Faulkner, Fiction, Film, Culver City and the Canon Revisited

Today’s readings offered a chance to compare the adaptation of Faulkner’s ‘Turnabout’ from short story to screenplay. It was interesting to see how the class critiqued the screenplay version and even the short story itself in terms of where the works sat in comparison to the rest of Faulkner’s body of work. Comments and chortles were bandied about the seminar concerning it’s gaudy unrefinement in comparison to the complexities of Absalom! Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury. One student however exclaimed they quite liked what may be considered in ‘bad taste’ , ‘bad movies’ or works which receded such literary or cinematic refinement. I was inclined to agree and it got me thinking…

The point of the exercise I assume was to interrogate the nature of what we may deem worthy of canonical inclusion. To consider Turnabout’s value as both a short story, and a screenplay (albeit an unproduced one) churned out as part of the Golden Age of Hollywood in the back lots of the movie houses that populated Culver City in the 1940s. To consider these texts again in comparison to the ‘value’ of Faulkner’s other works.

It becomes then a seemingly superficial task of gushing about Turnabout’s lack of complexity in comparison to Faulkner’s other works. If one begins to interrogate why this maybe so, the task does not prove so easy. It was suggested that labour may be an adequate measure of the value of a work. This I am not so sure of. While time and effort spent on something would contribute to a work’s greatness, I do not think that it would ensure it. I’m sure there exists completely terrible literary (and perhaps in bulk cinematic) works which have been labour, time and or budget intensive but have failed to deliver. And that is another question. Deliver in terms of what? How or what does one ‘deliver’. In terms of sales, in terms of its contribution to the genre or form? How do we determine these inconstant value markers?

Bernstein Smith’s derivational process of evaluation would suggest that we place value on a work through a consideration of our total experiential economies, which would in the case of Faulkner, for those of us who have read Faulkner’s other work or are familiar with his literary reputation, will value Turnabout with those other experiences or encounters in mind. And then does it not just become a matter of technique? We will measure then according to other works experienced and their effectiveness, their personal (on the readers behalf) likeability or relate-ability? The process will also then turn to a micro-level of analysis.

Perhaps, on another level, other works within the same periodical genre or form may spring to mind, other short stories published in the 1930s or movies of similar weight in the 1940s and the subject of our concern may then be compared against these. The politics of the value placed on different genres then become apparent and again, although some genres may be held in higher regard than others, this does not diminish their validity. Liking ‘bad movies’ is not a bad thing. But we then fall ino even more complex territory. What is bad? Is it kitsch, camp, b-grade, cult, lo-budget, cliché? The determination of such is again a complex process…..


- mia

"Rules of Attraction" and "The Secret History" - Crossed Paths and Blood in Baths.

By mere coincidence the other day this film was referred to me by a friend, with particular recommendation to the monologue which appears as linked below. If there ever was a rant that so succinctly demonstrates numbness and indifference to postmodern proliferation it is what is featured below. It is, what I would imagine, to be an accurate representation of what a post-secondary education Euro-trip would be like at the mercy of narcotics....or if you are Quentin Tarantino or Chuck Palahniuk. 


The segway for the appearance of this link on this blog and therefore its relevance to this course may be found in the novel that the film is based on. Bret Easton Ellis' Rules of Attraction (1987) is a novel very much in the same vein as Tartt's Secret History. Liberal Arts students, promiscuous sex, tragedy, blah, blah. In fact, both Ellis and Tartt were contemporaries and classmates at college. The setting of the novel reflects the author's own college (i will refrain from using the word 'lifestyle', lest the ghost of Barthe from weeks past chase me with a massive baguette or poorly prepared macaroons). Tartt's novel comes after but there is overlap in storylines. An intriguing and nerdy thing to read up on I'm sure. 


In the meantime, Youtube has disabled embedding on most of the clips of this monologue but be prepare to be amazed after the jump:

"Rules of Attraction Euro Trip Monologue "



                                                                            - mia
Picture Credit Here 

"The Canon"

Hernstein Smith intricately and tediously teases out 'value', both as a process and as a phenomenon. For Hernstein Smith evaluation is always compromised and is not a universally stable designation -

 'For evaluation is, I think, always mingled with regards that stand aloof from the entire point: always compromised, impure, contingent; altering when alteration finds; bending with the remover to remove; always Time's fool' (1).

The process of evaluation for a work has a past and a future, is rooted in moments in time and instances and is thus variable by those fixed marks or instances.

The first instance of such, interestingly, is in the very process of creation itself. The author must undertake a process of evaluation, selection and exclusion in order to compose a work. For Hernstein Smith value is an accumulative process. The determination of such is comprised of a combined economy of all experiences and encounters.

This applies within the process of composition as well as instances throughout the works history of reception. The original reception of Shakespeare’s sonnets will differ in value from those now, as those from earlier moments in it’s literary history.

Upon reception of a work, to evaluate a work is to estimate that economy of experiences and encounters for others -

‘to evaluate a work of art is, amongst other things, to estimate its potential value for others; but while our ability to make that estimation correctly certainly increases in  time with all our general and specific knowledge, it also decreases in time as we become less and less like anyone else, and thus less able to predict anyone else’s responses on the basis of our own (5)’.

The process of evaluation is highly subject to variability and inconstancy. Hernstein Smith suggests the following variable must be considered to name a few -  a consideration of how well that work will serve certain implicitly defined functions, the specificities of that implied audience, and how those defined conditions DEFINE the value given to a work (for instance to use the example she gives an opera at the Met will have a different value assignment than a performance of tribal African drumming to their respective recipients).

For Hernstein Smith, the cannons of literature or art are thus based on a collective accumulation of these of these evaluations -

‘the recommendation of value represented by the repeated inclusion of a particular work in anthologies of great poetry not only promotes but goes some distance towards creating the value of that work, as does its repeated appearance on reading lists or its frequent citation or quotation by professors, scholars, critics, poets and other elders of the tribe’ (11).

Interestingly also, Hernstein makes the point that the role of the scholar and the critique differ, in that it is the critic who determines value. There is then a politics of taste to consider, which Guillory picks up in the second reading.

For Guillory, in one sense the cannon can become a reflection of that collective of which it emerges. That site of preferential value maybe seen as a site of exclusion, where minority groups are not represented within the cannon. It is suggested that this is not a matter of political exclusion on the part of the critics but a circumstance of history itself, where minority groups or sexes may not have had access to literacy or the culture surrounding it.

The difference for Guillory between the syllabus and the cannon is ‘the difference between the pedagogic imaginary, with its images of cultural or countercultural totality, and the form of the list, as the instance of mass culture’s social imaginary, with its simultaneous denial and manifestation of cultural heterogeneity’ (197). Such groups are not represented in the canon of literature because of the nature of the construction of the cannon itself.

It seems to me however that the term ‘cannon’ still may be highly variable in meaning and applicability, and possesses the ability in the very nature of what it is to be a volatile an item as Hernstein Smith has suggested in her explanation of its composition. In the world of the literary and perhaps art the ‘cannon’ seems somewhat a more stable entity but consider it’s transference to the study of music or film? Is it possible to have a ‘cannon’ of great music or great film? Perhaps with music especially the instability of value is the most transparent. Each authoritative institutionalized voice of musical criticism appears to have a very different value set of what it deems worthy of inclusion into their ‘yearly’ cannons or even ones they comprise by the decade. Compare Rolling Stone, to Pitchfork, to Mojo, to street press like Drum and Brag. Perhaps in a medium like this that political element of lack of representation due to lack of access to the form is thrown to the wayside as most of these major institutions are able to consider obscure releases as long as they are heard or are thought to have been making some form of effect on the surface of the musical community. This again becomes a question of ease of access as a circumstance of the time we live in, in the emergence of literary cannons, such access was limited both by those who could access it and by the means of production of which it was distributed and reached.

                  - mia

"The Secret History" - Donna Tartt

So, i think i may have missed the seminar in which the relevance of The Secret History was discussed in class. If by some sad circumstance anyone is reading this and wishes to enlighten me as to why feel free to comment below. In the meantime I'm going to take a crack at it.

I was somewhat surprised when I sauntered into the Co-op to purchase the text. Sitting in the Lit-Nerd isle, occupying our units designated dumping bay, was a dwindling pile of Henry James novel's and quite a few copies of the above aforementioned text. I approached with mild apprehension. An exchange in my mind traversed as follows.....

                    ".....it's an orange Penguin........i've never heard of Donna Tratt....wow.....i feel kind of stupid...yuppie ass reading list.......fml....."

I am usually quite familiar with books of the orange Penguin range for a few reasons:

1. I stalk bookstores like I stalk yer mum.

2. Lit-Major (this does not afford me the right to claim an obnoxious amount of literary knowledge, but enough that I would be familiar with most orange Penguin titles).

So I was somewhat dismayed, why had I never heard of Donna Tartt? "Google will surely inform me of her place within the literary world and all will be well again", I chortled. 

What has just occurred here, I'm sure has academics championing Canon theory wetting themselves. My expectations of the novel, and the value that I have prematurely ascribe to the text has been informed by assumption that the Penguin classics range selects its texts according to the Canon. Albeit, the orange classics range is moving to incorporate more modern classics. What of this? How is the Canon derived, how are the values texts must posses determined, how is this phenomena changing in modern times? Fodder for next week I'm sure. However, this is could be an entirely far-fetched and pretentious assumption which neither Melissa or Sarah intended.

 The novel itself centers around the literarily aware and their classically inspired and tragic ends. (As an aside, how utterly promising and inspiring! It beguiles me to no end how liberal arts students are perpetually depicted as self medicating cutters). The incorporation of classical Greek tragedy provides an interesting and ironic point of discussion in terms of its value as a 'modern' canonical text. Here we have a text which is very much enriched by the use of narrative techniques and tropes both valued and upheld in the Canon. Which begs the question, how do we determine if something is truly good at all? Take away the use of such techniques and the plot would disintegrate into something entirely different. Would it be that bad? Why do we value ennui and heart wrenching anguish over indifference? What happens if our characters were devoid of hamartia? Out of a bundle of like minded novels about dysfunctional New-Hampshire college kids, what makes The Secret History the novel that Penguin classics orange chooses as part of its series? Such matters of value tie into the readings next week and thus shall be discussed there. The novel does promote quite a fair bit of brow narrowing in such a respect, but it's a descent read. As a humanities/ languages student references to grammatical case and Greek philosophy are kinda shamefully nerd indulgent. It's also kinda creepy. Kinda emo.....and wtf was that ending?

                                                                             - mia

P.S. New York Times Review of The Secret History here.

Picture credit here. 

Fun and Lit-Nerd Facts from the "Secret Lives of Great Authors"

To relieve any poor soul forced to troll through, or conversely anyone who happily stumbles across the "heavy" academic digression (pfft) that appears on this site, I thought i might include the odd relevant observation or relevant fun fact. Last week's readings inspired some thought to be given to some of our great literary inspirations and counterparts, so the following appear courtesy of Secret Lives of Great Author's (Robert Schnakenberg). A rippingly good coffee table/ throw cushion book for the literarily minded. It will simultaneously make you feel entirely better about your own life as a writer living in a time where both the plague and syphilis are no longer rampant as well as entirely guilty that your own life has neither been as neurotic, booze, tit or cock-filled. 

                                                                                   - mia

FUN FACTS TO MAKE YOU BLUSH, SCOFF, JUDGE OR OTHERWISE:

Speaking of Balzac - "Balzac revealed to friends that, while having sex, he preferred not to ejaculate out of fear it would sap his creative energy." 

Was thoroughly disappointed the first time he slinging hash with Baudelaire. It was not the "maddening" experience he assumed it would be.

Edgar Allen Poe was a Capricorn. 

"James Joyce sent many erotic letters to his longtime lover, Norah Barnacle, expressing his desire to be smacked, flogged, and whipped."

Steely Dan famously takes their name from the enormous rubber dildo featured in William Burrough's Naked Lunch. 

"The term heavy metal is also a Burroghism."

"Later in life, Burrough developed close collaborative relationships with several rock music performers, including Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle. His good friend Kurt Cobain even asked him to appear as Jesus Christ in the video for Nirvana's 'Hear Shaped Box', but Burroughs declined. In 1992 he recorded an EP with Cobain entitled "The Priest They Called Him".

After one critic gave Ernest Hemingway a bad review, Hemingway popped open a can of blitchslap and wrestled him to the floor. 

Louisa May Alcott - massively addicted to opium. 

Lord Byron - proper man slut. Rumored to have bedded 250 women and a young man in Venice in one year alone.

Picture credit here. 

The Death and Birth of the Author.

'This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuos boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility'

                               - Balzac

This week's readings fundamentally concern the role of the author as contributing value to a text, which, as one would entirely expect, poses an array of difficulties to consider:

• In what ways does the knowledge or consideration of a text's author inform a reading of a text? In what ways does it enrich it, or limit it?
• The complexity of the concept of 'author' must be considered also - what constitutes the 'author'?
• Is it merely a deliberately presented persona or reputation by the author themselves akin to a level of celebrity which both acts to reinforce and complicate elements within a text? (Such as in the case of strategically placed depictions of Whitman's everyman britches in Leaves of Grass and Pynchon's more recent deliberate elusive dematerialization from the public eye). 
• Is it what we do know about their actual lives which informs our reading of a text?
• Does this effect produce a different result if experienced in retrospect of an author from a contemporary experience of one? Does it matter how long it has been since they've kicked the proverbial bucket?

 We are of course familiar with Barthe's seminal work "Death of the Author" in which Barthe proposes that the consideration of the author is nothing but a grave and limiting imposition onto the possible readings one may derive from the text.

"To give a text an Author  is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final, signified, to close the writing." (Barthes: 223)

For Barthe, the author cannot be responsible for the final meaning one may deduce from a text. For Barthe, to consider the Balzac quote above is to glimpse a plethora of possible readings all deduced and determined by reader alone.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Balzac text, or Barthe's suggested readings of it *insert your wildly imaginative propositions here*.

Barthe offer's the radical assumption that the birth of the reader - that is, the acknowledgement of the possibility of multiple meanings of a text catalyzed by the possible differing experiential factors on possessed by the reader (histories, biographies, psychologies and literary experiences) is at the mortal expense of the author. This is nothing more than the academic equivalent of diva dummy spit. However I'm not sure if i can detect whether such an expression is one of  genuine and therefore hilarious intention or purposefully contrived to prove a point. I'd like to think it's the later.


I found Foucault's not-so undirected response far more satisfying, in poignancy and in the detail of his reasoning. While I agree with Barthes to the extent that the role of the reader must be considered a factor when extrapolating the shady features of 'value' from a text, I also believe that to disregard both a reader's knowledge of a writer (whether this be misguided, close to historically accurate or completely fabricated) is unwise. As is disregarding (and this may be a completely sentimental and self-indulgent observation made as a writer) the author's intention in creating the text to begin with. Perhaps it is terribly naive and unnecessarily romantic to think so, but I strongly believe that it matters that someone, writer or artist, decided, to create something at all, why it is they did so, and with what intention they did it with. Albeit,  uncovering a precise reason or answer to why a text is created may be at times extremely difficult, this after resides with the artist, and the minds of the creative minded are hardly ever easily transparently discernible. What does matter, is that a text is not some hermetically sealed thing cut-off from author or reader. From the world, time and place it appeared in.  If it were, it would be entirely pointless exercise and mute of any meaning at all.


                                                                                     -  mia

Picture Credit here