James: Philosopher and Top-Notch Flirt

In our first joint class (nice to meet you all by the way), we discussed the way in which Socrates used a seductive element to his writing, which was meant to “arouse” the readers’ interest as well as make them more open to the ideas presented in the essay. In William James essay “Prgamatism’s Conception of Truth,” I believe he uses a similar method. Though not filled with athletic young men and their tales of romantic conquest, James manages to seduce his readers in another and equally effective way. What way is that? He puts the charm on.

Charm may not be as arousing as half naked Greeks, but it’s still nothing to scoff at. James, known to be a very charming individual despite some mental duress, has a very personal touch to his writing that makes it easy for the reader to like him. He presents his ideas as simply as he can, never patronizes his readers, and – even better – is constantly engaging the reader throughout the essay. For example, after explaining for a few pages his pragmatists views on truth and its relation to reality James takes a moment to say “I have lead you through a very sandy desert. But now, if I may be allowed so vulgar an expression, we begin to taste the milk in the coconut” (pg 122 of Pragmatism: A Reader). This is a very James thing to do. After speaking at length about his ideas, James always takes a moment to remind the reader that he understands that they may not be completely convinced yet or else may need more information. He acts as our friend, our mentor who is helping us take our first shaky steps into the world of the pragmatist and if we don’t get it right away? Not a problem. James is here to help.

It is because of how personable and persuasive James is that he is able to seduce his readers. I may hate baseball, but if a hot guy smiles at me, asks if he can explain how the stats work and then comments on how well I’m doing to keep up with him, you know what? I’m sure as hell going to try and understand everything he’s saying. James is flirting with us and because he’s just so good at it, we can’t help but get swept up. He makes us want to understand pragmatism if only because we want to make him proud…even if he may be dead and buried. What Socrates does with the hard bodies, James does with a few compliments.

In conclusion, I think I speak for everyone when I say if you want to get someone to understand your philosophy, you should seduce the hell out of them.

Seduction by Provocation

Wallace Stevens seduces us in The Snow Man with provocation. In the first line he challenges us with the idea that we, the reader, "must" be of a certain mind in order to experience a particular wintry scene. It's as if he's suggesting that in no other frame of mind can one be in order to intercept the visceral effects of a certain type of landscape. This is enticement, getting us to question whether Stevens in fact is correct. Our interest is piqued. Who is Stevens to make such a bold statement about what I should or should not have for a mind, we ask ourselves. Provocation is a form of seduction. By drawing us into the debate, we are prodded to read on. The entire poem lacks seductive language per se. Using words and phrases like frost, crusted with snow, cold, jagged, rough, distant, misery, bare, and nothing are clearly intended to evoke a feeling of darkness. So how could one seduce a reader by making him feel miserable? The seduction is in the fact that we are entranced by the effect the words have. Even if you have never stood in such a barren, lifeless landscape, you can't help but feel its effects because of Steven's use of those words. Poetry is all about the language, and the seduction comes with the assembly of those words into a pattern that forces us to read on, to want to know what comes next.

The "experience" effect

“Poetic language may allow a reader to experience, rather than simply understand cognitively, the problem or issue the text presents.” This possible effect of the poetic use of language called the “experience” effect can be illustrated by Wallace Stevens’ poem "The Snow Man," and essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.”

Firstly, during our joint session we said that a poem is something that we experience. And that is true about the poem “The Snow Man” as, by reading the first lines, readers can easily represent the scene in their minds thanks to the style of writing and to the imaged description of the scene: One must have a mind a winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice

Besides, we can assume that many readers have already “experienced” winter with the snow, the cold or the sight of a winter landscape. As a result, they can “experience” the poem at it reminds them of their own experiences, emotions and feelings.

Secondly, we can illustrate this point by referring to one of Stevens’ essays, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” in which he talks about the notion of interdependence between imagination and reality in poetry. Thus, another way of “experiencing” is by the words themselves and the sounds of the words. He writes page 32 that “the deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings which, we are sure, are all the truth that we shall ever experience” and “words are thoughts …above everything else, poetry is words; and that words, above everything else, are, in poetry, sounds.” In other words, the nature of poetry is to take the words already existing (who are part of the reality) and then to use them to create an imaginary scene. Thus the readers can “experience” a reality that they already know such as remembering the emotions related to the snow, or they can “experience” something they do not know (for example imagining the sight of “the pine-trees crusted with snow”). He adds page 30 that “The poetic process is psychologically an escapist process.” This quote is a good example to illustrate this “experience" effect.

Thirdly, the “experience" effect can also be understood as the role of the poet’s own experience in the poems written. In this very essay Stevens adds page 28 that “the all-commanding subject-matter of poetry is life, the never-ceasing source,” meaning that poems are written about what happens around the poets’ lives, either in their lives or in the society. Their inspiration comes from there. As a result, with the help of the words they create another “reality” in which the readers can “experience” the poems written (as described in the above paragraph). He also puts the thought further by writing page 25 that “My memory is there, which conveys something of the past into the present,” which illustrates the fact that the experience in one’s life is very important in the process of writing poetry and depicting a certain reality.

To conclude, I would like to introduce two other quotes from the same essay, for they sum up perfectly these wo sides of the “experience" effect (that is to say the experience in the readers’ minds and the poets’ own experience put into their poems). The first one is page 36 and the second one is page 31: “The mind…is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality…our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives” and “There is, in fact, a world of poetry indistinguishable from the world in which we live.”

Kevin Gulliver: Stevens's Circe

Both of these prompts struck me as provocative topics to concentrate on for the task of interpreting the texts we have so far encountered this semester in Poetry and Pragmatism. I felt fairly certain that I would be able to locate an example of the “experience effect” in the works of the Pragmatists as the primary thrust of their work is dedicated to investigating the “practical bearings” ideas have for us in the world of our everyday lived experience. The “seduction effect” on the other hand is a device that these scientifically-minded philosophers never seemed to think expedient in their invectives against rationalism. It is often pointed out that America is a country that was founded by chaste fore-fathers of the Puritan grain. No doubt, at the turn of the 20th century not a little of this attitude still lingered in public sentiment. It is perhaps not unusual then that we do not find Professor William James lecturing to Harvard audiences about subject matters we might expect to encounter on opening the notebooks of Freud—not taking into account the diametrically opposed turn of mind these psychologists represent. Oddly enough, James would find it advantageous to make use of one of Freud’s discovery—the Unconscious—but to decidedly ends that Freud never would have imagined or approved.
Yes, furnishing an example of the “seduction effect” would prove more difficult, but I could at least be certain that if ever I was to find it, it would be occurring simultaneously with the “experience effect,” seeing how the work of the Pragmatists exerted such a prominent influence on the work of American philosophers and poets that came after them. A good place to start seemed like the poetry of Wallace Stevens, whose poems from Harmonium have been described by Hayden Carruth as being, “exotic as their titles; full of tropical imagery and unusual diction, armored in brilliant stylized rhetoric.” I found that as I worked my way further through the collection, again and again I kept coming across instances when the speaker “yields himself” to moments of sensual release—to the sheer radiance and beauty of the environment he inhabits. This all makes perfect sense. For one of the criticisms Stevens makes against modern literary society in his book of poetic theory, The Necessary Angel, is that “We cannot yield ourselves. We are not free to yield ourselves” (4). Need I say we are not free to be seduced? I take this to mean that we are overly preoccupied, indeed, we are too conscious of ourselves to ever allow the possibility of an external experience move us to transcendence. We have become obsessed with apprehending meaning, or as Stevens writes: “We have been a little insane about the truth” (33). Seduction necessitates that we relinquish control over ourselves and completely yield to the allure of the tempter which in Stevens’s poems assumes the guise of art and nature. William Barrett has pointed out that we have set ourselves over against nature in the attempt to master it; he cites this as the most fundamental example of our epoch’s metaphysic: the Nietzschean “Will to Power.” What is lost in such a dynamic and technical relationship with nature are the primal bonds of mystery, beauty, harvest and fertility that nourished the human race for tens of thousands of years. Please, do not mistake this for a plea of Romantic nostalgia harking back to pre-industrial society—the challenges and afflictions of such an existence we Post-Industrial New Scientists can never comprehend in their gravity. Modern Science and Technology are indispensable aspects for regulating our society and attending to its citizen’s wants and needs. In spite of all this, I don’t think it impossible for us seek to revitalize those parts of our being that are neglected when we assume rationalism as our modus-operandi. For this we must look to the wisdom of past ages that perfected the science of the spirit, as surely, if they could, they would look to us for the some instruction on the spirit of science. Who among us can open ourselves to the bounty of the “Timeless mother” in Stevens’s poem “In the Carolinas” to say with the speaker: “The pine-tree sweetens my body/ The white iris beautifies me.”
According to Stevens then, we must let ourselves be seduced back into experience, being too abstract to even “dip” back into reality by way of our own volition as William James had proposed. The poem in Harmonium I feel is most intriguing as a seducer is entitled “Infanta Marina”:

Her terrace was the sand
And the palms and the twilight.
She made of the motions of her wrist
The grandiose gestures
Of her thought.
The rumpling of the plumes
Of this creature of the evening
Came to be the sleights of sails
Over the sea.
And thus she roamed
In the roamings of her fan,
Parting of the sea,
And of the evening,
As they flowed around
And uttered their subsiding sound.

In this poem the carriage of nature appears in the personified form of a daughter born of either the King of Spain or Portugal fitted out with all the baroque elegancies of a spoiled heir to one of the most dominant world empires of the 16th century. This evening the Princess ventures out from her usual after-dinner affairs in the court to enjoy the exotic scenery of the New World. The reader is like a peasant who has stumbled upon this rare encounter with regal beauty and carefully notes every one of her movements so that he may play the images over and over again in his mind once she has departed. As we follow the Princess we observe how she makes nature attend to her like royal courtiers. The palms of the second line bend to shield her fair eyes from the too bright crepuscular glow that reflects off the gentle ocean. She dismisses with the flick of her wrist any ominous clouds that threaten to squander the beauty of this twilight moment— just as she would dismiss a band of players that failed to amuse her. The rumpled appurtenances of her evening gown roll like the wind through the massive sails of caravels navigating the limitless oceans in her honor, the grace with which she saunters act as “sleights” or models of dexterity studied by the captain and his men throughout the voyage. All nature is in harmony with the waving rhythms of her fan as she tames the surf and prolongs the ecstasy of the day’s final light before it plummets to the bottom of the sea and the darkness of the empty universe descends upon all.
Stevens’s succeeds in seducing his reader into “yielding” to the irresistible majesty of nature by narrating the scene with all the delicacy proper to an artist painting a portrait of a noble subject that would hang in the Royal Gallery. He has put the reader in a position of humble awe where, overwhelmed, he will hardly recognize his former self that previously reckoned nature in terms of its potential yield. It is his hope, and mine as well, that the gain derived from being in the presence of such greatness will cause him to forget his habitual ulterior motives that he may again be as, “the new-born children interpreting love/In the voices of Mothers.” The Timeless Mother that is…

Stevens' use of Seduction; Cassandra Shepherd

Poetry has the power to lower the readers guard through the seduction effect. The prior experiences with poetry that gives the reader the expectation of finding meaning with the capability of making them feel or understand something other is part of the seduction. I'm afraid I did not make that clear, we are used to reading poetry with the purpose of finding a deeper meaning that is supposed to make us learn, see from a different perspective, understand ideas, use our imagination, and/ or inspire. These experiences cause us to treasure the words written when we realize what we are reading is poetry.

In an essay called “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” by Wallace Stevens, the author of “The Snowman,” states

The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings which, we are sure, are all the truth that we shall ever experience, having no illusions, makes us listen to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us search the sound of them, for finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration, which it is only within the power of the acutest poet to give them. (32)

One of the reasons I love that passage is because it is poetry. Wallace Stevens is first and foremost a poet who also writes philosophical essays on Reality and Imagination. When we talked in our joint session about Lysis, we said that the narrative structure served as a type of seduction to the reader. The easing into the banter between Socrates and the others “soothed” the reader. If we entered during the banter we wouldn’t have a heart to figure out the meanings or continue the discussions ourselves. Personally, I would just find it absurd that Socrates is trying to intellectualize matters of the heart- whereas the narrative beginning allows me to at least listen, even if I find myself seeing Socrates as a sneaky snake at times. When reading this passage, instead of a narrative structure to calm the reader, Stevens uses cues that we are already used to: rhythm and repetition, among other features of the passage. It’s not a straight up statement, he doesn’t say things the most simplest of ways because if he did then we wouldn’t get lost in the feeling the sentence creates or in our love for words.

Chiasm (Ian Davis)

So. In responding to this prompt I find myself turning again toward old thoughts. I will lay them out here in hope of setting them in some semblance of order, and, of course, in hope of communicating them.

I want to rephrase these notions of the seduction effect and the experience effect, in the hope of deepening them. They sound a little cheap, like tricks a text can turn on a hostile high schooler. I mean I know we’re not trying to give a thorough phenomenological account of what it is to read a literary text. I don’t want to do that. I couldn’t do that if I tried. What I want to do is talk about the effect literature has on me. Perhaps all this really is is a snobbish attempt to make these notions sound more beautiful in my head. If I am only repeating things everyone has already thought about (as the insecure part of me is nervously informing me that I am), forgive me. And if I get a bit taken away with it all, forgive me that too. Listen, just forgive me any trespasses I happen to make.

I have come to think that much of the joy of reading literature is in the series of syntheses a text allows a reader to make, in the sensation of harmonious beauty that arises from those syntheses. Synthesis is the fundament of reading, of language: the initial movement of reading is that in which the signifier is combined with the reader’s sense of what is signified, those combinations are collected, and ‘sense’ is made. After or along with this initial movement one searches for other threads to interweave with this sense: the connotations of the words, their rhythms, their sounds, recurrent words, phrases, ideas, images, metaphors, etc. I would argue even that the most jarring notes add only to the sense of synthesis and combination, that the dominant term in the “harmony”/“discord” binary is “harmony” (though I imagine that any really serious argument over such a thing would quickly exceed my reach). Each reader, solitary since birth, finds different threads, and each word reverberates in her differently than it does in everyone else. The reader brings her own warp of emotion and meaning to the weft of the text. There is a powerful sense of beauty that springs up in one as syntheses accumulate and the textile thickens and spreads. This much seems clear. It begins to seem trite, even. But true, I think.

Let me rephrase that. In searching inside of herself for the strings, the reader is caught up in a strange movement between the abstract and the particular. How do I say this? I must return to Proust. She pulls a word inside of herself and rummages around for things to match with it. Each of those things, those images, so to speak, is self-made, an old sensory experience that was once transformed by the mind into an abstraction in order for the mind to comprehend and remember it (this last sentence is all Proust's idea; I don't have a copy of la recherche on me at present and can't properly annotate it). Have I said that clearly? We do not remember the past, only those things which we have extracted, abstracted, from it (Proust as well). But literature works in particulars, in characters, events, physical descriptions, etc. The reader must take those particulars into herself, abstract them, take them and interweave them with her memory. And this interweaving sometimes resonates. It resonates along with the plethora of sensory experiences that always accompanies us in this world. “A name read long ago in a book contains within its syllables the strong wind and brilliant sunshine that prevailed while we were reading it” (Proust again).

The difference mentioned in the prompt seems to me to be this: most literature works in particulars, and most philosophical writings work in the abstract, only delving into particulars for examples or counter-examples of those abstractions. It is difficult and tiring to work so much in that sort of abstraction. Particulars, for myself and for the notion which I have in my head of the common reader, have more emotional power than abstractions. We can more easily turn them into mirrors in which we can see ourselves.

I have used too many words to say this.

I haven't really said anything here. Perhaps a little, but this telling of it is empty, hot air. What more is there? The infusion of emotion into a text is something, but it would be folly for me to try to tell it. The holding of the book in one's hands is something, but that's all that can be said about it unless one is a poet and not an undergraduate student writing in the margins. There's more. There's more but I don't know what it is. Oh no, oh well.

The Snow Man Revisited

The Snow Man Revisited

During our joint class discussion, we discussed the literary ‘experience effect’ of a poem. That is, we discussed the act of reading the poem; how the author used poetic language and the overall affect the poem had on the reader beyond the literal or even abstract meaning of the poem. This ‘experience effect’ is certainly displayed in Wallace Stevens’ The Snow Man. The author speaks of a man who is in a meditative state, who, we deduce is not an actually round, decorated, ‘snowman’ but a man who is contemplating nature and reality. When reading the poem itself, one cannot help but experience a similar meditative state that the author is describing;

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

The first line instructs the reader that ‘one must have a mind of winter’ implying that the reader plays an active role in understanding this poem. They are not simply sitting back and garnering a literal meaning of it, rather, they must assume a certain mental state if they are fully going to get into the mindset of the ‘Snow Man.’ Then, the author begins to describe image after image of winter scenes; ‘the frost and the boughs/of the pine-trees crusted with snow/ and have been cold a long time/ to behold junipers shagged with ice/the spruces rough in the distant glitter.’ It is almost as if the act of reading this poem puts the reader in a kind of ruminative state, until the last line of The Snow Man, in which Stevens leaves us with; ‘For the Listener/who listens in the snow/And nothing himself, beholds/ Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’ The last lines of the poem lend a somber and somewhat abrupt ending to the speculative feel of the earlier lines in the poem. Thus, ending the readers meditation on the ‘Snow Man’ and perhaps, allowing them to leave behind the “mind of winter” that they may have acquired.