VV(7) Pig on Sartre (engineering poetry)

Slug lycidas2 at earthlink.net
Tue Jan 9 07:09:39 CST 2001


jbor wrote:
> 
> ----------
> >From: kevin at limits.org
> >
> 
> > Re: the question of Bodine's Sartre usage, I think it's an absolutely
> > delicious pun, Bodine assuming the identity of a Rusty Spoon intellectual
> > by questioning the assumption of identities.  I also thought of "Prufock,"
> > RJ, but the line that jumped to my mind was "to prepare a face to meet the
> > faces that you meet."
> 
> I like this, Kevin, thanks. And there's probably more to the reference to
> Sartre here (at a sub-narrative level) as Kai, Kurt-Werner, Terrance and
> others have been discussing. But what I like is the way the surface
> reference has been integrated into the narrative to give the reader such a
> succinct snapshot of some of these characters.
> 
> Pig is totally without intellectual pretension. He likes to drink and screw.
> 
> Rachel is nobody's fool, and can see straight through the paucity of real
> intellectual substance in much that the WSC affects to "discuss".
> 
> And those WSC members who have been holding forth on Sartre and "identity"
> at the Spoon ... well, you can just imagine the scene and the dialogue ...
> 
> And so, for "the next hour they talked proper nouns", which I take to mean
> that Rachel and Pig discussed their mutual acquaintances amongst the WSC,
> most probably Benny and Paola in particular. Recall that previous reference
> to Paola's note left for Rachel:
> 
>      Paola's handiwork, Paola Maijstral the third roommmate. Who
>      had also left a note on the table. "Winsome, Charisma, Fu,
>      and I. V-Note, McClintic Sphere. Paola Maijstral." Nothing
>      but proper nouns. The girl lived proper nouns. Persons, places.
>      No things. Had anyone told her about things? ... (51.6)
> 
> I doubt that she and Pig would have been discussing Sartre at all after
> Pig's line. (Not that that means Pynchon wasn't doing something with the
> reference, or that we shouldn't discuss it, of course ... But I still think
> that Kai's comment about it being there "to give a flavour of the time" is
> right on the money.)
> 
> best

Yup! Recall that T.S. Eliot was at first a student of
Philosophy. 

Once the affairs of poets and philosophers are thought to be
identical or comparable, philosophic reasons can then be
employed to instruct poets by truths, or to govern them by
prescriptions, which have moral, political and oh god yes,
religious grounds and consequences.  And the poet, for his
part, can give expression to philosophic truths which
exceed, fly above, or transcend the earthly realm of
pedestrian reason, or which pertain to the mysterious, to
the irrational, to love, or to passions, or to compulsions
that are in the poets arguments more effectively expressed
by poetry. On the "wings of poesy" ( Keats) "truth is
beauty, beauty truth" and the earth bound cognitive language
or the rigid syllogistic deductions of philosophers can only
mutter that flight is an impossibility and if the "law giver
had intended Apes to fly, he would have provided them with
wings."  ( Planet of the Apes,)  It is a quarrel in which
philosophers and poets are frequently joined by politicians
and priests, who in turn find reasons in common assumptions
or in the differences of philosophy and poetry to justify
them in their censure, restraint, modification, and
employment of art and inquiry. (Milton, Areopagita) 
The quarrel is interrupted, however, whenever critics
separate the themes and techniques of poetry from those of
science. Under these conditions, poets and philosophers
coexist in amicable mutual understanding or passive
indifference. To philosophers, thinking scientifically, it
is apparent that poets do not think or use language
cognitively and if "philosophers" write things that are
incapable of empirical verification, they do so as Poets. It
is no less apparent to poets who enrich meaning by
ambiguity, or adornment of metaphor, or evocation of
emotion, or concealments of unintelligibility, that the
"truths of philosophers" are not important and that lines of
poetry that can be considered true or false are not poetry
but philosophy. (Aristotle, Poetica) and (Freud, Moses of
Michelangelo).

The relation between poetry and philosophy is involved in a
complex circularity.
(Rembrandt's Aristotle with  bust of Homer) We can not hope
to free ourselves from these complexities by accepting
poetry as a neutral phenomenon in regards to which theories
might be formed, since the character of poetry and the
values embodied in it and expressed by it are affected by
the theories of poetry we accept and those we reject. Nor
can we free ourselves from these complexities by accepting
the supposition that speculation concerning poetry is
essentially different, because of its subject matter, from
speculation concerning the nature of things. For to do so is
to exclude without examination, philosophies in which nature
is the work of a divine artist, and in which philosophy
itself as well as morals are Arts.  And to do so is to
exclude philosophies in which science and art are explained
by practical processes and external determinations---moral,
social, economic, or political. (Aristotle) 

And when they are thought to be complementary? The
extremists on either side can be seen trashing  the excluded
middle.



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