File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_1998/phillitcrit.9807, message 36


Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 22:16:54 -0400 (EDT)
From: David Langston <dlangsto-AT-mcla.mass.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Literature and Space



On Sat, 11 Jul 1998, deaun moulton wrote:

> Me too.  But I'm planning a wedding (my own!) and getting ready to move
> to Canada....

My hearty congratulations, and best wishes on both ventures.

> In what ways are you distinquishing Modern from Enlightenment?

THAT distinction is a rather tangled story and would require a re-telling
of about 150 years of intellectual and cultural history, but to resort to
a thumbnail sketch, Modernism (Pound, Stein, Joyce, etc. and Co.) seems
predicated on an alienation from history and temporality which is only a
very minor theme among 18th Century defenders of Einleitung. "Time is the
problem" Pound says in the Cantos. 

> > extension of meaningless time. 
> 
> I'm having a little trouble with this notion of 'meaningless time.'  what
> does it mean?

The fear of history and the notion that temporality is a threat is a
pervasive theme among Modernist writers.  History, they keep saying, is
all sound and fury, a collection of fragments "shored against our ruin" 
which must be transcended in a form which resists time even as it also
endures it.  I take it that is Pound's main idea in his notion that the
essence of experience is like a crystal in flowing water.  The stream of
time and the transcendental essence are indistinguishable in any one given
moment, but through time we come to recognize the enduring pattern which
resists time. 

The main problem is whether it is legitimate to use the term, "space," to
designate that enduring form.  While I have some deep reservations, critics
like Joseph Frank and Gaston Bachelard have confidently used the term,
"space," to identify literary tropes and meanings which resist the
mutability of history. 

> It also sounds like Manifest Destiny which projected the western North
> American continent as "space" fit for conquering by the white American
> agents of progress.

I would say that the Puritan sense of "wilderness" probably suggests an
alien space which needs redemption; however, by the nineteenth century,
that notion had been reversed, had it not?  The western space was
considered to be a Promised Land in which the pioneers had a home awaiting
their arrival (if those pesky Indians would just shut up about the fact
that they already were at home and resented trespassers).  Of course you
are doing the research, and probably have a more interesting and nuanced
reading. 

Up to now I would have said that the notion of "wilderness" as a pristine
ideal landscape where human beings could never step without corrupting is
a THIRD idea.  Its antecedents are equally Romantic (Thoreau: "in wildness
is the preservation of the world") but I have not -- up to now -- put it
in the same register with Charles Kingsley, Horacy Greeley, or Fred'k
Jackson Turner.  One difference lies in how much of the western space
could be commodified and made "useful."  Thoreau and Muir and the Sierra
Club see wilderness as "useful" only so long as it remains the reified
Other, constantly reminding us of the ideals toward which we should
strive;  the party of Greely and Turner see wilderness as "useful" when it
eventually becomes "civilized" and has been tamed to be productive. 

On a philosophical and critical plane, however, I have a number of
reservations about too quickly collapsing an epistemological sense of
space or spatiality in Kantian and post-Kantian thought into notions of
either architecture or geography.  Reading these two senses of "space" in
terms of each other CAN reveal decisive cultural and political themes, but
finally they are not identical because at some point the spaces of
architecture and geography are only metaphorical elaborations, or perhaps
loose analogies, of the phenomenological sense of spatiality as a
necessary condition -- and counterpoint for temporality -- for all our
experience. 


                              David Langston


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