TEXTURE THOUGHTS

I just reread Ray Bradbury's FAHRENHEIT 451 and noticed an interesting correlation between one of Bradbury's justifications of books that "have quality" and a similar observation originated by Henry James and repeated, with some alterations, by Raymond Durgnat.  Here's the Bradbury quote:

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.”

Now, in my 2017 essay COMPLEXITY, MEET DENSITY PT. 1, I linked to the James essay, but chose not to reprint the relevant section. That's because the James essay-- which *in theory* Bradbury might have read, though I find that unlikely-- wasn't as germane to my ongoing topic re: literary mythopoesis as Durgnat's reading of James, which I repeat below:

To the aesthetic of the "tale" academic culture has, by and large, turned a blind eye. As recently as my grammar school days, English masters instructed us all in the necessity for realistic and deep characterization, logically consistent behavior, penetrating studies of motive, and that proliferation of vivid detail suggested by Henry James' phrase, "density of specification." We were besought to insist upon the "texture of lived experience," and many of the exegeses we studied had strained to detect such "density" in such improbable places as folk ballads, or Chaucer's tale of Patient Griselda. Yet it was curious that, rich and complex as was the showpiece of the "complexity" school, HAMLET, each critic struggled to isolate its hero's "real" motives, to simplify, to synopsize, him into a figure almost as systematic and simple as another famous procrastinator, Li'l Abner. For, as Erich Auerbach remarked in his study of the development of European literary realism, "To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend."

l find it very interesting that both authors utilized the metaphor of "texture," almost certainly with an awareness of the word's similarity to "text." Durgnat correctly asserts that what most literary critics value is "the texture of lived experience." Bradbury extends the metaphor to the texture of human flesh, finding "pores" and "features" in good fiction. It's not hard to imagine what sort of authors Bradbury finds mediocre, since 451 is replete with examples of superficial art. He's not quite so pellucid regarding what sort of authors "rape [life] and leave her for the flies," but that seems a side-point since RB's future society doesn't want violent/transgressive art any more than thoughtful art.

There's some irony that Bradbury, a science fiction author (of sorts) comes very close to championing mimesis as a primary virtue for literature. Arguably in other sections of 451 Bradbury places more emphasis on the different propositions that different authors produce with their very different readings of "lived experience." Indeed, Montag's foe Captain Beatty expresses frustration that the books "don't agree with each other."

Durgnat's essay, probably written about ten years later, is more sophisticated. Durgnat shows an awareness that details, while important, don't yield meaning in themselves, or critics wouldn't feel the need to "synopsize" the motives of Hamlet, whose procrastinating nature Durgnat compares to Li'l Abner. In some ways Durgnat's essay loosely foresees a later generation's fascination with *tropes,* which in essence are summaries of literary plots and character actions. Bradbury certainly USES tropes in his fiction, but I doubt that he understood their significance as literary values.            

    

COMPLEXITY, MEET DENSITY PT. 1

In order to explain why I'm choosing to devote a lot of space to one essay in Raymond Durgnat's 1967 collection in FILMS AND FEELINGS, as I said that I would in this essay, some personal reflections by an amateur literary theorist may provide some context.

I'm not certain as to when I read the Durgnat book, but since I was exposed to a lot of esoteric materials while working for a college library in the early 1980s, that's as likely a time as ever. I already had quite a bit of grounding in Jung and Campbell, and I probably discovered Frye around the same time as Durgnat. Durgnat didn't offer a lot of heavy theory in his essays, but in one essay, "Tales Versus Novels," he propounded a theory with which I both agreed and disagreed.

I lacked a certain amount of context to Durgnat's argument when I first read it, for the essay was in part a response to a type of literary elitism the writer found in a 1884 Henry James essay, "The Art of Fiction."  To my consternation Durgnat did not cite the source of James' remarks, which I later tracked down thanks to the wonders of the Internet. "Art of Fiction" itself was written in response to a diatribe by a more obscure writer of James' time, whom I chose not to seek out. In brief, James sought to set forth his parameters for excellence in literary fiction, and in the excerpt from "Tales Versus Novels" I'll print below, it should be evident that Durgnat is arguing that James' standards are based purely upon the art of the novel, not of fiction generally. Thus, Durgnat contrasts the virtues of "tales," meaning not only bonafide folktales but also pop-fictional creations like "Li'l Abner and James Bond," with the more celebrated virtues of largely naturalistic novels.

To the aesthetic of the "tale" academic culture has, by and large, turned a blind eye. As recently as my grammar school days, English masters instructed us all in the necessity for realistic and deep characterization, logically consistent behavior, penetrating studies of motive, and that proliferation of vivid detail suggested by Henry James' phrase, "density of specification." We were besought to insist upon the "texture of lived experience," and many of the exegeses we studied had strained to detect such "density" in such improbable places as folk ballads, or Chaucer's tale of Patient Griselda. Yet it was curious that, rich and complex as was the showpiece of the "complexity" school, HAMLET, each critic struggled to isolate its hero's "real" motives, to simplify, to synopsize, him into a figure almost as systematic and simple as another famous procrastinator, Li'l Abner. For, as Erich Auerbach remarked in his study of the development of European literary realism, "To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend."

A minor point first: in the essay to which I linked, James actually speaks of "solidity of specification" when he extols the ability of modern fiction to bring forth that texture of lived experience.  However, Durgnat's inaccurate memory is more inspired than the original, for the ideal of literary realism is based not so much in how "solid" things are-- which is "not at all" since fiction is not real-- but rather, in how "densely" an author provides all the details that produce the illusion of reality.

Now to a more substantial point: Durgnat is suggesting is that academic culture ought to appreciate not just the aesthetic of complex specification, but also the aesthetic of simplicity that one finds in folktales and popular fiction, and even in "high art" (like HAMLET), whose complexities ultimately reduce down into many of the same simple oppositions one finds in "low art." Here's Durgnat celebrating the symbolic oppositions one finds in Mary Shelley's famous creation:

The Frankenstein Monster is brutal but pathetic; he's a creature who masters his creator; he's brute material capable of a lofty idealism that, turning sour, makes him a devil-- but a sympathetic one.

I agree with Durgnat's readings of folk-lit and pop-lit in general, but the "disagreement" I mentioned above comes in when he tries to make these rather Levi-Straussian oppositions emblematic of his "aesthetic of simplicity." I don't think that, say, his Frankensteinian oppositions are simple; I think that they're just as "dense" as all the verisimilitude that Henry James ladles into his novels. I think I understand fairly well why Durgnat sought to create a contrast between his notion of tale-like simplicity versus academia's received opinion that "proliferation of vivid detail" was the defining virtue of all fiction, with the prose novel standing in as the best representation of that aesthetic. But I also think it was a mistake, because the academic community flourishes on the demonstration of hidden complexity beneath the surface of any narrative. As far as I can tell, Durgnat's aesthetic of simplicity had little effect on academia, be it concerned with the critique of prose or of cinema. In contrast, while the influence of Carl Jung's analytical psychology proves less popular than the pseudo-scientific formulations of Freud and Marx, there are still assorted critics who advocate the exploration of symbols through a Jungian lens-- in large part because Jung, like literary critics, was all about finding complexity amid apparent simplicity.

In future essays within this series, "density" will prove useful in further identifying the virtues of what I've termed, with due reference to Jung, the four potentialities.

INNOCENTS BROADSIDED (Spoilers)

"[Henry] James' world... is ruled by women. With a few slick exceptions, men are limited, subordinate or ludicrous. The mother herself presses turgidly on the late novels, a paralyzing biographical force whom James both resists and adores"-- Camille Paglia, SEXUAL PERSONAE, p. 621.

I recently had occasion to reread James' TURN OF THE SCREW and re-view the 1960 film adaptation THE INNOCENTS. Despite minor differences, both end the same way: the hysterical governess trying to cast out the ghostly spirit that she thinks has possessed her ten-year-old charge Miles, on whom she dotes as if she were the boy's mother. The result is that though she forces Miles to speak the name of the ghost Peter Quint (which the governess thinks will exorcise the spirit or its influence), the boy's spirit is also cast out, so that he dies in the governess' arms, sort of a literary-horror version of Michelangelo's Pieta. In essence Miles dies because the governess fears the shadow (Jung would say "animus") of malefic masculinity dawning within the prepubescent boy, represented (at least in her mind) by the ghostly image of a dead dominant male.

Interestingly, James comes very close in TURN to a setup described in Philip Slater's study of Greek myth and society, THE GLORY OF HERA. To summarize Slater briefly, he felt that the Greeks of the classical period suffered from a mother-complex that grew out of the strong bifurcation of male and female roles in classical Greek society. The husband went away to pursue war and/or business affairs (much as in TURN, there is an uncle who arranges for the governess to take charge of his niece and nephew but then has no more to do with the situation). This situation left his wife totally in charge of the affairs of the house, but without any avenue for sexual gratification in misogynistic Greek society (though naturally the husband was not so constrained). The governess of TURN, who indicates an almost subliminal lust for the uncle, is in much the same situation, and never seems to have any yearnings for a separate romantic life while in service to the uncle, though arguably her sexual desires are realized by her encounter (or fantasy) of the ghost of roisterer Peter Quint.

Slater went on to give copious examples to show that in myth and literature at least, the frustrated desires of real-life mothers in Greek society came out in the form of fantasies about fictional mothers who killed, harmed, or controlled their sons-- sometimes as small children, sometimes as full-grown men (particularly in the legend of Heracles, who was persecuted until death by his stepmother, and whose translated name forms the title of Slater's book). All such violence Slater regarded as projections of a displaced sexuality.

It's not hard to see a similar pattern in TURN OF THE SCREW, where the social roles of James' England were not much less stratified than those of classical Greece. But perhaps in one respect the movie adaptation inadvertently came even closer to the archetype of the devouring mother than the original book. In TURN, the unnamed governess is a very young woman, perhaps so that James might suggest her instability due to age (in the frame-story she goes on to continue her career as governess, and the reader never knows from the frame how Miles' tragedy affects her). But THE INNOCENTS casts 40-year old Deborah Kerr as the lethal child-care minister, and thus puts the character more in the mold of the frustrated spinster. Arguably, then, Miles' death in her arms is an even more mythically-appropriate "Pieta" than the one seen in the original prose of mother-worshipping James.