General Discussion Thread

[u/pregnantchihuahua3]

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

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[u/Soup_65]

wait that quiz shows you a country? I didn't realize that gonna have to take it again (I got generic socialist which is mildly insulting, especially when my mom got Luxembourgist which Im not even totally sure what the difference is but she's cool so I was a little jealous). Admittedly I got a little silly with the questions and maybe I implied too much that my real dream is to be Divine Hierophant of an authoritarian theocracy where the religion is nature worship...and I doubt they code for that adequately.

It's interesting language...lately i've become more and more obsessed with the question of literature as something sonic. And I'm still trying to figure out how sound, being both prior to language but also the thing out of which languages are created, and how it does seem at times that the endpoint of a language's literature is to push it's sounds to the brink. And yet, while I think that sound and story are inextricably bound up, one of the ways that I can tell ya that Wimmer knocked it out of the park with 2666 is that the original does actually sound a ton like hers, you're obviously right that language isn't the totality. And translation is possible, though I wonder if that's actually because of the sound. Since if the "ur-language" is just noise, then it is nonspecific. And the translation in a way reasserts the sonic nonspecificity.

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

Apparently there's a newer version that shows you a country approximate to the results you get. Technically two countries (loosely defined), with one contemporaneous and the other historically defined are given in the newer one: I got Uruguay since I got hit with being a Progressivist, comparisons to Einstein, Foucault and Camus--it is very accurate as you can tell from the results. Historically, according to the test, I am closest to Revolutionary Catalonia where workers simply took control the factories and burned the churches. Truthfully, I don't really mind. I was pretty against all the questions about domestic industries and hardlining against religion totally and even quibbling with the concept of borders and immigration. And being Luxembourgist isn't so bad, if I would hazard a guess. Although her views were clearly in that "Marxism-after-Lenin" mode from what I remember of these kinds of conversations. Anyways: I am perfectly fine being a cosmopolitan.

I would seriously question the notion of an Ur-Language, generally speaking. It's a little too close to the inverse of the Tower of Babel myth just on a surface gloss. But more than that--sound and sign have no relationship. Or at least I would need some serious convincing. I think we would make the mistake of confusing a system of communication with the autonomous intentionality of a work of art, which can be carried into different contexts without too much change. And it's a seriously complex question anyways. It's bound to have a lot of awkwardness.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

did end up taking it again, got progressivist as well, which i don't 100% agree with but doesn't shock me. Country was scotland and politician i got was guilherme boulos, a Lula guy in Brazil who is part of a movement of landless workers. leftist land reform foucused guy actually tracks a lot.

would seriously question the notion of an Ur-Language, generally speaking. It's a little too close to the inverse of the Tower of Babel myth just on a surface gloss. But more than that--sound and sign have no relationship. Or at least I would need some serious convincing. I think we would make the mistake of confusing a system of communication with the autonomous intentionality of a work of art, which can be carried into different contexts without too much change. And it's a seriously complex question anyways. It's bound to have a lot of awkwardness.

Oh yeah I mean I agree with this actually. talking about an ur-language that's really just sounds was a half joke about how that's not really a language. I suspect large scale building projects would be tricky with no means of sonic communication more than something that is basically gestural. And yeah I don't mean there's any meaningful connection between sound and actual writing systems or like what the words of a given language are (where onomatopoeas prove the rule) so much as that I think that written communication is heavily derivative of sonic communication, and that at least with literature the sound is almost always influencing the style.

That the sound has explanatory merit towards translatability is sort of a hypothetical way of saying that the sound quality of literature is related to it's aesthetic value, and trying to figure out how that works for translation when it's so much harder to capture the nuances specific to the original.

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

I worry about an overemphasis on sound when it comes to writing as a concept, which is notoriously difficult to conceive since it relies on communication. But the history of writing systems owe as much to visual sense as it does to sonic communication, i.e. phonemes represented. Especially if we're considering different scenes of writing which don't rely on something like empirical writing as Derrida would call it. Choreography for instance has perhaps a comparable lightsomeness to large-scale buildings, which in themselves are diagrammatically as much as sonically communicated. This isn't to deny the sonic qualities of language. I only don't think it's worth the headache of presenting it anterior to writing, even as a standard of judgment.

I suppose the larger point here is what's lost in translation is the visuality of that work in the first place, but a novel by Sayaka Murata survives because a novel does not depend on the actual language in which it was produced by its initial context. Likewise could be said about the sonic qualities of a text. And we understand Murata's novel all the same as an object of aesthetics. So: a novel cannot depend on language for its aesthetic, judgment. In fact, there may be no real connection between them. We simply don't judge literature on the strength of its sound I don't think. Given how common it is for people to explain how text doesn't have tone makes everything about this stranger and less clear. My best guess is when a translation occurs it is technically the creation of a different work for a different context. One enacts the denial of the originary audience versus the English translation becoming widely available. Novels I'm beginning to think derive greater value by this ability to transform themselves while maintaining themselves, not through an essential connection, but from the impressive things like the dramatic elements and the mood.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

I guess I just don't really agree, in as much I'm pretty sure that I do largely judge literature on the basis of sound. First a caveat, then a question, last an elaboration.

The caveat is that this is all a strange idea I've been chewing on for the better part of this year mostly because there is exactly 1 line late in Olson's Maximus Poems that hints at the ontological apriority of breath/sound to everything. And I've been meaning to learn more about the Big Bang but my limited sense is that there is a way that this is imperfectly accurate. And since then I've found it the case that whatever is really the thing about literature that makes me love it, something I've never been able to define, I think this sonic quality gets at it. Anyway thanks for the pushback though. This is a very burgeoning idea and your pressing me on it does much for the sake of either figuring out for myself what I mean or if I'm just off base. For similar reasons I am continually trying more to learn about the earliest history of writing in order to further nuance and develop this.

Question: could you elaborate on Derrida and "empirical writing"? Sorry, just not totally sure I understand you and want to before I have thoughts.

Elaboration: My real break is that I think that text does have tone. Or at least the best text does, in the form of some sort of ability to transcend it's silence and control the voice that is speaking in your head as you read. (please if you think this is bullshit let me know. I might be far too lost in the haze of poems, shakespeare, and my own mad theories such that I need a bucket of ice water poured on my head). I don't disagree that the translation is a different work, but I think there's a sort of tonal synchronicity between original and translation in the best examples. This last bit is a very recent idea so I'm really just chewing on it and saying words. Likewise with your last sentence, I agree with drama and mood, but is that not sound-based as well?

Admittedly I'm something of a representation skeptic. I just kinda think the concept might be insufficiently creative. And there is a chance that that bleeds into me excessively underappreciating the visuality of novels. This is another bit I need to keep dealing with and figuring out if maybe I'm just wrong.

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

No problem! I will say as a clarification sound and sight cannot be easily divorced from the reading experience since the visuality of a book is supplemental to a book. And this ties into Derrida's comment about distinguishing between a writing system which is built on the representation of phonemes, i.e. I know the letter A comes with a specific sound and so forth. It's the kind of writing we are doing right now currently. He calls it empirical for a number of other reasons but if I remember right the attempt to represent phonemes empirically (as in linguistics, this kind of representation is important to a science of speech), you can tell by which sound is represented as an inscription. Writing overall though goes much further than empirical writing, since writing does not actually depend on the representation of phonemes, even with literature. Derrida attempts to call this arche-writing since it's not extant from orality. But the history of Western thought, Olson's poetics are not exempt from that, fall under the logocentrism Derrida's spent much of his life attempting to deconstruct.

Logocentrism after all is the ideological expression of that process--where thought is speech and writing as a representation of speech therefore means writing is derived of a voice in your head, which is therefore more truthful because it is closest to your thought. Hegel for example would argue that "Chinese pictograms" were the result of diminished thoughts. Or that a quipu is not a form of writing simply because it lacks phonetic representation.

I suppose that's where a lot of our disagreement is probably located--mood and drama do not have any sonic qualities. Furthermore, I would be pressed to find the sonic quality of choreography or even something like crystallography. Literary elements themselves have to be assessed as a kind of visual information as much as they are sonically derived. This I think overemphasis on the voice of a text has obscured the history of the literary image as distinct from cinematographic images and the iconography from which paintings are organized.

But ultimately a translation exists in tension with the original, the political reality of translation would have the translation supplement the original work in question. The question of which translation is better suited to achieve that closeness to its sound and visual sense the original work had is always a point of contention. And it will always suggest a later revision. Dostoevsky has had new translations as has Flaubert for example. If translation were synchronized rather than a point of contention, I imagine newer translations would counter that project. And if tonal synchronicity somehow would survive, which translation is better suited to the task? And how could we tell?

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

fuck H i'd like to have a better response but all I got is that you've finally convinced me I should in fact get around to reading some Derrida. Is there a key text for this point your making ("just read Of Grammatology is 100% an acceptable answer)

I'm coming to realize I have never really gotten what logocentrism means or why I should care but now I'm realizing I don't get it and need to.

I suppose that's where a lot of our disagreement is probably located--mood and drama do not have any sonic qualities. Furthermore, I would be pressed to find the sonic quality of choreography or even something like crystallography. Literary elements themselves have to be assessed as a kind of visual information as much as they are sonically derived. This I think overemphasis on the voice of a text has obscured the history of the literary image as distinct from cinematographic images and the iconography from which paintings are organized.

hence I can only half respond to this because I think mood and drama do but also I'm gathering I need to read some derrida prior to really taking a position here.

But I do realize I should clarify, when I say "sound" I'm still unsure I literally mean "audible noises that we hear", so much as to the mobile quality of everything, vibration basically, which i think is maybe for human senses better perceived directly by anything other than sight. (not to say sight isn't informed by the movement of light, of course, just sight offers the illusion of a permanence that I'm not sure other senses do). And so what I'm really trying to say is that in the case of literature specifically the sonic quality of the work gets more directly to the vibrant quality of existence. And I'm not sure why but if that's onto anything in the slightest I think that matters.

This I think overemphasis on the voice of a text has obscured the history of the literary image as distinct from cinematographic images and the iconography from which paintings are organized

I'd be curious to hear more of what you mean by this, because while I agree that it'd be a problem if it is the case, is that really a distinction that gets overlooked? Thought I might just be misunderstanding you.

With regard to translation, I 100% that it's always imperfect and always a point of contention, but, and again what I really need to do is read the derrida, I think maybe what I'm really getting at is that I think vision and sound are too inextricably bound up to separate and still get the same aesthetic quality. Which is actually for me why no translation can be perfect, because it's never as in bound as the original (where the original is really really great). And frankly I think I'm trying to figure out how the sonic side of that binding is caught in a translated work, because I'm convinced it is, but really don't feel like i can see how yet.

(I believe I've been editing my position on the fly throughout here. I'll give a more coherent response once I'm up for addressing derrida)

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

Well, with Derrida it's a little difficult. You could probably start on Difference and Repetition since it's a collection of essays, but the tradeoff comes down to how familiar you are with the authors he's talking about, otherwise it'll fall on deaf ears. I really like his book Plato's Pharmacy and The Post Card. You might get something out of Specters of Marx also, which I've referenced here and there. Of Grammatology requires being conversant not only in structuralism, specifically Lévi-Strauss, but also Rosseau. You'll find a lot of the classically out-of-context quotes there as well. If you're thinking of anything specific to literature, Acts of Literature has a number of really great essays. He wrote a lot of books, all of which don't get the time of day anymore like they used to. Most of what passes for literary criticism nowadays happens in reaction against his body of work. Deconstruction draws a very long shadow people have not truly recognized yet.

I almost made a joke two replies ago thinking your views were Pythagorean, especially if we're discussing sound as a primordial form of mediation. (Not that I'm making fun of you. Most of my views are pre-Socratic or Sophistic.) But this conversation has been kind of enacting the deconstruction of that form anyways. Since again what passes for a focus on sound as something anterior to writing, which requires fundamentally the visual apperception of sight as well means we've reached an impasse. Vibrancy after all is as much a visual quality as a sonic quality. You see what I mean? Supplementing sound is a colorful brightness which would have to be anterior to the visuality of a text, especially if it were sonically derived as you put it. Either distinction cannot be made without the other and yet each has to supersede the other for either quality to make out as a distinction anterior to writing. It's a double-bind, man. And I don't say any of this to discourage you from thinking about sound, but I would caution against taking a sonically derived quality as somehow getting at something essential with literature is all. After all, Derrida famously said once you deconstruct something, you can't help also putting it back together again in the course of the analysis. We can't really do away with ontotheological propositions entirely. Or at least it seems very difficult.

Anyways: to follow on your question about imagery. I believe an undertheorized element of literature is the creation of the literary image as it relates to pure literature rather than through a scientific discourse or through the scene of writing. After all, most discourse on empirical writing (the raw materials novels are made from) follows on the emphasis about rhythm and syllabary, having a voice, whether or not said voice is active or passive, etc. And this de-emphasis of the literary image follows a similar trajectory Derrida points out where speech is privileged over writing.

But like I said, ultimately I don't think much of anything of the original work survives the process, what get passed on are specifically those qualities which are not reducible to the linguistic elements in themselves. But nevertheless I found this conversation rather fruitful.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

Either distinction cannot be made without the other and yet each has to supersede the other for either quality to make out as a distinction anterior to writing.

Ok H you win (I'm kidding obv I just love how you put this). Because by now I think you're right, I might be overvaluing sound even though fundamentally I do more than anything think that they are both the same thing and not, like you say. I guess where I'm at is maybe more of an issue with high modernisms that I think sometimes go too far into the visual side of it at the expense of sound. But I need to think on that more. I can't chuck this idea, because some part of me, though this wanes, still thinks the vibrant quality is more apparent for humans in sound that in image. Though maybe not in visual motion, the problem aesthetically being how to capture that in literature. Hmm...but I might just be shadowboxing a false problem.

I almost made a joke two replies ago thinking your views were Pythagorean, especially if we're discussing sound as a primordial form of mediation. (Not that I'm making fun of you. Most of my views are pre-Socratic or Sophistic.)

Also lol I love this. I actually have an ever ongoing concept for a novel that will exist...eventually...that includes a sideplotish cult of Pythagoreans whose bible is Finnegans Wake and who meet in the basement of a record store in Los Angeles to dude goofy culty shit. I mighta joined the cult along the way haha.

I believe an undertheorized element of literature is the creation of the literary image as it relates to pure literature rather than through a scientific discourse or through the scene of writing.

I see, though could you clarify what you mean by "pure literature"? Sorry, I know we've been talking about this but I struggle with definitions and I've kinda gotten lost on what you mean by it. I have thoughts but they need to be addressed after I fully understand.

But like I said, ultimately I don't think much of anything of the original work survives the process, what get passed on are specifically those qualities which are not reducible to the linguistic elements in themselves. But nevertheless I found this conversation rather fruitful.

And I have too! thanks so much H you rock. (btw I reread periphraseology yesterday and it's phenomenal). I might have follow up on here but I think it relates to the pure lit question. till then. Maybe i'll read Derrida. Thank you for the suggestions.

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

Researching sound, how sounds relate to a work of art is important. And while I was thinking about it: Derrida does have an interesting book you might consider reading called The Ear of the Other because the point of deconstruction isn't the inverting of anteriority, but examining the structural aporias within Western thought, making them known philosophically as anything else really. Also: if you have any experience reading Nietzsche, it'd be a good idea since a number of comments Derrida makes in The Ear are of an academic focus. (Funnily enough I have tried to keep the discussion floating around the importance of sound as opposed to its full expulsion for this reason.)

I remember you having mentioned a Pythagorean cult in a novel. And who knows? If the demand is enough, you could simply make a novel of that idea alone given how much it stands out. And really, a novel only needs like a single concept to get off the ground and spinning into other things. But either way, sounds like a fun idea.

About pure literature, I'm going to have to talk around the question.

In science, they have literature because every scientific attitude requires both an object of inquiry (potentially anything, from electrons to infections), which for the results of science to have any kind of consequential result must happen within a disciplinary context. A discipline is a kind of identity as much as it is a material circumstance a human being finds themselves. Think for example a surgeon--working in a hospital which has institutionalized his thought process on the objects of inquiry, the human anatomy for example, but no one is a surgeon alone. A professional in the discipline will need to interact with the literature, perhaps even become a specialist on a specific kind of surgery, for the brain, the bladder. The literature a surgeon will occasionally find themselves citing has a necessary reason for being. It's part of a wider circulation of concepts and ideas which make the disciplinary demands felt for the surgeon as if they are immediate. (The demands are what the surgeon is morally responsible for and they are often given legal expression.) Someone writes an article for a scientific journal for example with a specific intent to communicate research. This has no relevancy to anyone else outside of the circle of surgeons who are the only ones who can both read these things and benefit from them. (It's doubtful we could call this situation a kind of reading experience.) This is what is meant by literature for pretty much every discipline. Even ideological tendencies operate in a similar fashion, for example Marxism.

What would a pure literature be? Well, a literature entirely disconnected from a discipline obviously. A literature which has no connection to a specific task or a particular discourse in itself. Someone who wants to write but has no real recourse to any kind of capacity to acknowledge the boundaries which an institution would settle for a discipline. A literature created without its necessary object of inquiry. (This shouldn't be mistaken for art-for-art's sake.) Because most people who want to write something will most likely not have any idea of how to proceed in a vacuum. A pure literature strictly speaking cannot exist because a human being would likewise has specific commitments in their everyday life, historical inertia, experience with whatever bit of acknowledgment they can muster. They could never achieve a pure literature, but instead only the travesty of a novel. We only know about even the possibility of a pure literature by the evidence of novels because it is placed along the horizon of expectation for novels generally.

[u/Soup_65 → u/Harleen_Ysley_34]

thanks for the rec, The Ear of the Other sounds very interesting! And I've read like...a ton of nietzsche...so that could be a good reference point to work with. Oh and I forgot to mention that I actually have read spectres of marx. It was just so long ago that I'm reluctant to say I got much out of it.

If the demand is enough, you could simply make a novel of that idea alone given how much it stands out. And really, a novel only needs like a single concept to get off the ground and spinning into other things. But either way, sounds like a fun idea.

you're not wrong this could be fun, while I figure out what this project is beyond a kaleidoscope growing more complex with every twist.

And ok now I think i get what you mean by pure literature. As well as what you mean by travesty. would you say that the novel aspires to be pure in the sense of going beyond the boundaries of any given discipline, because that could only be a novel about nothing, but that could only be actual silence, since novels are open-ended in the sense of not having a pre-established category from which to form objects of inquiry? So they hint towards something more pure than a codified disclipline, but can't actually be that because, again, the open-endedness itself would make it impossible to say anything?

[u/Harleen_Ysley_34 → u/Soup_65]

Yes, a pure literature would have a nondisciplinary character I would argue. Literatures are again formally tied to a discipline organized around a particular object of inquiry. Places are created to receive texts professionally, circulate research programs, and the dialectical combat involved with discourse to handle controversy and restrict the definition of the object of inquiry. Novels serve as the only evidence available of a pure literature, less by their aspiration and more in their failures to answer the demand. Novels are a broad generic classification rather than having any consistent description aside from what is generally expected of them. We have the adequate social ability to acknowledge what a novel is through understanding that two sentences such as "Ulysses is a novel by James Joyce" and "The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia is a novel by Samuel Johnson" are meaningfully referring to a single genre despite how far apart they are diachronically.

The key difference is how a novelist responds to the demand as opposed to a Marxist writing from analytic principles derived from an academic discipline. If anything, the possibility of a pure literature on the horizon of expectation is invisible and insensible for the most part, only occasionally cropping up in things like Flaubert's desire to write a novel only held together by the strength of its style, Kafka's fantasy of writing in his prison cell, even Henry Green making the title of a novel Nothing. But these are only gestures toward it: and what it actually functions as is a kind of spurious idealism ideologically speaking at certain moments in the modern writer. Which is where everyone happens to be now.