I'm interested in taking up Stephen Greenblatt's introduction and "The Touch of the Real." However, as suggested for previous posts, I want to do so in context of some of the texts I am working with in other classes. Particularly, for this week's readings, it seems significant to delve a little more deeply into The Color Purple, which I'm reading for my Jazz and Black Feminism course.
I want to start with a quote on page 11 of Greenblatt's introduction where he states, "virtually every form of aesthetic pleasure--and this is particularly true of theatrical pleasure--is located in an intermediate zone of social transaction, a betwixt and between." "Zone" reminds me a lot of "horizon" and "plane" which are also terms that have been thrown about in the past few weeks, but Greenblatt actually situates or locates where this zone really is, an in-between place, but also a transaction, suggesting it as very relational. I know he says he's talking about aesthetic pleasure, but I'm sorting of widening that notion to general engagements with texts and objects. Previous to this statement, he pretty much declares that any engagement with a text or object will have the influence of the critic and the present temporal condition because any understanding of the historic is sifted through a critic's present temporal psyche. So, when he says the above bit that I put in bold, it seems that he's suggesting that an interpretation or "meaning" of the text is neither immanent to the text nor the critic, but in the in-between space of the interaction between the two. I wanted to set this bit up in order to talk about the difference between a "twitch and a wink" (23).
Although talking about performative aspects and conjuring examples related to performance (as he is an early-modernist), what Greenblatt is really talking about is affect and affective drives. He pushes his definition of "thick description" into a far-reaching notion of theatricality and performance--actually performance (with an audience, etc), but I want to stay within the first emerging boundaries of this example in his article. He argues that the way Ryle uses the term, thick description "entails an account of the intentions, expectations, circumstances, settings, and purposes that give actions their meanings" (23). This is merely a laundry list of affective drives, or elements that drive different types of affects and by knowing or finding out this list, one can decide the affect/meaning behind an action. Then he gives his example of a twitch and wink, arguing that the distinction is "secured by the element of volition that is not itself visibly manifest" (23). Here it is again in the word "volition": affective drive towards an action. By knowing the affective drive, one can differentiate between a "twitch" and a "wink." However, to know that drive means to be able to "see" it even if it is not manifest. How does one gain the knowledge to interpret affects, or even more, interpret affects in particular ways? Of course Greenblatt has said in a variety of ways in both articles how important the social and the cultural is, but he does not really emphasize it in this example or how a critic's own knowledge and experience will/does affect how he engages with the text at that discrete, "in-between" local for their rendezvous.
Maybe I already sound like I don't like this example of "thick description," but I actually do because it has provided me with a set of vocabulary to understand moments in The Color Purple that I felt, but could not articulate, though I would probably not use the term "thick description" in reading this text, even if the example does open the complexities of the stakes and concerns within the novel. So much of The Color Purple relies on affective drives and affective value, it seems, but more specifically, it seems concerned with re-orienting those drives and values. In the first 50 pages, the majority of work that has taken place in the domestic space has cultivated the space as one of subservience, punishment, enslavement, and pain. After Harpo, Celie's new husband's son, hits her in the head with a rock, she goes about her housework: "So after I bandage my head best I can and cook dinner--they have a spring, not a well, and a wood stove look like a truck--I start trying to untangle hair. They only six and eight [the other kids] and they cry. They scream. They cuse me of murder. By ten o'clock I'm done. They cry theirselves to sleep. But I don't cry" (12). However, once Shug Avery, a beautiful singer who Celie has admired since she was a teenager comes to live with her and Mr.________, the meaning of the domestic act changes because its affective value and drive do: "She [Shug] say, Well take a good look. Even if I is just a bag of bones now. She have the nerve to put one hand on her naked hip and bat her eyes at me. Then she suck her teef and roll her eyes at the ceiling while I wash her. I wash her body, it feel like I'm praying. My hands tremble and my breath short" (49).
To do a thin description--suggest that these two performances of domestic work are of equal and same value--would potentially miss the complicated significance and contradictory nature of a black woman's position in 1930s rural Georgia. What this juxtaposition shows is the potential to recuperate an action and its power by reorienting the pathway to said action. Maybe this is getting more into Audre Lorde's "The Power of the Erotic" but it seems significant that multiple times in the text the actions--actions that have previously been traumatically repeated with the same meaning, can actually end up cultivating a different meaning. On the level of The Color Purple, for Celie to survive does not mean to fight: "...I don't know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive." To stay alive means to re-configure the domestic around her own desire. When she washes Shug, she's doing what Mr.________ asks her to do, but it is also something she wants (Shug) and something that has value for her: "I wash her body, it feel like I'm praying." This domestic act possesses communication, cleansing, and a spiritual interaction which her previous domestic acts did not possess or could not possess. (I would go more into how that has to do with the female body, buuuut that feels like work for my other course).
I bring up the example from The Color Purple side-by-side with Greenblatt because he refers to himself as a New Historicist. My interpretation of Celie's actions and the affective drive/value within them really did depend on my gathered knowledge (through our class) of the historical conditions for black women in the 1930s. But rather than situating the knowledge and meaning that I gathered--that there is a way for Celie to recuperate the action of domestic work as a means of sustenance/staying alive--in the past and only in the past, I'm arguing that the historical context is merely the pathway towards a non-temporally bound interpretation (my interpretation) of the text.
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