So I have to know about this guy before I understand Phelps’s lead. Great. But, yeah, thanks for that, Bill.
No, I’m just being a jerk. Discovery is painful: there’s a top-level American literary thinker, he came up with a term people like to use, and I never heard of the guy or the term. What do I do with my time?
You’ll see that Bill also went to the trouble of digging up a relevant Phelps quote (on form, see here for another view), and that Noah is roused to give the quote a smack. Well, ok. To me the quote sounds like a Monty Python routine, but whatever.
Bill, since you’re being gracious, I will impose upon you with another question. You define “imagination’s geography” as:
the bounds of what’s imaginable, with a sense that certain imaginings, depending on where in the mind they’re from, come with different rules of use.
Can you give examples for the above — that is of an imagining, the part of the mind it’s from, the rules of use that apply to the imagining, and the consequences that arise when the rules are ignored and when they’re followed?
That sounds kind of long, I guess. But you know, whatever you want to do.
Now the original post:
Thanks. I posted here about my need for a plain-English translation of Donald Phelps’s Seuss/Sendaka article. Bill Randall and Jon Hastings posted in Comments, and now I have two plain-english summaries to be getting on with. They posted damn solidly too. You can check out the full versions here.
Noah comments that Phelps’s whole argument is a specious “high art/low art distinction.” But I’m not nearly at that level; right now my project is finding my feet.
Here’s a big deal: because of the Comments by Bill, Jon, and others, I now know that Donald Phelps does not consider Dr. Seuss quaint. Reading the essay had not made this point clear to me, which will show you how much I took away from it. The thing is, offhand, “quaint” is one of the words I’d apply to Seuss.
Bill Randall fluidly sums up the Phelps piece as he sees it:
“Form entails a sense of the imagination’s geography and its component laws.” Seuss breaks those laws; Sendak doesn’t.??For Phelps, form is art; specifically, it’s the form embodied in any individual work of art. He calls it “judicious awareness of locality.”…The Marx Brothers’ late works violated the vaudeville form that defined them; Seuss likewise failed for abandoning the integrity of his stories in favor of commodity. Phelps faults him for ditching the terms of the story for an awareness of the audience as consumers.…The quaint/cozy opening sets up the tone of reminisce– this one’s more prosaic than usual– and contrasts modern consumer tastes with gentler, older tastes. (Seuss is more revered by modern taste than Sendak …)
Note that I dropped some big parts of Bill’s post. What I hope is that the quotes here make up a rough version of Phelps’s argument, something that can take me from one end of the piece to the other. Even if it’s wrong, it may get me through.
Bill, another question before I go back to the essay. What is “the imagination’s geography”? It appears to be core to the subject of Phelps’s piece, and I don’t know what it is.
Jon Hastings addresses the aggressive strangeness question. His thinking appears to be similar to Layla’s and he expresses it well:
… edginess” means that the creator is working at or beyond the boundaries of conventions: it’s a challenge to the audience’s expectations. Challenge is aggressive.
Again, note that I’m dropping bits you may want to read. On competitive strangeness, Jon says this:
Edginess is competetive in that, in any dynamic, living genre, the boundaries of the conventions are always moving.
Thanks, Jon. Here’s a follow-up: What’s the competition between? What’s an edgy cartoon competing with?
Oh, I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that.
I like that Phelps tends to use precise terms loosely; “imagination’s geography” could mean a lot of things. Here I take it to mean the bounds of what’s imaginable, with a sense that certain imaginings, depending on where in the mind they’re from, come with different rules of use.
But that’s how I’d phrase it; and it seems allusive rather than the lynchpin.
Given Phelps’ context, I suspect the main allusion’s to the Guy Davenport essay/book The Geography of the Imagination, which, despite my reverence for him, I haven’t yet read. Knowing Davenport, it’s probably an allusion to something in the 456th canto of the first Middle English translator’s rendition of Apuleius. Or something.
And my shelfdigging turns up no copy of GotI; but I did find this quote from GG’s interview with Phelps in TCJ #277 (the 30th anniv. issue):
“Form is the investment of the artist’s faith in his art and the rendering of the art and the sense of consequence he that he brings to bear upon it, and the form represents the decision about the validity and the value of the experience that he’s putting down, either having observed it and/or reconstructed it in the laboratory of his imagination. Then, the form represents the decision about what to omit and what to include. … [form is] faith in the possible autonomy in the work of art that the artist is about.” (p. 41)
Yep, and I think that quote is idiotic too. Formalism isn’t faith; or rather, putting your faith in human forms is something very like a sin. Phelps is just a humanist aesthete, basically. He believes in his books. It’s not an uncommon critical stance, but I still think it deserves to be mocked.
Noah – Form as a decision about values makes a lot of sense to me. It also makes sense to me that an cartoonist’s faith in his/her ability to express these decisions by marking up a page plays a part here. You seem to be mocking a reduced version of what Phelps is saying.
Tom – “What’s the competition between? What’s an edgy cartoon competing with?” I’d say other cartoons, but that’s because I read The Anxiety of Influence at an impressionable age. I’m not sure that Phelps would interpret his comments the way I have.
Noah, is this suddenly a theological question? Graven images & all that, but I don't think Phelps uses "faith" with that weight. (Artaud did, but that's another thing entirely.)
I’ve been thinking about aesthetics and theology a bit recently. I mean, humanists never really give faith weight (that’s kind of the humanist thing). But I think, from that quote, he’s definitely getting a bit theological himself. He is, as Jon says, making form a value in itself, it seems to me.
“[form is] faith in the possible autonomy in the work of art that the artist is about.”
Again, it’s like he’s stuffed his mouth with glue, but he’s basically expressing the standard humanist line: form, aesthetic autonomy, the artist being about the work of art…yadda, yadda, yadda. He’s got to arraign Seuss on formalist grounds first because if he actually admits he’s interested in content his whole aesthetic of high-brow above-everything (the market, actual meaning) comes crashing down.
Look, I love lots of artists who are more about form than anything else. Winsor McCay’s probably the best example. But Winsor McCay’s formal mastery doesn’t mean he’s got more faith or content than someone like Seuss, who — unlike McCay — actually has stuff to say. You can prefer McCay to Seuss if you want (I may…I’m not sure.) But to pretend that form is content in this way is (a) dumb and (b) pernicious. It’s humanism ending in modernist works that end up speaking to no one but five erudite idiots who enjoy sitting around whinging about how no one pays attention to great art anymore. Spare me.
Or, okay, let me put it this way. Phelps presents form as an act of faith; for him the distinction seems to be form/not form. But every artistic product has form. And that form, like the content, exists in a cultural space. Sendak’s form tends to be neat, and to refer to high-art markers (volk art, Winsor McCay, both of which were high art by the time he was writing.) Seuss’ forms tend to refer to more contemporary cartoons, advertising, that kind of thing. You can evaluate how well those choices work, and where they point, but trying to say that Seuss is less formally ept wihthout pointing out that his formal concerns are pretty different seems like a telling failure. And I say “telling” because it seems to me that Phelps’ goal is to deracinate “form” – he wants it to be a non-cultural faith that shows artistic genius without involving the artist in the messier business of content.
“”What’s the competition between? What’s an edgy cartoon competing with?’ I’d say other cartoons, but that’s because I read The Anxiety of Influence at an impressionable age.”
Jon, can you fill that in a bit more? Is an edgy cartoon competing with a quaint cartoon, or just with other edgy cartoons?
“I’m not sure that Phelps would interpret his comments the way I have.”
Do you mean that your definition of “competitive strangeness” might not be the same as Phelps’s definition?
Noah – I think this is kind of funny because we seem to have switched sides from the back-and-forth about critics when I brought up Jonathan Rosenbaum.
This – “It’s humanism ending in modernist works that end up speaking to no one but five erudite idiots who enjoy sitting around whinging about how no one pays attention to great art anymore” – kind of reminds me of what Michael Blowhard wrote about Manny Farber:
“My complaint about Farber’s writing — and it’s not a complaint so much as a statement of where I think he’s weakest, and we all have strengths and weaknesses, blah blah — is that, despite his championing (for a time, anyway) of B movies, he has no mass audience sense. He’s unrealistic about the basic appeal of movies. He’s so keen (and so good) on the purely visual and rhythmic qualities that it can seem like he’s onto something cosmically central about the movies as an art form. And he is, I guess. But — simple historical fact — the reason the movies are the movies is that they’ve got stars, they tell stories, they have spectacle. Most of them feature outsized personalities, and are acted-out dramatic narratives that are enhanced, pumped and sold by elements like rhythm and visuals. They’re made and enjoyed as illustrated fantasies for the masses. The kinds of qualities Farber focuses on have been, in other words, and despite what film geeks may want to believe, secondary elements in film history. Important ones for buffs, sure. And important in certain minor corners of the filmmaking and filmgoing worlds. (This may help explain Farber’s turn to hardcore art films.) But “illustrated, acted-out fantasies for the masses” is a basic fact of life in the mainstream movie world — and mainstream movies are what the movies are for most people, who could generally care less about the values film buffs often cherish most highly.”
Tom – “Jon, can you fill that in a bit more? Is an edgy cartoon competing with a quaint cartoon, or just with other edgy cartoons?”
Hmmm – I’d say “just with other edgy cartoons”, but would add that a cartoonist working on the edge would need to take in “cartooning as a whole” (something that is contingent and dynamic – a moving target) in order to get the sense of where the edge is.
“Do you mean that your definition of “competitive strangeness” might not be the same as Phelps’s definition?”
No – I think my definition is the same, but I’m not sure he’d go as far as I’ve gone here in presenting it like a (Harold) Bloomian agonistic battle between cartoons.
In the title essay of his book, Davenport is using the word “geography” pretty literally. The essay is about how culture/ideas/”the imagination” are bound by era and especially by place.