MDMD2: The Learned English Dog

[Dave Monroe]

"All at once, out of the Murk, a dozen mirror'd Lanthorns have leapt alight 
together, as into their Glare now strolls a somewhat dishevel'd Norfolk 
Terrier, with a raffish Gleam in its eye,--" (M&D, Ch. 3, p. 18)

Okay, the last (we ALL hope, I'm sure ...), but perhaps the most immediately 
interesting set of excerpts from William Empson, The Structure of Complex 
Words (Norfolk [!], CN: New Directions, 1951), Ch. 7, "The English Dog," pp. 
158-74 ...

"It is the pastoral ideal, that there is a complete copy of the human world 
among dogs....

http://www.stanford.edu/~bescoto/hume/dogs.jpg

http://www.wapers.com/misc/dogpoker/dogpoker1024.jpg

http://www.mit.edu/people/svalente/gif/poker.dogs.jpg

I think there are two elements in the thought behind this word, which can be 
distinguished roughly as rationalist and humanist.
    "The eighteenth-century rationalist limited very sharply the impulses or 
shades of feeling he was prepared to foster--not merely Enthusiasm was cut 
out but [a] kind of richness of language ....  The feeling that the dog 
blows the gaff on human nature somehow attached itself to the ambition of 
the thinker to do the same, and this helped to make him cheerful and 
goodhumoured.  His view of our nature started from a solid rock-bottom, a 
dog-nature, which his analysis would certainly not break in digging down to 
it; this made him feel that the game was safe, and the field small enough to 
be knowable.  Whereas Shakespeare felt that 'there is no worst', and the 
corresponding depths to him were fearful degrees of lunacy; 'fool' was his 
earth-touching word, not 'dog'.
    "... it is surprising that the eighteenth-century could make so much of 
its more narrow material, could base so much poetry on a doggish 
mock-heroic.  It was the simplicity of this feeling, on the other hand, 
which let them prune down so far towards rationalizing their emotional life 
without killing the tree.  But there was a danger of killing it.  A 
surprising number of great writers went mad, and most of them feared to; 
indeed, the more you respect reason the more you must fear the irrational.  
Thus another use was found for the Dog in the way it stood for the 
Unconscious; for the source of the impulses that keep us sane, and may 
mysteriously fail ....  Its process of thought is a mystery, but the results 
are homely and intelligible; it makes what we do not know about the roots of 
our own minds seem cheerful and not alarming....
    "The humanist application corresponds to the hearty use of these words, 
as the rationalist one does to the patronizing use.  Of course humanism was 
a complicated affair ...; I am using it for something vaguely 
anti-Christian.... The fundamental novelty was an idea that 'Man is no 
longer an abortive deity, born in sin, necessarily incomplete in the world, 
but the most triumphant of the animals'....  The essential here is that you 
can start building yourself into a man, and not hate yourself, on the basis 
of being that kind of animal; the trouble about Evolution was that one could 
not feel the same way about monkeys." (pp. 168-70)

"The important point about the noble animal is that he is a deeply 
reassuring animal to contemplate.  The fact that he can be patronized as no 
more than fundamental makes you think better of the race of man." (p. 173)

"... there is an obscure humor from the idea of the dog being sad too;  he 
seems gay, but no, he is always in a great mess.  At bottom he feels the 
sadness of the thing, just as we do.  Perhaps there is a feeling that this 
dog has the right Old Adam to build a New Man upon ...." (p. 174)

A complex word indeed, "dog."  But wait, there's more ...

"It is surely a striking reflection that a great deal of the thought of a 
man like Dr. Johnson ... were not carried on by the official verbal 
machinery but on colloquial phrases ....  You need to know, as well as the 
serious opinions of a man in the society, how much weight he would allow, 
when making a practical decision, to some odd little class of joke phrases, 
such as excite, he would feel, sentiments obvious to any agreeable person, 
and yet such as carry doctrines more really complex than the whole structure 
of his official view of the world." (ibid.)

Well, that was rather more of a detour than I either expected or desired, 
but I'm not so sure it was entirely a detour, either.  A complex text, Mason 
& Dixon; a complex author, Thomas Pynchon.  Perhaps a handful of posts left, 
inc. ones looking both backward and forward in the text.  Maybe even to Ch. 
4 ...

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp