Utah State University

From the SelectedWorks of Gene Washington

2015

THE FASCINATION OF THE UNFINISHED,ABANDONED AND WRECKEDgene washington, Utah State University

Available at: https://works.bepress.com/gene_washington/170/

1

THE FASCINATION OF THE UNFINISHED,

ABANDONED AND WRECKED

"Unfinished paintings are enticing cracks in the facade of art history, lures along

the path to a deeper understanding of artistic processes and impulses." The New York

Times, January 9, 2014. The reference is to a current exhibit (April 2015) in the Modern

Museum of Art, NYC.

On an analogy with writing, thie above can be taken to mean that the reader,

reading an unfinished MS, has an opportunity for a deeper understanding of the author's

intentions with the MS than with a finished one—where intentions includes choice of

subject, problems addressed by the MS, strategies of writing employed by the author,

gaps in the narrative and so on. The word "enticing" is seems especially apt here. Unlike

a finished MS, the unfinished one entices the reader to finish the MS—prompts the reader

to ask, "what would it take to finish this MS? Give closure to its subject?" "From what I

read here what other MSS can I "spin off" from this MS?"

But the question remains. How does one finish an unfinished text? First there is

the problem of identifying an unfinished text. Is Hemingway's "Hills Like White

Elephants" finsihed? Recall that the couple, Jig and the American, are at odds about Jig's

pregnancy. Will she get an abortion, which the man's wants, or carry the fetus to term?

The ending of the story presents no clear decision by Jig. The reader is left in

uncertainty—or a state of undecibility. Life or death for the fetus? Much the same

situation ends the TV series, The Sopranos. Will Tony go on living? Or wll he be killed?

2

With the movie "Backcountry," one is left to ponder the question: is the woman

protagonist, seen lying on the bank of the river, dead or alive? With her erstwhile male

companion, there is no doubt that he is dead, earlier killed and partially eaten by a black

bear. The final scene of the movie "Grey" presents the same ambiguous ending.

With such endings one might be putin mind of Schrodinger's thought experiment

with a cat:

A cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed

box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom

decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat.

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that

after a while, the catis simultaneously alive and dead Yet, when one

looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive

and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum

superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the

other (Wikipedia).

Suppose we then say, any unfinished text like the above we can go one with two

general kinds of sequels, one where the protagonist is dead and one with h/h alive. With

examples of unfinishedness in this collection, one has the option of "leaving the subject

dead in the water" or keeping it alive by going on from the end by unpacking

presuppositions of the subject, or in general making the implicit more explicit. Every

great work of art, literature, or architecture that gets completed, there are probably just

as many that are abandoned and left unfinished because of wars, political strife, lack of

3

funding, or the death of the artist. Most of these works are lost and forgotten, but

some, by masters like Da Vinci and Mozart, are regarded as incomplete masterpieces.

The following are ten of the most famous unfinished works of art in history

(http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-unfinished-works-of-art.php).

Unfinishedness, far more than finishedness, makes the news. Think of the

recent articles about the earthquake in Nepal and the unfinished work of looking for

survivors, repairing the buildings and the like. The New York Times, by my count, has

run something like thirty one articles on the disaster (see, for example, "Survivors

Lay Amid Rubble and Bodies" May 1, 2015: A 4). A related new item appeared in the

Times of April 29, 2015 about an antiquarian interest in a beam from a temple in

Katmandu. He is pictured thinking about money the beam would bring in the

antiquarian marks of the West.

Unfinishedness, as "finished by time," is often a source for art. See, for

example, "Banky Finds a Canvas, and a New Fan Base, in the Ruins of Gaza" (The

New York Times May 1, 2014: A 4). Then there is always Shelley's poem Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

4

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away".

All this we might reduce to a simple formula: If X happens because of Y, then Y

causes Z to happen.

***

Contents:

1: Mute Responders

MUTE RESPONDERS

Epitaphers write in the imperative mood with essentially the same message:

“stop here and read.” Can this be the message of “Hills Like White Elephants?” Does

Hemingway command us to stop and read about the death (or possible death) of a

fetus? If there is any support for this possibility, it lies first in the static nature of the

story (“stasis”) and emotional response of the reader (“animation”) and secondly in

giving “voice” to the unborn child as a “mute responder” (Johnson).—essentially the

work of the rhetorical figure apostrophe.

5

So how does “stasis, ” as it affects the reader, appear in “Hills”? How does

Hemingway stop, or slow, the reader in order to allow him or her to meditate upon

the “presence” and “absence” of the unborn child? Link’s answer draws on linguistic

theory, especially that of Halliday. Stasis is essentially the diminution (and often

negation) of language’s way of representing temporal succession—that is by means

of active (transitive) verbs, aspect (especially present participles) and adverbs of

time, “before,” “after” and the like. Aiding this effort are devices like repetition,

questions, and the foregrounding of spatial representations by means of nouns and

adjectives. The general effect, depicted by absence as well as presence, is verbal and

physical stasis: “The man and the girl are trapped in a state of imbalance and

disagreement. Both are relegated almost exclusively to the passive (my emphasis) of

‘experiencers,’ rather than the active role of agents” (Link 69); “The text makes its

own repetition of evasive maneuvers and prominent inactivity explicit in Jig’s

comment that all they do is ‘look at things and try new drinks’….The couple’s few

remaining agentive actions outside of dialogue (16 instances) are almost entirely

intransitive (10 instances) further emphasizing their inability to affect

anything”(70). Unmentioned by Link is the subtle distinction “Hills” makes between

lack of movement/movement (stasis and animation) with grammatical aspect.

Aspect, unlike tense, is non-deistic. Its meaning does not depend on gaining context

(and so meaning) by reference to time external to the time of the speaker. It is,

instead, time realized by the “internal temporal constituency” of an utterance

(Comrie 3). Perfective and imperfective are the two principle forms of aspect. In the

first, time is given a beginning, middle and end. Things start and stop. In the latter,

6

time has no beginning and end. Also one plays on the potential capacity of things

(events) to be either perfective or imperfective. Shade, for example, has more

potential for being portrayed as perfective (a completed action) than does a shadow.

Hemingway follows this representation in “Hills.” “The American and the girl with

him sat at a table in the shade (CSS 211); “Come on back in the shade,” he said, “ you

mustn’t feel that way” (214)“The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain

and she saw the river through the trees” (213).

It’s possible to say “my shade moved with me” but it sounds a little odd.

With this grammatical distinction, between perfective and imperfective, we

can say that the man exhibits more perfective action and attitudes than does Jig.

Such qualities make him more rigid, more dogmatic, than the girl. (Consequently, he

is more instrumental, we can say, in slowing down reading time of the reader.) Much

of this is due his repetitive arguments (Link). But it is most apparent in the lack of

present participles (“—g”) in the man’s speech; a grammatical form most

responsible for representing exophoric movement. His use of the verb “know”

(repeated nine times) and its cognate “realize” (two times) is also instructive.1 Here

the intelligible ground is a situation extended in time. With a word like “know” every

point of time in the situation is identical with every other point. Whoever knows, as

the American says he does, knows the same thing at all times. It is impossible for

him to change what he knows and still know. Comrie calls this a “static situation”

(48-49) Its opposite, a dynamic situation, is one which it is impossible not to change

or move in some way. Hemingway gives most of this kind of representation to Jig: “I

1 Jig uses “know” twice and “realize” once; but only as an ironic echo of the man’s use of them (CSS 214).

7

was being amused. I was having a fine time…I was trying” (CSS 212). “Being,

amused” “having a fine time” and “trying,” represent temporal phases that gesture at

phases in which she was not “being amused” (Comrie 49-51).

Two other unremarked features of the language of the story, ones that slow

the reading pace, are what text-linguists call “recitation” and “deixis.” Recitation, as

the word suggests, means to cite again. In its original legal context, to recite

essentially meant to cite authorities or written precedents. What has been done, or

said, and recorded in the past becomes a warrant for advocating certain present and

future acts. In a literary context, like “Hills,” the authorial intention of recitation is

to use them as a conduit to enjoin the reader “to stop and think about this ” or “this

is what you should take as the truth.” (Since misrepresentation is a design feature of

all languages, the reader does not have to accept any of the speaker’s remarks.). In

“Hills” Jig and the American arrest the movement of the story by reciting opposing

arguments about the same subject, But the arguments of the American are far more

legalistic; that is to say positive, even dogmatic. Their essential character rises from

his appeal, again like a courtroom lawyer, to precedents. He keeps saying that “he

knows” persons who have undergone the operation; that it is perfectly safe and so

on. Jig’s opposing view mostly takes the form of questions. As such, it presupposes

that certain answers are possible. Her thoughts are on the present and future not

the past as a template for the present and the future. She shows herself, in the

language of temporal linguistics, to be a “presentist.” For the topic under discussion

(the fate of her unborn child) the past is irrelevant, not to say non-existent, erased

by present and future concerns. For the man only the past exists as it was for them

8

as a couple. He wants , in fact, to substitute the past for the present by means of an

abortion (Le Poidevin 125-37). Representation of the different attitudes towards

time appear only in the dialogue between Jig and the man.

ANIMATION, ITS LOSS AND REANIMATION

So how does stasis lead to animation in “Hills”? And what is the nature of

such animation? And, as it will turn out, the loss of animation and (sometimes)

reanimation? Newstok, under different heads, discusses three different possible

“types” of animation by their effects: instruction (something new is learned from

reading an epitaph or epitaphic forms of literature and contemplating its meaning);

action (one is moved to actually do something different from what one has been

doing) and the re-animation of an emotion (one returns to an epitaph, or epitaphic

writing, to re-ignite a previous emotion; for example, the speaker’s motive in Gray’s

“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” for contemplating the epitaphs there and

recording his response to them). In a written text like “Hills,” these three

overlapping types of possible (but certainly not necessary) animation depend not

only the subject and dialogue but also on what linguists call the deistic force of

tense—the representation of time as measured and made intelligible by context; or

reference from the present time of the speaker to another point in time. Both Jig and

the man make references from a ‘here and now” to a past. But they differ on the

value of that past.

MUTE REPONDERS

In order to provide more context for what has been said and what follows we

need to discuss more specifically the workings of apostrophe in terms of strategies

9

and intentions. As a “turning away” from linear discourse (a beginning, middle and

end plot) one “subverts” the normal expectation of time flowing from the past

through the present to the future. One effect of this is the slowing of reading time

and the introduction of new information. (This process might be likened to a river

opening a new channel.. The action diminishes the amount of water in the main

channel but it adds to the complexity, and information context, of the system as a

whole.) In the Culler and Barbara Johnson way of thinking about apostrophe, briefly

mentioned above, the authorial intent is to humanize an “absent, abstract or

inanimate” subject. In this there is always an “I” (addressor) and a “you” (the

addressee). The “I” “calls” the “you” into the text as a “mute” responder. Such a

presence “informs without speech” (Barbara Johnson 191). It is perhaps not too

much of a distension to say that Hemingway often uses this device to address the

dead. In “ A Natural History of the Dead” where one purpose is to set the record

straight on what it is like to be dead. This is also true of “Nobody Ever Dies” but here

there is also the ever present need of the fiction writer to “animate” the text with

color, human interest and movement. This need is expressed primarily through

dialogue constructed from linguistic forms like negation (“no,” “not,” “never,” etc),

aspect (imperfective) and questions. An example is the following stretch of dialogue

(as argument) between Maria and Enrique in “Nobody Ever Dies.” The subjects

“called” into the text to be animated is the dead from the Spanish Civil War:

Please note that Enrique’s reference to fighting (and dying) for “liberty”

echoes, with a difference, the “championing of liberty” (Strenum pro virili Libertatis

Vindicatorem) of Swift’s self-composed epitaph.

10

“And we say such things (dying in the war) are justified? That

men (their friends) like that should die in failures in a foreign

country?”

“There are no foreign countries, Maria, where people speak

Spanish. Where you die does not matter if you die for liberty.

Anyway, the thing to do is live and not to die.

But think of who have died—away from here—and in failures.”

They did not go to die. They went to fight. The dying is an accident.”

“But the failures. My brother is dead in a failure. Chucho is a failure.

Ignacio in a failure.”

“They are just a part. Some things we had to do were impossible….

But in the end. It was not a failure.”

She did not answer and he finished eating (CCS 475)

In order for apostrophe to create animation there must be continual contact

between the “I” and the “you,” here between Maria and Enrique (“I”) and the dead

(as a second “you”). Otherwise, the text losses its ability to apostrophe and so the

ability to designate some subject a mute responder. In the above passage

Hemingway’s statement, “She did not answer and he finished eating” breaks the

contact with the dead and their role in the text as “mute” responders (Barbara

Johnson 191).

How do mute responders appear in “Hills” and what role do they play? The

question presupposes the conditions necessary for an “absent, abstract or

inanimate” subject to become a responder and how such conditions exclude certain

11

other subjects from achieving that status. The first condition, of course, is that the

subject be, at some time, “absent, abstract or inanimate,” not present, concrete and

animate. But, given the tendency of language to animate everything, how do we

decide what is absent, abstract and inanimate? How do we determine when the

subject is absent? Let us assume that the absent and the abstract are what initially

appears to lack self-consciousness and autonomy but has the potential to gain them

by an authorial fiat. In the initial state the subject appears lacking in the ability to

modify behavior (if any), reflect on experiences, or think of itself as both an “I”

(subject) and a “it” (object). In the final state, typically at the end of the narration,

the subject appears in possession of some, if not all, such qualities. Take, for

example, the hills across the Ebro. Let us assume that in their initial appearance that

they are inanimate. They have, being “long and white,” potential qualities of the

animate, but they are incapable of movement. But as the story unfolds, they take on

a quasi-animacy and presence by Jig’s analogy with white elephants and by her

“looking” at them (CSS 211, 212). “Looking,” as an intentional act, establishes

contact between Jig and the hills and so adds to their “animation.” In Barbara

Johnson’s apostrophic model an “I” (animate,, present and concrete) directly

addresses a “you” (absent, abstract or inanimate) In other words there is always

dialogue between two different persons or one person talking with him or herself—

a situation in which the subject person is represented as both an “I” and a “you.”

Using Baudelaire poetry as an example, Culler notes how the author “posits a

relationship between two subjects even if the sentence denies the animicity of what

is addressed” (141)

12

In the following passages, in which Jig’s analogy appears, the reader knows

who the “I” is. But who is the “you,” the American, Jig herself, or the hills; or, given

the ability of “you” to be plural, all three? Certainly there are Culler’s “two subjects,”

the hills as “hills” and the hills as “white elephants”:

“They look like white elephants,” she said (CSS 211)

“They’re lovely hills,” she said. “They don’t really look like

white elephants. I just mean the coloring of their skin through

the trees” (212)

However we identify the gap that exists between the “I” and the “you” we must

recognize that new information has entered the text. “The hills can represent, on the

one hand, the precious dream of a family relationship, so ardently desired by the

girl, and on the other, the harsh stifling of the dream, manifested in the man's cold

response to her comment about white elephants.” (Nilifer 75) For the gi

Perhaps we should then say that the minimal conditions for an object to

become a mute responder are five 1) The subject must initially be absent, abstract

and inanimate; 2) An “I” must address a “you”; the “I” must be present as a narrator

or character in the story;, not the third person author (3) there must be constant

contact, whether looking, hearing, touching and the like, between the “I” and the

“you.” The “I” must not drop from the attention of the “you.” 4) the subject must be

episodic, entering and leaving discourse, but not present as a mute responder

during the entire length of the text ; 5) As a responder, it must either bring new

information into the text or repeat given information in a new way. Such

13

information, in theory, is essential for arriving at a coherent interpretation of the

text.

With these conditions in mind we might want to exclude from any list of

“genuine” responders in “Hills” ones like the following.

The train. It is inanimate and it brings new information about time in the text.

The word “train,” appearing two times, repeats given information. But no one

establishes contact with it by “seeing” it. It is, throughout the story absent from the

sensory contact, “present” only as a future possibility: ”the express from Barcelona

would come in forty minutes” (CSS 211); “He looked up the tracks but could not see

the train” (214).

The shadow: “the shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she

saw the river through the trees” (213). It is inanimate, episodic, sensory and it

conveys, along the “field of grain,” some information about the season of the year.

But, as a third person entity, it is not an addressable “you” and therefore lacks a first

person “I” present in the text. Therefore, it cannot be animated and made to

respond.

The bead curtain: “Close against the side of the station there was…a curtain,

made of strings of bamboo beads…to keep out flies” (211); “The girl looked at the

bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads” (213).

Here again the subject is inanimate, episodic, and informative insofar as it helps to

answer the question “where are we?” Where things are, at any specific time, conveys

important information about the relationship between Jig, the “it” (the unborn

infant) and the man. The bead curtain may tell us that they are, for example, the

14

only persons separate from everyone else; from the waitress and the persons inside

the bar “waiting reasonably” for the train (CSS 214). Are they separate from the

others because they have a separate problem? Separation, as a classical rhetorical

figure (articulus, paranomasia), is often used to prefigure the introduction of a new

problem (Quintilian; Burke). But it can also appear as a variant of apostrophe

realized as the interruption of the flow of linear time by new characters fixed, but

responding, in their own time.

Now let us turn to what may be (according to our five conditions) genuine

mute responders and their possible role in addressing the questions posed earlier:

does Jig abort the child? If so, what happens afterwards? Does Hemingway convince

us that the “it” reference of the dialogue (“It’s just to let the air in” 212) is abortion?

Or is Hemingway engaging, with his characters, in a dialogue a forever mute,

inanimate object.?

We begin with Culler observation that the effect of apostrophe may be to

“constitute the object as subject” and by so doing bring new information into the

text (143). “It” as a third person form can, if treated singularly, appear only as an

object. Promotion to subject not only requires a syntactical change but also a

ontological transformation from inanimate third person entity to a first person

animate one. (Shelley’s treatment of the wind in “Ode to the West Wind,” according

to Culler and Barbara Anderson, is an example). To be convincing, such

transformation would have to involve a reciprocal “re-constitution” between Jig and

the “it.” They each animate the other. The child animates Jig into a concerned

15

would-be mother. Jig, in turn, performs the equivalent task of “personifying” a fetus.

The task of the man, by contrast, seems to suppress all these changes.

So where do we stand with the consensus problem? The problem that

arises from scholars taking opposing views about the fate of an unborn child? Is the

“it” an unborn child threatened with death? If it is, then we have some justification

for continuing to say that Hemingway is writing an epitaph for it; or, at the very

least, drawing on the tradition of epitaph-like writing. We seem, at this point, to

have arrived a state of confusion between what is actual (an exophoric sense) and

what is only possible. In the scholars mentioned above, Renner, Nilifer and the

others, the possible (are the man and Jig talking about a fetus? Will Jig get an

abortion?) the possible becomes an actuality. Yes, “it” refers to a fetus and yes Jig

gets an abortion?) But this seems to go against Hemingway’s intention. Where are

we “told,” perhaps in the same way we are in A Farewell to Arms, that a pregnancy

occurs: did Jig or the man feel the fetus “kick”? No. See representation of abortion in

play:JonathanReynolds “Girls in Trouble” NY Times; p. C6, 11 Mar

HANNAH Arendt: speech/action: appear or hide; infant (in-fans; without

speech); does not describe itself as an actor : The Human Condition, 159

***

A SENSE OF THE NEGATIVE:

HEMINGWAY'S WORSHIP OF THE VOID.

16

Nothing is more real than nothing

(Rien n’est plus reél que rien). Samuel Beckett

The Trilogy.

Of the many scholars writing on Hemingway today, Susan Beegel seems to be the

main one that takes nothingness in Hemingway as a valid way to approach his work. In

her commentaries, nothingness appears, under various names, as what might be called

“effects through the lack of something.” In the Craft of Omission (short title) she is

primarily interested in how the “thing left out” strengthens Hemingway fiction. Of the

five “categories” of omission she identifies, the fifth is most relevant here. It is the

“theme” of “nothing.” “When everything is left out, nothing remains, and like “A Clean

Well-Lighted Place,” Hemingway’s archetypal story of ‘nada,’ much of his writing is

ultimately about nothing” (92; my emphasis). In a later essay, “That Always Absent

Something Else” (short title), Beegel carries Hemingway’s “theme” of “nothing” into an

analysis of “A Natural History of the Dead.” Key issues here are loss (Hemingway’s loss

of his parents’ belief in divine creation (75-76), Hemingway’s withdrawal from

abstractions (76) and by implication, his perception of a void at the center of

everything—but one that causes unpleasant events, war, death, privation, etc., to happen.

Instead of finding evidence of the “absent” other in nature (that is, God), Beegel

continues, Hemingway “found nothing, an absence of God in nature, an absence of life in

death, an absence of divine concern for human suffering” (“That Always Absent

Something Else” 77). She does not cite Hemingway’s letter (1950) letter to E. E.

Dorman-O-Gowan but it seems apropos here—especially in Hemingway’s representation

of nothing, like time, as a universal presence:

17

What a bastard you are to decide not to come down here.

….Seeing you again was all I gave a damn about. But am

getting to be like the whore who wouldn’t give a fuck

for nothing. And this is evidently nothing again. Our

well beloved nothing and from who’s or whom’s well?”

(SL 691; my emphasis)

Where does nothing come from, “from who’s or whom’s well?” I want to return to

this question below.

Does Hemingway, often or just sometimes, kneel at the altar of the void? Is

nothingness a constant presence in his work or are there only episodes (or pockets) of

nothingness in it? That the void (or one of its family members) comes as an uninvited

guest to the characters in his stories seems obvious. was often an uninvited guest, in the

figure of death, at the door of his on his mind seems fairly obviousOne way to response

to such questions is to ask about how his stories end. Do they start from something or

nothing and do they end in one or the other; or in some combination? he start from

something or from nothing? Or some combination of both?

What I would like to do here is to add an extended footnote to Beegel’s

observations. My focus is on “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.” Much of the material for

the note is from work done in negative metaphysics. With the exception of passages from

Hemingway’s letters, I make slight use of biographical matter. The key concept is “fact,”

18

a state of affairs physically experienced as either “light” or “dark” and cognitively known

as either “positive” or “negative.” In this latter mode, they both transmit information

about things seen and unseen, the said and the unsaid. I make the claim that Beegel’s

“ultimately about nothing” can be seen from the perspective of dark (negative) facts in

particular combinations with light (positive) ones. This makes the subject of inquiry

essentially ontological. Since Aristotle, questions about what “ultimately” exist, or

“support” everything else, fall under that head.

But in order to accompany me on this quest, I ask my reader to suspend whatever

disbelief she or he has in the existence of dark (negative) facts; to at least entertain, for a

short time, that negative facts are as real as light (positive) facts and that it is right to

follow their footprints. In Bjornnson words, “They (negative facts)…are an ontologically

free lunch. Or rather, they are complimentary once the positive facts have earned their

place on the menu “ (2).

A “Clean Well-Lighted Place” is a shadow play with light and dark facts. In it,

Hemingway uses such facts to create “pockets” of nothingness and, perhaps, a situation

with “grave universal implications” (Hoffman 174). In this he is following, with a

difference, similar shadow plays of writers like Plato (in his allegory of the cave; The

Republic 6) and in passages from Shakespeare (for example, A Midsummer Night’s

Dream: 5:1 and Richard II: 2:2) and those from the Bible (for example, Job: 24: 17 and

Ecclesiastics: 8:13.).

19

The shadow play in “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” begins, and has a

comprehensive reach into nothingness, with the scene where the old customer, watched

by the waiters, sits in dappled shadows:

They [the waiters] sat together at a table that was close against the wall

near the door of the café and looked at the terrace where the tables were

all empty except where the old man sat in the shadow of the leaves of the

tree that moved slightly in the wind (CSS 288; emphasis mine)

The light is very good and also, now there are shadows of the leaves

(290)

Shadows cast by the leaves of a tree are typically dappled. In this case, they are also

moving “slightly.”

So what is involved in the “making” of dappled shadows? To answer that (or

appreciate the difficulty of answering it) we first have to put ourselves in the

position of the old man sitting in the shadows cast by the leaves. We are alone,

drinking. We have lived a long time and have experienced, and observed, many

“dark things,” loneliness, fear, despair and the like. Now suppose we begin, looking

at the shadows around us, putting together cause and effect: what is producing the

shadows and what is their effect, physically as well as emotionally? We look up and

note that the wind is moving the leaves and look out toward the “electric light” (CSS

288). We conclude that the light is the source for the shadows. (We observe that

there is no moon or stars).1

20

The shadows, we note, are produced by blocked light.leaves, in this case,

being the blocking object. But, since the shadows cast by the leaves, are dappled, we

reason that the leaves are blocking only part of the light. We don’t know what

species of tree the leaves belong to, but we can hazard the guess, from their size and

shape of their shadows, that the “ratio” of dark to light it takes to make a dappled

shadow is roughly, 70/30. (The exact ratio would involve the [impossible?] task of

counting the number of photons emitted by the street light and subtracting the

number of photon that compose the light lying outside, and between, the boundaries

of the shadows.)

To continue the “thought experiment” of being the old man on the terrace:

we know that shadows have a long history in making intelligible the strategies and

intentions of writers. We remember, for example, Plato’s allegory of the cave and

Shakespeare’s “Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour

upon the stage, and then is heard no more” (Macbeth 5:5) What is the general message in

these examples? We reach out a hand to try to touch a shadow. What we feel is only the

surface on which the shadow lies. We conclude that a shadow is untouchable and so

ungraspable. What substance it has as something does not lie in what it is in itself, but in

something else, the surface, it falls on. In this we might be reminded of Dante’s lines

about the spirits of the dead from the Purgatorio (2: 79-81):

O vain shadows! Except in outward resemblance: three times my

hands I reached behind it, they as often returned empty to my breast

21

again (Ohi ombre vane, fuor che ne l’aspetto; tre volte dietro a lei le

mani avvinsi e tanto mi tornai con esse al petto. [my translation])

Shadows, we reasonably conclude, are negative facts. Those things that

produce them, the electric light, the leaves and the surface they fall on are positive

facts. If we can discover a “third” thing (idea, concept, relationship) between them;

one that binds them into a unified vision, then we can give, perhaps, the scene a

“shadow meaning.”

The old man sitting in the shadows can be said to be experiencing with his

senses what C. S. Pierce calls “firstness” (29-76 [The Universal Categories]) It is

reality, before and without language; reality via the senses stripped of any possible

metaphoric meaning. Something like this was on Hemingway’s mind in his words to

Bernard Berenson: “There isn’t any symbolism (in The Old Man and The Sea) the sea

is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The

shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is

shit” ” (SL 780). Should we, as readers, leave it there? Following Hemingway’s

statement should we conclude that the shadows are shadows, the leaves are leaves,

etc., and then go on reading? Or should we go on to the next level, what Pierce calls

“secondness”? Here we are in language and the beginnings of abstracting from

sensory information; into what Pagnattarro, speaking of “Chi Ti Dice La Patria,”

variously calls “shadow meaning” (37, 46) and “shadowy significance” (38). The

presence of shadows in fiction, in short, is not just shadows. They also have “shadow

meaning.”

22

At this point we may begin to wish that Hemingway, like Plato in the person

of Socrates in the allegory of the cave, would step in to tell us what the “shadow

meaning” of the shadows is in “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.”

We don’t have to go far to find readers who tell us what they mean.

In order to understand symbolism, a reader must learn that it is a non-

superficial representation of an idea or belief that goes beyond what is

"seen." Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" uses

symbolism to help convey the theme of Nihilism, the philosophy that there

is nothing heavenly to believe in. It discusses that there is no supernatural

reason or explanation of how the world is today. Three symbols: the

soldier, the café, and the shadows of the leaves, found in Hemingway's

short story clearly displays this Nihilistic theme.

(http://www.exampleessays.com/viewpaper/76555.html)

Presumably, the writer of the above would also find symbolism in these shadow passages

from “Hills Like White Elephants” and “The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber”:

Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud

moved across the field of grain and she [Jig] saw the river through the

trees (CSS 213; emphasis mine)

Macomber stepped out of the curved opening at the side of the front seat,

onto the step [of the car] and down onto the ground. The lion still stood

looking majestically and coolly toward this object that his eyes only

23

showed in silhouette, bulking like some super-rhino (CSS 13; emphasis

mine).

I mentioned above that Hemingway, with his use of shadows, seems to be

following, with difference, in the tradition of shadowiness represented by writers from

the Bible, Plato and Shakespeare. What is the difference? It is, one may hazard the

opinion, a difference made possible by what Peirce calls “thirdness.” Here we enter the

realm of “truthmaking” (Armstrong, Björnsson). True linguistic representations are

made, in short, by a triadic relationship between real world objects (firstness),

oppositions to them set up by language (secondness) and an interpreting term that

mediates between firstness and secondness. Shadows are real world objects. They take on

“secondness” by someone representing them as something different from all other

possible real world objects. In our story of sitting in dappled shadows (above) the

difference between shadows and other mentioned objects (the electric light, leaves, etc.)

lies in their immateriality relative to the materiality of other objects. Truthmaking

(thirdness) is what we create by establishing a relationship between the immateriality of

shadows and the materiality of the electric light, leaves and every other material objects

mentioned by Hemingway.

(Please recall our minimal definition of immateriality is its untouchability under

all circumstances. We can never touch shadows themselves, only the surfaces they lie

on.)

TO WRITE TRULY

So what is truth in writing? In “What I Like About Hemingway,” Beegel says it is,

24

at least in part, saying what others ignore or refuse to say, especially about war. Saying

what “is” is tantamount to denying what to others is a negative fact. It is, as she

comments, Hemingway’s “credo.” By finding the truth we have the grounds for

“making” the truth. So we should ask what Hemingway’s take on truthmaking is;

specifically, what he often describes as the conditions for “to write truly”? And how does

it relate to how dappled shadows in “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” make truth in the

story? From his letters we learn that a true representation is essentially “getting it

straight” with real world objects (facts, states of affairs, etc.). In standard truthmaking

theory this has a family resemblance to the Correspondence Theory of Truth. To make

truth, as Aristotle has it, one has to say that something “is” when it “is” (exists). To say,

conversely, that something “is not” when it does not in fact exist, is also true. Real,

material, things, events and the like in an actual world “make” our statements about

them true or false (Metaphysics 1011b25). This is the gist of Aristotle’s statement

that “the fact of the being of a man carries with it the truth (emphasis mine) of the

proposition that he is, and the implication is reciprocal: for if a man is, the

proposition wherein we allege that he is true, then he is” (Categories 14b, 14-17).

Hemingway never uses, of course, that kind of language. But when he speaks of

truth, especially in his letters, he’s not far from the thought of such

languageespecially with the common phrases, “write truly,” “true and straight,”

“one true sentence” and the like (Phillips 23, 21, 28).

Like Aristotle, Locke, C.S Peirce and other common sense thinkers,

Hemingway describes all knowledge as being originally via the senses and ending as

a linguistic representation of the thing itself. Achieving a true representation lies, in

25

part, in giving the right title to a story. Like a proper name, a title gives being, as a

palpable entity, to the named person (SL 229). Being almost blinded by his son left

him with his visual ability impaired, and consequently, a diminished capacity for

writing: “Being blind even for a little while scares you—especially if you don’t just

write out of your head but with all the senses you have on tap” (SL 270); seeing

something as it is, and then describing it, means experiencing it with the senses and

without symbolic conversion. To Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway attributes success in

writing to life experiences: “whatever success I have had has been through writing

what I know about” (273). Sense impressions of the material world and an accurate

representation of it appear often in his letters. He talks repeatedly about getting it

“straight” in his writing; and he criticizes Fritzgerald for not achieving that with his

representation of Sarah and Gerald Murphy in Tender Is The Night:

It [Tender Is The Night] started off with that marvelous

description of Sara and Gerald…then you started fooling with

them making them come from things they didn’t come from,

changing them into other people and you can’t do that, Scott.

if you take real people and write about them you cannot

….make them do anything they would not do…You can’t make

one be another (407)

26

Writing truly, in other words, is not only about getting the facts right about what

was and what now is but also about what might plausibly be based on what is. Here

plausibility and probability go hand in hand. The message is twofold, one negative,

“don’t go beyond what is possible” and one positive, “make sure you include in your

writing not only what is inevitable, like death, but also what is highly likely.”

Writing to Dos Possos about his book 1919, Hemingway tells him “Remember to get

weather in your goddamn bookweather is very important” (SL 355). Why is

weather important? From the evidence of the stories, we may surmise that weather-

forms, rain, snow, heat, cold and the like constitute a large part of a typical

Hemingway system of “atmospherics”; weather-forms supply, for example, material

for dialogue (“Three Day Blow, ” “Cat In The Rain,” “Out Of Season”) and help to

explain the behavior and emotional state, of characters like Frederic Henry (A

Farewell To Arms) and the narrator of “In Another Country.” Without the presence

of snow and what it makes possible, skiing, neither “Cross Country Snow” nor “An

Alpine Idyll” would exist in their present form.

So how does the above play into Beegel’s “ultimately about nothing”? To answer

that we first have to ask how we recognize a negative fact. In essence, it appears as the

product of a subtraction, or a series of subtractions, of properties or relations from a

positive fact. Subtraction does not bring negative facts into being. They would still exist

without it. Subtraction just makes them accessible and “active.” As I mentioned earlier,

Blindness, for example, can be seen as a subtraction of sight from the ability to see;

deafness as a subtraction of hearing from the ability to hear or blackness as a series of

subtractions of all possible colors from an object. In all these examples, especially in the

27

case of blindness and deafness, the production of them as negative facts involves a

challenge to “normal function.” Seeing, that is, is a normal function of eyes; blindness, as

an absence of that function, challenges that. But please note also that no negative fact

would be intelligible without either the existence or expectation of a positive fact. All

negative facts are, as it were, “slaves” of their “master” existence or expectation. This is

the relationship, it seems fair to say, that runs through all representations of such facts

from Rochester’s Upon Nothing to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.

A shadow is the product of a subtraction of photons from a source of light. A

dappled shadow is the product of a subtraction of some photons from the source. Total

darkness is the complete subtraction of photons. Insofar as a product can be seen as the

result of a process, then we have some justification for saying that the terrace scene in “A

Clean Well-Lighted Place” is one stage in a process of negation—a process whose final

stage is whatever we want to claim is the import of the words “nada, nada,” etc (CSS

291). In this, Hemingway’s “writing truly” would extend to the significance dappled

shadows has as a negative fact. The old customer sits half in and half out of light. Is

Hemingway suggesting that the man, while he is on the terrace, is only half alive?

Perhaps then, by his walking away from the dappled shadows, away from their light

source, Hemingway is, in effect, robbing the old man of even a half life? (CSS 290).

Shadows without a light source equate to total darkness. Extending the reach of this

image is the older waiter turning out the electric light in the café (291). No more

shadows for the old man or the waiters, either inside or outside the café. Only darkness, a

global negative fact like death or the unseen part of an iceberg.

Every day is Ash Wednesday reminding us of our individual death.

28

Now please imagine Hemingway reading the lines immediately preceding and

repeating to himself the statement he wrote to Berenson about symbolism; “There isn’t

any symbolism (in The Old Man and The Sea) the sea is the sea…. All the symbolism

that people say is shit” ” (SL 780; Cf. 162). To him a line like “Only darkness, a global

negative fact like death” (and others preceding it) would fall under the category

named by “all the symbolism that people say is shit.”2

Or would they?

So let us for a few lines consider the possibilities, following Hemingway’s

dictum, that either 1) the shadows in “Clean Well-Lighted Place” are shadows and

nothing more or 2) the symbols can be made into symbols but the symbols would be

“shit.” Each of these options depends on our interpretation of the word “all” (“All the

symbolism that people say is shit”) In the tradition of negative information that I

am following in this essay, “all” is equivalent to “no more.” Once you have declared,

for example, that “All men are mortal” you have said, in effect, that “no man is

immortal” (Armstrong 58-59 ). “All,” entails, by necessity, the negative affair “no-

more.” Since Hemingway’s letter to Berenson was in reference to The Old Man And

The Sea, we might claim that Hemingway is limiting his remarks to the novel, not to

his other works. The novel, as it were, sets an absolute limit to what we can say

about symbolism.

But what if “all” as “no more” also refers to all his works? Doesn’t that mean

that he is saying in, effect, “no more shit (symbols).” Unlike an absolute limit on

symbolism making, in the first possibility, here we have the more attractive option

29

of “no more” symbols of a certain kind. And who is he saying it to? Presumably, to all

his readers, not just to a few scholars.

No one, it seems fair to say, is going to stop the production of symbols—

though there would be a problem in deciding which ones do not fall under

Hemingway’s representation. But there is a procedure, I believe, for limiting their

production. It essentially involves taking negative information (negative facts, states

of affairs, etc) seriously—to attend to shadows as much, and sometimes more, than

the bodies (positive facts, states of affairs, etc) that cast them.

Insofar as a symbol (or analogy or metaphor) is unstated in the text (“this is what

these shadows mean”) it can be seen as a negative fact. This, I think, is the general case

with Hemingway. Unlike Plato, or to a lesser degree Shakespeare, Hemingway does not

step into the text and tell us what shadows mean or what symbolic weight a passage like

this from A Farewell To Arms has: “…the troops were muddy and wet in their

capes…two gray leather cartridge…bulged forward …so that the men…marched as

though they were six months gone with child” (FTA 4; emphasis mine). The symbolism

involved in the rain, the mud, or in troops portrayed as pregnant women is “missing

information.” Whoever tells us what they symbolize, in effect, supplies us with such

information and asks us to take it as “true” information . Pozorski, for example, draws an

analogy between elements of the marching troops, Catherine’s still-born infant in A

Farewell to Arms, “modernist literature” (78-79); another commentator sees the rain,

featured in the passage, as representative of “an undesirable type of fertility”

(http://www.gradesaver.com/a-farewell-to-arms/study-guide/section1).

30

Parody and imitation, as add on extras, would also belong, as a distant relative, to

the family of analogy, symbol and the like.

So what is wrong with add-on extras? Aren’t we free to add to the text what we

think is “missing information”? No reader is required to accept it as “true”? At least three

objections can be made to it. One, dating from the Middle Ages, is that anything “added”

to an adequate description of a positive state of affairs violates the law of parsimony—

Occam’s Razor. Reducing the categories to an absolute minimum for an adequate

description, in theory, makes it easier for a reader (or listener) to process information.

Another argument against symbol finding is that the interpreter of a text, following in

love with the symbolism, can be influenced by his or her own interpretation to the point

of blindness to any other interpretation. Finally, perhaps the strongest argument against

add-on information lies in the “power” of symbols as negative information. In

Sorenson’s words, negative information, since it cannot be “paraphrased” as positive

information, is “more powerful than positive information. Knowing how things are not

gives you knowledge of exhaustiveness. If there is any reduction to be achieved, it runs

from positive statements to negative facts. For instance, one reductive strategy is to

exploit a kind of double negation; to say that the cat is on the mat is to say that there is no

negative fact of the cat not being on the mat ” (226-227). This, in essence, is

Armstrong’s “all” equates with “no-more,” and Hemingway’s own use of absolutes, like

“everyone,” “inevitable” and “all” to refer to the ruin that can come to everyone (SL 222,

226, 227).

So it appears that we are left with dealing with Hemingway’s own use of negative

facts. It seems the only way to be on sound ground with them. Only they, internal to the

31

text, are not add-ons. I have tried to give some hints how Hemingway’s strategies with

negative facts work as shadows in “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.” Perhaps the best way is

to attend to them as process, not product. This would mean taking negation as phases in

time tending toward, but not necessarily reaching, an “ultimate nothing.” In terms of

syntax, one would expect to find here the participial form (“-ing”) dominant over a

completed state one (“-ed”); and sometimes a state of affairs represented as a negative

process set in opposition to a positive one. Writing to Dos Passos about the reciprocal

relationship between church and state Hemingway comments that “…it is very possible

that tearing down is more important than building up” (SL 375). In the letter to E. E.

Dorman-O’Gowan (quoted above) Hemingway implies that “ultimate nothing” can form

the terminal point of a negative process which starts from a person refusing to perform an

action (SL 691)

But this is tricky business. How shadows work, how they are formed and the like,

are harder to understand than the leaves that cast them. Under what conditions, for

example, do trees not cast shadows? When you place a leaf in darkness with the exact

dimensions of the leaf why does the leaf disappear from view while still being there?i

We know it is there because we can reach our hand into the darkness and touch it.

One thing seems fairly certain, at least to me. It is that negative facts can be as

informative in “A Cean Well-Lighted Place” as positive ones. In this belief one thinks of

how one arrives as negative numbers by using natural numbers to subtract from zero. A

negative process is a deceleration of a positive one. In the case of “A Clean Well-Lighted

Place,” the deceleration picks up maximum speed by subtracting away from zero to a

Paternoster void of belief.

32

“FROM WHO’S OR WHOM’S WELL”?

From what source, or sources did Hemingway obtain negative facts? Facts that can

easily create the style, and sometimes the substance, of what he describes to E. E

Dorman-O’Gowan as “our well beloved nothing” (quoted above, SL 691)? Language,

obviously, is one source. No language can function without negatives, “no,” “never,” etc.

and near-negatives like “empty,” “insomnia” etc., and all the literature Hemingway had

read and thought about makes heavy use of negationespecially Shakespeare and

Turgenev (Reynolds 181, 194).3 But just as likely is the third source of history, “the age”

and its personal effect on him; the wounds of war, head injuries, headaches, depression

and the death of friends (SL 723). On 4 January 1951 he wrote to Mizener “Best luck for

what looks like as bad a year as we have seen” (718); to Edmund Wilson he wrote “we

live in a time of such violence, false witness, inaccuracy, calumnies and lies for profit I

am going to spend the rest of my life trying to be just” (737)‘Writing to Mrs Paul Pfeifer

(2 August 1937) he has this to say about “our generation” and recent history’s effect on

creating his disbelief in the next life:

You have always led such a fine life, giving such a just proportion to this

world and to the next one, that the ones of our generation who have

to make our own decisions and mistakes must seem, rightly very

often silly. I’ve temporarily I hope, lost all confidence in the next

one. It seems to have no importance at all….It seemed as though

the world were in such a bad way and certain things so necessary

to do that to think about any personal future was simply very

egoistic (SL 461)

33

But it can be argued that it was the horrors of the age, and the recognition of human

fallibility (especially his own), that gave him great strength as a writer. Kafka’s

assessment of his own time and its effect on his writing seem apropos hereespecially

the phrase, “absorbed the negative element of the age”:

I have brought nothing with me of what life requires, so far as I know, but

only the universal human weakness. With thisin this respect it is [a]

gigantic strengthI have vigorously absorbed the negative element of the

age in which I live, an age that is, of course, very close to me, which I

have no right ever to fight against, but as it were, a right to represent (qtd

Medin).

Strength from nothingness? The idea seems bizarre. But if we think of nothingness

as giving a writer “a right to represent” then we are not far from Hemingway’s

justification for taking war, death, the breakup of human relationships and the like

as his major subjects.

NOTES

1 Hemingway tells us that the old man sits in “the shadow of the leaves of the tree

made against the electric light” (CSS 288). This, with additional information about

the street light that “shone on the brass number on his [soldier’s] collar” (288)

makes the electric light, as the only light-source of the shadows, somewhat

problematic. Perhaps both the “electric light” and the street light are sources?

Adding to the ambiguity is the author telling us that the leaves make a shadow

“against” the electric light. If so, then what we are seeing there, is not, strictly

speaking, a shadow. It’s a silhouette of the leaves—in the fashion of the passages

34

where the lion shows its “silhouette” in “The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber”

(13, 14; on the difference between a shadow and a silhouette please see Sorenson

26-30).

I am indebted to professors Molly Hysell and Jan Bakker, very reluctant

apostles of negative metaphysics, for their oppositional help with this note.

2There is, admittedly, some irony in Hemingway’s statement that all symbolism is

shit; however we want to interpret it. For symbols and analogies abound in his

descriptions of writing, his own and others: “Writers are forged in injustice as a

sword is forged” (GHA 71); “I try always to do the thing [achieve plain speech in

writing] by three cushion shots rather than by words or direct statement” (SL 301).

3Meyers sees an influence of Gongora, especially his poem, “Mientras por compatir

con tu cabello,” on the nada passage that ends “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.” Both

Hemingway and Gongora leave the reader with “…no tangible thing, but a palpable

and overwhelming sensation of nothingness” (3).

In his biography of Hemingway, Meyers says that the theme of “In Another

Country” is nada (198).

In the language of this essay, “a palpable…nothingness” is equivalent to

negative facts in an inactive state. In order to “activate” them, make them into

positive (“palpable) facts they have to be negated. This operation, negating a

negation, is, in essence, the claim Hemingway makes when he says he writes on an

hitherto unrepresented subject:

…everything has been written except those things nobody wrote

about. So I write them” (SL 785).

35

You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely

palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become

a part of the experience of the person who reads it (SL 837).

As it’s a thing [bullfighting] that nobody knows about in English

I’d like to take it first from altogether outside…then go all the way

inside….It might be interesting to people because nobody knows anything

about it. (SL 236)

In sum, to negate a negative fact is to make (activate) a positive fact—one that’s

“palpable” and “normal” (cf. Sorenson 226-227; Horn 296-308 [“double negation”]).

WORKS CITED

Armstrong, D.M. Truth and Truthmakers. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 2004.

Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917-1961. New York: Charles

Scribner’s Sons, 1981.

Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples. Ann

Arbor/London: UMI Research Press 1988.

—————— ‘That Always Absent Something Else’: ‘A Natural History of the

Dead’ and Its Discarded Coda.” New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of

Ernest Hemingway. Ed. Jackson J. Benson. Durham, NC: Duke UP (1990): 73-95.

——————“What I Like About Hemingway.” Kansas City Star. 27 September 2007.

http://www.kansascity.com/hemingway/story/210275.html

36

Björnsson, Gunnar. “If You Believe in Positive Facts You Should Believe in Negative

Facts.” http://people.su.se/~gbjorn/Negative%20Facts.pdf.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca

Vigia Edition. New York: Scribner, 1987.

Hoffman, Steven K. “Nada and ‘The Well-Lighted Place’: The Unity of Hemingway's

Short Fiction.” Essays in Literature, 6:1 (Spring, 1979): 91-110.

Horn, Laurence R. A Natural History Of Negation. Chicago : Chicago UP. 1989.

Meyers, Jeffrey. “Hemingway, Gongora and the Concept of Nada.” Notes on

Contemporary Literature 38:3 (May 2008): 2-4.

———————Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row (1985).

Medin, Daniel. Review: Reiner Stach’s, Kafka. Die Jahre der Erkenntnis. TLS (April

24, 2009): 7.

Pagnattarro, Marisa A. “ ‘Chi Ti Dice La Patria’: Shadows of Meaning.” The

Hemingway Review. 1:14: (Fall 1995). 37-49

Peirce, C. S. The Collected Papers. Ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss.

Cambridge MA (1965): Vol V.

Phillips, Larry W. Ernest Hemingway on Writing. New York: Scribner. 1984.

Pozorski, Aimee L. “Infantry and Infanticide.” The Hemingway Review. 23: 2 (Spring

37

2004):75-78.

Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway’s Reading, 1910-1940. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP,

1981.

Russell, Bertrand. The Philosophy of Logical Atomism. Chicago: Open Court,

1985. Lecture III.

Seife, Charles. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. New York: Penguin, 2000.

Sorenson, Roy. Seeing Dark Things. The Philosophy of Shadows. Oxford: Oxford UP,

2008.

Does Hemingway, always or only occasionally, kneel at the altar of the void?

Witness of the prosecution; witness for the defence? Most people (especially

philosophers) are more interested in something than in nothing. To them, any question we

can raise about nothing (nothingness) is unanswerable. Several reasons can be given for

this. One, dating back to Aristotle, is that all arguments must start from existential

premises: nothing can come from nothing. Another one, one made famous by Descartes,

is that in order to explain any given phenomenon (any something) one must one

demonstrate the capacity of what came before it to cause its being—or its destruction. If I

know that I exist, then I also know that other things potentially exist. If I know that

avalanches can act a certain way, then I also know that they have the capacity to destroy

38

trees in their path. On this reading nothing lacks not only any reality but also any

possibility of being something real, materially or psychologically.

If we re-direct our conversation from nothing to negation a different picture seems

Anto emerge. It seems (at least for most people) that we can live comfortably

without ever thinking of nothing, or one of its family members, “absence,”

“empty,” etc. as something that should interest us. But with negation such

comfort is harder to achieve. Without understanding some form of the negative

(especially “not” or “never”) we would be unable to process information

conveyed by the Ten Commandmants (though shalt not kill, etc) or general

prohibitions (“Do not walk on the grass”; “do not open until Christrmas, etc) and

without the ability to negate a proposition Parmenides would not have been able

to issue his injunction against taking an interest in nothing. Negative thinking also

seems to make certain kinds of computations easier (and faster?) than positive

thinking. Recall Tom Stoppard’s play on probability in his Rosancrantz and

Ruildenstern Are Dead. He has the probability of heads coming up, from the coin

being tossed, not by counting the times heads does come up, but rather by the

times tails does not. The total absence of tails then gives the audience a

probability factor as to the fate of the two characters—one that they are unaware

of.

And what is the procedure of the caricaturist? By eliminating certain facial

characteristics from a portrait of the person, and exaggerating others, does he not

sometimes make it easier to recognize that person?

39

Writing to Sherwood Anderson, 23 May 1025, Hemingway, apologizing to

Anderson about his criticism of Anderson’s Many Marriages, says that “All criticism is

shit anyway. Nobody knows anything about it but yourself…professional critics make me

sick, camp following eunochs [sic] of literature” (SL162). Much later, 13 September

1952,writing to Bernard Berenson: “There isn’t any symbolism (in The Old Man and

The Sea) the sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish

is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that

people say is shit” ” (SL 780). Then he goes on to say, in an enigmatic comment, that

“What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know. A writer should know

too much.’” (SL 780).

Obviously, Hemingway was no fan of literary critics. The question is why.

Why was he so vehement in his rejection of commentary on his works? We might

minimally conclude from statements like these (and others) that Hemingway 1)

disliked literary criticism and especially that of his own works; 2) that hunting for

symbols in his work and others was just so much “shit”; and 3) that “a writer should

know too much” which is seeing what goes on “beyond when you know” [what goes

beyond]. Only writers, not readers and certainly not professional critics, can truly

see what goes on “beyond” in a literary text.

So, we might ask. What is this “beyond?” And why does he characterize all

criticism and symbol hunting as “shit?” So is there a way to avoid writing shit about

Hemingway and seeing beyond what’s going on there? A reasonable answer to the

40

second part of the question is no. Only Hemingway, and by extension all fiction

writers, can see what’s going on “beyond” in their writing. There is, however, a

glimmer of hope for the first part: the possible avoidance of shit when writing on

Hemingway. This way, in short, is taking the way Susan Beegel opens up in her

remark that

Nothingness: training for the expected? Coping with the unexpected?

Pele: Hawaiian goddess of fire and volcanoes: destroyer and creator.

What kind of function does nothing (“no thing”) have in discourse? What can we

make it have? Can nothing ever replace something? Please consider these text-specimens

of “nothing”:

1) Doing nothing is very hard to do…you never know when you’re finished.

Actor Leslie Nielsen

2) Why is there something and not nothing. Martin Heidegger.

3) When everything is left out, nothing remains, and like “A Clean Well-Lighted

Place,” Hemingway’s archetypal story of ‘nada,’ much of his writing is ultimately

about nothing. Susan Beegel.

What follows is a tentative exploration of the implications, for a literary critic, of

#3; reading Hemingway’s “A Clean Well Lighted Place.” The whole is composed of a

series of “thought experiments” on what a “nothing” reading of the Hemingway story

41

would differ (if at all) from a positive, or “non-nothing,” one. Items #1 and #2 are here

primarily to establish some syntactical and functional constraints on “nothing.” Our

initial assumption is that there is a boundary between “nothing” and “something” in our

consciousness which we use to prevent the meaning of either one to “leak” into the other.

Without such a boundary there would be no way, in principle, to distinguish when

“nothing” is “on” (active) or “off” (inactive) in the story.

REFERRING, IDENTIFYING, CHARACTERIZING

In all the above specimens, please note, we seem to be witnessing writers making

“nothing,” with the aids of the copula “is” and an object, serve three functions: to refer, to

identify and to characterize. The overall structure of each utterance is the expected (to an

English speaker) subject:verb:object. Within it occur the acts of referring, identifying and

characterizing. In 1) “Doing nothing” refers to and identifies the subject of the utterance.

“You’re never…finished” characterizes the object. In 2)

ut rather as Something salient in both linguistic and (presumably) pre-linguistic

consciousness. Obviously, the question can be answered in a number of ways. Sartre and

Rochester, for example, use Something and Nothing, in combination, to compare and

contrast one thing with another. The Nothing as Something for Heideger is a doorway to

a puzzle about Being; for Swift Nothing is way of exposing the nonsense modern writers

create. For an academic publishing an article, or book, on Nothing may lead to tenure and

promotion.

In short, Nothing, like the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes and fire (Pele) can be,

depending on one’s purpose at a specific time, both a creator and a destroyer. One can

42

employ it as an approach to a puzzle; one can use it to attack someone (or some thing). It

can, as in Genesis, be the foundation of a cosmological story.

But what can Nothing be for a literary critic? Here, following hints from the

Hemingway scholar, Susan Beegel, I would like to perform a what I like to think is a

“thought experiment” with Nothing on Hemingway’s short story, “A Clean Well Lighted

Place.” Is it Something to one person but Nothing to another? Is it a question that should

not be asked? The question is prompted by, not only the vast literature on Nothingness

and its family member Negation, but also Doing nothing (“no-thing”) is hard, it seems

fair to say, because one is never sure when he or she is finished. Processing negative

information, “the seems harder , as many philosophers (Heidegger, Sartre, Aristotle and

others), poets and writers (Rochester, Swift, Shakespeare) have been Doing nothing, it

seems fair to say, is hard because you never know when you’re finished. This seems to

describe the trap Heiddeger It’s not surprising that persons interested in language and its

relationship to thinking (and place in our consciousness) have long been interested in

nothingness. Nothingness, as negation (or more generally privation) permeates language

with terms like “not,” “never,” “absence,” etc. For the name of every object that engages

our senses, especially seeing and hearing, there is seemingly a term for the lack of a sense

impression: blindness and deafness, for example, for seeing and hearing. More cognitive

concepts, “full,” “happy” or “present” have corresponding negative terms, “empty,”

“unhappy” and “absent.” Without a sense of nothingness there would be no logic

(especially Aristotelian logic); John Wilmot (Lord Rochester) couldn’t have written his

poem “Upon Nothing” (1680); nor could the modern school of “negative metaphysics”

43

have come into being without belief in negative facts (Russell, Armstrong, Sorenson,

etc.)— nor a treatise, like that of Seife, on the zero.

ADDENDA

Dante's shadow ; Purgatorio II, 74-77.; Plato's cave. See Sorenson, Seeing Dark

Things, p. 115

"rionnach maoin " Gaelic WORD for "the shadows cast on the moor by cumulus

clouds" "Economist p. 80 May 26, 2012.

Corialanus: "such a nature, tickled with good success, disdains the shadow which he

treads on at noon. "no shadow at noon; dominates a dimished shadow; cf. Donne

First Anniversary 1, 145, and lecture upon the shadow;

"ADUMBRATE" to shade in Latin; use of darkness imaking a point w/ songs Music of

the night n Phantom of the Opera; presented 4 mar Kued.

"The Christian communities created what any thrusting institution needs-the sense

of a future on earth touched by the shadow of eternity." Peter Brown, "A Tale of Two

Bishops and a Brilliant Saint" pp. 29-32; Diane Johnson, "The Storyteller and the

Kid," …..modern writers writing in "the shade" …."the shadow of Hemingway" p. 38;

both ariticles in March 8, 2012, NY Rev Bks,

HOLLYWOOD AS "THE capital city of shadows, and it is shadows that rule the

world….just as the shadows take up no space, so the people in this have no time.

44

Even truth…is a shadow. The laws of truth are proclaimed from the capital of

shadows."

Navy Seal describes proper application of camouflage: "When painting the skin, it's

important to appear the opposite of how a human being looks. Make the dark

becomes light and the light become dark. That means making sure the parts of the

face that form shadows (where the eyes sink in, etc.) become light green and the

features that shine (forehead, cheeks, nose, brow and chin) become dark green." NY

Times, May 9, 2011, p.C4 (my emphasis)

Shane Weller: A Taste for the Negative. London: Legenda, 2005; PR 6003 F282 Z883:

Change Title: “A Sense Of The Negative: Hemingway’s Worship of the Void.

Change title again: “H Modes of Presentation: Failure of presentation becomes a mode of

presentation” Weller p. 77; paradox: absolute inadequency adaquent for a presenttion 7 8;

distinction bet freedom and nature; role of the “I” spectator or actor, pl 79

Plug in Moderism: see A Taste of the Negative: (Shane Weller)p.7

“No symbols where none entended” Beckett Addenda to Watt 95; Negating Thought: 95;

Failure to negate body and mind 96; absolute value decides negating; location of value

death and silence, 96;

TO BE CONTINUED….

El tiempo no hace nada evolucionar. Sólo se erosiona, se

retrae, fragmentos—Augusto Monterroso.

45

(Time doesn't make anything evolve. It only erodes,

retracts, fragments)

Value of shadows vs value of casting body

‘Death promises to produce value by negating the embodiment of its absence” 101;

liberation from the female body; narration art of masculine dying; “endless dying” equals

the impossibility of a possibility (die Moglichkeit der schlechthinnigen Unmoglichket);

not just one possibility but that possibility which is one’s ownmost”

Harry in Snows: not alive enough to die; key terms, identity, difference, resemblance

103; “production” of value, identity, etc.

SAMUEL GUTTENPLAN: objects of Metaphor.

WHAT'S IT LIKE TO BE IN A STATE OF INERTIA?

The vis insita, or innate force of matter, is a power of resisting by

which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavors to preserve its

present state, whether it be of rest or of moving uniformly forward

in a straight line.

(Definition 3 Philosophiae Naturalis Principia

Mathematica. A familiar term for vis insita is "Inertia")

John Tierney: "A Generation's Vanity, Heard Through Lyrics" NYT Times April 26,

2011: D1--D2. Psychologists afer a computer analysis of three decades of hit sobngs

46

found a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular

music…the words "I" and "me" appear more frequently w/ anger related words while

there's been a corresponding declie in "we" and "us" and expression of positive

emotions.. Where 19thg C Shakers sang "tis the gift to be free the singer Rivers Cuomo

sang the melody as "I'm the meanest in the place, step up, I'll mess with your face;

instead of the Shaker's message of love and humility, Cuomo sang "I'm the greatest man

that every lived"

The problem of the first person point of view is first the problem of

consciousness. What do we mean when we say "I am conscious of X"? Does it mean that

facts are accessible only from one point of view, the view of the "I." Or are they also

intelligible from the other point of view, the third person one? Do these points of view

always, sometimes or never, yield different information about X? If so, how would be

ever know the difference? Mind reading is never an exact science. Secondly, there is the

problem of representation and the always threat of misrepresentation. To observe X from

a first person point view has the potential, for a language user, of laying the foundation

for a story (play, poem, etc.) about X. The transition from observation to linguistic

representation is, however, fraught with hazards. Our observation of X may be fuzzy. We

may lack the proper words and rules of representation. We may not know who are

audience is—or care.

Between the idea and the execution many shoes are worn out.

Please note that this essay is composed entirely of "Thought-Runs." These, by the

nature of a thought as a "run," are short, speculative and always inconclusive. One

47

finds here, consequently, "runs" that go forward, then back and sometimes to the

side, somewhat skewed.

I would like to approach the first person problems from the angle of

Newton's vis insita, better known to us as "inertia." The question I'm asking, one not

raised by Newton, is "What's it like to be conscious of being in a state of inertia?"

What does it feel like and what are the consequences ? In this inertia is imagined to

be the first level of consciousness and as such the ultimate origin of the first person

point of view. From the first person, so imagined, images the second and third

person points of view. These are represented as Non-Inertial Forces interacting with

the original Inertial Force. Like Newton we start by assuming that every subject,

person, thing, event, etc., has an innate force to rest or remain moving in a straight

line. Inertia, then, is a "resisting" force in all bodies. This implies that the

"foundation" of every first person representation is some kind of resistance. What it

resists is an outside force (a non vis insita) that attempts to move it from rest or

movement in a straight line. The "I," that is, resists the "Non-I" and by so doing

produces an Event with a beginning middle and end.

Let me begin with some specimens of first person point of view

1) Call me Ishmael

2) From my mother's sleep I fell into the State…

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

3)

48

According to C. S. Peirce, constructing a philosophical system, one that "shall

outlast the vicissitudes of time" is analogous to fabricating a building a certain way. The

secret is not so much to lay the bricks "with accuracy," but "to lay the foundations deep

and massive." Thus we have the example of Aristotle who built on a few concepts, such

as matter and form, action and power. The result is that "Aristotelianism is babbled in

every nursery…and every ordinary man lives in the house of the Stagyrite" (246). The

same kind of reasoning appears in what linguists call the "combinatorial system"

represented by grammar. Meaningful speech is not just putting words together but

combing them with proper rules. With just a small inventory of rules and words

(lexemes) one can produce a vast amount of products: Likewise a limited number of

chemical elements (a 100 or more) can generate every kind of molecule (Miller, Pinker,

Chomsky etc)

Since Aristotle's Poetics we have been taught that storytelling, specifically

playwriting, can be done with a finite number of words and rules. The trick is to use the

rules to put the words in an order intelligible to a member of the same language group.

"Call me Ishmael" to an English speaker, "Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus

unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren

Ungeziefer verwandelt" ("When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from bad dreams he

found himself in bed changed into a vermin-like monster") to a speaker of German and

the like. Humans are grammatical, strict followers of the rules, to the extend that they can

use the rules properly and avoid using them in an improper, ungrammatical, way.

49

Storytelling, one might say, depends on recognizing a double agenda, submitting oneself

to the rules and avoiding the non-rules.

What follows rises from two assumptions. The first is that storytelling is based on

our awareness of natural forces and our reaction to them with virtual representations.

Such Forces are "vast" and "vague" (Peirce). They are vast enough to accommodate an

infinite library of words and rules. Forces are vague in the sense that they are samples of

something much larger, more inclusive and always concrete; Samples point the way to

our destination. Sensing the vagueness and vastness of Forces creates fear. "Fear" is the

name of our reaction to such Forces. We fear certain forms of weather, tornadoes,

hurricanes and the like. We fear loss of status, of the unbounded, of failure. Such fears

are often unfounded. But the reference of "fear" need not exist as an actuality. Its

existence, as a possibility, can be just as real as its material appearance.

The second assumption is that a valid analogy can be made between our

representations of natural Forces and Newton's remarks (quoted above) about the vis

insita—in today's terminology "inertia."

Writers generate stories based on a finale number of concepts, character, plot, setting

and the like. it seems fair to say, between the construction of a first person narration, a

story, plays, novels, poems and so forth. Each of these, to order "stand up" and endure a

reasonable amount of time, have to have its "foundations deep and massive."

What is special about first person narration? Is it because it communicates

personal information? Information unique to the individual? Or is it simply that it is more

50

forceful than other techniques? My claim here is that it is all of these things. Words like

"I," "we" "my" and the like narrow the distance between us and other persons. They bring

us into the circle of their family. They give us a family home filled with ancestral objects

that carry deep memories.

The "I" presupposes the "non-I," myself and everything and everyone else. They

enact a dialectic of forces, the I as an Innate=Force, the non=I as a Non-Innate force. The

complexity of the I (life experiences, memories and the life) could not come to life

without the opposition of the Non-I. Without the force of the Non-I, the I would be at rest

or "moving in a straight line," the movement of a motionless voice.

By now the reader has recognized that I am using "forces" in the Newtonian way

as a vis insita, inner force—in modern terminology, "Inertia." My claim is that the

appearances of the I is the result of an Innate Force cooperating and competing with Non-

Innate Forces. The result is the text as a pluristic (public) space; a space where the I

appears to speak and be heard and seen. The Non-I, often silent and anonymous, supports

the presentation of the I—in the way shadows support the existence of bodies that cast

the shadows.

In Persian terms it is a foundation, "vast," "vague" and "unshakeable."

The forces I have in mind rise from our everyday experiences of the interplay, sometimes

cooperative, sometimes competition, between Innate Forces and Non-Innate ones. The

notion of an Innate Force is that of Newton's vis insita:

Our two "primitive" notions here are then Innate Force and at least one

Non-Innate Force. Following Newton's description we can say that any "body" (object)

has its Innate Force in the interest of staying at rest or moving forward in a straight line.

51

Any Non-Innate Force is one that disrupts, or attempts to disrupt, the Innate Force—with

the result of causing the body to move from its rest or motion in a straight line. To these

two Forces we add a third, Intentionality. Intentionally originates with the "I," the subject

of first person narration.

I walk carefully around the broken glass on the sidewalk.

I stroke a backhand cross-court with that certain underspin.

I am searching for the words to make my point in conversation.

Here are rudimentary characterizations of some familiar types of experience. Each

sentence is a simple form of phenomenological description, articulating in everyday

English the structure of the type of experience so described. The subject term “I”

indicates the first-person structure of the experience: the intentionality proceeds from the

subject. The verb indicates the type of intentional activity described: perception, thought,

imagination, etc. Of central importance is the way that objects of awareness are presented

or intended in our experiences, especially, the way we see or conceive or think about

objects. The direct-object expression (“that fishing boat off the coast”) articulates the

mode of presentation of the object in the experience: the content or meaning of the

experience, the core of what Husserl called noema. In effect, the object-phrase expresses

the noema of the act described, that is, to the extent that language has appropriate

expressive power. The overall form of the given sentence articulates the basic form of

intentionality in the experience: subject-act-content-object

.Let us assume that the foundations of narratives (fiction and non-fiction) can be

represented as "forces." Forces animate plots, characters and the like. There are Forces in

52

words. Forces set things in motion. They have an existence prior to plot, character and the

like.. They are prior, as we will later discuss, in three ways, in time, in cause and in

"account"—in order to account what goes on in a narrative we have first to understand its

Forces. Let us further assume that the Forces we have in mind have an actual- to -virtual

relationship with the "Inertial" and "Non-Inertial" Forces of classical physics. Using

Newton's terminology, we are then allowed to say that an Inertial Force expresses itself

as a resistance within (insita) a "mass." Inertia is how mass resists an outside Force, any

Non-inertial Force that attempts to move the mass or alter its motion in a straight line.

Forces are present in all our perception. In what we hear, see and touch. They are

present in our dreams and daydreams. But their presence is vague, implied not stated. We

try to make them explicit with language, a faculty always susceptible to uncertainty and

error. The purpose here is to try to eliminate some of the uncertainty

I follow a Forces:Foundation analogy. It is felt but not always seen. as the

foundation of a house is largely hidden, often completely hidden, so are the Forces within

(and beneath) a narrative. Their absence is a presence. But it is a indirect one, by

presupposition and allusion.

In what follows we have Innate Force for Inertia and Non-Innate (outside) Force

for Non-Inertial. The warrant for this change in terminology is Newton's vis insita, the

"force within" and its negation to yield "the force outside" or the Non-Innate.

Furthermore, by the etymology of Innate (nasci "by birth) we are justified in saying that

an Innate Force is not acquired by its host. It is there from its beginning. By extension

Non-Innate Forces are not by birth. They are, as it were, "added along the way," either by

53

design or by accident. Chance gives them birth after the birth of the Innate Force. (See

TYCHISM below)

Traditionally, certainly since the Poetics, we have viewed stories from the point

of view of plot, character, ending and the like. Is there any advantage of seeing such

components from the perspective of Forces? A quick answer, one I will elaborate later, is

that Forces (at least the way I will use them) are both more universal and economical than

traditional points of view. Like Aristotle's matter and form. In Peirce's words, they are

"very broad, solid, unshakable" and in their "outlines vast and vague" (251) We can, with

Forces, employed a certain way, do more with less. But first we have to work out a

context for them that both distances our remarks from a purely physics interpretation (a

largely mathematical one) and aligns ourselves with certain linguistic universals and the

evidence of existing narratives—where narrative is taken in the board sense of all genre

of lierature.

In particular we have to explain, rather quickly, what we mean by "actual-to-

virtual."

METHOD

It will turn out that the popular song, by Johnny Mercer, "Something Gotta

Give," follows the pattern I describe in this essay. That is, two Forces represented as

coming together (or conflicting) to produce (or make intelligible) a third thing.

ACTUAL-TO-VIRTUAL

I dwell in Possibility

54

A fairer House than Prose.

More numerous of Windows,

Superior to Doors.

Of Chambers, as the Cedars,

Impregnable of eye;

And for an everlasting Roof

The Gambrels of the Sky.

Of Visitors, the fairest,

For Occupation. This

The spreading wide my narrow Hands

To gather Paradise.

—Emily Dickinson

When we think of "virtual" we usually think of digital technology and

"cyberspace." We think of machines that create imaginary, or artificial, worlds. We think

of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Here we meet virtual friends, fight virtual wars, play

virtual games. Instead of going out and fighting an actual war, risking life and limb, we

can stay at home and fight a war with no real consequences—or one with trivial

consequences. With a cyber war we know we will live to fight another day.

"Virtual," from the Latin "virtualis," began its career with the general meaning of

"what is the potential in X." It originated as a substantial concept, in our tradition, with

55

Aristotle discovery (invention?) of modal logic, the logic of verbs like "can," "must,"

"may," or "should.". By employing modal verbs, "can," "should," "must," the

subjunctive and the "if/then" form and the like, one could create a feedback loop

between discourse controlled by verbs of actuality, "is," "was," "had been" and the

discourse of virtuality. In contemporary modal logic (building on Aristotle in the

Organon) all it takes to turn a proposition about actuality, p, ("it is raining") into a

virtual p ("it might be raining") is to add the possibility operator ◊ to p. In Aristotle,

this operation is reversible, in theory an infinite number of times: p<—>◊p. Since

verbs, at least in European languages, cannot stand alone in a sentence. They need an

auxiliary verb, a non-modal verb that denotes an actual state or action: "I can walk a

straight line," "I should get more exercise" and the like—where the modals share the

sentence with the non-modals "walk" and "get" This joint ownership of a sentence is

probably the reason Aristotle always discusses the virtual (possible/potential) in junction

with the actual. His remarks on imitation as being nature to human relies heavily on this

actual:virtual dichotomy Poetics 3.1.6); 5.5.16; Physics; see also Waterlow).

Aristotle's way of illustrating the above is by analogy, a procedure I adopt for this

essay:

It is as (a) what is building to what is capable of building and (b) the waking to the sleeping, and (c) what is seeing to what has its eyes shut but has sight and (d) that which has been shaped out of the matter to the matter and (e) what has been worked up to the not thoroughly worked. Let actuality be set down as one side of this and let the potential (i.e., the virtual) the other. (Metaphysics 1048a37-

56

1048b5) 1 Let us take one step back and consider a possible "problem" of the writer of

narratives. Roughly speaking, it is the problem of "using up the actual," of some

completed act conditioned by the senses at a particular moment. This phenomenon

occurs at many levels of life. Once we have finishing building our house and

furnishing it, we have used up one kind of actuality. Similarly with completing a

poem or finishing a bottle of wine. Not only are the reasons for writing and drinking

used up in the act of writing and drinking but also the form and context of the act in

each. One feels that the completed act cannot be revived by information from either

the senses or imagination. No new information is available. One might say to oneself

"what has to be done is done. There is no more to be done on this account."

In most cases the feeling of the used-up creates the need for reversal, a

feedback loop; a way to go back to the time when the actual was in a nascent state,

just coming into being, bearing its novelty. One feels the need to find a way to return

to the time before the actual became used up. Not a final state of entropy, perhaps,

but a gesture toward it.

One needs, in short, a way to revive (and transform) the actual, animate the

phoenix from its ashes. On way to accomplish this, it seems fair to say, is by

reference to the "virtual."

Plato, referring to his allegory of the cave, might say that the virtual is just

another name for misrepresentation; a fake, a simulacra cloaking the false. For

57

others, the dark side of the virtual appears in the consequences of acting on "what

could have been but wasn't." Our fall from Eden comes to mind. What if Eve had not

believed the words of the serpent and acted on them? What if Adam had not eaten

the forbidden fruit? What if God had been absent during these transactions? (see

Kahn 20-32)

But to Levy and Ryan the virtual is, in Levy's phrase, ""fecund and powerful":

The virtual, strictly defined, has little relationship to that which

is false, illusory, or imaginary. The virtual is by no means the

opposite of the real [actual]. On the contrary, it is a fecund and

powerful mode of being that expands the process of creation,

opens up the future, injects a core of meaning beneath the

plentitude of immediate physical presence (16; qtd Ryan 35).

In a more systematic representation Levy says:

—The relation of the virtual to the actual is one-to-many

—The virtual is not anchored in space and time. Actualization

[i.e., of the virtual] is the passage from a state of timelessness

and deterritorialization to an existence rooted in here and

now [i.e., the actual]. It is an event of contextualization.

—The virtual is an inexhaustible resource. Using it does not

lead to its depletion (qtd Ryan 25)

One can detect in Ryan and Levy, it seems fair to say, echoes of Deleuze's statements

about the relationship between the actual and the virtual——for example, "There is

58

coalescence and division, or rather oscillation, a perpetual exchange between the

actual object and its virtual image: the virtual image never stops becoming actual"

(see http://deleuzeatgreenwich.blogspot.com/2007/02/text-for-19th-february-

workshop-on.html).

The virtual, in other words, gives substance to the absent, the anonymous

and the insubstantial and makes them present in a (possible?) infinite number of

places and in an endless number of forms. In this the example of a game of chess,

without end in its possible moves, comes to mind. In order to move the chess-piece

to a new location, the player must have in mind virtual (possible) locations that

surround the new location and give it a certain "value."

For De Sousa, all of Shakespeare's depictions of home as a special place are

virtual: "For Shakespeare, place is always virtual, always imagined, not based on exact

observation and not represented realistically" (5). For Bachelard, we experience "the

house in its reality and in its virtuality, by means of thoughts and dreams" (5) (The

Poetics of Space. Trans Maria Jolas: Boston: Beacon Press 1994). For Ryan and Levy all

fiction is virtual and analogous with the actual. The actual and the virtual perform a

drama of ontological doubleness. (Ryan 69-73; Levy 46-49). Two other leading literary

critics, Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser, adopt a similar "doubleness" as a core

concept for eliciting meaning from artistic productions (Ryan 44-45).

The stuff of our dreams and daydreams is mostly virtual presupposing the actual.

(Palmer 5; Modality and the English Modals. London: Longman1979)

Please see below remarks on THE VIRTUAL AS NECESSARY.

RESISTENCE

59

One, Two Three, are more than mere count-words

Like 'eeny, meeny, mony mi,' but carry vast,

Though vague ideas. C. S. Peirce

In Newtonian thinking, vis insita inhabits its host as either resting or moving

object. It is always a "resisting" force. In a pluralistic world it always presupposes the

other (or others) as being "against it." In Peirce's terminology, resistance is a "Second":

"The genuine second suffers and yet resists…whose existence consists in its inertia."

(249) What is being resisted is always a ""First: " "It must be fresh and new…present and

immediate….It must be initiative, original, spontaneous and free, otherwise it is second to

a determining cause" (Essential 248)

Resistance is an important concept for representing conflict, both physical and

non-physical. In the following passage, for example, Bachelard pictures a house in a

storm. The "house's human resistance," appears as a struggle of the a house against a

storm:

The house was fighting gallantly. At first it gave voice to its

complaints; the most awful gusts were attacking it from every

side at once, with evident hatred and each howls of rage that,

at times, I trembled with fear. But it stood firm. From the very

beginning of the storm snarling winds had been taking the roof

to task, trying to pull it off, ….Then other winds…charged against

the wall. Everything swayed under the shock of this blow, but the

flexible house stood up to the beast (44-45; Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics

of Space. Trans Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press1994).

60

OBSERVER

Innate Force, the initial state of the house at rest, and Non-Innate Forces, the

storm, animate the scene and produce the scene as a "Third" thing. This last is the

position of the Observer, the one who stands outside the fray and "umpires" the conflict.

Here again we refer to Peirce's discussion of the Third as the force that relates (mediates)

First and Second.

The Observer is either a group or a member of the group, a group potentially

composed of author, audience and the text (script) as scenes. The Observer can be inside

or outside the conflict of forces. The function of the Observer is like that of a Third. As a

force, it is relative to the "absoluteness" of the Innate and Non-Innate Forces. The

Observer, by relating different forces, gives intelligibility (intention) to the whole (Peirce

251). Kafka's HE, a short parable, is a model for an inside Observer:

He has two antagonists; the first presses him from behind, from his

origin. The second blocks the road in front of him. He gives battle

to both. Actually, the first supports him in his fight with the second

for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second

supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But

it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who

are there, but himself as well, and who really knows his intention?

His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment—and

this would require a night darker than any night has ever been

yet—he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account

61

of His experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his

antagonists in their fight with each other (Gsammelte Schriften V: 287.

Trans Willa & Edwin Muir)

FORCE-FIELD

Let us, by moving slightly sideways, read Kafka's parable as a force-field. What

image of Forces is he presenting us with? Notice first the word "forces" does not appear

in the text. Yet their presence is felt in words like "presses," "blocks," "supports" and

"push." This is the image of a foundation underlying the action, the "battle." It supports

the "battle" and HE but is largely unseen. We know its presence by its absence at a

distance. Notice also that the "antagonists" are a "first" and a "second." With this

terminology we are some warrant for saying that "first" represents an Innate Force (it was

there from the beginning) and "second" a later, added-on Non-Innate Force. Was this

Kafka's method of compositon. First there was a "first" and then a "second" and finally

the figure of HE. The space he is in is re product of both.

By the rule of non-contradiction (Aristotle) we can say that a "first" cannot

represent a "second" at the same time and in the same way. Without this constraint we

could not tell the difference between them. Time holds "back of HE" and "front of HE" in

a state of non-contradiction. HE cannot escape the space of in-betweeness opened up by

the "battle" between the antagonists. "He dream is …is to "jump out of the fighting line."

But of course he cannot. If he did, he would not only jump out of time (the parable

presupposes the arrow of time) but out of the Innate-Forces of gravity and friction.

MAGNETISM

62

A simple statement about magnetism is that it is a natural force that attracts

objects. It is "natural" because like "Innate," it is there from its birth, another

offspring of nasci. This suggests that magnetism can represent an Innate Force

of the order, X attracts Y, the body as source of magnetism and the affected

body. We then have justification then for feeling the presence of the Force as

attraction in these lines of Auden:

Only the hands are living; to the wheel attracted,

Are moved, as deer trek desperately towards a creek

Though the dust and scrub of the desert; or gently

As sunflowers turn to the light ("Casino"; my emphasis)

Love narratives, with the focus on desire, present this kind of Force. The attractor may or

may not be present. But its presence is always felt. In Auden's lines the attractor, "wheel,"

is present. In Cherobino's song, from The Marriage of Figaro, is materially absent.

Following this image further we see that every kind of desire, but especially sexual takes

the form of X attracts Y. "Attract" is another name that presupposes an Innate-Force—

just as every house "presupposes" the existence of a foundation.

THE FORCE OF SHADOWS

Let us turn and look back at salient features of the terrain we have crossed. On the

landscape are many shadows. Some are moving. Some seem to be at rest. Their casting

bodies, birds, trees, our body, are hidden yet prior to the existence of the shadows. The

casting bodies are prior in three ways, in time, cause and account. Before there was a

shadow there was a body that could cast a shadow. The causal relationship is a necessary

63

one. Destroy the body and one destroys the shadow. To "account" for the casting body,

and by extension, its shadow one has to make a distinction between

From this point on "Innate" and "Non-Innate" replace "Inertial" and "Non-

Inertial."

Doppler model of inertial

forcehome.netcom.com/~sbyers11/inertia.htm - Cached - Similar

THE MAGNETIC MIND

FORCE, WORD, WORK

Wittgenstein famously defined, or at least described, the meaning of word by its

use. "Use" is a performance based concept. A necessary minimal condition for use-

meaning is a specific action by a plurality of persons. As such use-meaning presupposes a

specific, possible, context, a building site, a master-servant relationship, landing an

airplane or docking a ship—in short a workplace. Person A might ask person B questions

about what to do next; A might order B to do such and such; A might give reasons why

he or she cannot do C, what B wants. In such cases, a word can only lose its meaning if it

is impossible for the relationships between A, B, and C to exist. What gives "words their

64

meaning…is that without which they would have no meaning" (#55. Philosophical

Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1968).

Wittgenstein's "use" theory can easily be carried over into other contexts—one,

say, like music. Words can be used to "orchestrate" meaning as thought and feeling

To read Shakespeare is to be in contact with a verbal medium of

unequaled richness and exactitude; with a mode of statement which

does not, as in ordinary men, limit itself to a conventional, fixed

pattern of significance, but persistently conveys a multiple,

creative energy of thought and feeling. We speak as if words

were a piano score; Shakespeare's is full orchestration (George

Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature

And the Inhuman. NY Atheneum 1967: 106)

My modest homage to Wittgenstein follows: I ask the reader to imagine, not the

meaning of a word, but its Force. Force allows words to do work. Work gets things

moved around in the world, it excites the emotions, among other things, and it creates

possible worlds.

Would it be possible to write a dictionary on this concept? Perhaps. Let us

imagine its salient characteristics. First the book would be founded on Innate and Non-

Innate Forces. Separate and combined they would create three categories. Under these

one would list the possible kinds of work a particular word can do, not only what a word

has done or is doing now. The dictionary would have to name the work. Inn most cases

the work would take place among a plurality of people. Several words might combine to

65

produce a single king of work. Or one word might produce several kinds of work. In any

case, the word would always precede the work in time, cause and account. Word and

work reciprocally define each other by reference to Force..

"Problem" is a word for work to be done.

A word that tends toward a null state of work has NEGATIVE FORCE (see

below)

As long as new work emerges in the world, or in our imagination, a new word

entry would be added to the dictionary. When work ended with the extinction of the

human race, and consequentially the creation of words, the book would be complete.

We said earlier that resistance is a form of Innate Force. Can we make the same

claim with words? Can a word, or a combination of words, name a kind of work that

resists change? Are words like "reaction," "confrontation," "opposition" and the like

examples of such words? Here, it seems, we have to follow the image the words create.

"Opposition" easily calls to mind the banks of river "opposing" the force of the current;

tree limbs in wind resist by yielding to the wind; clouds that obscure the sun cast shadows

on the ground. The word "shadow" is the name of the work of the clouds—though not the

only name.

Non-Innate Forces oppose (resist) the Innate one. Let us, witt cannibalism as our

guide, follow the image here. Innate Force of the victim's body resists the work of the

cannibal, to kill the victim, carve up his body, eat the flesh, drink the blood and so on.

("Cannibalism" is the name of the work). Following the image further, we can create

scenes born of an Innate Force interacting with Non-Innate ones. We begin with

imagining a jungle (or wilderness) as an Innate Force. Within the jungle live cannibals.

66

The work of the jungle and its natives is to stay in its present state. One day a group of

missionaries arrive. Their work is to oppose the Innate Force of the jungle. Within the

jungle live cannibals. They also work to stay as they are. A missionary

This is the problem of the body

Let us then begin with work, as described by Newton, and ask if he envisioned it

as a situation named by the words vis insita. Would it be fair to say that reading his

description that we a more interested in the work mentioned in it than in the words that

name the work? Or, to put it another way: if we destroyed the words would it also destroy

the work. Or would the work endure the destruction of vis insita? Please notice in the

Newton passage that it seems to be the case that it is not just vis insita that names the

work. It is also "force," "power" and (perhaps?) "present state":

The vis insita, or innate force of matter, is a power of resisting by

which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavors to preserve its

present state, whether it be of rest or of moving uniformly forward

in a straight line.

The answer seems to be that work will always survive the words that name the work. But

not the reverse. Words that name the work come and go. This is because work can have

more than one name. We can, by eliminating the old name, "re-name" work with a new

name. This is essentially what we have done by replacing Newton's vis insita with

"Inertia." But we can't substantially re-work the work. The work goes on whether or not

we name it. A specific kind of work, building a house, can only destroyed, or changed, by

a greater work, say an earthquake or bulldozer.

67

So, to return to storytelling as a word. What kind of work does it do? What kind

of work can it possibly do? As an example, let us consider the word "Eden

NEGATIVE FORCES

To this point I have talked about the Forces as positive ones. Now I would like to

envision them in the dress of negation. Like infinity and absolute zero (temperature), we

can never "reach" absolute Negative Inertia or Non-Inertia. In our representations we can

only approach them. Some of the names for this situation are "exhaustion," "failure,"

"weakness," "alienation," "waste," and "ennui." These are states of privation. Something

is "missing" we might expect to find there. The Forces one would expect to find in

someone or something has either "leaked out," "drained out," or been "subtracted from."

Literary history is replete with masters of Negative Forces. Let us begin with the

greatest of them, Shakespeare. We can then continue with examples from Kafka and

Hemingway.

Please note this passage from The Merchant of Venice. Hunger is an Inertial Force

that can be changed by eating, an Non-inertial force

NECESSARY

Most readers would agree that the minimal constitutive components of fiction

would include representations of action, dialogue and point of view. They are

"necessary." The problem with them is a reliable representation. Not a complete on

68

perhaps, but one that hopefully approaches compleltion. In a work by Tyler Burge, this

problem of representation is put in the context of perception.

EXHAUSTION NEGATION: ungeheuren Ungeziefer

GO ON WITH

THE NOVEL AS UNMEDIATED REALITY p. 50; Wayne C.

Booth. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Cicago, the Uof C Press1961

(reader control)

HAUNTED HOUSE: force of evil

CHANCE tychism. CITE article in NY times on longevity

Cite: Tyler Burge. Origins of Objectivity. Oxford UP. 2011investigate

minimal constitutive conditions for an individual to represent specific forces…as belong

to phsical particulars in his enviroment ; main concern is vision conditions are not known

to observer. Representation constrained by environmental of X behavior and action in

fulfilling basic needs ad activities goals interact w/ sensory states & perceptual states;

mind independent perception; ; perception yields knowledge…nonperspectival includes

basic actions

69

"When an irresistible force meets and immovable

object…something got to give" (song)

VOLITION

DIGRESSKIONS ON DIGRESSIONS SWIFT

DELICATE RESTRAINT: ny times 19 april; Bryant Austin photographing humpback

whale and her calf felt a gentle tap on his shoulder. Turning around Austin found himself

looking into the eye the mother whale. The tap came from her pectoral fin, weighing

more than a ton…the mother whale extended her fin with recision and grace-to touch the

photographer without hurting him--he was in awe of her "delicate restraint"

This makes us think of gravity and friction. It makes some of us recall the story of

Sisyphus and the work of pushing a stone up a hill to see it roll down again. It may cause

us to realize that inertia as resistence is not just physical. It is also cognitive and

emotional. It may ultimately cause us ponder the ways of the will and willing.

Plot has been described from many perspectives, as mythos, having a beginning,

middle and end (Aristotle); as conflict, man versus man, man versus nature and the like

(Quiller-Couch) or as a structure having, among other parts (five in all) an exposition,

rising/falling aspect, and a resolution (Freytag). In the context proposed here plot

becomes a play between inertial and non-inertial orces as experienced by an observer—

the reader or listener. On this reading the observer becomes the Archimedean Point, a

70

point outside the play. We can add to this Galileo's observation that it is impossible to tell

the difference between a moving object and a stationary one without some outside

reference to compare it against (Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World

Systems 1631; see also Arendt 248; 284; 322 The Human Condition. Chicago: The U of P

Chicago Press. 1998)

The task of the author is to open a space for the outside observer, to create a

"theater of forces." This presupposes that a literary text, in the beginning (in a pre-

nascent state) is equivalent to an inertial force. Its nature is to "resist" any change in its

present state. Before I wrote the first word of this essay, before Melville wrote "Call me

Ishamel" or before Kafka wrote "Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens…."" ("As Gregor

Samsa one morning….") there was the resisting blinking cursor on a blank screen or a

blank page. At this point the resistance of the text is total. Undisturbed by language it will

last an infinite amount of time in its present state, either at rest or moving through time as

a straight line—where present state and straight line are understood, respectively, as

outside and inside moving ime. But it is time with no purpose.. In either state time has no

destination. It is composed completely of "nows." In this situation, one cannot give an

account of any subject representable by language. The space of the text, as a container of

a subject with meaning, cannot exist. Its non-existence is necessary.

To open the space of the text is the first work of the storyteller. The second job is

to keep it open. The third is to fill the space with what Kant calls "empirical content."

This is content composed of both actual and virtual facts. All of this work involves

71

resisting the inertial forces of the text. Not being able to resist means failure, rhetorical

collapse.

It starts to diminish only when the force of words (sentences, paragraphs and the like)

"move" the text The first word of the author is the first test of resistance. If the author

returns to delete the word, or replace it with another one, than he or she fails to overcome

resistance at that stage.

Y took on new life when it became X

THE NECESSARY

"Dwelling places and images of places become intimately intertwined with the 'passions

of living."….'Home' evokes "the remembered field of familiar experience…functions as

the 'the loci of memorable personal events' 5'(4. Geraldo U. DeSousa.At Home in

Shakespeare's Tragedies: Ashgate:Farnham Surrey, UK: 2010)

MEDIATED SPACES

Actual and virtual spaces mediate Inertia. Language represents actual space

as "is" ("was") and the like and virtual space with the subjunctive, the if/then

constructions and modal verbs. Mediated spaces are thus whatever has the

72

possibility of being "between" at least two other things (Peirce). In Kant's way of

thinking we can perceive space in either pure (rein) form or one filled with

"empirical content" ( )—in traditional terminology, before and after an X, the a

priori vs the a posteriori. The before and after carry their own notions about the

truth of propositions. In order to know that an a priori X is true you don't have to

"do" anything. You can lie on your couch and not get up. You don't have to get up

and go outside into the world. You don't have to investigate anything (Strawson

"Episodic Ethics"). In these notions about the a priori and the a posteriori we see the

footprints of Aristotle. Everything has "energy" (energeia) in two forms, the

unexpressed (potential) and the expressed (dynmic). Together they form the

infrastructure of movement of bodies in time (In the Physics III, IV; bk theta of the

Metaphysics; see Beere).

Limiting our inquiry to literary characters we begin with the a priori from the

point of view of the author. He or she can create an Inertial or Non-Inertial

character. Using a mathematical concept, we can say that neither kind of character

can reach an absolute state of Inertia or Non-Inertia. They can only "approach"

them, just as numbers can neither reach absolute zero or absolute infinity. The

absolute state exists only in theory, or more intuitively as a "fuzzy boundary."

Take, for example, Goncharov's Oblomov.

Move/Not to Move

Makes Choices/ Not to Make Choices

73

So let us get up off our couch, pick up a book, and read about Inertia in virtual

(fictive) spaces.

***

THE ALIENATED VOICE

In order for something new to happen, something old has to disappear or

make room for it—or find some way to accommodate it. Ballard argues, for example,

that much of the history of western culture can be seen in new styles of architecture

replacing, or forming an uneasy alliance with, the old. The Baroque replaced the

Gothic, postmodern the modern. Each of these forms serves as "a stage set where we

need to be at ease in order to perform." With the Gothic we staged our "guilt,

pointing to heaven we could never reach" (Gothic); with the Baroque a "defensive

fantasy…a set of conjuring tricks to ward off the Age of Reason." For Ballard, the

chief work of modernism was to create "totalitarian" spaces, structures like the Tate

Museum (London), the high rise apartments, the high-rise apartments of modern

cities and WWII military structures along the beaches of Normandy. Modernism,

now dead, served the "scientists of geometry and deatha kind of totalitarian

architecture replaced (killed off?). (J.G. Ballard. "A Handful of The Guardian 20."

Dust" March 2006)

Modernism, a new thing, made salient what has always existed in muted

form; that is, the "alienated voice" in literature. We hear it, for example, in Genesis, in

King Lear and more recently, and much more clearly, in the works of Samuel

74

Beckett, Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway. The alienated voice speaks from a

specific place and time and from nowhere. The voice bears the characteristics of the

postlapsarian human, full of the need to do better but conscious of failing. The voice

is that of the human out of season, a victim of bad timing, in a word, out of Eden

suffering from the need to return there.

Here are two examples of the alienated voice, Gregor Samsa and Lucky (from

Waiting for Godot)

What I offer here are "thought-runs" on the subject. These, by the nature of a

thought as a "run," are short, speculative and sometimes inconclusive. One finds

here, consequently, "runs" that go forward, then back and sometimes to the side,

somewhat skewed. In an attempt to reduce the possibility of contradicting myself

(or otherwise sowing confusion everywhere) I chose to use the metaphor of

"theater" as a way of controlling the wayward movements of the whole. To employ

theater this way is to imagine literature as a mediating space that allows an author

to give his or her characters an exit and an entrance. Making an appearance, being

seen and heard, then becomes a mater of "splitting our time" within the theater and

outside it.

Our thought runs are thus on the inside and outside of a theater as the space

of alienation. When we hear the fictive alienated voice (in written texts or staged

performances) we are within the theater. Outside it we hear it in our dreams and the

in voices of those articulating their suffering. .

MEDIATED SPACE

75

The theater mediates voice, often among a plurality of voices. The voice

originates and controlled the flow of information to the reader/listener. Alienation

begins whenever the mediating voice loses contact with other voices (a plurality) or

becomes inadequate to an assigned role. To lose voice contact with other voices is to

reduce, or lose, our human nature. For this to happen the alienated voice must first

appear as a member of a "family "of other performers. At this point the voice is that

of the human. It appears as a being possessing reason, will, and being capable of

certain acts.

The alienated voice presupposes a plurality of voices, both actual and virtual

(please see ACTUAL AND VIRTUAL below).

When fate, working through bad dreams, transforms Gregor Samsa (Kafka's

The Metamorphosis [Die Verwandlung]) into "ungeheueren Ungeziefer" (large insect

or bug) he first becomes aware of his new state by changes in the sound of his

voice:" Gregor had a shock as he heard his own voice answering hers [his

mother's]…a persistent horrible twittering squeak…one could not be sure one had

heard them rightly." (Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories. Ed Nahum N. Glatzer: NY:

Schocken 1976:91).

VOICE AS SPEECH

In the larger world, outside the theater, the voice appears as speech: Because

we act, we are called on to speak. Speech and action are reciprocal phenomena. To

dialogue with others means to reveal our subjective nature. Dialogue, in turn, brings

into the picture choice. If we can choose, then we can become a subject, a being with

76

an inner emotional life. Traditionally, action and speech have been associated with

rhetoric; that is, with persuasion.. An example is that of the American, of

Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants." He attempts to persuade Jig, his female

companion, to have an abortion. Jig's speech, by contrast, is creative, not rhetorical.

Its purpose is to represent her subjective nature, the inner sources of "I." She does

not succumb to persuasion. As the "audience" of this drama, readers need to listen

to the dialogue between the American and Jig in order to understand their actions

and assess the choices they make. If their choices do not resonate with us, then we

have a warrant for saying, "we are not persuaded."

The voices we hear carry the possibility of not being recognizable.

THE DIRECTIONALITY OF THE VOICE

The effect of theater then, with all its components in play, is to represent our

voice speaking and being heard. In a classical text, like Oedipus Rex or King Lear, the

action and speech tend to point outward toward epistemological puzzles: is there

higher power? What is real? Can one achieve transcendence? A modernist text,

Kafka, Hemingway or Carver, by contrast, turns inward. It forces us to ask what

went wrong. Why did so and so fail? What could he or she done otherwise to avoid

failure? Of course, classical texts often deal with failure. But the conditions for

failure are different from that of a modernist story. In Lear, for example, the

condition of failure is reason. He doesn't realize the consequences of his acts. These

are consequences not only for the product of his acts but also for the acts

themselves. In this latter case the consequences rise out of the irreversibility and

77

unpredictability of the acts themselves. Lear cannot undue what he does. Nor can he

know before hand what the effects of his acts will be. In this the play enacts a drama

closer in spirit to classical theater than to the modern one. In Lear Shakespeare

enacts a drama of fate. In the modernist text we look for a drama that rises out of the

human will. Of course modernist characters cannot always be certain what the

effects of their actions will be. But they do, in most cases, have knowledge of their

contingency.

TO SPEAK WITH MANY TONGUES

πόλλ' ο•δ' •λώπηξ, •λλ' •χ•νος •ν μέγα.

Nothing identifies us so directly, or comprehensively, as our voice. With it we

communicate our race, our age, our gender, our interests, our prejudices, our

knowledge. Without the vocalizing organs, lungs, vocal cords, tongue, we wouldn’t

be able to sing, scream, laugh, call or moan. As immigrants we may attempt to

“sound” like a native speaker but the attempt is usually a failure. Consequently, we

may get stuck in the middle, somewhere between our own language and that of the

new one. Or we might construct a voice that nobody speaks in the manner of an

actor like Gary Grant who first spoke with the voice of a Cockney. Deborah Kerr,

who worked on several movies allegedly said that his voice seemed to “come from

nowhere.”

Wittgenstein’s remark, in the Tractatus (5.6) , that the “limits of my language

mean the limits of my world” can be construed to mean, among other things, that

78

we must always speak, as one person at a time, in the first person singular, “I,” or the

first person plural, “we” and address our remarks to a second person “you” about an

(sometimes) extralinguistic third person, “he” or “they.” Our voice, in other words, is

bound fast within the ontological triangle of only three possible persons (objects,

events, ideas and so on). In Heidegger view, by calling things into being with our

“voice,” we authenticate our personhood. (233-236:) To speak of one voice, our

voice, it seems then that we need to focus not only on the possible qualities of the

voice but what constains it, prevents it from being some other kind of voice—an

alien gender or race In her discussion of “voices,” Zadie Snith says that “voices are

meant to be unchanging and singular” (133) But some are multi-voiced because of

necessity, persons learning a new language, and others by talent, for example,

Shakespeare and Obama (143). Poets “delight” to be “many voiced” (146) She

arrives at these general conclusions by way of Keats’ conception of “negative

capacity,” expressed in a letter to his brother dated Sunday, 21 December 1817:

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects;

several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what

quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature &

which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative

Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties,

Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

.

79

The alienated voice presupposes a plurality of other voices.

Jose Ortega y Gasset. The Revolt of the Masses. NY: W. W. Norton & Co. 1957. "The

mass-man is simply without morality" 189 ("We Arrive at the Real Question") last chp.

From: Gerhard Wahrig: Deutsches Worterbuch. Mosaik Verlag: Munchen 1988

ungeheuren Ungeziefer

Geheuer: nur verneinend gebraucht) nicht~unheimlich; es ist hier nicht~hier spukt

es, mir ist das nicht ~die Sache ist mir unheimlich

Ungeheuer: ans Wunderbare grenzend, riesig, gewaltig, ausserordentlich. Eine

ungeheure Anstrengung, Leistung; von ungeheurer Grosse, Hohe

Ungeziefer: vom Menschen als schadlich berachtete, for das Gleichgewicht der Natur

jedoch wichtige Tiere

Geziefer: Getier=Ungeziefer: Getier: Tiere, kleine Tiere Insekten Schnecken

FROM another German dictionary

"Insect" das Insekt. Das kleine unbedeutende Ding (bedeuten=inform

No "vermin" in German

"Worm=der Wurm

80

"geheuer" safe, secure (from ghosts): In diesem Hause ist es nicht geheuer; ie.

This house is haunted

"Ungeheuer" huge, vast, monstrous

�

A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages

CARL DARLING BUCK

Section Heads

Tychism; chance C. S. Peirce Essential 312

Emily Troscianko "Kafkaesque Worlds in real time" Language and

LiteratureApril 27, 2010 vol. 19 no. 2 151-171

1. Energy The ability to do work 2. Work- To exert force or movement to achieve a purpose 3. Motion When something changes its position 4. Force Any push or pull that can change something’s speed, shape, or direction. 5. Inertia The tendency of any object to stay still 6. Speed How fast something is going 7. Friction The rubbing force that resists movement when things slide against each other. 8. MagnetismThe natural force that attracts objects 9. Gravity A force of attraction that pulls everything toward everything else 10.Direction The line or course on which something is moving

81

Carl Darling Buck: A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-

European Languages. Chicago: The UP 1949Chicago Press

Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glazer. NY Schrocken Books

1971

***

HEMINGWAY: TRUTHMAKING AND THE EMPTY SPACE

A PROPOSAL FOR THE 14TH BIENNIAL HEMINGWAY

SOCIETY CONFERENCE, LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND

2010

Gene Washington

Utah State University, Logan

(435) 752 4141

gene.washington@usu.edu

Most readers of Hemingway, I suspect, would not disagree with the

proposition that his main concern as a writer was to “make it true”; or as he often

says in his letters, “get it straight” (SL 153, 688, 748; cf 400, 744). In this paper I will

attempt to show that such “truth-making” involves “populating” and “depopulating”

an empty space with positive and negative facts (or, if you will, pieces of reality).

Depopulation, in which negative facts become the population, or part of it, is, in

82

essence, a follow-up of Beegel’s statement that Hemingway’s works are “ultimately

about nothing.” i This is the case in “A Clean Well Lighted Place” in which

Hemingway empties positive facts out of his description of the café and then

replaces them with negative ones that go to create an ending of absencessignified

primarily by “nada,” “nada,” the “it was all nothing” (CSS 291), and encroachment of

darkness, the insomnia of the old waiter, etc.

Positive facts, colors, forms, smells, sound, etc, especially those that make up

the natural world, are always uppermost in Hemingway. But certain negative facts,

like the absence of color, darkness or the death of individuals (Catherine Henry,

Macomber, Pace) always reduce the “density” of positive facts and the size and

weight of a populated space.

In this presentation it will be necessary to describe 1) how truth-making

necessitate an empty space and negative facts; 2) how a certain amount of linguistic

analysis into words denoting negative facts, “nothing,” “despair,” “emptiness,” etc.

leads to this conclusion and 3) how one can chart the relations between positive and

negative facts in selected texts.

If you believe that Hemingway always makes truth with positive facts, then

you should also believe that he makes it with negative ones.

If we take "negative" as "absence," then we have characters present by

reference in the text, but absent as a speaking, moving, inacting with other

83

characters . Some examples include, the unborn child in "Hills Like White

Elephants," the baby in "for sale.

***

NARRATIVE STRUCTURES: 'THE WIND BLOWS COUNTER

TO THE SHIP'S DESIRE.'

Man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot will

what he wants--Schopenhauer.

Lorrie Moore, a writer and professor of English at Vanderbilt, reports about a

panel she was recently on that was supposed to "converse authoritatively about

narrative structure." (The New York Review of Books March 5, 2015: 4). Miranda July,

a member of the panel and also a well-known author, decided to sing instead of

present her thoughts on narrative. Moore goes on to say that from that point

narrative "had clearly been given the bum's rush (Well, fiction writers will do

anything to avoid this topic: it is the one about which they are the most clueless and

worried and improvisational").

One has no trouble seeing why fiction writers might want to refuse to discuss

narraative structures (henceforth NS). The complexity of the topic seems

overwhelming: something, perhaps, the King had in mind when he advises the

White Rabbit, on storytelling, "To begin at the beginning and go until you come to

the end and stop" (Alice in Wonderland). Or peruse the Wikipedia entry under

84

"narrative structure" and try to find a common core of meaning in the various

theories of NS—like a black hole everything is pulled in and nothing escapes. Or, to

put it another way, there is no consensus on of what can be called an Ur-NS, nothing

NSs have in common except a mere existence in time and space—or worse, an

existence in name only.

If it is true that the question "What is a fictional Ur-NS?" will never receive a

definitive answer, should this be a reason to give up trying to find one? Or a reason

to not look for an UR-NS in the first place? No, not necessarily. Rather, I suggest that

we can choose any one sentence (proverb, idiom, puzzle or whatever) as a starting

point and do our best to demonstrate that it contains all of the deep structure of a

NS—though not necessarily the surface ones, especially stylistic variation, which we

add on.

With that in mind I would like to start with an Arabic proverb: "The winds

always blow counter to the ship's desire."

So in what is the deep structure, or its basic elements, of the proverb? The

reader, I suspect, will have h/h own interpretation. But, for what's its worth, here is

mine. I will first make some general claims about the proverb as an NS and then put

more flesh on their bones.

These claims will appear, below, under the headings of Fiction, Inner and

Outer, Context, Narrative, , Homostasis, Structure, Lineage, Classic NS,

Emergence.

85

Fiction. Is the proverb fiction? Most commentaters contrast fiction with "fact,"

saying, in essence that what has not occurred, and has no possibility of occuring, is

fiction. Here words like "invented," "feigned" and the like occur. But in. a tradition

dating from, the Proto-Indo-European language (circa 14,000 BCE), though

Aristotle's Poetics and Horace's Poetica, one can say that anything that can be

"predicated" without contradiction of a subject can be taken as either fact or

fiction—both of them has their source in the Indo-European word *dheigh" (to set,

put, to mold clay) through Latin "fictio" the past participle of "fingere" (to touch,

make, mold; OED, Buck;Watkins). Additionally, and more generally, one can leave it

to any author to say whether h/h text is fiction or fact. The New York Times quotes

Larry Kramer, the author of The American People (2015) saying that "Farrar and

Strauss (the publishers) call it a novel. That way the lawyers will leave you alone.

But I believe everything in the book is true. It may look like fiction but, to me, it's

not" (emph mine; April 8, 2015: C4).

One even want to say that fiction can be found, not in texts like Hamlet and

Pride and Prejudice, but more often in literary criticism and accounts like

Wikipedia's entry under "fiction." If this is true, than once might want to classify the

present text as fiction. But it's not. At least not completely.

Perhaps we should say that fiction and non-fiction are on a continuum.

Where you say X is fiction and Y says its non-fiction depends on which part of the

continuum they are looking at.

Inner and Outer. My take on this generally follows Aristotle's discussions of

"place" (topos), "collection" and "container and things contained." What is placed

86

within something is the inner. What surrounds it, constrains it, identifies it, and the

like is the outer. His comments on these topics reflect his work as a biologist

recently (2015) discussed at length by Armand Leroi in The Lagoon: How Aristotle

Invented Science. Ariustotle's focus is on organisms. But I think it can be taken, in a

metaphorical way, as descriptive of almost everything, an event, a narrative,

grammar and the like.

The Inner is by far the most important of the two. Nothing is more critical to

the survival and independence of organisms, events, narratives, than the

maintenance of a constant internal environment. Oliver Sacks, recently, puts this in

the context of the human body. (The New York Review of Books. "A General Feeling of

Disorder"; April 23, 2015: 4-6). The work of perserving such "internal

environment" is that of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and the central

nervous system (CNS). CNS "along with muscles and sense organs, evolved to allow

animals to get aroundin the world---forage, hunt, seek mates, etc. ANS, by contrast,

"sleeply monitoring every organ and tissue in the body, tells one how one is."

If the inner environment is maintained, than one does not feel anything is

amiss. It is when the ANS "starts listing heavily to one side or the other, that …the

feeling of how one is takes on an intrusive, unpleasant quality, now one will say ' I

feel ill--something is amiss.' At such times one no longer looks well either." Here

Sacks gives the example of a migraine: "Migraine provides, in miniature, the

essential features of being ill--of trouble inside the body--without actual illness."

Inner and Outer, in short, come together in Sack's representation to provide

context for viewing the proverb: "The wind blows counter to the ship's desire."

87

"Desire," obviously, is mainly viewed as a biiological concept. Moving around,

hunting, seeking a mate and so on rise from a specific desire--feeling of longing to be

elsewhere, in a different state, the need to escape present circumstances and so on.

"Desire," in other words invest the ship with a consciousness and intention. In

Sack's terminlogy it is "homostatic." In order to remain in a state of desire it has to

regard the state as normal and orderly. Not to be in the state would be abnormal

and disorderly.

Narrative and Context: When students ask me "Professor W— " what is the

meaning of the word 'narrative'?" I am tempted to say the question makes no sense.

Anyone who has read a lot of fiction, or written it, knows that no one narrative

rarely, if ever, matches another one. And for one narrative in English, say, to match

one in Chinese is impossible and even highly unlikely in a language related to

English like German.

This leaves us only with context, grammatical type, statement, question or

command and genre. Context presupposes parts and a whole. A narrative can be the

part of a whole, or a whole itself—as long as both are coherent. But the intelligibility

of a narrative depends on presupposition and implication and imageability (visual

perception) of the referents of its words. With presupposition and implication, one

assumes a "disjunction of two propositions, positive and negative ones" (Lyons: 2:

757-61). Stated as a series of questions, we can then ask, "where is the ship?; Where

could it not be? From what direction is the wind blowing? From what direction

could it not be blowing? In what part of the world would statement "Wind always

88

blows counter to the ship's desire" be true or not true? Is there or is there not a

landbased equivalent of the statement?

Visual perception can be seen in terms of the metaphor of travel; one looks

into the distance, at, or towards, an object; one's gaze travels to and reaches, or

grasps, the object. Perception can be interpreted as making a kind of visual journey

from a point of reference, as source, to the object of perception, as goal. Often the

path of visual travel plays a part. (Lyons 2: 700-702)

Perception, conceived as imageability, implies levels (intensities) of

visualizing a scene. So: how vivid is "The wind always blows counter to the ship's

desire/" Slightly vivid? Vivid? Very vivid? How well does its imageability support the

proposition of the proverb?

Emergence. This phenonanon is usually put in a biological, evolutionary, context. Here

is an example, the emergence of a diaphagm:"In the first wave, one set of cells in the

folds multiplies outward, toward the sides of the body. Then these cells fan out toward

the front and back. The cells become connective tissue, formig a thib membrance across

the top of the liver. In the second wave, muscle-generating cells emerge from the folds.

They follow the trail blazed by the connective tissue, forming a second sheet sandwiched

inside the membrane. 'The muscke cells are kind of dumb, and they're just following the

connective tissue.' " (New York Times, April 7, 2015: D3).

When things are troublesome, always remember,

keep an even mind, and in prosperity

be careful of too much happiness:

since my Dellius, you’re destined to die,

89

whether you live a life that’s always sad,

or reclining, privately, on distant lawns,

in one long holiday, take delight

in drinking your vintage Falernian.

Why do tall pines, and white poplars, love to merge

their branches in the hospitable shadows?

Why do the rushing waters labour

to hurry along down the winding rivers?

Tell them to bring us the wine, and the perfume,

and all-too-brief petals of lovely roses,

while the world, and the years, and the dark

threads of the three fatal sisters allow.

You’ll leave behind all those meadows you purchased,

your house, your estate, yellow Tiber washes,

you’ll leave them behind, your heir will own

those towering riches you’ve piled so high.

Whether you’re rich, of old Inachus’s line,

or live beneath the sky, a pauper, blessed with

humble birth, it makes no difference:

you’ll be pitiless Orcus’s victim.

We’re all being driven to a single end,

all our lots are tossed in the urn, and, sooner

or later, they’ll emerge, and seat us

in Charon’s boat for eternal exile.

90

(Horace, Liber Alter, Ode III; "Aequam memento rebus in arduta…")

First, the proverb has a structure. That such structure is something more, in

Aristotle's words, something more than a "heap"—in this case words and their

referents. Additionally, this something more than a heap implies that it is, in some

sense, an emergent, As such, it is a whole bearing new information that is

irreducible to its parts taken as bearers of old, or given, information. With

emergence something old, or given, gives birth to the new but the new cannot be

understood, at least not completely, by analyzing the old. All this is the narrative

part of the proverb. It tells a story. In doing so, it makes itself self-reflective, a story

about itself telling a story. It also suggests that we can translate the proverb into any

other language without its losing either its core, or general, meaning: for example, El

viento siempre sopla en contra del deseo de la nave; or Der Wind immer Gegen blasen,

um die Schiffs Wunsch. This further implies we could take our translation to native

speakers and then record their reactions. Does it preserve the meaning, by encoding

all requisite information, that a native speaker must have to communicate to a

fellow speaker?

Secondly, the S part of the proverb tells us quite a bit about "structure," in

both a diachronic and synchronic way. Diachronically, we learn that the word

91

comes from the Latin struere, or to bring scattered parts together. This implies that

the parts were once "strewn," or unconnected (the word "straw" is a cognate). The

word "constructed," in its temporal sense, has the sense of an a completed collection

of the parts into a whole. Additionally, each part has a proper place in the whole, not

just any place. A narrative is something. Secondly, that the NS forms a knowing

commentary on the satisfaction of desire blocked by an exterior force. Or we can say

that it weaves together the actual and the possible, the ship and wind with desire

This leaves us with only a starting point. be unanswerableWittgenstein, obviously at

sea about the power of language to "bewitch," us came up with the notion of the

"family resemblance" of certain words

I can think of no better expression to characterize the similarities

(between

Words) than 'family resemblances' Familenahnlichkeiten). PI 66.

Does it even exist? Or is a fiction, made up by theorists who lack other, more

salient subjects, to discuss? "narrate," "narrator" and so forth). In recent issues of

The New York Times, for example, it appears in reviews of films, TV series and books

far more often (by my count) than synonyms like "story," "tale" and the like. Next,

think of the "names" of fiction narratives: in accounts of the crash of Germanwings

Flight 9525 twenty seven times. NSHad I been on the panel I would haver said that

all narrative structures (NS) are depictions of possible worlds represented by actual,

92

everyday, language.In this sense NSx represent a convergence and an emergence.

Stuff from an actual world converges with that from a possible world to general a

third, narrated, world.

Put in more linguistic terms, a writer/speaker represents possible world

with modal and non-modal language—roughly, expressions like "X is Y," "X was Y"

(non-modal) and "X could be Y," "X could be Y" (modal).

This leads to other claims:

1. All NSx, fiction and non-fiction, can be reduced to, or described from, the

convergence of modal " (or possible) "wolds" with non-modal (or actual) "worlds."

NSs emerge from the merger of "What is…" with "What if…All NSs then are a a third

thingi generated by two prior things (Peirce).

2. NSx as possible worlds rise from the employment of modal verbs, "can," "should,"

"must," "may" and the like. The reference is generally to the future, what might be

the case, but is not yet the case, but might be the case. The expression of cause and

effect, with the "if X then Y" structure is a common example of modal thinking. Non-

modal language, by constrast, is most salient in the use of the verb to be in its past

and present forms, "was," "had been," "once was" and "is" and expressions like "here

and now." Such language presupposes the direct perception of a world of shapes,

sizes, colors, textures, movements and the like. In this world everyday objects, trees,

clouds, books, whatever are present to the senses.. They occupy space and time.

They are susceptible to naming and re-naming.

93

3. The most "priviledged" objects in both an actual and a possible world are persons

and the most fundamental units in NSs. Sherlock Holmes, for example, is not a

person in the actual world, but is present in a possible world. Barack Obama is fully

present in an actual world.

3a. Synonyms for "possible" are "virtual," "potential," "mythic," "legends" and the

like. Possible-world theory is also used within narratology to divide a specific text

into its constituent worlds, possible and actual. In this approach, the modal

structure of the fictional text is analysed in relation to its narrative and thematic

concerns.

Watkins, Calvert. "Indo-European Languages," Internation Encyclopedia of

Linguistics. Oxford UP: 4 vols: vol 2: 206-212.

Blumstein, Sheila. "Perception of Speech." Voll 3: 178-180.

Cutler, Anne. "Psycholinguistic Aspects" vol 3: 181-183.

On Emerence: seehttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/emergence.html (11 minute video from Nova); "Consciousness appears to me to be an emergent phenomenon characteristic of a complex adaptive system. It is more than the constituent part of anatomy and physiology, yet it emerges from their interation." (Lois Yellowthunder; TLS, April 3, 2015: p. 6. Loyal Rue, Religion is Not about God: How Spiritual Traditions Nurture our Biological Nature and What to Expect When They...

Jul 24, 2006

bottom up (no leader, no dominate part); parts follow simple rules; new,

unpredictable.

94

***

PROPER FUNCTION AND THE COMEDY OF TRISTRAM

SHANDY

Risum teneatis amiciHorace

The comedy of Tristram Shandy has been described from many different

perspectives, from that of 'learned wit' (Jefferson), Lockean psychology (New;

Landrow), the effects of 'gravity' (Burckhardt), and text-linguistics and style

(Hunter) and several other ways. Of these, it is perhaps Ricks' and New's

treatments that have the most comprehensive reach and, consequently, are the most

useful to a first time reader of TS. New's strength lies in demonstrating the need to

read the novel in the context of the culture of the Renaissance and by how the

comedy feeds on material and techniques of writers like Cervantes, Rabelais and

Swift. That culture is not ours therefore, the work of annotation becomes

important.

Ricks' account of the comedy of TS, takes a 'pluripotent' approach. Much like

a stem cell, the comedy takes different forms and makes us laugh (some of us) for

different reasons. A salient example of such pluripotency appears in the names

Ricks gives the comedy: 'shaggy dog story,' 'exuberant humor,' 'wheels within

wheels' or 'mirrors reflecting mirrors.' Each of these allows us to view the

'machinery' of the story from different perspectives.

95

Here, without taking issue with any previous reading of TS, I would like to

propose a reading of its comedy of the absurd from the perspective of the violation

of 'proper function,' or the emphasis on 'improper function.' The claim is that,

instead of things (sperm cells, bridges, a bowling green, a bull and so on),

performing a proper, or normal, function, they enact an improper one. A bridge

collapses, Obadiah's cow does not calve because of an infertile (impotent?) bull,

Susannah's memory does not 'hold' the proper name (the one Walter has chosen)

for the new born Tristram. It's as if Sterne presents us with something whose

function we recognize, starts a performance of the function, and then throws a

wrench into the works.i

With TS, it can be argued, Sterne has in mind a 'strategic audience'an audience

that would resonate with his kind of storytelling. Unlike other novels of the long

eighteenth-century, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Richardson's Clarissa, Smollett's

Humphrey Clinker or Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, Sterne, with TS, asks the

reader not to take things seriously. In this, Sterne's strategy seems to presuppose an

audience that has a high resemblance to Aristotle's portrait of the 'liberal' and

'magnanimous' personthe one who 'take few things seriously, and are not anxious (

Nicomachean Ethics 1124b, see also 1125a 12-16).

For a novel to reach such an audience it must have a strategic narrative. This is

largely an implicit 'explanation' of why one is writing a comic novel this way and how

the strategy used will lead to the promised outcome. Without such a narrative, no author

can command the belief of h/h readers. The narrative must not only be persuasive in

rational terms. It also needs drama to appeal to the emotions.

96

Perhaps such a novel has the structure of a 'game novel,' one in which the author

presents few things moving in a linear, cause (in time) before effect, way. On this issue

please hear the voice of another notable writer, Milan Kundera. Kundera is writing to say

that writers who do not follow Sterne's lead, miss the opportunity to write a great comic

novel:

For him (Sterne) the novel, (is) that great game of invented characters. It

means unlimited liberty of formal invention. Let me state categorically:

no novel worthy of the name takes the world seriously. Moreover, what does it

mean ''to take the world seriously''? It certainly means this: believing what the

world would have us believe. From ''Don Quixote'' to ''Ulysses,'' the novel has

challenged what the world would have us believe.

So, following Kundera, I ask the reader to take this essay, not as a full-blown

game, but as having some of the qualities of a game. In this, you might want to imagine a

game going on between two players; say a chess game, one in which the players follow,

not one strategy, but different kinds, moving the chess pieces here and thereone space

forward, one back, on to the side, diagonally, slightly askew.

If you are fed up with the overuse of the word 'strategy' in literary criticism,

then you might want to use the term, as I do, 'thought run.'

The 'runs,' as I employ them here, rise from perspectives on 'proper

function.' Such function is not defined as one way of moving the chess pieces, but

many different waysall with the purpose of achieving a narrative about the

comedy of TS.

97

If you are the least bit grateful what I have, and will inform you of in these

thought-run, then you should be eternally grateful what I have not, and will not, tell

you.

So what is proper function? Critically, it is a normative concept. We define

such function, not by what a thing normally does or is disposed to do. We define it

by what it should do.i There are three foundational units for this definition. First, any

item, trait, process, event, may do many things, not all of which are part of its proper

function. The heart, for example, pumps blood. But it can also make one's chest

pound. It can make an appearance as squirmy lines on a cardiograph machine

printout. One can, given certain conditions, make a mechanical replica of a heart.

But only pumping blood is the real heart's proper function. This is what hearts have

done in the past that explains the existence of hearts in the present. Second, an

item, trait, process, event, can have a proper function even if it never, or hardly ever,

performs it. A salient example in TS is Walter's sperm cell. The proper function of

the cell's tail is to propel the cell, without disruption or damage, to his wife's ovum.

The sperm gets there. But in damaged condition. Most real-world sperm cells never

reach the ovum, something Sterne could not have even guessed. But he did know,

following the medical knowledge of the age, what the cells were supposed to do;

what their normative, proper, function is. But, throw off track by an 'unseasonable

question,' Walter's sperm cell that became Tristram did not perform in a normative

way. It just performed, because of an interrupted journey to the ovum, what it could

do. Finally, an item, trait, event, process may have a proper function but not be able

98

to perform it. Take, for example, Walter's misuse of his hands in the scene with his

wig and handkerchiefand one that caused him to make a 'devil of a figure':

As my father's India handkerchief was in his right coat pocket, he

should by no means have suffered his right hand to have engaged: on

the contrary,instead of taking off his wig with it, as he did, he ought to

have committed that entirely to the left; and then, when the natural

exigency my father was under of rubbing his head, call'd out for his

handkerchief, he would have had nothing in the world to have done,

but to have put his right hand into his right coat pocket and taken it

out;which he might have done without any violence, or the least

ungraceful twist in any one tendon or muscle of his whole body (TS,

3.2. 187-88; my emphasis).

Tristram is here describing an improper use of hands from the perspective of

proper function and its effects. His employment of should and ought makes explicit

the proper use of hands in this context. (The modal verbs, should and ought, state

the normative value of the use of handsas they can do for everything else

represented in English as a nominal clause). The clause, "would have had nothing to

have done," is a statement that linguists (and philosophers) call "counterfactual." It

creates a counter narrative of what should have happened, in order to satisfy the

conditions of a proper functionin contrast with a narrative of what did happen.

Every action, or transition, stops in TSand the novel as a completion

presumably has closure (Booth). In the language of computer programming, we can

99

say that every action and transition has an 'halting program' that produces an

'output.' But the program and the output, as a finite process and finite product, are

(unlike a computer program) always immature. Toby's bowling never matures into

a proper replica of the fortifications of Numar. It lacks the proper pieces of artillery

and what it has are in the wrong place. Tristram's recording of his life and opinions

never becomes a complete autography because he can't catch up with his life

experiences. Walter never achieves his goal of naming his son with the name that

will determine his fateand so on. If we take these examples as a model for the

transition of something with proper function into something without it, then we

have some warrant for writing a 'halting program' in this fashion:

If X has proper function at time t1 (the input stage), but loses it (becomes a

function with improper function) at t2 (the output stage), then we can say that X

achieves immaturity at time t2. From the normal transition from immaturity to

maturity the reverse happensit's as if, in a mundus inversus manner, time as

growth goes the wrong way. X, from a state of having, proceeds to one of lacking.

But the story of X in its proper to improper transformation does not stop

there in TS. It becomes a starting point (and cause) of Y, Z and so on as an item

losing proper function. As an example of this consider what happen when Uncle

Toby asks Trim to cast two Namur-like artillery pieces on the bowling green. 'Tis a

pity, Trim, said my uncle Toby…that we have not a couple of field pieces to mount

in the gorge of that new redoubt….Your honour shall have them, replied Trim, before

to-morrow morning' (5.19.450.51). So where does Trim get the lead for the pieces?

100

After all hadn't he already cut off the 'sprouts' of my uncle's roof, melted down his

'pewter shaving bason' and taken lead from the roof of the church? Trim removes

the leaden weights from a window, of course, which causes the window to fall on the

five-year old penis of Tristram: 'Susannah did not consider that nothing was well

hung in our family' (5.17.449).

By obtaining lead from three different things (in three different places), Trim

destroys the proper function of each and invests it with an improper functionone

with consequences with different things in different places.

So what is the ultimate foundation of the normative nature of proper

function? Of something doing what it should do? The quick answer is its history, not

what it is now doing. For hands to perform their proper function they must do what

nature has selected for them to do. If through history bowling greens have been

designed to bowl on, to use them properly is to bowl on them, not to erect mock

cannons and a sentry box on them. If windows are an historical artifact, designed to

keep out bad weather while letting in the sun (and so on), then allowing one of their

kind to injure the penis of an infant, is to represent the destruction of their historical

origin and development.

Proper function, in short, necessarily presupposes a historical past in which

environmental pressures determined the proper function of an item, not just a

present use.

So what is the role of the reader in this? The issue here seems to have a

relationship to the 'is/ought' distinction discussed by Hume (3.2 of A Treatise of

101

Human Nature (1739). Can we derive the normative nature (the ought/ought not)

from the 'is-ness' of how items like Walter's sperm cells, Uncle Toby's bowling green

or Susannah's memory functions? Does the reader (one with an intact mind)

acknowledge the normative 'ought-ness' of each of these items? Or does h/h see

their nature as purely factual of the form X does Y, but not X should not do Y, but

rather Z?

In other words, is there an 'ought' quality to proper function or merely a 'is'

one? Or a combination of 'is' and 'ought'? Do we need to add 'ought' to 'is' to extract

comedy from an item? In the accounts mentioned above (in the first paragraph) the

answer would seem to be no. All we need is a factual description, not a normative

one. Every critic I am aware of acknowledges the existence of failure as a leitmotiv of

TS. But none, it appears, moves from 'is-ness' to 'ought-ness' in their accounts, from

description to an assignment of explicit normative value.

There seems to be, in brief, an unbridgeable gap in the standard criticism of

the comedy of TS: the gap between 'is' and 'ought.' Consequently, such criticism, it

seems fair to say, can be characterized as Humean. But my colleagues who have read

this paper, ones familiar with the literature on proper function, take issue with my

characterization of the 'is/ought' of Hume. So, if you are up to it, please read Hume's

most succinct statement (below) on the matter:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have

always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the

ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or

102

makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I

am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of

propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is

not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is

imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or

ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it

should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should

be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can

be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as

authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to

recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention

would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let

us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the

relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason (355; my emphasis).

The irony in this is just one mark of Hume's geniusand, arguably, his chief weapon

in his destruction of the foundations of 'vulgar systems of morality.'

My claim (which some might take as counterclaim against Hume), is that if

we acknowledge the value of proper function as one kind of account for comedy,

then we also need, and can derive, a normative 'ought' from a descriptive 'is' this

in order to give the items in question (Walter's handedness, Susannah's memory for

names, and so on) a goal-oriented character. Or, in terms more familiar to Sterne, an

Aristotelian teleological one. Whatever exists for a cause, processes, art, thinking,

103

events, has a goal (or end, teleo) driving it. Causes, intention, chance, form, matter,

define what bring items into being and determine if they succeed, or fail, to reach

their end (akne or perfection). Aristotle refers to the 'is-ness' of an item, a 'being'

(outa or on), under the conditions of form and matter. Its 'ought-ness' falls under the

heading of efficient and necessity causes.

In other words, it is Aristotle's belief that everything acts (tends toward) the

normative ends they serve (Physics, 195a23-24, 198b 10-21).

Walter, Trim, Toby and the rest of that lovable lot each have a goal in mind

with h/h projects. Each is, like Swift's grub-street writer, Bickerstaff, or Modest

Proposer someone who can only be fully defined from the point of view of 'is' and

'ought.' The 'I' of A Modest Proposal is perhaps the best example of this. Swift builds

the infrastructure of Proposal on a transition from 'is' to 'ought to be.' The narrative

begins, as we know, with a descriptions of beggars and their children and short

reference to what the speaker's 'Intention' is with his proposal and then proceeds to

describe how his scheme differs from 'the several Schemes of other Projectors'

(Davis 12.110). At this point, his project becomes normative, what not only can be

done but more importantly, what ought to be done:

But my Intention is very far from being confined to provide only for

the Children of professed Beggars. It is of a much greater Extent, and

shall take in the whole Number of infants at a certain Age, who are

born of Parents, in effect as little able to support them, as those who

demand our Charity in the Streets

104

(12.109-110).

The term 'proper' occurs 37 times in TS. 'Improper' appears twice. 'Proper

place' makes four appearances (Graves). Let me meditate briefly on these and see if

it makes sense to see a correlation between their use and my discussion of proper

function above. First, let me say a passing word about 'proper place.' Should this

nominal phrase put us in mind of Swift's definition of style as 'proper words in

proper places'? And is Swift being ironic? Some of my learned colleagues think so. Is

Sterne also being ironic with the expression? It seems, considering the structure of

TS, plausible. Harder to answer is the question: is 'proper' being used in a normative

way, as a means of saying what ought to be, but not necessarily what is. One, after all,

is only required to give real-world evidence of what is, not what should be. One effect

of existence claims is that one can stop after exhausting the evidence. With an

evidence-less subject like what should be one can 'go on leisurely, writing and

publishing…which, if I am suffered to go on quietly…I shall continue to do as long

as I live (1.14.42).

But let me go on to a quick overview of the other 30-some occurrences of

'proper.' In Millikan's account of proper function, she stresses the relational aspect

of such function. This is because the function that evolved did so because of

environmental pressures. Spears come into being for the purposes of defense and

hunting; a lion's claws is to enable it to catch and hold prey, the function of the bee's

waggle dance is to indicate the distance and direction of nectar.

105

I suggest then that Sterne uses 'proper,' in most cases, is to make salient (or

at least more salient) the contextual 'pressures' of writing comedy. I will stick my

neck out and say that the (intentional, unintentional?) effects of these pressures are

usually ironic. No doubt that there are effects of such pressures that are not ironic.

Writers, in relationship to their subject and especially to their readers, are always

under some kind of pressure, oscillating between the comic and the serious.

Perhaps the major pressure for the 'I' is spatial and temporal: where should I

put this information and when? (This presupposes its negation: 'Where and when

should I not put or not have put it'). Please consider these examples of Sterne's

employment of 'proper':

*Sir, as you and I are in a manner perfect strangers to each other

it would not have been proper to have let you into too many

circumstances relating to myself all at once (1:10; my emphasis)

*…my uncle Toby was sadly put to it for proper ammunition

I say proper ammunitionbecause his great artillery

(erected on the bowling green) would not bear powder;

and 'twas well for the Shandy family they would not (6.23.541;

Sterne's emphasis).

*…had they (good people) more of either the one or the other

(wit and judgment), it would destroy the proper balance

betwixt them, and I am satisfied moreover they would want

occasions to put them to use (3.20.231; my emphasis).

106

Each of these examples presupposes a normative purpose with the subject of each

onewith 'wit/judgment,' 'ammunition' and the reader as a 'stranger.' Each moves

beyond presupposing to asserting, as a sort of thought-experiment, to the possible

lack of such purpose. In each specimen, such lack comes into being through

negation, with the words 'not' and 'want' (italicized).

'Improper,' as I mentioned above, occurs twice in the text. In the first

specimen we find Walter interrupting Trim's reading of the sermon. The second

specimen takes up the question whether or not it was 'proper' or 'improper' for

Trim to wager his Montero cap on whether or not the widow Wadman is in love

with uncle Toby.

*Certainly, Trim, quoth my father…you give that sentence a very

improper accent; for you curl up your nose, man, and read it

with such a sneering tone, as if the Parson was going to

abuse the Apostle (2.17.143; my emphasis)

*…was it proper, continued Trim to offer a wager

before your honours? ….there is nothing improper in it,

said my father (8.34.734 my emphasis).

What 'improper' does, in the first specimen is to affirm the importance of normative

value of an act (doing something the 'right' way) by denying the act's present

performance. The effect is to reduce something positive to something negative,

presence to absence. In the words of one commentator on negation, one can use

negative information, to destroy the normative value of a subject:

107

Negative statements are more powerful than positive statements.

Knowing how things are not gives you knowledge of exhaustiveness.

If there is any reduction to be achieved it runs from positive

statements to negative facts….one reductive strategy is to exploit a

kind of kind of double negation, to say that the cat is on the mat is to

saythat there is no negative fact of the cat not being on the mat

(Sorenson 227).

Please notice in the second specimen above the use of double negation, 'there is

nothing improper….' Walter's comment on Trim's statement, in short, affirms the

truth of the statement by 'exhausting,' with double negation, any argument that

might be made against it.

One notable claim about Sterne's fiction is that its foundational unit is a

'double principle' (Lamb). First there is an experience then something 'said' about

the experience. One might see in this a procedure, akin to that anticipated by

Aristotle and described by Tyler, of the 'unsaid.' and the 'said.' If one experiences X,

one does not necessarily 'say' anything about it. In fact it is reasonable to assume

that the 'unsaid' is far more common, has more quantity, than the 'said' (Metaphysics

1078b 27-29). In that light we might think about the statement from Epictetus

attached to the frontispiece of TS and Tristram's complaint about living faster than

he can record his life experience (I.14.41-42). As Epictetus makes clear throughout

The Discourses and the Enciridion that the "sayable" (legetai), being contingent on

the pragmata (matter, stuff, trouble), comes into existence like a helpless infant

108

(without a voice) and vanishes through the holes of memory (please see, for

example, Discourses, 3.2.1-6; Enchiridion 52).

Did Hume think of 'is/ought' as a double principle? And my reader think of

proper/improper the same way? Perhaps. Obviously, in one representation it is a

double. But the point I am attempting to make about proper/improper function and

the comedy of TS rests, not solely on a double principle, but on a triadic

oneinstead of seeing an unbridgeable gap between 'is' and 'ought,' we should look

for a transitional zone between them. In Tristram's words: 'Attitudes are nothing,,

madam'tis the transition from one attitude to anotherlike the preparation and

resolution of the discord into harmony, which is all in all' (4.6.331; my emphasis).

Given the space here I can only give an outline of the 'all in all' here. (I

describe it in much more detail in a text now in preparation). It is best described

quickly by reference to the reduction of something that has property into something

that lacks the property. Aristotle calls this reduction "privation" (sternsis):

We speak of 'privation' if something has not one of the attributes which a

thing might naturally have, even if this thing itself would not naturally

have it; e.g. a plant is said to be 'deprived' of eyes. If, though either the

thing itself or its genus would naturally have an attribute, it has it not; e.g.

a blind man and a mole are in different senses 'deprived' of sight….Indeed

there are just as many kinds of privations as there are of words with

negative prefixes; for a thing is called unequal because it has not equality

though it would naturally have it, and invisible either because it has no

color at all or because it has a poor color, or either because it has no feet

109

at all or because it has imperfect feet. Again, a privative term may be used

because the thing has little of the attribute (and this means having it in a

sense imperfectly), e.g. "kernel-less"; or because it has it not easily or not

well (e.g. we call a thing uncuttable not only if it cannot be cut but also if

it cannot be cut easily or well); or because it has not the attribute at all; for

it is not the one-eyed man but he who is sightless in both eyes that is

called blind. This is why not every man is "good" or "bad", "just" or

"unjust", but there is also an intermediate state (Metaphysics 5;22).

In short, the transition of one thing to another, say, its proper function to an

improper function, can be described as various stages of privation, from something

like strong to weak. I have already mentioned how Walter's sperm cell becomes

weakened during its transition from my father to my mother, an event that casts its

shadow over the whole of the text. The humuculus, Tristram tells us, arrives at its

goal 'miserably spent;his muscular strength and virility worn down to a thread

(1.2.3). Here, one imagines, the reference is not only to Walter but (a case of a more

severe privation) to the failure of Obadiah's cow to calve: 'The cow did not

calveno she'll not calve till next week the cow put it off terribly'

But, since the bull 'went through the business with a grave face, my father had a high

opinion of him ."(9.33.808).

Lamb's "the things things say" takes what I said above to a level, more

general level. So,

NOTES

110

iThis essay is for Professor Jan Bakker (1936-2013) condemned to teaching

American Literature while loving the English literature of the Eighteenth-century,

especially the works of Laurence Sterne. 'We die with the dying. See, they depart,

and we go with them, We are born with the dead. See, they return, and bring us with

them'T.S. Eliot.

iThere is good reason to believe that Plato, in his uses of 'specific function' (ergon) to

define the 'excellence' (uperoche) of things (horses, the ears, eyes and so) has in

mind something very close to what I am calling here, after Millikan, proper function.

The only salient feature missing from Plato's representation is an explicit reference

to the historical development of proper function in any given item (The Republic

352 b-e; see also Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 988a 12-17).

Is there any similarity between the approach to comedy given here and the

so-called 'incongruity theory.' Perhaps. The reader is invited to assess the possibility

by reading 'Theories of Humor,' as given by Wikipedia, especially the section

'Incongruity Theory.'

3I am indebted to professors Jeffrey Smitten, Charles Romesberg and Bob Cole for their

comments and suggestions on this essay.

WORKS CITED

111

Aristotle. Trans. W. H.. Hett. 23 vols (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP 1968). (Loeb): vols

12. .

Booth, Wayne. 'Did Sterne Complete Tristram Shandy.' Modern Philology 47 (1951):

172-183.

Burckhardt, Sigurd. 'Tristram Shandy's Law of Gravity.' English Literary History.

(1961): 28:70-88.

Davis, Herbert. The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift. 12 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwood

1968).

Graves, Patricia. 'A Computer-Generated Concordance To Sterne's Tristram Shandy.'

Diss, 4 vols (Ann Arbor MI: University Microfilms International, 1991).

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. (London: John Noon.1739).

http://www.davidhume.org/texts/thn.html.

Hunter, John P. 'Response as Reformation: Tristram Shandy and the Art of Interruption.'

Novel (1971):132-146.

Jefferson, David W. 'Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit.' Essays in

Criticism 1 (1951): 225-248.

Kundera, Milan

http://www.kundera.de/english/InfoPoint/Introduction_into_variaton/introduction

_into_variaton.html.

Lamb, Jonathan. Sterne's Fiction and the Double Principle. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP

1989).

-------------------The Things Things Say.

Landrow, Frank. http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/sterne/gpl1.html),

112

Millikan, Ruth. White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice (Cambridge MA:

Harvard UP 1993).

New, Melvyn and Joan. Ed. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. 3

vols (The University Presses of Florida, 1978). All quotations from TS are to

this edition.

Editor's Introduction Tristram Shandy.(New York: Penguin 1967): xxvii-xli.

Plato, The Republic. Trans. Paul Shorey. 12 vols (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP 1956).

(Loeb): vol. 5.

Ricks, Christopher. Introductory Essay. Tristram Shandy.(New York: Penguin 1967): vii-

xxv.

Sorenson, Roy. Seeing Dark Things. The Philosophy of Shadows (Oxford: Oxford UP

2008).

Tyler. Stephen A. The Said and the Unsaid. Mind, Meaning, and Culture (New York:

Academic 1978).

WORD COUNT?

***

TO PASTICHE OR NOT TO PASTICHE

(Or, You Remind Me of Me)

Man is the most imitative of animals—Aristotle

113

To the reader: What follows is an excerpt from a “memoir” called THE

CONFESSIONS OF A PASTICHER. So please draw your own conclusions. Make your

own mistakes.

***

“Pastiche” is from an Italian word, “pasticcio” meaning “pie” or anything

cooked inside a pastry shell. That is, it is essentially a mixture, or combination, of

different elements. The first recorded use of the “pasticcio” was in 1535, vivanda

ricoperta di pasta e cotta al forno “(nourishment covered with crust and baked in an

oven”). Its translation into English as “pastiche” was in 1643 (OED) But over the

years, and what linguists call semantic drift, pastiche has departed from its

“pasticcio” meaning to take on many others, pejorative, neutral and positive.

Imitation, parody, invocation of previous works, copycat, awareness of what came

first, and so on have a family resemblance to pastiche.

There seems little doubt that pastiching is a form of animal imitation. Just as

baby chimps learn to climb by aping their elders, so infants pick up words and

gestures by copying parents. They sense and mimic peers’ behavior from early on,

too, looking up at the ceiling if others around them do so or mirroring others’

cringes of fear and anxiety. Researchers have studied human mimicry in a number

of contexts. They have found that immediate social bonding between strangers is

highly dependent on mimicry, a synchronized and usually unconscious give and take

of words and gestures that creates a current of good will between two people.

114

Successful salespeople know that imitating another accent or body position makes

for a favorable impression, not only of the salesperson, but also the product he or

she is selling: “Myself, I’m very conscious of people’s body position, “ says Ray Allieri

of Wellesley, Mass., a former telecommunications executive with 20 years in

marketing and sales. “If they’re [the prospective buyer] leaning back in their chair, I

do that, and if they’re forward on their elbows, I tend to move forward.” i

Richard Dyer, author of a recent book on pastiche, lists and describes what

he believes are 13 discrete and semi-discrete meaningsi. As a social and cultural

commentator, he is especially interested in how “pastiche” can be used—with

positive results—to deconstruct various forms of artistic representation. For

example, the Western movie, particularly that distinctive Italian form, the Spaghetti

Western. Here is a form, having no single source, that is essentially a series of

variations on a theme. One cannot point to a past particular literary work, painting,

architectural work, etc. as its “authentic” original. Instead, one finds in it a

combination of different sources, echoes of past works, characters, plots, and

themes reminiscent of melodrama, epic poetry (especially Homer), Ovid’s

Metamorphosis, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (itself a reworking of Ovid) and

elements of the Old Comedy of the Greeks.

In short, pastiche always involves, in Dyer’s terminology, a pastiching work

and a work (or tradition, genre, concept, etc.) that is pastiched. Madame Bovary , for

example, pastiches, in the character of Emma, certain features of Romanticism;

Proust’s The Lemoine Affair by Gustave Flabert pastiches salient themes and stylistic

115

aspects of Flaubert’s writings and The Murder of Gonzago (the play in Hamlet )

pastiches, among other things, the traditions of dumbshow, mimes, and the story of

Aeneas telling Dido of the murder of Priam. It can even be argued that Stoppard’s

Rosancrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead pastiches The Murder of Gonzago. The

contemporary well-known poet, Bernard O”Donoghue’s “The Year’s Midnight,” a

recently published poem (TLS ,February 1, 2008), pastiches Donne’s “Nocturnal

Upon St. Lucy’s Day Being the Shortest Day,” in subject matter and affective

responses to its context while at the same time avoiding plagiary by the use of a

different point of view (“we” vs. “I”), blank verse instead of rhyme and syntactic

forms unavailable to Donne.

The phrase, “The sound of an axe in the woods,” always carries the high

probability of invocating the last bit of information about the fate of the family

estate in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. The phrase is the title of a dance routine by

the New York Company of Karole Armitage.

What is the most pastiched work in Western Literature? Obviously, the Bible,

part and whole.

Does this mean that most, if not all, literary works pastiche other works? Yes

and no. It’s largely a matter of how you apply criteria of identity and difference to a

particular work. In Dyer’s opinion’s a non-pastisching work, for example, the films

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Fort Apache (1948) attain that status

by being both self-reflective and self-conscious: they announce to the viewer,

116

through certain framing techniques, that “we are Western movies.” Other Western

movies, Cat Ballou (1965) or Pale Rider (1985 [a remake of Shane 1952]), by not

being self-referential, and by invoking themes, plots, styles, etc. found in

predecessors, signal their identity as a pastiche (Dyer 94-95, 101, 123 et al ). In

other words there is a close linkage between the concepts of information, identity

and difference. Identity, in essence, involves how we refer to something as the same

again. A common example is identifying Venus, not as the ancients did, as the

morning star and the evening star, but as the same star, the planet Venus. The

person who buys groceries in one store is the same person who buys hardware in

another. To verify that just check his credit card. Difference always involves new

information, from a particular perspective, about something. The phrase “man bites

dog” conveys something new to me; the phrase, “dog bites man” typically does not.

It is given, or, not surprising, information. New information is a difference that

makes a difference. A first reading of Hamlet then has the potential of informing the

reader that its differences from other plays lie in certain aspects of the whole, plot,

conceits, etc. Here newness as difference, is akin to what Brecht calls

Verfremdungseffekt (strangeness effect).

Can creative writers benefit from pastiching, pastiching in a intentional way?

Under certain conditions—some of which I will attempt to enumerate here—I

believe the answer is yes. First, however, let me list some possible objections to the

yes answer. One is what might be a variation of the Hamlet Problem: writing always

rises from decisions made under (often extreme) uncertainty. There is no way, in

117

principle, to know in advance whether or not there will be any “return” (money,

fame, a good job, etc.) from what you write. Conversely, there is no way to

determine beforehand that deciding not to write is a better decision than writing. By

not writing you might save time, energy, and money; and avoid possible humiliation

from producing something really bad—a disgrace to your spouse and family.

So, given the uncertainty condition, why should I concern myself with

pastiching which might increase the uncertainty? Why burden the to write/not to

write mental labor with the decision to write pastiche/not to write it? Another

objection is the danger of parody creep—or worse, plagiary. What if my intention is

to write, write really seriously, about some subject and readers take it to be a

parody of some previous text or tradition? Afterall, isn’t that what pastiching

essentially feeds on? Multiple sources, allusions, echoes and the like, from past

works; which, if mixed together in a haphazard ways, may risk generating bad

pastiche? As an academic, what if my department head concludes that my text is a

copy of someone else work? Finally, say my text, in draft form, does turn out to be a

pastiche of the worst kind, a parody or a transparent plagiary? What then? Do I walk

away or do I labor to revise the pastiching elements out of it? The decision to not

write might start to look better and better.

Still, if Dyer is backpark right, and if luminaries like Shakespeare, Proust, Ellison and others

profited from pastisching, why can’t I? But what, as a creative writer (or a would-be one) should I

knowingly pastiche? Two key assumptions of Dyer come to mind. First authentic pastiching is never

accidental. It always involves a “knowing look back.” Secondly, authentic pastiching takes place, for the

most part, between members of a “family” of related artists. That is, writers tend to pastiche other writers;

118

painters patische painters, film directors, film directors and so on. Does this mean, to continue the analogy,

that pastiching has an air of incest about it? Perhaps. Perhaps it’s more like nepotism. Anyway. Are we to

conclude, consequently, that creativity goes down as cosanguinity of the writers we pastiche (or painters,

architects, etc.) increases? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Let the reader decide.

Now I want to go on to a couple of different issues. First, what are my general impressions for

being, from time to time, a pasticher? (Please notice my discretion: nowhere will you find here a list of my

publication, awards, honors, etc). Secondly, are there any applications of pastiching not explicitly

mentioned by Dyer? Ones that creative writers should be aware of.

Most of the fruits of my pastiching appear in comic drama. But some of it also informs my short

stories, poems and a memoir. Why is it there? One reason is one I have already mentioned, the uncertainty

condition. The authors I have pastiched (all from the 18th century, especially, Swift, Sterne, Fielding,

Sheridan, etc.) have given me a place to start and a place to return to and start over whenever I got stuck.

Another reason is what Dyer calls the “affective” response of the reader. I’ve always wanted, at least in my

comic writings, for the reader to laugh and, consequently, feel superior to the characters; take delight in the

incongruities of presented things, events and occasions. No one, in my opinion, can equal an English 18th

century writer in creating incongruity, the mainstay of comedy. 18th century writers, doing a bit of

pastiching themselves, took a look back at Greek and Roman comic writers (Aristophanes, Juvenal,

Horace, etc); changed the context, used different syntactical forms and then built their incongruities around

common concepts like size, shape, time and person, especially in the form person can take as a first person

narrator. Gulliver’s Travels, for example, grounds it main comic incongruities in size (Gulliver, in Book

One, is 12 times larger than the native; 12 times smaller in Book Two) and shape (Gulliver is not a horse, in

part, because he has a different body shape). A principal incongruity of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy raises

from distortions in time and cause and effect. The narrator, Tristram, is born (he says) after he has written

150 pages of his life and times; the “cause” of his birth, he tells us, comes from his mother, at the time of

conception, disrupting his father work (depositing sperm onto an ovum). She asks him whether or not he

has wound up the clock. The incongruities of a Sheridan play, to go on a bit more in this vein, come into

existence, bit by bit, by characters missing and near-missing the point of a situation, what another on-stage

119

character is saying or what has been previously reported about what has gone on off-stage before the play

began. All this boils down to incongruities that rise from different degrees of knowledge: members of the

audience, typically, know more than on-stage characters; more than the characters know about other

characters and even about themselves.

This all adds up to the LOSER character, voice, narrator, or authorial presence. Some of their

names are Gulliver, the “Proposer” (of A Modest Proposal ), Luckless (Sheridan’s The Critic), and

Shadwell (Dryden’s MacFleknoe) So: all my comic characters, most particularly the first person narrators,

are losers with comic DNA from the 18th century. This, to return to an earlier topic, is their identity as

something, as something to themselves, as a bat is something to itself by the fact of doing what a bat does,

hanging upside down in a cave, say, or sensing its prey by means of sonar. But, in order for a pastiche to be

authentic (and not a parody or a plagiary) it also has to be different from what it pastiches. It has to signal

its newness. An important way to achieve it is through the basic move of re-contextualization. An 18th

century LOSER loses in a different time and place than a 21th century one and he or she loses in a different

way for a different reason. Obviously. Of course. Obvious but necessary. What if you’re just learning how

to play a piano while giving a concert on the instrument? Or acting in a Warren Miller ski-movie before

your first lesson in skiing? Or, as an participant in the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, acclimating

yourself to the smog there by running alongside cars during their evening commute? You are, in effect, like

a diminutive Gulliver when he attempts to play a “Jigg” for the Queen of Brobdingnag on an instrument 12

times larger (“near sixty Foot long”) than the one he plays at home. “I ran sideling upon it (keyboard) that

way and this, as fast as I could, banging the proper Keys with my two Sticks….But, it was the most violent

Exercise I ever underwent, and yet I could not strike above sixteen Keys, nor play the Bass and Treble

together…which was a great Disadvantage to my Performance” (II, vi).

(“A great Disadvantage to my Performance.” The words sound in my ears as I write this.)

Different LOSERS lose in different contexts, performing in different events with different reasons

for so doing. And they lose with different faces and voices. To create such difference the pasticher must, as

it were, wear different masks, the most basic and recognizable of all forms. Like early humans, the writer is

trying to make sense of the universe by personifying its forces, and the most visible form of personification

are the face and the voice through it—usually the “I.” Think of the company the writer keeps: masks have

120

long been central to religious rituals, serving as tools of transformation and bridges to the spirit world; they

have figured in ceremonies intended to ensure fertility and raise the dead, make crops grow and rain fall,

kill enemies, ward off evil and cure sickness; they have been used by soldiers and celebrators of Lent,

astronauts and action heroes, hockey players and fencers, firefighters and welders.

But enough of my own (largely undistinguished, but enjoyable) patisching life—so far. Now I

want to turn to a few suggestions and implications about pastiche under the aspect of time and history. All

of this, I should say, is highly speculative and full of uncertain promise. I know, as many others have, that

“the owl of Minerva unfurls its wings only with the falling of the dusk” (Hegel), that is, we only know the

truth of something after it has flown away.

But that shouldn’t keep any of us from not trying.

Pastiching is a kind of time travel. A writer goes back into time to get

inspiration from, invoke the spirit of, borrow from, a tradition, a specific work or

Zeitgeist. He or she does so, generally, with a specific purpose in mind and with

some knowledge of what can be found there. So far, following Dyer’s lead, we have

mostly talked about diachronic time, movement back in time. (Science fiction, or

exploring the history of the future, is the subject of chapter 7). But what about

synchronic time, lateral movements, if you will, into areas existing in your own

time? Time that holds as many mysteries and riches as past or future time.

So, let us voyage for the next few minutes through the seas of modern

science on our way to colonizing a continent called THE HUMAN CONDITION. In the

sea are strange creatures like the Boltzman Brain theory; one that suggests (but

does not claim) that our brains may be momentary fluctuations in a field of matter

and energy.i Here one implication is that we are not persons with a real past living in

an orderly universe. Rather, we are free-floating brains, out in space somewhere or

121

suspended in a vat living in an illusionary world. Another example, loosely tied with

the Boltzman Brain theory, are lines of thought that can be made from the second

law of thermodynamics; the one that says, in effect, that “things always get worse.”

As time goes on, and entropy increases, things fall apart; “the center does not hold”;

waste accumulates and information becomes noise and then silence. Spacetime dies.

Isn’t it likely that the creators of The Matrix used some of these notions in the

movie?

Or, for different takes on THE HUMAN CONDITION take perspectives on the

blue sky. Its color often sets up a range of freaky emotions. Take, for example,

Zöglings Törless the principal character in Musil’s Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings

Törless [The Confusions of Zöglings Törless] (1906). He looks into the sky and

experiences a variety of experiences; ones ranging from an encounter with the

infinite to the ambiguity of human existence and finally to the inexpressible nature

of reality. One passage, in particular, illustrates these feelings:

He felt it must be possible, if only one had a long, long ladder,

to climb up and into it [blue sky]. But the further he penetrated,

raising himself on this gaze, the further the blue, shining depth

receded. And still it was as though some time it must be reached, as

though by sheer gazing one must be able to stop it and hold it. The

desire to do this became agonizingly intense. (My translation).

122

Challenging such views were scientists seeking to find the “real” reason for

the blue of the sky. Aristotle, Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham (the 10th century Iraqi

astronomer), Leonardo da Vinci, and Newton all had their theories and explanations.

In the 1760s, the Swiss geologist, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, theorized that the

blue of the sky was due to moist particles in the air whose hue gave the air its color.

So he invented a device called a “cyanometer” to measure the sky’s blue. This

instrument consisted of a hand-painted color circle calibrated with 52 shades of

blue, ranging from white (“zero degrees”) to black (”51 degrees”) The so-called

moist particles would, Saussure thought, measure 34 degrees on his cyanometer.

Higher or lower readings were supposed to give an indication of how many particles

were present in the air at a specific time and place. On Mont Blanc, Europe’s highest

mountain, Saussure measured the blue of the sky at 39 degrees. At sea level he

found a 23 degrees reading.

But none of these theories won wide acceptance. It wasn’t until late in the

19th century that an acceptable explanation was found: namely, light scattering. The

sky is blue because air molecules scatter the sunlight. This result was mostly the

work of Lord Rayleigh (John William Strutt). From 1871 to 1899 he was able to

show that light with short wavelengths (blue violet) is more likely to be scattered

than the longer wavelengths (orange or red). Scattered light then is ruled by short

wavelengths and so the sky above appears blue.4

So, you might ask, what can do with all this stuff about the blue sky? Well,

you might use it to create an article and submit it to a journal like Isotope: A Journal

123

of Literary Nature and Science Writing. It’s perfect bridge between nature and

science. The history of the blue sky leads like a tunnel of time into scientific research

and into various human responses to a salient aspect of nature.

Time. That’s the essence but also the problem of pastiching. Suppose you are

writing a play, an unconventional one; one that features absurdist antics—a type of

play that is very popular today (2008) with New York theatrical companies like

Clubbed Thumb (Ohio Theater) and Playwrights’ Horizon or companies like The

Illusion Theatre (Minneapolis) or Berkeley Repertory (Berkeley California). Like

most of us, you have had a lot of encounters with “thirdness,” with things that come

in threes, events that re-occur three times, ménage a trois , the three generational

family, etc. So you separate your script into three parts. It becomes sort of like

Woolf’s The Hours, only with more men. The first section, set in Germany during the

1860s, shows Richard Wagner as he struggles to write his next opera. The second

story, in 1960s America, features a teen pop idol named Elvis who hits it big with a

song that uses Wagner’s Liebestod melody and has an affair with his producer, who

resembles Phil Spector. Finally, the play cuts to the present day, with a high school

boy who listens to Elvis’ old song as he develops a crush on his male opera teacher.

Elvis’ grandmother is played by a man and her prom date is played by an actress

who’s supposed to be a man. And all the characters stop to talk about themselves in

the third person.

You then submit the script to a local theater group for review with the note:

“Several of my plays use third-person language, but this is the first one where every

124

character has that power. It feels novelistic, something that lets us cross time easily,

that lets us swoop in.”

You have, in effect, pastiched a lot of historical personages and their spirit,

Wagner, Woolf and Elvis and profited (you hope) from their life, personal qualities

and ideas. But you have, by crossing back and forth from different time periods,

created a potential disaster for the director of your play and the actors who may

perform in it. Actors, like writers, work under uncertainty as to decisions to stage or

not to stage: what will our audience think if we stage the play? If they hate it, will

they return for other performances of other, more conventional, plays? Under these

uncertain economic conditions, where will the money come from to keep our

company going? But the company likes you and some of them see in you a

playwright of some promise. They inform you that they will file your script away for

a possible future performance. They will think about it and they send a note of

encouragement. “Keep writing and send us another script or two.”

You read about a female filmmaker, who worked for Hitler, who wanted to do

a play about Achilles’ battle with the Amazons. Still obsessed with travel in time, you

decide to write a script in which the filmmaker plays both herself and the leader of

the Amazons. You spend time at the local library reading about figures from ancient

Greece. Books like Gilbert Highet’s The Classical Tradition and The Oxford Classical

Dictionary become your Bible. You decide to cast your sister as Achilles. In order to

help your brother, who’s had a troubled youth, and give your play more time-depth,

you make him the leading character in a play within a play. He plays a dealer in

125

antiquities who time-travels between ancient Greece and the Metropolitan Museum

in New York. In Greece he falls in love with Euxitheos, a potter famous for his

depictions of the gods on Mount Olympus.

You represent everyone speaking in the third-person. You read part of the

script to your writing group one of whose members is the editor of the local

newspaper. Next week, a notice appears in the newspaper calling your nascent

script “funny,” “thought provoking” and “even moving.” Out of rent money you move

in with your parents and continue to work on the script. At the urging of your

parents, and with them paying the bill, you take a career-guidance test. It show that

you are best suited to be a lawyer, a college professor, a human resources director

or a flight attendant.

You continue to work on your script. You may or may not have noticed that

you’ve nailed yourself to the masthead again. But, what the hell, you’re having fun

pastiching.

So, READER…sorry, did I wake you up? Should you pastiche or not pastiche?

In Dyer’s words “it suggests the way in which feeling is shaped by culture….it can, at

its best, allow us to feel our connection to the affective frameworks, the structures of

feeling, past and present, that we inherit and pass on. That is to say, it can enable us

to know ourselves affectively as historical beings” (180)

126

But at the same time you might also keep in mind what Flaubert’s says about

happiness. What’s true of it may also be true of pastiching: “It’s like the pox. Catch it

too soon and it will ruin your constitution.”

MY WOODS

127

A few years ago a real-estate developer attempted to re-zone our block in

order to build high-rise housing for students who attend a local university. (The

university is only a five-minute walk away, up a hill). My wife and I, out of as much

fear as desire to own more property, bought all the land behind us we could afford.

What we got, in addition to a fine garden space and an old house, was about an half

acre of woods. The woods are composed of old apple and plum trees, a walnut or

two (good for attracting squirrels), and a few Russian olive trees. Box elder trees,

which tower above the others and threaten to extinguish them, dominant the scene.

Along one side of the woods runs an irrigation canal. In the summer, it attracts

several kinds of ducks, fish, and a muskrat likes to swim upstream against the

current. Big black willow and smaller box elder trees overhang the canal. Homeless

crows make their temporary, squawking roost in the trees, especially on early

summer mornings.

128

At the center of the woods is a giant apple tree. It is almost twice the size of

my other trees. It leans out, above the other trees, toward the open garden. A perfect

place for a young girl and boy to meet and fall in love. And for me to sketch out a

story about them: He is the son of the idle rich…she is the daughter of working

parent…she is a server at a local restaurant…he is a recent graduate of an Ivy League

University on a leisurely hiking, skiing, trip in the West… the apple blossoms are

falling…even though it's September…it starts to get dark…their hands and eyes

meet…they turn and look together at the sun setting in a golden sky…he promises her

he will come back for her…she turns away saying it is time for her to be at work.

At the edge of the woods, we have placed four or five chairs, a couple of

tables, and one chaise lounge. The extra chairs are for friends and family who

occasionally come by. The view from this place is west, out over our neighbors’

gardens, some trees, a city park and finally to where it stops, a line of steep

mountains. Snow, in the form of decaying cornices, stays at the very top of the

mountains all year and often by September you can see a dusting of new snow. For

years I've waited for the woods to register something dramatic—a tornado,

hurricane, flood—the stuff of television drama. But so far I've only seen it show the

effects of a drought. And it was so subtle, so slow, I almost missed it.

My wife and I owe the property jointly. It’s our woods; we have the same

rights with it:

129

each of us has the right to sell it, chop trees down in it, fence it, plant other trees in

it, order stray cats off it, etc. But I’ve noticed, in the three and half years we’ve

owned the property, a marked difference in the way we allow its ownership to affect

us. Molly (my wife) treats it essentially as she does other pieces of property, our car,

house, or furniture--as a system of rewards and punishments. Yes, it rewards us

with shade in the summer, fruit in the fall, and fuel for the fireplace in the winter. It

also makes us feel good when friends express (or feign) delight in the possession of

such a pleasing place, a sort of secret garden-so close to, yet so hidden from, the city

and university. But the woods also breeds mosquitoes; stinging insects; thorns on

the Russian olive tree tear your clothes; and the bushy undergrowth catches at your

feet. Every two years or so, a green, slimy worm attacks the leaves of the box elder

trees. The woods assume a ghastly gray appearance and the hanging pupae of the

worms smear your face and drop down the back of your collar. “For this,” I heard

Molly say to a friend one day, “we pay taxes.”

If I hadn’t been two days before I had read it, I would have quoted at the time

Emerson, “If we walk in the woods, we must feed the mosquitoes.” Still, later... at

ease in my woods...I had to kill a few...but only the ones I hadn’t been able to

convince that I was harmless.

A group of trees as large as mine are an object of local memory. Some of my

neighbors remember playing in them as children. One of them regularly takes his

family back to gather fallen apples. Traces of other kinds of past human activity

occasionally turn up, a horseshoe, medicine

130

bottle or a child's marbles. But the woods also hide history. Just inside one side of

the woods runs a wide, shallow depression. The trees that inhabit the space lean at a

crazy angle in toward the tops of their neighbors. Is the depression the remains of a

road? If so, where did it go?

FRANK

(narrates): And then, quite suddenly, I remembered. I'd been here before. Years

before. I'd stood on this self-same hill. I knew the valley into which I looked. That

ribbon of road and the old well behind. Life has moments of sheer beauty, of

unbidden flying rapture that -- they last no longer than the span of a cloud's flight

over the sun. I'd stumbled on just such a moment. In my own life, I'd stumbled on a

buried memory of wild, sweet time.

MUSIC OUT

FRANK

It was after my first year in college. A friend of mine, Robert Garton, and I were

making a walking tour of the country around Torquay. But my knee which'd been

injured in a football game the year before was giving me trouble. I knew I'd have to

131

give up the tour, we were looking for a farmhouse somewhere where we could put

up until I got better.

ROBERT:

I don't think you ought to walk much farther, Frank. Why don't I go ahead and

reconnoiter? Ohhhh, I won't need to. Here's someone coming.

FRANK

(narrates): It was a girl. The wind blew her crude, little skirt against her legs and

lifted her battered tam-o'-shanter. It was clear she was a country girl -- her shoes

were split, her hands were rough and brown, and her hair waved untidily across her

forehead. But her lashes were long and dark, and her gray eyes were a wonder:

dewy, as if opened for the first time that day.

No doubt owning property changes a person, makes him heavier, more

serious. He comes to like the sound of words like, “man of property,” “owner” or

“landowner.” The possessive pronouns, “mine,” “my,” and “our” come to have a new

132

meaning. In time, he begins to think his property ought to be larger, perhaps with a

vista or two. Perhaps it ought to be called a forest, not a woods, a forest with a heavy

name, like “brooding,” or “mournful.” Also, doesn’t a forest, more than a woods, elicit

those larger-than-life questions? Questions about the meaning of life, truth, the

enjoyment of leisure? He starts eyeing his neighbor’s property. He becomes over-

protective, like you were with the sandbox you owned as a child; the one your

younger brother could play in only as long as he understood who its real owner was.

Ownership also demands permanence, publicizing in some lasting form that

what you own is yours, forever. It’s the impulse that moves you to leave your name

carved in stone or embedded in a stained-glass window--at last something about

you will yield what you have yearned to know, through a public form, about

yourself. To know absolutely. But how to obtain such permanence? You don’t have

many options, especially if you are looking for it in the subtle changes of your

woods, its cycle of spring, summer, fall, winter. One way, one I haven’t tried yet, is to

video-tape,

not the woods as a whole, but a single tree, to follow it from morning to night, day

after day.

Just leave the camera there, maybe on a tripod, running away, catching every mood

and nuance of the tree that the roving eye, wandering from one place to another, can

never detect.

133

One day I may try that, especially if I should happen to receive a camera for

my birthday. My family, and the few friends I’ve mentioned my plan to only seem

mildly interested. So, in the meantime, I continue in the usual way, jotting down

notes about my woods and occasionally dropping comments about them into

conversations with friends.

Someone I recently read has a character say, “if there is more than one cure

for an illness, you can be certain it's incurable.” Attempting to memorialize one’s

property is, in a sense, much like that: if there is more than one way of recording its

value, then you can be reasonably certain that no one way--writing an essay about it,

for example--will do it full justice. Something, some nuance, detail, will always be

left out. Not to mention the spontaneity one expects in all of one’s creative work--

making the mind, for instance, a sort of wooded playground of the imagination.

At the very beginning of my ownership of the woods lay the linguistic

problem. What words should I use to describe my woods? Essentially, it was a

matter of getting the name right. Perhaps, I asked myself, the woods are “romantic.”

“The woods are romantic.” It had a good sound. But how could I make it more

personal, fill in the details? What was romantic about them? Perhaps the view from

inside them out across my neighbor’s garden to the mountains. With the right

words, I could maybe catch the mood of the opening lines of Hills Like White

134

Elephants: “The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white.” It was the

long view that created the romantic. But these were mountains, not hills, Utah, not

Spain. And Hemingway’s view was not from woods but from a train-station. Still,

the view-at-a-distance thing was appealing. And, being surrounded by trees on three

sides, the view would have a window-like frame to focus it. Perhaps my friends

would notice I had woods with a view. But what if someone asked me to say what I

meant by “romantic”? What would I reply? Maybe a better word for my woods was

“sexy”? At least at certain times of the year. Like spring or fall. Or when the flowers

bloom in it and the apples fall from the old trees. Hadn’t one of our friends, hearing

an apple fall, used that word? It would give, I thought, my woods an agreeable

carnal, nature. Much better than, say, “enchanted." With “sexy,” you can accept, even

delight in, your tripping over dead branches, getting gouged by thorns or ingesting

leaf dust kicked up by your feet. Your woods don’t have to be populated with spirits,

ghosts of former owners or elves .On moonlight nights, you don’t need to imagine

the ghostly presence of knights riding through them. The sound of a twig snapping

only means the natural movement of a cat toward the slaughter of a bird. Blood,

feathers, a bit of bone--carnality, sexiness. “Enchantment” may suggest a certain

kind of inner peace; without its vagueness, even an act of poetic creation. Peace and

creation are both very good, but usually unattainable without a material ground.

Isn’t that what we get from being sexy? A way of enjoying sensual nature? In the

touch of the fingers on the bark of a tree?

135

My neighbor’s woods to the south are totally lacking in sexiness. Even the

birds that roost there know that. I intend someday to build a new fence between us.

It will help to show the difference. I expect to see his birds fly over singing into my

sexy trees.

I take my woods seriously, just as I do aging and the real chore of acting my

age. The woods, of course, won’t undergo a mid-life crisis, or become an old geezer.

But they can be made to evoke some heavy symbolism. Sometimes, when the wind is

still, I imagine that they have become smug, self-satisfied, as if they have just opened

the front page of the local newspaper and found their pictures there. Trees,

especially clumps of them, can remind us of the garden of our lost love, or, in an

state of new growth, of the wilderness that sometimes overcomes our thinking and

living. Trees, like some sentences, will sometimes take us by surprise.

A bad day in my woods would be when they do not yield serious symbolism

or start to send out small warnings that they are, after all, only so much wood. By

then I will either be too old to notice or the woods themselves will have changed.

When spring came this year, I decided to change the look of my woods, to do

something with them. Doing something with them meant first cleaning them up.

Here I had owned the

136

woods for over three years and hadn’t noticed what state they were in. I had been

too busy looking at other things. But there it was, perfectly obvious. The woods were

full of a lot of

ugly things, dead wood, a tin can or two, a couple of used tires. It looked as if

somebody had been using my woods as a dump. Watching me stooped over, picking

up things they left might make the culprits feel guilty. I would first have to remove

the dead wood. Perhaps I could sell some of it for firewood? I had some friends who

owned wood burning stoves. They were living a life the opposite of gas and

electricity consuming America. The thought made me feel good. I could do

something to save the environment and make an overgrown gas-company feel bad.

But I couldn’t deliver the wood to my friends. They would have to come and gather

it themselves. But wouldn’t that mean people invading my space, stomping down

saplings, and bruising the bark on my trees? I would have to wait for my friends,

show them where to step, what to leave, what to pick up. I obviously couldn’t hang

around my woods all day for that. I couldn’t afford to hire anyone to do the policing

for me.

Late spring became early summer. I was still undecided as to how best clean

up the woods. Selling the dead wood had been an unworkable idea. I began to get

restless, not to take the joy I should have in what I owned. But I didn’t know how to

avoid not feeling good about what I owned. Then I noticed Dennis, a neighbor,

starting a fire next to the fence. What was he burning? "O", he said, "just some twigs,

pieces of straw, papers." He had, it turned out, a permit

137

from the city, good for that day. He showed me the permit:

*An available supply of water must be on hand to put out the fire.

*The fire must be extinguished before night.

*In the event of wind, extinguish the fire immediately.

*Position the fire away from overhanging trees, dead grass, wooden

structures, telephone and electrical lines.

*The Fire Department will extinguish any fire that escapes the permit

holder’ control, resulting in an economic loss to the holder.

*Permits issued only after an on site inspection, by authorized personnel

of burn-materials.

Before you burn anything, Dennis said, you’ll need some tools, a chain saw, a

long-handled pruning saw, clippers, file and, of course, a shed to keep them in. He

added that I’d want to plant some things later that would grow in the shade, hosta or

a woodland perennial like cardamine or lepimedium.

“What’ll all that cost me”?

“Well, Johnson’s Lumber has a good size shed for $925.00, unassembled,”

Dennis said.

“Unassembled”?

138

“You have to put it together yourself.”

Three weeks later I had my shed, for $1,133 in all. (The extra was for the

carpenter I hired

to assemble it.) My chainsaw and the other tools cost me $675.70. The upscale

catalog of

woodland plants, with illustrations, was $75.35. It defines the hosta as an “elegant

but largely misunderstood” plant. For all woodland plants it recommends, for

greatest visual impact, a group of five or six. All but one of the epimedium, which

cost about $6 a piece, died the first month after planting. Next year I plan to order

from a different catalog.

These costs, I tell myself, have to put in perspective. It’s certainly more than

going out to dinner or buying a new coat. But not as much as a trip of Europe--or

even Disneyland. And, buying the smallest chainsaw I could find, a 12 inch model,

demonstrated considerable personal restraint If you add to this the greenhouse I

didn’t buy--to start my woodland plants in--then the costs seem even more

reasonable.

I have my burn permit from the city. I figure I am about a third through with

the job. It took a little practice, getting started, getting the wood piled up the right

way. I had to buy some diesel fuel to get the fire going--which meant driving all the

139

way across town. I started on Monday. I smell like wood smoke and diesel fuel--like

the trunk of my car. My skin feels funny, prickly, and I’ve singed some of the hair on

my left eyebrow.

It starts getting dark. The wind turns and blows smoke over me. I pick up my

available supply of water and start hosing the fire down. I hear a swish-rustling

sound in the trees. It's a squirrel, being chased by a bird away from her nest.

My bird. My squirrel. My woodsm myå

Word Count: ?

***

CONVERGENCE, EMERGENCE AND

"HILLS LIKE WHITE ELEPHANTS"

Any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly (DIA 278)

What makes "Hills" an intractable text is a specific kind of consciousness. For

want a better term, I will call it a "cubist mentality." Critics approach the text like a

viewer does a painting by (early) Picasso, Braque and (late) Cézanne. Instead of one

point of view one sees the meaning of the text broken into multiple points of view.

Given our preference for singular perspectives, one that yields a unified and

coherent meaning, one is then tempted to reduce multiplicity to a unity—in short, to

140

undertake a convergence maneuver. If one perceives X and Y to be separate, and

disparate, ideas, events or states, then one feels the need to make them converge to

a singularity. This, course, is the motive behind an equation like An+ Bn-C where An

and Bn represents all salient parts that sum to a singular whole, C, and the

emergence of coherent meaning.

This works well with numbers. They resist a reduction to a subjective state of

being. It also works in linguistics (and grammar) where we reduce words to

categories like nouns, verbs and the like. The objectivity of the characters of "Hills,"

by contrast, cannot be reduced to their (presumed?) subjective states. The

convergence of one with the other is impossible. Such impossibility is not unlike the

futile efforts over the centuries to establish a connection between the body and the

mind. Cubist mentality always blocks an intelligible and coherent connection.

, , spatial (distance/location/orientation of characters), and temporal are For some

the meaning lies in what one extrapolates from the potential symbolism of "white

elephants" (an expensive burden?), the "hills" (Jig's pregnancy?) or the "curtain."

For others, the meaning lies in gender issues (who has the power in the relationship

between the American and Jig? What is going to happen to the alleged unborn

child?). Still other readers see meaning in the linguistics of the text, the use of

repetition, indefinite pronouns, negation and the like—in short, they find substance

in style (Link).

141

Cubism, especially what I am calling cubist literary criticism, asks that we

construct meaning from a convergence of parts into a whole. An analogy for the

required movement of the mind here is an equation like an+ bn=c where an and bn

represents all salient parts, spatial (distance/location/orientation of characters),

and temporal (past/present/future) that converge into a whole, c. The interpretive

task here for the critic (as for the viewer of a cubist painting) is a daunting one. How

does one come to understand 1) the source of the parts 2) how they converge into a

whole and 3) how the whole is indeed a whole, or an anomaly with vital parts

missing. If we assume, as many critics do, that Hemingway is a modernist writer,

then how can we expect to achieve a reading of the meaning of "Hills" as a coherent

whole—one that excludes all over readings? After all, isn't one of the key principles

of modernism a rejection of the notion that the world, and its representations, sums

to a totality—or at least not a coherent one?

Like most great writers, Hemingway is addicted to making our flesh creep.

I make no claim that there is a convergence of parts into a whole called "Hills

like White Elephants." Nor do I say that readers who claim there is a convergence, or

multiple convergences, are on the wrong track.i Instead, I have the more modest

purpose in exploring how such convergence might occur. If I conclude that it is

unlikely, even impossible (which I do), then I request that the conclusion not be

taken as evidence that "Hills" is a flawed piece of work. The opposite, rather, is the

case. Like any great cubist painting, "Hills" shows that a great literary work can be

constructed on the absence, not the presence, of convergence.

142

The well known philosopher and mathematician, C. S. Peirce has, I believe,

gives us a starting point for exploring this issue. For a convergence to occur, and

meaning to emerge, there must be what Peirce calls "firstness," "seondnss" and

"thirdness."

The spatialization of time: Lyons, vol 2, p. 718

Transitive vs intransitive

My argument begins with the possibility of the emergence of a "family" of concepts

headed by betweenness.

bjetions to , The problem here in getting to c2 (knowledge of lies in our trust of

thinking that we know what a2 and b2 are plus how they might converge.

Criticism & cubism

No article on Hills: "a" vs "the" see Leech

Station bet two lines

"before" and "afterwards" 212

Unborn child bet them?

From: " translation strategies" The Hemingway Review

Volume 27, Number 1, Fall 2007

143

pp. 108-129 | 10.1353/hem.2007.0014

Jeffey Herlity-Mera; vol 31.2: 84-100: Difference with us guys is I always lived out of

country... Found good country outside, learned language as well as I know English ...Dos

[Passos] always came as a tourist. I always came to make a liveing, paying my debts and

always staying to fight. Been chick- enshit dis-placed person since can remember but

fought each time. (SL 624)

Hemingway “liked to use it very much. He felt proud talking in Spanish to waiters, hotel

maids, people in the bull ring [sic], and everyone” (qtd. in Capellán 188). In 1954

Hemingway said that Spanish is “the only language I really know. If I had been born in

Spain like your defunct friend [George] Santayana I would have written in Spanish and

been a fine writer... Spanish is a language Tu (sic)” (SL 828).6

“... [I] am considered a Spanish author who happened to be born in America” (SL 873).

“he was soRT oF a JoKe, in FacT”: eRnesT hemingway in spain JEFFREY HERLIHY-MERA Hemingway Rev 2012

University of Puerto RicoPamela Smiley, "gender linked miscommunication" in Hills;

Hemingway Rev 1988

144

HILLS LIKE WHITE ELEPHANTS:

JIG'S PERCEPTION

A Thought Experimenti

Accounts of seeing and not seeing have a long tradition in Hemingway

studies. In these accounts, seeing the landscape, to give the narration a sense of

place, are the loci classici. Baker, for example, credits Hemingway with "graphic

vitality" in his "presentation of the land" and the "landscape as symbols" (xvii, 95).

In Putnam's provocative essay on Hemingway, "perception has always held a moral

value." Additionally, quoting Nick Adams, such perception means "to live right with

his eyes " (101). More recently, Balaev claims that the swamp of "Big Two Hearted

River" "functions not only to express the emotional action of the story but it also

points toward the limits of language to convey the truths of existence." (112) i In

this, there is compatibility with Beegel's recent study, "The Environment."

Likewise, there is a lot of dicussion of the character of Jig in and how it

differs, based mainly on gender, power and emotional nuances, from that of the

American. I would like to add to this conversation by reference to what each sees, or

145

does not see, and how this creates divisions between them and by so doing creates a

profoundly different "picture" each has of the future.

But, I suggest, this leave a lot out of seeing an object. Not seeing as "looking

away" will occupy an important part of this essay—that is to say, the presence of

absence conveys as much information about Hemingway's intention as the presence

of presence.i A leading assumption is, then, that there is a causal relationship

between the foregrounding of such words as "see," "looking," "look like," their

objects and the way we interpret the text—especially the relationship between Jig

and the American. As such, my account has a loose family relationship with Link's

"stylistic analysis" of "Hills." We start with the repetition and patterns of words, go

to the objects they signify and end, hopefully, with a coherent reading of the issues

of the text.i

In this the chief points of reference for the reader are the objects of seeing or

not seeing—to start thinking about h/s has seen.

The chief issue we are pursuing is the knowledge of "differences." What

differences, especially the difference between the characters, comes to light by

means of epistemic, nonepistemic and nonseeing?i Readers of Aristotle will perhaps

call to mind, in this context, his correlation (perhaps the first in our tradition) of

knowing the difference between things by means of seeing—please note that

146

Aristotle puts seeing in the context of knowing. Seeing an object, ideally, leads to

"knowing" it. Seeing is always prior to knowing:

All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the

delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their

usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others

the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when

we

are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say)

to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses,

sight makes us know and brings to light many differences between

things (Metaphysics 980a22-28; emph mine)

So the question is who does the seeing, what kind of seeing is it (epistemic,

nonepistemic or not seeing), what are the objects of the seeing and what effect does

the whole have on our interpretation of differences in knowing—especially

difference between what Jig know versus that of the American?

The essential difference between epistemic and nonepistemic seeing is with

the presence or absence of a "belief content." With nonseeing there is, obviously,

neither epistemic and nonepistemic seeing. Nonseeing, with Kukso, Martin and

Sorensen (16-17; 188-90), I take things missing as regards their existence, location

and (sometimes) duration in the text. Missing in this sense implies a hiatus in

awareness (or consciousness) of the one nonseeing. The man's statement in "Hills"

"I've never seen one," is an example (213).

147

The "belief-content" doesn't have to be any particular kind but it must be

something, usually something remembered (Dretske 1969: 88):

Whereas seeing that a is F entails belief that a is F, nonepistemic

seeing lacks commitment to a belief content. When cavemen

witnessed asolar eclipse, they saw the moon even if they had no

beliefs about what they were seeing (Sorensen 38).

Sorensen goes on to say that nonepistemic seeing is compatible with

epistemic seeing. "The caveman can nonepistemically see a distant

bird and epistemically see it (by virtue of his belief that the observed

creature is a bird)" (39).

An example of seeing both nonepistemically and epistemically is that of the

lion in "Macomber." When it first sees Macomber it sees only an "object" and "thing,"

Only later does he see the "object" as a "man-figure" and a "man":

The lion still stood looking majestically and coolly toward this object

(Macomber) that his eyes only showed in silhouette, bulking like some

super-rhino….Then watching the object, not afraid, but hesitating

before going down the bank to drink with such a thing opposite

him, he saw a man figure detach itself from it…. (If he was close

enough) he could make a rush and get the man that held (the

"crashing thing" (13).

After identifying the "object" as a man, he begins to form a plan—in short, he begins

to "think," as all epistemic seeing produces. Notice particularly that the lion is not

148

only "thinking" in a spatial way. He is also thinking temporally, of future

consequences in his encounter with the "man figure."

I return to the spatial and temporal dimensions of epistemic seeing below.i

(Aristotle's comments about seeing and knowledge (above) rest on epistemic

seeing. "Seeing is believing" also encodes epistemic perception).

Birdwatchers who epistemically see a bird not only just see a bird but can

also see it as a specific kind of bird, say a robin, not a crow, a goldfinch not a magpie.

In English we code this identifying-information not as "seeing," "looking" or "looking

at," (examples of nonepistemic seeing), but as "looking like" and "seeing as."

Insofar as love, hate, pity, fear and the like can be expressed with the eyes

(usually joined by the voice and body language) we can say we are seeing

epistemically.

So, with seeing in "Hills" we have three possibilities to convey information

about presence or absence as information: 1. Seeing things with belief (or more

generally with remembrance of past things and experiences) and the ability to name

the object of seeing; 2) seeing things without remembrance or without naming the

object 3) not seeing things and not using their names—including, looking away.

When Jig looks at "the ground the table legs rested on" she looks away from the all

the other things she has looked at, the hills, the bead curtain and most saliently the

man (212). With "ground" we infer that the station (at least that part) has no

artificial surface. And we also infer that she may still have a memory (belief-content)

of looking at other things, including the man. Still, by her looking away the contents

of her short term memory are missing from the story.

149

However, contents of her long-term memory are present— as we will see.

Inference (and presupposition) are important ways absences become

present in the narrative and ultimately aid our understanding of what's going on

between Jig and the American. When each looks away from the other in order to

look at something else they become absent from each other.

Can we infer that the man's looking at Jig is often a gaze? At times perhaps a

stare? Her six-fold "please, "please," "please" is, we might suppose is accompanied

with a stare (214). Speech is often (depending on its tone) redundant on seeing and

body language. But we cannot be certain about other ways she looks at the man.

Since Hemingway leaves them presupposed, not asserted, we cannot name them,

"look," "stare," "gaze," "glance" "notice"— or what else. But we can be fairly certain

they are epistemic, heavy with memory as belief content.

The other absence, as salient as looking away in "Hills," is by what linguists

(and philosophers) variously call "implicature," "inference," and "presupposition."

These contrast with "assertion," or the presence of a presence. When Hemingway

writes "the girl was looking off at a line of hills" (211) he is asserting the existence

(and presumably the truth) of Jig's action. The hills are present to Jig

consciousness—or we might say, following Dretske, she is "aware" of them (2206:

147). But Hemingway occasionally implies (and presupposes) looking at an object

while asserting looking at a different object in the same sentence: "She (the

waitress) put the felt pads and the beer glasses on the table and looked at the man

and the girl"—putting the pads on the table obviously presupposes that she is

looking (minimally) at the pads and the table (211).i

150

Does Hemingway ask the reader to infer the implicit meaning all objects of

looking (unpack its presuppositions) while asserting their explicit meaning? His

"definition" of explicit and implicit hangs most famously on the cooperation of

writer and reader, each of whom "knows":

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may

omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly

enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the

writer had stated them….A writer who omits things because he does

not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.i

If we look at this passage (the celebrated iceberg analogy) from the point of view of

epistemic seeing, it describes an impossible situation—impossible not in theory but

in execution. "Stating" something, what I have been calling asserting something, is

clear enough. Its form rises from an intelligible subject and predicate: "The hills

across the valley of the Ebro were long and white" (211) After reading it we "know"

(and can visualize) the location, size and color of the hills. That is, we see them

epistemically. With the "to be" verb, "were," Hemingway brings into the picture

what scholars of the Indo-European language calls the three-fold purpose of the "to

be" verb; namely, to state existence, location and (sometimes) duration (Kahn)

With this knowledge the reader is prepared to read epistemically and

nonepistemically seeable objects in the rest of the story and their relationship with

knowledge— not just the hills but "things" like the three characters, the river, the

shadow of a cloud, the table in the shade and so on. But then Hemingway destroys

151

the possibility of reading these ways with the negative phrase, "does not know

them." In effect, he reduces all his earlier positive statements to negative ones with

no existing referent. The result is, in Sorensen's words, an "exhaustiveness" of

positive statements about knowing an existing object:

Positive statements. Knowing how things are not gives you knowledge

of exhaustiveness. If there is a reduction to be achieved, it will run

from positive truths to negative truths (Sorensen 227).i

Had Hemingway accompanied his statement about "feeling those things strongly"

with one about knowledge it would have restored the validity of his statements

about omission. Graves, another well-known American writer (and admirer of

Hemingway, especially "Big Two-Hearted River") gives a succinct statement of the

necessity of joining knowledge with feeling—in order to know and to write truly:

Feelings without knowledge, love and hated too, seem to flow easily

in any time, but they did not work well for me" (Graves 5).

Feeling and knowing, in short, are eternally separate and distinct—as long as they

are not brought together, and made intelligible, by actions and words that

presuppose or assert, feelings like love, pity, empathy, hate and the like.

Reading involves the participation of reader and writer on the basis of

"knowing." What about a reader who cannot unpack presuppositions? Obviously,

then, s/h loses (misses) much of the information flowing from the text—including,

of course, the rhetorical intention(s) of the author.

Jig's seeing comes in the form of "look at," "looked across," "looking off" and

"look like." By the criteria given above, "look at" is nonepistemic. It has, at least in

152

the context of its utterance, no belief content: "That's all we do, isn't it. Look at

things and try new drinks" (213) She is saying, in effect, that the "things" they look

at are insignificant and (perhaps) largely devoid of meaning. They are not

memorable and so useless for seeing later, enjoyable, things.

Joy, excitement, pleasant memories are absent from the text. Are "new

drinks" enjoyable to them? Perhaps. But the new drink they are now having "tastes

like licorice" (212). Insofar as the taste of licorice is an individual one, good to some,

bad, or not so good, to others, Hemingway seems to be leaving the question open

how it tastes to Jig. i

Is Hemingway suggesting that nonepistemic seeing (on the whole) is what

tourists do? The couple are, after all, Americans in a foreign country. If so, then

seeing in this context is compatible with Jig's lack of Spanish. But how good is that of

the man? Hemingway doesn't give us many details. He only speaks two Spanish

words, "dos cervesas" or "two beers" (211). Hemingway gives his other

communication with the waitress in English:

The man called 'listen' through the curtain. The woman came out

from the bar.

"Four reales."

"We want two Anis del Toro."

"With water?

…

"You want them with water?" asked the woman.

"Yes, with water." (212).

153

We might translate this as:

El hombre llamado 'escuchar' a través de la cortina.

La mujer salió del bar.

"Cuatro reales."

"Queremos dos Anis del Toro."

"Con agua?"

***

"¿Los quieren con agua?" preguntó la mujer.

"Sí, con agua."

We might draw several conclusions from this: 1) the waitress speaks English. She

has served many American tourists; 2) Hemingway's Spanish was not very good and

he didn't want to go to the trouble of writing in that language. (It was, after all, the

age before Google Translate); 3) Hemingway asks the reader to imagine the man

speaking Spanish in order to indicate the man's need for control.

Si le preguntas cuál es mi elección de estas tres posibilidades es, yo

respondería "me pregunta otra pregunta."i

Notice that the man looks mostly at near things, Jig at both near and far

things:

They sat down at the table and the girl looked across the

hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at

her and at the table (214).

She also looks at things before and behind things near and far things.

154

Acoss, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks

of the Ebro. Far way, beyond the river, were mountains (213).

Jig looks at a "higher" object, "the mountain," than the man.

Jig's far things, the river, the mountains, the fields, are more distant than the

man's. His only far thing is looking down the tracks for the train.

He looked up the tracks but could not see the train (214).

I also suggest that Jig's farthest seen thing, the mountains, can represent

being "free": I base this on my own experience as a backcountry skier, hiker,

moutain climbing and the similar activities of my friends—but I also call on Chani

Lifshitz's account of why many Israeli were killed in a recent avalanche in Nepal.

She said that many of the Israeli travelers who come to Nepal do

so after three years of mandatory military service, sometimes

involving combat and the deaths of friends on the battlefield:

'After three years (their term of service) they're looking for a place

that's far and free (emph mine; Najar). i

Does this mean his relationship with Jig is going nowhere because what

might save it isn't coming? Perhaps. But thinking metaphorically about

Hemingway's words is even riskier than what I am attempting to demonstrate here

about seeing.

Does the man look epistemically? Yes, of course:

He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the

station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had

spent nights (214).

155

This, as noticed before, is memory as belief content.

Looking near or far can be either epistemic, nonepistemic or not looking:

"They look like white elephants" she said.

"I've never seen one," he said (213).

Does "one" refer to hill or elephant or both? Most likely to both, for when we

refer to the part of something we also imply the whole. "Arm" implies "body," "leaf,"

"tree" and so on.

So what should we make of Jig's seeing one thing in front of another thing, a

near thing before a far thing.i

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station.

Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees

along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river,

were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across

the field of grain and she saw the river through the

trees (213).

This suggests to me that far, and high, things have more significance to Jig

than near and low things as appears in her sight of the "the mountain," the most

distant and highest of all objects seen in the story.

But what is the significance here? Perhaps it relates to the relative

dimensions of a hill with a mountain. Mountains, depending on the weather, are

more salient than hills. As any mountaineer (or even someone passing through

them) can tell you mountains, unlike most hills, attract the need to climb them.

156

But there may be something else significant here. Most speakers (and

scholars of Hemingway) take seeing near and far things (the landsacpe in general)

in a spatial and directional sense. From the standpoint of our body we can look in six

different directions and see, consequently, six different kinds of landscape (Miller

and Johnson-Laird 233-303).

But perhaps Jig is taking the landscape around and over the Ebro in both a

spatial and temporal sense. In particular, is she making reference to her future with

the man after her abortion? Is the mountain beyond the hills, the field of grain, the

trees and the river a possible destination for her? A future with a child? A family?

Notice the times she is the one who brings into the conversation a reference to the

future:

"Then what will we do afterward?"

The man's response suggests that any future will have to replicate the past:

"We'll be fine afterward. Just like we were before" (212).

Biologists have coined the term "'pluripotent" to describe the nature of a

stem cell. Unlike any other cell in the body, it alone has the ability to become

(replace) any other type of cell. Like the Greek god, Proteus, a stem cell never stays

what it started to be but only what it becomes in its journey to another cellular

location, function and duration.

Is this an apt description of the nature of epistemic, nonepistemic and

nonseeing seeing in other works of Hemingway? Can these seeings, working as a

triad, help to create fictional character—or we might want join with other fictional

157

devices to become such characters, Nick Adams, Robert Jordan, Catherine Barkley or

Frederic Henry?

Given the space I have, I can only suggest a possible answer to the question.

Seeing alone cannot create character for the reader. It has to be joined by all the

information flowing from the senses, especially hearing, touching and feeling. But I

believe we can say that seeing, following Aristotle, is the principal sense. My reason

is his reason: that is, it is the most beloved, and pluripotent, of the senses because of

its ability to identify "differences."

We see, but do not hear or touch, the characteristics in others by gender, age,

color of the skin and the like. But we see, and respond to them, by how and what we

see. Hemingway, whose eyes were not all that good, is a master in the manupilution

of seeing as a foundation for character and especially for making the implicit explicit

and for forshadowing.

Please recall the first scene from "The Short Happy Life of Francis

Macomber." We first meet, Robert Wilson and Macomber having a drink and

"pretending that nothing had happened" (5). Macomber wife, Margot, or Margaret,

enters, does not speak to Macomber, and begins picking out physical features of

Wilson, the color of his hair, strubby mustache, red face and ""extremely cold blue

eyes with white wrinkles at the corner" (6). We then begin to sense the frozen

relationship between Margot and Macomber:

"Here's to the lion," he (Macomber) said. "I can't ever thank you for

what you (Wilson) did."

Margaret, his wife, lookied away from him and back to Wilson.

158

Wilson looked over and her without smiling and now she smiled at

him.

…

Margot looked at them both and they both saw she going to cry (7).

…

"Yes, we take a beating," said (Wilson) still not looking at him

(Macomber) (7).

…

"I'd like o clear away that lion business," Macomber said." It's not very

pleasant to have your wife see you do something like that (10)

…

His wife said nothing and eyed him strangely (25).

Every reader of the story knows what eventually happens. Margot sees the buffalo

charging Macomber, about to gore him, and "(she) shot at the buffalo…and had hit

her husband about two inches up and little in one side of the base of his skull" (28).

Was she looking at the buffalo or at Macomber? To reframe the question: was

she looking epistemically or nonepistemically?

Much of the above is about "how" we see and "how we fail to see." But seeing

also presupposes where we are when we see and in what direction we are seeing.

That is to say, where do we stand when we see and how that influences how and

what we see. On this vast issue, the literary critic Ebbatson, taking the landscape as

his point of reference, has this to say:

159

The landscape is not a totality that you or anyone else can look at, it is

rather the world in which we stand, taking up a point of view on our

surroundings. And it is within the context of this attentive

involvement in the landscap that the human imagination gets to work

in fashioning ideas about it. For the landscape, to borrow a phrase

from Merleau-Ponty, is not so much the object as the 'homeland' for

our thoughts (33).

In this we are reminded of Heidegger's description of the authentic human condition

as "being in the world" (sein in der Welt) as an act of "dwelling" (verweilzeit) in the

world—all of which implies a familiar place to stand in the world. Without the

familiarity of place there can not exist a homeland or a dwelling from which to see.

So, what, if any, does this have to do with seeing and nonseeing in "Hills"?

One way to answer (or attempt an answer) it is to focus on the reader and h or h

seeing and consequently knowing and thinking. In this, we first assume that the

reader sees from where h or s dwells. H or s is at home in a place. From where h or s

dwells they can see a familiar landscape, familiar faces and interact with them. But

does the reader "see" any of this happening with the characters of "Hills"? Do Jig and

the American dwell in a familiar landscape with familiar faces and a common

language?

Of course not. Like many migrant worker, tourist or immigrant they are

homeless and "placeless." Are we not then, with "Hills," being given a depiction of

what much of modern liteature (and films) give us? Namely, a world in which none

of us can dwell or return to in order to dwell?

160

WORKS CITED

Aristotle. The Basic Works. Ed. Richard McKeon . New York: Random House, 1941.

Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer s Artist. Princeton; Princeton UP, 1972.

Beegel, Susan F. Ernest Hemingway in Context. Eds. Debra Moddelmog and Suzanne

del Gizzo. Cambridge UP 2013. 237-246.

————— Hemingway’s Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples. Ann

Arbor/London. UMI Research Press 1988. PS 3515 E37Z582

Balaev, Michelle, "Language Limits and a Doubtful Nature: Ernest Hemingway's 'Big

Two Hearted River' and Friedrich Nietzsches's Foreign Language." The

Hemingway Review, 33 (Spring 2014): 107-118.

Dretske, Fred. "Perception without Awareness." In Perceptual Experience. Eds.

Tamar Gendler and John Hawthorne. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006.

___________.Seeing and Knowing. Cbicago: Chicago UP, 1969.

Ebbatson, Roger. Ladscape and Literature: Nature, Text, Aura. New York: Palgrave

Macmilian 2014.

Graves, John. Goodbye to a River. New York: Sierra Club Book, 1960.

161

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time 12:84.

Kukso, Boris. "The Reality of Absences." Australasian Journal of Philosophy. 84:

(2006): 21-37.

Link, Alex. "Staking Everything on it. A Stylistic Analysis of Linguistic patterns in

'Hills Like White Elephants.' The Hemingway Review 23 (Spring 2004): 66-74.

Lyons, John. Semantics. 2 vols. Cambridge UP 1977.

Kahn, Charles. "The Verb To Be." Foundations of Language 2 (1966) 245-265.

Martin, C. B. "How it is: Entities, Absences and Voids." Australasian Journal of

Philosophy 74 (1996): 57-65.

Miller, George and Phillip Johnson-Laird. Language and Perception. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP 1976.

Najar, Nida. "Mourning After Nepal Storm Resonates Across Borders." The New

York Times. October 21, 2014: A8.

Nicolson, Marjorie. Mountain Gloom, Mountain Glory: The Aesthetics of the Infinite.

Seattle: Washington UP, 1997.

Putnam, Ann. "Memory, Grief, and the Terrain of Desire: Hemingway's Green Hills of

Africa. In Hemingway and the Natural World. Ed. Robert E. Fleming. Moscow

Idaho: Idaho UP 1999: 99-11

162

"The Hills Like White Elephants." Johnston, Kenneth G. (Autumn 1982). "Hills Like

White Elephants". Studies in American Fiction 10 (2): 233–38.

Weeks Jr., L. "Hemingway Hills: Symbolism in 'Hills Like White Elephants.'" Studies

in Short Fiction, Winter 1980. Vol. 17 No. 1. p. 75

Fletcher, M. "Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants." Explicator, Summer 1980.

Vol. 38 No. 4. p. 16.

Smiley, P. "Gender-linked Miscommunication in 'Hills Like White Elephants.'"

Hemingway Review, Fall 1988. Vol. 8 No. 1. p. 2

Renner, S. "Moving to the Girl's Side of 'Hills Like White Elephants.'" Hemingway

Review, Fall 1995. Vol. 15 No.

NOTES

WORD COUNT?

i. See also David Seed's "Ernest Hemingway: The Observer's Visual Field," in

Cinematic Fictions: Liverpool UP (2009): 68-85.

i Nothingness as absence in Hemingway is a critical aspect of his iceberg account

of style. But it has, in different contexts, entered Hemingway studies with Beegel's

"nothing" thesis and with Murray's "Some Versions of Nothing." Beegel's account is

especially important in the context of this essay: In her study of Hemingway’s revision of

163

four of his manuscripts, Susan Beegel lists, and describes, five “categories of omission”

of the author. The fifth of these, after a comment by Harold Bloom, she calls “the Real

Absence” (91) Citing such works as “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” “A Natural History

of the Dead,” Death in the Afternoon and “After the Storm,” Beegel notes that these

works, and by implication other works of Hemingway, are “ultimately about nothing”

(92).

For a general description of the presence of absence in imaginative writing

see "Shots in the Dark: The Presence of Absence in Imaginative Writing" at:

http://works.bepress.com/cgi/sw_config.cgi?context=gene_washington. Also

available on the internet.

i One might also see this essay as a footnote to Link's account. It differs only by

starting with a different set of words and following their implied, and presupposed,

meanings.

i The Paris Review Interview; "The Art of Fiction 21: Ernest Hemingway" (Spring

1958): 26.

i Seeing is perhaps the most enjoyable and informative of the senses. But what about

the others mentioned, or presupposed in "Hills"—especially hearing and touching

(feeling)? Perhaps some Hemingway scholar would want to undertake the task of

164

explicating the synergistic effect of all the senses in the text and how it relates to the

issues of the story?

i Sorensen has a long account of "near" and "far" in Seeing Dark Things (chps 1 and

2).

Word count: 3,707

i All animals, it seems fair to say, see both epistemically and nonepistemically. Notice

that the cat on your lap has no belief content about the TV show you're watching. A

TV show has no belief content for it. But contrast that with the difference it finds in

wet and dry food or your presence versus that of a stranger. But of all the animals I

have observed over a long life, cats, birds, horses, the squirrel tops them all.

Right now (September 2014) my wife and I watch every evening a squirrel

we have named Alterea gather nuts for winter. She (we think, but cannot prove, that

females of all species are better at epistemically seeing than males) runs back and

forth on a power line from one clump of woods to another. The clump on our left has

the trees that supply Alterea with her nuts. She always exits it with a nut in her

mouth, deposits it (we surmise) in a cache in the trees on the right. Then she repeats

her journey until it get too dark to see her.

All in all, a remarkable demonstration of thinking both spatially and

temporally from the prior condition of seeing epistemically.

i On the difference between "presupposition" (inferring) and "assertion" please see,

for example, Lyons II, 503, 753.

165

i. See also David Seed's "Ernest Hemingway: The Observer's Visual Field," in

Cinematic Fictions: Liverpool UP (2009): 68-85.

i Nothingness as absence in Hemingway is a critical aspect of his iceberg account

of style. But it has, in different contexts, entered Hemingway studies with Beegel's

"nothing" thesis and with Murray's "Some Versions of Nothing." Beegel's account is

especially important in the context of this essay: In her study of Hemingway’s revision of

four of his manuscripts, Susan Beegel lists, and describes, five “categories of omission”

of the author. The fifth of these, after a comment by Harold Bloom, she calls “the Real

Absence” (91) Citing such works as “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” “A Natural History

of the Dead,” Death in the Afternoon and “After the Storm,” Beegel notes that these

works, and by implication other works of Hemingway, are “ultimately about nothing”

(92).

For a general description of the presence of absence in imaginative writing

see "Shots in the Dark: The Presence of Absence in Imaginative Writing" at:

http://works.bepress.com/cgi/sw_config.cgi?context=gene_washington. Also

available on the internet.

i One might also see this essay as a footnote to Link's account. It differs only by

starting with a different set of words and following their implied, and presupposed,

meanings.

166

i The Paris Review Interview; "The Art of Fiction 21: Ernest Hemingway" (Spring

1958): 26.

i Seeing is perhaps the most enjoyable and informative of the senses. But what about

the others mentioned, or presupposed in "Hills"—especially hearing and touching

(feeling)? Perhaps some Hemingway scholar would want to undertake the task of

explicating the synergistic effect of all the senses in the text and how it relates to the

issues of the story?

i Sorensen has a long account of "near" and "far" in Seeing Dark Things (chps 1 and

2).

Word count: 3,707

i All animals, it seems fair to say, see both epistemically and nonepistemically. Notice

that the cat on your lap has no belief content about the TV show you're watching. A

TV show has no belief content for it. But contrast that with the difference it finds in

wet and dry food or your presence versus that of a stranger. But of all the animals I

have observed over a long life, cats, birds, horses, the squirrel tops them all.

Right now (September 2014) my wife and I watch every evening a squirrel

we have named Alterea gather nuts for winter. She (we think, but cannot prove, that

females of all species are better at epistemically seeing than males) runs back and

forth on a power line from one clump of woods to another. The clump on our left has

the trees that supply Alterea with her nuts. She always exits it with a nut in her

167

mouth, deposits it (we surmise) in a cache in the trees on the right. Then she repeats

her journey until it get too dark to see her.

All in all, a remarkable demonstration of thinking both spatially and

temporally from the prior condition of seeing epistemically.

i On the difference between "presupposition" (inferring) and "assertion" please see,

for example, Lyons II, 503, 753.

TO UNBURDEN (ONESELF) OF THOUGHTS: OR

ON ALLOWING A WORD TO GUIDE, OR SEDUCE,

YOU ELSEWHERE

On Being Guided By the Written Word "Seeing" and its family of related words,

"look," 'watch" and the like

A Prolegomena in the Form of short Thought-Runs

***

Judge not/Thou know mine intent/But read me

Throughout/And then say thou fill—Thomas Cramner

(1556)

168

***

When we hear music are we guided elsewhere by the sound? When you hear

Debussy's Clair de Lune are you led to a place different from Cherubinos's arias? It is

fair to say that you are led from the perceptual to the conceptual? A painting by its

colors, design and subject? When you read certain words do they lead us to think—

perhaps more concretely or abstractly? What happens in-between the reading and

the subsequent (if any) thinking? Where does reading any given word and its

context take us?

"You," in this case, refers to both writer and reader.

Here are three examples.

1. Captain Ahab and the white whale. His preoccupation (or should we say

absession) with the animal.

2. Notice, in #2, the phrase "I follow a riff":

Riff

Placing a chord just so

between major and minor

as if being neither

there might be imagined

the point of departure,

the lift-off from doubt,

169

I follow a riff.

its melodic invention,

lts certain crescendo,

a coming together

within and without. (John Mole)

#3. To humorists of the eighteenth-century, Jonathon Swift, Thomas Sheridan and

others an important way to "draw" (create) characters was by what a "ruling

passion." A "humorist" character was one whose mind was biased by a peculiar

humor or passion, one which colored his vision and perverted his judgment of every

aspect of life.

The main source of the ruling passion was the eye, or seeing something,

sometimes aided by the other senses, especially hearing. This could take the form of

direct sensory impressions sight or the more indirect on of reading. With visual

information one then went on to form a concept from it and then to act on it. Don

Quixote (Cervantes) is a famous example. Having read many books on chivalry and

the ways of a knight, he decides to be one.

Laurence Sterne, novelist of the eighteenth-century, drew all the major

characters of Tristram Shandy from following this sensing:concept:action process.

Here is how one scholar describes Uncle Toby (from Tristram) been guided

by the process. Note the use of the word "remind," "suggest" and "moves"sensing

X triggers Toby's memory of Y, something, he imagines, is X:

170

A train of ideas suggest to him (Toby) only a train of artillery; Yorick's

figurative use of the word 'point-blank' moves him to discourse upon

projectiles; my father's awkward thrusting of his left hand into his

right pock reminds him of the 'transverse zig-zaggery' in which

he had been wounded, whereupon, forgetting the conversation in

progress, he start to send for a map of Namar to measure the

returning angles of the traverse of the attack; and his brother's

auxiliary verbs remind him of the Danish auxiliaries at Limerick:

though he conceives them to have been different things (Work lii-liii).

Thesis: Words, written and spoken create new things, fictional or actual, true

or false, reliable or unreliable. Written words create syntax, texts and scenes both in

and as texts. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the

Word was God" (John 1:1) Readers, and often writers, of texts help to create their

meanings by allowing themselves to be guided, seduced or betrayed elsewhere by

words. Elsewhere is a much larger and richer, space than here. It contains, for

example, new information, information that surprises us, information that will even

lead us beyond elsewhere. Elsewhere has many names, none of which expresses the

meaning and uses of the whole, the Tao, the potentiality, the numinous, God, the

virtual, the forms of Plato, the "is"/is not" of Hamlet and the ghost of his father.

Premise: "Language is the mother of thought, not the handmaiden of thought.

Words will tell you what you never thought or felt before." W. H. Auden.

171

But we should also consider the possibility of being seduced elsewhere—to

be taken to a place where we don't want to be taken. Or a place unknown,

frightening or repellent to us? Such an event may violate our expectations, subverts

our plans or produce, at some later time, guilt for allowing ourselves to be led

astray.

Here is the testimony of a cancer patient about how words "obscure":

While I continue taking an experimental drug to keep my

cancer at bay, I cannot claim to be in a remission or a

recurrence, and the word 'maintenance' does not shed

Much light on the situation. The paucity of the language

at my disposal stymies me as does the obfuscations….

Some of the vocabulary swirling around cancer leaves

me feeling what I never wanted to feel or unable to

think what I need to think (Susan Gubar "Words That

Obscure," The New York Times January 27, 2015: D4).

I invite the reader to read the complete article. It is a good example of words, not

inspiring thought, as Auden would presumably have it, but blocking it.

-0. Prolegomena: From the Greek, "to say beforehand," pro (before) +legein (to say).

The suggestion that a successor text will be much larger, more complete, on the

same subject.

-0a. Though-Runs. One step forward, one back, one to the side slightly askew. Nothing

172

certain but all plausible and potentially fruitful. I illustrate this with a parable of

Mahavira, the Founder of Jainism. What a person thinks is true depends to a large degree

on where he is standing and on what he has been taught to think is true.

As an experiment, an Indian prince once ordered six blind

men to touch various parts of an elephant and then describe their

sensations. One man thought the elephant’s leg was a tree

another that its ear was a large winnowing fan, another that

the tail was a broom and so on— but of course,

none imagined the whole elephant.

Let's call this the “Doctrine of Maybe.”

-0b. Guide: Frankish to show the way, observe, akin to Old English witan, see, show

the way akin to Indo-European witan, the base wise.

-0c. Seduce. From the Latin, "ducere," to lead and "-se" apart. Browning's "Childe

Roland to the Dark Tower Came," takes being led astray, confused, and lost, as its

theme.

y My first thought was, he lied in every word,

That hoary cripple, with malicious eye

Askance to watch the working of his lie

On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford

Suppression of the glee, that purs’d and scor’d 5

Its edge, at one more victim gain’d thereby.

173

What else should he be set for, with his staff?

What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare

All travellers who might find him posted there,

And ask the road? I guess’d what skull-like laugh 10

Would break, what crutch ’gin write my epitaph

For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare (ll. 1-12)

Still, allowing a word to guide, or seduce, you, presupposes, in some cases, that you

have the desire to go elsewhere and to be something else. Call it a search for

salvation, for a sight of God, or an escape from the routine.

-0d.Members of the "family" of "See." Familienähnlichkeit) is a philosophical idea

made popular by Ludwig Wittgenstein with the best known exposition being given

in the posthumously published book. It argues that things which may be thought to

be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series

of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all. Games, which

Wittgenstein used as an example in order to explain the notion, have become the

paradigmatic example of a group that is related by family resemblances.

So, with "see" we have words like "look," "watch," "glance," "gaze," "blink,"

"squint," "ogle" and the like. All of them, obviously, have reference to the physical

eye. But they differ by the intention of the see-er, the seen object, the position of the

eye and head, the distance between the eye and the seem object. See below

"accommodation."

174

"Eye" is a member of this family

-0e. Seeing what seeing makes:

And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.

And the evening and the morning were the sixth day (Genesis 3:31))

-0f. Seeing as Guide and Seducer

In this essay "seeing" (within quotation marks) refers only to the word itself.

The quotations marks are to call attention to it and its context. By contrast, seeing

(without quotations marks) is there to lead the mind to a wider context than that of

"seeing."

Here is a passage that demonstrates the power of seeing ("eyes") to lead the

mind—to a larger context and to potential actions:

I made a pact with my eyes, not to linger on any virgin….(God)

cannot fail to see my innocence. If my feet have wandered from the

rightful path, or if my eyes have led my heart astray. …let another eat

what I have sown, and let my young shoots be rooted out. (Job 31:1-9).

Please consider this thought run from Wittgenstein. Notice that the passage

has a triadic structure—as all examples of reading "seeing" take in this essay. Before

the philosopher sees the picture it is, at least for him, existing but "unseen." Next

175

there is, in a temporal sense, the act of seeing and finally a reaction, as a series of

unanswerable and potentially answerable questions about what the viewer sees.

I see a picture which represents a smiling face. What do I do if I

take the smile now as a kind one, now as malicious? Don't I often

imagine it with a spatial and temporal context which is one either

of kindness or malice? Thus I might supply the picture with the

facy that the smiler was smiling down on a child or play, or again

on the suffering of an enemy.

This is no way altered the fact that I can also take the at

first sight gracious situation and interpret it differently by putting it

Into a wider context—if no special circumstances reverse my

interpretation I shall conceive a particular smile as kind, call it a

"kind" one, react correspondingly (Philosophical Investigations #539;

emph mine):

My principle guides in this essay are chiefly Wittgenstein, Aristotle, literary

specimens from Western Literature. plus selected students of language and

perception, especially Roy Sorensen, David Lamb and Fred Dretske. Dretske is the

author of the terms, "epistemic and non-epistemic" that will appear later in this

essay.

-0g. See as truth: In all the languages I'm acquainted with to see, X is to see the truth

of X: For example, "La Verdad," (the truth) in Spanish has as its root "ver" to see. The

176

connect is the same in French, "a voir," German, "um zu sehen," (to say the truth),

"de vedere" trueand of course Latin "video" and back to the Indo-European

(Buck). One could also mention Russian, videt� (to see) and vedat� (to know).

In short, seeing X, knowing X and knowing X as the truth converged in Indo-

European, the father of most modern languages:

Proto-Indo-European *woida originally meant "I see, I am a witness".

This meaning developed to the meaning "I know" in Ancient

Greek oîda and Vedic veda, as well as in Gothic wait. The original

semantic meaning of "seeing" is preserved in Latin vīdī 'I saw'

(probably an old root aorist). (Buck).

-0h1. See as to understand. "I see what you're talking about."

-0h2. Severing a relationship: "I don't want to see you again."

-0i. See as seeing the difference. Aristotle claims that the sense of sight is the most

"loved" of all the senses. Why? Because, above all the other senses, we use it to know

"differences."

All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the

delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their

usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others

177

the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when

we

are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say)

to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses,

sight makes us know and brings to light many differences between

things (Metaphysics 980a22-28; emph mine).

On Being New

If the word "seeing" leads us elsewhere in thought or belief, it carries new

information and qualifies as "epistemic." If it fails in these, it is "non-epistemic."

So, if all the members of the seeing-family presuppose the existence of

the eyes, plus the word "eye," then what makes them different from each other? I

will come back to this question later under the headings of existence, location and

duration.

The Unseen.

Here, following Aristotle, Wittgenstein and the thought-runs of my essay

"The Presence of Absence in Imaginative Writing," I take the unseen as an existing

entity and a potential "seeable" one. As such, it is as much a potential source of

information as a "seen" entity. Things unseen may, like actors, become unseen by

exiting the stage. But they retain their seeability as one form of deep potentiality. By

coming on-stage their potentially becomes actual.

178

The existent unseen guides us elsewhere as the seen does, but in a different

way and in an "exhaustive" way. In this the unseen acts much like linguistic negation

or negative "facts." Positive facts can be reduced to negative facts, but not he other

way around :

Negative statements are more powerful than positive statements.

Knowing

how things are not gives you knowledge of exhaustiveness (Sorenson

227).

In this regard think of the Ten Commandments, six of which are negative, and four

positive. Or definitions of God as what He is not. Or of a political ontology where one

alleges the existence of the non existent in order to arouse fear in the voters: for

example, Kennedy's claiming evidence that the Republicans had allowed a missile

gap to develop between Russia and the US as regards Cuba (1959).

According to many readers, the "it" referred to by the two characters of

Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" denotes Jig's unborn child. We never see

the alleged fetus, of course, but "it," real or not, is the principal force driving the

dialogue of the story.

I return to this topic and seeing in the "Hills" below.

Reading

Reading is an enormously complicated subject. You look at it from one

perspective, say from the point of view of the writer's intentions and you appear to

179

find your way around. Then, say, you take a different path to its subjective effect on

a reader and you find yourself in a labyrinth. Like giving a concert on a violin while

learning to play the instrument, you then look around for an escape route.

One can imagine three approaches to reading the word "seeing" or one or

more of its family. One approach is from the point of view of the common reader.

What does h/s "see" and remember seeing? Is it a guide to elsewhere? I am now

looking at the screen of a word processer and moving my eyes from left to right,

right to left, as I type these words. Can I describe all of what is going on in my mind?

Probably not. We might call this the extra-text approach. While I process the words,

or struggle to process them, I compare what the words might mean to me by what

they may mean to other writers of English. Is the "use" of a word by others the same

as my "use"?

A second approach is from the writer writing and a reader reading "seeing"

or a member of its family as a truth-maker (Armstrong). Seeing is believing

whatever seeing gives birth to, new information, a wider context, a new field to

cultivate.

Finally, and the way I propose here, is reading "seeing" as a always a guide,

and possible, seducer, that leads us elsewhere, say from the perceptual to the

conceptual, from the sensual to the abstract or the transcendental. Here I want to

say an analogy would be to take "seeing" as the same star that led the three kings, in

St. Mathew's account, from the east to Bethlehem.

180

No man can say that eyes have not had enough of seeing, ears their fill of

hearing (Ecclesiastes 1:8-9)

Seeing as Guide.

Following a star, we may supposes, presupposes something definite, a goal, a

certain direction or destination. Here are some examples the reader might want to

consider. The emphasized words are mine.

In order they are:

John Williams' Stone, Ecclesiastes, a prayer from the Anglican Book of

Common Prayer, and finally an excerpt from Hemingway's "Hills Like White

Elephants."

*Here Williams describes a meeting between the protagonist and t

woman he will later marry. After giving an account of the woman's

physical characteristics, height, teeth, lips and hair he comes to her

eyes:

'But it was her eyes that caught and held him, as they had

had done the day before. They were very large and of the

palest blue that he could imagine.' (51)

*I came to observe the business that goes on here on earth. And

certainly the eyes of man never rest, day and night. And I look

at all the work of God….For I have reflected and to understand

that the virtuous and the wise with all they do are in the hand of

181

God (9:15-19).

*God, by the leading of a star you manifested your only Son to the

peoples

of the earth. lead us, who know you now by faith, to your presence,

where we may see your glory face to face, through Jesus Christ our

Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God

now and forever.

* They sat down at the table and the girl looked across the

hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at

her and at the table… Across, on the other side, were fields of grain

and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far way, beyond the river,

were mountains (213—14).

There are several ideas we could develop here. One is that seeing face to face leads

to a belief stronger than faith in the unseen.. Secondly, there is the implication of

being led from one life to another, from the lack of love into love of the other. Being

led is equivalent to being "caught" and dragged from one state to another. Thirdly,

presupposed (and sometimes stated) is an unseen (and unexperienced) goal or

destination. To be believeable, real and true, one must see, if only in the mind's eye,

the goal as a presence.

Obviously, one could spend a lifetime giving examples of these "ideas" and

following out their implications. In a short account, like the present one, what one

needs are constraints. I propose to use those implied by Aristotle's statement on

182

seeing and, in modern times, by comments on how langange encodes visual

perception.

Seeing as Ruling

The assessor of a MS submitted to a scholarly journal reads it and "sees" that

it is not acceptable. H/s rejects it. The judge and the jury "see" the evidence in a trial

and rule. In a recet (January 2015) game between the Dallas Cowboys and the

Greenbay Packers the Packers won the game by a ruling of the referee on a pass:

The referee, Gene Seraore, turned the apparent catch into an

incomplete

pass, ruling that Bryant (the one alleged to have caught the pass)

lacked

full possession of the football (The New York Times January 12, 2015:

D1).

Only As versus As Only.

With Aristotle, Wittgenstein and modern commentators a division between

seeing "only as" versus seeing "as only." We might see the person next door only as

our neighbor or as only a nieghbor—that is, as just a neighbor, and not as the spy he

is.

Sorensen gives this account:

Golf Illustrated treats Annika Sorenstam only as a golfer. But

Golf Illustrated does not treat her as only a golfer—that would be

demeaning. Exclusively focusing on the golfing aspect of

Sorenstam does not carry te message that this is an exhaustive

183

Treatment of her—that Annika Sorenstam is nothing more than a

golfer

(225-26).

The seeing only as versus as only will play a part in an account of

Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" (below).

With all commentators, seeing leads to thinking and (often) to acting. It can

also lead to misleading, or lying, either to ourselves or the other.

Epistemic, non-episemic and the unseen.

If we see with a "belief-content" in what we are seeing than we are thinking

epistemically (Sorenson, Drehske). If we see without it, we think non-eistemically.

What is unseen, obviously, is not-seeing. Not-seeing what the other is seeing is an

important strategy in establishing the "difference" in things—especially in two or

more characters:

"Epistemic," of course, derives from the Greek, "knowing." When we say

"we see" we mean "I understand."

Seeing, Verifying, Contingency.

All the ot her sense modalities are contingent on seeing in order to verify the

truth of what they sense. A cat, lying on the sofa, hears a noise. It turns its head to

see the source of the noise. It then acts appropriately, stay, run away, or hide.

Seeing to distinguish.

Displaying the Unseen.

184

Get ready for a Warhol wave in 2015, ad not just at auction. About 40

exhibitions of tha artist's work—much of it previously unseen by the

public —will be flooding university art museums and institutions.

(The New York Times January 5, 2015: C1).

A New Look

In his book on chaos theory James Gleick claims that the theory is essentially

about seeing. What one sees are familiar things in a "new light" and other

"problems…recognized for the first time":

(Chaos Theory involves) New hopes, new styles, and most important

a new way of seeing. Revolutions do not come piecemeal. One account

of nature replaces another. Old problems are seen in a new light and

other problems are recognized for the first time. Something takes place

that resembles a whole industry retooling for new production. In

Kuhn's

words: 'It is rather as if the professional community had been

suddenly transported to another planet where familiar objects

are seen in a

different light and are joined by unfamiliar ones as well.' (39)

My claim here is more modest. It starts from the assumption, based on years

of teaching and writing various forms of imaginative writing (mostly novels, plays,

poetry)

185

that most folks involved in similar activities are unfamiliar with the subject of this

essay—epistemic seeing, an important tool in my writing and teaching. The term

"epistemic," as the reader well knows, denotes "knowledge," seeing that produces

knowledge and belief and of Let me begin with a quotation from Aristotle's

Metaphysics that focuses on the main issue of this essay and its general

methodology. I will then go on and describe how the methodology might be applied

to readers and writers of imaginative literature—especially various genres of

literature

All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the

delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their

usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others

the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when

we

are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say)

to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses,

sight makes us know and brings to light many differences between

things (980a22-28; emph mine).

In essence Aristotle is saying three important things about the sense of sight

that will form the basic structure of this essay. First "the need to know" is necessary.

In this context, the need to know is how to construct a heuristic for composing and

interpreting the literary text. Secondly, we need to use visual information in

composing a literary work and in interpreting one. This entails using words like

"see," "look," "watch" and many others of the same family as the principal way of

186

creating, or revealing, the meaning of a text. The goal here, broadly speaking, is

locating and using "differences. between things—especially characters and their

locations.

Modern thinkers have refined, and expanded, this see:know:understand

differences with what they call 0seeing with a "belief content": The "belief-content"

doesn't have to be any particular kind but it must be something, usually something

directly present to the observer or something h/s remembers (Dretske 1969: 88).

Whereas seeing that a is F entails belief that a is F, non-epistemic

seeing lacks commitment to a belief content. When cavemen

witnessed a

solar eclipse, they saw the moon even if they had no beliefs about

what

they were seeing (Sorensen 38).

Sorensen goes on to say that non-epistemic seeing can precede and accompany

epistemic seeing. "The caveman can non-epistemically see a distant bird and

epistemically see it (by virtue of his belief that the observed creature is a bird)" (39).

In more simple terms, epistemic seeing exemplifies awareness of what something is

(its nature) versus the unawareness of non-epistemic seeing. Both kinds of seeing

arise from, using Aristotle's terms, the "need to know…the differences between

things." By implication, the person who does not see has neither the potential to see

epistemically nor non-epistemically.

On Being led from Nonepistemic Seeing to Seeing Epistemically.

187

An example of this is the lion in Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of

Francis Macomber." When it first sees Macomber, who is out to kill it, it sees only an

"object" and a "thing." Only later does it see the "object" as a "man-figure" and a

"man":

The lion still stood looking majestically and coolly toward the object

That his eyes only showed in silhouette, bulking like some super-

rhino…

Then watching the object, not afraid, but hesitating before going down

the

Bank to drink with such a thing opposite him, he saw a man figure

detach

Its from it….(if he was close enough) he could make a rush and get the

Man that held the "crashing thing" (the rifle) (13).

After identifying the object as a man, the lion begins to form a plan. In short, he

begins to think, as all epistemic seeing produces. Notice particularly that the lion is

not only thinking in a spatial way. He is also thinking temporally—of future

consequences in his encounter with the "man figure."

Since we are discussing a prolegomena, not a finished product, I propose to

use what can be called "thought-runs" to suggest elements a heuristic ought to have

(necessary for it to be effective) and potential ones that might be attractive to

writers and reader of literature. two different approaches a world composed of ES,

non-ES and non-S.

188

The Reality Effect: This effect, following Starritt, can be described as a writer giving

heavy emphasis to "seen" and "seeable" things:

(The effect is) whereby an author introduces objects and incidents

(the color a front door here, a humorous encounter there) not strictly

related to the development of h/h theme, but whose very irrelevance

simulates reality. Just as the world we experience is cluttered with all

manner of extraneous things, so are novels that are written with the

reality effect (24).

It follows from this account that reality can be made "thicker" or "thinner" by

expanding or reducing the number of seen and seeable things. Intuitively, we would

expect these things to be thinner in a narrative that takes place at night or in a lyric

like Keats Ode to a Nightingale.

Lists, categories, catalogues of things seen and seeable are examples

of "thickness":

He watched the street gliding by, looking for signs that he was awake

and, indeed, alive: a revolving breasted bust in the wedding-dress

store Beanie Babies piled up in Noah's Ark; women in saris

walking down Mozart Street; World Shoes; East-West

Appliances, Universal Distributors; a man in a white shirt

installing a bucketful of roses in front of his flower shop; Cosmos

Press; Garden of Eden Cocktails Bar; leaflets taped to light posts;

189

sign-posts, mailboxes reading 'Pray for wisdom for Mike;'

Miracle Medical Center, Acme Vacuum; a tailor-on-duty sign held

by a tailor dummy (Hemon 44). .

With opening words like the following, we expect a "thinner" account of seen

and seeable things in the narrative.

The premiss is stark. Late at night on a country road somewhere in

Switzerland a drunk driver collides with a deer. When the passenger

wakes up in the hospital, the driver, her husband, is dead and her face

Has been mutilated. The woman is a television presence, a person

who trades on her face (24).

Relevance and Applicability: Obviously if we plan to use epistemic seeing and

non-epistemic seeing as a heuristic we need to give thought to the relevance of each

(as well as non-S) and in terms of their applicability. How should we use each to

establish "differences" in a text? In a narrative an obvious difference we want is that

between characters. The relationship between the one seeing and the one seen is

reciprocal. The effect is much like the relationship between subject and object, or

the one that acts and the one that receives the action.

So let me illustrate this by reference to Hemingway "Hills Like White

Elephants" and brief excursions into other texts of the author as well as scenes from

John Williams' novel Stoner.

Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants":Accounts of seeing and not seeing

have a long tradition in Hemingway studies. In these accounts, seeing the landscape,

190

to give the narration a sense of place, are the loci classici. Baker, for example, credits

Hemingway with "graphic vitality" in his "presentation of the land" and the

"landscape as symbols" (xvii, 95). In Putnam's provocative essay on Hemingway,

"perception has always held a moral value." Additionally, quoting Nick Adams, such

perception means "to live right with his eyes " (101). More recently, Balaev claims

that the swamp of "Big Two Hearted River" "functions not only to express the

emotional action of the story but it also points toward the limits of language to

convey the truths of existence." (112) i In this, there is compatibility with Beegel's

recent study, "The Environment."

To speaker of the English language "landscape" generally provokes imagines

of rural spaces with long vistas. Not infrequently such spaces recall past experiences

there—landscapes of memory. For some a rural space can take on mythic meanings,

an Edenic garden, even Utopia. Only in such spaces can pastoral thoughts, issuing

perhaps in pastoral poetry take place. Here, of necessity, light, sunshine, youth "the

singing and the gold," occupy the spaces. Escape from crowded urban spaces, where

exploitation, poverty, constraint are frequently implied though often left unsaid.

So what about urban landscapes of violence, death, and darkness? A "dark

mirror" to use Williams' expression. Shouldn't all forms of imaginative writing give

space to both perspectives, the landscapes of both sun and darkness, perfume and

mustard grass? Surely this latter is one of the intentions of war poets like the

WWI poet Patrick Shaw Stewart in his poem, "I saw a man this morning":

191

O hell of ships ad cities

Fatal second Helen

Why must I follow thee?

Achilles came to Troyland

And I to Chersonese:

He turned from wrath to battle

And I from here days' peace

Was it so, Achilles,

So very hard to die?

Thou knowest, and I know not

So much the happier I

I will go back this morning

From Imbros over the sea

Stand in the trench, Achilles.

Flame-capped, and shout for me.

Now I want to engage more closely with forms of seeing in "Hills Like White

Elephants." Non-seeing as "looking away" will occupy an important part of this part

192

of the present essay—that is to say, the presence of absence conveys as much

information about Hemingway's intention as the presence of presence.i A leading

assumption is, then, that there is a causal relationship between the foregrounding of

such words as "see," "looking," "look like," their objects and the way we interpret

the text—especially the relationship between the two characters in the narrative, Jig

and the American. As such, my account has a loose family relationship with Link's

"stylistic analysis" of "Hills." We start with the repetition and patterns of words, go

to the objects they signify and end, hopefully, with a coherent reading of the issues

of the text.i

So the question is: who does the seeing, what is being seen, and what kind of

seeing is it (epistemic or non-epistemic). What are the objects of the seeing and

what does this tell us about what each character knows?

The essential difference between epistemic and nonepistemic seeing, as I

have said above, is with the presence or absence of a "belief content." Non-seeing,

with Kukso, Martin and Sorensen (16-17; 188-90), I take as things missing as

regards their potential existence, location and (sometimes) duration in the text.

Missing in this sense implies a hiatus in awareness (or consciousness) of the one

non-seeing. The man's statement in "Hills," in reference to the mountains Jig is

seeing, is "I've never seen one," is an example (213).

Hemingway has something to say about non-seeing (from the reader's point

of view) in this well known statement:

193

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may

omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing

truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though

the writer had stated them….A writer who omits things because

he does not know them only makes hollow places

in his writing.i

If we look at this passage (the celebrated iceberg analogy) from the point of view of

epistemic seeing, we begin, as readers of Hemingway, by focusing on four key words

in the passage: "know," "state," "feeling" and "omit." The general context is an "I"

(author) "you" (reader) relationship. What the author "omits" the reader "feels" and

"knows" if the writer is writing "truly." Correlating style with meaning is the work of

two.

Millions of readers have, of course, made the correlation. It is the main

reason Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize and why he continues to be a

popular writer with both scholars and the common reader.

But where does epistemic seeing enter this picture? I suggest that it is by way

of "seeing with belief content" of what is omitted—in this case, the mind's eye. The

effect is at once the act of intuition, memory and the imagination.

Reading Hemingway then presupposes both courage and trust. Courage on

the part of the author to give the reader freedom to see with h/h mind's eye what is

true —and trust on part of the reader that the author has intentionally omitted

things—that things missing are not accidental or through ignorance.

194

Jig's seeing comes in the form of "look at," "looked across," "looking off" and

"look like." By the criteria given above, "look at" is non-epistemic. It has, at least in

the context of its utterance, no belief content: "That's all we do, isn't it. Look at

things and try new drinks" (213) She is saying, in effect, that the "things" they look

at are insignificant and (perhaps) largely devoid of meaning. They are not

memorable: and so perhaps useless for seeing later, enjoyable, things.

Joy, excitement, pleasant memories are absent from the text. Are "new

drinks" enjoyable to them? Perhaps. But the new drink they are now having "tastes

like licorice" (212). Insofar as the taste of licorice is an individual one, good to some,

bad, or not so good, to others, Hemingway seems to be leaving the question open

how it tastes to Jig. i

Is Hemingway suggesting that non-epistemic seeing (on the whole) is what

tourists do? The couple are, after all, Americans in a foreign country. If so, then

seeing in this context is largely non-epistemic, or has a reduced belief content, and is

consequently compatible with Jig's lack of Spanish.

But how good is the man's Spanish? Hemingway doesn't give us many clues.

He only speaks two Spanish words, "dos cervesas" or "two beers" (211). Hemingway

gives the man's other communication with the waitress in English:

The man called 'listen' through the curtain. The woman came out

from the bar.

"Four reales."

"We want two Anis del Toro."

"With water?

195

…

"You want them with water?" asked the woman.

"Yes, with water." (212).

If the reader will now indulge me for a short digression: I have a feeling that

the word the man uses, namely 'listen,' invites us to uncover its implications. For

one thing, why doesn't Hemingway, who apparently knew Spanish (at least in a

rudimentary way), not use the imperative, "escucha" (infinitive form "escuchar")?

Like "listen," the 14 possible forms of "escuchar," have a heavy use in Spanish

speaking countries. Also what about the context of "listen"? Recall it follows hard on

"dos cervesas." Do we not have a use, non-use, of Spanish? With non-use a gap in the

man's knowledge of the language? Or is there a lapse in the logic of Hemingway's

characterization of the man? Don't we expect, after hearing the man address the

waitress with "dos cervesas," to continue addressing her with other Spanish words?

I would appreciate the reader's thoughts on the matter. You may address me

at: gene.washington@usu.edu.

But, before closing this digression, I feel the need to stick my neck out with a

translation of the passage: perhaps with the dim expectation of amplifying my

reputation as an admirer of all things Hemingway and Spanish:

El hombre llamado 'escuchar' a través de la cortina.

La mujer salió del bar.

"Cuatro reales."

"Queremos dos Anis del Toro."

"Con agua?"

196

***

"¿Los quieren con agua?" preguntó la mujer.

"Sí, con agua."

***

Now, returning to epistemic seeing in the "Hills."

Please notice that the man looks mostly at near things, Jig at both near and

far things:

They sat down at the table and the girl looked across the

hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at

her and at the table (214).

The American does not look at Jig or at what she is looking at. I would call this non-

seeing as a form of estrangement, not only with Jig but the environment.

Jig also looks at things before and behind things near and far things.

Acoss, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks

of the Ebro. Far way, beyond the river, were mountains (213).

Jig looks at "higher" objects, "the mountains," than the man's seen objects.

Jig's far things, the river, the mountains, the fields, are more distant than the

man's. His only thing that might be called "far" (or "farther" perhaps) is looking

down the tracks for the train.

He looked up the tracks but could not see the train (214).

His looking is non-seeing.

Does this mean his relationship with Jig is going nowhere because what

might save it isn't coming? Perhaps. But thinking metaphorically about

197

Hemingway's words is even riskier than what I am attempting to demonstrate here

about seeing.

Does the man look epistemically? Yes, of course:

He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the

station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had

spent nights (214).

This, as noticed before, is the memory of seeing as belief content.

Looking near or far can be either epistemic, non-epistemic or non-seeing:

"They look like white elephants" she said.

"I've never seen one," he said (213).

Does "one" refer to hill or elephant or both? Most likely to both, for when we

refer to the part of something we also imply the whole. "Arm" implies "body," "leaf,"

"tree" and so on.

So what should we make of Jig's seeing one thing in front of another thing, a

near thing before a far thing.i

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station.

Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees

along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river,

were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across

the field of grain and she saw the river through the

trees (213).

198

This suggests to me that far, and high, things have more significance to Jig

than near and low things—as high and far appear in her sight of the "the

mountains," the most distant and highest of all objects seen in the story..

But what is the significance here? Perhaps it relates to the relative

dimensions of a hill with a mountain. Mountains, depending on the weather, are

more sight-salient than hills. As any mountaineer (or even someone passing through

them) can tell you mountains, unlike most hills, attract the need to climb them.

As Marjorie Nicolson reminds us, in her classic study Mountain Gloom,

Mountain Glory, we live (a sensibility beginning in the late 18th century) in the age

of the "glory" of mountsins. . Unpacking the connotations of the word, following

Nicolson's own, would have to include:

*Freedom (escape from the constraints of ordinary life)

*Beauty

*Sublimity

*The need to go higher if only in the imagination.

Does Jig want to escape the constraints of her relationship with the man?

Now, for public opinions on the mountain-as-freedom, let me cite the

following:

1. Chani Lifshitz's account, in an interview with a New York Times reporter, of

why many Israeli came to the mountains of Nepal and were killed in a recent

(September 2014) avalanche there:

She said that many of the Israeli travelers who come to Nepal do

so after three years of mandatory military service, sometimes

199

involving combat and the deaths of friends on the battlefield:

'After three years (their term of service) they're looking for a place

that's far and free (emph mine; Najar).

2. Mountains, in this case Yosemite National Park, are the source of freedom

in this account by the solo climber Alex Honnold. I quote only excerpts from his

article ("The Calculus Of Climbing at the Edge") in The New York Times November

20, 2014: A27:

It's (free soloing) a wonderful freedom, in many ways similar to that

of

an artist who simply lives his life and creates whatever moves him….

We will all continue climbing, in the ways that we find most inspiring,

with a rope, a parachute or nothing at all. Whether or not we're

sponsored,

the mountains are calling, and we must go.

Most persons take seeing near and far things (the landsacpe in general) in a

spatial and directional sense. From the standpoint of our body we can look in six

different directions and see, consequently, six different kinds of landscape (Miller

and Johnson-Laird 233-303).

When Jig looks at the mountains, other things, the man, the station, the

drinks, all disappear behind her, retreating into the realm of the non-seen. She

200

leaves them, if only in her mind. Are we then allowed to say she wants to go to the

mountains? That they are calling her?

But perhaps Jig is taking the landscape around and over the Ebro in both a

spatial and temporal sense. In particular, is she making reference to her future with

the man after refusing her abortion? Are the mountains beyond the hills, the field of

grain, the trees and the river a possible destination for her? A future with a child? A

family? Notice the times she is the one who brings into the conversation a reference

to the future:

"Then what will we do afterward?"

The man's response suggests that any future will have to replicate the past:

"We'll be fine afterward. Just like we were before" (212).

Biologists have coined the term "'pluripotent" to describe the nature of a

stem cell. Unlike any other cell in the body, it alone has the ability to become

(replace) any other type of cell.Is this an apt description of the nature of epistemic,

non-epistemic and non-seeing in other works of Hemingway? Can these seeings,

working as a triad, help to create fictional character—or join with other fictional

devices to become such characters, Nick Adams, Robert Jordan, Catherine Barkley or

Frederic Henry?

Given the space I have, I can only suggest a possible answer to the question.

Seeing alone cannot create character for the reader. It has to be joined by all the

information flowing from the senses, especially hearing, touching and feeling. But I

believe we can say that seeing, following Aristotle, is the principal sense. My reason

201

is his reason: that is, it is the most beloved, and pluripotent, of the senses because of

its ability to generate "differences."

We see, but do not hear or touch, the characteristics in others by gender, age,

color of the skin and the like. But we see, and respond to them, by how and what we

see. Hemingway, whose eyes were not all that good, is a master in the manupilution

of seeing as a foundation for character and especially for making the implicit explicit

and for forshadowing.

Constructing a scene by how, and what, characters "see"

Please recall the first scene from "The Short Happy Life of Francis

Macomber." We first meet, Robert Wilson and Macomber having a drink and

"pretending that nothing had happened" (5). Macomber wife, Margot, or Margaret,

enters, does not speak to Macomber, and begins picking out physical features of

Wilson, the color of his hair, strubby mustache, red face and ""extremely cold blue

eyes with white wrinkles at the corner" (6). We then begin to sense the frozen

relationship between Margot and Macomber (All emphases are mine):

"Here's to the lion," he (Macomber) said. "I can't ever thank you for

what you (Wilson) did."

Margaret, his wife, lookied away from him and back to Wilson.

Wilson looked over at her without smiling and now she smiled at him.

…

Margot looked at them both and they both saw she going to cry (7).

…

"Yes, we take a beating," said (Wilson) still not looking at him

202

(Macomber) (7).

…

"I'd like o clear away that lion business," Macomber said." It's not very

pleasant to have your wife see you do something like that (10)

…

His wife said nothing and eyed him strangely (25).

Every reader of the story knows what eventually happens. Margot sees the buffalo

charging Macomber, about to gore him, and "(she) shot at the buffalo…and had hit

her husband about two inches up and little in one side of the base of his skull" (28).

Was she looking at the buffalo or Macomber? To reframe the question: was

she looking epistemically or non-epistemically?

Growing the Scene. A barebones account of a scene would be by means of entrances and

exits. A character, or characters, are both actually or potntially on or off stage. There is

no third option. For the novelist, or playwrite (including myself) the challenge is to invest

them with human reality, especially the ability to feel and think, to change, to establish

new relationships or sever old ones.

How I like to think of Aristotle's statement: "Here and elsewhere we shall not

obtain the best insight into things until we actually see them growing from the

beginning" (Politics). By this account, God "grows" Genesis, Virgil that of Aeneas,

Shakespeare of Hamlet and so on. In scenes of his novel, a bildungsroman, Stoner,

John Williams grows the story of Stoner from early childhood to death. The story

203

begins with Stoner born and raised on a farm. It then goes on to his education at the

University of Missouri, his teaching there, marriage and death.

How important are the forms of seeing in growing his character?

important are the three forms of seeing. For me personally they are the most important.

As Genesis has it, seen and seeable things appared

Mistaking X for Y; or False Epistemic Seeing: When we see someone, especially a

stranger, we can mistake h/h as someone h/s isn't. This is a common strategy in comedy

exemplifed notably in Abatt and Costella and in Sterne's Tristram Shandy. A recent

example occurs in the movie "Wild" in which a hiker is taken, mistakenly, for a hobo.

These are examples of making a mistake with what can be called false epistemic

seeing.

Or take the case of Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Plato has Socrates describe a

gathering of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing

a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front

of a fire behind them, and begin to designate names to these shadows. The shadows are as

close as the prisoners get to viewing reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like

a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the

wall do not make up reality at all, as he can perceive the true form of reality rather than

the mere shadows seen by the prisoners.

Here Socrates compares peoples' perception of the world around them "to the

habitation in prison, the firelight there to the sunlight here, the ascent and the view of the

upper world is the rising of the soul into the world of the mind" (517b). This allegory

204

along with an earlier Allegory of the Sun, then illustrates the difference between true

epistemic seeing (seeing the sun as the real) and false epistemic seeing (seeing shadows

as the real and as truth)—the "belief content" of their seeing is wrong. Or, in more

common terms, the shadow seeing folks see with content but its (from Plato's point of

view) the wrong kind.

From Perceptual to Conceptual: As noted earlier, following Aristotle I said that we

perceive in order to know—specifically,, to know the differences between things.

In other words the movement of our mind is always from the perceptual to the

conceptual, not the other way around. The movement of each allegory is then from the

perceptual to the conceptual. Seeing the sun and shadows is mere perception. Seeing both

as something more than their materiality is conceptual. It always raises the question

"what am I seeing and what does it mean?

Epistemic Seeing and Teaching. Frequently, one finds in narrative one character

teaching another "what to see." A notable example is Jake show Brett what to

"watch" for in bullfight (Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises):

I sat beside Brett and explained to Brett what it was all about. I told

her about watching the bull, not the horse, when the bulls charged the

picafors, and got her to watching the picador place the point of his

Pic so that she saw what it was all about…I had her watch how

Romeo (the bullfighter) took the bull away from a fallen horse with

his cape, and how he held him with the cape and turned him (171).

205

By the terms of this essay Jake assumes that Brett, without his mentoring, will watch

a bullfight non-epistemically, without "belief content" and, and consequently, not

learn "what it's all about.." His self-appointed role, then, is to teach her to see

epistemically as he does.

Epistemic Seeing and Animals: Mammals (perhaps all animals) see both

epistemically and non-episemically. Housecats, familiar with their owners, see

epistemically. They "know" what they are when they look (or hear) them, even if it's

only as a foodsource. One assumes this is due to there repeated recollections of their

owners as non-threatening. But with strangers housecats tend to see on-

epistemically. A "what is that?" accompanies (or results from?) their seeing.

What makes a housecat a housecat and not a wild or feral cat, is their

developing epistemic seeing a certain kind of person. No doubt this is true of

domestic horses and dogs plus other animals, llamas, goats, hamsters

Seeing Near and Far and Higher and Lower.

Evidentiality.

Visionary Sages

THE EYE

The Likerous Eye (Chaucer)

Accomdation

206

"Here and elsewhere we shall not obtain the best insight into things until we

actually see them growing from the beginning. The Politics

If X sees epistemically, Y sees non-episemically and Z non-sees there is an

enormous potential for contrast in a narrative.

An example of seeing both non-epistemically and epistemically are those of

Plato Allegory of the Cave and Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis

Macomber. is that of the lion in "Macomber." When it first sees Macomber it sees

207

only an "object" and "thing," Only later does he see the "object" as a "man-figure"

and a "man":

The lion still stood looking majestically and coolly toward this object

(Macomber) that his eyes only showed in silhouette, bulking like some

super-rhino….Then watching the object, not afraid, but hesitating

before going down the bank to drink with such a thing opposite

him, he saw a man figure detach itself from it…. (If he was close

enough) he could make a rush and get the man that held (the

"crashing thing" (13).

After identifying the "object" as a man, he begins to form a plan—in short, he begins

to "think," as all genuine epistemic seeing produces. Notice particularly that the lion

is not only "thinking" in a spatial way. He is also thinking temporally, of future

consequences in his encounter with the "man figure."

I return to the spatial and temporal dimensions of epistemic seeing below.i

(Aristotle's comments about seeing and knowledge (above) rest on epistemic

seeing. "Seeing is believing" also encodes epistemic perception).

Birdwatchers who epistemically see a bird not only just see a bird but can

also see it as a specific kind of bird, say a robin, not a crow, a goldfinch not a magpie.

In English we code this identifying-information not as "seeing," "looking" or "looking

at," (examples of non-epistemic seeing), but as "looking like" and "seeing as."

Insofar as love, hate, pity, fear and the like can be expressed with the eyes

(usually joined by the voice and body language) we can say we are seeing

epistemically.

208

So, with seeing in "Hills" we have three possibilities to convey information

about presence or absence as information: 1. Seeing things with belief (or more

generally with remembrance of past things and experiences) and the ability to name

the object of seeing; 2) seeing things without remembrance or without naming the

object 3) not seeing things and not using their names—including, looking away.

When Jig looks at "the ground the table legs rested on" she looks away from the all

the other things she has looked at, the hills, the bead curtain and most saliently the

man (212). With "ground" we infer that the station (at least that part) has no

artificial surface. And we also infer that she may still have a memory (belief-content)

of looking at other things, including the man. Still, by her looking away the contents

of her short term memory are missing from the story.

However, contents of her long-term memory are present— as we will see.

Inference (and presupposition) are important ways absences become

present in the narrative and ultimately aid our understanding of what's going on

between Jig and the American. When each looks away from the other in order to

look at something else they become absent from each other.

Can we infer that the man's looking at Jig is often a gaze? At times perhaps a

stare? Her six-fold "please, "please," "please" is, we might suppose is accompanied

with a stare (214). Speech is often (depending on its tone) redundant on seeing and

body language. But we cannot be certain about other ways she looks at the man.

Since Hemingway leaves them presupposed, not asserted, we cannot name them,

"look," "stare," "gaze," "glance" "notice"— or what else. But we can be fairly certain

they are epistemic, heavy with memory as belief content.

209

The other absence, as salient as looking away in "Hills," is by what linguists

(and philosophers) variously call "implicature," "inference," and "presupposition."

These contrast with "assertion," or the presence of a presence. When Hemingway

writes "the girl was looking off at a line of hills" (211) he is asserting the existence

(and presumably the truth) of Jig's action. The hills are present to Jig

consciousness—or we might say, following Dretske, she is "aware" of them (2206:

147). But Hemingway occasionally implies (and presupposes) looking at an object

while asserting looking at a different object in the same sentence: "She (the

waitress) put the felt pads and the beer glasses on the table and looked at the man

and the girl"—putting the pads on the table obviously presupposes that she is

looking (minimally) at the pads and the table (211).i

Does Hemingway ask the reader to infer the implicit meaning all objects of

looking (unpack its presuppositions) while asserting their explicit meaning? His

"definition" of explicit and implicit hangs most famously on the cooperation of

writer and reader, each of whom "knows":

What I propose to do in this essay is to give a preliminary account (towards a larger

account) of ways authors employ varieties of seeing, as it gives birth to knowing, in

such matters as distinguishing between characters, setting the scene, style, tradition

and culture. My hope is that it will start a discussion among scholars of narration of

the value of pondering the question of who "sees" what in any given text and what

210

such "seeing" tells us about certain issues (mentioned above) and also about

authorial intentions as a whole.

My take on seeing originates with certain linguists and philosophers who

categorize seeing into epistemic, non-epistemic and non-seeing—or seeing with

knowledge, or "belief content," versus seeing without it or not seeing at all.

I take "seeing" as the dominant member of a "family" of related forms

such as "look," "watch," "glance," "peek," "notice" and the like. Each of these gives

birth to a triadic procedure: namely, seeing>thinking>acting. In this thinking is

broadly defined as being conscious of something and realizing what it is. Likewise,

acting presupposes consciousness of something but also involves some physical act

like talking, running away or any normal movement of the body. For example: In

"The Big Two Hearted River: Part I" Hemingway describes Nick watching a

grasshopper, realizing why it is black. This is then followed by him picking the insect

up:

Now, he watched the black hopper that was nibbling at he wool of

his sack with its fourway lip, he realized that they had all

turned black from living in the burned over land…Carefully he

reached his hand down took hold of the hopper by the wings (165; my

emph).

211

Perhaps the reader will better understand what I am proposing with the

following short discussion of seeing in selected texts of Hemingway, a Nobel Prize

American author. Most of my discussion will center on "Hills Like White Elephants"

with brief excursions to other texts.

Subsequent essays will be on two additional novelists Faulkner and

Steinbeck.

At the end of this essay I suggest further avenues of interpretation that

might be opened, especially in style and culture, with this see:think:act approach.

Any one of these three parts can be absent. One can fail to see, fail to think or

fail to act. In this the ones who identifies the "failures" is usually someone present

(another character) in the narrative and, of course, the reader. With what is present

plus what is absent I believe we are close to Hemingway's Iceberg metaphor of style.

***

Above I mentioned other "avenues of interpretation" epistemic seeing might

open for the reader of Modern American Literature. I give some here in skeleton

form, mainly with reference to Hemingway. For epistemic seeing please read ES:

1. EP, memory, landscape: For most commentators the landscape has a double nature.

There is dreamlike version a place of effortless bucolic sweetness, where you can lie on

your back and smell the grass while there's a faint noise of people talking or moving

212

around. Then there is the nightmare version is a slightly scary, sinister, dense place of

sex, violence and death (See Schama).

2. ES and framing an image.

3. ES, landscape and myth.

4. Intra-ES versus extra-ES

5. ES and the introduction of new characters.

6. EP and the usss of color.

7. ES and lying.

8. ES, description versus prescription.

9. ES and verb "to be": Above I mentioned the three meanings of the verb "to be" in

all the Indo-European languages, existence, location, and duration. In all my

discussions of ES

10. ES and "seem."

SEE FURTHER:

Surveilience? Presupposes seeing?

"EXISTENCE"

EVIDENCE"

Any word is the root -spec' xi (expect, prospect, spectator, etc) presupposes seeing

Evidence: Federal Rules of Evidence: West Publishing: St. Paul, Minnesota 1987.

213

"One of the reasons religion refuses to go away, despite all its problems is that it addresses a restlessness

deep within our nature-our long to transcend the boundaries f the given and reach forward to something we

are not yet, but might somehow become. 'Everything in our existence pooints beyond itself' Roberto Unger

remarks in his opening sentence, referring to the paradox of our nature as finite beings with infinite

longings." (John Cottingham: "Exercises on the border of the sayable," TLS February 6: 2015: p.28

See Psalm 19: goining elsewhere

Building images of a god is making the unseen, seen and so knowable, intelligible

Horizontal and veritcal transcendence; TLS Feb 20: 15: p. 22

From How Jesus Became God: hacullinations about His resurrection: Source mentoring skills: 2 kinds Self-

generating visions or external generating ones: non-vericial or veridical: bereavement visions.

Idioms: It's been staring us in the face, but we didn't see it.

You travel to see the sights but no exclusively to know them.

Seeing transcendence: At dawn of June 8, 1924, George Mallory and Sandy Irvine set out for the summit of

Mt. Everest. They were last seen, on the Northeast Ridge, at 12: 50 p.m. by Noel Odell a fellow climber: as

a "vision of sublimity, that it has been the lot of few mortals to behold, few while beholding have become

merged into such a sceneof transcendence." Wade Davis: INTO THE SILENCE: NY Knopf 2911: xiv.

214

Seeing, Idenity and disguise: Odysseus

Odysseus and 3 questions about him. 7:182-239

In a perfectly phonological alphabet, the phonemes and letters would correspond perfectly in two

directions: a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker could predict

the pronunciation of a word given its spelling.

John Campbell, Berkeley's :Puzzle: Oxford UP 2015.

Nico Orlandi: The Innocent Eye. Oxford UP, 2015 (both bks rev in TLS, Feb 13, 2015: p. 24.

Is the world "mind-independent" or does it exist beause we perceive it? esse est percipi (Berkeley). "to be is

to be perceived." God perceives it when we're not around.

Follow 3 powerful words, seeing, death, love?

QUOTE ruling passion passage in Work ed. TS p. lii. Led by the "eye "where it led him; "guide"

"hypothesis" p. liv,

For example, Proto-Indo-European *woida originally meant "I see, I am a witness". This meaning

developed to the meaning "I know" in Ancient Greek oîda andVedic veda, as well as in Gothic wait. The

original semantic meaning of "seeing" is preserved in Latin v ī dīd ī 'I saw' (probably an old root aorist).

Compare Russian videt� (to see) and vedat� (to know).

215

s1 John 1-19

Revelations 21-1-7

ES and evidentiality; see p. 7 Swift comedy evidentially; seeing vs hearsay. evidentiality (marking the

source of information in a statement) to be distinct from epistemic modality (marking the degree of

confidence in a statement). An English example:

I see that he is coming. (evidential)

I guess that he is coming. (epistemic)

For instance, de Haan (1999, 2001, 2005) states that evidentiality asserts evidence while epistemic

modality evaluates evidence and that evidentiality is more akin to a deictic category marking the

(wikipedia)

Synoptic "seen together"

Mistaking a hitchhiker for a hobo

Applicability?

Hedgehog and the fox

Beginning and end The Tao; Pope's Dunciad; Genesis; Big Bang and Heat death

The reality effect. Alexander Starritt. "The Symmetry of turmoil." TLS p. 24

Estrangement

"seeing" NYKr Jan 5, 15 p. 74; 72, 73. Alwx Ross:"Guided by Voices" 74-5.

Gullability

Failure/falsehood

Constructing a scene (Stoner)

Here and elsewhere we shall not obtain the best insight into things until we actually see them growing from the beginning. The Politics

216

To be continued….

WORKS CITED

Aristotle. The Basic Works. Ed. Richard McKeon . New York: Random House, 1941.

Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer s Artist. Princeton; Princeton UP, 1972.

Beegel, Susan F. Ernest Hemingway in Context. Eds. Debra Moddelmog and Suzanne

del Gizzo. Cambridge UP 2013. 237-246.

————— Hemingway’s Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples Ann

Arbor/London. UMI Research Press 1988. PS 3515 E37Z582

Gleick, James. Chaos, Making a New Science. New York: Viking (1987)

Balaev, Michelle, "Language Limits and a Doubtful Nature: Ernest Hemingway's 'Big

Two Hearted River' and Friedrich Nietzsches's Foreign Language." The

Hemingway Review, 33 (Spring 2014): 107-118.

Dretske, Fred. "Perception without Awareness." In Perceptual Experience. Eds.

Tamar Gendler and John Hawthorne. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006.

___________.Seeing and Knowing. Cbicago: Chicago UP, 1969.

Graves, John. Goodbye to a River. New York: Sierra Club Book, 1960.

217

Hemon, Alekandra. New York Review of Books, December 4, 2014: 44.

An account of a character describing Chicago while riding a bus on his way to

the El:

Kukso, Boris. "The Reality of Absences." Australasian Journal of Philosophy. 84:

(2006): 21-37.

Link, Alex. "Staking Everything on it. A Stylistic Analysis of Linguistic patterns in

'Hills Like White Elephants.' The Hemingway Review 23 (Spring 2004): 66-74.

Lyons, John. Semantics. 2 vols. Cambridge UP 1977.

Kahn, Charles. "The Verb To Be." Foundations of Language 2 (1966) 245-265.

Martin, C. B. "How it is: Entities, Absences and Voids." Australasian Journal of

Philosophy 74 (1996): 57-65.

Miller, George and Phillip Johnson-Laird. Language and Perception. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP 1976.

Nicolson, Marjorie. Mountain Gloom, Mountain Glory: Aesthetics of the Infinite.

Seattle: University of Washington, 2009.

Putnam, Ann. "Memory, Grief, and the Terrain of Desire: Hemingway's Green Hills of

Africa. In Hemingway and the Natural World. Ed. Robert E. Fleming. Moscow

Idaho: Idaho UP 1999: 99-11

Schama, Simon. Memory and Landscape.

218

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus 1073.

Work, James. Ed. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. New York:

Odyssey Press (1940).

SENSING A SCENE: THE FICTION

WRITER AS SENSOLOGIST.

Numbered Diachronic and Synchronic Thought-Runs

-0. These thought-runs fall into three categories: the SENSES, RELATIONSHIPS,

SCENES. The categories have a cause and effect relationship. One stands to the

others as both cause and effect. A complete description of each would, in theory, be

a complete account of the nature of every actual, and possible, fictional scene.

-0a. We use "scene" in the context of paintings, movies, page and stage. There is

considerble overlapping between the two modes. But in this essay I deal only with

the written representation and leave the others to later essays.

Claims.

1. The fiction writer is fundamentally a "sensologist." H/s draws information from

the five senses, gives them a linguistic turn, and then creates a scene.

219

2. To the reader, a fictional scene should appear as a cross-modal unity of sensory

information, potentially from all the five senses. That is, for a scene to be

"perciptible," it must be perceived by means of more than one sensory. Color, for

example, is a mode of seeing, not of touching or tasting. But no written scene can

become perciptible, not even a painting, via a single mode such as color.

3. Moreover, a writer does not create a scene via as different sensory modes

conveyed to the reader at differtent times. They must be conveyed, and experienced,

as "togatherness." The scene, in other words, is greater than the sum of its sensory

parts. I stand on a pier and l smell the sea air. I look at a ship inn the distance. I hear

the sound of seagulls. Consequently, I have the experience of the color blue (the

sea), an experience of a salty smell, the sound of birds. Color, smell and sound,

although coming from different directions and from objects sseparte in space, are

experienced together (cf. Tye).

THE SENSES

0. All sensory information has a name: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting.

0a. Every name has a "family resemblance" to certain other names. Every family has

a pater familia, or a salient name. The salient name of family of "to see" is "seeing."

Less salient names are "peek," "gaze," "look," "watch" and so on. The salient name of

"to hear" is "hearing." "To listen" is its only less salient name. With "to touch," the

salient name, there is "to feel," the less salient. The same is true for the other two

senses, smelling and tasting (cf. Wittgenstein's Familienähnlichkeit).

220

0a. "To sense" is the super-salient name of all the sensory families. That is, it can be

a substitute for each one. But such substitution means a loss in precision and

imageability carried by the specific name.

0b. A writer experiences the senses by direct contact or more indirectly via listening

and reading. In either case the senses deliver sense-specific experiences which are

then operated on by the cognitive faculties.

0c. Writer does not present the senses as separate channels of information. Nor

does the reader experience them as such. But there is something of each sense in a

scene perceived by the reader. In "The Hills like White Elephants," for example,

Hemingway presents the world to the reader via the senses of seeing (the most

dominant), tasting (the couple drink beer) and hearing (each other and the

waitress). But the reader may be "blind" to something else, the cross-modal unity

that gives the scene a meaning. We may, for the moment call this meaning an

"overarching experience" received, and processed, by the reader. But its salient

quality of the experience must be the sense of "newness," something not

experienced before via the senses.

0c1. In themselves, individually, each sense is "blind." Each becomes "sighted" by

combining with other senses to become a phenomenal whole. An aggregate of

sensory modes, just as a community of likeminded citizens, makes a whole with a

common purpose. A "heap" of things, as Aristotle has it, is only a unified whole after

221

its parts are connected. A unified whole is something new made up of something old,

or given.

1. A writer represents dialogue as a combination of necessary and optional sensory

modes. The salient, and necessary, modes are hearing and seeing. Optional ones are

the other senses.

2. Nevertheless, a writer can "priviledge" a mode over the others. Sight is most often

the priviledged. But touch can become the most priledged in the representation of

pain. Suppose we are writing a story about a retired football player. The story

almost demands he narrate his suffering. We learned about his tough childhood,

successin football, the injuries, adiction to paintkillers in his career, the persistent

pain and the crack cocain he smoked to soothe it, the jail, the years living on the

street, the millions of dollars squandered and the debt that remains.

At the beginning of his story he steps forward and says,

"I don't want people to go through what I went through. I feel it's my

duty as a retired player to explain the difference between pain and

injury, between being hurt and being injured."

With this, we can continue, for example, with descriptions of his face in pain, his

difficulty in walking, his sleepless nights and so on. But in all this we would have to,

at a minimum, include the modes of seeing (we see his pain mediated through body

postures) and hear his words, to us and to others, his wife, say, children and doctors.

222

2a. Another example of priviledging touch is the parable of the blind wise men and the

elephant. Once upon a time, there lived six blind men in a village. One day the villagers

told them, "Hey, there is an elephant in the village today."

They had no idea what an elephant is. They decided, "Even though we would not be able

to see it, let us go and feel it anyway." All of them went where the elephant was.

Everyone of them touched the elephant.

223

"Hey, the elephant is a pillar," said the first man who touched his leg.

"Oh, no! it is like a rope," said the second man who touched the tail.

"Oh, no! it is like a thick branch of a tree," said the third man who touched the trunk of

the elephant.

"It is like a big hand fan" said the fourth man who touched the ear of the elephant.

"It is like a huge wall," said the fifth man who touched the belly of the elephant.

"It is like a solid pipe," Said the sixth man who touched the tusk of the elephant.

They began to argue about the elephant and everyone of them insisted that he was right.

It looked like they were getting agitated. A wise man was passing by and he saw this. He

stopped and asked them, "What is the matter?" They said, "We cannot agree to what the

elephant is like." Each one of them told what he thought the elephant was like. The wise

man calmly explained to them, "All of you are right. The reason every one of you is

telling it differently because each one of you touched the different part of the elephant.

So, actually the elephant has all those features what you all said."

"Oh!" everyone said. There was no more fight. They felt happy that they were all right.

The moral of the story is that there may be some truth to what someone says. Sometimes

we can see that truth and sometimes not because they may have different perspective

which we may not agree too. So, rather than arguing like the blind men, we should say,

"Maybe you have your reasons." This way we don’t get in arguments. In Jainism, it is

explained that truth can be stated in seven different ways. So, you can see how broad our

religion is. It teaches us to be tolerant towards others for their viewpoints. This allows us

224

to live in harmony with the people of different thinking. This is known as the Syadvada,

Anekantvad, or the theory of Manifold Predictions

(http://www.jainworld.com/literature/story25.htm).

2b. Suppose we want to write a scene that priviledges smell. A couple, say a young man

and woman are out walking in a woods. Suddenly, one stops and turns to the other, and

says, "what's that smell?

"I don't smell anything."

"(Pointing): It's coming from other there."

"Where?"

"It seems to be over there. Where that swam of flies is."

Might this be taken as the beginning of a mystery tale; or perhaps a crime fiction story?

The smell of the unidentified object, plus the sight and sound of flies, might suggest a

murder victim? The carcass of an animal killed by a predator?

2c. Taste. Suppose I look at a red apple. I first infer a sweet taste which I apprehend by

sight and then, by biting into the apple, I experience its taste. What have I done here but

take a journey from sight to taste.

2d. Aristotle calls sight the "most beloved" of the senses. Charles Wolfe names it the

most "noble of the senses" and touch the most "materialistic." With sight, in other words,

we typically begin our journey to the other senses in order to verify what we have seen.

For Aristotle, the journey ends in the idenfication of "differences." (Metaphysics; TLS

APRIL 17, 2015: p. 9).

2da. But it seems clear that we can begin our journey with other senses than sight. Every

pet owner knows a cat or dog hears something first and turn its head to see what it is. Or

225

as in the little story above, someone smells something and looks to see where, and what,

it is coming from.

3. Is there such a thing as a Common Sensible? Aristotle distinguishes between the five

special senses, sight hearing and the rest and common sensibles κοινὴ αὴσθησις (koinē

aísthēsis), magnitude, movement, number and so on.

It might be asked why we have more senses than one. Is it to present a

failure to apprehend the common sensibles, e.g., movement,

magnitude, and number, whih go along with the special sensibles?

Had we no sense but sight and that sense no object but white, they

should have tended to escape our notice and merged into an

indistinguisble identity because of the concomitance of magnitude

and color. As it is, the fact that the common sensibles are given in the

objects of more than one scene reveals their distinction from each and

all of the special senses (On the Soul, 425b 4-10).

I take this mean, in regard to constructing a scene, to mean that a scene cannot be

made solely with the "special senses." It must also contain the common sensibles.

The issue, as Aristotle points out, is "identity." Without distinguishing between each

of the five special senses and the each of the common sensibles a scene would lose

its identity as a unity—the something more than the presence of the five senses.

I expand more on this below.

3a. Epistemic and nonepistemic. Or "knowing that…" versus "not knowing that."

226

Hierarchy Epistemic and nonepistemic sensory modes.

SCENES

The Presence of Absence in a Scene

The cautionary tale

0a. A scene is a network of relationships between persons and things

0b. The fundament scenic relationship is structured like that of a bee, seeking

nectar, and a blossum of a crabapple tree in need of the dispersal of its pollen. The

bee and the tree both can profit. Nectar can become honey to feed on and the tree a

chance at reproduction.

0b1. A relationship can be recriprocal.

0b2. A relationship can be nonrecriprocal.

0b3. A relationship can have value to ne pattner but not to the other. .

227

1. Every relationship presupposes time, space and causlity. Each one comes

into being at a specific time and ends at a specific time. Each one is the effect of some

cause. Each takes place in a specific place.

0b1. A relationship, like that between bee and the blossom, can fail. Severe weather

may kill the bees. A disease may destroy their hive. The tree may not bloom.

1a. A scene, as I use it here, can be either a part of a larger whole (an act, a

play, a book) or a whole, entire of itself. The contents of a scene may be something

contained by something containing. A scene has an interioral and exterior, an inside

and an outside. A scene has a certain duration and is bounded as such.

My purpose here is to discuss a scene as a whole, not a part of a whole.

A scene is established and meditated, via the senses and encoded in language.

Of the five senses, seeing, hearing and touching have special importance. Seeing, as I

willsay later, is generally "priviledged" in fiction. As Aristotle points out, it is the

"most beloved" of the senses because it is the most useful for seeing "differences,"

different colors, shape and sizes. But seeing is also important because only through

it do we observe, but do not feel, touching. Moreover, seeing equates with

"knowing,," realiability, eyewitness, where hearing only rises to the level of

"hearsay."

Being grounded in the five scenes, and blindly following them, scenes become

contingent entities. They come and go; they mutate, shift and change as the

relationships between their parts change. .

228

Wihtout sight we would lack the word "blind."With hearing we often "verify" what

the other senses, especially seeing, "tell" us about the world. Without hearing we

would be "deaf." Seeing and hearing, as far as information goes, are redundant on

each other. Touching, in Classen's termology is the "deepest sense." Wihtout it, we

would not have the word "numb" For infants, one can claim, it is the primary way

they "sense" their environment. Hugging, shaking hands, manipulating tools having

sex, directly depend on the sense of touch. As Classen shows in great detail touching,

of all the senses, yields most readily to a historial account. for example, the way

London "felt" to its inhabibants versus how it feels in the twentieth first century

Constance Classen: Ed. A Cultural History of the Senses. Bloomsbury 2915.

—————The Deepest Sense;A Cultural History of TouchUrbana: Illinois UP 2012

Ed. With David Howes Ways of Sensing (2014)

TLS April 17, 2015: p. 9. "Tastes of Socrates"

· William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman A Handbook to Literature (7th edition).

New York: Prentice Hall, 1990, p. 212.

· · Farner, Geir (2014). "Chapter 2: What is Literary Fiction?"Literary Fiction; The

Way We Read Narrative Literature. Bloombury Publishing USA.

229

· · M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (7th edition). Fort Worth, TX:

Harcourt Brace, 1999, p. 94.

sites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic720164.files/Tye_The Problem of Common

Sensibles.pdf