[lbo-talk] Examination of Wit Controlling Wit

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sat Feb 4 05:34:15 PST 2012


Joanna:

Israel to strike Iran in the next few months?

I guess this will calm the financial markets.

-------

Excellent!*

Here we see nicely exemplified a cautious but powerful instance of Wit (compex of senses to be found in EonC).

"Israel controls the financial markets"; find a metaphorical expression of that and you are moving into the realm of "one glaring chaos and wild heap of with." Jaming together Israeli foreign policy and "financial markets" finds _resemblances_ (or even identities that represent too great a stretch. Wit loses control of its own resources. (Joanna is a student of Donne, & probably his compass image is a glorius instance of stretching wit to its 'bounds of control" (my critical vocabulary here is inadequate but I think points in the right direction). Note that in the present case Joanna uses a device more characteristic of Pope or Pound then of Donne: 'simple' juxtaposition. (Well, she hedges a a bit: " I guess this will calm the financial markets" as opposed to "Tthis will calm the financial markets." Perhaps that difference moves us closer to Wordsworthian wit than either that of Donne or of Pope.)

I'm trying to use Joanna's clever juxtaposition here to explore the content of Pope's curious couplet:

"Some to whom nature in wit has been profuse, "Want as much more to put it to its use."

That is, I'm suggesting that Joanna _controls_ her image not with a 'separate' application of "Judgment" to 'correct' the possible promiscuity ("wild heap") of the original witty identification* but that the control is incorporated into the wit itself. She exhibits the "much more" of wit called for in Pope's couplet.

[*This calls up Pope's other coulet:

Wit and Judgment often are at strife, Though meant each other's aid like man and wife.

Two distinct 'acts' of the mind, as opposed to the single (but internally complex) act represented by "want as much more," in which the act of wit itself controls itself. I won't try to judge which of these two 'senses' of wit 'controls' Donne's compass image, though I would like to hear from Joanna on this. In that image is it possible to 'separate' wit & judgment as two acts of the mind or must one see it as an instance of wit being sufficient in itself to control wit? (I've never come across a specific reference in early 18th-c criticism to Donne's image, so one I can't say whether or not readers among Pope's contemporaries would have regarded it as a controlled 'reach' or as an instance of Wit gone wrong. (Of the better poets probably the boundaries of Wit, the point at which it tumbles into chaos, are stretche furthest is Crashaw?)]

In case it hasn't been clear, I highly admire Joanna's wit here.

Carrol

P.S. My _historical_ hypothesis is that Pope's _wit_ rather than Coleridge's "Imagination" marks the appearance of the modern (ideological) foundation for the illusion that Literary Criticism points to a legitimate scholarly _Discipline_ or _Domain_. As I have suggested elsewhere, Frye's Anatomy marks the last desperate attempt by "Literary Critics" to claim the existence of the distinct entities, "Imaginative Literature" and "Literary Criticism." Both concepts are boundless and therefore empty.

P.S. 2 Several of last night's posts from me reflect fatigue, not thought. As a result I smushed what I think is probably a legitimate distinction but which I haven't properly defined, that between "that which" calls for explanation and "that which" does NOT call for explanation.



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