On Leave: A Book of Anecdotes (Salt Modern Lives) - Softcover

Tuma, Keith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844714861 ISBN 13: 9781844714865

Publisher: Salt, 2011

Synopsis

A book of and about literary anecdotes, On Leave presents passing observations concerning the anecdote in a modular prose that tracks the events of a year on leave. Its cast of characters includes avant-garde poets, students, friends, family, and strangers encountered on travels in a year away from university work. Fragments of conversation with Bernadette Mayer, Tom Raworth, Trevor Joyce, John Wilkinson, Harryette Mullen, and many others lead onto informal commentary about poems by these authors and other observations about the reading and culture of poetry, all offered in the form of daybook notation.

About this title

About the Author

Keith Tuma is the author of Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers (Northwestern, 1998) and editor of Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford, 2001). He teaches at Miami University in Ohio.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

from the Introduction

Near the beginning of Nadja (), Andre Breton writes that criticism would do well to abandon its “dearest prerogatives” for “a goal less futile than the automatic adjustment of ideas.” In Breton’s view, changes in standards of taste or literary value, as also in literary practice, are not importantly shaped by criticism. Instead of passing judgment upon works, critical writing about literature and art would do better to “explore the very realm supposedly barred to it, and which, separate from the work, is a realm where the author’s personality, victimized by the petty events of daily life, expresses itself quite freely and often in so distinctive a manner.” Breton hoped that efforts to write about authors in everyday, extra-literary contexts would replace what his generation knew as criticism--Adorno would have called it “cultural criticism” and despised it for the “dazzled and arrogant recognition” it seeks to confer upon culture.

It is not full-length biography that Breton has in mind but rather the biographical anecdote. Offering an example of what he hopes for from commentary, Breton relays an anecdote about Victor Hugo and his mistress Juliette Drouet riding in their carriage. The two ride past an estate featuring two gates. Hugo points to the larger of the gates:

Hugo, for perhaps the thousandth time, would say: “Bridle gate, Madame,” to which Juliette, pointing to the small gate, would reply: “Pedestrian gate, Monsieur”; then, a little farther on, passing two trees with intertwining branches, Hugo would remark: “Philemon and Baucis,” knowing that Juliette would not answer; we have reason to believe that this marvelous, poignant ritual was repeated daily for years on end; yet how could the best possible study of Hugo’s work give us a comparable awareness, the astonishing sense of what he was, of what he is? Those two gates are like the mirror of his strength and his weakness, we do not know which stands for his insignificance, which for his greatness. And what good would all the genius in the world be to us if it failed to countenance that adorable correction, the redress of love itself, which so perfectly characterizes Juliette’s reply? The subtlest, the most enthusiastic of Hugo’s critics will never make me feel anything to equal this supreme sense of proportion. I should be privileged indeed to possess, in the case of each of the men I admire, a personal document of corresponding value.

Breton’s phrase “this supreme sense of proportion” means to describe the conversation of Hugo and Drouet and the rest of their “poignant ritual.” Does it also refer to aesthetic values that shape Hugo’s work and might be found in it? Breton ignores the ambiguity, promoting a view of Hugo and Hugo’s writing that finds something essential in this vignette, this perfect anecdote. The two gates are symbols of the strength and weakness of Hugo’s work, but Breton won’t say which is which.

Breton also values what is usually called table talk. He is fascinated by glimpses of the author and the author’s offhand remarks. The translation again is by Richard Howard:

Lacking these [i.e., personal documents], I should even be content with records of a lesser value, less self-contained from an emotional point of view. I do not admire Flaubert, yet when I am told that by his own admission all he hoped to accomplish in Salammbo was to “give the impression of the color yellow,” and in Madame Bovary “to do something that would have the color of those mouldy cornices that harbor wood lice,” and that he cared for nothing else, such generally extra-literary preoccupations leave me anything but indifferent.

Image does the work explanation might do: the phrase “mouldy cornices that harbor wood lice” probably suggests the moral and emotional rot that Flaubert’s novel explores, but how can we know that for certain? An anecdotal criticism might be a more poetic criticism.

Breton would have us fold the most mundane extra-literary information into exegesis of the artistic or literary work:

The magnificent light in Courbet’s paintings is for me the same as that of the Place Vendome, at the time the Column fell. If today a man like Chirico would confide--entirely and, of course, artlessly, including the least consequential as well as the most disturbing details--what it was that once made him paint as he did, such a step, taken by such a man, would mean an enormous advance for exegesis.

There is little about Breton’s sense of the value of the extra-literary in exegesis that is controversial; the extra-literary has a secure place in the academic study of literature. Texts and contexts blur, cross and proliferate in cultural studies and elsewhere. But Breton’s anecdotes are exceptional for working so hard to avoid being absorbed by other discourses that would put them to use. They want their own life.

The thing about the best anecdotal criticism is that it cannot be reduced to method or system. It values style above argument, allows impression equal footing with knowledge. The greatest anecdotalist among recent literary critics, Hugh Kenner, wrote in a manner that has had few imitators.

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844714861
• ISBN 13: 9781844714865
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200