Post #3: Spivak, Greenblatt, and Hayot

With Spivak’s text for this week, “Reading with Stuart Hall in ‘Pure’ Literary Terms,” I began understanding her move from the text to the political in terms of a text’s form revealing more about its content than the book could hold. I worry, however, that this is an oversimplification, even for a starting point. Here’s what I mean, and where I’m reading from, to make the moves from form to content to responsibility:

Throughout the piece, Spivak places special importance on parataxis within Lucy (“Placing together phrases, clauses, and sentences, often without conjunctions, often with and, but, so and with minimal or no use of subordination” (354)). With this technique used throughout Lucy, Spivak argues that we cannot simply read Lucy for its content (“…with this literary characteristic… Lucy resists and alters any reading that would categorize it only by its subject-matter” (354)). This characteristic, parataxis, “infects” the story (355):  “…parataxis… becomes a formal description, a homology for what the language describes” (355). What the text is doing, in other words, reflects or maybe enhances what the text is saying. In another selection from Lucy, a series of ellipses that produce the parataxis become a “representation of a withdrawal” for Spivak (356). In another part of the text, the “absence of a conjunction” is “felt,” Spivak argues, “as absence” (357). This “trained” reading (351) (I’m trying to avoid “close reading” or “surface reading” by using Spivak’s own language here) results in finding a pattern within the text (the repeated use of parataxis) which illuminates more clearly the text’s content. Rather than begin with a theory about the text, Spivak begins with the textual characteristics, and at one point, while discussing the “diasporic experiences,” suggests that a reduction “to a formula” and a “quick” response is “no solution” (360).

The move beyond the text of Lucy begins with an analysis of diaspora as a biblical punishment resulting in guilt, which makes diaspora, for Spivak, “full of affect” (360).  I understood from Spivak that the parataxis within Lucy actually points to diaspora, both signifying connections cut apart. Yet, what I am not completely sure about is how diaspora and parataxis offer a “solution” (361), but perhaps walking through the next section will help. The novel’s references to the past make us go beyond the novel, and, for Spivak, to colonial poetry (Wordsworth) and to Kincaid’s writing of herself crossing into an imperial class. Spivak further explains the move beyond the text: “if what happens in the literary text is the singularity of its language and that singularity is in its figuration, that figuration can point to the depth of the content by signaling that the content cannot be contained by the text as a receptacle” (367). I’m understanding this to mean that the parataxis points to the diaspora, which cannot be contained within Lucy, therefore we are pointed outward from the text. I’m afraid I’m missing some steps here, though. Spivak shows us what this move outside the text looks like when she analyzes diaspora and calls for expanding the definition of class to include the political and not simply economic (371).

While Stephen Greenblatt’s essays for this week are most directly in conversation with Eric Hayot’s essay, I actually wanted to draw a connection between Spivak’s and Greenblatt’s texts. Describing the role of parataxis in Lucy, Spivak suggests “…but it is the power of the parataxis, entering and leaving experiences…that relates more to the fact that this is narrative fiction we are reading” (356). Greenblatt, in the introduction to Learning to Curse, draws a distinction between fiction and nonfiction, as well: “It matters for us that The Unfortunate Traveller is marked out for us in a variety of ways as fiction and that Scott’s Exact Discourse is not; it fundamentally alters our mode of reading the texts and changes our ethical position toward them…The existence or absence of a real world, real body, real pain, makes a difference” (15). In what ways, I wonder, does Spivak’s analysis of how a text (of fiction) calls beyond itself troubles Greenblatt’s distinction between fiction and nonfiction and the “ethical position” we take for each?  Hayot certainly picks up on this distinction, and claims (after a theory of the anecdote that includes both the “literary and the referential” (36)) that “language too is real” (37).  

“The Touch of the Real,” however, makes Greenblatt’s stance on what’s “real” more complex, perhaps, than Hayot describes. I want to first point out the tentative language throughout “The Touch of the Real” in reference to reality (all emphases are mine):

“So too an anecdote may conjure up reality, but will reality come when it is called?” (29).  

“Geertz’s conjuring of the real seemed to us useful for literary studies…” (30).

“We could at least seize upon those traces that seemed to be close to actual experience” (30)

There are quite a few other examples throughout the text of this tentative language in regards to the “real.” Here is a moment of tentative language that addresses the literary and non-literary: “The greatest challenge lay not simply in exploring these other texts…but in making the literary and the nonliterary seem to be each other’s thick description” (31). If the literary and the non-literary could both provide context for one another (the definition of “thick description” being more than “context,” however), perhaps what’s “real” for Greenblatt is not as clear as what Hayot describes.