Keynes did not _need_ Ibsen to arrive at his critique of Hayek; _after_ he had arrived at that critique, and while he was attempting to communicate that critique to his readers, he noted that The Wild Duck _illustrated_ the kind of thing he was discussing as exemplified by Hayeek. That use of course involves a particular construal of Ibesn's text, and of course different (and equally knowledgeable) critics arrive at conflicting interpretations of Ibsen. (My guess is that I would agree with Keynes, but others probably wouldn't.)
The following is from a post on the Milton-L list about a year ago:
*****Yes. literature must be about something.But (1) I presume you are not going to ask something to be ontological, that literature provides and internally justifies truthful statements about the real world itself.Does Hell really have burning lakes, or Paradise a real tree of life?I think (2) that we decide on the something as a first act of interpretation, not as an outcome, particularly about a work with as vast a compass as Paradise Lost.We may be interested in Eve and patriarchy (the something), then read relevant passages of the poem and other opinions to decide for ourselves what we think the poem has to say about Eve and patriarchy.As there are more than fifty articles and one book on Eve (not all about patriarchy), with diverse and incompatible conclusions drawn from the poem, it would be hard to say that the poem itself produces a mimesis of Eve and patriarchy. Instead, (3) as you observe through Gadamer, an interpretation comprises (at least) the text, our interests in the text (not drawn from the text itself), and within those interest various beliefs that we bring to the poem.Those interests must influence our interpretation, provide content to the interpretation, and (more often than we would like to admit) direct and may provide all of the material of an interpretation.How do we read He for God only, she for God in him?Well, it depends.If we decide it is not ironic, then it may become either a claim for the actual relationship between men, women, and God (with the usual biblical citations), or a statement of female oppression (with various real-world treatments of women quivering in the background).If we decide it is ironic, (it is seen through Satans eyes, after all, and the narrator is not reliable), then we begin a journey through the poem that has Eve resisting patriarchy, or ironically defending patriarchy as a necessary component of civil order. None of these can be justified by the poem alone. I claim that (4) mimesis works in one direction, from the reader to the poem, as a means of understanding and organizing the interpretative process, but that mimesis does not work in the other direction, that we learn from the poem on its own terms something about the world.I believe a careful reading of Aristotles poetics will reach the same idea, that fictions have necessary properties that require mimesis to understand but preclude mimesis as a poetic outcome.
Perhaps a classic formulation of the problem I mean can be found in Kerrigans The Sacred ComplexHe says, The survival of literature as anything more than an artifact depends on our ability to extend its original reference into a genuinely revelatory description . . . of the world we inhabit now.(p2)He then proceeds to self-consciously read the poem through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis.This is not revelation, it is (very ingenious and interesting) imposition of an external theory of the world.If anyone believes that the poem cannot be made to confute rather than defend a Freudian view, they have not been reading criticism latterly.
I realize this makes the justification of literature itself difficult.If it does not teach us about the world, or make a better world (by teaching virtue, or otherness, or any of the other things so many even recent scholars have advanced in favor of beauty and instruction, still the most common justification), or critique or defend our cultural, moral, political order, or order our thoughts, or create a consciousness (all of which may be considered mimetic), what does it do?I do not know the answer to this question.It may have no answer (rather like saying what poetry is).But it seems to that literature on its own revealing truths of the world cannot be one of them.*****
This, I would argue, applies to Shakespeare as well as to (say) Eddie Guest (Hero of Dorothy Parker's poem, "I'd rather flunk my Wasserman test / Than read a poem by Eddie Guest.") And I doubt very much that Marx _needed_ either Balzac or Shakespeare to arrive at his own views of money! He arrived at those views quite independently of any author, and when he was involved in expounding his views found those writers excellen _illustrations_ of what he was trying to explain. This is probably in fact the general, perhaps the universal, case: readers look for literary works that reflect their own views or at least provide an occasion for expounding their own views. And if someone were to provide a reading of Balzak that convincingly refued Marx's interpretation I doubt that Ted would change his views to fit the new understanding of Balzak on money.
There can also be a confusion between a "world" an artist makes visible and the artist's own _judgment_ of that world. I wouod suggest, for example, that the best vision available of the U.S., 1870-1970 is to be found in the movie, _Birth of a Nation_. It is a vile but true image Griffith provides, but I think a true one. But the valuation, the affirmation of truth, is mine, not a valuation I take from the movie. A member of the KKK would respond quite differently (and we could argue forever what valuation Griffith intended of the image he created.)
Skeat read Chaucer for the purpose of determining how Middle English words were pronounced, discovered that the final e was pronounced unless the next word began with a vowel, and of course that discovery led to a more accurate reading of Chaucer. It would have been sad if Skeat had had a Dennis C hanging over him saying what a terrible way to read such a profound story-teller.
Crudely, there is no truth in literature except the truth the individual brings to his/her reading of it. I 'use' a scene near the end of All Quiet on the Western Front as a gloss, for me, on Yeats's "An Irish Airman Fosees his Death." In that scene the sergeant is carrying a wounded man back from the front, holding th man by the arms over his shoudlers. A plane appears in the upper part of the screen, there is a chatter of machine gun fire, and the sergeant trudges on, unaware that the wounded man is now dead. There is Yeats's brave airman. That is probably a distortion of the "real" meaning of both Yeats and the movie. Is there anything wrong with that?
I'm arguing, in fact, that Dennis C's comment on reading Shakespeare was as limiting as would be a reading which allowed no reading except a sociological one. It is simply wrong to condemn _any_ use _any_ reader wants to make of _any_ text. For no use is exclusionary of any other use.
Edgar Snow was in Moscow during the war. He tells of the ludspeakers at corners hat had been spouting propaganda nwow played only classical music. Life was grim in Moscow. I suppose we could be sarcastic abaout Stalin's use of Mozart.
Carrol
Ted Winslow wrote:
>
> Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> > I'm agreeing. Ted says Shakespeare understood money very well.
> > That's no doubt true. But Shakespeare is as good now as he was 400
> > years ago not because he tells us a lot about his own time but
> > because he is "bottomless",as a book I've been reading recently
> > describes it. You can keep going back to the well and finding new
> > things that are more than just information about money and
> > humankind, although that is there of course.
> >
> > I read one of Marx's kids saying she could recite from Shakespeare
> > when she was six because her father placed such an emphasis on its
> > importance. I don't think Marx read him only to find his thoughts on
> > money or the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
>
> I quoted Marx saying that.
>
> Shakespeare on "money" - on "avarice" - is "universal"; as is, so Marx
> claims, Balzac.
>
> Such "universality" is his genius.
>
> Marx "appropriates" Greek drama in the same way:
>
> "Philosophy, as long as a drop of blood shall pulse in its world-
> subduing and absolutely free heart, will never grow tired of answering
> its adversaries with the cry of Epicurus:
>
> 'Not the man who denies the gods worshipped by the multitude, but he
> who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes about them, is
> truly impious.'[19]
>
> "Philosophy makes no secret of it. The confession of Prometheus:
>
> 'In simple words, I hate the pack of gods'
> [Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound]
>
> is its own confession, its own aphorism against all heavenly and
> earthly gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the
> highest divinity. It will have none other beside.
>
> "But to those poor March hares who rejoice over the apparently
> worsened civil position of philosophy, it responds again, as
> Prometheus replied to the servant of the gods, Hermes:
>
> Be sure of this, I would not change my state
> Of evil fortune for your servitude.
> Better to be the servant of this rock
> Than to be faithful boy to Father Zeus.
> (Ibid.)
>
> "Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical
> calendar." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/foreword.htm
>
> As I've pointed out before, Keynes, who "appropriates" literature in
> the same way (as, e.g., in his quotation of Shelley's Prometheus
> Unbound in The Economic Consequences of the Peace), makes this the
> basis of a similar judgment of Ibsen.
>
> In an unsigned introduction to the program for a series of four Ibsen
> plays staged at the Cambridge Arts Theatre to mark its opening in
> February 1936, having referred to Ibsen’s "reputation as the greatest
> dramatist of the nineteenth century", he claims that, "as is usually
> the case with the greatest plays," these four "can be understood and
> enjoyed, and are indeed in a sense complete, from several distinct
> aspects and on planes of varying depth below the surface." (Collected
> Writings, vol. XXVIII, pp. 326-7)
>
> At the deepest level
>
> "they can be seen sub specie eternitatis, remote from contemporary
> moods and problems, as tragedies of character, exploring the depths
> and often the crannies of human motive with the imagination of a poet
> and the insight of a novelist. If the plays have sometimes been felt
> to be painful, it is because Ibsen can penetrate too deeply into
> regions which we prefer to keep concealed even from ourselves." (pp.
> 326-7)
>
> In The General Theory, he quotes The Wild Duck as insightful about the
> roots of Hayek's money crankery.
>
> Ted
>
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