes Samuel Beckett, How It Is (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 7. Ibid., 7. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). Ibid., 24. Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1991), 44–45. 6 Ibid., 44–45. 7 Ibid., 47. 8 Ibid., 46. 9 Charles Altieri, Reckoning with the Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015). 10 Ibid., 123. 11 Ibid., 63. 12 Derrida, Passions, ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavy Jr., and Ian McLeod (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 28. 13 Ibid. 14 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophy of Psychology-A Fragment, ed. P.M.S. Hacker and J. Schulte and trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and J. Schulte (London: Blackwell, 2009), 135. 15 Altieri, Reckoning with the Imagination, 126. 16 John Ashbery, Houseboat Days (New York: Penguin Press 1977), 47. 17 Peter A. Stitt, “John Ashbery, The Art of Poetry, No. 33,” The Paris Review 90 (Winter1983), https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3014/the-art-of-poetry-no-33-john-ashbery. 18 For an account of how the position I’m staking out here is grounded in neuroscientific studies of the cerebellar-cortical system, see Stephen T. Asma, The Evolution of Imagination (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 114 19 Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (London: Blackwell, 1995), 189–92. 20 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987). 21 Ibid., 183.

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1 THE MIRROR OF ATTENTION Affording Literarity

[the] writer’s thought doesn’t control his language from without: the writer is himself a kind of new idiom constructing himself, inventing ways of expression and diversifying itself according to its own meaning. Merleau-Ponty, Basic Writings

Visualizing Attention

Horace’s weary conceit, ut pictura poesis, remains an all too persistent topos of intellectual inquiry into the nature of the literary. Literature is a reflection of painting as painting is a reflection of the visualizable world. The notion is powerfully seductive, for its all too apparent lucidity. Nonetheless, it may be objected that the recourse to a mirror effect, rather than an explanatory cause of what is to be represented, diminishes the cognitive value of Horace’s point. Hence, the unhelpful prevalence of thematic attitudes that count for knowledge of how the arts, painterly and literary in particular, produce meaning. Most egregiously, the Horatian dictum ignores the way in which literary language, in its compositional aspect, models the experiential conditions of human agency. If not for the enhancement of agency, why do we pay attention to the arts? And what are the arts, after all, but an occasion for heightening attentiveness, without which agency remains a fruitless endeavor? Despite my wariness of positing facile equivalencies between painterly gestures and literary sentences, there is no denying that the juxtaposition of these media may be productive of insights about human personhood. This is especially the case if personhood itself is grasped as an attentional disposition correlative with a compositional will: a quintessentially practical circumstance. I will expand upon the notion of a “compositional ethos” that is implicit here in Chapter 3. Here, however,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003384052-2

12  The Mirror of Attention

I must observe that Maurice Merleau-Ponty is one of the few philosophical inquirers into the act of making art who casts it as an un-transcendable perceptual circumstance: what I see specifically as a convergence of attention and will. So it is perfectly logical that in his unfinished, but remarkably forward looking text, The Prose of the World, he begins by situating himself on the painter’s picture plane. Visuality, for Merleau-Ponty, as we will see, may not be disentangled from the perceptual constraints without which agency remains a purely theoretical or, worse still, a spiritual proposition for aesthetic theorists. Art making and personhood are virtually conflated by this logic. Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to aesthetics is thereby distinguished by his refusal to decouple the value of the art work from the value of attentiveness to the world generally. The assumption here is that we belong to the world by our activity in it, not by virtue of our divine placement in it. That would make us passively innocent creatures of an environment rather than volitional beings in a knowing scene of action. Merleau-Ponty’s refusal to pass forgetfully beyond the perceptual world is informed by a counter-intuitive fact. We would never see anything clearly nor would there be an object to view … unless I used my eyes in such a way as to make the view of a single object possible. To complete the paradox, one cannot say that the mind takes the place of the body and anticipates what we will see. No, it is our glances themselves … their prospecting which bring the immanent objects into focus.1 Our object-mongering glance is made most palpably apparent for MerleauPonty in his report of a notorious movie of the painter Matisse, who is counterintuitively visualized in the act of painting. To the naked eye, the painter’s brush would ordinarily appear as a natural flow of inspiration, fostering the illusion that color and form are an organic extension of the gesture of touching the brush to the canvas. Under the gaze of the slow-motion camera, however, the touch of brush to canvas is revealed to be something quite unrecognizable to the painter’s sense of himself as spontaneously applying the paint as a “spot of color or stroke of charcoal.”2 The slow-motion filming reveals how The same brush, which to the eye, did not jump from one movement to another, could be seen meditating, in a suspended and solemn time, in an imminence, like the beginning of the world, beginning ten possible movements, performing in front of the canvas a sort of propitiatory dance, coming so close several times as almost to touch it, and finally coming down like lightning in the only stroke necessary.3 Matisse’s own amazement at the otherwise unseen and unthought hesitations of the brush over the brushwork, the suspense and apparent wariness of error, the seeming awareness of “ten possible movements” inherent in the hand holding the brush, led him to a mistaken conclusion. The painter flatters himself to see the possibilities revealed by the camera as though they were already contained in his own head, as though he were a demi-god creating a universe according to

The Mirror of Attention  13

a blueprint of already determined choices immanent to consciousness. MerleauPonty is quick to point out that those possibilities are made explicit by the camera and not by some numinous conceptual power. In fact, the possibilities denoted here are only perceptually the case. They are possibilities in themselves, independent of the painter’s abstract intentions. They are not what the painter might otherwise imagine he sees, in advance, to be gesturally necessary, a choice among choices. This is not to say that the painter does not choose from an array of possibilities. That would vitiate agency. But the painter who does not see the slow-motion film of himself painting will not be sufficiently apprised of the fact that the gestural possibilities are already realized, as such, by the perceptual field within which the brush is already bound. As Merleau-Ponty explains, it is not that the painter’s choice arises from some miraculous transcendence of perceptual immediacy, some organic extension of percept into the realm of concept. Rather, the hesitation of the painting hand revealed in the film – against the testimony of the naked eye – indicates its mediation by a given perception, with the understanding that perception is not preformulated: It is therefore true that there was a choice, that the stroke was chosen so as to satisfy ten conditions scattered on the painting, unformulated and unformulable for anyone other than Matisse, since they were defined and imposed only by the intention to make this particular painting which did not yet exist.4 In other words, Matisse’s possibilities already inhere in the choices instantiated as the compositional field where his attention is held by so many unformulated “conditions scattered on the painting.” The painting, “which did not yet exist,” is not a phantom reality but a real condition which summons explanatory powers yet to be realized. What is “yet to be realized” is a possibility that inheres in the activity of the moving brush, not in the conceptual prowess of the painter’s intent. Calling to Attention

To speak, as Merleau-Ponty seems to, of locating a view of where one stands in the world – elsewhere than within the perspective of one’s own point of view – is to echo the insights offered in Jacques Lacan’s well-known account of the mirror stage.5 But there is a caveat. Lacan importantly locates the always belated self in the mirror. But in his rush to elaborate the realm of the Symbolic, he risks obscuring a point that is nonetheless profoundly implicit in his exposition and more pertinent to the discussion at hand. Lacan underplays the fact that what appears in the mirror is first and foremost a function of attention. For my purposes, attention must be construed as a feature of human mindedness that links the eye to a physical mobility: an activity that might be said to precede the order of signification altogether. Here, I defer to Hegel’s notion of mindedness as all that is opposite to naturalness, natural necessity, and exclusive of agential purposiveness. Recently, theorists of perception like Alva Noë and S.L. Hurley have explored

14  The Mirror of Attention

the way that our sense of being in the world is the result of our doing something in the world.6 From this vantage point, the Lacanian recognitive gaze by itself does not do justice to the disposition of the body engaged in the activity of attending to the visualized world. Thus, the visual image in painting, photography, cinema – even in the verbal eye of descriptive language – may be said to feature itself not as an object of attention but as an act of attention. I stress the act of attention not simply because I want to see action as supervening perception, but because attention is the staging ground for knowing oneself to be involved in a world that one doesn’t yet understand. The thrust of my argument will be that one’s attention fundamentally tells one where one is going from here, so to say. A visualized world proffers an intimation of physical mobility, the kind of motion that leads us around existential corners: blind spots of viewing. It is the kind of motion that is implicit in the mysterious flicker of cinematic montage, which will be a subject for further speculation in Chapter 4 of this book. For some art theorists like Jean Luc Marion7 and Paul Crowther,8 this attentiveness to the blind spot is an intimation of divinity or sublimity. Their respect for the divinely ordained or sublime blind spot – paradigmatically in painting – is a deference to ultimately unrealizable powers of understanding. I would say that they thereby miss the possibility of treating attentiveness as its own realm of power with respect to what is not immediately visible. Certainly, material forms are not sufficient to the meaningfulness they foster. But for Marion and Crowther, cognizance of this fact is tantamount to what divinity and sublimity have in common: a beckoning beyond the human facts of existence. The distinction I want to make here between the indulgence of divine sublimity and the intently attending consciousness holds out the possibility of thinking as an activity that is not predestined for indeterminacy. Attention, in my view, prevails upon the mind to see beyond only in the manner of expecting a determinate something else. This does not mean however that attention is reducible to picturing, in the sense that the picture shows you what you already know you have seen. Quite the opposite. As it entails responsiveness to the cognitive opacities of what is pictured, attention is nothing less than an awareness of prospective error. Perhaps it would be more pointed to say that attention is a mode of perceptual-cognitive prospecting. This account of attentiveness is, of course, epitomized most commonly in instances of trompe l’oeil and anamorphic projection, where the eye is prompted to look beyond what it most immediately sees, without losing sight of the act of seeing. In a sense then, I want to take such visual illusionism as normative for seeing generally and, more importantly, as analogous to narrative expectation and, ultimately, human self-explanation. The chief aim of my remarks here is to show how the image, calling us to attention, is substantially always more than the object to which we attend. The visual image denotes a capacity for attention that is not only commensurable with its objects. It is furthermore commensurable with the world of experience which those objects denote as possibilities for a viewer to take action in. This is to say that the image hails an agential identity that is not reducible to an idea of the self. It denotes selfhood as a prospective spatio-temporal contingency. In order to explore

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the power of the image, as a calling to attentiveness, I will shortly focus my analysis upon Caravaggio’s masterpiece, “The Calling of St Matthew”. Perhaps it is best to begin my commentary on how the image calls us to attention by acknowledging the egotistical privileges of visual perspective that have been honored since the Quattrocento. Typically, we treat perspective as the anchor of what Lyotard has mockingly dubbed the “princely” viewing self.9 This is the always irresistible proffer for mastery of the object world. Perspective, in this context, is explicitly proprietary with respect to the objects it reveals. What we often forget, nonetheless, is that perspective is always already perception. I would draw a distinction between the two on the basis that perceiving entails cognizance of adjacent perspectival vantage points. It thereby demystifies any proprietary illusions. I will admit that if we grant my point about the essential illusionism of our habitation of spatial fields, we risk putting the self on what might at first appear to be a shaky footing. Upon closer inspection however, I believe that this indulgence of illusionism might prove to be a more fleetfooted knowledge of what it means for the self to be contiguous with other perspectives. After all, where we know ourselves in our attentiveness to spatially situated objects, we are already in motion, as any student of Albertian perspectivalism (as it is tutored in Della Pittura) knows. This is a tribute to the recessional drive toward the vanishing point. While the vanishing point is a token of indeterminacy for most arthistorical readers of the picture plane, I contend that it is more engrossingly a token of movement. Under the authority of the vanishing point, attentiveness is the corollary of the measurable distances (the ratio of orthogonals and diagonals) that the vanishing point purveys to us as a prospect for movement. Once again, I am asserting that the attentive eye is a counterpart of the mobile body. This is a prompting to admit that what we know, according to what we pass beyond, what we render illusory by passing beyond it, is the most authoritative kind of self-knowledge. I am convinced that we have knowledge of what we pass beyond more consequentially than our speculation upon any metaphysical beyond that might otherwise tempt our attention. This is just to reaffirm that mental attention and physical movement are inextricable activities. This is also the crux of Alva Noë’s Action in Perception. I want to say that Noë’s self-described “enactive theory of perception” encourages the viewer’s attentional proclivity for prospecting. The gist of Noë’s view is that “What we perceive is determined by what we do (or what we know how to do); … we enact our perceptual experience; we act it out.”10 For example, if we see the roundness of a plate represented in perspective, we are aware that its round appearance is seeable from another vantage as an ovoid or elliptical shape. We are tempted, as with any conventional trompe l’oeil, to alternate between views. This is implicitly a concession to our habitation of the space in which we may choose to see the plate in relation to how it is presented or not. If, as I am suggesting and following Noë’s lead, the act of looking surpasses the object-hood that otherwise appears to give focus to our attention, then attention denotes a mobility of perspective that I now want to say is profoundly implicated in the activity of choice-making. That is, I see choice-making as de rigueur for activity itself, especially since every object of vision denotes its being brought into

16  The Mirror of Attention

a field of vision by a viewing agent: an embodied and thus potentially animate subject. This is to say that our attention is drawn to an object with the aid of some considerable “draftsmanship,” on the part of the viewer. Aptly, for my purposes, Noë’s refusal to write off the perceptual ambiguity of the round/ovoid plate as mere indeterminacy is formulated as knowledge that “There is a sense in which how things look depends on what you are interested in … on how you probe.”11 No thought about how something looks is “interest–neutral,” at least insofar as it depends upon what we are attending to. It would therefore seem impossible to escape the conclusion that knowing how something looks requires some choice-making initiative. My earlier characterization of such looking as a mode of prospecting is coherent with the notion that the identity of the viewer is something to be discovered – in the consequence of looking one way or another – rather than something to be posited. Since I am presuming that finding one’s place in the world is a searching after rapport with what the world presents to us, I want to affiliate my thinking with the work of psychologist James Gibson. Gibson reshaped the field of visual perception in the 1950s. Gibson’s radical empiricism, in a line of descent from William James and E.B. Holt, led him to introduce the theory of affordance which will help to accelerate my argument. His interest in the psychology of apprehending the visual world, in his The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, privileges the environmental or, to put it in an aesthetic register, the compositional totality within which any discrete perception is available.12 Specifically, Gibson privileges an environmental/compositional orientation over any phenomenological apprehension that would otherwise be remanded to a private consciousness. By contrast with private consciousness, affordance denotes the intrinsic relationality of any discrete perception with respect to the “action possibilities” which the perceiver is disposed to upon encountering the diverse particulars that make up the environmental/compositional field. Even more pointedly, Gibson notes that the possibilities for action denoted by affordance are perforce improvisational insofar as the properties of any object may call out diverse agential capacities. After all, we won’t ultimately know what we grasp until it is within our active grip. Gibson observes, e.g., that an actor may throw a ball or sit on it because either is objectively possible. The privileging of possibility is the counterpart of choice or, as I would put it, the opportunity for an agent to do something rather than something else. This is to acknowledge that we have perceptions that outstrip conceptions of what they are good for. Perception outstrips conceptuality in its orthodox Kantian sense. Noë sees this fact as a basis for claiming that conceptuality is precisely relevant as a kind of place holder for sensory-motor activity per se. I would go further to say that wherever there is slippage between perceiving and even a specifically Kantian conceiving, attention or notice13 obtrudes as the sine qua non, of visuality. Furthermore, where attention and notice obtrude, the apprehensions that they denote as possibilities for action entail some kind of choice-making protocol on the part of the viewer. Affordance presupposes alternative uses of a ball within a frame of reference that makes each a plausible choice. Just so, our perception, insofar as percepts are

The Mirror of Attention  17

never discrete from the field of reference in which they invite us to move – purposefully, with conceptual trajectory – compels our disposition to treat other percepts as candidates for our attention. They impose a warrant for choice-making. But such choice-making is not a strict instrumental mandate since percepts inevitably call our attention into an ever more disparate field of perceptual contingencies. At this point, I wish to return to my premise that illusionistic practices, in visual art especially, might be considered normative for the general view of visuality I am taking here. But it is not illusionism qua game playing or trickery that interests me. Choice-making and, implicitly, reason-giving remain the salient stakes of my view of the viewer’s engagement with the illusion-conjuring image. It is for this reason that I choose to look at Caravaggio’s “Calling of Matthew”14 rather than, e.g., the more theatrical trompe l’oeil featured in Hans Holbein’s “The Ambassadors,” or the showy anamorphic ceilings of Andrea Pozzo, where illusionism too readily succumbs to awe and wonder. In “The Calling of St Matthew” (Figure 1.1), Caravaggio dramatizes the imperative of choice-making in two ways. Christ appears to choose Matthew unequivocally. More precariously however, the viewer is inveigled to choose the figure who would be Matthew. The crook of Christ’s finger is the ambiguous hinge of meaning here. This ambiguity inheres in the mirroring of Christ’s denotative gesture by what I would characterize as the connotative gesturing hand of Matthew himself. The would-be disciple sits adjacent to a bushy haired youth obliviously calculating his profit at the end of the customs table. While Matthew appears to be pointing, as if in recognition to himself, Caravaggio invites speculation that his finger wavers between himself and the younger man, whom some Caravaggio scholars have more recently conjectured might be the real Matthew.15 This appearance is reinforced by the trajectory of St. Peter’s finger which appears to be on a more direct line of sight with the younger man. I am not saying that Christ’s pointing finger is a trompe l’oeil. But it dramatizes mis-recognition in a manner that is congruent with the errancy of perception conjured by trompe l’oeil. In this regard, it is worth noting that one challenge Caravaggio took on in this canvas is the crowding of a greater number of human figures than he had orchestrated in previous compositions. He foregrounds the urgency of picking and choosing. So, while Christ’s pointing finger, in its particularity, picks out the figure of Matthew, it is also conspicuously figured among other orientational perspectives, other pointers. Furthermore, I would argue that the effective mirroring of the pointing finger, in Caravaggio’s composition, rules out our seeing Christ’s pointer as a discrete and dispositive referential gesture. It is rendered no less uncertain than the identity of Matthew himself, whose nature Christ’s gesture means to alter in any case. The viewer’s attentiveness to the picture plane thus issues in an awareness of its calling her to choose differently according to what I think we can fairly call competing affordances: the three deictic fingers whose trajectories we are obliged to sort. If, as Gibson, suggests, affordance is an acknowledgment of action possibilities, the correlate of possibility is the attentional capacity itself which Caravaggio so vibrantly animates in this canvas.

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FIGURE 1.1 “The

Calling of St Matthew,” Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1599–1600), Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome.

Along these lines, Louis Marin notes how the light in which the “real” Matthew will be revealed, at least insofar as it appears to strike his face, does not come from the same source as the oblique light that illuminates the scene in its greater totality. As Marin says, “This disjunction of rays of light strikes me as the energetic substratum of the gesture of pointing …”16 Marin’s notion of a “substratum” is cognate with Caravaggio’s widely acknowledged strategy of multiplying the coordinates upon which we are invited to map our recognition of what is happening in the dramatic scene. By this means, Caravaggio is always asking the viewer to look again. I would however quarrel with Marin’s implicitly spiritualizing conclusion, faithful as he is, that the possibility of transcendence is in the offing here. I would rather say that if there is a “substratum” of the act of pointing, it can only be made sense of in terms of our dawning realization that we must choose between the two

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prospective Matthews. For, in this instance, we do so with full recognition that it is our capacity for attentional engagement that takes priority over whatever choice we finally make. In other words, the drama of the picture plane here has less to do with the act represented in Christ’s “calling” and more to do with the artist’s calling the viewer into a field of choice-making activity, or what I might call perspectival mobility. I am conflating choice-making with physical activity because they are mutually implicated in a human capacity to mobilize alternative views. Caravaggio’s “Calling” is dispositive for this point. Instead of merely finding ourselves passive in Caravaggio’s field of vision, i.e., called obediently and single-mindedly to the dispositive detail of Christ’s pointing (and I would add “choosing”) finger, we actively attend. Thus, in the very act of our attentiveness, we discover the possibilities that comprise it. Those possibilities might remain obscure if we did not honor our diligent presence in relation to what is not yet definitively presented. What is not yet known, what is contingent upon our choosing acumen, is the guarantor of our self-recognition as knowing agents. In this relation, we are not bowing to an indeterminate beyond. We are moving beyond what presents itself as being there independent of our attentional powers. The Powers of Attention: Henry Green and Knowability

If what is true of painting is applicable to literature, as I am bound to argue it is, the relevant stake for the attentive mind is the kind of worldliness that painting and literature proffer in common. The compositional aspect of each medium presents or is, in effect, a prompt to affordance. Composition animates the coordinates of experience whereby we come to understand that the forms of the world are responsive to our attentiveness, even as our attentiveness is a response to the world. Just so, the prose writers who will interest me here compel our awareness of reading as emphatically formative rather than merely formalistic. I do not mean to invoke form as a self-effacingly genial counterpart to content, or as an all too self-subverting antagonist of content. What is most relevant to my deployment of these terms is the relationality, without any binary presumptions, that inheres in form. Just as affordance ought not to be taken as a substantive fact,17 so form ought to be thought of as what one knows in the course of knowing that something comes next: syntactically one might say. My subject now is sentences. Caravaggio’s compositional impulse is to multiply perceptual vantage points and their respective perspectives, as if to cultivate uncertainty about where one stands and so to keep the viewer more attentively on his or her toes. Similarly, I am here considering the ways in which for certain writers, prose composition can be a métier for looking into the future. I do not speak of fortune telling. Rather, I am interested in a disposition toward accommodating the possibilities latent in any specific experience as it is happening. Such a disposition privileges modes of knowledge that are already in medias res, with respect to the knowing agent. I deliberately conflate syntactical and plot-making activities in my account of prose composition.

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In taking this approach, I wish to find wider scope for my speculations by turning to a prose artist whose conspicuously obscure career was marked by a steady descant of essayistic reflections on what he is doing as a novelist, especially with regard to the syntactical practices which I have argued are correlative with plot-making. For Henry Green (1905–1973), whose novels arrived on the AngloAmerican literary scene in the late forties and fifties – in the wake of official high modernist masterpieces by the likes of Joyce and Faulkner – there is no striving to be in step with the heroic/mythical scale of formal innovation exhibited by texts like Ulysses or Absalom, Absalom! Just as Green holds us to the modest scale of commonplace experience in his plots, e.g., the worlds of factory workers, fire fighters, wayfarers in bustling train stations, the downstairs affairs of great country houses, soldiers returning from war, his most vibrant imaginative feats obtain at the level of the sentence: word by ever more surprising word. So, Green helps me argue that as I shift from a visual to a verbal framework I must elide attention with syntax. In effect I am alleging that syntax is where affordance meets agency. That is to say, I am treating syntax as pragmatical18 more than grammatical. Just as affordance follows the order of perception, actualizing attentional capacities, those capacities succumb to the adaptive imperatives that the potential illimitability of the perceptual world imposes upon us. Syntactical articulation expresses the contingency of attentional variability. Accordingly, Henry Green’s syntactical practices demystify the all too easily conjured sense of the sentence as a natural habitat, where all of our perceptions are naturalized by our conceptual habits. Under Green’s stylistic authority, the sentence yields something like the sensory manifold of an enliveningly animate environment. It is a calling to attention unencumbered by what we know in an already interested capacity. But we needn’t succumb to the Kantian slippery slope of self-caricaturing aesthetic disinterestedness in order to appreciate the experience. Nor do we need to permit the experience to be pre-emptively co-opted by what we might perversely understand as an overriding aesthetic interest. To the contrary, the featuring of attentional variability is a calling to improvise intelligibility out of a circumstance of confusion. It is worth remembering that confusion, what Alexander Baumgarten19 understood as the de facto syntactical fusion of unclear perceptual forms (fused together), i.e., “confused perceptions,” is the spur of aesthetic agency. Baumgarten surmises an agency that is reciprocally compositional. He asserts that bringing clarity to the confusion of sense presentations requires an elaboration of sensate particulars, a shift of attentional trajectory. As Baumgarten further stipulates with respect to the perceptual image, its clarity will be the result of the number of distinctions or divisions within a continuum that it ordains. In an earlier commentary on Baumgarten, I characterized this account of aesthetic form as effectively turning the perceptual image into syntax.20 I have already alleged that attentiveness is not equivalent to any mere picturing of the world as a unified sensorium. For this reason, I counter-intuitively took tromp l’oeil and other illusionistic practices of painting as normative for attending to the

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world in the first place. Inasmuch as attentiveness is a sine qua non of our human agency, a convincingly purposive disposition toward our situation in a world of shifting appearances, it should not be surprising that I equate it with a condition of change. Syntax is fundamentally a counter for shifting appearances since syntactical periods, contrary to strict grammatical appearances, are not axiomatically heralds of temporal closure. I therefore think it fair to say that what painting and prose writing, especially in the modes of fictional narrative, have most in common is epistemic confidence in the unknown. This is not simply to analogize painting and prose narrative, but to appreciate the consequence of thinking about them together insofar as they are callings to what we can see they portend: what remains to be seen. I have already intimated that I do not invoke the unknown for its seduction to ecstasies of the sublime. Rather, I have turned to Gibson’s notion of affordance as a métier for discovering capacities hitherto unknown. If affordance denotes a relation between properties of objects and capacities of agents, I would now like to gloss Henry Green’s syntax as an exemplification of the notion that where shifting appearances are a calling out to our attentive faculties, as they are so prominently on the canvas and on the printed page, knowledge of the unknown is proffered as an exploratory practice. Green’s sentences are virtual purveyors of affordance in much the way that Caravaggio’s composition in “The Calling of St Matthew” moves us beyond the appearance that the object of our attention is coterminous with the capacity for attention shaped by that object. But first I must admit that when it comes to talking about sentences in literary works, we are prone to see things typologically as Stanley Fish does in his How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One.21 Fish is an excellent reader, one might even say an extraordinarily adaptable inhabitant of a multifarious array of literary sentences exampled in How to Write a Sentence. But he is ultimately concerned with understanding the controls exercised within syntactical patterns as correlates of desirable and categorically bound ends. For Fish, sentences rank, order, and sequence events. They presuppose a “world where control is the imperative and everything is in its proper place.”22 There is no doubt that, typologically speaking, there are styles of sentence writing. Fish adduces the “subordinating style” and the “additive style,” for example. But when we begin to inventory them, these styles turn into unproductive categorical imperatives. I do not mean to preclude thematic reduction of the sense of the sentence. I only wish to foreground the tension between knowledge and experience: the phenomenological substrate of reading. It is what gives sentences, in literary texts especially, their unusually potent imaginative charge. Fish’s characterization of Hemingways’s notorious simple or straightforward style, e.g., intimates the blind spot of his approach: “[Hemingway’s prose] does not demand that attention be paid to it. It aspires to a self-effacement that allows the object to shine through ….”23 Fish is equating the author’s self-effacement with a beneficent inattention. He misses a point that will become a refrain of my argument: that attention, inasmuch as it entails a judgmental stance toward an object, is selfrevising rather than self-effacing. A self-revising consciousness eschews stylistic identity as an imaginative animus.

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One more thing needs to be said before I get to Green’s sentences proper however. My preference for a phenomenological viewpoint (with an appreciation of syntax as a mode of affordance) is a disincentive to read sentences as exemplary of any conceptual schema that might decouple the act of reading from a range of actions in the world. I do not mean to suggest that reading is a physical act. But, as I’ve already intimated, perceptual misprision – an inescapable feature of action in the physical world – might be usefully appropriated as a way of thinking about the sentence as an experiential state of affairs, as much as an abstractly thematizeable statement. The kind of misprision I have already highlighted as the métier of trompe l’oeil and, more specifically as the compositional impetus of Caravaggio’s “Calling,” yields evidence that perception is most remarkably the case for sentient beings under the constraint of a changing sensorium. John O’Neill, Merleau-Ponty’s translator for The Prose of the World makes the point that the “… phenomenological approach to language is ultimately … a reflection upon our being-in-the world thorough embodiment, which is the mysterious action of a presence that can be elsewhere [my emphasis].”24 The “presence that can be elsewhere” is a nod to the agential contingency epitomized in perceptual illusionism. It is ineluctably a feature of all action in a world of appearances. Here it is worth reminding ourselves that the enactive theory of perception promoted by Alva Noë is predicated fundamentally on the idea that our sense of the world generally is an awareness of our surroundings as mediated by sensorimotor contingencies. Could sentences be written that must be read out of this presupposition? Henry Green’s remarkably original novel Caught,25 which appears to be written in a language that we possess but don’t yet know how to use, offers an opportunity to answer this query. Leo Robson’s retrospective of Green’s work in the New Yorker was somewhat teasingly titled “The Novelist of Human Unknowability” (October 17, 2016). Robson features Green as a writer who seemingly capriciously eschewed the definite article, ignored the relative pronoun, and deployed commas as if they were obstacles to be littered on the reader’s path. So he might be easily written off as an oracle of the sort of gnomic truths that are so hoarily portended in the concept of the unknown. But there is not a whiff of mysticism in Green’s distinctive prose style. As I’ve already indicated, I use the term “style” advisedly and with a nod to Andre Malraux’s insistence that “… perception already stylizes, that is, it affects all the elements of a body or behavior with a certain common deviation [contingency/action possibility?] with respect to some familiar norm that I have behind me ….”26 In order to grasp what Green is offering, one has to understand that the “style” ear-marked by Robson’s inventory of Green’s “ungrammatical” gestures does not apply to a system of grammar, i.e., of “norms” that one has “behind one.” It has more to do with what one has before one as a choice posed to the human capacity for attentiveness. Style ought not to be thought of in terms of the imposition of an already formulated attitude, imposed from outside the circumstantial parameters of the “experience” instantiated in the act of reading. Style is not codifiable or susceptible to categorization, the capaciousness of Fish’s inventory notwithstanding. On the contrary, and most emphatically for the writer, style is a quasi-improvisational matter. As Merleau-Ponty asserts, the

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writer’s “thought doesn’t control his language from without; the writer is himself a kind of new idiom constructing himself inventing ways of expression and diversifying itself according to its own meaning.”27 I choose to look at the opening of Caught, Green’s 1943 novel about the auxiliary fire service in London during the blitz. This is in no small part because the title evokes the situational constraint that I have been arguing is the operative condition of reading and acting alike. This is especially the case where affordance is in the offing. Thus, we find, in the opening scene of the novel, Green’s protagonist Richard Roe evoking a report/memory/imaginary vision of his young son’s kidnapping – his presence taken elsewhere – from the toy display in a London store. Here all that is purveyed to the concupiscent eye of the young boy, whose gaze is nothing but an ever-intensifying “want,” is literally colored with perceptual misprision. That is, the merchandise intended to catch the desirous eye is cast in the light of stained glass windows lining the walls of the store. The colors are transfigurative of the objects upon which they fall no less than of the reader’s perceptual disposition toward the sentences that proffer such a spectacle: The walls of this store being covered with stained glass windows which depicted trading scenes, that is of merchandise being loaded on to galleons, the leaving port, of incidents on the voyage, and then the unloading, all brilliantly lit from without, it follows that the body of the shop [my emphasis] was inundated with colour, brimming, and this colour, as the sea was a predominant part of each window as a permanence of sapphire in shopping hours. Pink neon lights on the high ceiling wore down this blue to some extent, made customers’ faces less aggressively steeped in the body of the store [my emphasis], but enhanced or deepened that fire brigade scarlet to carmine, and, in so doing, drugged Richard’s consciousness.28 This is not exactly trompe l’oeil, which I have taken as a touchstone for the kind of “action” syntax can inveigle on the basis of fostering a verbal misprision. But it is worth noting that Green’s sentences here, like trompe l’oeil, do not permit thought to control an image, as Merleau-Ponty might say, “from the outside.” The trompe l’oeil image effectively eludes the recognitional concept it teases into consciousness, thereby remanding consciousness to the exigencies of an inherently unstable perceptual immediacy. Green’s figuration of the light, which no doubt comes from a putative “outside,” as an affective state of the “body” of the shop, precludes the possibility of knowing inside from outside, no less than the possibility of knowing the body as controlled, from the outside so to speak, by mind. Furthermore, Green’s figuring the shop in terms of the physical body, which can only know itself and assert that existence through activity, holds his reader to account for the fact that finding one’s bearings in the text entails shifting the focus of one’s attention. Attending to luminosity is distinct from attending to an illuminated physical object. The slipperiness of this differential in this passage constitutes something like a threshold of affordance, where we are rendered irrepressible in response to new prompts for

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attentiveness. I would even say that Green’s prose, as I am characterizing it, coaches what we might fairly call a compositional agency in the reader. Where a reader’s perspectival commitments, i.e., agential capacities with respect to the properties of the apparent object of attention, are challenged, where those properties belie the appearance of their formal sufficiency to the moment of apprehension, a new perceptual orientation is unavoidable. This is so in the same way that sense-making, for the hermeneutically attuned mind, is in no way vitiated or deterred by apparent nonsense. The “body” of the shop, like the physical body that is the sine qua non of affordance, is animated in Green’s prose by yet undiscovered capacities or orientations for sense-making that get teased out in the further unfolding of the scene I am attending to here. This unfolding, in the syntactical torsions by which it is accomplished, displays precisely the stakes and rewards of suffering affordance. For we must be reminded, as we read, of a memory which threatens to be lost in the disorienting succession of times concatenated in Green’s sentences. We must recall that Richard Roe’s habitation of his son’s stupefaction in the store, held as the child is under the colorful spell of the toys, is not a memory per se. It is an effortful imagining, as if Roe intended to wrest his son from the obsessive grip of the kidnapper. The imaginative effort is magnified by the revelation (later in the text) that the kidnapper is the deranged sister of a man who will by chance become Richard’s chief. Her madness is a delusion of parenthood. As if to compound the problem of the reader’s imaginative orientation further, Green show us that Richard’s imagination is also a vehicle for remembering his own experience as a child, being led on the catwalk in the choir of Tewkesbury Abbey. Stained glass windows cast the vivid coloration of Bible stories over the Abbey floor, which the young Richard perceived as a chasm threatening to swallow him into oblivion. That memory is, in a manner of speaking, re-enacted in Christopher’s experience, which is thereby revealed not to be the child’s alone nor any longer the father’s. Green himself deftly re-enacts the twists and turns of this increasingly complex mise-en-scene in the following sentence where Richard Roe attempts to take possession of his son’s experience by visiting the scene of the abduction himself: “For both it was the deep colour spilled over these objects [toy fire engines, deer, sailboats] that, by evoking memories they would not name, and which they could not place, held them, and led both to a loch-deep unconsciousness of all else.”29 In this sentence, I think memory, invoked as a conceptual entity, evokes our awareness of the inescapable confusion of one thing with another: in this case, past and present. Past and present are conflated and decoupled in the mis-recognitions occasioned by colored light “spilled over these objects” of desire. Green appears to be tendering a momentous question: without such mis-perceivings would we even know what desire is? The memories “for both” are not nameable we are told. I surmise that this is because father and son are locked (“loch-deep”), as desire is wont to handle us, in the state of unconsciousness which typically augurs paralysis. And yet, the word unconsciousness appears to be bi-directional in this syntactical matrix. Father and son are led backward by the participle construction “evoking memories,” into an unknown

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which was never brought to consciousness. But the subsequent prepositional phrase denoting unconsciousness of “all else” propels them into a future of infinite possibilities about which they are nonetheless unconscious insofar as “all else” denotes all that remains to be known. Aptly, the latter unconsciousness portends embodiment under conditions of changing perceptual constraint, the sine qua non of trompe l’oeil. Again, I do not pretend that trompe l’oeil per se is the case here. Rather, I want to hark back to Merleau-Ponty’s remarking upon style as an effect of perception in the manner that trompe l’oeil effects. I have already said that it would be easy to pigeonhole the effects that I am appreciating in Green’s sentences as indices of his prose style. But this would be a non-experiential typologizing gambit. It would actually eclipse any dimension of worldliness proffered by syntax that might otherwise be seen as tantamount to action. For this reason, I want to get away from the habit of using “prose style” as a handle for any discussion of what prose syntax accomplishes in literary texts. To this end, it is worth attending to Merleau-Ponty’s citation of a Malrauxean anecdote. It is one in which reading the “prose of the world” is intended to illustrate the aptness of his claim that “perception already stylizes.” It might underline my belief that Green’s sentences arouse a sense of worldly embodiment without succumbing to a privileged sense of things, to a conceptual other-worldliness. In Merleau-Ponty’s account of Malraux’s experience, the world is “A woman passing by.” Malraux is immediately scrupulous to point out however that she “… is not first and foremost a corporeal contour for me, a coloured mannequin.” Rather, Merleau-Ponty extrapolates, She is flesh in its full presence, with its vigor and weakness there in her walk or the click of her heel on the ground. She is a unique way of varying the accent of feminine being and thus of human being, which I understand the way I understand a sentence, [my emphasis], because it finds in me the system of resonators that it needs.30 I deliberately put emphasis on Merleau-Ponty’s analogy between understanding the human being by virtue of a system of resonators and understanding a sentence. After all, a sentence certainly “resonates” by varying “accents,” accentuating variously the grammatical counters of our attention in the concatenation of ever more complicating syntactical order, e.g., Green’s reversing of the direction of consciousness by the addition of the phrase “of all else.” Such consideration of the self-complicating relation of sentences to the capacities of readers calls to mind, once more, Gertrude Stein’s view of syntax as affording “the pleasure of concentrating on the final simplicity of excessive complication.”31 Stein appreciates how the pleasing effect of realizing untried attentive capacities is only appreciable when the expectation of finality is put, even momentarily, in check. I would say that such pleasure can arise in the complicating of a syntactical order like Green’s because it gives occasion for affordance: the coordination of objects of attention with action possibilities. That is, following the logic of affordance, the object of attention gives place to a means for potentiating

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the capacity for attentiveness that suits its circumstance. So I am not saying, as many admirers of Stein are tempted to say, that finality is held permanently in check. Rather, it is assimilated to an elaborative order and, as we shall see, to a furtherance of reasoning. Don Norman, the psychologist and engineer who took up Gibson’s work on affordance, in the context of trying to understand how we get from the discoverability of aspects of the world to their intelligibility through our actions in the world, equates affordance with a design concept.32 Design concerns itself with how things work, or to put it another way, how we work to afford them places in our lives. Is our concern any different with regard to sentences? Could we not view syntax as a design concept? After all designers, according to Norman, make affordance operative only insofar as they guarantee its visibility, its readily apparent intelligibility. A good design is an inveigling of the capacity to figure out “what actions are possible,”33 e.g., a flat plate on a door affords pushing. We might say that a good sentence, with respect to the narrative practices of a writer like Green, nurtures the capacity to figure things out by conspicuously figuring the gesturality of alternative construals of intelligibility. The syntactically induced misprisions of Green’s stylistic gambit offer opportunity for perceptual experience rather than ideas of experience. It is not just the misapprehension that matters, insofar as it is revealed in syntax or, as we have already seen, in paint. It is even more importantly the apprehension of the mis-perceiving self, revealed to itself as capable of what I wish to characterize as “uninvited” perceptions. The perceptual incursions of a world uninhabited by a reader’s expectations – think of the worldly traveler submitting to new geographical/spatial horizons – renew the vivacity of what one knows one is capable of taking in. Like a new design element, Green’s syntactical turning away from the obvious trajectory of his reader’s purpose in taking things in, renders purposiveness itself a mode of discovery for hitherto unacknowledged possibilities. It is worth noting here that William James’s influential theory of attention in Principles of Psychology entailed two processes: The accommodation or adjustment of the sensory organs and The anticipatory preparation from within of the ideational centers concerned with the object to which attention is paid.34 The “anticipatory preparation” as I will elaborate in Chapter 4 of this book is a nod to imagination, the animus of unacknowledged possibilities. It offers a prospect for adaptation to circumstantial change. James’s faith in the attentive subject’s accommodation or adjustment of the sensory organs, I would say, rhymes with the kinds of accommodations necessitated where syntactical elements defy a reader’s anticipatory preparation. The conclusion of Green’s novel is a reprise of the scene of Christopher’s kidnapping, where we were compelled to see into the greater depths of a sea of light. It is both a counterpart to and a consequence of our becoming a reader who adopts/adapts to the challenging design, so to say, of this author’s rigorously baffling imposition of syntactical constraints. The concluding scene of Caught is a kind of enactment of what, in the previous paragraph, I described as a “syntactical turning away from the obvious trajectory of one’s purpose.” But in this case, the turning away is also a turning against. It is a strident inattentiveness. Richard Roe’s attempt to recount, relive,

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remember, imagine, and thereby explain, the confounding experience of his first blitz conflagration on a London dock, is challenged by his wife Dy’s antagonistic will. She wishes to turn his mind away from the literary gambit of story-telling itself. She lives in resistance to the new design of life in wartime England. The scene is conspicuously inaugurated by Roe’s wonderment at his own attempt to recount the events of the fire: “The extraordinary thing is … that one’s imagination is so literary.”35 “Literary” here appears to stand in for the complexifying attentiveness in which he and we are embroiled. Green recruits his reader’s effort to see and see again as the perceptual reflexes of memory demand, indentured as they are in the service of an ever more elusive intelligibility. Hence, we are put under the spell of an ever quickening montage of passing moments. Indeed, by the projective light of Roe’s understanding, imagination and literarity are conflated. It is so in the same way that experience eventually always extenuates attentiveness beyond the conceptual punctuality of knowing what one ought to be paying attention to: “What will go on up there tonight in London, every night,” Richard attests. is more like a film or that’s what it seems like at the time. Then afterwards, when you go over it, everything seems unreal, probably because you were so tired, as you begin building again to describe to yourself some experience you’ve had. It’s so difficult.36 So we are not surprised to realize that Green writes the nominally “final” scene of his novel as montage, “… more like a film ….” Roe’s account of his first blitz fire is set up as a rhythmic counterpoint to Dy’s willful inattentiveness. For example, when he challenges her to imagine the room in which Christopher’s kidnapper kept the child prisoner, she rebuffs the bid for such a costly payment of attention. Roe’s own account of the baptizing fire is therefore the counterpoint to Dy’s unwillingness to follow his account. It emphasizes the point that Dy’s inattentiveness refuses the possibility of finding oneself in ongoing experience. Rather, she presupposes her existence apart from the successiveness of moments that threatens its integrity. Here I must of course point out that it is not in discrete sentences per se, the syntactical complexity within each sentence, that Green finds his most expressive means in these last pages of the novel. Rather, he more profitably exploits the way that sentences can have, in their very successiveness, i.e., their syntactical order within paragraphs, a montage effect that mimes the shifting parameters of importance given to perceptual objects on film. In this regard, Stanley Cavell’s point, in “What Becomes of Things On Film,”37 has relevance. Cavell observes that the very appearance of things beyond their thingness is the discovery of their importance. What happens to particulars in our attentiveness to objects that are filmed is “[T]o express their appearances, and define those significances and articulate the nature of this mattering ….”38 Mattering, Cavell is emphatic, is distinct from matter, in much the same way that every moment is distinct from what it calls our attention to in an ensuing moment. The nature of mattering is a uniquely human concern. The matters that we are mindful of are chosen with the knowledge of other choices inherent to our way of paying

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attention. Green makes the point urgent for his reader by reprising his earlier strategy of inviting attentional misdirection as a leader of self-understanding. Such misdirection de facto constitutes a modality of self-elaboration. The title of Green’s novel figures the salient human predicament. To be caught is to be trapped, to be aware of one’s limits without the means of escape. Or it is to be caught up, to be attentive to the possibilities inherent to one’s immediate constraint, in which case those possibilities constitute the mirror of one’s attention. If one peers into it, one will go beyond oneself in a manner that defies the seductive traps of what we must otherwise call blind narcissism. Roe is caught up. Having been admonished by his wife not to imagine the room in which Christopher had been kidnapped, he insists that he will not refuse the impulse to imagine, to pay attention to the possibilities that court what he calls the effort of “building again … some experience you’ve had,” as if the having of it were haplessly provisional. In the face of Dy’s admonition not to imagine the chamber of their son’s captivity he challenges: “Well, I did [imagine]. Even [my emphasis] to the firelight on the walls. Like the flames did [my emphasis] the first night.” Dy’s retort is, as we will see, an ironic taunt to the reader’s memory: “We don’t know if they had lit a fire. Darling, it’s no use, that sort of thing, no help.”39 Two things are going on here. Richard’s protestation in defense of willful imagining, specifically imagining the firelight in the kidnapper’s room, extends into the scene of the conflagration on the London dock “that night,” as if the flames on the dock were merely greater flickerings of the flames in the fireplace illuminating Christopher’s captivity. Notably, the bridging of one moment in time to another is marked not by syntactical continuity but by the elision of the very word that would have otherwise guaranteed syntactical completeness here: i.e., “Well, I imagined. Even to the firelight on the walls.” The syntactical elision of “imagined” renders “even,” a word that typically marks the degree to which some reality extends beyond itself, an all the more extensive reference. More to the point, the extension of the fire from the fireplace to the dock is provocatively stoked by the repetition of the verb “did,” though the instance of the repetition entails a logically jarring anthropomorphism: “Like the flames did.” As Richard imagined, so did the flames? Under the auspices of what agency? We are disposed to follow the meaning beyond the immediate object of knowledge, in this case the dispositiveness of “did.” The second thing is the wife’s doubtfulness that a fire was lit in the kidnapper’s room. Dy’s certainty about the unhelpfulness of memory – not to mention her indisposition toward knowing what is beyond the immediate object of knowledge – should chime with our memory of the earlier episode recounting Christopher’s kidnapping. There Richard registers that “The police told Dy they had found Christopher seated comfortable in front of a fire.” So the reader is ironically charged with correcting Dy’s memory, provided the reader’s powers of notice are more acutely attuned to the possibility of extenuating inference. This power of notice and inference is perhaps a more salutary analog of the spreading inferno, than hers. In both cases, we are caught up in the ways of mattering that carry us to the conclusion of the novel. We are hereby schooled in a regimen of noticing what

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is not most immediately presented to us as the relevant state of affairs. I would characterize Henry Green’s “montaging” of Richard’s fevered recollection of the fire on the dock with Dy’s extinguishing inattentiveness as inducing affordance. Montage, after all, keeps adding particulars to the cinematic frame, in the way that the perceptual continuum animates, so to speak, the frame of human attentiveness: illuminating emergent capacities for attention by bringing out or staging our adaptive powers. Dy’s frame of reference is, alternatively, fixed. She is not interested in discovering capacities so much as hiding the desire for discovery. If affordance is, as Gibson and Norman assert, a correlation of perceptual objects and subjective capacities, then Dy is the epitome of a worldliness bereft of a world. If Richard Roe is caught up, impelled to narrate on in his engagement with a reanimating inference, Dy is simply caught, arrested by her fear of unwelcome inferences. Syntax and the Kinétoscopic Frame

I have said that Henry Green’s novel Caught is relevant to my interest in art as a mirror of attention on the basis of the ease with which we pigeonhole him – witness Robson’s glib profile of the novelist of unknowability – as a prose stylist. Once more I must declare my antipathy toward the category of “prose style” as a handle for appreciating what readerly capacities syntax can disclose in literary texts. The label, prose stylist has utility for critics of the novel who seek to distinguish – as if such a distinction could be naturalized – between the easily penetrable novels of plot, character, and setting and the always threatening to be impenetrable novels of linguistic density. The former stylists are susceptible to affectively attuned caricatures. Think generally of the commonplace descriptors “muscular” or “florid,” or worse still “masculine” and “feminine.” Think more specifically about Johnson’s embrace of “harmonious” prose, McCauley’s rejection of “bombastic” prose, Goldsmiths’ admiration for “simple eloquence,” Hazlitt’s “familiar” prose, Dryden’s “lucidity,” Thoreau’s “vigorous” prose. Our long-standing rapport with these sentiments as predicates for critical judgment ignores what I am valuing here as that quasi-perceptual register of reading, which I have argued is made palpable in the novel affordances encouraged by syntactical transformations. Lexis and taxis are conflated in Green’s prose. Such conflation invites a reorienting of attention to lexical elements that would otherwise be immobilized in their conceptual transparency. Is this not tantamount to Stein’s wish for the reader to reckon with “excessive complication”? The inhibiting concept underpinning the assignment of affective states to prose styles, as I’ve glossed them above, is of course some version of the Cartesian ego, or whatever is apperceptive with respect to the myriad dispersed perceptions that otherwise denote its governing authority. Such cognitive governance, by its absolutizing rule, is antipathetic to the attentional agency that I have claimed the arts, in this case literary art, enhance. But, with this assertion, I do not mean to reprise the postmodernist indulgence of an agency without subjectivity. In fact, I must avoid several confusions here. Because I have made syntax (loosely equating it with a montage effect) the armature of attentiveness for a

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reading subject, I do not presume to elide the subject with its perceptions. Nor do I wish simplistically to conflate the reading subject with the representation of the perceived world. Pierre Ouellet’s attempt to understand the perceptual impact of literary texts may be of some use here. In his essay “The I’s Eye: Perception and Mental Imagery in Literature,”40 he reads what he characterizes as a syntactically “mobile” passage from Proust, which he also explains in terms of montage. His mind is drawn by the complementarity of Proust’s syntax and the French author’s self-acknowledged infatuation with the late nineteenth-century invention of the kinétoscope. The kinétoscope was a forerunner of the motion-picture projector. A strip of film was passed rapidly between a lens and an electric light bulb while the viewer looked through a peephole, perceiving the apparent movements of objects in the frame. I am in strong sympathy with Ouellet’s responsiveness to a comparable perceptual register in prose syntax. His embrace of the conceit of the kinétoscope prompts him to insist that the object of perception is indistinguishable from a movement apparatus – if only the human body – which the syntactical order of prose might be said to stand in for. The kinétoscope shows us the still image in its capacity to draw our attention to what we lose sight of when we know that there will be more to see. We know this by virtue of the attention shifting imperative of “changing states,” that is the very animation of the kinétoscopic frame. Thus, we are moved attentionally with a particularly rich appreciation for the power of movement that our fixed attention to objects might otherwise incline us to lose sight of. Ouellet’s choice of a passage from Proust reinforces my earlier contention that perception and movement cannot be decoupled if we are to grasp experience in a manner that remains faithful to the prospects for meaningfulness. The object of Oullet’s attention in the first book of La Recherche is Marcel’s recitation and re-citing of his childhood experience, falling asleep in his bedroom at Combray: It is a very different kind of life that one leads at Tansonville, at Mm. de saintLoup’s, and a different kind of pleasure that I derive from taking walks only in the evenings, from visiting by moonlight the roads on which I used to play as a child in the sunshine; as for my bedroom in which I will be falling asleep [Ou e me serai endormi] instead of dressing for dinner, I can see it from the distance as we return from our walk, with its lamp shining through the window, a solitary beacon in the night.41 This scene is inscribed in a present tense experience of an adult oversleeping and therefore missing the opportunity to dress for dinner. Marcel is sleeping in a bedroom of the house of Madame San Loup after taking an early evening walk along the road from which he espies the lamp shining in the window of the room in which he will be falling asleep. This, in turn, awakens him to a memory: the reflection of the roads on which he took daylight walks as a child, mirrored like the sunset in the panes of his childhood bedroom window at nighttime. Ouellet is

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essentially impressed with the multiplications of point of view on display here, posed as a challenge to the notion of a unitary subject. He sees, in Proust’s syntactical practices, an un-mastering of the Cartesian Ego. But this seems to miss a more important point. I would rather characterize the effect of Proust’s sentences as potentiating attentiveness to aspects of Marcel’s sense experience without losing any sense of him as a subject. By dint of memory, Marcel sees from the inside and the outside, without so to speak freezing the frame that otherwise permits movement between these realms. Memory is the adjacency or contiguity of perceptual affordances, capacities shifting across the boundaries of our attentiveness. As I’ve already stipulated, I am not suggesting that percepts here are the counterparts of objects. Rather, they denote the manner in which a reading subject feels, so to speak, the capaciousness of the world as a subjective capacity. That is to say, memory – and here the involuntary nature of Proustian memory is most exemplary – as it is epitomized in the mobile syntax which is Proust’s forte, is animated by abrupt seizures of our attention. They push us beyond the discrete frame of the montage toward the ever more proliferating objects that cast the spell of worldliness upon our desirous consciousness. I do not hesitate to add that my invoking such a spell here ought to remind my reader of how the cast of colored light over Henry Green’s characters leads them to be caught in the “… loch deep unconsciousness of all else.” I have already extrapolated from this line in Caught that the syntactical appendage “all else” is a bid for understanding unconsciousness as knowledge of “what remains to be known.” This is much of what we experience with respect to the device of trompe l’oeil, especially if we refrain from resolving the game in favor of one eye or the other. In trompe l’oeil, the pleasure of transition between one angle or eyeline and another powerfully resists the seductions of a stabilizing self-sufficient viewpoint. The moving eye trumps the eye stilled by the focus upon a single perspective. Perhaps a better grasp of what I am getting at is provided by what Immanuel Kant, in his chapter on genius,42 calls the Progressus of the mind driven by sublimity. Kant famously contends that the sublime moves us to reach for a conceptual terminus via an infinite succession of sense perceptions surpassing all powers of conception. Sanford Buddick in his Kant and Milton43 sees the syntactical suspensions in Miltonic syntax, inviting a reader to second-guess the seemingly infinite succession of clausal meanings subject to an ever more deferred verbal terminus, as sublime in just this way. Such sublimity is thus achievable by our extenuating attentiveness to what, in sense perception, does not suffice to be attended to as merely itself. As I’ve noted in my preface, this is what counts for Kant as an “aesthetic attribute.” Aesthetic attributes are sense “… presentations of the imagination, expressing the concept’s implications and its kinship with other concepts …” i.e., what “… prompts the imagination to spread over a multitude of kindred presentations [sense particulars] that arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words.”44 The sublime pleasure of Kant’s Progressus is explicitly proffered in lieu of the trap of mimesis, mere imitation, in which we

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are caught too quickly by a self-preempting predicate. In mimesis, we know too conclusively what we are seeing. We are not attuned to the prospect for knowledge portended in the blind spot of our viewing/reading experience. Of course, I have already cautioned against the temptation for viewers of the blind spot in painting to succumb to the promise of sublime divinity or sublime infinity in pursuit of the meaning of the painting. So I must stipulate here that because the aesthetic ground of experience that matters most in this chapter is syntactical order (a Progressus of sorts, whether in painting or writing), it is not the potential infinity of successive perceptual registers taunting conceptualization that counts most in reckoning with the question of what a work of art means. It is more so the improvisational disposition of the mind that such a Progressus cultivates. Again trompe l’oeil is a useful exemplifier inasmuch as it epitomizes an improvisational disposition keyed to shifting attentional registers. The syntactical practices of novelists such as Henry Green, who incite attentiveness as a version of the trompe l’oeil artist’s prompt for us to look again, give me the occasion to speculate: attentiveness per se might be the disciplinary watermark of the much-vexed notion of literarity. I’ve already observed that the most common mistake incurred by asking the question “Is it literary?” involves the presumption that one could identify an inherent trait of the text. My reader may well imagine I’ve already committed such an error by focusing my analytical energies on syntactical order. But it is precisely the ordering of one’s thoughts in relation to what perception presents that points us away from any perceptual object per se, even the literary object, as long as it is misunderstood as a set of qualities independent of a set of reciprocal capacities. As we have seen, all affordance is understood otherwise. It is predicated upon our improvisational impulse to exercise capacities that we don’t yet know the precise utility of. This is so precisely because our attentiveness to the object is reciprocal with how that object is there to present itself in the first place. In the next chapter, we shall see how such reciprocity can be seen as a pretext for learning and knowledge production (implicitly reason-giving) rather than as a glibly “aesthetic” respite from thinking. In this regard, we may see how literarity may well be the affordance we cannot afford to do without. Notes 1 My sources for considering Merleau-Ponty’s relevance to how powers of attention inhere in art making are for the most part derived from his unfinished work The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), 78. This work was meant to extend the argument of Phenomenology of Perception toward a theory of truth with respect to literary prose. This is not to propound an inherent truthfulness. It is to account for all of the ways in which language ceases to be “the mere clothing of thought.” Aptly for my purposes, Merleau-Ponty’s leverage derives from the belief that “All great prose is also a re-creation of the signifying instrument, henceforth manipulated according to a new syntax.” 2 Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, 44. 3 Ibid.

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4 Ibid., 45. 5 See “The Mirror Stage” collected in Ècrit. 6 Here the relevant texts are Noë’s Action in Perception and Susan Hurley’s Consciousness in Action. 7 See Jean Luc Marion’s Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 8 See Paul Crowther’s How Pictures Complete Us: The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Divine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016). 9 This is the point of departure for Lyotard’s chapter “Representation, Presentation, Unpresentable,” in The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 120. Here Lyotard is observing how attention is always a variable privileging of one’s place in an ever more complex circumstance of self-orientation. It ultimately vitiates self-evident claims of identity. 10 Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 2. 11 Ibid., 168. 12 See also Don Norman’s appreciation of Gibson’s work and his modification of the notion of affordancy in The Design of Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 11–13. For Norman, affordancy entails the discoverability of intelligibility vis-à-vis the objects of experience: “Perceived affordances help people figure out what actions are possible without the need for labels or instructions.” (13). 13 See my The Self-Deceiving Muse: Notice and Knowledge in the Work of Art (State College: Penn State University Press, 2010). I am blurring the line here between attention and notice in order to emphasize the way in which our engagement with the world always entails the risk of fallibility. This in turn prompts the question “What should I do next?” The question tracks the irresistible forward trajectory of perceiving. 14 This work, commissioned for the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, and still exhibited in the Contarelli Chapel, remains a touchstone for discussions of embodiment among theologians, philosophers, and artists alike. 15 See, e.g., John Spike’s reading of the canvas in Caravaggio (New York: Abbeville Press, 2007). 16 See Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mette Hjort (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 167. 17 As Gibson stipulates, it is best to treat the operation of affordances in terms of “information pickup.” The meaning of the perception is less immediately relevant than the mental “operation” it occasions: the perceiver’s figuring out what actions it makes possible. See Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 12–13. 18 Pragmatics entails the management of context and inference. Under the methodological umbrella of pragmatics, linguists study linguistic contingencies where ambiguity is meant to be overcome. In this regard, pragmatics is opposed to semantics. 19 Baumgarten, credited by Kant among others as giving currency to the term aesthetics, is deeply conscious of the need to reconcile the academic study of literary art with thinking as it is practiced by philosophers and scientists, i.e., with respect to the burdens of rational judgment. Baumgarten’s conviction that feeling and reason-giving are not mutually exclusive is important background for my thinking about the dynamics of attention. 20 See Alexander Baumgarten’s Reflections on Poetry, trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and William Holther (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), section 17. My fuller account of this dynamic appears in The Subject as Action: Transformation and Totality in Narrative Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 121–122. 21 My quarrel with Fish’s book is nuanced. For the most part, he is genuinely flexible about how “types” of sentences elude typological thinking. But the structure of the book lends itself to categorization more than to the kind of speculative elasticity that Gibson’s “affordance” accommodates.

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22 Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2012), 134. 23 Ibid., 73. 24 Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, xxxi. 25 I am using a new edition of Henry Green, Caught (New York: New York Review Books, 2016). It departs from Leonard Woolf’s original 1943 “self-censored” edition published by the Hogarth Press. 26 Malraux’s remarks in La Creation Artistique (152) are cited by Merleau-Ponty in The Prose of the World, 60. 27 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, trans. Thomas Baldwin (London: Routledge, 2003), 40. 28 Green, Caught, 10–11. 29 Ibid., 10. 30 These reflections are cited by Merleau-Ponty in The Prose of the World, 48. They are meant to buttress his faith that the task of literature is analogous or even contiguous with the task of painting. Both painting and language make “…from the transmutation of meaning into signification that is their function, a sacrifice to the Being whom they believe they are destined to serve.” 31 See Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, 72, for a view of how Stein’s thinking dovetails with faith in the sentence as an epistemic adventure. 32 See Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, 11–12. Norman is adamant that “intelligibility,” a sine qua non of design, is occasioned by what he calls the “novel situation.” I am inclined to emphasize, especially in the cases of Stein and Green, that the novel form is such an occasion insofar as it is a prompt to the “discoverability” of affordances latent in the baffles of syntax. 33 Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, 13. 34 William James, Principles of Psychology Vol. I (New York: Dover Publications, 1950), 411. 35 Green, Caught, 170. 36 Ibid. 37 This essay, collected in Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), invites interesting commentary in S. Laugier’s “The Ethics and Aesthetics of Importance,” in Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding, ed. Garry Hagberg (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2018), 179. 38 Cavell. Themes Out of School, 183. 39 Green, Caught, 170. 40 See Pierre Oullet, “The I’s Eye: Perception and Mental imagery in Literature,” SubStance 22 (71/72) 2019, pp. 64–73 (Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press,1993), 71–72. 41 Oullet’s passage is from the Moncrieff/Kilmartin edition, Penguin, 1981, 7. He has modified the translation himself. 42 See Critique of Judgment, Book 2, Section 49, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 180–188. 43 Buddick, drawing upon lectures by Kant only recently published, treats Kant’s careerlong involvement with Milton as an exploration of how literary form (syntactical form specifically) gives moral purpose to thought. 44 See Kant, Critique, 183. Kant’s notion of the mind spreading out over a “multitude of kindred presentations” has affinity with the contiguity of celluloid frames that makes montage possible.

2 SENSE AND SENTENCES Writing the Prose of the World

Introduction

I am making my inquiry into the nature of literarity on the assumption that the uniquely human capacity for attentiveness is self-perpetuating. Perhaps imagination is another word for this disposition toward the world of experience. But imagination is already too romantically presumptive. The champions of imagination are too often infatuated with the tropes of sublime genius and unworldly knowledge. Or at least this is true nominally. I think that a verbal modality is more promising: imagining, the gerund or present participle, denotes possibility. Possibility is in such instances transitive. It is not however a portentously indefinite infinity. I want to say that it is circumstantial in the way that our orientation to physical space is determined by what is around us, but at the same time dependent upon our resources for responsiveness. Responsiveness is an attentional attunement subject to the variabilities of action that the objects of consciousness occasion. So my thinking about literarity recurs perforce to the topic of syntax wherein the work of art may be said to enact itself rather than offer itself as a “beautiful” topos of contemplation or inspiration. In this chapter, syntax will be featured as a threshold for perceiving that we are always circumstantially situated with respect to an irresistible prospect of intelligibility. It taunts us even where our immediate perceptions of the physical world are brutally unintelligible. Literature is experienced in just this way. Its hermeneutic promise is hazardous but ineliminable. Syntax is the crux of hazard in the sense that no sense-making syntactical rule exhausts the sense of the sheer adjacency of words. Perceptual gestalts respect the same truism. The eye is led almost inexorably to the thing it is not focused upon precisely because focus is an ongoing process. Human perception is an expanding field of reference. DOI: 10.4324/9781003384052-3

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In Chapter 1, I was already making a bid for understanding syntax on the order of perceptual experience. I will follow this line of argument by observing the convergence of John Duns Scotus’s view of tendere (a condition of tending toward, understood as the salient métier for cognizing the physical world) with the signature terms of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetics, inscape and instress.1 Duns Scotus and Hopkins will help my assertion that perception is syntactical by virtue of the progressive unfolding of the objects of our attention beyond the categories which call us to attention in the first place. Such is their inexhaustible contiguity with other objects. Once this assertion is established, I will broaden the reach of the argument to compass literary experience without severing literarity from experience in general. Faulkner’s syntactical signature in “The Bear” will serve as an apt epitome of how literarity stages human capacities for purposes not yet revealed to human purposiveness. Such staging is the condition for understanding literarity as confluent with human experience: what transpires, no less than in any narrative artifice, in the circumstantial current of irresistibly changing times. Since I am emphasizing the act lurking, so to speak, in syntactical practices, I ought to acknowledge Lucy Alford’s like-minded view of the actantial dimension of poesis generally. Poetic form for Alford is indistinguishable the movement of the mind. In Forms of Poetic Attention, her eloquent appreciation of the ways in which poetry shapes powers of human attention, she gives special notice to the ways of understanding poetry as happening in time: “Thinking about poetic attention as always a present act, however temporally inflected, leads to a consideration of what the practice of poetic attention might look like and what (if any) effects or implications it might have beyond the page.”2 Interestingly, Alford sees what the practice of poetic attention might look like, particularly in its effects off the page, through the eyes of Paul Celan. Celan reminds us that poetry denotes an interval between poet and reader that has a quasi-syntactical character. It is both a connection and a recognition of the contingency of any one thing (or person/mind) connecting with another. The poetic act, however much a creature of the present moment, is not confined within the moment. It is more consequentially a creature of irresistibly changing times. It entails, as Alford puts it, “… tuning language … in an interval between two or more minds, or between one mind and itself, and set in the moving terrain of time.”3 I would say the moving terrain of time demands an attentiveness akin to perceptual experience generally speaking. Syntax and Perception

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who makes syntax an arguably perceptual threshold of his poetry’s sense-making power, explains himself this way in his journals: Poetry is speech framed for contemplation of the mind by the way of hearing or speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest, even over and above its interest of meaning. Some matter [my emphasis] and meaning is essential to it but only as an element necessary to support and employ the shame which is

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contemplated for its own sake … Verse … might be composed without meaning … and then alone it would not be poetry but might be part of a poem. But if it has meaning and is meant to be heard for its own sake it will be poetry.4 Hopkins unintentionally delivers us to our senses with his choice of the word “matter.” Here it is nominally redundant for the meaning of the word meaning. There are matters that concern us and preoccupy us. They are the contents of our thought. They matter to us because we know abstractly what they mean. And yet, in the context of Hopkins’ larger desire to grasp the nature of literary experience in this journal entry, “matter” chimes with his omnipresent privileging of the materiality of language which, “heard for its own sake,” we can easily presume to be ineradicably perceptual. Hopkins’ journals are of course replete with perceptions anchored by inscape, which the poetry struggles to realize by instress. According to Hopkins’ highly specialized nomenclature for exalting the powers of poetry, inscape denotes the particular features of a landscape or natural object that bring out its differential uniqueness with respect to any other natural forms. Instress denotes the experience a reader undergoes according to the constraints of inscape, dramatized as they are by the compositional powers of the poet. The poet’s perceptual responsiveness, to the natural world especially, is beholden to the contingencies of the compositional act which proffers its own perceptual appreciations to the reader. In these distinctions, we can hear an echo of the equivocal relation of sense to intellect implicit in language “heard for its own sake.” Here Hopkins wants his thought to chime with that of the scholastic philosophers, specifically John Duns Scotus. Scotus rejected any possibility that material things are objects of sense exclusively or that universal essences might be the exclusive objects of intellect.5 Hopkins asks us to see the problem of knowledge in terms of the natural unfolding of capacities for self-understanding that are occasioned by the continuum of sense experience. His thinking takes off from a vaguely Aristotelian acknowledgment that identity and nonidentity are incommensurable to one another. But he adds significant qualification to the point: We say that any two things however unlike are in something like. This is the one exception: when I compare myself with my being-myself, with anything else whatever, all things alike, all in the same degree, rebuff me with blank unlikeness; so that my knowledge of it, which is so intense, is from itself alone, they in no way help me to understand it.6 There is both a continuity of identity in perception and a difference without which that continuity cannot be comprehended. Or, as Hopkins puts it several pages later, “Nothing finite can determine what itself shall in the world of being, be …. It always in nature’s order is after the nature it is of.”7 Here is where Scotus figures ever more urgently for Hopkins with respect to sense experience, which we could fairly say his “Notebooks” aspire to catalog exhaustively. The haecceities of nature, which we only know indirectly, remain obscure to us in their uniqueness. In fact, Hopkins, like Scotus, treats haecceity

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(Hopkins’s equivalent term is “pitch”)8 as virtually irrelevant to human experience because it is prior to intuition. It is therefore emphatically secondary with respect to the humanity of the poet. Hopkins’ alternative technical terms, inscape and instress, comport with Scotus’s rejection of Aristotle’s idea that intellect can pull free from the tether of sensory particularity. In this regard, I will shortly argue that Scotus’ terms, agent intellect and possible intellect, (derived from Aristotle and Averroes) illuminate why Hopkins thought that his own rapport with sensuous existence obligated him to follow a specific poetic practice. The sine qua non of this practice is the taking of syntactical liberties, fully proportionate to the liberties Hopkins takes with metrical pattern, i.e., “sprung rhythm.” Sprung rhythm is a perceptionforward compositional effect that nonetheless finds conceptual purchase beyond naming or taxonomizing the Nature about which Hopkins writes so compulsively. As I pointed out in the preface to this work, when we think about the continuity of perception with conception, we are usually entertaining the kind of zero-sum game that Kant epitomizes in the faculty of Understanding. The percept is suborned to conceptual understanding by the power of abstract thinking. Practically speaking, we leave the percept behind in the moment of its schematization. We are compensated for the resulting incompleteness of experience by the gift of beauty: the harmony of sense and sense-making faculties Kant affords us in the exercise of aesthetic judgment. But aesthetic judgment is inherently indeterminate. As such, it reaches beyond the bounds of practical agency. In the Kantian judgment of taste, the compositional capacity that I associate with the artist-maker, and that I want to say is de facto in the linguistic feature of syntax, is pushed into the background of conceptual knowledge. Effectively, the experiential register, i.e., the perceptual register, is surpassed. For this reason, it is perhaps useful to coordinate the term syntax with its Latin cousin taxis. Taxis, a term of art in medical Latin, presupposes an item that has been displaced from its proper place in the organon of the organism. Replacement, when the original part is no longer coherent with the totality of which it was a part, denotes a re-ordering: the intimation of a re-combinatory logic. Duns Scotus’s emphasis on the transitive aspect of what would otherwise be inert haecceity is apparent in his yoking taxis with the verb tendere in order to explain how sense and intellect are reciprocating registers of thinking. Hopkins’s delight in syntactical constructions that permit facets of perception to proliferate along with subordinate clauses denotes a signal compositional capacity. It does not yield to the familiar mandate that vivifying physical sense should make clarion conceptual sense. Tendere is de rigueur when sense persists in thought. Or at least this appears to be what Hopkins understands Scotus to be saying when he asserts that “Poetry is speech framed for contemplation of the mind by the way of hearing or speech framed to be heard for its own sake ….” For tendere, to tend toward, does not mean that the mind moves closer to the object of thought, dissolving the object in the cognitive act. Rather, as Robert Pausnau puts it in his illuminating essay on cognition in Scotus, “The presence of the object is the cause of the presence of the species [idea of the object], and not vice versa. For it is not because the species is in the eye that white is present, but vice versa.”9 Consequently, we might say that the attentionality of the mind itself is the relevant fact. Furthermore, because the

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object of attention is subordinate to the attentional act of mind, the perception of the object and any thoughts about the object are implicitly tending toward other objects. Every object tended toward implicates the species of which it is a specimen in a more complex syntactical relation to the world of possible experience. The species is ever more elaborately articulated by the specimen rather than imposing a limit of experiential knowledge upon it. We see this rather clearly in Hopkins’ perceptions of natural objects that appear to be unbounded by their perceptual contiguity with other objects. Here is one of Hopkins’s notebook entries, an appreciation of the bluebells in a little wood: In the little wood/opposite the light/they stood in blackish spreads or sheddings like the spots on a snake. The heads are then like thongs and solemn in grain and grapecolour. But in the clough/through the light/they came in falls of sky-colour washing the brows and slacks of the ground with vein-blue, thickening at the double, vertical themselves and the young grass and brake fern combed vertical, but the brake struck the upright of all this with light winged transomes. It was a lovely sight – The bluebells in your hand baffle you with their inscape, made to every sense ….10 Hopkins’s attentional engagement with the natural world exemplifies what Scotus understands as the irreducible, dynamic play of agent intellect and possible intellect. The concluding line – rendered virtually a throwaway – “It was a lovely sight,” signals how woefully incommensurable intellect alone is with the experience of sight. Nor, if we consider the rest of the passage, is picturing any more adequate to the task of experiencing what Hopkins might celebrate as sensory glory in its fullest flowering. Something else is required. Hopkins takes his cue again from Scotus in a manner commensurate with his appreciation of tendere. The active intellect abstracts from sensory particularities, i.e., “phantasms.” It refers the conceptual species derived from such phantasms to the possible intellect. The possible intellect in turn renders them available for future intellection. Thus, there is no decoupling of the abstractive capacity of mind from the sensory intellect. Scotus insists that the essential immateriality of intellect, by comparison with physical sense, occasions the necessity of intellect always to recur to phantasms in order to sustain its activity.11 As the passage we are reading from Hopkins’s notebooks illustrates, there is no turning back to phantasms that is not a calling of attention to another aspectual feature of the sensorium, hitherto unaccounted for but syntactically imperative. Or at least we may say it is syntactically imperative if we are to respect the limitlessness of the sensory context of thought. Or as Robert Pasnau stipulates in his own reading of tendere, To tend toward another is to represent another, to be about another–not in the way that a word or picture represents something else, but in the distinctive … way in which thoughts and perceptions are about things. Words and pictures do not themselves tend toward what they represent; they do so only through the mind of an interpreter. Thoughts and perceptions need no interpreter, for they are the interpretation.12

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How are Hopkins’ bluebells interpretations in need of no interpreter? How is their representativeness better understood as an aboutness with respect to other things? We need only observe that the bluebells are multiple in the poet’s perception of them without his mistaking their apparently distinct aspects as essences to be captured. To wit: the “snake” heads of the flowers are also “thongs.” The “sheddings” which warrant the likeness to snake heads cue that likeness retrospectively. The spots on the snake are syntactically out of step with the “sheddings” that make them plausibly visible as the heads of flowers. Retrospect and prospect are continuous here. One thing becomes another by dint of an attentiveness that doesn’t permit any one thing from distinguishing itself from all others. Likewise, the solemnity in grain and color of the flower “heads,” now conceivably sprouted from snakes, is a variable of changing light that constitutes a “washing.” The washing ensues as a flow. It sweeps along the “slacks of the ground,” “the double, vertical thickening at the double … the young grass,” and ultimately the “light winged transoms” through which we now see what has already instantiated our visualizing capacity as nothing less than emergent possibilities of vision. In fact, Hopkins is following another path already trod by Scotus. In opposition to much scholarship on the place of haecceity in Scotus’s thought, Hopkins asserts the priority of formalitates. While haecceity (Hopkins spells it eicceitas indicating he was using a source other than Scotus) allows for thinking a thing to be a singularity before it is perceived, formalitates mandates that we appreciate the existence of a thing insofar as it is the occasion for multiple ways of looking at it. Not surprisingly Hopkins leans heavily on trinitarianism here. To his way of thinking, the three forms are not distinct. Nor are they one in the sense that they fold into one another. It is easier to think that the attentive mind unfolds itself in attendance to what occasions its attention. In Hopkins’ perspective, we serve a calling (there is an affinity between Caravaggio’s “Calling of St. Matthew” and Hopkins’ “calling out” of inscapes) to what is yet to be perceived. What is there is there perforce incarnationally. But what is incarnated depends upon a mind unformed, so to speak, in its disposition toward the possible formalitates soliciting its attention. The inference is that there is always more to be perceived should the mind be present to the possibility of its changing relation to what was already perceived. As Hopkins writes in “Hurrahing in Harvest”: “These things, these things were here and but the beholder/Wanting ….”13 As Bernadette Waterman Ward has put it: “Formalitates depend not upon the act of the perceiving mind but upon the possibility that there could be such a mind.”14 I might add that Hopkins’s investment here seems to denote a faith that the manifold of Nature exists as the condition for our appreciating how the mind holds out a further possibility for attentiveness. As I have already alleged, this is how syntax works when it doesn’t follow grammatical formalities. It compels the reader to try out combinatory possibilities in a manner that redounds to rethinking attentional priorities, i.e., to engaging formalitates. In effect, Hopkins’ attentiveness with respect to the bluebells renders them experiential. They are not mere objects of description. He dramatizes

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the conviction that a single thing may not be known by a single conceptualized essence. Attentiveness in this case is tantamount to acknowledging the ineluctable intelligibility of all natural beings. More importantly, it raises a collateral question: is this attentiveness not a presupposition of art, both the techne of making art and the possibility of knowing art as one’s own experience? Hopkins is an important reference point here because his art is literary. It is therefore a propitious occasion for specifying what literarity might be beyond the scope of what we usually count as aesthetic judgments, on the one hand, or historically freighted stories of our acts and our times, on the other. Alain Badiou puts the question of literarity this way with regard to the literary achievement of Beckett: “… philosophy finds in literature some examples of completely new forms for the destiny of the human subject.”15 I emphasize the literarity of the sentence insofar as syntax, mere grammaticality aside, makes of human attentiveness a learning project. It does not presuppose what the reader already knows to be possible. The Sentences

Peter Lombard’s The Sentences (1150) is, not coincidentally, a predicate for Scotus’ speculations about experience and intellect. Lombard’s text is no less a prompt for me to extrapolate from Scotus/Hopkins, a notion of literarity that comports with the perceptual groundedness of art. In what I have argued so far, perception is not deterministic for attention. Attentiveness is the condition for perception to count as a register of human experience. In my earlier reading of lines from “Hurrahing in Harvest,” I stipulated that what counts as experience – inasmuch as I take Scotus’s formalitates and Hopkins’s inscape as callings to attention – involves us in possibility. But I do not want to invite a reductive view of possibility as pure indeterminateness. That would take us as far from experience as conceptual essence would. I consider possibility to be as much a circumstantial condition as it is a reference to what is not yet the case, what remains unintelligible but for a prompting to further thought. Insofar as I have argued that it encompasses both taxis and tendere, I take syntax to be exemplary of this prompting. I will take up the full relevance of possibility to creative, compositional acts in my final chapter. For the moment however, I wish to explain how Lombard’s The Sentences is useful to this discussion. Intelligibility in this famous scholastic assemblage of writings on sacred texts is staked upon a practice of commentary that shows affinity with what we might call a self-elaborating syntax. I am not making reference to grammatical rules however. Lombard’s texts, in the service of truthful revelation, are fundamentally a record of re-combinatory strategies for construing meaning. They are, by definition, exegetical compilations: of biblical texts and passages from the Church Fathers. They are commentary on the extant commentaries upon the full range of theological issues which, in the twelfth century, had not yet been reconciled into a doxa. Lombard’s text then models the movement of mind toward a revelation that will never succumb to transcendence.

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Rather its prompting to thought is its meaning, very much in the way that Scotus has maintained (at least according to Robert Pasnau) that “thoughts and perceptions need no interpreter, for they are the interpretation.” I am aware that my correlation of syntax (specifically in Hopkins) with a scholastic philosopher’s exegetical project may appear quixotic. I will try to dismiss this appearance by reading more attentively the prompts to further thinking in the syntactical order of Hopkins’ “Hurrahing in Harvest,” where every possible reconciliation of combinatory elements eludes a doxa. Let me begin by pointing out that the four books of Lombard’s commentaries on Christian liturgy do not presuppose a prior logical grammar. Rather, they are generative for something like grammatical sense. In other words, Lombard’s sentences are improvisational within a context of theological speculation where conclusions have not yet been arrived at. And of course the title of Lombard’s work references not the grammatical structure that is a sentence but the sententiae, the authoritative views purporting to illuminate the sentences that comprise biblical texts. Lombard’s project is a product of sentences as much as it is a syntactical composition in its own right. That said, there is a grammatically minded syntactical stake in the project of assembling commentary without rules that hermetically enclose it. In Lombard’s time, theology had not been formally constituted as a discipline. It is for this reason, as I’ve noted, that Lombard’s text is conspicuously improvisatory: the commentary is interlinear, patched together, additive, self-revising. So Lombard’s sententiae gain their authority by taxis: arrangement and rearrangement. Considering this fact returns us to thinking about the syntactical authority of sentences again – literary sentences in particular – insofar as they arise out of the kind of synthetic exigencies inherent in Lombard’s improvisational hermeneutics. This then is the pretext for attending to the sentences that make up Hopkins’ sonnet “Hurrahing in Harvest.” Hopkins, in following the lead of Scotus, is following the practice of Lombard. Here is the poem in full: Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise Around; up above, what wind-walks! What lovely behavior Of silk-sack clouds! Has wilder, willful-wavier Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies? I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour; And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies? And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder Majestic-as stallions stalwart, very-violet-sweet!These things, these things were here and but the beholder Wanting: which two when they once meet, The heart réars wings bold and bolder And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.16

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The act of reading Hopkins’s sonnet is profoundly an act of faith. It resourcefully keeps faith with his Christian desire for ultimate intelligibility which nonetheless manifests no immediate appearance except what perception affords. Here the affordances of perception are inspiriting and enactive. I have already discussed Hopkins’s rendition of the perceptual register of the bluebells in his notebook. There, perception with respect to the plant morphology appeared to be a salient pretext for attention when in fact attentiveness was already inherent in the formalitates, not the form of natural splendor. Similarly, in “Hurrahing” we never lose rapport with perceptible forms. And yet, in this literary gambit it is the unique syntactical arrangement of parts, such that it promotes contemplating a rearrangement of those parts, that activates our perceptual acuity and vivifies our sense of experience. It might be fair to say that the functionality of words supervenes their categorically denotative value. This is indeed a nod to the commonplace critical (specifically Russian formalist) assumption that context in literary texts trumps reference. But what I want to feature in Hopkins’ sonnet is the heightened dynamism of that commonplace. Consider the first declamatory clause: “Summer ends now;.” The momentousness of the statement is immediately modified by the momentariness of the repetition of now: “now, barbarous in beauty ….” Hopkins, in effect, turns a syntactical period into an ellipsis. Most conventionally ellipsis serves to denote an omission where otherwise repetition would be the case. Here repetition is flaunted. But importantly it carries the inference of a temporal change. Aptly enough, the immediate context denotes seasonal progress. Indeed, temporal change inheres as a secondary meaning of ellipsis. It is especially the case in narrative fiction. As myriad novels and stories will attest, ellipsis denotes a “sudden leap” from one topic to another. It thereby involves a pause. The pause carries the implication of a resumption whose contextual coordinates are necessarily unpredictable. In this regard, ellipsis is very much a prompting to think alternatively. In Hopkins’s poem, consonance and alliteration mimic the effect of the sudden leap: “… barbarous in beauty …” “what wind-walks …” “silk-sack clouds! ...” “willful-wavier/Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?” My own ellipsis here notwithstanding, it is not omission that is featured but progression. Each aural repetition alters the prospect of our attention. Each of these syntactical entities/phrases infers a re-combinatory logic by virtue of revealing alternative trajectories of attention. Taking the formal totality of this sonnet into account, one might even say that Hopkins’s poetry simultaneously enacts the elliptical “sudden leap” and dramatizes it. Like every sonnet in its dramatic “turn”, “Hurrahing in Harvest” harbors an organizing conceit. The sonnet’s “turn” is conventionally a lever of totalizing conceptualization, the gist of concetto. Thus, we are meant to understand that the harvest fruits disclose consubstantiality with the divine. In Hopkins’ poetics however, the turn is ever turning. The poet declares that he trods this harvest ground “to glean our Saviour.” Thus, does he all too succinctly conjure a meeting of lovers: “… eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a/Rapturous love’s greeting ….” But in the final stanza “the azurous hung hills [which] are his world-wielding shoulder” display their

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majesty in the image of a stallion, which becomes a heart. Subsequently, the heart “rears” by something akin to syntactical co-option of the stallion’s anatomy. The heart that rears is given the even greater locomotion of “wings”: “The heart rears wings, bold and bolder.” But the effective enjambment of these words compels us to ask: do the nominal wings give the heart its abrupt leaping ability to rear, or is “wings” a verbal anaphora of rears? Does the subtly comparative repetition of “bold” and “bolder” recapitulate the imperative to sort nouns from verbs and thereby transpose intransitive with transitive modalities: “heart,” “wings”? Such questions get an answer of sorts in the culminating line of the sonnet’s “turn”: “… And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him, off under his feet.” Aptly enough, the subject, thematically speaking, is a sudden leap. But syntactically speaking, it is not unidirectional. It is elliptical in the sense that whatever conceptualizations are to be “gleaned” here are subject to re-combinatory inferences. Just so, in the previous two lines (“… which two when they once meet …”) the antecedent of “they” materializes out of the progress of the attentive reading mind to the next line, thus evincing its “availability” to “the things” from which the Saviour is to be “glean[ed].” We must submit to the necessity to “glean” the meaning of “earth” by countenancing rearrangements of the syntactically mobile contextual imperatives. The heart appears to be the relevant agency of hurl. But we are abruptly encouraged to understand that the prepositional phrase “for him,” which marks the heart’s trajectory, bears a burden of earth. And yet the heart does not hurl itself independent of what it stands upon, both physically and syntactically. The first “hurls” has no direct object, implying the mortal earth of the beating heart. The second “hurls” is freighted with the alternative meaning that the earth underfoot is hurled away, in order that the way to the Saviour may be gleaned. Or transitivity inheres in the earthen heart. It “hurls” for “the beholder” who is wanting, in the sense that he has not yet been definitively “called” with respect to “these things, these things” of Nature. By the fact of the repetition, their thingness understood in terms of haecceity would appear not to be the significant element of the composition. We are reminded that gleaners, harvesters, are more specifically choosers. And because the prepositional “off under his feet” functions in some sense anaphorically, it brings us back to earth as if a choice is yet to be made. These last two lines pivot on prepositional phrases that move us – spatial mobility is a given of the prepositional phrase – and return us to contemplation of our sense-making choices. The action is multi-directional depending upon which attentional cue is followed though, importantly, no single “following” leads to the path of ultimate intelligibility. In this way, Hopkins is featuring the attentional capacity of the reader. If for Duns Scotus and for Hopkins the availability of mind is what perceptual attention dramatizes, the sonnet culminates in that revelation. Conjuring the Available Mind

For Duns Scotus and for Hopkins, the availability of mind is the threshold of perception. But, as we have seen in “Hurrahing the Harvest,” perception is no longer a simple proposition. Mind is not presupposed, nor is the perceptual object per se

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its coercive calling to attention. The availability of mind is a functionality of mind in relation to what calls it. Experience is perforce an interactive modality. I have already assigned grammatical weight to this modality. But that is in no way a concession to a linguistic system, a prior grammar for describing experience as it comes. Rather, I am pursuing the notion that syntax might be appreciated as a perceptual experience itself, in the sense that every prompting to a new thought is de facto a re-combinative activity. One is finding terms of contextual fit that are not yet fitted to the moment which is itself, after all, still unfolding. I am treating syntax here as a pragmatics that supervenes upon semantics. Later I will say more about the necessity of distinguishing semantics from pragmatics (thereby inextricably linking semantics to syntax) in order to stipulate the literarity in sentences generally speaking.17 For now I wish to consider one distinctive prose writer’s deployment of a cumulative syntax which invites pragmatic resourcefulness: where semantic grounds for intelligibility are rendered shaky. William Faulkner’s syntactical periodicity is notoriously wayward by the standards of declarative statement-making that conventionally give narrative thrust to literary fiction. I am of course over-simplifying and belying the history of the novel, at least in English. We need only start at the beginning with authors like Thomas Nashe and Lawrence Sterne to acknowledge that ungrammaticalized syntax has long been de rigueur for the purposes of novelistic invention. But it is undeniably the case that Faulkner’s so-called style is epitomized in a pattern of readerly misdirection-redirection enacted by his sentences. To put it more emphatically, the pattern of readerly misdirection-redirection animates the re-combinative disposition of mind that I have wanted my reader to see as a prerequisite for promptings to new thought. I have been defending the notion that such promptings denote the work of the work of art as a reciprocal calling out of human capacities for attention: those for which no template (conceptual or perceptual) for paying attention already exists. Along the lines of my speculation above about what the proper work of the work of art might be, I propose that we take the literarity of Faulkner’s sentences in his remarkable short novel “The Bear,” as something like a perceptual quandary. I am thinking of sentences where conceptual unity (the fully grammaticalized meaning) of declarative sentences is deferred – much as we saw the power of apprehension was deferred with respect to Hopkins’ bluebells – in the midst of competing vectors of attentiveness (formalitates). I do not mean to reprise Kantian aesthetic indeterminacy as a norm here. Rather, I am interested in how the work of art inspires an integrative motive where circumstances otherwise threaten to disperse attention. Competing commitments about what makes sense in any immediate circumstance of attention to the world (not to mention the world of the text) predispose us to ask the question: what reasons might go with what we take to be plausibly integrable aspects of experience, as opposed to other aspects of experience that are more questionably, we might even say unreasonably, integrable? Reasons and perceptions are revealed in this circumstance to be arguably reciprocal. So how are Faulkner’s sentences in “The Bear” tantamount to a perceptual quandary such that new thoughts are prompted as reasons for further responsiveness?

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I am treating the experience of sentences as a mode of perceptual encounter because perception is an exceptionally immediate threshold of responsiveness. The immediacy of responsiveness matters for me insofar as it forces us to concede that the object of attention is not immediately intelligible. Intelligibility follows perceptual experience in a complicated way. We know what we perceive as already connected to other perceptions: other perceptions to which our knowledge claims are ultimately, but not yet knowingly, beholden. The verb tense “past perfect progressive” (sometimes called “past perfect continuous”) captures this prospect: it denotes an action in the past that continues into a future that will be past, thus portending a continuous present (future?). Faulkner’s syntax, in the following representative case from “The Bear,” is a vehicle for expressing this condition. It is aptly a passage in which the intelligibility of the creative act of the divinity (in this case not distinct from the creative act of the literary author) is put into question. The narrator is reporting the dialogue between two cousins, McCaslin and Isaac (Ike). They hand off the narrative to one another as if passing a baton. Not unlike Peter Lombard in The Sentences, they are exegetes of the ledgers recording every transaction of their forbears whose legacy of property and historical fate they must contend with. Such is the inheritance the cousins are trying to work out in the following paragraph at the end of which Ike is handing off the narrative to McCaslin: What they were trying to tell, what He wanted said, was too simple. Those for whom they transcribed His words could not have believed them. It had to be expounded [my emphasis] in the everyday terms which they were familiar with and could comprehend, not only those who listened but those who told them it too, because if they who [my emphasis] were that near to Him as to have been elected from among all who breathed and spoke language to transcribe and relay His words, could comprehend truth only through the complexity of passion and lust and hate and fear which drives the heart, what distance back to truth must they traverse whom truth could only reach by word-of-mouth and McCaslin.18 Perhaps “and McCaslin” is the place to start. This rejoinder is patterned throughout the pages of part four of Faulkner’s novella. I want to say that the rejoinder “and McCaslin” is key to the sense Faulkner tenders to the reader as something like a sense percept. I say this because the phrase instantiates the past perfect progressive, functionally if not, strictly speaking, grammatically. We might read it as an enjambment if this were a work of poetry. It implies a conversational retort: statement and reply. McCaslin will speak next. But since the phrase is not punctuated that way – in effect it is not punctuated at all – it bears a kind of historical witness to the past, everything “they [the ancestors] were [already] trying to tell,” as if it could be told retrospectively in the manner of the immediately preceding sentences. But at the same time it marks a temporal continuum and so a determinable future, i.e., the sentences that must ensue from the cue to McCaslin’s forthcoming

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speech. Another way to put this is to acknowledge that we stumble upon the phrase “and McCaslin” much as our attention might stumble upon an aspect of the physical world that challenges our perceptual sense of its fitness. The stumble prompts a revisionary impulse: what I have already referenced as a re-combinatory act of mind inherent to syntactical intelligibility. If we stumble backward, so to say, into the syntactical pathways of this paragraph, we can see even more starkly what the stakes of reading are for Faulkner’s duly attentive reader. To what modality of self-knowledge is she called? The exegetical burden of the cousins deciphering the ledgers of the past turns on their mutual recognition of what we might call their literarity. The ledgers are allegorized as sacred text. They constitute an ultimate authority with respect to what can be known of the land that has, in the course of its being passed down from one generation to another, become a torturous conundrum to the cousins. In the paragraph we are reading, it is posited in the guise of a divine creator of the land. His wisdom must be transcribed, presumably after the example of Jerome, whose available mind was conjured by an angel not, as would be the case for Duns Scotus and Hopkins, by an experience. I want to suggest that Faulkner’s prose here is densely experiential in a way that belies the faith in what can only be told second hand (even an angelical second hand): representationally rather than circumstantially. The stakes of the exegetical labor shared between the cousins Ike and McCaslin, in the notoriously labyrinthine and multi-directional syntax of section four of “The Bear,” are announced in the word “truth.” It is of course a truth that Ike hopes might be told representationally, Faulknerian syntax notwithstanding. On the other hand, McCaslin skeptically laments that if the truth might be told at all it would be the unrepresentable truth of the human heart. After all, the heart is that touchstone of immediacy which, in this context, is most authoritatively vested in “Him,” the creator. His labor, in sharp contrast with Ike’s and McCaslin’s labor, is un-besmirched by history. By contrast with the pristine immediacy of divine creation – the presumptive origin of the narration Ike and McCaslin are pursuing – the Faulknerian syntax of the pages in which they must navigate the circuitous pathways of that narration is all brutal mediation. The brutality is famously bloody. But here I wish to keep literary experience in the foreground. The thematic violence narratively unleashed upon the problematically heritable land of the American south by human usurpers – native Chickasaws, white slave owners, soldiers, bankers, real estate traders, politicians, etc. – is, I want to argue, counterpart to an ameliorative historical agency that is animated in Faulkner’s syntax. The heart’s truth – Ike struggles to persuade his cousin of its forcefulness in human experience – is belied by its need to “be expounded.” The ensuing exposition of the assertion is a compounding of its predicate. The two words – expound/ compound – share a stem in Latin and Middle French: ponere, to put and implicitly to put together. Such is the techne of syntax. The expounding of the divine truth, too simple for simple humans, is compounded in Ike’s torturous next sentence in a manner that shows the reader’s attentional capacity to be polymorphous in the spirit of Duns Scotus’s formalitates. Specifically, what must be expounded and “put in

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the everyday terms which they were familiar with and could comprehend …” holds out intelligibility as a model of single-mindedness. The syntactical compoundings of propositional sense-making which ensue from the deceptively simple propositional gambit that “He” might make his purpose plain to “human men” are of course already implicit in Ike’s concession that any transcription of the divine plan will suffer the corruption of humans making the world intelligible to themselves. I would put pressure on the word making here especially inasmuch as art works are irreducibly made artifacts and so made up in a way that does not permit us to revert to raw materials in order to grasp some truthfulness. So unsurprisingly the promise of intelligibility in “everyday terms” must allow for the unavoidable slippage between a teller and a listener. This is nothing more than the ineluctability of error. It is owing to the necessity that those who were that near to Him as to have been elected from among all who breathed and spoke language to transcribe and relay His words, could comprehend truth only through the complexity of lust and hate and fear which drives the heart what distance back to truth [my emphasis] must they traverse whom truth could only reach by word-of-mouth. Aptly enough, the reader is obliged to err in the bi-directional logic of the sentence. Just so, in the paragraph we are reading here, everything pivots on the pronoun “they” which carries the weight of the admonition “It had to be expounded …”: “… because if they who were …” The pronoun “they” at first appears to reference the listeners. But immediately we are apprised that the demand of the listeners for “everyday terms” is a warrant for the tellers as well. The tellers and the listeners denote reciprocating perspectives, a counterpart to the reciprocating words of the two cousins in colloquy here. But Faulkner does not feature symmetry in these sentences. The tellers “who were that near to him as to have been elected from among all who breathed and spoke … [to] relay his words …” suffer multiple subordinations to qualifying clauses (“which they …,” “not only …,” “because …,” etc.) that extenuate the reader’s risk of losing any clear sense of antecedence. The point is explicit in the acknowledgment that the truth is hard to tell due to the complexity of the heart’s passions. But those passions are not the driver of the reader’s sensemaking. True enough, in the passage we are looking at, the passions initially appear to “drive” the heart, denoting a forward propulsion. But that apparently straightforward directionality is abruptly reversed when we read the rest of the phrase: “drives the heart, what distance back to truth must they traverse ….” We’d perhaps make better sense of the phrasing here by reading roughly in reverse: they must traverse the distance back to truth. The problems we’ve already faced struggling to find a secure orientation toward the truth (both the historical past and the immediately perceived syntactical precedence of hierarchical phrasing) are especially compounded by the placement of “whom” intended to identify the relevant agency: “what distance … they

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traverse whom truth could only reach by word-of-mouth.” “Whom,” grammatically speaking, is both the object of a verb establishing already fixed referential coordinates, and a relative pronoun, linking clauses both retrospectively and prospectively. But in this case, the relevant verb, implicitly the relevant agency – is it “traverse” or “reach”? – tempts the attentive readerly mind to move in two directions at once. More to the point, in its capacity as a relative pronoun, “whom” points us conflictedly to both cousins, thwarting the “truth” of antecedence. In Ike’s concession that the truth is only reached by “word of mouth,” Faulkner is echoing the effect of his own syntactical confection: the words are the record of a movement of the mind from one compositional disposition to another. I deliberately use the word “compositional” because it emphasizes the making (as distinct from the productionist/commodifying) aspect of art-making. After all, the passage is all “word of mouth” where antecedence needs to be repeatedly asserted as if it were perpetually in doubt. I have raised the issue of precarious antecedence because I am interested in how the search for reference, especially in Faulkner’s proliferation of syntactical subordinations, involves us in trying out different combinatory logics. It is a discipline of decision making, the task of summoning better reasons for thinking what is the case. With this emphasis, I have been cultivating the pragmatism that says: such is the experience which literarity is disposed to intensify. Faulkner’s prose obliges the reader to be a pragmatist in much the way that perceptual experience, while it gives us immediate rapport with the world, does not release us from the obligation to be attentive beyond our capacity to know what we are already attending to. There is a counter-intuitive presumption here that we might become our best reading selves when we come to know ourselves as circumstantially bad or erroneous readers. The reader’s experience of “The Bear” sustains itself on inducements to erroneous perception in much the way that Hopkins’s journal entries insist upon making more than one mind available to the object of perception. From the outset of Faulkner’s short novel – “There was a man and a dog too this time …” – the revisionary momentum of time passing determines the necessity of re-reading in order to reintegrate, assumptions for which the reader has not yet found the terms of their compatibility. Re-reading is de rigueur for the experience of literarity to be sure. But however typically we are prompted to re-read in order to fill in the gaps of memory and comprehension, where conceptualization outpaces perception, I want to stipulate that Faulkner’s text holds us to a distinct standard of what we might call knowledgeexperience. Hegel’s term for experience, Erfahrung, comes closest to grasping the aesthetic effect I am interested in here. Unsurprisingly, it figures significantly in Hegel’s aesthetic lectures, as well as the Phenomenology. Experience for selfconsciousness is of course strictly dutiful to temporality. Erfahrung grasps the problem of taking in incompatible perceptions over time and respecting the reasongenerating consequences that each passing moment thereby presents us with. Hegel’s insight is pitched in terms of mindedness not Nature on this point. I would suggest that the mindedness that manifests itself in the syntactical patterns of

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Faulkner’s narrative fiction follows the same logical fate. When Hegel points out that experience is epitomized in a moment of transition from one object (first the object in-itself) to another (then the object understood for consciousness), he is forcing the realization that the in itself is not for itself. He is emphasizing how “This way of looking at the matter is something contributed by us, by means of which the succession of experiences through which consciousness passes is raised into a scientific progression ….”19 This progression is a gain and a loss. For Hegel, no less than for Faulkner, I want to argue gain and loss are not mutually exclusive conditions. Certainly, “The Bear” lends itself to a thematic gloss. One could glibly say that it is about the irreversible dispossession of the land, of youth, of agency in general – all self-transfiguring losses. I use the word “about” advisedly however. My claim that literarity is experiential hinges on my ability to distinguish between thematic aboutness and something like a prompt to the reader’s perceptual responsiveness in Faulkner’s prose. Perceptual responsiveness in Nature is implicitly an activity that blurs the distinction between physical and mental acts, as we know from Hopkins’s Notebooks. Robert Brandom’s recent rethinking of Hegel’s Phenomenology signals the salience of Erfahrung with respect to what he calls the historical/recollective nature of rationality, where activity is an irreducible feature of experience: “Viewed retrospectively, the process of experience is one of determining conceptual contents in the sense of progressively finding out more about [my emphasis] the boundaries of concepts that show up as having implicitly, all along already been fully determinate.”20 Thematic aboutness falsifies precisely this activity of “finding out more about ….” For Hegel, the course of experience always brings us to a cross-roads of de facto decision making. Since we are always attending to an object with the expectation that its truth is only available through other constraints of attentiveness (the Notion vs. Nature), we are destined to endure the “moment of transition.” I have already alluded to this as a relinquishment of one commitment in favor of another to which we are constrained by changing circumstance. As Hegel puts it, the skepticism that drives transition, what appears to be an “untrue form of knowledge … must not be allowed to run away into an empty nothing but must necessarily be grasped as the nothing of that from which it results – a result which contains what was true in the preceding knowledge.”21 I want to emphasize Hegel’s focus on consequence here, “… that from which it results….” Hegel is careful to acknowledge that his notion of experience does not comport with ordinary usage of the term: It usually seems to be the case … that our experience of the untruth of our first notion comes by way of a second object which we come upon by chance and externally …. From the present viewpoint, however, the new object shows itself to have come about through a reversal of consciousness itself.22 I would say that Hegel’s ascribing the moment of transition between two otherwise incompatible concepts of an object to consciousness of the object per se denotes a hitherto unknown, or at least unexplored, capacity for knowledge. It is indicative of the potentialities inherent in the attentional power of mind tout court.

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Or as Brandom avers, we must understand that Hegel’s theory of conceptual understanding is nonpsychological. He cites Hegel’s view of conceptualization as “standing in relations of material incompatibility and consequence.”23 The accruing of incompatible commitments to knowledge claims demands their integration into the already existing constellation of commitments that constitutes our circumstantial reality. Because the incompatibility of commitments accruing in time has consequence Notionally speaking – not simply in terms of a one-sided negation – Brandom’s characterization of the “moment of transition” as finding out more about the concept – rather than nullifying the concept – should have resonance for a reader tracking the modal shifts within Faulkner’s syntactical compositions. Brandom appreciates that Hegel’s “moment of transition” is progressive. The boundaries that constitute conceptual understanding do not portend the self-limitation of knowledge claims so much as their prospective relevance to what has not yet been claimed to be the case. Along these lines, I wish to appreciate Faulkner’s syntax as persistently situating a reader within a seemingly closed predicate where predication nonetheless remains an active modality. It denotes an openness to what might also be the case. Once again, I might invoke the past perfect progressive tense as a touchstone for this effect – an event in the past that is ongoing until something else transpires. I am not saying that Faulkner writes exclusively within the constraints of this tense. Rather, the reassertion of predicative contingencies, within what appears to be a punctual predicate, renders the tense modality of Faulkner’s narrative compulsively periphrastic. As is the case with any periphrastic modal,24 grammatically speaking, there is always more to account for than what appears to be otherwise already fully stated. I have already indicated how the opening line of “The Bear” signals the salience of temporality: “There was a man and a dog too this time.”25 But the ensuing lines make “this time” periphrastically dynamic in a way that, once more, thwarts simple antecedence and posits incompatible ongoingness: Two beasts, counting Old Ben, the bear, and the two men, counting [my emphasis] Boon Hogganbeck, in whom some of the same blood ran which ran in Sam Fathers, even though Boon’s was a plebian strain of it and only Sam and Old Ben and the mongrel Lion were taintless and incorruptible. The count is both retrospective and prospective. Incompatibility and consequence matter here in distinctly Hegelian ways. The succession of subordinate clauses cued by “in whom,” “even though …,” followed by the conjunctive “and only Sam and Old Ben …,” mimics recognition of incompatible commitments and some ensuing consequence whereby we might progress to a more accommodating horizon of knowledge. We might say, in this regard, that intelligibility thwarted in Faulkner’s syntax is intelligibility guaranteed. Intelligibility is as much an irresistible consequence of unintelligibility as the fates of the characters whose names are hung here on a kind of genealogical tree. Not coincidentally the convoluted genealogical fates mapped in section four of “The Bear” mirror the syntactical labyrinth

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of Faulkner’s text in which we are already trepidatiously wandering. I think it is fair to speculate that they therefore invite prospects for figuring new commitments, according to which we might claim to know what yet un-intuited reasons count for doubting what we thought was the case. What are Ike and McCaslin doing in their sorting out their family history from the stacks of ledgers left to them by their fathers (grammatically disordered, orthographically obtuse and overwritten like Peter Lombard’s The Sentences) but rearranging the facts to finesse incompatibilities? Syntactical order is crucial here. In short, I am asserting that the guarantee of intelligibility is inextricable from the struggle with unintelligibility since the struggle itself presupposes an agency, a power of making that is the sine qua non of the work of art generally speaking. Correspondingly, in these pages I have been treating the work of art as a calling out of a human capacity for attention from which some agential responsiveness (techne) ensues. It is an inherently syntactical gambit. It is worth noting that syntax trees that purport to schematize the intelligibility of sentences often display combinatory possibilities, vectors of intelligibility, that would be incompatible with the intelligibility that grows organically from syntactical rules. Certainly, syntactical rules, like logical rules, can instantiate circumstances that they cannot cover. Just so, human circumstance sometimes begs for rule coverage where the absence of rules threatens the intelligibility of the circumstance. Likewise, genealogical trees seek to clarify genetic and generational links that augur the intelligibility of change over time. Genealogical trees are of course the backdrop of Ike’s and McCaslin’s verbal exchanges in the decaying commissary where, surrounded by stacks of yellowing ledgers, they are discerning the order of things. And, as is the case with syntax trees, the genealogical tree, according to which they are attempting to trace lines of descent and causality, inevitably confounds them with items whose placement cannot be unequivocally decided upon. For example, the cousins Ike and McCaslin come upon a seemingly imponderable ledger entry with reference to a slave named Eunice: “June 21th 1833 Drowned herself.”26 It appears in a chronicle of slave purchases and financial transactions conducted in the course of their forbears’ tending to the land inherited from the antecedent patriarch Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin. The events recorded in the ledger are superficially intelligible to Ike and McCaslin as two virtually identical, but nonetheless distinguishable, hands (scripts), in constant dialogue with one another. The twin brothers Amodeus (uncle Buddy) and Theophilus (uncle Buck) who are the authors of the text and antecedent to the two cousins Ike and McCaslin – the readers and decipherers of the text – recorded every transaction in a kind of call and response pattern. When the cousins come upon the notation of Eunice’s death, they are confounded by a repetition of this fact (“Drowned herself”) attributed on a different calendar date, August 13, 1833. The challenging intelligibility of the record is already anticipated within the text of the ledger by one of the uncles’ previously dated (June 23, 1833) question: “Who in hell ever heard of a niger drownding himself?” My vagueness about antecedence here is not meant to be coy. “One of the uncles …” is probably Uncle Buddy, judging from a subsequent

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reference. Faulkner however seems intent on challenging his reader’s attentiveness to this point by obscuring pronominal antecedence throughout this section. Such vagueness potentiates the act of questioning itself (“Who in hell ever heard of a niger drownding himself?”), not least because the gender pronouns operative here are conspicuously contradictory (herself/himself). By indulging a vagueness of my own about the source of the question regarding Eunice drowned, I wish to remind my reader of the way in which both Hopkins and Faulkner make the question of antecedence a crux of syntactical order, a crux of the trajectory of knowledge: the promise of an answer to a question. There is of course a suitably convoluted answer to the question “Who in hell ever heard of a niger drownding himself?” Ike discovers two ledger entries subsequent to his/her drowning. The first records the death in childbirth of the slave Tomasina, come to be known as Tomy, daughter to Eunice. The second records the name of the male child born to Tomasina: Turl. Ike infers from these records that Carothers McCaslin, the antecedent progenitor of all pronominal references, had previously fathered Tomy upon Eunice. So Turl is both his son and his grandson. Eunice’s suicide, once sorted in the chronology of events – she drowns herself six months prior to her daughter coming to term – is the answer to the question it originally posed. I want to say that the aura of the past perfect progressive tense hovers over this knowledge. Antecedence is progressive as well as recursive. It furthermore tends toward the periphrastic, especially when Faulkner brings his reader uncomfortably close to the experience of reading the ledgers in a sentence that seems to embody them more than to represent them. Here the genealogical convolutions I’ve just traced are rendered as if Faulkner must reimagine grammatical structure in order to do justice to them: specifically to our acquaintance with Tomy’s Turl whom Carothers McCaslin strove to do justice to by leaving a legacy of a thousand dollars. In the sentence that we must attend to now, Ike discerns the truth not as an itemized gift of his grandfather’s legal testament but as a syntactically embedded notation in the ledger pertaining to the birth of the son/grandson: “Turl Son of Thucydus@Eunice Tomy born June 1833 yr stars fell Father’s will.”: … and he [Ike] had seen that too: old Carothers’ bold cramped hand far less legible than his sons’ even and not much better in spelling, who while capitalizing almost every noun and verb, made no effort to punctuate or construct [my emphasis] whatever, just as he made no effort either to explain or obfuscate the thousand-dollar legacy to the son of an unmarried slave-girl, to be paid only at the child’s coming-of-age bearing the consequence [my emphasis] of the act of which there was still no definite incontrovertible proof that he acknowledged not out of his own substance but penalizing his sons with it, charging them a cash forfeit on the accident of their own paternity;27 I choose this passage because, notably in its comment on the ungrammaticality of the ledgers, it is confluent with my interest in sentences as counters of experience.

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I have argued that such experience is correlative with the threshold of perception, at least where perception is a goad to thinking more exhaustively about the commitments embodied in the objects of perception. I have deliberately italicized the words “construct” and “consequence” here. Like incompatibility and consequence, the crux of Hegel’s Notional self-realization, construct and consequence coerce our attentiveness to new conditions of intelligibility. Construct and consequence are both revisionary of antecedent knowledge. They are productive/constructive with respect to what is not yet known to be the case. Accordingly, in a series of what I would argue are unpredictable, not to say confusingly punctuated, syntactical subordinations, Faulkner requires his reader to construe what is not already ruled by a constructive (which is to say, rule governed) intent. Just as the grandfather’s handwriting is noted to be less legible than the sons’, anticipating a reader’s access to such meaningfulness as the sons may subsequently discern, Faulkner’s syntax drives us back to a consideration of the grandfather’s fallible capitalization: what rendered it originally illegible. Following upon the mildly invidious judgment of whose handwriting is more legible, father’s or sons’, the placement of the immediately subsequent clause “… who while [my emphasis] capitalizing almost every noun and verb made no effort to punctuate …,” points in two directions, past and future. Aptly, the italicized relative phrasing conflates personhood (pronominal ambiguity) and temporality (the generational trajectory, fruits of the family tree). I might say that the entire clause mitigates the force of the antecedent judgment and re-poses the question of how a reader might find direction in such a syntactical wilderness. By this syntactical gambit, Faulkner furthermore establishes a correspondence between the illegibility of the script and the logic of the financial legacy to be bestowed at some future time. After all, “… the consequence of the act of which there was still no definite incontrovertible proof that he acknowledged not out of his own substance but penalizing his sons with it, charging them a cash forfeit on the accident of their own paternity …”28 calls a reader’s attentiveness to the possibility that sufficient attention has not been paid, so to speak. The father’s act of endowing a legacy upon Tomy’s Turl is itself absent from the text of the ledgers. But it is meant to be found out. Faulkner’s syntax vexes this prospect with a complicated inferentiality, keyed as it is to an abrupt tense shift. The father didn’t acknowledge the act “out of his substance,” such as was embodied in the past, but in the quasi-gerundial “penalizing” (if we infer parallel phrasing, i.e., “but out of penalizing), “charging them a cash forfeit ….”29 Because the sons will be charged “on accident of their paternity,” the legibility of the passage demands that a reader participate in the accidentality of fate which the sons have already suffered. The past, in which the truth would have been acknowledged, is acknowledged as a proleptic knowledge of what the sons do not yet grasp as their legacy. The syntactical volte face of almost simultaneously looking to the past that reveals itself to be a kind of past perfect progressive, headed into the future, heightens a reader’s awareness of how attention succumbs to temporal conditions. One is ever more urgently responding to the conditions of one’s

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response as awareness of those conditions proliferates from the state of responsiveness itself. Like Ike reading the ledgers, we are denied respite from awareness of our unpreparedness for more information. Faulkner’s syntactical elaborations deny respite. I would say they are a fitting counterpart to Hopkins’ inexhaustible responsiveness to the natural sensorium. Hopkins’ perceived Nature calls us to attend without respite to the formalitates that we might otherwise fetishize as objective forms. It should not be lost on us that in Faulkner’s text the fetishized objective form is an enslaved human being. He is yet unknown to himself as possessing the freedom bestowed in the circumlocutions of Faulkner’s syntax. Syntax spells out his fate as something which conspicuously depends upon his (Tomy’s Turl), Ike’s, and the reader’s yet unrealized, but tantalizingly teased out, powers of attention. Indeed, Faulkner appears to be insistent in his judgment that such powers of attention are self-realizing because they are reciprocal with the most unforgiving temporality. More to the point, Faulkner teases us with the seeming inconclusiveness of the sentence which is “bearing the consequence” of its already knowledgedeferring syntactical flow, no less so than the father’s act for which there is no proof, and hence no consequence. The sentence thereby propels itself in a new characterization of what has already been stated. The thousand dollars is reprised as the subject of what appears to be a new independent clause, nonetheless tethered to its antecedent by a semi-colon. The thousand dollars registers in Ike’s reading consciousness as …; not even a bribe for silence toward his [the father’s] own fame since his fame would suffer only after he was no longer present to defend it, flinging almost contemptuously, as he might a cast-off pair of shoes, the thousand dollars which could have had no more reality to him [my emphasis] under those conditions than it would have to the negro, the slave who would not even see it until he came of age, twenty-one years too late to begin to learn what money was.30 Once again we move backward and forward in time. We do so in precisely the way that Faulkner’s persistent questioning of pronominal antecedence – instanced here in the backward and forward looking pronoun him ( Ike’s grandfather or the Negro son?) – disposes us to do. Just so, the money to be gained is as fungible, temporally speaking, as the reputation (fame) to be lost. The conceit of the cast-off pair of shoes cues our reading, no less than Ike’s I would have to surmise, to the fact that in time one thing is always exchanged for another. We are obliged to take account of our indebtedness to a future that awaits our capacity for attention. We are forever catching up with the particulars of the unknown. This is not a glib paradox. It is rather a condition of knowing that demands our attention, in the Hegelian sense of Erfahrung, where we are predisposed to incorporate new commitments without the prejudice of identity. In other words, identity does not presuppose terms of fitness with our prior commitments as we endure changing times. Instead, our responsiveness is the threshold of our subjectivity. Our responsiveness to the world at large, no less than Hopkins’

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responsiveness to a flowering bluebell, is a calling out for us to exercise capacities that might otherwise remain occult. When, at the start of this chapter, I characterized literary imagination as circumstantial, “… as an attentional attunement subject to the variabilities of action that the objects of consciousness occasion,” I was taking care to stipulate that the opening of possibility in literary practice, what I am counting as literarity per se, was transitive and not an open-ended abstraction. Understood as an open-ended abstraction capacity would be voided of agency. Faulkner’s extravagantly unfolded sentence, parsing the chaotically scrawled ledgers piled in the commissary, sentences, so to say, Ike, his cousin McCaslin and Tomy’s Turl, to respond to competing prospects for intelligibility. Each demands countenancing incompatible inclusions and exclusions of spatio-temporal fact. We should therefore acknowledge that there is a more succinct and far more direct answer to the inciting question “Who in hell every heard of a niger drownding himself …?” We did. The reader, at least Faulkner’s especially well-attuned reader, along with Ike, McCaslin, and Tomy’s Turl, comes to understand Eunice’s suicide as something that can be comprehended. This is the case even if comprehension demands ongoing, improvisational thinking: re-combinative resourcefulness with respect to the circumstantial revelation of one fact or another. The potency of the question for old Carothers McCaslin appears to be a presumption that the intentionality or agency required for the act of suicide is absent. But Faulkner’s reader can see that it is absent in precisely the way that the consequence of the grandfather’s egregiously mindless insemination of Eunice’s daughter, “… His own daughter …,”31 unfolds: in a manner that demands intelligibility as much as it challenges the presumption of intelligibility. That’s how Faulkner’s sentences work broadly speaking; they propound incompatibilities in a manner that does not elude the inevitability of consequence. Consequence is the warrant for explanation. It is occasioned by the surfeit of attentiveness that explanatory opacity inveigles. Since I am speaking of syntax here in terms of spatio-temporal extension, I might avail myself of the concept of “hodological space,” given currency in the early twentieth century by the German psychologist Kurt Lewin. Just as James Gibson’s concept of affordance presupposes that when an object appears our perception of it entails action possibilities, the concept of hodological space (from the Greek hodos: way) presupposes that where there is an object (in Lewin’s case a penetrable space of any sort) there is perforce navigability, a prospect of possible movement.32 Hodological space is typically contrasted with Euclidean space where the domain of exploration is presupposed. Hodological space invites what I have alleged is the sort of improvisational re-combinative impulse inherent in syntax, especially if we think of syntax in roughly spatializing terms, where notions of adjacency and addition or augmentation are prominent. Eunice’s suicide is less a real conundrum than a signal of old Carothers McCaslin’s inattentiveness. Contrastingly, the very attentiveness cultivated by Faulkner’s sentences invigorates our appreciation of consequence, by its eschewing any abstractly preordained consequence. The sentence is a navigable space of sorts in which what counts as consequence is a

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re-attunement to the elements of attention, revealing something like new capacities for handling incompatibilities. We are reminded of Hegel’s account of the necessary transition from one concept to another as incompatibilities arise with respect to our commitments to the object of our attention. What Brandom takes from Hegel’s thinking on this point, as exploring hitherto unexplored boundaries of the concept, I see as discovering or presenting new capacities for experience tout court on the threshold of attentiveness. I have already intimated the experiential proximity of attention to responsiveness here, specifically the kind of responsiveness to natural forms that are so richly on display in Hopkins’ notebooks. Here it might be useful to circle back to Hopkins’s “It always in nature’s order is after the nature it is of.”33 The prepositional movement animated in this formulation reminds us that responsiveness to the object is an elaboration of the objectivity that would otherwise be lost to the determinative capacity of mind, and without which the object would lack vivacity. We might take the point more emphatically by glossing the two sentences that precede it: “For to determine is a perfection, greater than and certainly never less than, the perfection of being determined. It is a function of a nature, even if it should be the whole function, the naturing, the selving of that Nature.”34 The gerundial heterogeneity of “naturing” and “selving” reminds us of how the object in the flow of mental attention is complementary to the object in the flow of time: consequence is unceasingly determinative for form, or for what might be even more persuasively appreciated now as formalitates. The final pages of “The Bear” involve the reader in a challenge to this proposition, proving the necessity of Faulkner’s syntactical complications. In doing so, they signal the reader’s complicity with the ongoing consequentiality of Faulkner’s syntax as I have tried to epitomize it here. The challenge is figured in the character of Boon Hogganbeck, the mixed race (white/Chickasaw) giant of a man dwarfed by the mind of a child. He embodies incompatibilities. Though he appears in several Faulkner narratives, his salience in “The Bear” is his conquest of “Old Ben,” the novel’s eponymous force of Nature. By extrapolation from this fact, we might say that in the final scene of the novel Boon Hogganbeck struggles to conquer all of Nature. And yet he is curiously, belligerently, unresponsive to Nature. His personal atavism, inasmuch as it precludes his accommodating the heteronomous antagonisms of the world around him, mocks the heterogeneity he embodies. It may of course be said that Boon is too much a part of Nature to countenance a warrant for responsiveness. But I want to suggest that the final pages of “The Bear” belie such forbearance. The painful comedy that Faulkner orchestrates with respect to the formal heterogeneity of the world of perceptual experience closely aligns with the experience his reader has already suffered on the syntactical pathway that leads us to these final pages. Given that the syntactical practice I have engaged in Faulkner’s prose encourages a disposition to affordancy, a responsiveness to forms that are reciprocal for burgeoning capacities of attention, our final view of Boon Hogganbeck is inimical to the prospect of fostering new human capacities. In the final two pages of the novel, Ike returns to the natural setting of his adolescence. Then his consciousness was

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twinned with the convoluted account of what transpired according to the ledgers left by Carothers McCaslin. Now, making his way through woodland Ike comes unexpectedly into attunement with a sound that, like the ledgers, needs decipherment: He couldn’t tell when he first began to hear the sound, because when he became aware of it, it seemed to him that he had been already hearing it for several seconds – a sound as though someone were hammering a gun-barrel against a piece of railroad iron, a sound, loud and heavy and not rapid yet with something frenzied about it, as the hammerer were not only a strong man and an earnest one but a little hysterical too.35 Faulkner’s syntax again disposes us toward a kind of revisionary reading mandated by incompatibilities (e.g., the sound of a hammer that is a gun barrel, resonant of the iron of a railroad rail, loud, not rapid, yet frenzied.) that invite recombinatory prospects for making logical coherence. Ike discovers the source of the cacophony. Boon Hogganbeck sits with his back against an ancient gum tree. The remnants of his rifle are scattered on the ground about him while a riot of squirrels, mocking the hunter’s ambition, is erupting in the branches above his head. Antithetical to Hopkins’ register of instress, Peter Lombard’s re-combinatory exegeses of scripture, Gibson’s aptitude for affordance, each of which presupposes an interactive and enactive rapport with the perceived object, Boon proclaims possessive dominion over the squirrels: “Get out of here! Don’t touch them! Don’t touch a one of them! They’re mine!”36 The tableau of the dismembered rifle littering the ground around him and the corollary insurrection of the squirrels offer a comic rebuttal to the belligerent stance of conceptual abstractionism that Boon Hogganbeck otherwise unwittingly embodies in this punctuating moment of Faulkner’s narrative. Conclusion

I have taken my epigraph for these pages from a famous confession by Samuel Beckett in one of his letters: “I have always been a poor reader, incurably inattentive, on the lookout for an ‘elsewhere’ … the reading experiences which have affected me most are those which were best at sending me to that ‘elsewhere.” The transit to elsewhere is afforded, so to speak, by accommodation of what attention steals our attention from. This implies something like the conceptualizing of the nonconceptualizable. But this is not to say we are cut loose from the world of experience. After all, what we have not yet seen as a warrant for our attention is a function of its adjacency to something that has already held our attention. It is the kind of adjacency that our perceptual apprehension of the world reveals best in the rigors of unrelenting responsiveness. Responsiveness, perceptual and conceptual, is precluded where the possibilities of opacity, unintelligibility, the attentiveness that is born of inattentiveness (e.g.,

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Beckett’s “elsewhere”) are eschewed in favor of incontestable certainty. Syntax, understood most reductively in pragmatic rather than semantic terms as placement of elements within a matrix of sense-making prospects and possibilities, is a staging ground for negotiating opacities such as those from which de dicto and de re propositions arise. Or, it might be fair to say that syntax is a medium for appreciating the coincidence of de dicto and de re propositions as a prompt to more thought, a progressive experiential trajectory. Indeed, Beckett’s sense of himself as a poor reader, inattentive to what is immediately before him, does not merely denote an opacity of thought, the menace of unintelligibility troubling a sentence that warrants a de dicto, de re distinction. It is inferentially a promise of intelligibility “elsewhere.” The distinction between de dicto (what is said about a thing) and de re (the thing about which something is said) is used in philosophy of language and metaphysics to acknowledge competing modalities of knowledge. It denotes slippage between what is the case with respect to the way things are and what is the case with respect to how they are characterized. The alternating focus of the two registers intimates an affinity with the attentional “movement” inherent to enactive perception. I have argued that enactive perception is correlative to the experience of literarity within the precincts of the sentence, i.e., the virtual “movement” so to say of syntactical elements with respect to the variable pressures of contextual construal in play. This contrasts with circumstances where context is, propositionally speaking, a given. Boon Hogganbeck’s perception-blind absolutism similarly contrasts with Ike’s power of perception, rendered in Faulkner’s syntax as an expanding field of inferentiality. Faulknerian syntax conjures the available mind, as Scotus and Hopkins might have it, on shifting grounds of attention. Attention matters most because it enables human capacities for change, not for the sake of changeability itself. There is of course a long history of avant-garde aesthetic manifesti from Dada to Italian futurism to the Situationalists, to Fluxus, to Telematic cyber-art, promoting temporal flux: changeability for changeability’s sake.37 Such practices typically profess to exploit the ways in which modern technology proffers an antidote to the monomaniacal tyranny of the Enlightenment ego (the hypostasis of individuality), in the guise of a democratizing collective agency. Ambitions like “Augmentation of the Human Intellect,” even the ambition “To Boost the Human IQ,” touted in Zakros InterArts’s “Telematic Manifesto” (https://www.zakros.com/ projects/telematic),38 ignore the problem of opacity and so obviate the question of intelligibility. I maintain that obviating the question of intelligibility, ignoring the problem of opacity, invites a quasi-mystical intransitivity. It blocks the transit to Beckett’s elsewhere, which is of course everywhere. Hence, Beckett’s signature disposition to be “on the lookout,” inciting the very attentiveness that occasioned his judgment of himself as “a poor reader,” fosters an agency that is all the more self-consciously irrepressible. By contrast, the disembodied agency conjured in the techno avant-garde manifesti alluded to above precludes the world of embodied experience. These manifesti elude the baffles of perceptual life that render agency

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vividly purposive and consequently responsive to opacity in a way that reveals new prospects for action. I’ve been promoting the idea that such prospects are the stakes of compositional agency in the arts, specifically the literary arts. Now it remains for me to demonstrate that literarity is compositional for the writer and the reader alike because they are, so to speak, partners in syntax. Notes 1 Scotus’s point, and its resonance for Hopkins, is best represented in the following excerpt from In Metaph. 7,q.14, n.29. This text is cited in Pasnau’s “Cognition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus, ed. Thomas Williams. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 188: “A cognitive power must not only receive the species of its object, but also tend through its act toward the object. This second is more essential to the power because the first is required on account of the power’s imperfection. And the object is the object less because it impresses a species and more because the power tends toward it.” 2 Lucy Alford, Forms of Poetic Attention (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 270. 3 Ibid., 271. 4 The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphrey House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 289. 5 For a fuller discussion of this dynamic see Robert Pasnau, “Cognition,” in The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus, ed. Thomas Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 286. 6 See Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (New York: Penguin, 1953), 146. 7 Ibid., 148. 8 The best commentary on this point is detailed in Bernadette Waterman Ward’s “Philosophy and Inscape: Hopkins and the Formalitas of Duns Scotus,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 32, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 214–39. 9 Pasnau touches on a refrain of this text by emphasizing that even notions like “divine light,” so essential to Duns Scotus’ theological orientation, come down to a question of intelligibility with respect to perceptual reality. He observes that for Scotus “…the divine light acts not on us but on the objects of our understanding. By giving objects their intelligibility (esse intelligibile), the divine intellect ‘is that in virtue of which secondarily the objects produced move the intellect in actuality.’” (303). 10 Hopkins, Poems and Prose, 123. 11 Pasnau, “Cognition” 286–87. 12 Ibid., 287. 13 Hopkins, Poems and Prose, 31. 14 Ward, “Philosophy and Inscape,” 226. 15 See Badiou’s “Figures of Subjective Destiny: On Samuel Beckett” posted on Lacan. com. 16 Hopkins, Poems and Prose, 31. 17 Jan Mieszkowski, Crises of the Sentence (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), 29, has importantly observed the necessity for literary critics and scholars to ignore the long-standing Chomskyan admonition against conflating syntax with semantics. 18 William Faulkner, Three Famous Short Novels: Spotted Horses, Old Man, the Bear (New York: Vintage, 2011), 257–8. 19 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 55. 20 Robert B. Brandom, A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 55.

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Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 56. Ibid., 55. Brandom, A Spirit of Trust, 54. I call attention to the periphrastic modal here insofar as Faulkner’s use of modals (words expressing possibility) is typically pretexts for attentional shifts, i.e., re-readings. The periphrasis that is virtually synonymous with Faulknerian “style” is trivialized if we don’t appreciate that the syntactical motions inherent in such periphrasis point to a threshold of experiential variances. In other words, “Style” doesn’t quite capture the occasion for readerly agency afforded by Faulknerian syntax. 25 Faulkner, Three Famous Short Novels, 191. 26 Ibid., 264. 27 Ibid., 266. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 266–7. 31 Ibid., 267. 32 It is worth noting that Sartre uses the term to emphasize how consciousness is unequivocally embodied and, by inference, always circumstantial, launched on a vector of action. See Haim Gordon’s The Dictionary of Existentialism (London: Routledge, 1999), 93. 33 Hopkins, Poems and Prose, 148. 34 Ibid. 35 Faulkner, Three Famous Short Novels, 324. 36 Ibid., 325. 37 Ziarek, The Inner Touch, 80–84. 38 According to the manifesto, telematics means “…to be embedded within a network semiotic composed of abrupt information transfers and instantaneous, more or less communications.” https://www.zakros.com/projects/telematic.

21 22 23 24

3 READING FOR EXPERIENCE The Compositional Ethos

[perception] … is no longer something that just happens to us. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit1

The Syntactical Thing

In the section of his “The Origin of the Work of Art” entitled “The Work and Truth,” Heidegger makes a by now reigning claim in contemporary aesthetic theory. I want to argue that it nonetheless threatens the usefulness of aesthetic theory. When Heidegger professes to answer the long contested question “But what is art?” he makes what at first glance might appear to be an incontestable assertion: “Artworks universally display a thingly character.”2 But, he cautions, The attempt to interpret this thing-character of the work with the aid of the usual thing-concepts failed – not only because these concepts do not lay hold of the thingly feature, but because in raising the question of its thingly substructure, we force the work into a preconceived framework by which we obstruct our own access to the work-being of the work.3 While he importantly discerns the art object as distinct from an “… object of the art industry,”4 Heidegger’s thingliness risks obviating the object as integral to the perceptual universe that I’m counting as the sine qua non of aesthetic experience: what makes it a distinctively human experience. Motivated as he is by a Kantian disposition to pre-empt the tyranny of the concept, Heidegger falls into the trap of treating the thingliness of the object as a playing piece in a zero-sum game. Heidegger famously exemplifies his thinking by conjuring a Greek temple. The thingly sculpted god, the object, so to speak, of our attention, is interior to the temple in DOI: 10.4324/9781003384052-4

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more ways than one. It “… is not a portrait whose purpose is to make it easier to realize what the god looks like; rather, it is a work that lets the god himself be present and thus is the god himself.”5 Experience here appears to be sacrificed to Being insofar as what counts for Heideggerian truthful thought is neither essence nor appearance but the indeterminacy that obtains in the slippage between them. Alternatively, in the Phenomenology, Hegel points out that the object, in its transmutation into pure self-consciousness, is only one aspect of what he calls “formative education,” arguably a framework for his aesthetic theory. He stipulates that “… the task nowadays consists not so much in purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension, and making him into a substance that is an object of thought and that thinks, but rather in just the opposite in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so as to give actuality to the universal ….”6 Of course, the fixity alluded to here is the negative “power of the I.” It is however only fixed in the way that, by its power of negation, it sets itself apart from itself in the process of self-supersession. That is to say, by contrast with fixed thoughts, sensuous existence lends consciousness a greater fluidity of thought. The experience of thought here has to do more with a determinative being, known to itself in the course of determinate negation and bound as it is to perceptual registers of experience. I have already associated Hegelian access to experience with what Brandom calls “recollective rationality,” whereby the determinateness of conceptual content is knowable by virtue of what self-consciousness knows itself to be no longer: the curator of a duly superseded sense certainty for example. Because Heideggerian thingliness is not perceptual any more than it is conceptual, it is not, for my purposes, sufficiently experiential in the Hegelian terms that I have favored here. I wish to argue that thingliness (both on a Heideggerian and a perceptual register) must give way to something like a compositional ethos if the artwork is to be persuasively addressed in terms that comport with the conditions and ambitions of human agency. What I mean by compositional ethos – and what I frankly admit is concordant with the terms of Hegelian self-consciousness – is implicit in my earlier observation that shifting grounds of attention dispose us irresistibly toward re-combinative imaginative acts. Syntactical order is cumulative with respect to changing commitments demanded by what comes next in a sentence. When a part of a whole is no longer coherent with what has been contextually postulated as a principle of wholeness, the predicate of wholeness implicit in it must be revised. I have already noted that taxis (particularly as a term of art in Latin medicine regarding the wholeness, the organon of the body) denotes both placement and replacement. Contextual order presupposes a necessity of reordering, insofar as progression is necessarily retrospective, engendering inevitable contradictions. One replaces commitments much as organic parts of a body might replace the function of parts failing under changing health conditions. Self is perforce self-understanding. Self-understanding

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is perforce self-transformative experience in a way that Nietzsche made so convincing in Genealogy of Morals.7 In the Nietzschean perspective, our ethical nature is modified by the myriad vicissitudes of our experience. Syntactical order is similarly responsive to contextual modifications that in turn prompt new occasions for reason giving, imposing new rationalistic constraints upon the compositional ethos. Here is an example of the kind of syntactical constraint I want to call attention to with the notion of compositional ethos: where the prospect for intelligibility is a self-elaborating proposition. Gertrude Stein a writer whose syntax and whose investment in the time of the sentence are well known introduces us to Julia Dehning, the protagonist of her The Making of Americans, in this way: And so those who read much in story books now can tell what to expect of her [Julia] … neither her father for her, nor the living down her mother who in her, for I am not ready yet to take away the character from our Julia for truly she may work out as the story books would have her or we may find all different kinds of things for her, and so reader, please remember the future is not yet certain for her, and be you well warned reader from the vain-glory of being sudden in your judgment of her.8 Stein’s admonition to the reader to recompose herself, to reconfigure her disposition toward the story-telling of storybooks, is already underway in the reader’s grasping the admonition itself as a unique temporality. Within the temporality of the sentence, readerly attentiveness is modified by syntactical inversion, repetition, analepsis, delay, and persistent suddenness. In effect, the sentence is a series of situational reconnoiterings, indicating the necessity for recombining elements of the sentence to suit the changing predicative environment. Consider the clause “… neither her father for her, nor the living down her mother who in her ….” Each increment of predicative guidance is revised in the pursuit of a singular predicative trajectory. Parsing things, more specifically, the phrase “the living down her mother who …” at first promises the idiomatic closure of Julia’s relation to her mother. The relative pronoun “who” proffers clarification of the mother’s nature. But the abruptness of the ensuing prepositional phrase causes us to revise our expectation that knowing the mother could ever be anything more definite for Julia than knowing the mother in her [Julia’s] self. This precludes the notion that knowing the mother well enough to live her down might be possible. There are several mothers here and several Julias. But, as we follow the sentence to its conclusion, the author’s wish not to “take away the character from our Julia … because she may ‘work out …’” dramatizes the modifications of the reader’s trajectory as I’ve mapped it. It is convergent with the authorial experience within which those modifications are rendered most immediately urgent. I want to say that movement, or the movement of predicative topoi within the sentence, gives the sentence its literarity insofar as it teases out a repertoire of re-combinative strategies. I am implying that it is impossible to read Stein’s sentence without bootstrapping a compositional ethos. I take the Steinian sentence as a touchstone for her own

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observation about the ways in which aesthetic gestures, modes of making within ever more vibrantly felt constraints of experience, inevitably devolve to selftransfigurations. I am not interested in postulating the self-transfigurative mode here for its own sake. Rather, what is transfigured under one specific set of constraints vis-à-vis another counts more dispositively for my purposes. As I will elaborate later, self-transfiguration entails choices. When Stein writes that The Making of Americans morphed from “… a history of a family to being a history of everybody the family knew, … the history of every kind and of every individual being …,”9 she gives urgency to the belief that who we are in the world, and I would add, where we are in the world, depends on what we are doing in time. History, from this vantage point, is made in recognition that the self is forever an adaptive creature. Adaptation is a register of choice-making. It gives us an opportunity to give ourselves better reasons for the choices we make. We selflessly adapt to consequences that belie whatever intentional acts permitted us to conceive of the self as a quintessential maker in the first place. It should not surprise us that in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein thought of her novel, like America itself, as a “space … filled with moving.”10 Space, conceived in this way, takes no precedence over movement inasmuch as movement is not, strictly speaking, contained within the spatiality it instantiates. In this context, we may say space is borderless but not unbounded. It is not territorial. It is compositional. Composition is a noun harboring a verb. In this context where temporality is urgent, where space is “filled with moving,” the nominal and the verbal modalities are conflated. This happens much in the way that the object world is conflated with the world refashioned by human techne. The Kantian notion of dynamis (the underpinning of his exposition of the faculties) similarly conflates doing something and realizing (making real, experientially) something in the process. Needless to say, the experience that I am interested in here and which for me counts as a warrant for thinking “literarity” is compositional, with emphasis on the agency of composition. Steinian spaces filled with moving are compatible with the idea of syntactical progression where the tension between what is promised and what is given in the placement of linguistic elements, i.e., the sheer adjacency of elements, is duly suspenseful with regard to what comes next.11 Theories of art like Heidegger’s that worry the instrumentalism of mechanistically formed work (syntax has been deemed to be such a coercive form by the avantgardists of the early twentieth century) and more recent theories of art arising from post-Foucauldian schools of thought see the formed work as merely an artifact of power and hegemonic identity. It might be fair to say then that the blind spot shared by these theoretical perspectives is the Steinian prospect for a compositional mode (inherently syntactical) that is not preordained but ordinational nonetheless, exhibiting dynamis in the Kantian sense. Not surprisingly, reading Stein’s sentence in this way brings us back to Hegel more urgently than to Kant, albeit Hegel informed by Kant. I have been advocating that we see the combinatory logic of syntax as a quasiperceptual register in its own right. It enacts the passage of time in relation to presentational features of a world: the world of successive “things” composed under an

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ordinational constraint. In this regard, Hegel’s second chapter of Phenomenology is aptly titled “Perception: Or the Thing and Deception.” In this famous inauguration of the theory of self-consciousness, Hegel makes the point that perception is “… no longer something that just happens to us ….”12 Experience, as I have been teasing it out in these pages, is similarly not just a response to the world but knowledge of response. Implicitly such knowledge is forward looking. After all, in knowing one’s response, one cannot but anticipate the warrant for further response. In just this way, Hegel points out that perception is constituted as two “movements.” The first is the movement of “pointing-out or the act of perceiving, the other being the same movement as a simple event [my emphasis] or the object perceived.”13 Hegel’s “event” (I will shortly distinguish it from the Heideggerian event, Ereignis), the revelation that what we might easily mistake as the moment of perception is a movement, is evidence that the perceived object is an object of consciousness. Consciousness is in turn transmuted in the self-differentiation of the negating I. The I’s displacement of the object entails its own splitting into a being in itself and a being for the object. As Hegel puts it, “for only perception contains negation, that is difference or manifoldness, within its own essence.”14 This the gist of Hegelian experience. But what does it have to do with syntax? Here I will take some help from Roland Barthes, whose career in many ways could be characterized as a phenomenological probing of the nature of the literary. In his last completed work, a sheaf of lectures posthumously published under the title The Preparation of the Novel, Barthes entertains the idea of composing a novel. He gives impetus to the project by rehearsing his vast readerly experience of literary texts from Dante to Proust. Within the framework of Barthes’ recapitulating his career as a reader, syntax figures as a crux of the ambition to shift from the role of the reader to the role of the writer. Barthes, who treats syntax as an “incident” (a variant of event), specifically with reference the literary form of Haiku, touches base with the experience of what I am calling “literarity” generally and in a predictably Hegelian way.15 The significance of the “incident” of Haiku for Barthes is not the Tangibilia of vivacious perception, which is too often taken to be its distinguishing characteristic. But neither is the significance of Haiku ideational. On the contrary, for Barthes, Haiku is the signal literary form that precludes ideational or thematic reading. Barthes uses the French word redans to denote the inner workings of Haiku, favoring the architectural provenance of the word, which entails articulation. We ought not to forget the etymological relation of articulation (ars) with art. Redans or steps are perforce taken in relation to one another, articulating one register of spatial perception with another. Quite explicitly Barthes’ anatomy of Haiku appeals to the Japanese concept of Ma an “Interval of Space-Time.”16 One takes the steps of a staircase in that interval. We are thus involved in the architectural enterprise of potentiating our attention to what comes next. Each step is at once a movement and an uncertainty about placement of the foot. It is hard to deny that every sensory perception that is deemed to be shareable in language reminds us that placement is

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no less a syntactical consideration in sensing our experience of the world than it is in sensing the world in a sentence. Here is a famous haiku by Basho. It exhibits what Barthes takes to be the hallmark features of the form. Haiku, according to Barthes, seems “to loosen up the syntax” registering a “tenuous agitation.”17 Once again, placement is everything. The old pond A frog jumps in Oh! The sound of water.18 The ideational limpidity of the old pond is agitated so to speak by the jumping frog. The sound of the broken stillness of the water, denoted as abstractly as the nominalistic pond, is however only heard in the exclamatory “Oh!.” But the exclamation is empty of signification. It is rendered merely as a sound by virtue of its placement before the “sound” that we know to be “The sound of water.” It thus denotes a capacity for hearing before the aural perception is known as what the capacity can deliver. A well-attuned reader will appreciate how the exclamatory “Oh” sounds the sound that warrants exclamation in a way that the phrase “The sound of water,” taken in the order in which it is presented, never could. The capacity for hearing without hearing the water denotes a re-combinatory logic inherent to the syntactical combinations already guiding our reading. What the reader engages here is coherent with Hegelian supersession as I’ve already sketched it out. Following Barthes’ account of the distinctiveness of Haiku, I want to return to the subject of experience by stipulating that in experience one takes steps (redans). Perhaps I can mitigate the apparently syncretistic juxtaposition of Hegel and Haiku by pointing out how in both traditions – thought in Hegel, aesthetic making in the Haiku – incremental steps of knowledge take precedence over all-knowing spectacle, or what’s worse, visionary truth (Geist notwithstanding). Hegelian supersession, like the self-dramatizing formativeness of Barthesian Haiku, and as opposed to academic rubrics of literary form, admonish us to take steps. One takes steps in time. To say that Haiku is an emphatically syntactical form is to acknowledge how the temporality inherent to syntax presupposes the necessity of supersession and inference. I’ve read the Basho Haiku just so. The poem issues a warrant for re-reading in a way that redounds to a re-combinatory logical disposition.19 That is, hearing sound first as content-less exclamatory vocalization and then hearing with the knowledge of the watery occasion that calls out the capacity for hearing sound within a conceptual purview (i.e., water) denotes a movement of the mind in two directions. It goads alternative construals or combinations of perceptual moments. Such movements are steps of the reading experience that may be justifiably called perceptual with the Hegelian proviso – in his account of sense certainty – that percepts matter only as premises for inferences. Inferences are both recollective and projective. Knowing the capacity for hearing and knowing any particular sound as an exercise of that capacity is both a step back and a step beyond. If we pose

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the question “Is what one hears what is heard or the capacity for hearing itself?” are we not reordering the priorities of perceptual experience? Is it the leaping frog sounding in the ear or is it the water? For Hegel I would warrant, no less than for the astutely engaged reader, it is not the determinate answerability of the question that matters so much as the further determinability of the question. It is worth noting with respect to the further determinability of the question that, in his chapter “Perception,” Hegel speaks directly to the “percipient” of any perceptual object (thing) in a manner that conflates the Thing of perceptual experience with error, or yet unrealized determinations. The Truth of the Thing is not an answer to the question “What is it?” so much as the percipient’s apprehension of … a connection of the diverse moments of its apprehension to one another; but if a dissimilarity makes itself felt in the course of this comparison, then this is not an untruth of the object – for this is the self-identical – but an untruth in perceiving it.20 As I’ve discussed already, when Hegel gives account of perception as an “act,”21 he understands that it instantiates two moments which constitute a movement: “… the movement of pointing-out or the act of perceiving, the other being the same movement as a simple event or the object perceived.”22 Because perception contains negation, the deictic “This” is always something superseded and thus “… expanded into a host of differences.”23 In this way, as Hegel puts it, the negating I shows itself “… to be the thing with many properties.”24 These might be characterized as incremental steps of attentiveness or perception without advancement toward a Truthful object. Such attentiveness is nonetheless productive of determinative knowledge. And it is worth remembering that for Hegel any determinacy is a property strictly “… through the addition of a further determination …”25 So when he calls the “abstract universal medium” in which properties make a claim to “Thinghood,” we understand that such thinghood is not an entity but what he calls “a simple togetherness.”26 This, I want to suggest, is not so different from syntactical articulation wherein predicative ends are not substantively presuppose-able. Are the experiences of reading a Steinian sentence or a Basho Haiku like this? Could we say that such sentences figure the architecture of steps: the space-time intervals, the articulating registers of treads and risers? I would answer in the affirmative, with the caveat that one neither goes straight up or straight down. I’ve invoked the conceit of a “compositional ethos” as a counter for the reader’s experience with respect to taking these steps in stride. I have already noted how the question of literarity, understood as an experiential register, has long foundered on the threshold of critics’ attempts to assign essential qualities to literary forms. The history of genre, e.g., is a conspicuously fraught effort to make literary forms into frameworks for capturing literary experience. But the experience that can be qualitatively known as literary within the confines of generic forms is redundant for the anatomy of forms and falls prey to the charge of unworldly aestheticism.

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Capturing literary experience qua experience cannot be a conceptually generalizing enterprise. Derek Attridge, a literary theorist who is alert to the liabilities of formalist approaches to literary experience, sees the problem clearly.27 But his solution, a striving to appreciate the singularity of literary works independent of conceptualizing rubrics like genre, risks throwing the baby out with the bath water. In his effort to locate the “singularity” of literature (his alternative to aesthetic essentialism), he justly defers to the poem or the novel itself as the relevant threshold of experience in literature. That said, the notion of singularity Attridge sketches in The Singularity of Literature refers to what the artwork, the poem or the novel, renders unintelligible with respect to norms.28 When he makes singularity tantamount to unintelligibility with respect to norms, he risks re-inscribing literary experience within the province of those norms, albeit negatively. Not surprisingly, Attridge’s fullest articulation of what counts as singularity amounts to the recognition of “otherness.” Consequently, the singularly of literature is, in effect, an experience only with respect to what it cannot explain. Attridge’s chariness of explanation, like the caution of Heidegger’s Thingliness, is a worthy attempt to elude instrumentalism. But, as I have argued in the previous chapter, explanatory power is not ineluctably a power mongering enterprise within repressive cultural institutions. So I am taking the critique of formalist approaches to reading in a different direction. In reading Stein and Basho as I have, in positing steps of syntactical articulation, I am attributing explanatory power to syntactical progress. This is in line with the dynamics of Hegelian supersession, understood to be both recollective and prospective. What one knew is no longer what one knows in the movement of the moments of self-consciousness. I am proposing that something like this is the case in the sentence as we follow what are perforce the re-combinatory increments of change within the range of possible predications. In the interval between one expectation and another, we contend with contesting vectors of attentiveness. Attentiveness fosters affordance. Where attention lands on an object of attention, the possibility of making use, not to mention making sense, is portended, if it is not already the case. Our predisposition to find explanations (intelligibility, however improvisational) for the circumstances that hold our attention is key to counting affordance as a critical aspect of human experience. In effect, I am posing affordance as alternative to Attridge’s principle of ineluctable and inexhaustible alterity. What I value as experience here is not preeminently the nominalistic experience of the literary form per se (genre governed) but the access to the lived experience that literary form actualizes. This obviates the problem of making so-called literary/aesthetic forms the self-pre-empting objects of inquiry when we are contemplating the scope of literarity. Taking Steps

I am therefore asserting that taking steps entails thinking about the construal of sentences in terms of reason-giving. In the context of the literary artwork, these are reasons for compositional construal and sense-making which are self-elaborating

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and, in that way, ultimately self-explanatory for the reader. The basis for my claim here is an assumption that syntactical elements always work inferentially. If I am right, rational agency is implicit in the act of reading sentences whenever we regard a reader’s duty to contend with divergent attentional trajectories. The phrase “act of reading” of course privileges agency and subjectivity. I need to be very clear that my thinking here is in tension with much contemporary aesthetic theorizing that takes its lead from Heideggerian admonitions against making as a production, a practical techne. Heidegger essays to preserve the autonomy of thinking over against acting and doing. Thinking is a “deed” not an action, Heidegger insists. In this capacity, thinking enables thinking Being. It is the springboard for apprehending beings in their Being. The thrust of Heidegger’s argument here is against Plato and Aristotle who confuse thinking with a techne. Contemplating the stakes of engagement (and perhaps with a sidelong glance at Sartre), Heidegger complains that classical philosophy takes reflection to be ineluctably in service to doing and making.29 This stance is perhaps nowhere more conspicuously posed than in Heidegger’s 1947 revised “Letter on Humanism.” The “Letter” invidiously compares thinking and writing. In writing, “thinking loses its flexibility.”30 It fails to “retain the multidimensionality of the realm peculiar to thinking.”31 Heidegger is faulting the effective “doing” of “deliberate linguistic formulation,”32 as if deliberation were one dimensionally deterministic for sense-making. My interest in syntax here is meant to dispel this notion. What I am taking as the literarity of syntax is its predisposing us to discern and seize upon re-combinatory possibilities. This predisposition is operative where syntactically ordained meaningfulness exposes an impasse of understanding by the extenuation of its contingencies for alternative construals. From my perspective, the problem with Heidgegger’s prejudice against techne is implicitly its evasion of the prospect of intelligibility inasmuch as Heidegger doesn’t squarely face up to the inescapable circumstance of unintelligibility. Heidegger’s humanism professes to “care” for mankind by “bringing man back to his essence.”33 But the gist of this essence, especially since subjectivity is obviated, is that nothing need be said about being man. That is, nothing need be said about mankind as a realm of experience where action incurs changed circumstances of knowability: roughly on the order of perception, as I have been viewing it, in roughly syntactical, combinatory/re-combinatory terms. Since I am already seeing Heidegger and Hegel contrastively, it now seems apt for me to favor Hegel’s term Humanus over against Heidegger’s “humanism.” Hegel’s humanus is distinguishable from Roman cultural humanus which Heidegger justifiably dismisses in “Letter on Humanism.” The Romans invoked an instrumental code of virtues. Alternatively, Hegel’s Humanus denotes the way in which the artist acquires his subject matter in himself, as a self-determining expression of the infinity of “feelings and situations ….”34 As Benjamin Rutter attests, art within the scope of Hegelian Humanus only becomes modern when it’s “… subject has been … the predicament and the possibility of rational agency.”35 In the Hegelian scheme, subjectivity is de rigueur as a place of change. Every increment of change is warranted by existential circumstances that are of a piece with the dynamism of subjective

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self-consciousness. It might be fair to say then that Humanus is circumstantial. It is circumstantial on analogy with our self-consciousness of the possibilities for experience presented to us by the perceptual sensorium. This, I would argue, is precisely what the compositional imagination faces in exploring the limits of its own power. Along these lines, we might acknowledge that any act of making is de facto a stance of openness toward other reasons for making. This is the case in the same way that commitments are self-modifying in the circumstance of our acting on them. So, the Hegelian rationality that I’m subscribing to here presupposes a knowing subject, subject to unknown possibilities: the potential infinity of “feelings and situations” unfolded in Humanus. If the Heideggerian impetus behind so much contemporary aesthetic theorizing – which I would say is epitomized in Attridge’s “singularity” – eschews determination in order to pre-empt practical power infringements upon or through the artwork, I believe we are paradoxically accepting the sacrifice of experience to the menacing contingencies of experience. When Attridge, e.g., stipulates that experience for him is pre-eminently the experience of alterity, he concedes the relevance of a change of state, a transformation.36 But when he hedges against self-consciousness of such a transformation, he capitulates to Heideggerian aphesis, a letting go of the world of perceptual encounters: of action and agency. He abandons a world in which steps can be taken. On the contrary, I am saying that the artist, in the midst of an array of compositional choices, must know that in proceeding she is acceding to yet unresolved ratios of knowledge and ignorance. Perhaps Barthes’ sense of the Haiku as “incident” is my most ready to hand touchstone for such experience. By contrast, Heidegger and Attridge hew to the “event,” Heidegger’s das Ereignis. The incident, by foregrounding increments of action, steps of self-acknowledgement, occasions cognizance of change in time, with emphasis on cognition per se. The event, by its deference to pure alterity, what Attridge designates too generally as an “opening” to new possibilities of meaning and feeling, is comparatively timeless and so actantially inconsequential. My investment in incident over event is rooted in the temporality exhibited by syntactical order. I should recall that for Hegel perception always contains negation. Differences and manifoldness mark the steps, so to speak, of understanding how “the universal as principle is the essence of perception ….”37 I am not pursuing the destiny of the universal of course. I am strictly interested in honoring the ambition, implicit in Hegelian Humanus to research the limits of human experience at the apparent limit of self-determinative activity, “… the infinity of its feelings and situations ….” Krzysztof Ziarek has coined the term “Forcework” in order to capture the ambitions of post-Heideggerian art theorists like Attridge who take the Hegelian dialectic as their antagonist. For them, the dialectic is an all too self-serving capitulation to the imperialism of universalist thinking. Ziarek spells it out this way. Forcework is a release or a redisposition of forces into a constellation alternative to the sociopolitical conditions of art production. The work of art is a field, a multidimensional space-time event, where forces come to be transformed through the “force” of poiesis, that which “makes” art ….38

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The terms “force” and “poiesis” stand out as the crux of my quarrel with Ziarek and the schools of thought he marshals to stand against any “productionist” notion of artistic making: any concession to art as techne. So what does Ziarek understand about making art? Within a field of forces, what he elsewhere calls a “nonsubjective field of ‘action,’”39 we are bound to dispense with the abiding binaries of Western logic, the particular and the universal both. Ziarek takes his inspiration from Irigaray’s notion of “femininity.” For Irigaray, femininity epitomizes the possibility of there being no subject and no object. Rather, a relationality of forces obtains “beyond identity and power-oriented praxis,”40 beyond particularity and universality. Such relationality, which at a glance might appear to be not so distant from my view of syntactical relation, is understood by Ziarek (reading Irigaray) to be a function of proximity. But there is a crucial difference between proximity and syntax. Contrary to Hegel’s notion of force as what determines the continuity of mind thorough difference, Irigary’s proximity is a place holder for a praxis that is neither “one” nor the “other.” It conspicuously precludes the articulation of one with another. Syntax allows for the speculative intuition of a re-combinative logic latent in the combinatory patterns that syntactical rules – which I want to say are implicitly “reasons” – have already determined. Ziarek’s inability to specify what a relationality that we must take as sheer proximity to what is otherwise the case, leaves him to proliferate metaphors for such an “otherwise.” That is to say, instead of specifying what other ways of acting/doing/making might practically ensue, Ziarek conjures “foldings” and “unfoldings” of being, “incalculable exchanges of unmarketable information,” “transformative power,” “power-free praxis.” He ultimately circles back to the Heideggerian commonplace of “letting be,” of aphesis. In all such cases, what is lacking is acknowledgment of the outcomes from the exigencies of any particular existential circumstance. Ziarek thus misses the possibility of “learning” from such outcomes. Learning is, after all, a calling of attention to the fact that something happens. It is the gist of what a compositional ethos bestows. Something Is Happening: Pinter’s “A Kind of Alaska”41

Since I find the Haiku useful for “taking steps,” for its distinct foregrounding of syntactical effects – on the register of abrupt perceptual juxtapositions as much as on the formal grammatical register – I choose a short play by Harold Pinter to hasten my progress on this path of inquiry. Both the Haiku and the playscript, by their formal eschewing of expositional devices, starkly reveal the threshold of self-deterministic activity in gestures of surprising syntactical articulation. Such gestures make the circumstantial elaboration of the reader’s attentional commitments unusually transparent. My thinking here is congruent with the Hegelian “force” that forces our changing commitments in the course of dialectical supersession. Both the Haiku and the playscript, by their de facto minimization of expositional machinery, bring us closer to the experience of what comes next without the portentousness of too much teleological plotting. As Hegel says with regard to

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supersession, where determinateness is all, “… these determinacies – which are properties strictly speaking [that is to say, perceptual] only through the addition of a further determination – are related [only] to themselves ….”42 I am assuming that the thing related to itself here is determinate in the manner of the Hegelian bondsman’s creativity, realized by his working on Nature. Such labor specifically instantiates cognizance of change through time. Experientially speaking, it is perceptual and universal, percipient, and anticipatory. The thingliness Hegel asks us to contend with here is not so different than the thingliness of the work of art that I’ve already staked out as a ground of experience: beckoning us beyond the threshold of aesthetic value per se. As Caravaggio’s “Calling of St. Matthew” urged us to see, experience is a calling to attend, with no expectation that our recognition of ourselves as called will suffice with respect to what has not yet been paid due attention. For in the time of syntactical articulation, when something is happening, something else is always happening inferentially. The experience of the work of art is very particularly a calling to this experience. Pinter’s play, “A Kind of Alaska,” commences with what I take to be a strong admonition: that what is the case for the work of art is the case for agents and patients alike under the spell of a “calling.” One can be called to attention, to an awakening or, in Wittgensteinian terms, to the dawning of an aspect. Deborah, a medical patient, a victim of the sleeping sickness epidemic that spread over Europe (and then the rest of the world) in the winter of 1916, awakens from 29 years of physical immobility to declare: “Something is happening.” These are of course the words that are calling us to attend to the fact that Pinter’s play has begun. They are no less an admonition to pay attention, which is to say – I will say more about this shortly – that there are reasons to attend. It is fair to infer that if something is happening, something else will happen. Keeping up with what’s happening then will require ever more resourceful reasoning. Changing mandates for attentiveness, after all, articulate different reasons. In other words, the inference that reason-giving is in order baldly announces itself here. I think it would be fair to say that something like “volatile inferentiality” is what animates Pinter’s play with vertiginous prompts to shift one’s rational commitments. The experience for the reader, for the audience of Pinter’s play, is circumstantial, in the terms that I have suggested the compositional ethos urges us to engage. I am counting commitments as reasons that arise on the threshold of what T.M Scanlon in his Being Realistic About Reasons calls an “epistemic situation.”43 To be in an epistemic situation is to judge one’s grasp of what one should be thinking of, given what one knows of oneself in the exigency of judgment. The distinctiveness of the literary work is that it imposes the epistemic situation without the constraint of even the most realistically imagined finitude that, for the philosopher, might count as leverage for making truth claims. The point I am getting at is eloquently voiced by Beckett’s aptly named unnamable: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” However, the widely accepted thematic meaningfulness of this famous syntactical duo – usually taken as a touchstone of existential dread – misses the acknowledgement they proffer that situations are ongoing in the most banal and

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momentous sense of the word: going on to something else. I speak of the time that transpires for all of us, even for the sleeper whose awakening is on that continuum. Awakening is not an interruption of sleep any more than sleep is an interruption of waking existence. In this situation, reasoning, rationalistically speaking, must be proleptic. Beckett gives the point even more force in another famously temporally attuned locution: “Imagination dead, imagine” where the stakes of experience are most emphatically aligned with our understanding of human creativity as a selfsustaining practice. Going on under the auspices of an inability to go on, imagining imagination dead, are epitomes of the compositional ethos. They intimate possibilities for sense-making that challenge the finite powers of predication. Reading Pinter’s “A Kind of Alaska” – or watching Pinter’s “A Kind of Alaska” transpire on stage – one is bound to acknowledge the frailty of the power of predication. It must be acknowledged to be a fulcrum of inferentiality and hence a challenge for the prospect of any duly Beckettian “going on.” Deborah after all is called to attention in the most agonizingly abrupt manner. Because she does not know she has been asleep for 29 years, because she does not know what “is happening,” though she is cognizant that “something is happening,” she is perforce a creature of affordance. Whatever sense she can make of her circumstance must suffice where otherwise nothing makes sense. If we were to take the Heideggerian stipulation about thingliness quite strictly, the circumstance of Deborah’s self-knowledgeable subjectivity is arguably akin to the occasion fostered by the Heideggerian work of art. It “opens up in its own way the Being of beings.”44 Deborah’s experience in the hospital room, like the presence of the god in the temple is, by force of her illness, the sacrifice of being to Being. But in order to engage this aspect of Pinter’s play as something other than a parody of Heideggerian aesthetics, I want to remind my reader that I have made my own methodological stipulation. I am treating syntax rather broadly in this discussion as an ordering or a combinatory logic on the model of cinematic montage, along lines that I explored in Chapter 2.45 I wish to account for more than strict grammatical rules can account for. As I’ve already noted, the typographical form of the playscript displays the syntactical features I am interested in more starkly than other literary forms, with the exception perhaps of Haiku. I admit I’m talking very loosely about the juxtapositional “look” of the lines on the page. This is because I want to emphasize the imperative to change one’s commitments in the interest of flexing one’s capacity for gaining a self-explanatory grasp of successively changing circumstances. Montage in cinema is after all simultaneously interruptive and determinative. It destabilizes predication. Continuity with the past action is broken. But the “break,” the act of experiencing – in the case of cinema the act of viewing – the break, is nonetheless elaborative. Similarly, existentiality persists in unrelenting cognition. As we shall see, the plot of Deborah’s suffering is, in effect, a montage of ultimately failed self-mirroring gambits. Yet her character persists, an embodiment of persistence itself. There are two other characters who stand in as registers of that

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failure. Hornby is the doctor who awakened Deborah with an injection. Her sister Pauline is Hornby’s wife and, by his own admission, a woman widowed by the doctor’s extraordinary devotion to the patient’s care over many years. For these two characters, circumstance is a function of fixed predicates: the public and private facts of the case historically. It is indeed the case that Deborah’s circumstance, her epistemic situation, is quite clear from a medically and historically diagnostic point of view. The sleeping sickness that afflicted Europe in 1916 is all too self-evidently a predicate for the dramatic action of the play. But the starkly compositional devices of the play supervene that single-minded predicate with a proliferation of diverse predicative topoi. The play might have easily borrowed its structure from the doctor’s diagnostic interrogatories. But the trajectory of Deborah’s character turns instead on her own compositionally aggressive disposition toward the necessity of giving herself reasons for what she knows she knows all too precariously. Such is the circumstance of the reader. The reader must advance, sentence by sentence, with little security that the predicative path she is on will be followable without the necessity of looking back. Thus, the reader is obliged to rethink the reasons to go on that, as Beckett assures us, will be necessary but not sufficient to the purposiveness of the journey. I’ve already conceded that, taken sentence by grammatically parse-able sentence, Pinter’s syntax appears to be soberingly straightforward. But something is happening quite differently in the succession of these sentences. Here is an example. Hornby lays down a predicate for Deborah who, upon her abrupt awakening, might be said to be struggling to find her bearings. Hornby: You have been in this room for a long time. You have been asleep. You have now woken up. Deborah: You shouldn’t have brought me here. What are you saying? Did I ask you to bring me here? Did I make eyes at you? Did I show desire for you? Did I let you peep up my skirt? Did I flash my teeth? Was I as bold as brass? Perhaps I have forgotten.46 Deborah’s almost reflexive reversal of roles between interrogator and interrogated is even more pointedly complicated by the fact that all of the predicates of her speech are inferential. This makes a sharp contrast with Hornby’s dismissiveness toward the possibility of error or untruth. After all, what Deborah means to say depends exclusively upon what she says, not upon some rigorously predicative logic. Here is her retort to Hornby’s explanation that he awakened her by an injection. Deborah: And you are my Prince Charming. Aren’t you? Pause Oh speak up. Pause

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Silly shit. All men are alike. Pause I think I love you. Hornby: No, you don’t Deborah: Well, I’m not spoilt for choice here, am I? There’s not another man in sight.47 We may be tempted to think that Deborah’s articulation (the sine qua non of syntactical ingenuity) of one thought with another is nothing more than an exercise in deploying non sequiturs. The non sequitur would seem to be a logical dead end. Nonetheless, we can’t miss the fact that here Deborah is improvising a pathway upon which she might “go on” without interruption. She thus makes a gesture toward joining the continuum of “something is happening” but without succumbing to the arrest of the implied passive construction “something is happening to me”, which would of course mime the epidemiology of her disease. The state of the afflicted patient is fixity, the symptomatic antithesis and antigen of Deborah’s character in the play. Her syntactical playfulness, as I have characterized it, thus asserts its own rationality, moving the contextual walls so to speak, of what Kenneth Burke might call the dramatistic space. My use of the word playfulness here is not meant to be a reprise of or a capitulation to Kantian or Derridean indeterminacies which are ultimately timeless. Rather, I want to insist on the reasonableness of what is going on in the dramatistic space of Pinter’s play, in the sense that reasons apply. Reasons apply. But they don’t dictate along the lines of normative judgement. As I’ve been arguing, reasons – even putatively normative reasons – are above all else relational with respect to changing circumstances. The exigency of changed circumstance and the attendant coercion to take up new commitments has its most dramatic articulation in Deborah’s account of the walls closing in upon her. This follows directly upon one of the play’s most sharply pointed demonstrations of what unquestionable predication is like. Deborah’s sister Pauline has entered the scene. Deborah would like it to be her birthday. Perhaps it is. But Pauline opportunistically seizes upon the device of recalling Deborah’s birthday. It already serves two predicates: the day of Deborah’s birth and this day of rebirth. Pauline immediately sees that she will be able to confine her sister within the conceit of the birthday party: singing, unwrapping gifts, etc. But the continuity of the uninterruptedly intelligible “sentence,” so to speak, the imagined scene of the birthday party, which Pauline is hopeful of sustaining within her own predicative controls (“We’ll sing happy birthday to you”), is broken by the non sequitur of Deborah’s recurrence to her own uncontrollably circumstantial mindset: “Now what was I going to say?”48 What she was going to say is said subsequently: “Yes, I think they’re closing in. They’re closing in. They’re closing the walls in.”49 This is not memory speaking. To emphasize the point, Pinter’s stage directions indicate that during the speech Deborah’s body becomes hunchbacked. Furthermore, we must observe that when one asks “What was I going to say?” one presupposes retrieval of a past thought. In this case, thought is occasional in the ongoing present, effectively pre-empting the predicative

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authority of memory. The closing in becomes a self-elaborating and apparently literal – in real time – predicate for Deborah. She goes on to report that they are … shutting the walls on me. Shutting them down. So tight. So tight …. The light is going. They’re shutting up shop. They’re closing my face …. Ah eyes stuck. Only see the shadow of the tip of my nose. Shadow of the tip of my nose. Eyes stuck.50 This appears to be happening. It amounts to another challenge to the predicative authority so desperately and opportunistically deployed by Pauline’s conjuring the “event” of a birthday party for her sister. But there is a difference between Deborah’s and Pauline’s stagings of the circumstantial moment. The marker of this difference is the immediately ensuing question posed by Deborah: “Do you hear a drip?” It is yet another abrupt non sequitur delivered as a causal, explanatory, aid to sense-making: “I’ll tell you what it is. It is a vast series of halls. With enormous interior windows masquerading as mirrors ….”51 Deborah’s self-explanatory non sequitur is a tease to the audience, the reader, and the listener to pay attention without a sufficient warrant but with the strong inference that the statement is warranted. It is a perverse counterpart to the frustrated admonitions issued by Hornby and Pauline whenever Deborah’s remarks precipitate what appear to be non sequiturs challenging the closure of their own narratives: “You’re not listening.” Listening is a way of paying attention. The call to attention can be fixed in an object or any object of attention can be a register for knowing and flexing the muscles of one’s attentional capacity. The fact is that one can’t “listen” to the non sequitur because the sense of it is not readily heard. But sense and sense-making are quite distinct propositions. The non sequitur might not make sense immediately, but it arguably teases the prospect for knowing more than what one expected was already necessary and sufficient knowledge. Deborah’s use of the idiomatic phrase “I’ll tell you what” dresses out the nonsense, so to speak, of the non sequitur that ensues with the presupposition of explanatory transparency. The “what” she tells us is nothing less than a terse description of the space that her hunched physique now figures forth. She goes on to describe the “drip” as a “vast series of halls … with enormous interior windows masquerading as walls,” inveigling us to “see” with her that “The windows are mirrors, you see, [my emphasis].” She concludes with “And so glass reflects glass. For ever and ever.”52 We are thus bound to a world in which to be a rational agent is to inhabit a vexing circumstance: one’s belief about what is happening is one’s reason for acting in a way that gives the circumstance explanatory bite. Like the windows masquerading as walls, which are in turn revealed to be mirrors reflecting mirrors “For ever and ever,” we must acknowledge the prospect that something else will be the unforeseeably explicable case wherever we look or, more specifically, wherever our attentiveness is on the lookout for it. The breaking up of the word “forever” into “For ever” forces a reckoning with an imperative of attentiveness without respite. “For ever” proffers a different topology of attentiveness than “Forever.”

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Here I might recall T.M. Scanlon’s speculation, in Being Realistic About Reasons that circumstances entail reasons as long as we think of them as relational. As he puts it, they would be relational on the model of the proposition that “… a consideration p is a reason for an agent in circumstances c to do a.”53 Scanlon demurs the question of the truthfulness of reasons by insisting that “truths about reasons are truths about relations that hold between us (as individuals in certain circumstances) and certain other facts ….”54 He appears to see the futility of taking reasons nonrelationally. This would be incompatible with a practical understanding of how one makes a judgment about what to do. Pinter’s concatenation of the circumstantial conundrums lurking in the syntactical dimension of the non sequitur reminds us that Deborah’s malady has its own normative existential trajectory, however constricted she may appear to be, in mind and body. This is no less vividly the case for Pinter’s audience/reader. Furthermore, it is relevant to my notion of literarity and the experience literarity constrains us to – in such a way that constraint might be judged to be consonant with imaginative freedom. That is to say, one’s beliefs (roughly equivalent to Hegelian commitments) about what one has reason to do show up the malleability of behavior. We might say that behavior itself prompts the belief that actions always infer unrealized possibilities for action as a normative condition. It is the condition that literarity potentiates. In effect, explanatory value is what is most irreducibly at stake in experience, however eccentric the relationality of what it depends on might appear to be. Rational agents, as Scanlon so modestly intimates,55 are rational insofar as their beliefs, which is to say the circumstance of their articulating beliefs occasions specific behavior which we can tacitly take as self-explanatory. Deborah’s final monologue is once again dispositive for considering what we might say literarity proffers in the work of art: a reason for thinking that such and such an action, taken verbally or physically, makes sense. Deborah: You say I have been asleep. You say I am now awake. You say I have always been alive and am alive now. You say I am a woman She looks at Pauline, then back to Hornby. She is a widow. She doesn’t go to her ballet classes any more. Mummy and Daddy and Estelle are on a world cruise. They’ve stopped off in Bangkok. It’ll be my birthday soon. I think I have the matter in proportion Pause Thank you.56 The compounded comedy and pathos of this conclusion of “A Kind of Alaska” arguably renders Pinter’s audience as participatory as the characters of the play. We are made complicit with what I might call the beneficent refashioning of a dysfunctional non sequitur into an improbably creative catachresis. This is Deborah’s

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self-satisfied “solution” to the circumstance she suffers, however challenged it might be by her ironic interlocutors. One might complain that her “Thank you” maroons us in a kind of Alaska. This is of course Hornby’s manifestly strained metaphor for Deborah’s state of affairs, at the extremity of his efforts to explain what exactly is “happening” in her life: “Your mind … took up a temporary habitation … in a kind of Alaska.”57 On the contrary, I would say that the compositional ethos I wish ascribe to Deborah’s “Thank you” is a remediating alternative to the self-inhibiting ironies that otherwise permit what she describes as the closing in of walls. Irony, after all, precludes anything else happening. Where happening remains a condition of possibility, the contextual walls of human experience are neither widows nor mirrors. Either of these would presuppose what can be seen in a manner that pre-empts attentiveness with expectation. This would amount to a form of arrest indistinguishable from the freezing slumber from which Deborah has been awakened. I would rather consider that Deborah’s reckoning with what she has heard is acknowledged in the words “Thank you” with a promise that things can now go on. Things can go on in her own non-sequitous terms. Aren’t we all on non-sequitous terms with the world? Reason giving, as I’ve argued, has a circumstantial warrant for its explanatory initiative. I’ve furthermore argued that attentiveness is the occasion of this warrant. Since attentiveness is irreducibly perceptual, we might say that perceiving is a kind of reasoning. This is the case at least with respect to the exigencies of an otherwise inexplicable relationality that binds us to the non sequitur of unforeseen circumstance. Unforeseen circumstance is as ineluctable as Hegel’s conviction that “Perception … takes what is present to it as universal.”58 I remind my reader that this was a point of departure for my thinking about literarity generally. I should add that the aspect of Hegelian universality that I’ve featured here denotes the circumstantial particulars of supersession, i.e., a process of change. Obviously, I do not encourage aspirations toward the untouchable reality of Geistian truth. There is however another account of literarity by Jacques Ranciere59 which I ought to acknowledge at this juncture of my argument. Ranciere’s literarity is codependent, so to speak, with the late nineteenth-century emergence of the term literature. Ranciere makes the point that previously, reading novels, poems, plays, etc., had been a private pursuit. These genres were given a place in the public sphere by the coinage of the term literature. For Ranciere, this constitutes a de facto link between art and politics. It becomes the currency of political critique. While Derrida’s definition of literarity helped me to establish the warrant for thinking beyond the more commonplace term literariness (with its baggage of Belle-lettrist moral judgments and self-refining sensibilities), it revealed the liability of seeming to cut literature off from the political. Ranciere’s definition of literarity, because it insists upon conflating the realms of aesthesis and politics, forces us to play a similar zerosum game. I would argue that Pinter’s compositional practice and by extension Deborah’s compositional ethos resist this imperative. Deborah, admittedly by default of her “malady,” is a genius of re-combinative logics. The non-sequitous facts she

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unites in her concluding monologue have all been syntactically configured in previous moments of the play, instantiating different “spaces” in which different and distinct movements are made possible. The cramping spaces that afflict Deborah in her memory of the time of sleep and in the performance time of the play are tokens of the knowledge that constrictedness and expansiveness are on a continuum of experience. Conclusion

I should restate that the political and the aesthetic are for my purposes conjoined in the activity of reason-giving. At least this is the case where reason-giving is entailed by perceptually grounded circumstance, under the constraint of a non-linear temporality. I am of course assuming that even time is mediated by consciousness of time. If we are to entertain the notion of an artistic avant-garde, which permits aesthetics to escape aestheticism, we might consider it to be the sine qua non of reasongiving in the terms I’ve just sketched out and in relation to the imperatives of some re-combinatory i.e, syntactical logic. Theorists of the avant-garde typically mistake individuality as the political problem which the avant-garde artist addresses. Collectivity is posited as the solution. Avant-gardists from the early twentieth century have equated collectivity with the freedom from oppressive power. As I argued at the conclusion of Chapter 2, I think that intelligibility not collectivity – the abdication of inherently individual subjective powers – offers a more compelling reason for committing to something we might wish to call the avant-garde. Or this is the case if we are invested in an aesthetics that doesn’t devolve to feckless hedonics – the slippery slope of beauty theory – which in turn risks sentimentality, socially divisive and power-mongering connoisseurship, snobbery, and moralistic stridency. Reason-giving is after all the province of individual existence where experience cannot be decoupled from action without losing intelligibility. I have been insisting that when we speak of experience we are already speaking of reason-giving. We are contending with problems of self-understanding, striving to make intelligibility out of what is happening to us, struggling to make it happen in ways that keep up with the circumstantial vagaries of whatever happens next. Here I am implying that some kind of re-combinatory logic is the condition of dealing with the absence of self-evident reasons in circumstances that are beyond our control. Hence, the cultivation of a compositional ethos might be the best reason we can give for sustaining faith in the utility of the term avant-garde. I would say that the mere ambition to overthrow norms, which gives the avant-garde its political trajectory among cultural critics who have declared a war against Power, misses a key point. The defeat of Power fails to signify something which one could make a commitment to. It is fair to say, I think, that it inhibits commitment altogether by its flirtation with indeterminacy. It obviates the determinateness that so potently (I demur the descriptor “powerfully” for reasons I will elaborate later) animates Hegelian supersession and the expansiveness of Erfahrung. I might argue that it therefore detracts from the capacity for human attentiveness that gives reasoning its most urgent impetus.

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Notes 1 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 67. 2 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1977), 164. 3 Ibid., 164. 4 Ibid., 166. 5 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 168. 6 For Hegel, perception appears to be the sine qua non of subjectivity inasmuch as subjectivity itself is a self-transcending phenomenon. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 19–20. 7 The famous parable of the lambs in the Genealogy is a touchstone for the psychological trajectory of resentful creatures insofar as we are all wishful for transcendence of the condition of weakness that animates resentful activity. 8 Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2020), 15. 9 See Steven Myer’s “Introduction” to The Making of Americans. 10 Again Steven Myer’s “Introduction” deftly elaborates the implications of Stein’s phrase. 11 Ziarek generalizes about Futurist works in this regard. He characterizes them specifically along the lines of Marinetti’s “words in freedom” as “unsyntaxed forces.” They reflect a modern dynamic (as opposed to dynamis) that escapes the so-called “technoscientific” means of constraint epitomized by syntax. Ziarek, The Force of Art (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), 73. 12 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 67. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Barthes’ posthumously published lectures, The Preparation of the Novel, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) were intended for a course about his intention to write a novel. It is particularly resonant for the issues I raise here under the umbrella of the “compositional ethos.” He understood these lectures to be a hybrid of teaching and novel writing, i.e., a prompt for the composition of his own narrative opus. 16 It will be clear that the interval is constitutive of syntactical sense-making, from Haiku’s “Ma,” to Hegel’s “supersession,” to Vertov’s montage. For my purposes, the thread through these historically distinct, but practically intuited imaginative devices, is crucial to distinguishing literarity from a library of “literary” texts. 17 Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, 63. 18 Cited in Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, 63. 19 Jan Mieszkowski reads Pounds famous Haiku “In A Station of the Metro” with equal emphasis upon something like a re-combinative potential inherent in the grammatical ambiguity of such a contracted form. He says of Pound’s composition that “…it remains ambiguous whether the resulting minimalist construction is the ruin of a former sentence, a proto-sentence on its way to becoming a fully-fledged one, or a gesture toward a different kind of textual unit that is no longer defined by its obedience to or defiance of sentence grammar.” Mieszkowski, Crises of the Sentence, 184. 20 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 70. 21 Ibid., 69. 22 Ibid., 70. 23 Ibid., 67. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 68. 26 Ibid. 27 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004). 28 Ibid., 164.

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The foregoing thought process unfolds in Heidegger, Basic Writings, 218–27. Ibid. 219. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 223. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vols. I, II, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 607. 35 Benjamin Rutter, Hegel on the Modern Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 44. 36 Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 19. 37 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 67. 38 Ziarek, The Force of Art, 30. 39 Ibid., 150. 40 Ibid., 159. 41 Harold Pinter, Other Places: A Kind of Alaska, Victoria Station, Family Voices (New York: Grove Press, 1983). 42 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 68. 43 T.M. Scanlon, Being Realistic About Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 81. 44 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 165. 45 It is by now a commonplace in literary and cinema studies to see montage as roughly correlative with syntax. As Eisenstein insisted “All is montage.” Dziga Vertov’s coinage of the “cine phrase” presupposes a combinatory logic not unlike that which I have alleged is inherent to syntactical gestures in language. But I am not interested in analogizing one art form to the other so much as I want to point up the inevitability of an incipient re-combinatory logic in every combinatory gambit. Where relationality is an irreducible condition of sense-making, any specific combination of elements invites speculation about an alternate construal. To pay attention is to warrant more attentiveness to the unaccounted for. The speed of montage in cinema accentuates this attentional disposition by intensifying it. The temporal continuum is the force of our attentiveness. The very initiative to combine any two things invites self-consciousness of our susceptibility to being called to attend to unforeseen aspects. Such attentional tropisms animate our experience in the perceptual world. 46 Pinter, Other Places, 7. 47 Ibid., 19–20. 48 Ibid., 37. 49 Ibid., 38. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 39. 52 Ibid. 53 Scanlon, Being Realistic About Reasons, 120. 54 Ibid., 121. 55 Ibid. 56 Pinter, Other Places, 40. 57 Ibid., 34. 58 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 111. 59 Ranciere takes Aristotle’s maxim that “man is a political animal because he is a literary animal” to reference the way in which writing is an orphan unless it is adopted by a social community of readers who understand each other. See “Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Ranciere”, conducted and translated by David Panagia, Diacritics 30, no. 2 (summer 2000): 115–6. 2 9 30 31 32 33 34

4 THE POTENTIALITY OF THE READER

Things in the environment that would otherwise be mere smooth channels or else blind obstructions become means, media. At the same time, things retained from past experience that would grow stale from routine or inert from lack of use, become coefficients in new adventures and put on a raiment of fresh meaning. Dewey, Art As Experience

Introduction: Syntax Not Style

The art world’s perennial nostalgia for an avant-garde is born of several kindred ambitions. We like making a virtuous fetish of novelty. I have noted that, in the present context of literary criticism, we tend to valorize the indeterminacy that avant-gardism often purveys as a beneficent powerlessness. Such is the warrant for its political relevance. We welcome its proffering of an albeit disingenuous freedom from the ideological or formalistic coercions of history. These inclinations are no doubt born of a self-perpetuating imaginative idealism. We flatter and renew our aesthetic propensities by invoking the name of the avant-garde.1 That said, I have preferred the term literarity to literariness in part in order to avoid the romantic temptations proffered by the avant-garde. Pace Pound, literary art is not destined to be always new at the expense of a doddering old guard, a conceit which, if truth be told, is an academic crutch for historicist critics and periodists to lean upon, as much as it is an artist’s bid for independence from rule by the Rules of the academy. I furthermore wish to relieve aesthetics of the baggage of the avant-garde’s militarist metaphors (vanguard of the assault, tip of the spear, first line of attack, defeating the old guard, etc.) in favor of a more pacific, but no less agentially focused compositional ethos. In other words, I would prefer to speak DOI: 10.4324/9781003384052-5

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of the avant-garde strictly in terms of the kind of human, imaginative, making that harks to Aristotle on the one hand but also has currency with contemporary academic critical and artistic practitioners: for whom the task of generating new combinatory logics is a quasi-Hegelian “force” of potentiality in human circumstance. The Hegelian force of circumstance is inconceivable, even beyond comprehension, without acknowledging the inexorability of change. This is what is inescapable with respect to the terminology of Erfahrung,2 enacted or read enactively. With my emphasis on enactive experience, at least in the context of my discussion of literarity, I am renewing my bid to privilege syntax over style. Flaubert’s body of work is all too often spoken for as the indisputable “epitome” of style. The surfeit of commentary on “le mot juste,” in its fetishizing of the discrete lexical item, ignores the structure of the sentence, which is where I think Flaubert’s reader is more energetically invested. Flaubert’s correspondence sharpens the point. He would like to “produce books which would entail only the writing of sentences … just as in order to live it is enough to breathe.”3 Although I have quarreled with Ranciere’s notion of literarity, I must agree with his notion of what Flaubertian sentences mean in Mute Speech.4 In his chapter “The Book in Style,” Ranciere credits Flaubert for seeing the folly of treating language in the novel as a vehicle of transit from the private world of authorial subjectivity to the objectivity of the world of God’s creation. Flaubert knows full well that a reader entertains this fiction of experience (experience of the book) as an occasion to stand vicariously in God’s shoes. All the better to walk from the subjective here to the universally objective there. Furthermore, Ranciere is absolutely right to point out Flaubert’s reason for rejecting style: “… because it is primarily a matter of ‘conception’.”5 It is a blind against lived experience where, I have maintained that the activity of reason-giving, not divinely rational rule, governs. Ranciere sees Flaubert as deploying the sentence as a means by which to “pierce the idea.” From this vantage point, Ranciere can see how style, in a manner of speaking, commodifies the sentence. Ranciere is of course caught up in the need to distinguish art from the social circumstances, i.e., market forces of capitalism, that take ownership of it and endow the value of capital by trading in fashions of “aesthetic taste.” So it is important for him to find a way of valuing aesthetic work in relation to the capitalistic ideological forces that work upon us and so dispossess us of our own powers of intellectual labor, not to mention the fruits of that labor. I nonetheless depart from Ranciere in his treatment of syntax. He understands the words that make up syntactical constructions as correlative to the seeming discreteness of percepts, instead of treating syntax in relation to action. Words in books are of course not physical actions. But syntax, by the combinatory/recombinatory logic it instantiates, epitomizes the kind of choice-making that agents contend with in their actions. Contrary to my way of “seeing” things, Ranciere’s syntax is an “eye” more than an agential “I.” He finds his example in Emma Bovary’s mindless contemplation of beanpoles outside her kitchen window, which have been tilted by the wind. Ranciere reads Flaubert as rendering the experience

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of being lost in contemplation of the object to be what he calls an “antisyntactical use of syntax.”6 Ranciere reasons that by undoing the usual powers of syntax to present a circumstantially dynamic world, one gains distance from the circumstances within which contemplative mind is pre-empted by the political forces of capitalist exchange. Syntax on this understanding is a homologue of exchanging a word for a perceptual thing in that world where politics has already denatured that thing. Perception is always already conception. As Michael W. Clune7 points out, Ranciere thinks of this detour from thinking as “attentional manipulation” in the manner of commercial advertising. Along with Ranciere and Clune, I am interested in the ways that literarity might be said to present opportunities to discover and exploit our attentional capacities, rather than telling us what to pay attention to. But Ranciere’s “antisyntactical” syntax would seem to be a bid for abstraction from the world of attentional manipulation rather than a critical engagement with the worldly conditions of that manipulation. I prefer to see syntax not as what distances us from the corrupting worldliness of the world, but what distances us from our previously self-presumed attentional rapport with the world. Within this perspective, literarity occasions knowledge of what distance from one’s former self is opened up in the course of the re-combinatory doing that syntactical composition performs. Hence my preference for considering literarity not in the self-contradicting terms of an always emerging avant-garde, but in terms of a compositional ethos. It is important to realize that literary theorists and aesthetic critics have wished to privilege the avant-garde in a way that inevitably blurs any distinction between making and making new. Making is the yeoman’s work of giving form to experience. Making new valorizes form only insofar as it resists any account of its making within a tradition, a practical context, a set of cultural norms, or the precincts of self-consciousness. On the contrary, I have noted that making – I am thinking again in terms of the creative labors of the Hegelian bondsman – entails learning. In this context, it is therefore useful to remind ourselves of the conceit of “aesthetic education” propagated by the eighteenth-century theorists of modern aesthetics, Hume, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Kant, and perhaps most pertinently Schiller. Between Hume and Schiller, we can observe a transition from thinking of taste or aesthetic response as a cultural discipline predicated upon learning from the example of “sensitives,” possessors of “Those finer emotions of the mind …”8 to thinking of taste as a selfrevising initiative born of one’s own will to experience. While Hume acknowledges the imperative of we who would appreciate and thus be motivated to attend to beauty, I would insist that we do so by a rigorous protocol of choice. We not only must choose the “proper time and place,” insulating us from the distractions of the practical world, but we must choose according to the recognized durability of great works endowed to us by authors whose example is authenticated as a cultural value over time. Like Hume, Schiller understands the imperative to liberate oneself from the distractions of the practical world, the duties of law and reason on the one hand and from the sensuous passions on the other. Thus, does he posit the “play drive”

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which we only come into attunement with when we take up the vocation of the “Ideal Man.” But the “Ideal Man” comes to his vocation, and appreciation of his natural refinement, not from submission to a protocol of choice but through an accession to experience which chooses, so to say, our engagement with the world by animating our attentiveness to it. As Schiller says The man who lives under the indulgent sway of taste is in need of energizing beauty; for he is only too ready, once he has reached a state of sophisticated refinement, to trifle away the strength he brought with him from the state of savagery.9 The animation of our powers of attention teach or attune us to become a part of Nature. They deliver us to a state of “harmony and grace” with respect to our capacities for response to what Nature affords. But I should clarify my stance here. I am not reprising Hutcheson’s and Shaftesbury’s idea of a pre-determined condition of reciprocity between human nature and green Nature, or “natural forms” of any kind. Rather, harking back to the relevance of reason-giving as a salient feature of literarity, I am entertaining the notion of a circumstance within which syntax, e.g., invites us to improvise the sensemaking coordinates of the context where subjectivity, readerly or otherwise, is situated. Affordance, after all, is understood by designers to be a function of the use we make of the circumstances – here I believe we can’t distinguish circumstances from objects – that invite our attention, thereby exercising our capacity for attention. I would furthermore argue that the capacity for attention is never decoupled from the experience of learning. In this respect, aesthetic education is decidedly not an academic enterprise. Ranciere is once again relevant. As I’ve already noted, Ranciere’s understanding of the “political” aspect of the aesthetic ignores precisely the “I,” the intentional subject which my notion of literarity presupposes as ineluctable in any state of attentiveness. Ranciere’s is a counter-move with respect to the Kantian dictum that one judges for all, that aesthetic judgment is necessarily collective and universal. The liability of this move, as Ranciere’s book The Ignorant Schoolmaster,10 among others, so paradoxically reveals, is that it seems to elide aesthetic education with a radical unlearning of the rules of aesthetic judgment. The prized ignorance of the schoolmaster is, in effect, a self-renunciation however. Ranciere rightly wishes to preclude the Kantian Sensus Communis that has held aesthetic theorists in thrall to the idea that art does some kind of social justice by not doing anything at all. Ranciere sees such idealism as rendering moot any distinctions of class, race, economic status. But he fails to ask a simple question. Why must this idealism prevail as the predicate of aesthetic judgment? Or why must it prevail in this Kantian form? I would furthermore ask why does Ranciere’s remedy entail such a radical renunciation as he proposes? Is self-understanding, the learning one acquires in personal experience, any less relevant to the virtue of human agents than Humean tutelage by time honored sensitives, or the Kantian categorical imperative? I would argue, contrary to Hume and Kant, that learning

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that one’s capacities are one’s own is no less important than holding faith with the commonality of human capacities. Capacity itself is only fully intelligible as it is individually exercised. Ranciere’s zero-sum game with respect to the rules already articulated effectively precludes this knowledge of human capacities. Furthermore, it risks conflating rules with judgment in a manner that nullifies both. I have no interest in thwarting or trivializing judgement.11 The kind of choicemaking I locate within the compositional ethos afforded by syntax would be inconceivable without involving ourselves in the consequences of perceptual experience. Of course, I do not mean perception exclusively. Our involvement is a self-referencing attentionality. That is, we must be mindful that perceptual experiences cannot coherently be an end in themselves. So aesthetic judgement cannot be reducible to a merely sensuously guided preference. Rather, it ought to be repeatable as a way of attending to the world ever more expansively. The capacity for attention must be temporally as well as sensuously engaged. It portends a futurity, without which the notion of experience itself is self-nullifying. This can only be the case if the capacity for exercising one’s capacities is developmentally exercised. Empiricists like Hume and Shaftesbury and more emphatically their literary taste-making counterpart, Samuel Johnson, ask us to find ourselves, aesthetically speaking, in the experience of others, in a wellrecorded history of judgment. My stance toward futurity is a bid for judgment that is more in accord with the experience of making – aesthetic making and human making in general – that is duly enactive. Unlike the historical avant-gardes, my stance is not a blind acceptance of the future, in effect obliging us to be forever looking backward at what must be surpassed. It is rather seeing the future by facing up to any present circumstance of unintelligibility. This is the ultimate motive for aesthetic education, for our taking up new commitments with respect to re-combinatory logics that the reigning combinatory logic (e.g., a knotty syntactical order) renders opaque. Montage Theory and the Futurity of Syntax

Perhaps by turning the “I” back to the “eye,” I can make the idea that syntax is an inherently re-combinatory logic more convincing. I must therefore return to the practice of montage in visual art, cinema specifically. The coincidence of Russian theorizing of cinema and Russian theorizing of literary compositional form in the 1920s is propitious for thinking about montage as an essentially syntactical proposition. So the aesthetic ambition of Tomashevsky and Shklovsky to “defamiliarize” or, as the Hungarian filmmaker and critic Bela Balász put it, to resist the temptation of the beautiful picture and see that everything is seen perforce in some non-natural constructivist relation, is key. I must of course acknowledge that Russian formalism in the realm of the literary ultimately tends to break things down in a way that invites the logic of inventory, while montage breaks things up in a way that precipitates a re-combinatory practice. In his “Bela Balász and the Tradition of Formalism,”12 Dudley Andrew alleges that Russian Formalism – e.g., Shklovsky writing about Sterne’s Tristram Shandy – insisted upon understanding every grammatical and figurational artifice as a de

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facto distortion of a putative reality. In Andrew’s view, the aesthetic object is stillborn within the womb of this theory of forms qua form. While Russian formalism alludes to a process of defamiliarization, it ends up reifying the kinds of formal distortion it inspires. By contrast cinematic montage, while it emphasizes the techniques of form making, permits thinking about technique (and I would add techne) less in terms of an inventory of forms and more in terms of formative activity. Shklovsky’s meditations on poetry in particular give traction to montage theory in general and to my argument about syntax in particular. Shklovsky characterizes poetry as a “disordering which cannot be predicted.”13 It nonetheless teases mistaken predictions. In other words, we might speculate that the coincidence of Russian formalist literary theory and film theory inheres as an insight about engaging what is not yet known, not as a threshold of transcendence but as the threshold of a certain kind of intellectual/perceptual labor. This is precisely what prompts me to appreciate Eisenstein’s rejection (contrary to most Russian Formalists) of the idea that montage could be conflated with defamiliarization in literature. Bela Balász is an interesting figure in this regard. Unlike Eisenstein, he imagined the shots assembled by the film editor to fit together according to an intention that would have a mechanical effect. But in his own practice and when his critical mind turned to montage per se, Balász asserted the notion that it bridges a gap between what the camera shows and “conjecture.” The conjecture is a function of the combinatory logic that is revealed belatedly in the otherwise unpredictable sequence of images, making projection and retrospection reciprocal with one another. Dziga Vertov who, along with Sergei Eisenstein, was one of the premier theorists of montage uses the word “phrase” to designate the unexpected articulation of one shot with another. The phrase evokes that aspect of verbal syntax which needs an interval in order to articulate one word with another. This is not so different from the manner in which literary critics parse the grammatical parts of a sentence in order to warrant their continuity, notwithstanding that such continuity is never fully sufficient to the grammatical rule that governs one’s attention to the order of words, i.e., the juxtaposition of “phrases.” Vertov in fact formulated the notion of “interval theory” to justify his own editing practice in such prodigiously inventive films as Man With a Movie Camera and especially Across One Sixth of the World. As Jacques Ranciere coincidentally elucidates in his essay “Seeing Through Things,” “The principle of Vertovian montage is not the fracturing of tasks into a number of complementary operations. It is the simultaneous presentation of normally incompossible activities.”14 Considering Ranciere’s commitment to improvising the rules that govern verbal sense-making in the literary work in the wake of “incompossible activities” – i.e., seemingly contradictory juxtapositions – it is not surprising that he is passionately engaged with Vertov’s theory of montage. I speculate that Ranciere does not deploy the more common term “incompatible” precisely because he does not see incompossibility as an obstacle to sense-making. It is therefore worth looking a bit more closely at what is arguably Vertov’s most ambitious film Across One Sixth of the World. This work gives some more clarity to

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Ranciere’s use of the word “incompossible.” Vertov’s interval does not presuppose what connects with what. Instead, he treats the connection as the rule of an intelligibility that gets worked out perforce in the time of successiveness. Or I might say that successiveness is a potentiality not so different from that occasioned by Flaubert’s free indirect discourse. It poses for the reader a reflective choice about where to put one’s commitments respecting point of view. A Sixth of the World, A Kino-Eye Race around the USSR: Export and Import by the State Trading Organization of the USR, produced in 1926, was, as its lengthy official title makes clear, commissioned and sponsored by the State Trade Organization of the Soviet Union. The commission stipulated that the film would carry a message to buttress the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union. It would celebrate the state’s mandate for the surplus production of local goods in the most remote places in the Soviet world. This surplus would provide the state with a currency to trade for heavy machinery abroad. The film features workers from the Kremlin to the Chinese border, the Matochkin Strait, Bukhara, Novorosiyst, Leningrad – mostly places unknown though they constitute a sixth of the world. They denote a potentiality for hitherto unwarranted attention. The presumed genre is “travelogue.” But Vertov’s own description raises suspicions that something else is afoot. He states that “A Sixth Part of the World is somewhere beyond the boundaries of … definitions; it is already the next stage after the concept of ‘cinema’ itself …” (from Barbara Wurm’s essay in the DVD booklet).15 I have suggested that syntax trumps style with respect to what literarity proffers to our knowledge of experience. Vertov’s film, despite his tease of a commitment to an avant-garde cinema in his description of the film (as I’ve argued the avant-garde is historically a trap for fetishizing style), is on the contrary all syntax. Vertov’s film is a concatenation of images that nominally represent the productivity of the regions of Soviet life, the local productivity of diverse peoples performing a myriad of worldly and world furnishing tasks. But the representational burden is ultimately eclipsed by the manner in which the successiveness of images makes of one’s attentiveness a distinctly non-representational modality of attention. Attentiveness and attention to specific objects are “incompossible,” to use Ranciere’s term. The “incompossibles” are, compositionally speaking, what present themselves as sequence only insofar as the sequence mandates some rationalizing of the challenge to intelligibility it presents. The montage is a calling to attend to the fact that something comes next for which one’s scope of attentiveness is already inadequate. Significantly, in this regard, the beginning of reel two of Vertov’s film is shot from the back of a movie theater where the audience is attending to what we’ve already seen in reel one. This is a realization of a capacity for attention, not a dismissal of the reality which otherwise merits our attention for the sake of its authoritative objectivity. Montage was always controversial because it called reality into question. Even enthusiasts of the new technology like Adorno were skeptical that it might render the shock of unintelligibility,16 i.e., the strongest lure of intelligibility,

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a habit of mind rather than a provocation of thinking. But Vertov’s film doesn’t trifle with questioning reality. A Sixth Part of the World already presupposes that we do not see what is before us. We do not see the potentiality for attention. Vertov’s montage shows that the “pictured” regions of the Soviet Union are unknown not exclusively in the sense of not being paid proper attention to. More pointedly they are unknown insofar as they are prompts to knowing that possessing the capacity for attentiveness is a world of experience unto itself. The intriguing thing about cinematic montage in the 1920s, for enthusiasts of Einsteinian physics (the relativity of time and space seen as cognate with montage) as well as filmmakers like Eisenstein, was its formative engagement with temporality. For the filmmaker, montage transcended Hollywood’s privileging of the spectatorial position, a hold-over from the traditions of Renaissance painting and the theater. The concomitance of change and choice in the interval – which is the essence of temporality – is, in effect, the crux of montage. The point is not the transcendence of time. The point is a new accounting for things happening in time. As Vertov puts it, the interval is “the transition from one movement to another.”17 What is valued here is not so different from what I have valued in the temporal dimension of syntax with its built-in analogy to the temporal logic of literary narrative generally. What is known is a function of what is happening. It is even more crucially a function of knowing what one is doing with respect to what makes the doing of it originally possible. As Michael Polanyi18 claims in his theory of tacit knowledge (agential knowledge in contingent human circumstance), any claim to expertise in the context of human doings is bound to treat “its [the agent’s] current ideas as stages leading to unknown truths which, when discovered might dissent from the very teaching which engendered them.” I will come back to this with more emphasis shortly. What is happening in montage, I would argue, makes the task of knowing what one is doing, as a viewer or a reader, both more challenging and more rewarding. We see this clearly when we consider how Eisenstein famously thought of montage as kindred to Hegelian dialectic: where what is happening is unknowable except with regard to the commitments that are surpassed in the act of doing something. Eisenstein’s Hegelianism was however unduly focused on the synthesis, which he conceived of in Wagnerian terms as Gesamkunstwerk, the integration of diverse forms into a “total work of art.” Indeed, both Vertov’s and Eisenstein’s concepts of montage keep faith with what Annette Michelson has called a “totalizing structural principle,”19 in a manner that risks self-contradiction at best. After all, even Hegelian Geist lacks persuasiveness if we must concede that the end of history is endlessly postponed. Geist notwithstanding, our prospects, in what Hegel calls the “movements” (proto-cinematic?) of self-consciousness, are known retrospectively. For Hegel of course, the transition from one thing to another is intrinsically negative. In response to Vertov and Eisenstein on this point, I would ask: what if our theory of montage focused on the shifting of a viewer’s attentional commitments in the transition from one thing to another, instead of on a “totalizing structural

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principle?” This stance is somewhat congruent with the secularizing political thought of post-Hegelians like Kojeve. For them, human self-production prevails over the Geistian realization of the human in history. In a similar vein, Vertov’s “intervals,” the key to his theory of montage, denote the possibility of combining one thing with another in a manner that discovers its own logic strictly within the bounds of their successiveness. To the contrary, scholars of Vertovian montage (i.e., the interval) like Anette Michelson privilege an artificial unity, a triumph of the eye over temporal change, as opposed to a successiveness that raises questions about what comes next. In other words, they fail to appreciate how montage behaves syntactically. They fail to appreciate the full implication of Vertov’s choice of the word “phrase” to explain the point of film editing. If, as Vertov says, a composition is made up of phrases and phrases are made of up of intervals of movement, but are not movements in themselves, then phrasing must allow for re-phrasing, i.e., some re-combinatory logic. I say this because every movement signals a possibility that is not immediately operative but, upon integration with other movements, might appear to satisfy the need of intelligibility more fully than whatever compositional choices have already been phrased. I do not see that what is proposed here is markedly distinct from what Polanyi asserts with respect to acknowledging that ideas are “stages leading to unknown truths.” This is true in the sense that what is unknown denotes an eminently knowable possibility. Of course, when Polanyi makes his influential claim that “we can know more than we can tell,”20 he is pointing out how expertise self-pre-emptively contextualizes knowledge. Vertov’s phrasing and my own commitment to knowing more than what is already articulate in a syntactical performance, point more in the direction of what contextual variables are yet to be discovered, given the variability built into the articulative gambit itself. The Reader’s Lot

I now want to link the disclosure of knowable possibilities to the enterprise of aesthetic education. I have characterized aesthetic education not as an academic discipline but as disciplined learning about one’s capacities for attending to the world in a manner that potentiates experience. This assertion nonetheless presupposes that literature is a kind of work. Etymologically, the word literature denotes the task of “learning from books,” going back to middle English boccræft, or further back to the Latin, “learning from grammars.” In the academy today, and with regard to any presumptive canon of “great works,” there is an expectation, earned or not, that serious literature is hard work. I must therefore clarify what I mean by working hard in order to reap the cultural fruits of literarity. This clarification entails a substantial modification of the notion that literature presents difficulties of comprehension vis-à-vis normative uses of language. As I have already stipulated, intelligibility counts mightily in my view of literarity. And, as I have argued, there is no countenancing of attention as a meaningful pursuit without a prospect for reason-giving,

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the prerequisite of intelligibility. That said, the work of literarity is not the kind of punctual enterprise that the mastery of categories of knowledge or the mastery of grammatical rules entertains. For the question that looms largest within the realm of the literary reader is “What is happening?” Where there is a presumption that we don’t yet know, there is a prospect for knowing according to not yet fully formulated, or to be more precise, fully articulated categories of experience. This fact is always disclosing itself to us in the successively unfolding episodes of experience. My sense of unfolding experience here may sound like a version of Keats’ “negative capability.” Poetry is virtually a perceptual capacity for Keats: “… when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It should be clear by now that, unlike Keats, I am emphatically “reaching after … reason,”21 at least insofar as reason is a reason to make intelligible what mere sensation will not tell. Keats appears to see the poem as a bridge to experience. I stand against bridge building enterprises because they implicitly concede a two-worlds theory of literary value. For me, what prompts reason-giving, what I have compared with Hegel’s need to change one’s commitments through changing circumstances, is a fuller determination of experience. This is quite distinct from the indeterminacy courted by Keats’ formulation. I share Keats’ faith in the potentiality of the reader to know what is not yet known. But I prefer to think of the acquisition of knowledge in terms of whatever resourcefulness a human agent can muster to meet the temporal challenge of what comes next. I have been arguing that attention is a cue to what comes next. After all, when I am called to attend, I am apprised of the need to pay greater attention. I can only proportionately do justice to my capacity, in so far as my attention has been called to it, by exercising it further, by learning from it better. As I’ve pointedly discussed in an earlier chapter, the notion of affordance is de facto the posing of a question: what do I do with this? How is this not a variation on the question what comes next? Without our practical adaptation to changing perceptual experience – what affordance entails – we are disposed to a Keatsian indeterminate wonder at the infinite possibilities of experience. In that case, experience ceases. It becomes a Grecian urn-like artifact of time not a métier of human activity in time. Human activity in time induces an energetic, prospective wondering in lieu of a restful, contemplative wonderment. Oddly enough, paranoia comes to mind. One could say that the paranoid personality is an indefatigable worker, since his overactive perceptual attunement to the world proliferates questions that demand answers, i.e., reasons to be given for whatever is the case. The answers invite ever more presumptively adequate questions, assuring the inevitability of ever more vexingly inadequate answers. Not unlike the Hegelian bondsman, the paranoid “works” on perceptions that are effectively re-constitutive of her laborious subjectivity in determinate, i.e., expressive, ways. The paranoid personality is not passive in the face of determinism but is disposed to animate re-combinatory logics in response to whatever is presented to her without sufficient evidence of its intelligibility. So it may seem less an oddity of my argument that I now turn my attention to Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.22 Unless I am paranoid enough to

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imagine that it is a mistaken claim, the thematic crux of Pynchon’s novel is paranoia. If my enthusiasm for reading Pynchon is the prospect it offers for heightened rapport with experience through what I might call “paranoid” attentiveness, I might also take some advantage from John Dewey’s notion of “coefficiency” in Art as Experience.23 The font of experience for Dewey is “impulsion.” Impulsion is the circumstantial imperative of needing to know what is happening wherever the world impinges on “direct forward action”24 in a manner that thwarts immediate intelligibility. As he puts it, Things in the environment that would otherwise be mere smooth channels or else blind obstructions become means, media. At the same time, things retained from past experience that would grow stale from routine or inert from lack of use, become coefficients in new adventures and put on a raiment of fresh meaning.25 In other words, Dewey’s version of expression is not so different from Hegel’s. In either case, one works against the resistance of yet unintelligible circumstance. Coefficiency presupposes that experience is meaningless without taking responsiveness to the world as prior to knowing one’s place in the world. One’s place in the world remains a labor of responsiveness. That is to say, responsiveness denotes powers of attention that are inexhaustible with respect to the world’s calling us to attend to everything that is not already known to be the case. Is Oedipa Maas’s calling to attend to a “misprint,” e.g., “REPORT ALL OBSCENE MAIL TO YOUR POTSMASTER,”26 actually predicated on a misprint, an accidental re-combination of letters in an already knowable world of postmasters? Or does she miss the point of what is printed? What Dewey calls “art in its incipience”27 is instanced here in the transition from misprint to volitional printing. Volitional expression, as Dewey sees it, is an intentional act born of a non-intentional state of affairs, perceptually speaking. A child cries spontaneously but “he begins to order his activities [crying] in reference to their consequences. The consequences undergone because of doing are incorporated as the meaning of subsequent doings because the relation between doing and undergoing is perceived.”28 Dewey contends that there is a transition from involuntary crying to purposeful, i.e., attentiongetting, crying. In effect, the child is now making a commitment to crying. The child is “speaking” to the capacity for attention – specifically attention getting. I have been arguing, on a parallel track, that perception is a passive undergoing until its consequences – in terms of a perceiver’s making new commitments based on the consequences of perception – accrue to active experience. Attentionality in other words becomes intentionality, what Dewey calls “expression,” as a consequence of its portending an intelligibility other than what mute or seemingly mute perception initially presents. After all, Oedipa Maas’s attention to the spelling “potsmaster” deems it, at least provisionally, unintelligible. Notwithstanding Oedipa’s desire to read the word this way, Pynchon’s reader is quickly apprised of the definition her unreliable interlocutor, Metzger, all too readily improvises: a potsmaster is a “Guy

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in the scullery.”29 We are being coaxed to read unintelligibility here as a kind of intelligibility with the proviso that whatever meaning is asserted is just a consequence of its assertion of meaning, as long as consequences ensue. As Pynchon’s narrator says in his recounting of The Courier’s Tragedy, the novel’s paradigm of paranoid intelligibility, “… an ambiguity begins to creep in among the words.”30 But I have no interest in indulging ambiguity for ambiguity’s sake here. Nor, I would argue, does Pynchon. Instead I am interested in ambiguity as a transitional modality, a marker for Dewey’s coefficiency and, as I have already intimated in relation to coefficiency, a warrant for reason-giving. The point is that any bid for attention is inescapably a presumption of intelligibility. It cannot be decoupled from a propensity for entertaining re-combinatory, i.e., roughly syntactical logics. The Trystero conspiracy, which challenges Oedipa Maas’s ambition to make intelligible a world of presumptively transparent facts, is an engine of re-combinatory logics: promulgating ever more comprehensive alternative reasonings. These are in turn predicated upon an ever more expansive attentiveness to the world. Certainly, Oedipa Maas, when presented with the first teasing re-appearances of particularly curious objects of her attention, recognizes that it is not the object itself but its placement in the context of her experience that matters most. Most of her objects are of course words, and more to the point, words from a literary text (the text of the play), though the word text itself becomes increasingly unreliable. This unreliability is proportionate to the ever more expansive play Pynchon ordains between his text and the world of its readers. Suitably enough, The Courier’s Tragedy, is a Jacobean revenge tragedy predicated on mail correspondence, on words that seek an attentive mind across an abyss of time and space. The more information Oedipa Maas gathers about the “possibility” that the fictionalized conspiracy in the play plays out as a real-world conspiracy – a codex for the questions that must arise in a world where what is known is a function of what more one needs to know – the more she needs to know. The operative “possibility” here is an invitation to think alternatively to everything that presents itself as “self-constituting,” to indulge a relevant Hegelianism. As we have already noted, self-constitution, or recognition [Anerkennung] for Hegel, presupposes a reordering of one’s commitments with respect to an otherness that presents itself to the self. Thus, do we recognize the self that doesn’t yet know itself as a commitment-making agent. Such is the case in Pynchon’s novel, and in the phenomenology of syntax that I have been teasing out here. Oedipa Maas’ disposition to think alternatively with respect to every given alternative exhibits a capacity for attentiveness that does not fall neatly into any of the categories of attentional behavior accepted by behavioral psychologists. They tend to correlate attention with categorically determinate moods and attitudes: e.g., preferential attention, selective attention, effortful attention, divided attention, etc. Psychologists are looking for distinctions between these all too presupposable modes of attention. In Oedipa’s case, all of them apply. Attention is not just a structure of consciousness that is mappable upon the structure of a perceived object. Furthermore, Oedipa’s choices, when she is impelled to choose between competing objects of attention, as inferences proliferate from their appearances, seem not to presuppose any specific object of attention. On the contrary, they

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constitute a goad to attentiveness itself. While the proliferating clues to the Trystero plot do suggest the possibility of a master plotter – the mysterious bidder on “lot 49?” – Oedipa’s attention is bidden beyond that melodramatic explanandum. For Oedipa Maas, intelligibility is in the offing as a register of self-scrutiny, however painful that may be turn out to be in the immediately unintelligible moment. Yves Citton, in his valuable reassessment of the ways in which attention informs intelligibility in practical circumstances, maintains that “The rationality of our behavior is constantly jeopardized by the deficiency of the information that we have about our environment. In other words: we never have the means to pay enough attention.”31 Citton’s claim rhymes with the paranoia menacing the incompleteness of Oedipa Maas’ insufficient grasp of the informational context within which she dwells. The deficit nonetheless denotes a capacity to know such incompleteness as a prompt to more energetic rationalization. Citton sees the deficiency of information as “irrationalizing” our behavior. But that does not preclude the prospect for incorporating “… attention to its transindividual sustainability.”32 In other words, Citton honors hitherto unrealized capacities that inhere in the act of transcending the perspective of any already “knowing” individual. Pynchon’s sentences, not least of all his inaugural sentence in The Crying of Lot 49, cue us to Oedipa’s yet unrealized capacities, i.e., her lack of information in relation to a yet undetermined possibility of relatively more information: the incontestable prerequisite of action/knowledge. Here is a calling to attention that obligates Pynchon’s reader to recognize the necessity for more far-reaching attentiveness: One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix [my emphasis], of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time, but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it out all the more honorary.33 I take “or she supposed …” to be an exemplar of what the whole sentence and the novel as a whole instantiates. The re-combination of “executrix” with the antecedent predicative “Oedipa” might appear to be a mere anaphoric curlicue of her style of sense-making. But we must remember that anaphora changes what it ostensibly and inadequately replicates, soliciting new reasons for the original declarative gesture or attentional object. That is to say we can easily accept that anaphora presupposes a “switching” of attentional foci and implicitly a reflection in consciousness of the capacity to be a “switcher.” The kirsch in the fondu is anaphoric for the Tupperware party no less than executrix is for executor, asset is for estate. The syntactical convolutions here call upon precisely the skills Oedipa must exercise in her executrix capacity: “sorting it out.” The attentional turns of the sentence for Pynchon’s reader constitute complicity with Oedipa’s task. I equate such “sorting out” with re-combinatory logic, e.g., the re-ranking of or switching of attentional priorities.

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Switching of course assumes contextual variability. I think it is fair to say that Pynchon’s opening sentence, the prototype for much of what is to come, challenges our sense of contextual boundaries by switching the informational priorities from the summer afternoon to the party, to the hostess of the party, to the executrix Oedipa herself is to become, to the Inverarity property, etc. In a manner of speaking, the conspicuous length of the sentence, which I’ve already called attention to, testifies to Pynchon’s foregrounding of the reader’s capacity, if not propensity, to switch. Boundaries are inexorably moveable. Perhaps more importantly, the sentence asserts the knowledge that one thing is never just one thing if one takes account of context. This entails the solicitation of other reasons to think what something is. Aptly, philosophers of mind like Gilbert Ryle and Alan White,34 who have written authoritatively about attention, concur that it is not, as William James asserted, just an activity, an entrée to experience. It is a “circumstance” in its own right. As White stipulates, attention “… does not name any specific activity; it indicates the circumstances in which the activity occurs and thus signifies what, on the occasion, it amounts to or is a form of.”35 James’s view of attention as experience, in Principles of Psychology,36 was meant to defend against the notion that attention is a passive state answerable to something like perceptual stimulus. I would suggest that there is no substantive quarrel between James and Ryle/White. Context is always a site of activity insofar as the circumstance it instantiates, like syntactical order which possesses its own temporal dimension, is subject to change as one follows the course of its inevitable elaboration in time. We are implicitly talking here about what Ryle, in The Concept of Mind, called “heed concepts.”37 Heed concepts do not simply tell us what is happening. They require that we see the what in relation to a broader set of dispositions than are immediately apparent and operative. They encourage hypotheticals that portend change and futurity.38 Indeed, “heed concepts” for Ryle have an episodic character, very similar to syntax as I have been attending to it. As an articulative practice, syntax presupposes its own futurity. I believe, therefore, that heed concepts point us, once again, toward the realm of reason-giving. The dispositions inherent in heed concepts are “pregnant,” to use Ryle’s term, with possibilities that wait upon good reasons for pursuing them. Pynchon’s protagonist is a creature of heed concepts inasmuch as they intimate a potentiality of knowledge. Once the heedful frame of mind cued by The Courier’s Tragedy (authored by Richard Wharfinger, directed by Randolph Driblette) becomes operative, Oedipa is at the mercy of her attentive capacities. It is worth nothing that Ryle’s heed concepts can be more or less “pregnant”39 with prospects for soliciting reasons that reward attention. Ryle gives the example of distinguishing between the statement that a bird is flying toward Africa and the statement that it is migrating.40 The latter he alleges tells a more pregnant story in the sense that it both describes the activity of flight and gives us hypothetical information about what might be the case for the bird in the duration of its activity/experience. Just so, everything Oedipa attends to, subsequent to her viewing Wharfinger’s/Driblette’s play, entitles her to speculate, i.e., to indulge hypothetical knowledge that some

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reason may obtain to convince her that what she observes is not the case. This flies in the face of Driblette’s admonition: “You came to talk about the play …. Let me discourage you. It was written to entertain people. Like horror movies. It isn’t literature, it doesn’t mean anything.”41 He is admonishing her to draw the conclusion that the play only exists in one’s head where pregnant stories yield unceasing deliverances of heed-mongering information. I would add that the play, couched in this admonition, is de facto experiential in the manner that I have been arguing (in terms compatible with both Dewey and James) literarity, not literature per se, purveys. It is not immediately apparent how syntax, the métier of an art work like Pynchon’s novel, is like a horror movie. But I would argue that both entail an expectation of and therefore a preparation for a shock of discovery, the hypothetical knowledge of which is built into the very notion of syntax as a mode of articulation. Of course, syntax needn’t be long and circuitous to exhibit literarity as experience. Pynchon’s characteristic syntactical patterns are mixed: long, subordinateheavy circumlocutions and short staccato sentences, especially in dialogue. In both cases, the heed concept is featured as a modus operandi for character and reader alike. In other words, explanatory power constitutes the stakes of attention. As Christopher Mole notes, philosophers of attention consider Alan White’s theory an “explanatory adverbial” theory as opposed to Gilbert Ryle’s “dispositional adverbial” theory.42 In both instances, what matters is that what can be learned is a function of some contextualizing activity. Hence the notion of “adverbialism,” i.e., one attends insofar as one is doing something with the expectation that one knows what one is doing. The strong inference is that activity is reciprocal with contextuality. With respect to syntax generally, I must allow that any elaboration of the sentence – a condition of openness to what is not anticipated by what is already articulated – is perforce a kind of action. I have already defended a notion of syntax as an act of ordering (necessarily combinative and re-combinative). Vertov’s practice of interval theory invites the same inference. In Pynchon’s syntax specifically, this means that our attention is consistently called to reflect on a reader’s capacity to shift or switch one’s attention as articulations reveal their explanatory insufficiency. The call to reflect is a function of the fuller and fuller articulation of context. Here is an exemplary sentence where syntax turns context into a kind of activity. Oedipa, in her pursuit of the meaning of the Trystero conspiracy, has been swept up into a crowd of tourists, encouraged by their guide to ogle San Narcisco culture in a notorious gay bar. She is, so to speak, a creature of a context (the crowd of tourists) in which she appears to have no agency. With an unidentified drink in her hand, she is jammed up against someone who is described only as “tall in a suede jacket.” Ironically, she gains her bearings by attending to the iconography of the Trystero plot, a muted post horn, where it is pinned to the lapel of the someone’s suede jacket. The recognition is pointedly mute for Oedipa, the character. For the duly attentive reader however, the syntax demands a sorting or re-combinatory switching of contextual priorities. The sentence begins ungrammatically. That is, it begins with a subordinate clause that properly belongs to the previous sentence. I

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might say it belongs to that someone’s suede sport coat, “In the lapel of which she spied, wrought exquisitely in some pale glimmering alloy not another cerise badge [the badges identifying the members of the tour group], a pin in the shape of the Trystero post horn. Mute and everything.”43 The taunting ungrammaticality of the sentence is a cue to the circumstantial predicament of reading it. We must ask, “What reasons account for this”? Such is the standard interrogative for rational inquiry in science where anomalous deviations from a context of systematic belief stymie intelligibility. As Paisley Livingston44 has argued, this should be the sine qua non of literary knowledge no less than of scientific knowledge. Livingston prompts us to ask: Why should the explanatory warrant demanded by anomalous deviations from a context of belief or grammatical rules be any less urgent in the circumstance of reading than in the circumstance of encountering the physical world? Pynchon’s sentence certainly presents the explanatory warrant without which knowledge would remain mute in this context. The post horn after all is a symbol without a correlative contextual referent except perhaps the desire for correlation itself. It only signifies if the Trystero plot is not simply the structural armature of a play featured in the plot of the novel. It will only signify if there is reason enough to imagine that the symbol’s re-appearance, wherever Oedipa turns her attention, can buttress belief that it correlates with how human fate plays out in the world in random appearances, e.g., the “design” of the symbol “in the shape of a post horn.” Such appearances are assimilated to our craving for meaningfulness. The concluding sentence of the paragraph we are reading here – and especially since it reads as a continuation of the previous sentence by plausibly completing it – “Mute and everything.” is another grammatical anomaly. It is a fragment sentence. Because it invites being run-in with the previously complete, at least duly punctuated period, it ameliorates its own grammatical insufficiency, by requiring an other than grammar-motivated reason. There are therefore more complications. The fragment, treated as a fragment prompts the question, Is everything mute? “Mute and everything” is idiomatically straightforward. It asks us to reason that the design of the lapel pin features the mechanical device that fits the noise-making horn, the conventional accoutrement of the musical instrument that permits the musician to focus the sound. Or, by its grammatical incorrectness, it invites us to reason that the symbol is mute – soundless – like everything else for which there is no normalizing belief system, thus revealing the putative “design” to be a mere brute mark, e.g., Ranciere’s “mute speech.” The point here is not simply the indeterminacy of meaning. Rather, a reader is encouraged to count meaningfulness as a variable of attentiveness. The reading I am performing here is by no means an example of an original literary critical practice. But the focus I am giving to how the dynamics of attention that are foregrounded in this piece of literary syntax, which I am taking as elemental literarity, reveals once again the inextricability of syntax from the practice of reasongiving. Reason-giving is de rigueur wherever brute marks resist the seductive intimation of design. This of course is the case with the principle of affordance insofar

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as it is a term of art, so to speak, in the world of commercial design. Reason-giving in this context is interrogative not assertive. A question arises when contingent facts are revealed in light of their lack of fit with current contextual determinants. Design, in the case of affordance, is cultivated by an agent in relation to a context of unintelligibility. The perceived object of attention reveals a usefulness beyond what is afforded by mere perception. In Pynchon’s sentence, as in the novel generally, a reader is prompted to notice or attend more closely to competing contextual markers in order to grasp cognitively what she is doing as a reader. This aligns with Christopher Mole’s understanding of attention as what he calls an instance of “cognitive unison”: What the thinker who lacks understanding lacks is not a cognitive state that enables him to make an appropriate response (he may have such a state if he has been appropriately drilled). What he lacks is a capacity to redeploy the cognitive basis of his performance in a way that enables him to deal with alternatives.45 Understanding is a calling to attention: it is a calling to see alternatives in the first place and then to be able to summon reasons for putting one thing in the place of another, i.e., re-combining elements. Alternatives thus present themselves as a way of sustaining a rational performance under a condition of cognitive vigilance. These constraints complement Mole’s notion of attention when he characterizes it as a “task.” He stipulates that An activity fails to be a task if it is not agent involving, if the agent has no understanding of that activity, or if the agent has an understanding but his understanding does not guide the way in which the activity is performed.46 I would add that performance here entails reason-giving without which understanding is mute. The alternative to muteness that Pynchon inveigles is the proliferation of contextual vectors or frames within which some understanding is possible. He is soliciting what Duns Scotus has called “the available mind,” or what I have called in my reading of Faulkner, an “expanding field of inferentiality.” By this reckoning, what is most significantly knowable presupposes the capacity for attention in relation to what it attends to. The object of attention itself otherwise appears to be causal with respect to attentional activity. Quite to the contrary, it is the possibility of the mind adapting to novel presentations – a prospect of futurity where futurity inheres in an ability to “redeploy” the cognitive basis of one’s performance – that is the salient disposition here. The finale of Pynchon’s novel is nothing but the future-directed expectation of the “crying of lot 49,” the contents of which signify an implicit commitment by Oedipa Maas to pursue whatever ensues from the auctioneer’s final gaveling. When Oedipa arrives at the auction house she replies to Genghis Cohen’s query “May I ask if you’ve come to bid Miz Maas,” that “No …, I’m only being a busybody.”47 Busyness is the watchword here. It is an honoring of activity. It is

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important to point out however that activity is not aimless, which is to say inattentive. At the same time, it is not aimed pre-emptively. As the notion of affordance stipulates, there is always an understanding that intention, the complement of attention in this regard, is an accommodation of what conceptuality does not know about itself until it is deployed, until it becomes a task. Oedipa Maas, e.g., doesn’t know the jargon of the auction house. She takes crying to be an expression of sadness that looms over the possibility that she lacks understanding. Her’s is kindred to the sadness of Oedipus who is exemplary here because, even in the midst of the incomprehensible, he looks to the future. He remains task oriented. Oedipus gives instructions to Creon that the new king take full responsibility for the futures of his children: this despite the fact that fate has decreed Oedipus himself will not be part of that future. Implicitly Oedipus does not accept such an abstract decree. At the conclusion of Sophocles’s play, Oedipus awaits reasons for his own, prescient, Beckettian going on. Similarly, Oedipa Maas awaits the crying of Lot 49 with the expectation that once the cry is up, there will be something to do. Because I’m saying that a lack of understanding is a de facto warrant for reasongiving, it is also a bid for a futurity that we must live out rather than posit as an absolute. Sophocles strands his protagonist on the threshold of a futurity that is little more than abstract faith. By comparison, Pynchon is more concrete. Oedipa Maas, like her namesake who is too often taken to be less of himself than he might be, exhibits an expectation of doing as much as knowing what that “might be” will be. Like all creatures of time and its fatalisms, Oedipus certainly knows that more is coming. Oedipa Maas knows that whatever “more” is coming will be her task to work out. Such an expectation can only be rewarded by modifying the presumption that attentiveness is determinate in the objecthood of the object of attention. As we’ve seen, prevailing philosophical theories of attention depend upon specifying how focalization upon the object risks blindness toward competing resources, de facto reasons for attention. But as my discussion of montage – specifically Vertov’s “phrase” – suggests, the gist of how attentiveness matters in the context of literarity is the presupposition that attention is inextricable from inattention. Attentiveness knows what it is not attending to. Such knowledge is perforce syntactical, in the sense that the relationality it instantiates expands the horizon of intelligibility, even as it faces up to the obstacles to intelligibility.48 I’ve noted with respect to montage that knowing what is the case is always the case in relation to other vectors of knowledge. Just as perception never occurs except in relation to contextually competing percepts, which promulgate an occasion for mustering better or worse reasons for paying attention, some fluency with futurity is de rigueur. By fluency with futurity, I only mean to acknowledge what I’ve previously referred to as a capacity for changing one’s commitments. Shifting Attention

I want to emphasize what should already be apparent here. Philosophical theories of attention like Mole’s, when he prioritizes analysis of psychological behavior, are disposed to feature attention as focalization. The object of attention acquires

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that status by virtue of its occlusion of competing cognitive resources within the contextual frame of focus. One prioritizes what is required to complete the task at hand. One screens out the aspects, the properties of the event, that do not warrant attention. But literarity presents a different case. As montage theory cues us to the inextricability of inattention from attention, just so in literarity, the calling of attention to competing cognitive resources is revealed to be a cognitive resource unto itself. That is to say, we are invited, as syntactical twists and turns in literary texts make conspicuous, to think about what else would make sense? What else would make sense as we are making the kind of sense that may not otherwise appear to be susceptible to revisionary pressures? We value what are in effect the counterfactual conditionals arising in self-elaborating syntactical periodicity. In the course of reading such sentences, we have the occasion of knowing that other possibilities obtain as markers for our paying attention. Such are the pleasures of inhabiting the worlds of literarity. Works of art, commonly understood as feats of world making, are here understood to involve us in rational choices where rationality itself must therefore be considered a cardinal feature of the artist’s techne. I might may make this point more sharply by recurring to my reading of what I took to be an “exemplary” sentence in Pynchon’s novel earlier. We will recall that the object that calls Oedipa’s attention to a tall man in a suede jacket is the object of a prepositional phrase that is not preceded by a subjective point of view. Aptly, “the object” looks unlike the cerise badges that identify the other members of her tourist group. Identification here is a function of Oedipa’s not seeing what she might be expected to see, i.e., the cerise badge, the cognitive resource that is most ready to hand. This is to say that the exquisitely wrought pin in the shape of a post horn is a competing cognitive resource. We know this because the ungrammaticality of the sentence in which it is featured requires locating a subjective point of view within Oedipa’s paranoid consciousness of the Trystero conspiracy. That the pin requires the replacement of one vague point of view with a more focused point of view makes Pynchon’s attentive reader a de facto chooser. The choice is abruptly challenged by a subsequent ungrammaticality – the fragment sentence, “Mute and everything.” – threatening the muteness of everything. We are thus alerted to the fact that the wisdom of what we choose next to be the most relevant object of attention will depend preeminently upon our powers of construal or reason-giving. Here it is useful for me to recall that I have characterized Hegelian Erfahrung as an exploration of the limits of a concept. Hegel is getting at something similar to the way counter-factual conditionals are de facto exploratory with respect to the limits of what is the case. In the realm of counter-factual conditionals, wherever attention is warranted by a specific perception (tangibilia), it intimates or infers a wider horizon of perceptual possibilities. In effect, we are entertaining Hegel’s “thing with many properties.” Theorists of attention like Mole appear to agree with the implications of what I have just sketched out: that attention is inextricable from explanation (re: behavior and thought) or what for me is more precisely stipulated as reason-giving. This, after all, is the impetus of what I have been calling the

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“compositional ethos” specific to literarity. As I have been arguing all along, our knowing ourselves as creatures of attention obliges us to be rationalizers. I have taken syntax as a special scene of the rationalizing activity because it helps to make clear why I think literarity is important, why our sense of what constitutes experience is impoverished without it. These claims matter most when our potentiality for having more experience and for knowing ourselves through that augmented experience is at stake. Notes 1 My generalizations about theories of the avant-garde here are amply contextualized in Peter Berger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) as well as the works of Jacques Ranciere which I take up at length elsewhere in this chapter. 2 The gist of experience as a practical doing of things is especially clear with respect to Hegel’s use of the term “force,” in Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 136. 3 Gustave Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857, trans. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 154. 4 Mute Speech: Literature Critical Theory, and Politics, trans. James Swenson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 5 Ibid., 123. 6 Ibid. 7 Michael Clune’s A Defense of Judgment (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 10, is particularly acute on the point of the literary critic’s responsibility to practical experience. 8 See David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1985), 232–234. 9 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willougby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 111–115. 10 See generally The Ignorant Schoolmaster, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). 11 Contemporary literary theory too frequently eschews judgment as a lever of instrumental reason, a refuge of oppressive ideology. I am somewhat heartened by Eric Hayot’s posit of “humanist reason”: “Reason is, simply, a subjective procedure for producing objective, shareable knowledge.” Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument, A Plan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 94. He is careful to stipulate that Reason does not require individuals to shed their identity and forswear affective life. I only wish he were more precise about the means of reason-giving that makes such an “end” of humanist reason imaginable. His claim that “Contexts have no explanatory or causal power” (99) ignores the condition of some recognitive mechanism in the pursuit of something like shareable knowledge. If reason is context embedded, as he claims, but not context-determined, the issue of agency, where reasons are accepted or rejected, is mooted. 12 See J. Dudley Andrew’s The Major Film Theories (New York: Oxford, 1976), 76–100. 13 See Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, eds. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reiss (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 3–24. 14 Ranciere, Aisthesis, 230. 15 A Sixth Part of the World/The Eleventh Year, 2 DVD set, FilmGalerie, 2010. 16 This is the gist of much of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, and Dialectic of Enlightenment, two texts at war with the habituating predispositions of most formalist approaches to art.

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17 See Annette Michelson’s On the Wings of Hypothesis: Collected Writings on Soviet Cinema (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), 12. Much of what I am contemplating here is informed by the title chapter of this work. 18 Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 82. 19 Michaelson, On the Wings of Hypothesis, 15. 20 Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 4. 21 See Robert Gittings’s edition of Selected Letters by John Keats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 116. 22 Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Bantam Books, 1967). 23 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin Books, 1959). 24 Ibid., 60. 25 Ibid., 60–61. 26 Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 30. 27 Dewey, 62. 28 Ibid. 29 Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 30. 30 Ibid., 49–50. 31 See Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, trans. Barnaby Norman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 35–36. 32 Ibid. 33 Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 1. 34 See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979) and Alan White, Attention (Oxford: Oxford University Press/Basil Blackwell, 1964). 35 Alan White, Attention, 6. 36 William James, Principles of Psychology Vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1950). 37 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 135–138. 38 See Christopher Mole’s commentary in Attention as Cognitive Unison (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 21–22 for a fair account of the differences between these approaches. 39 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 136. 40 Ibid. 41 Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 54. 42 Mole, Attention as Cognitive Unison, 48–49. 43 Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 81. 44 Paisley Livingston, Literary Knowledge: Humanistic Inquiry and the Philosophy of Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 230–231. 45 Mole, Attention as Cognitive Unison, 55. 46 Ibid., 52. 47 Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 137. 48 Here I should point out once again that “emergence theory” on Terence Deacon’s account is unthinkable without acknowledging obstacles to intelligibility – at least insofar as “ententional” knowledge, by its very incompleteness, mandates a re-combinative acuity.

5 LITERARITY AND POSSIBILITY

Every experience can be extended in a continuous chain of explicative individual experiences, united synthetically as a single experience, open without limit of the same … however, I can convince myself that no determination is the last, that what has already been experienced always still has, without limits, a horizon of possible experience of the same. Husserl, Experience and Judgment

Possibilizing: Syntax as a Scene of Rationalizing Activity

In quotidian experience, humans inhabit attitudinal grooves, grist for the mill of habitual practices. Literarity, I have been suggesting, smooths them out so to speak, opening a more far-reaching horizon of experiential possibilities. I do not mean to equate possibility with limitlessness. Rather, literarity makes the transition by inferential knowledge from one groove to another, as important as the knowledge instantiated in any normative groove. It thus cultivates a new register of normativity. I am seeing this possibility of transition as a version of counterfactualism that comports with contemporary theories of imagination. As Ruth Byrne has put it in The Rational Imagination: “People who could not create counterfactual alternatives to reality would be stuck with the facts,” stuck in their groove, so to say.1 As Byrne explains they would be unable to conjecture, to take account of making a wrong decision, to infer correctives.2 To be stuck with the facts is to stymie attention and potentially to render experience redundant. Edward S. Casey’s theory of imagination in Imagining, A Phenomenological Study spells out implications of Byrne’s point. He does so in a manner that I will argue dovetails with my account of the syntactical aspect of literarity. For he stipulates that “imagining is entertaining a given presentation as purely possible while at the same time experiencing it as inherently indeterminate.”3 Casey deploys Husserl’s gerundial term DOI: 10.4324/9781003384052-6

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of art “possibilizing.” The term intimates the prospect for a re-combinatory logic inasmuch as it may serve alternatively as a noun and a verb. Casey wishes to make clear how the disciplined imaginer is “converting what is actual or necessary in other contexts into what might be so for the moment.”4 This is tantamount to my sustaining claim that the “moment,” incremental as it is in syntactical periodicity, is susceptible to reversal, a crisis [krisis] of temporal succession.5 It is furthermore congruent with Husserl’s observation that Every experience can be extended in a continuous chain of explicative individual experiences, united synthetically as a single experience, open without limit of the same … however, I can convince myself that no determination is the last, that what has already been experienced still has, without limits, a horizon of possible experience of the same.6 I have made an issue of the way in which syntax involves us in temporal succession, urging us to submit to the mandate for improvising re-combinatory logics. In the most self-elaborating syntactical convolutions of an author like Faulkner, we’ve seen how attention is perforce both prospective and retrospective. Such syntactical initiatives dispose us toward a re-contextualizing of the elements that otherwise give us confidence that context has explanatory force in the first place. This is to say the obvious. Sentences are capable of generating narrative suspense in precisely the way that a surprise plot turn, a classical peripeteia, ordains a reconfiguration of contextual priorities. We are well acquainted with the time-honored work of anagnorisis. It is a warrant for the reader to re-contextualize the particulars of the scene of her selfunderstanding in the same way that the syntactical markers of temporal succession mandate the furtherance of plot complications. In Aristotelian poetics, peripeteia and anagnorisis make a natural pair. Every reversal must explain itself. This is what makes reading a bona fide activity, albeit on the register of a reader’s resourceful rationalizing. I take rationalizing to be de facto reason-giving insofar as any recombinatory imperative entails prioritizing choices for making better sense of what otherwise obstinately refuses edifying scrutiny. I will shortly discuss the syntax of one of modern literature’s most cunning rationalizers, Humbert Humbert, who proffers the motto, “Always trust a murderer for a fancy prose style.” As we will see, Humbert’s “fancy” is syntactical divagation. Along these lines, I wish to employ Nabokov’s Lolita7 to buttress my claims about the necessity of literature. I maintain that literature is arguably a necessity of life if we prioritize knowing our capacity for experience in the temporally articulated increments of syntax. But first I must expand upon my notion of the “compositional ethos” as a “possibilizing” enterprise. I have invoked the “compositional ethos” as a pillar of my faith that the prospect for intelligibility is always a self-elaborating proposition. As I sketched it in Chapter Three, the compositional ethos is inherently an expression of rational imagination inasmuch as shifting grounds of attention dispose us irresistibly toward re-combinatory imaginative acts. I have posited this dynamic within the precincts of literary syntax.

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But it should be obvious that the compositional ethos is a component of any life in which choice can be improved upon, wherever better choices can be imagined. It is a potential guarantor of moral amelioration as long as choices are subject to some inferential capacity for better reason-giving – without which re-combinatory imaginative acts would be unimaginable. I have been insisting all along that circumstantiality is both the presupposition of literarity and of the life we engage through literarity. I will remind my reader however that the re-combinatory imaginative acts of which I am speaking are derivative of the notion of counterfactual conditionals. Ruth Byrne has argued that counterfactual imagination is inherently rational. Byrne’s position is simply stated. Humans are capable of rational thought. The principles undergirding rational thought determine the possibilities people contemplate in circumstances that invite speculative choice-making. This entails trial and error, or some such re-combinatory logic, with regard to the things people think about.8 Of course, Byrne’s own thinking is turned in the direction of behavioral psychology and cognitive science, not aesthetic works or aesthetic experience. But since I take the position that aesthetic experience is continuous with lived experience in its most vibrant expressions, I will treat Byrne’s insights as applicable to the enterprise of attending to the literary, i.e., the compositional ethos. I would argue that Byrne’s focus on peoples’ desire to create alternate realities is a generalized version of my notion of the compositional ethos. To repeat: shifting grounds of attention dispose us irresistibly toward re-combinatory imaginative acts. In both cases, a disposition toward self-elaboration is presupposed. Byrne’s thinking commences with a question about how people might create counterfactual alternatives that are more imaginative than the ones they typically create: “Could it be possible to judge whether a counterfactual thought is the best one?”9 This is of course the question for the artistic imagination tout court. It is no less the question that drives the reader of literary syntax, at least insofar as an author has been sufficiently resourceful with the syntactical rules. With the word resourceful, I am asking: does the syntax invite counterfactual possibilities that it does not immediately articulate or realize? Byrne settles for the proposition that some people are just better than others at creating counterfactual alternatives. In other words, she doesn’t really answer the question. Or, to put it another way, I think she misses her own point. I’d ask, not what is the answer to the question, but what is the occasion for the question? As Byrne herself observes: “History is full of examples of creative products that were not recognized as creative initially because of the prevailing social and cultural standards.”10 Unsurprisingly enough, Byrne’s touchstones for the question of who creates the most imaginative counterfactuals are Van Gogh and James Joyce. The distinctiveness of both artists is their compositional resourcefulness with respect to the syntactical – loosely speaking – elements of their respective artistic materials. The relationality of elements in their works is such that they can only be successfully attended to by positing something like a re-combinatory logic as the precondition of a viewer’s or a reader’s engagement. This obtains over the time such compositional elaboration takes to be ever more

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adequately apprehended. Such is the occasion of the question. And of course, both Van Gogh and Joyce share the trait of asserting imaginative forms for which no existing norms of imaginative appreciation were prepared or adequate. We shall see that Nabokov’s Lolita is no less exemplary of the imaginative power Byrne ascribes to works that exhibit the better counterfactuals. Sin and Syntax in Lolita: Light of My Life, Fire of My Lines

Thematically, Lolita is predicated upon forms of behavior for which there are no appreciable imaginative norms, notwithstanding that the expectation of imaginative norms is a virtual non sequitur. It is worth noting, in this regard, that Humbert Humbert’s early stipulation that the authentic nymphet is frozen between ages 9 and 14 requires a substitution of “time terms for spatial ones.”11 Time terms are, as I’ve repeatedly asserted, the essential operators of syntactical periodization. And of course, time, over the course of the reader’s time of reading the novel, is what ultimately exposes Humbert’s moral nakedness to himself. Not coincidentally, the hard time Humbert faces for his crimes is the pretext of his confession, the pretext of the novel itself. It will not be surprising then if I allege that self-recognition is inherently counterfactually conditional in the episodic unfolding of Nabokov’s novel. Lolita is, after all, a counterfactual of Annabel Leigh, herself a counterfactual of Poe’s Annabel Lee. Variants are the sine qua non of counterfactualism, as we shall see in more detail shortly. I must recap a bit to clarify more fully what will count for me as the counterfactually inclined workings of Nabokov’s novel. My refrain throughout these pages is that literarity is not exemplary or representative of experience. It is a staging or teasing out of the possibilities for attention. Attention affords experience. Experience is not to be confused with the object of attention, which is de facto fetishized by such a confusion. So, as I’ve noted when Edward Casey says that the role of imagination is “possibilizing,” he denotes a temporal activity or affordance without which the imagining activity would be merely a stubborn renunciation of the way things are. Casey’s view is, to the contrary, and especially with relation to aesthetic practice, that … imagination in art opens up an experiential domain that would not otherwise have been available either to the artist or to the spectator. This domain is one in which everything is possible …. Thus, as we follow Picasso through the numerous stages in which Guernica was composed, [roughly what I’ve taken for granted as a compositional ethos] we become aware that at each decisive step (and taking into account what had already been achieved) Picasso’s creating might have taken any number of different directions.12 Casey is not valorizing indeterminacy per se. He acknowledges that imagination acts within the constraints of “what had already been achieved.” He is however pointing to an attentive capacity without which Picasso’s, and even the Beckettian artist’s ability to go on, would be unimaginable because the imaginative capacity itself

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would reduce to a merely didactic predicate of going on. Instead, Casey astutely observes that Even in contemplating a painting or a piece of sculpture, I can adopt an attitude that is sensitive to aspects or nuances which I have not yet apprehended and which are, for the moment, purely possible in status. It is imagining that makes such possibilizing possible.13 In other words, counterfactualism is inherent to imagination inasmuch as possibilizing is ongoing in the manner of syntactical contingency. I am speaking of the unexpected subordination or veritable insubordination of clauses that call upon a reader’s affordance of sense-making. Once again, we should be reminded that the great theorists of Western imagination, Kant and Coleridge14 (Kant in his notion of aesthetic ideas and attributes and Coleridge in his theory of secondary imagination), both see that we are predisposed to attend to objects of perception erratically. This is so given the possible attentional variants that are latent in any conceivable object of perception, which its contextualization in mutable worldly circumstances presupposes. I’ve been interested to see how syntactical articulations, which I’m treating as the prerequisites of literarity, similarly predispose all readerly imaginers to attend to the variety of variants. The variants are presented to us, phenomenologically speaking, by each increment of syntactical articulation. Each variant in turn is attended to within the suspenseful indeterminacy of its elaboration of the context in which we wish to make sense of it. My ambition from the start has been to show how it matters that we engage literarity without the distractions of academic periodizing, debates about genre, or competing schools of aesthetic practice, e.g., avant-gardism, romanticism, and modernism. I wish to decouple my thinking from the bid to make universalizing claims that is the driver of such debates. Instead, I wish to attend to the variants within a framework of possibilities without the universalist’s presumption of a self pre-emptive thematic core of meanings. I do not share Casey’s belief that the discipline of investigating available variants in order to “seize the thematic core”15 finds its best exemplification in psychoanalysis. There, as he says, the analysand attains freedom from self-inhibiting choices rather than proliferating choices. For Casey, choice-making has an end: “the patient is free from his own neurosis.”16 For me, the occasion of choice-making is rather, and merely, a potentiation of the activity of choice-making. This happens in a way that sustains the compositional ethos. It happens in the way that counterfactualism creates imaginative space for novel forms of agency. I am not proposing for a moment however that the attention to variants is an evasion of knowing what we mean. To the contrary, I am insisting that we only know what we mean when we know that we could have meant something else. Here I agree with Casey that the imaginative contemplation of possibilities is not simply instrumental to some compositional end. It is also the case that, “… such possibilities are themselves ends and are experienced as such.”17 I think my notion of literarity provides a framework within which Casey’s point does not invite the conclusion that he is contradicting himself.

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Nabokov buttresses my resistance to the idea that there is a thematic core to be “seized” – as Casey suggests is the case in all art works – on a par with psychoanalysis. We might, e.g., consider Humbert recounting a dream ripe for the most banal Freudian interpretation. In the dream, Dolores Haze and her mother are riding horses. The dispositive element is that “… I [Humbert] rode too, dutifully bobbing up and down, bowlegs astraddle, although there was no horse between them, only elastic air – one of those little omissions due to the absent-mindedness [my emphasis] of the dream agent.”18 Nabokov’s syntax here mimes the incursion of variants which is perhaps best epitomized – if Freud is to be our guide, however satirically for Nabokov – in dreams. The dream agent, at least in Humbert’s terms, is not unlike the syntactical compositor pursuing re-combinatory variants of an imagined circumstance. Those variants modify his manifest intentionality or the circumstantiality of the character he is writing about. In this case, the “elastic air” between Humbert’s bowed legs calls attention to the manner in which “mindedness” is only “absent” here with respect to the literal act of riding a horse. Indeed, mindedness recurs to the reader’s all too present knowledge of Humbert’s desire to be astride of the fatally omitted Annabelle Leigh. We are acutely mindful that in the person of Annabelle Leigh, Lolita is both epitomized and instantiated as an epigone. At least this is the case in Humbert’s mind, which is elaborated here beyond the selfmockery that otherwise might suffice to disguise his desire. In other words, the predicative variants that give the sentence its dramatic trajectory – in an Aristotelian sense, privileging anagnorisis – point up the logical sin of compounding knowledge of what the compositor won’t admit to knowing with making knowledge of what he is doing the conspicuous and dangerous stake of his narrative. A more sinful “dream” ensues. In this case, Humbert admonishes his reader “to participate in the scene ….”19 A cautionary to the reader, whose wariness is by now well aroused, is announced in Humbert’s inducement for the reader to share what the duplicitous lecher will not admit is the oxymoronic state of “impartial sympathy” (57). Impartial sympathy epitomizes the kind of participation that is inveigled by Nabokov throughout the novel. A reader must be in two places at once. The reader must finesse that impossibility by becoming cognizant of simultaneous but divergent actions. I have been arguing that this necessitates recourse to a recombinatory logic. I will address this claim more directly in short order. For the moment, I need only stipulate that we are reading a scene that might be called the scene of Humbert’s deflowering of himself. He makes a masquerade of his sexual possession of himself by employing the corporeality of Lolita’s person, unknown to herself as such. They are sharing a divan, Humbert perusing the newspaper, Lolita reading her magazine. She is about to take a bite of an apple. He feigns a fumbling struggle for possession of the duly Edenic fruit in order to bring her onto his lap where the sensual friction of legs becomes shockingly an idea. Humbert realizes that her physical proximity, by dint of the struggle for the apple, lends itself to a private masturbatory enterprise, under the cover of an ardently performed playfulness, a child-like playfulness, that might persuade him of his own childish innocence. The ruse of playfulness is orchestrated by Humbert’s appropriation of a song popular with

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Lolita’s age group: “O my Carmen, my little Carmen!/Something, something those something nights,/And the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the/[barmen– ….”20 Humbert’s hectically fractured rendition of the lyrics is meant, in his mind anyway, to take Lolita’s attention away from his most maniacally focused attention. He is of course bent upon exploiting the proximity of their anatomical parts, notwithstanding the hymenal tissue of his pajamas and robe. Humbert imagines the song, which he characterizes as “automatic stuff,” will facilitate his lascivious maneuver. It will induce in Lolita the opposite of the mindedness that Nabokov’s syntax strikes a complicating contrast with. To stay within the terms of my discussion of imagination, I might say that the song, as a strategic device for Humbert, inhibits variants in a way that makes his actions appear to be innocently oblique. Nabokov’s syntax, on the other hand, obtrudes a proliferation of variants that make the act all too transparent and perversely enough in that regard make it the threshold of reckless imaginative freedom. Nabokov thereby unburdens the reader of the false choice of accepting complicity as Humbert’s dupe or ceding to Humbert a righteous indignation if the reader were to denounce the spectacle unfolding before her hypocritically scandalized eyes. Here is a telling sentence: Talking fast, lagging behind my own breath, catching up with it, mimicking a sudden toothache to explain the breaks in my patter – and all the while keeping a maniac’s inner eye on my distant golden goal, I cautiously increased the magic friction that was doing away, in an illusional, if not factual, sense, with the physically irremovable, but psychologically very friable texture of the material divide (pajamas and robe) between the weight of two sunburnt legs, resting athwart my lap, and the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion.21 One could describe the structure of the sentence as anaphoric in the quite strictly Hegelian sense that each clause is both a repetition of the meaning of its predicative antecedent and a variant of that meaning. In fact, the quick succession of modifying clauses constitutes a comic rendition of the inaugural phrase “Talking Fast.” The fast talker, as we know, doesn’t really want the substance of the talk to be heard. The fast talker scatters our attention. But if we pay an albeit unwanted attention to the elements of the sentence in its full periodic scope, we “participate,” to use Humbert’s word, in the imaginative flight of the scene. Indeed, we participate even more guiltily in the imaginative flight from the scene which the rapid pace of the proliferating clauses confesses to. I want to say that in either case of “flight” the reader is imposed upon to revise the predicative logic of the sentence. This happens in the same way that a fictional character – distinguished from the presumption that there is a “real character” possessed of permanently indwelling traits – develops his or her self-understanding. This is accomplished without any confident expectation of what improvised traits will turn out to be most suitable, given the precise circumstance of the improvisational constraint. In effect, I am eliding the fictional character with the “real character” in order to more honestly reflect the plasticity of character that we too often ignore in pursuit of an essential nature.

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In Humbert’s unwittingly confessional account, the breath of speech, the “catching up with it,” the miming of the toothache, the “golden goal,” which is “all the while” a marker of the temporal succession of clauses, the magic friction, the physical vs. the psychological friability of the material that is the medium of Humbert’s contact with Lolita, are all successively variants that might seem to take the reader a good distance away from the phrase “talking fast.” At the same time, each increment of knowledge here is also an enactment of talking fast. Of course, no instant is as variant as the “tumor of an unspeakable passion.” The tumor is the squeamish-making touchstone of the mask of monstrosity that Humbert obsessively calls attention to in order to pre-empt anyone else’s judgment of him as a monster. The sentence, nevertheless, teases just such a judgment by the reader if she is sufficiently attentive to the entailments of reading it. What are these entailments? We can better answer the question by noting that the syntactical complications of such sentences as this in Nabokov’s novel must be distinguished from other sentences. I’m speaking of the non-variational sentences in Lolita that we might call, after Humbert himself, “the automatic stuff.” I think Nabokov veritably taunts us to read the grammatically non-variant sentences of his novel as equivalent to the uncorrupted version of the Carmen/Barmen song – distinct from Humbert’s lascivious fracturing of it. The non-variant sentences of the novel set the stage. But they are not the main event. We might then imagine they are presumed to perpetuate our distraction, no less than Lolita’s, from the act taking place. Indeed, the relevant act from which they distract us is the more demonic working of language orchestrated – Carmen, Barman notwithstanding – to implicate us in Humbert’s ravenous desire. In other words, the variance, variability per se, is the stylistic “thing,” to use Heidegger’s term for the work of art, that counts toward the reader’s culpable participation, as Humbert hopes to inveigle it. Of course, the distinction I’m making here overstates the case. It is impossible to hierarchize the relevance of syntactically straightforward, non-variant sentences and their more “monstrously” convolutional, multi-clausal counterparts. That caveat notwithstanding, the distinction does strikingly mimic Humbert’s obsessional attentiveness to proliferating features of experience, his solipsistic own experience, to be precise. They ever more energetically tease out the counterfactualism powering his imaginative leaps. His imaginative leaps are de facto leaps from reality. In effect, reality is merely that which has been left behind: lost. So we are reminded of the deprivation of Annabel Leigh, that brute “reality” which, we might now say, “possibilizes” Humbert’s serial crimes against Lolita. In the sentence we are attending to here, a reader is similarly caught up in the variability of the moment’s consequence. Just as Humbert’s breath is catching up with his talk, his idea that the failure to keep up might be better explained by mimicking the symptoms of a toothache varies the meaning of keeping up. It reveals itself as Humbert’s scheming to keep away from the knowledge of what he is doing. By the same token, it cues Nabokov’s reader’s knowledge of what Humbert is doing, as a variant of what is “illusional” in the “factual sense.” That is to say, the registers of fact and illusion are rendered interchangeable with one another. Likewise, the “physically irremovable, but

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psychologically very friable” material of Humbert’s pajamas and robe display the variability, if not the more self-indicting deviance from, clarifying ways of knowing. This variability is not simply an obstacle to knowledge, but a kind of restating of the challenge that the desire for knowledge originally presents. The effective comparability of the “sunburnt legs” athwart Humbert’s lap and the “tumor” of his passion is a function of the variability of registers of knowledge upon which Humbert’s and the reader’s experience converge. They do so to virtually catachrestic effect. The sentence is a vehicle for transformations that accrue to a reader’s ability to participate in the kind of re-combinatory logic that is de rigueur for a consciousness striving to keep up with the experience of failed expectations. The varying registers of Humbert’s desire displayed in Nabokov’s sentence reference a capacity to attend alternatively to the same object of desire, thus to desire more effortfully. I would not characterize the imaginative leaps and lurches of Nabokov’s prose here, as theorists like Casey might, as sheer independence of mind. I do not take the act of imagination on display here as purely abstract from “causation, context, content and use,” but as an elaboration of those pretexts for variation.22 Obviously, what I am most interested in is not the tell-tale feature of prose style, or even thematic interpretation. Instead, the quality of experience for the reader in specific predicative circumstances counts most significantly for my purposes. It is certainly worth remembering how Husserl, in Experience and Judgement, takes the selfevidence of objects, the perceptual register per se, as making up the concept of experience in the broadest, albeit the most empty sense. After all, for Husserl, it is the power of predicative judgement for which the self-evidence of objects matters most. What Husserl references as the realm of the predicative is distinctly a function of imagination. Imagination here is understood as a modification of what is known originally as perceptually self-evident: “This is true not only because every lived experience of imagination, every modification of experience in the mode of as-if, is given precisely as a modification, as a transformation and metamorphosis of previous experience ….”23 For Husserl, the world is pre-given. But it is only knowable as such in its transformability, via the conditions of predicative elaboration. I have invoked the notion of predicative elaboration, rather than indeterminacy in this discussion, because I want to keep faith with the Hegelian power of mind as determination. We have seen that even Casey’s notion of indeterminacy cannot be decoupled from possibility. This portends the inevitability of rethinking the consequence of one’s predicative vantage point. As I have already alleged, it guarantees the inevitability of applying some kind of re-combinatory logic within the constraints of knowing that we contradict ourselves. We might remind ourselves how Humbert’s catching up with his “tumor of an unspeakable passion” is a reversal of the relative innocence he wished to project at the start of the sentence. But it is also an acknowledgement of the inevitability of self-perpetuating experience. Lolita is, after all, if generic markers are relevant at all, a road novel. Humbert’s car, moving perpetually across one horizon after another, chimes with Husserl’s own comment on the way in which the word “horizon” itself is tantamount to induction or propulsive inference:

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Every experience can be extended in a continuous chain of explicative individual experiences, united synthetically as a single experience, open without limit of the same …. However, I can convince myself that no determination is the last, that what has already been experienced always still has, without limit, a horizon of possible experience of the same.24 Of course, Husserl is a transcendental idealist. His interest is ultimately the pre-predicative conditions for predication. Nevertheless, the realm of worldly predicates, without which Husserl would have no access to the pre-predicative, is the place where our commitments as readers of the novel (in this case Nabokov’s novel) are remanded. Furthermore, this is so with respect to literarity and the circumstances of worldly experience which literarity extenuates. In other words, Husserl’s account of the potentially self-elaborating aspect of predication can serve our interest insofar as our shifting attention to the objects of the world portends the possibility of sustaining our experience of worldliness. I take this to be a version of Duns Scotus’s presumption, discussed in Chapter Two: what is perceivable is ultimately dependent not upon the perception of an object but upon the possibility that there is a mind available to perceive, and suited to the variable predicaments such perceptible objects contrive for us. The available mind is a capacity for attention and a disposition toward affordance. Nabokov dramatizes the availability of Humbert’s mind in this sense. What Humbert senses to be the case is the necessity of many things being the case. The mind of the murderer thus survives any moralistic judgment that would circumscribe him within the bounds of a merely guilty self. The beneficence of this stance from the reader’s point of view, following the syntactical cues of the narrative, is the opening of a wider and wider horizon of explicability. Nabokov’s reader participates in the available mind wherever predication disappoints the expectation of explicability without nullifying it. As Husserl makes clear, explicability is prior to any specific explication. Lolita is a particularly apt text because Humbert’s rationalizing power knows no limit with respect to imaginatively rectifying the imaginably irreparable damage he’s done. Certainly for Humbert, explicability is, aspirationally speaking, inculpability. But Nabokov seems to be saying that no one is excused from the brute exigencies of experience that supervene any specific explanation. That is, experience is not to be remanded to thematic summary or the summary judgments that typically attend such explanatory gambits. This is why I have been considering imagination to be a kind of predisposition to counterfactualism. It follows that the practice of predicative elaboration which occasions that predisposition to counterfactualism – albeit in the sentences that exhibit such elaboration – might be viewed as proof of an imaginative capacity. In the case of the character Humbert Humbert and in the character of the reader both, this imaginative capacity is a guarantor of greater knowledge. I might even say that it portends a greater world that would presume to accommodate such knowledge. It should go without saying however that “greater” here is only a value of scale not a value judgement.

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I think that Nabokov makes the point most remorselessly toward the end of the novel in the wake of Quilty’s murder and so in the waning days of Humbert’s ruthlessly single-minded pursuit of Lolita. Humbert has parked his car on the side of the road, perched high above a small mining community, echoing with a sound to which he has deafened his ears up to now: Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that with this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic – one could hear now and then, as if released in an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat … but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.25 The voices of children at play are precipitated syntactically from a broad spectrum of perceptions that do not travel in a straight line, any more than Humbert’s omnidirectional road trip with Lolita, any more than the counterfactual imagination discovers its purposiveness with strict teleological rigor. The gist of things here is more dialectical than teleological. Humbert himself gives a nod to the Hegelian undercurrent of much of my argument, not in terms of some final synthesis, but with acknowledgement of the ways in which Hegel, as Brandom emphasizes, is invested in the idea that experience is essentially a commitment to progressively finding out more about the boundaries of the concept which are otherwise assumed to be selfenclosing. Humbert of course falls prey to the logic of a more terminal synthesis. Conceding that he is trapped by the police on his overlook of the small mining town he confesses “… and there I came to a gentle rocking stop. A kind of thoughtful Hegelian synthesis linking up two dead women,”26 Annabel Leigh and Lolita. I must note once more that I am not doing a close reading of the entirety of Nabokov’s text. What matters more for my purposes is the reader’s attunement to what happens in the experience of reading under the kind of constraints Nabokov imposes. I am less committed to a totalizing rehearsal of the meaning of what has been read. What enhances the capacity for attentive affordance on the reader’s part is primary. Suitably enough, the articulation of Humbert’s thoughts in the quoted passage requires a reader’s compliance with oxymoron. The syntactical twists and turns of the passage presuppose a unifying “melody.” But that unity is vaporous in more ways than one. The reputedly blended voices are also undeniably antithetical: “majestic and minute, remote and near, frank and divinely enigmatic.” Furthermore, this sequence is fitfully interrupted by Humbert’s registering of discrete sense percepts – e.g., laughter, the crack of a bat, the clatter of a toy wagon. They compound our oxymoronic disorientation by evoking an alternate coherence of time and space where everything belongs to the same realm of facts: the lovingly mythified schoolyard. It figures a dissonant juxtaposition with the counterfactualism of Humbert’s syntactical swerves.

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It is important to see that oxymoron is moribund in this passage. I might make the thrust of my thinking here more explicit by asserting that Humbert’s syntax, whereby he finally register’s the pathos of Lolita’s absence, takes the form of a counter-counterfactual. Death commands such a reckoning with the end of “possibilizing.” Lolita’s absence denotes the nullity of anything more being imaginable. It is the antithesis of the counterfactual. The temptation would be to make a virtue of this bleak necessity, as Humbert himself does by taking refuge in the aestheticizing of death. Concluding his criminal confession before the jury of his readers, Humbert appeals to their reluctant sense of complicity with the crime. The simple fact of the reader’s coming to the final page of the narrative, Humbert reasons, forces a confession. It is impossible that the reader would have preferred the author’s death to Quilty’s. Addressing the reader under the flimsy disguise of an appeal to Lolita herself, Humbert confidently asserts … one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer [than Quilty], so as to have him make you [Lolita] live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.27 The aurochs and the angels are creatures of other worlds than our experience among Nabokov’s sentences constrain us to. Touchstones of our fear of loss, they make us susceptible to the seductions of transcendence. The mythos of artistic eternity entertained in the last lines of Lolita seems admonitory, reserved for a reader who has not paid sufficient readerly attention to Nabokov’s work. Human experience, as our capacity for counterfactual thinking attests to, does not demure the prospect of change even on the threshold of the seemingly unchangeable. The literary exemplar that comes most promptly to mind once again is Beckett’s “Imagination Dead Imagine.”28 Beckett knows the inescapable need to go on, the restful seductions of eternity notwithstanding. On the contrary, Humbert’s imagining some timeless consummation of his love for Lolita is epiphenomenal of his refusal to grant Lolita her mortal reality in the vibrantly elapsing time of her youth. Even more to the point, Humbert’s indulgence of an aesthetic idealism, his invitation to the reader to indulge it here, belies the syntactical rigors of the book we have just completed. After all, Nabokov’s prose entails a reader’s self-knowledge of the necessity to afford the events of the novel readerly engagements that resist punctual knowledge, that resist the idea that there is nothing more to know. Nabokov’s sly invocation of aurochs and angels belies the greatest virtue of his prose, without which the novel would not have the imaginative vitality that distinguishes it: a scrupulous attentiveness to possibilities not yet exhaustively articulated. I say this with the admonition that articulation is the thing that matters most. Such is the syntactical thing that I have counterposed to Heidegger’s “thing being” of the artwork.29 Durable pigments are only figments of experience. Nabokov’s sentences honor the durability of thinking. This does not mean that the novel goes on forever. It means that the novel fosters

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an openness to thinking more about what has been at stake in the course of reading it. This not to say that the novel is therefore merely memorable. It stages the occasion for reflecting upon a reader’s capacities for affording her attentiveness to the task of reading in the first place. I have returned to the concept of affordance quite deliberately to emphasize the not surprising, to me at least, relevance of design theory to literary composition. As Don Norman points out in The Design of Everyday Things, the designer’s animating question is “… how do people know how to act when confronted with a novel situation ….” In answering the question, Norman asserts that the designer has recourse to what he calls “an ecological approach”30 to information pickup. That is, everything potentially counts as a counter of intelligibility. But the available attentional foci are not inherently prioritized with respect to intelligibility. Norman’s “novel situation” pertains to the novel and to all other literary forms inasmuch as they are articulations of verbal components, that follow a querying, which is to say possibilizing, trajectory. As we have seen, Casey’s deployment of Husserlian “possibilizing” does not assume a merely alternative means to otherwise preordained ends, or pure chance, i.e., indeterminacy per se. Experience is not reducible to either paradigm. Knowing that anything can happen is tantamount to the requirement that possibilities must be entertained. This is an expectation that – as my notion of the compositional ethos intimates – existential agents and agential readers alike will afford themselves powers of adaptation sufficient to reckon with what is coming. I’ve already made it clear that adaptation is inextricable from reason-giving: specifically giving better reasons on the assumption that we never know enough, even in the circumstance that might otherwise appear to be self-evidently intelligible. When Don Norman says that “design thinking” is not exclusive to designers but is evinced by artists as well, he is referencing the inextricability of adaptation and reason-giving in our experience of accommodating what, for lack of a better word, we must call interpretative difficulty. The notion that literary writing can be difficult is typically accompanied by the complaint that the author could make it easier for the reader by cultivating greater verbal transparency. My riposte to this complaint, especially with respect to the reputed difficulty of the texts I’ve examined here, is inspired by “design thinking.” Design theorists accept the beneficence of difficulty. They honor the virtuous durability of problem-solving activity, which I would say is one of the beneficent “problems” of reading literature. As Norman attests, designers are typically embarked on a problem-solving mission with the expectation that once they’ve engaged the assignment, they are prone to skepticism that the problem has not been formulated in the right way.31 What ensues is something like a pursuit of counterfactuals. By questioning what designers call the apparent problem, on the assumption that the real problem is yet to be discovered, designers de facto expand the space of possible solutions.32 Only by questioning the aptness of the problem to which one assigns one’s thinking can one make space for imagining what it does not yet take account of that might denote a more relevant need. I am not proposing a systematic analogy between the practices of designers

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and the practices of writers/readers in the realm of literarity. But let me suggest that the animating circumstances of the human thinker in both instances are quite similar, experientially speaking. The presupposition of a false problem is productive for both enterprises. Designing Literarity

In these pages, of course, I am concerned primarily with the reader of the literary text. But rather than indulging the familiar trope of “suspension of disbelief” as the proverbial counter for experiencing literarity, design thinking might prompt enthusiasm for a more acutely analytical trope: suspension of sufficient reason or cause. Error is de rigueur. Interestingly enough, one of the mottoes of design theory favored by Norman and, according to him, coined by Stanford professor David Kelly – “Fail frequently, fail fast”33 – rhymes conceptually with Beckett’s admonition in Worstward Ho,34 “Fail again. Fail better.” In both cases, knowledge of some kind of agential “going on” is invested with imaginative agency only where we find ourselves inadequate to the task of knowing ourselves to be in pursuit of self-knowledge. So we might say that designers and agents of literarity both presuppose difficulty, without apology, as enabling creativity. I will persist in my conviction that, in the case of the literature, the creative act is a capability shared between writer and reader. The literary artist is kindred to the imaginative designer who, on Norman’s account, understands “never [to] ask [himself] to solve the problem I am asked to solve.”35 This is because the prospects for experience encompass a broader horizon of expectation than any unique expectations allow for. Likewise, literary artists, by feigning adherence to syntactical norms, invite easy readerly solutions in order to show up capacities for solving more difficult problems. The problem to be solved must be discovered in the process of solving it. I needn’t go on at greater length about how this conundrum informs the syntactical gambits featured in the literary texts I’ve sampled here. Rather, let me exemplify how much of what is at stake in such gambits depends once again upon an enhanced capacity for reason-giving, without which the transition from one understanding to another – from one attitudinal groove to another as I figured the issue at the beginning of this chapter – is inconceivable. I have treated reason-giving as a counterpart to attention giving throughout this work. I have repeatedly held faith with the Hegelian assumption that experience presupposes a determination to find out progressively more about our concepts by supersession of their boundaries. It is therefore reasonable to expect that fully attending to whatever perceptual item solicits the concept is implicitly the solicitation of a reason for surpassing the limits of the concept. I offer an example from William Carlos Williams Spring and All,36 “The Red Wheelbarrow.” A justly famous and by now canonical modernist poem, it nonetheless remains enigmatic for many readers, at least insofar as the question of its

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meaning is often said to hinge on a question that the poem begs all too provocatively: what “depends” upon a “red wheel/barrow?” I want to begin by maintaining that all questions earnestly in pursuit of answers invite conceptual reasons for why they are sufficient to whatever possible answers present themselves. We shall see however, and especially in the context of Williams’s poem, that the putative reasons are too often presumed to be conceptually determinate. They are presumed to be so in precisely the way that I am claiming literarity, by its affinity with counterfactual imagination, is not inclined to indulge. We need only contemplate the widely divergent accounts of the compositional sources for the poem. On the one hand, the poem is deemed to be a product of the poet’s tendency toward naked pictorialism. Williams had just become an enthusiast of the “precisionist” painter Charles Sheeler. On the other hand, Williams acknowledges that what I might call the “compositional ethos” of the poem has its root in painful personal experience. He attests that he wrote the poem out of recollection of a scene he witnessed peering out the window after a night of worrisome bedside attention to a sick little girl who was his patient. This is a token of the poem’s sentimental origin. Not surprisingly, I would prefer to foreground the poem’s starkly revealed syntactical armature. No less surprisingly, I wish to feature the way in which the poem courts our attentiveness to the dependence of one element of existential being upon another. Such is the uncontroversial sine qua non of syntax, which is otherwise simply inarticulate. My account of literarity after all presupposes the necessary convergence of attention and dependence. This is not to say that the visual pictorialism and the sentimentalism that I have just rushed past are not operative in the poem. I would rather say that they are relatively subordinate to the effects of the poem that are actively syntactical, ordaining an experience that is immediately as much the reader’s as the poet’s. The critic Neil Easterbrook reminds us that, when first published in Spring and All, the poem was numbered not titled. The refusal of titling gives emphasis to what develops in the poem as the rule of its development. That is, the omission of a title makes us more nakedly dependent upon the syntactical, developmental increments of the poem. Their mutual dependency heightens our attention to ourselves as capable of paying attention on variable registers of perception. The ways of attentiveness that are conjured in the poem, needless to say, invite an explicitly re-combinative logic for the duly attentive reader whose capacity to adapt to new contextual cues is beneficently tested. Here is Williams’ map of dependency. so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water

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beside the white chickens.37 For me, the most conspicuous thing about how the poem functions is that syntax dictates diction or semantics,38 not the other way round. That would be an all too conceptually driven compositional protocol. The prepositional disposition of the poem announced in the first stanza reminds us once more how syntax is relational. It is articulative. More to the point, it compels us to understand relationality as instantiating a condition of dependency. So in each of the three subsequent stanzas, we are obliged to contemplate how wheels are perceptually distinct from wheelbarrows, how rain is perceptually distinct from rain water, how the color white is perceptually independent of the chickens it so colors. I feel confident saying that conception follows perception here in so far as the line breaks starkly determine the relations of dependency. The line breaks constitute the experiential pressure exerted by the poem upon the reader. These formal features of the poem are selfevident of course and have been widely commented upon in the course of its canonization as a modernist touchstone. My interest in the poem however, not to mention its utility to my argument, depends more upon seeing how its instantiations of dependency inveigle us to think distinctions where we are not expecting to find them. It forces us to see that what we took to be the problem was imaginably the wrong problem. It furthermore turns the reader’s mind back upon itself as a compositional agent. This is where reasongiving is ineluctable. I am not suggesting that the syntactical moves of the poem, conveniently marked by the line breaks, are merely a bid for honoring the possibilizing of imaginative acts. Rather, they make possible the distinct reasons that the syntactical dependencies solicit. They do so in a way that affords, what we might now call an attentionality with distinct consequences. If we must summon reasons for answering questions like “How is a wheel not a barrow, a wheel barrow not a wheel, the piling up of a barrow rendered possible by a wheelbarrow?,” then we are attuned to our capacity for positing such questions in the form of a bigger question: what are the limits of our capacity for producing reasons? I want to suggest that this is where the reputed difficulty of art is revealed to be its mandate for reason-giving. All making in this regard is making difficult, but without the necessity to concede difficulty as a unique feature of ivory tower productions. It is a general feature of thinking wherever presentations of sense stymie further cognitive articulation with worldly circumstance, mandating a yet unarticulated combinatory logic. Williams makes the point that all such articulations have a syntactical armature. His poem culminates in our recognition of what capacity for combining and re-combining elements we have exercised in reading it. This is where literarity, as I have discussed it in these pages, dovetails with experience generally. This is just to say, as Williams might say, that difficulty comes naturally. It might even be fair to say that the poem dramatizes a design problem, not so different from what constitutes the compositional ethos.

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Each line break discloses the possibility that we are solving the wrong problem. We fail frequently with the line breaks that organize each stanza as a discrete item. Our success in solving the right problem is indistinguishable from the act of reading the poem the wrong way, i.e., ignoring our dependency upon what we haven’t yet experienced. Attending to the Literary

Attention is of course what gives us our sense of dependency upon what we know is not yet the limit of our experience, inasmuch as it denotes a capacity for attending further. It is inferentially a goad to creativity since it is imbricated in a context of other, potentially alternate, objects of attention. This I count as the most invigorating reward of attending to the literary. Attention must therefore be acknowledged as a token of incompleteness. As I’ve already conceded however, this would risk the misstep of valorizing an infinite deferral of knowledge and the consequent emptying out of the value of experience. Therefore, it is worth noting that there is much rich speculation going on among contemporary neuro-anthropologists – in their explorations of how mind emerges from the matter of physical existence – that I believe bears on any discussion about how literary experience, particularly at the level of syntax, cultures the difficulty of imaginative invention. Imagination, as I’ve already discussed it here, presupposes something that remains to be seen, i.e., rendered intelligible. Aptly, Terence Deacon has coined the term “entention” to designate “all phenomena that are intrinsically incomplete in the sense of being in relationship to, constituted by, or organized to achieve something. non-intrinsic.”39 Where the non-intrinsic is involved, where intelligibility is thus teased out, the occasion for reason-giving is upon us. Deacon of course is not thinking about imaginative possibility or artistic creativity.40 But he is careful to point out that the “ententional” disposition and the necessity of the adjectival form of entention might be best understood by entertaining the phrase “inclined toward.” I take this to be a nod toward attention as what makes knowledge of incompleteness coherent with dependency. Deacon himself makes the point: “For example purposive behaviors depend on represented ends, representations depend on information relationships, information depends on functional organization ….”41 Here his reference point is purposive behavior generally. But here, purpose, as distinct from purposiveness, and not so distinct from the conditions for the Kantian judgment of taste, is bracketed. Williams’ poem starkly displays the inducements of incomplete knowledge to reanimate our pursuit of knowledge. Our dependency on what we don’t yet know is vitally constitutive of the act of knowing, not to mention our dependency on activity to instantiate self-knowledge as the prerequisite of human imagination. Knowing the self as a counter of incompleteness is a disposition to consider variants (in Casey’s terms), or formalitates (in Duns’ Scotus’s terms). Either way, our thinking is correlative with the solicitation of reasons. Either way, we are speaking

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of experiential constraints that presuppose alternative experiences, without which imaginative agency is unimaginable. Where we turn our attention is the crux of creative powers. Taxis in the perceptual domain generally and syntax, in the domain of literarity particularly, is the axis upon which that attention is turned. What comes next always entails a reason among reasons. It acknowledges the necessity of choosing one thing or another to attend to, at the expense of what warrants present themselves for paying attention to other things. Literarity, as exampled in Williams’ poem, is the scene of such negotiations. My sense of imaginative activity here, unlike Casey who sees imagination as pure possibility independent of any investment in value, is emphatically value-laden. My notion of the compositional ethos would be inconsequential if it didn’t mandate making determinate sense, however provisional, in the successive moments, the syntactical increments, of the act of making literary art. I began my inquiry with the proposition that works of art are commonly thought to be touchstones of imagination in an insufficiently experiential way. That is to say, art-critical and art-theoretical interpretive ambitions often founder upon the impulse to abstract from the act of reading which I here consider to be roughly consubstantial with the compositional act. The compositional act, as we have witnessed in the literary works attended to in these pages and wrought by a diverse range of artists, issues in an emergent sense of lived experience. It does not represent life as a content of experience. Accordingly, I have treated syntax in literary art as a site of combinatorial interactions that do not depend upon pre-existing terms of fitness with respect to how one thing relates to another. Gregory Bateson’s42 upending of the order of intelligibility in Nature has relevance here. As he succinctly puts it in his famous debunking of the medieval world view, i.e., Lovejoy’s conceit of the Great Chain of Being, “… the mind at the top, now became that which had to be explained.” Bateson, taking off from Lamarckian theory, observes that animals adapt to changing environmental “pressures.” We therefore can’t avoid the conclusion that the mind of the human animal is evolutionary. Deacon, in his appreciation of Bateson’s line of thought and more specifically following the footsteps of George Henry Lewes’ theory of emergence, thinks about experience very much in the terms with which I have conjured the compositional ethos. Sense does not accumulate as the sum of its articulating elements. Its articulation possesses vitality insofar as it varies from itself: “The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to the sum of their difference.”43 It is apt that my argument obliges me to wade into the adjacent and swiftly moving disciplinary waters of biological anthropology, since I am maintaining that literarity is an enhancement of latent, emergent, human capacities. As opposed to the hard sciences where we expect a cause to be a physical, fully predicative fact, Bateson states that “in the world of mind nothing – that which is not – can be a cause.”44 He is endorsing emergence as the aspect of mind that entails experience qua change, or to use his preferred term “difference.” The essential condition of

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syntactical articulation is difference precisely insofar as meaning emerges without causal prejudice. Indeed, Aristotelian-style first causes, at least within the realm of tragic plot, do not retain their explanatory power in the course of their unfolding consequences. A literary sentence, I have maintained, is not meaningful until it is. Bateson’s notion that “… the transform of a difference in a circuit [I might say a circumstance of change] is an elementary idea,”45 allows me to broaden my claim that syntax as a mode of thought, a motor for generating ideas, imposes upon us the obligation to keep thinking. This chimes with Deacon’s – again following Lewes – characterization of emergence: “… the principle characteristic of emergent properties is an intrinsic inability to predict those properties from the properties and laws at the lower [in my terms ‘prior’] level.”46 The emergence of semantic value in Williams’s poem, e.g., not only exceeds the predictive and predicative scope of “So much depends …,” but encourages a reader to entertain competing reasons for honoring one dependency or another. Attentiveness is thereby invigorated, not merely rewarded, by reasoning. This is to say that emergence and reason-giving are confluent in the development of the syntactical order of the poem. The value at stake here is literarity per se. What resources for human experience are better appreciated than those that further experience in the way that I am claiming literary texts can actualize? My use of the term literary here is of course looser than my use of the term literarity. I am maintaining the distinction on the grounds that “literary” denotes potentiality with respect to the ongoing history of art making, e.g., styles of art making, while literarity is existentially de rigueur given the fact of human imagination. I began this inquiry by adducing three theorists of literary art who address what I am calling the prospect for literarity in literary art as an experiential register: Burke, Derrida, and Altieri (Altieri’s Wittgenstein). Though none of them addresses attention per se, they each presuppose attentiveness to circumstantial impingements from the sensorium. For Burke, this presupposition is epitomized in the scene/act ratio. For Derrida, it inheres in the performativity of reading. For Altieri, it is the Wittgensteinian acumen for seeing aspectually. I treated each of these thinkers as complicit with the Kantian “aesthetic idea” which is presentational before it is conceptual, thereby guaranteeing an experiential threshold for literarity. Nevertheless, the presentational elements or aspects I am alluding to here denote not so much the artifacts of the physical world as what I have called, after Hopkins and Duns Scotus, “the available mind.” For Kant, this is the occasion for any attentiveness to the physical world in the first place. As Kant says about the “aesthetic attribute,” correlative as it is with the “aesthetic idea,” “… it [the physical attribute] makes reason think more.” Mind is self-serving in this regard. As I have repeatedly cautioned, the literary works that I have read in these pages, according to their syntactical modi operandi, are not meant to be representative of a self-valorizing literary tradition so much as a practical human condition. This condition is featured prominently in imaginative acts. Such acts are however not the exclusive property of the literary arts, or even of the arts generally, as my frequent

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recourse to design theory attests. My emphases on possibility, hodological spaces, affordances, and self-elaboration (in lieu of self-sufficiency) in order to assert the value of literarity invite us to go in a different direction than the aesthetic privilege of good “taste” and the cultural cache of canonical legitimacy might lead us. I prefer to think that this different direction is pointed to by Beckett’s compulsion to look elsewhere from where he is immediately focused. In his letter to Hans Naumann, he characterizes this disposition as inattentive. But I have already intimated my faith that such inattention elides with attention inevitably. If this is the case, we cannot decouple attention from the essential movement of mind that is imagination itself. Furthermore, it is important to realize that the elision of inattention with attention is a function of the re-combinatory mandate that is in force whenever a syntactical dependency defaults on or disappoints expectations of semantic continuity. Perhaps it is fair to say that Beckett’s “elsewhere” is the threshold of this experience, where attention is drawn to a new possibility – however provisional – of intelligibility. It comes close to the condition of mindedness itself which is always a contextual proposition. Mind finds meaning according to the variants of contextual construal, i.e., the circumstantial pressures upon agency: the topoi of attention. In this regard, it is worth glancing briefly at the current trend toward revising literary critical practice (Best and Marcus, Latour, Felski, etc.) in the direction of “surface” experience rather than deep interpretation. Surface readers admonish us to shift our attention. While this trend offers the benefit of attending to the circumstantiality of reading literary and social texts and thereby avoiding the metaphysical traps of symbol decoding, mining the unconscious and indulging the transcendent mysteries of allegory, it also risks skirting the duties of mindedness with respect to acts of mind and the perpetuation of human agency. So, pace Best and Marcus and Latour, Felski is, for my purposes, the best exemplar of sticking to the surface of things in literary theorizing. Furthermore, any broader discussion of the methodology that I am claiming Felski samples for us would, for all its richer nuance, risk distraction from my focus on literarity as a form of agency. Rita Felski’s recent Hooked: Art and Attachment admonishes the critic to demur from excavating the foundations of interpretative judgment in lieu of asking how or why we find ourselves in a relationship of attachment to literary works of art. As she says, To focus on attachment is to trace out relations without presuming foundations; to look closely at acts of connecting as well as what one is connected to; the transpersonal as well as the personal; things in the world as well as things in works of art.47 While Felski puts her emphasis on “why” we find ourselves in a relationship, I would prefer to emphasize how we enact relationships. Felski’s notion of attachment has affinity with attention. But I would mark a distinction. Attachment, because it privileges an already formed subjective disposition, sleights the adaptive

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agency inherent to attention. I am sympathetic to Felski’s interest in more attunement-driven approaches to the literary text. But I am reluctant to agree that a mere openness to the aspects of the text that no interpretive program already presupposes will suffice as an account of what scope of experience the text allows to emerge. Felski’s wariness of any kind of detachment from the work of art, such as seeing it or appreciating it within a conceptual framework – Hegel and Foucault are the menacing names she mentions – risks the presumption that thinking about the work of art is separable from feeling for the work. Felski is right to want to protect the specificity of the artwork. But I don’t see how conceptualizing, as long as it resists conceptual apotheosis, is necessarily an obstacle to appreciating specificity. My account of syntax, after all, entertains exactly the opposite possibility. That is, my emphasis on reason-giving as a condition for knowing variant trajectories for connection – the syntactical order of things – looks beyond attachment. It looks beyond our belonging to the world of our attractions toward what capacities for further attachment we are cultivating in appreciating our attachments. Does this amount to the demand that one needs to explain oneself conceptually in order to have experience of the sensorium generally or of the work of art particularly? Certainly not in terms of one’s self-possession in the moment. But perhaps, with respect to some kind of Beckettian “going on,” I could endorse a protocol for attending to what reasons are in the offing when intelligibility is challenged by contextually ill-fitting compositional particulars. This would be conducive to a self-possession that rigorously faces up to the prospect of unpredictable circumstance. As the indwelling irony of Beckett’s famous phrase proclaims, one does not go on without thinking about it. I hope that the works I have fostered attachment to here are indicative of how our capacities for attention depend upon cultivating awareness of how much more we might take in. After all, the conceit of the “available mind,” which I have frequently recurred to in order to propel my argument, amounts to understanding that reasongiving might be understood as a mode of uptake in a world of unrelenting, but not therefore inscrutable, change. In fact, I have been implicitly making the case that scrutability is goaded by change, at least within in the domain of human imagination. That is to say, the syntactical compositions – the compositional circumstances – with which I have sought to engage my reader, are not meant to represent an authorial style, an aesthetic attitude, a set of periodizable historical practices, or a regimen of judgment. These would be the usual warrants for employing what I do not deny is my own practice of close reading. Since I have given the availability of mind a privileged place in my argument, it should be clear that what counts as literarity for me is precisely how the text potentiates the experience of mind. The literary text is obviously not the only catalyst for this experience. But the text’s significance, even its cultural value for me, does not range far beyond this experience. From the start of this project, I have been chary of indulging the traditional axiological buttresses of aesthetic works: emotion, morality, truth. I do not mean to dismiss investments in emotion, morality, or truth. I would rather subordinate such ideas

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to the ways of knowing them, under the constraints of what I’ve characterized as possibilizing syntactical articulation. Ultimately, this is just to say that literarity is not inherently an art form and does not lend itself to the reification of artistic value. Getting at the value of art has always been a fraught proposition. As Larry Shiner points out in The Invention of Art,48 the tensions between artisanship, craftsmanship, physical labor, and spiritualizing aestheticism have vexed practicing artists and their critics since the advent of the mimeticism in the classical world. It is well known that the Greeks had no word for art. Techne or making is often considered to be the best approximation to modern artistic practices, at least insofar as it does not succumb to the romantic pitfalls of something like Keatsian beauty. But I wager that another Greek word, psychagogia, offers even more rigorous scope for thinking about art. Psychagogia, loosely translated as soul guidance or leading out from the soul, might thereby seem to be already complicit in the metaphysical aspirations of romantic aestheticism. Greek theater purported to tutor the emotions through psychagogia, thus to encourage moral improvement. But psychagogia, practiced by stoics, epicureans, and cynics, all practical experiencers of the world, was fundamentally a maieutic discipline. This leading out of the soul is effectively a testing of assumptions in the manner of dialectic. Related to the Greek elenchus meaning both reproach and subsequent self-examination, psychagogia guides skepticism toward what is already known.49 Psychagogia leads the skeptic toward the possibility of a variant construal of knowledge in the mode of Socratic dialogue. Though ultimately Plato’s view of psychagogia has a metaphysical trajectory, Socrates, under Plato’s direction, makes his students suffer the birth pangs (maieutic therapeutics are epitomized in the vocation of the midwife) of self-contradiction. Is this not the fruitful exigency of any compelling re-combinatory logic? Similarly, the syntactical practices I have sampled in these pages, in terms of imaginative robustness, dispense with the spiritual burdens of self-serving expressiveness, especially the expression of creative genius. Instead, they favor emergent Batesonian differences and the reasons which such differences might solicit in the service of an essentially improvisational sense-making enterprise. The elaborative drawing out or birthing of truth in Socratic pedagogy where the student, pregnant with possibility, does not already know what he is capable of knowing – until he recognizes his emergent wisdom in his alienation from his knowing self – should be resonant for the reader of the sentences by Ashbery, Hopkins, Green, Faulkner, Pynchon, Stein, Pinter, Nabokov, and Williams, that I have adduced to exemplify literarity. I say exemplify because the staging of human capacities for experience, which I am asserting is the essential work of such sentences, does not accede to any systematizing rules. Or, to put this another way, if I am seeing the shifting attentional topoi of syntax as a kind of psychagogia, I am trying to keep faith with a view of art that resists all transcendental temptations and thereby resists the demands of classical aesthetics for hierarchies of taste, or touchstones of truth. We students of artistic experience, as Socrates might have it, will be content to know such experience as our own capacity for knowing it differently. Difference in this case, and once again with a nod

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to Hegel, is a mode of determinacy. It knows itself best in terms of a penchant for self-differentiations that are ever more ingeniously form-giving. Notes 1 Ruth Byrne, The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 198. 2 In Yves Citton’s analysis of the cultural apparatuses of media that turn the payer of attention into the currency of attention, he is describing precisely the condition of being “stuck in the facts,” rued here by Byrne. I think Byrne’s advocacy for the counterfactual impetus of imagination might serve as an apt corrective for the problem Citton identifies in The Ecology of Attention, trans. Barnaby Norman (Cambridge: Polity Press), 35–37. 3 Edward Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 123. 4 Ibid., 116–7. 5 “Krisis,” the Latinized version of the Greek, has biblical provenance with respect to a break in faith. It is the warrant for a decision, a reorganization of priorities (as is explicit in Aristotle’s peripeteia). All of these meanings denote a predisposition to respect the re-combinative logics inherent to the “available mind,” given that the available mind is occasioned by incremental temporal change. 6 Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. James Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 32. 7 Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel Jr. (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). 8 See Byrne, The Rational Imagination, 208. 9 Ibid., 210. 10 Ibid. 11 Nabokov, Lolita, 16. 12 Casey, Imagining, 206. 13 Ibid., 207. 14 Kant’s third critique and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria are aligned with Casey’s view of imagination as a resource of variability. For Kant and Coleridge (as for Schiller), the term of art is “play.” Play denotes an attentional variability inasmuch as it is not circumscribed by pre-experiential precepts. 15 Casey, Imagining, 211–2. 16 Ibid., 212. 17 Ibid., 231. 18 Nabokov, Lolita, 54. 19 Ibid., 57. 20 Ibid., 61. 21 Ibid., 59. 22 Casey, Imagining, 201–2. 23 Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 29. 24 Ibid., 32. 25 Nabokov, Lolita, 308. 26 Ibid., 306–7. 27 Ibid., 309. 28 Samuel Beckett, Imagination Dead Imagine (London: Marion Boyars, 1965). Syntactically speaking, Beckett’s refusal to give a single direction to the statement by eschewing a grammatically instructive comma after the first “Imagination,” compels our sense that we must think imagination twice. Imagination is dead. Imagination is imagined as dead. Imagination is thereby a varying of our attention to verbal imperatives of knowing.

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29 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Kress (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2012), 147. 30 Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 12. 31 Ibid., 219–23. 32 Ibid., 220. 33 Ibid., 229. 34 Samuel Beckett, Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen, Ill Said, Worsward Ho (New York: Grove, 2014). 35 Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, 217. 36 Williams, Imaginations: Kora in Hell/Spring and All/The Descent of Winter/The Great American Novel/A Novelette and Other Prose (New York: New Directions, 1971). 37 Ibid., 89. 38 Again, I take some support from Jan Mieszkowski who points out that we are forced to decouple semantics from pragmatics when we do literary criticism: “There can be no ‘dialectic’ of form and content, a position Chomsky has maintained in the face of considerable resistance from new generations of linguistics committed to developing a generative semantics. As a consequence, it is not really possible to undertake a Chomskyan ‘reading’ of a poem or a novel…” Jan Mieszkowski, Crises of the Sentence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 29. 39 Terence Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (New York: Norton, 2013), 27. 40 While it is true that Deacon does not address artistic creativity, I should note that Henry Staten, in his very suggestive Techne Theory: A New Language for Art (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) productively harnesses the thinking of neuro-anthropologists like Deacon for the purposes of understanding artistic production and appreciation. Staten’s observes that the key notion of “morphodynamics” in Deacon’s work implicitly addresses the manner in which self-organizing forms manifest themselves not from the top-down but by virtue of the interaction dynamics of the component elements of forms. See Staten, Techne Theory, 192–3. My own view is that syntax manifests such interactive dynamics but not without recognizing the consequences of such interactions. And not without respecting their determinations as meaningfully interpretable. 41 Deacon, Incomplete Nature, 27. 42 Bateson, Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 455–6. 43 Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, Vol. II (London: Greubner & Co., 1874), 412. 44 Bateson, Steps Towards and Ecology of Mind, 458. 45 Ibid., 460. 46 Deacon, Incomplete Nature, 157. 47 Rita Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 1. 48 Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 49 For a full appreciation of how psychagogia dispenses with any presupposition of selfsufficient individuality distinct from the struggle with an interlocutor, where dialogue is not an assumption of pre-existing knowledge but a strategy for approaching truth, see François Renaud’s “Humbling as Upbringing: The Ethical Dimension of the Elenchus in the Lysis.” This essay appears in Rethinking the Elenchus In Plato’s Dialogues and Beyond, ed. Gary Alan Scott (State College: Penn State University Press, 2002), 186–7.

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INDEX

Note: Italicized pages refer figures and with “n” notes in the text. Across One Sixth of the World (Vertov) 88 Action in Perception (Noë) 15 act of perceiving 66, 68 act of reading 22, 43, 70, 120, 121 adverbialism 97 aesthetic attributes 7, 8, 31, 122 aesthetic education 85, 86, 87, 91 aesthetic ideas 7, 8, 108, 115, 122 agent intellect 38, 39 Alford, L. 8, 36 Alighieri, D. 66 Altieri, C. 4, 5, 6, 122 “The Ambassadors” (Holbein) 17 anagnorisis 43, 105, 109 anamorphic projection 14 Andrew, D. 87, 88 Annabel Lee (Poe) 107 antisyntactical syntax 85; see also syntax Aristotle/Aristotelian 37, 38, 70, 82n59, 84, 105, 109, 122, 126n5 Art as Experience (Dewey) 93 Ashbery, J. 6, 7 attention 11–32; attentiveness and 82n45, 89; calling to 13–19; capacity 17, 19, 21, 26, 44, 47, 55, 77, 86–87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 113; powers of 19–29; shifting 100–102; syntax and kinétoscopic frame 29–32; visualizing 11–13

attentiveness 27, 40, 56, 59, 89; attention and 82n45, 89; to the blind spot 14; boundaries of 31; conditions of intelligibility 54; constraints of 50; defined 41; determinative knowledge 68; expectation and 79; human capacity for 22, 26, 35, 94; inattentiveness and 58; literary 27; objecthood of the object of attention 100; obsessional 111; paranoid 93; responsive to 19; sensorium 20, 122; sine qua non 21; to spatially situated objects 15 Attridge, D. 69 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein) 65 availability of mind 44–58, 124 Badiou, A. 41 Balász, B. 87, 88 Barthes, R. 66, 81n15 Bateson, G. 121 Baumgarten, A. G. 20, 33n19 The Bear (Faulkner) 36, 45–47, 49–51, 57 Beckett, S. 1–2, 41, 58–59, 73–75, 100, 115, 117, 122–124, 126n28; artist’s ability to go on 107; “elsewhere” 123 Being Realistic About Reasons (Scanlon) 73, 77 Biographia Literaria (Coleridge) 126n14

Index  133

Brandom, R. 50, 51, 56, 63, 114 Burke, K. 2–4, 76, 122 Byrne, R. 104, 106, 107 “The Calling of St Matthew” (Caravaggio) 8, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 40, 73 calling to attention 13–19 capacity 86–87; abstraction 39, 56; attentional 17, 19, 21, 26, 44, 47, 55, 77, 86–87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 113; for attentiveness 26; combining and re-combining 119; compositional 38; counterfactual thinking 115; determinative 57; for hearing 68; human 1–9, 19, 22, 35, 52; imaginative 107, 113; inferential 106; for knowledge 50; reader’s 96–97; for reason-giving 117; subjective 31; visualizing 40 Caravaggio, M. M. da 8, 15, 17–19, 18, 21–22, 40, 73 Casey, E. S. 104, 105, 107–109, 112, 116, 126n14 Caught (Green) 8, 22, 23, 26, 29, 31, 34n25 Cavell, S. 27 Celan, P. 36 “cine phrase” 82n45 Citton, Y. 8, 95, 126n2 Clune, M. W. 85 Coleridge, S. T. 108, 126n14 compositional ethos 9, 11, 63, 64, 81n15, 85, 105 The Concept of Mind (Ryle) 96 consciousness 66; capacity 95; implicit 3; narcissistic preoccupation 4; of the object per se 50; “of all else” 25; paranoid 101; private 16; self 63; self-revising 21 The Courier’s Tragedy (Wharfinger and Driblette) 94, 96 Crowther, P. 14 The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon) 9, 92, 95 Deacon, T. 103n48, 120–122, 127n40 defamiliarization 88 Derrida, J. 3–6, 79, 122 The Design of Everyday Things (Norman) 9 , 33n12, 116 Dewey, J. 83, 93, 94, 97 Driblette, R. 96 The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Gibson) 16 Eisenstein, S. 82n45, 88, 90

enactive perception 59; see also perception Erfahrung 49–50, 80, 84, 101 expectation 69, 97, 107; attentiveness with 79; of doing 100; failed 112; human 7; of imaginative norms 107; narrative 14; reader’s 26; of semantic continuity 123 experience, reading for 62–80; Pinter’s “A Kind of Alaska” 72–79; syntactical thing 62–69; taking steps 69–72 Experience and Judgement (Husserl) 112 Faulkner, W. 9, 20, 45, 48, 49, 53, 56, 105; duly attentive reader 47; Erfahrung 49; narrative 51; narrative fiction 50; proliferation of syntactical subordinations 49; pronominal antecedence 55; syntactical complications 55; syntactical elaborations 54; syntax 46, 47, 51, 54–55, 57, 59, 61n24 Felski, R. 3, 9, 123, 124 femininity 72 Fish, S. 21, 22, 33n21 Flaubert, G. 84, 89 formalitates 40, 41, 43, 45, 47, 54, 55, 57, 120 Forms of Poetic Attention (Alford) 8, 36 Foucault, M. 124 Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) 64 Gibson, J. 21, 26, 29, 33n12, 33n17, 33n21, 56, 58; radical empiricism 16 A Grammar of Motives (Burke) 2 Green, H. 8, 19–29, 31, 32, 34n32 Haiku 66–68, 71, 72, 74, 81n16, 81n19 Hayot, E 102n11 heed concepts 96 Hegel, G. W. F. 2, 49, 62, 70, 124 Hegelian paradox of substance 2 Hegelian self-consciousness 63 Heidegger, M. 62, 65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 111, 115 hodological space 56, 123 Holbein, H. 17 Holt, E. B. 16 Hooked: Art and Attachment (Felski) 123 Hopkins, G. M. 9, 36–45, 60n1, 60n8, 122, 125 How It Is (Beckett) 1 How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One (Fish) 21, 34n31

134 Index

Humbert, H. 105, 107, 109–115 Hume, D. 85, 86 Hurley, S. L. 13 “Hurrahing in Harvest” (Hopkins) 40–43 Husserl, E. 3, 104, 112, 113, 116 The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Ranciere) 86 Imagination Dead Imagine (Beckett) 115, 126n28 Imagining, A Phenomenological Study (Casey) 104 “In A Station of the Metro” (Pound) 81n19 inscape 36–41 instress 36–38, 58 intelligibility 34n32, 41, 46 The Invention of Art (Shiner) 125 “The I’s Eye: Perception and Mental Imagery in Literature” (Ouellet) 30 James, W. 16, 26, 96 Johnson, S. 87 Joyce, J. 20, 106, 107 Kant, I. 2, 7, 31–32, 33n19, 34n43–44, 38, 65, 86, 108, 126n14 Kantian aesthetic indeterminacy 45 Kantian self-caricaturing aesthetic 20 Keats, J. 92 “A Kind of Alaska” (Pinter) 72–79 kinétoscopic frame 29–32 A Kino-Eye Race around the USSR: Export and Import by the State Trading Organization of the USR (Vertov) 89 knowability 19–29 knowledge experience 49 Lacan, J. 13 La Recherche 30 Leigh, A. 107, 109, 114 Lewes, G. H. 121, 122 Lewin, K. 56 literarity 1, 3, 4, 5, 104–126; attending to 120–126; designing 117–120; possibilizing 104–107; sin and syntax in Lolita 107–117; syntax as a scene of rationalizing activity 104–107; see also attention literature 1–2; act of inscription 5; described 91; singularity 69; visualizing attention in 11 Livingston, P. 98 Lolita (Nabokov) 9, 105, 107–117,

Lombard, P. 41–42, 46, 52, 58 Lord Shaftesbury 85, 87 The Making of Americans (Stein) 64, 65 Malraux, A. 22, 25 Man With a Movie Camera (Vertov) 88 Marion, J. L. 14 McCaslin, C. 46, 47, 52, 53, 57 Merleau-Ponty, M. 2, 11–13, 22, 23, 25, 32n1, 34n30 Michelson, A. 90, 91 Mieszkowski, J. 81n19, 127n38 mimesis 31–32 mind see availability of mind Mole, C. 97, 99, 100, 101 montage theory 87–91 Mute Speech (Ranciere) 84 Nabokov, L. 9, 105, 107–116, 125 Nashe, T. 45 negative capability 92 Nietzsche, F. 64 Noë, A. 13, 16, 22; “enactive theory of perception” 15 Norman, D. 9, 26, 29, 33n12, 34n32, 116, 117 Notebooks (Hopkins) 50 “The Novelist of Human Unknowability” (Robson) 22 object perceived 66, 68 O’Neill, J. 22 “The Origin of the Work of Art” (Heidegger) 62 Ouellet, P. 30 Passions (Derrida) 5 Pausnau, R. 38 perception 31, 33n17, 66, 114; aural 67; availability of mind 44; confused 20; enactive theory of 15, 22, 59; erroneous 49; negation 71; passive undergoing 93; sine qua non, 80, 81n6; syntax and 36–41; trompe l’oeil 17; uninvited 26; visual 16; vivacious 66 peripeteia 105, 126n5 phantasms 39 The Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 50 Picasso 107 Pinter, H.: “A Kind of Alaska” 72–80 Plato 70, 125 Poe, E. A. 107

Index  135

poetry 36–37, 38, 43, 88, 92 possibilizing literarity 104–107 possible intellect 38, 39 potentiality of reader 83–102; montage theory 87–91; reader’s lot 91–100; shifting attention 100–102; style 83–87; syntax 83–91 Pound, E. 81n19 powers of attention 19–29; see also attention Pozzo, A. 17 pragmatics 33n18, 45, 127n38 pragmatism 49 The Preparation of the Novel (Barthes) 66, 81n15 Principles of Psychology (James) 26, 96 Progressus (Kant) 31–32 The Prose of the World (Merleau-Ponty) 12, 22, 32n1, 34n30 Proust, M. 8, 30, 31, 66 psychagogia 125, 127n49 Pynchon, T. 9, 92–101, 125 Ranciere, J. 79, 82n59, 84–89, 89, 98 The Rational Imagination (Byrne) 104 reader see potentiality of reader reader’s lot 91–100 reading for experience see experience, reading for Reckoning With Imagination (Altieri) 4 recollective rationality 63 redans 66, 67 responsiveness 14, 30, 35, 37, 45, 46, 52, 55–58, 93 Robson, L. 22, 29 Roe, R. 23, 24, 26–29 Rutter, B. 70 Ryle, G. 96, 97 Sartre, J.-P. 61n32, 70 Scanlon, T.M. 73, 78 Schiller, F. 2, 85–86 Scotus, J. D. 2, 36–42, 44, 47, 59, 113, 120, 122 sense and sentences 35–60; availability of mind 44–58; Lombard’s The Sentences 41–44; syntax and perception 36–41 Sensus Communis (Kant) 86 sentences see sense and sentences

The Sentences (Lombard) 41–44 Sheeler, C. 118 shifting attention 100–102 Shiner, L. 125 Shklovsky, V. 87–88 sin and syntax in Lolita 107–117 The Singularity of Literature (Attridge) 69 A Sixth of the World (Vertov) 88, 89 slow-motion: camera 12; filming 12, 13 Socratic pedagogy 125 Sophocles 100 Spring and All (Williams) 117 sprung rhythm 38 Staten, H. 127n40 Stein, G. 25, 26, 29, 64, 65, 69 Sterne, L. 45, 87 style, potentiality of reader 83–87 syntactical order 25, 27, 30, 32, 63, 64, 71, 87, 96, 122, 124 syntax 7, 21, 35; action 23; antisyntactical 85; Faulkner, W. 46, 47, 51, 54–55, 57, 59, 60n24; futurity of 87–91; kinétoscopic frame and 29–32; perception and 36–41; potentiality of reader 83–91; as pragmatical 20; as a scene of rationalizing activity 104–107; and sin in Lolita 107–116 taking steps 69–72 taxis 29, 38, 41–42, 63, 121 Techne Theory: A New Language for Art (Staten) 127n40 telematics 59, 61n38 tendere (a condition of tending toward) 36, 38–39, 41 Tristram Shandy (Sterne) 87 trompe l’oeil 14, 15, 17, 22–23, 25, 31–32 Van Gogh, V. 106–107 Vertov, D. 81n16, 82n45, 88–91, 97, 100 visualizing attention 11–13; see also attention Waterman, B. 40 Wharfinger, R. 96 White, A. 96, 97 Williams, W. C. 9, 117–122, 125 Wittgensteinian, L. 4, 73, 122 Worstward Ho (Beckett) 117 Ziarek, K. 71–72