Pooh pooh, Paul Lake.

Jonathan and Henry responded to Paul Lake's essay, but here are some of my notes on it:



Paul Lake says: The implications of this for literature and criticism are immense. If, for instance, while reading MobyDick we can mentally "see" the swelling ocean, great white whale, and harpoon-clutching crew, then it appears that, contrary to theory, signifiers do evoke the signified. The meaning of a text is not wholly indeterminate, but collapses into relatively clear, determinate pictures. Though the imagined details may vary somewhat from reader to reader, a moving drama unfolds inside our heads, above the level of decoding, like movie clips transmitted to our pc's.



And: The problem with much modern literature is that writers from Sterne to Silliman have deliberately concocted strategies to thwart the emergence of higher-level orders from lower ones. In "laying bare" the devices of fiction and calling attention to the "constructed" nature of their language, postmodern writers often frustrate a reader's attempt to imagine a story's characters and events.



And: The implications of this for literature are obvious. Somehow, writers pack four dimensions of space-time implicate with human meaning into two-dimensional strings of letters on a page, which readers must then unpack, using built-in procedures they share with the writer. A further complication is that in order for this process to work, the writer must first model the minds of prospective readers to predict how they'll respond. To satisfy and subvert reader expectation, he must continuously refer to his own internal model of the reader's mind and adjust the writing process to accommodate it. Because both writer and reader share a language, a culture, and certain universal human experiences, their mental maps of the world share similar patterns. The full context of any text must include this large, recursive mapping process.



And I say: True in one very broad sense: Melville writes "red" I "see" red. But jeez, readers are not automatons. They aren't reading "machines" that process "input" and react with "output." The writer is not a freaking programmer. How depressing.



He does talk a bit about "emotional memory" of the reader in part II (if you can get that far).



It's the memory explosions, linquistical ticklings, chance resonances and other messes touched off in a reader's mind that matter. This is what the reader brings to the book. This is what the author, supposedly, is happy to stir up--not create ex nihilo. This fellow allows no role for imagination on the readers part--unless in the simplistic sense of read red, imagine red.



And thanks for definining madeleine for us, Professor: "madeleine (tea cake)."



Perhaps I should choose poem and illustrate the various paths through to better explain what I mean. Finding one's way makes reader an active participant, not Hansel and Gretel the first two times back from the woods. We know where that got them. The third time, they learned to read creatively.



He also says: Despite modern critics who want to dispense with authors and treat texts as infinitely malleable globs of verbal clay, it makes far more sense to define texts in the terms of information theory as "messages" sent by authors to readers--as long as we keep in mind that these "messages" are complex systems of mind-boggling reflexivity and depth.



Um, no.



And then he says: By systematically applying rules that increased redundancy and lowered the system's entropy, Bennett came closer and closer to producing a line of English blank verse. Paradoxically, it was by reducing the freedom of his imaginary monkeys that he liberated them to write something resembling human speech. Still, there are limits on the ability of low-level rules to produce a Hamlet. To generate the works of Shakespeare, we need a complex human culture, a literary tradition, and a poetic genius as well as chance. It took four billion years of an evolving Earth to produce the works of Shakespeare. Throwing off the rules that make such complexity possible produces only nonsense.



Again, if the "rules" and well-worn paths of the human mind are going to win out anyway, and the reader is going to struggle to find the meaning he craves, what's wrong with bending things a bit?



And whom does this critic suggest as an avant-garde poet who uses ONLY chance as a shaping principle (it's still a principle after all, and even chance adheres to patterns and syncronicities). I don't see a name, except "from Sterne to Silliman." And what's with lining the "academy" up with the avant-garde? Plenty of avant-garde traditions are defiantly anti-academic.