A Different Myth

My summer of reading and writing about Truman Capote's place-portraits published in the collection "Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote." This blog will encompass reflections on the text of study itself, supplementary readings, and maybe even some moments of place-portraiture of my own.

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Seeing the City

In "New York," Capote makes this observation regarding the changing ways in which we see as we age; particularly here, the ways that we see the city change:

It was a sad winter, inside and out. For a child the city is a joyless place. Later on, when is older and in love, it is the double vision of sharing with your beloved which gives experience texture, shape, significance. To travel alone is to journey through a wasteland. But if you love enough, sometimes you can see for yourself, and for another, too. That is the way it was with Selma [the cook for Capote's aunts, in the house where he grew up]. I saw twice over everything: the first snow, and skaters skimming in the park, the fine fur coats of the funny cold country children the Chute-the-Chute at Coney, subway chewing gum machines...I watched, listened, storing up for the quiet kitchen-hours when Selma would say, as she did, "Tell stories about that place, true stories now, none of them lies." But mostly they were lies I told; it wasn't my fault, I couldn't remember, because it was as though I'd been to one of those supernatural castles visited by characters in legends: once away, you do not remember, all that is left is the ghostly echo of haunting wonder. (Capote, 16 - emphasis mine).

This excerpt opens with some rather platitudinous statements regarding how our ways of seeing are shaped by our age - and our relationship to "love." The most interesting point in this excerpt comes towards its end - and is a point I plan to discuss further in my final project. That is, the notion of the experience of place - here the city in particular - as the experience of fantasy. Capote's attribution of the notion of "those supernatural castles visited by characters in legends," to the experience of the city, marks an interesting emphasis on the experiential as constructed; as fantastical. This reflects both Benjamin and Shklovsky's musings on literature - and experience - as necessarily, very intentionally constructed, so as to elicit "objective truth."

Capote, Truman. Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote. New York: Random House, 2007.

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My blog is so text-y, I thought it deserved some lightening up with this picture of TC skating.

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Capote's Fragments

Here I'll outline some of the places I'll be looking when I'm considering the form of Capote's place-portraits - and their use of the form of the written fragment.

Every one of these portraits contains some kind of implicit or explicit engagement with written fragments. From the dating of entries, as though lifted from a diary - for example, in "New Orleans," Capote opens a section in which he reminisces about a particular friend of his with "July 3: An "at home" card last week from Miss Y., so I made a call this afternoon..." (Capote, 5). He goes on from this rather factual account to a general, musing reflection on her and her place in the city. The dating here seperates this section from the preceding section: general literary musing on signs in the city.

In "Haiti," the entire middle section of the piece consists of numbered fragments; not necessarily leading to the next with reason, their assemblage more closely resembling a Deleuze & Guattarian rhizomatic thought and writing pattern. Yet, the sections are "organized" by the numbers - but this "organizing" might be more similarly comparable to the whimisical-sounding entry from a Chinese encyclopedia evoked by Michel Foucault in the Preface to his book The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences: "In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that." (Foucault, XV). Here, the system of thought imbued with exotic charm is that of another culture's way of scholarship, distinct from Foucault's Western methods; the numbered entries in Capote's "Haiti," encompass a type of writing distinct from those we scholars of literature are not immediately accustomed to; with place painted through fragments rather than through a more cohesive narrative.

"Ischia" presents the most explicit moments of Capote's engagement with the form of the fragment:

When one rereads a journal, it is usually the less ambitious jottings, the haphazard, accidental notations that, seen again, plow a furrow through your memory. For example: 'Today Gioconda left in the room an assortment of colored paper. Are they presents? Because I gave her the bottle of cologne? They will make delightful bookmarks." This reverberates..." (Capote, 46).

The piece proceeds with his recording of these "less ambitious jottings," and his later reflections on them.

Capote, Truman. Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote. New York: Random House, 2007.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1994.

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The First Glimpse

Another moment in "One-Way Street" that struck me was this consideration of "the first glimpse:"

What makes the very first glimpse of a village, a town, in the landscape so incomparable and irretrievable is the rigorous connection between foreground and distance. Habit has not yet done its work. As soon as we begin to find our bearings, the landscape vanishes at a stroke like the façade of a house as we enter it. It has not yet gained preponderance through a constant exploration that has become habit. Once we begin to find our way about, that earliest picture can never be restored (Benjamin, 83).

This notion of "the first glimpse," so "incomparable and irretrievable" by virtue of the fact that it precedes the establishment of habits of seeing - reflects to a certain degree Shklovsky's notion of "estrangement," and enstrangement as a literary method - and, as it can perhaps be pulled from this Benjamin quote - enstrangement as a method of reading, a way to really experience "objective truth." 

Benjamin, Walter. “One-Way Street." Reflections. Ed. Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken, 2007. 

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Writing - Fragments

An important point of analysis for this project is the form of the fragment. What particular qualities of writing are legible within the form of writing fragments, notes, and jottings? How might the form of the fragment - and how it is or isn't assembled with other fragments - shape our methods of reading and of meaning making? The fragment as form is not only vital to Banjamin's Arcades Project, as well as his work One-Way-Street, and is generally a a form notably connected to his writing generally, but it is also one which characterizes Capote's place-portraits. 

All of his place-portraits encompass some degree of fragment writing; from dated entries, resembling diary entries, to excerpts from letters, to numbered questions and thoughts; indeed, the "Ischia" place portrait is formed entirely of reflections on very short "jottings" and later reflections, recorded memories of the moments alluded to. 

I found this opening moment from One-Way-Street to be of interest when considering the particular place and utility of fragmentary writing:

Significant literary work can only come into being in a strict alteration between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous form that better fit its influence in active communities than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book - in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards (Benjamin, 61).

In his place portrait "New Orleans,"in particular, Capote muses on the soda signs and litter which I discussed briefly before, as well as the the signs adorning the streets as marking the particularities of the neighbourhood. 

Benjamin, Walter. "One-Way Street." Reflections. Ed. Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken, 2007. 

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Shklovky's Take on Sight vs. Recognition

Here I am, finally returning to Shklovsky after it was returned to the library and made its way into my hands quite by coincidence!

I am still quite new to Shklovsky - I have only read the paper reference by Dennis Porter, titled in the Sher translation "Art as Device."

This particular moment in the essay struck me as a potentially useful interms of examining the formal underpinnings of the concepts of sight and recognition - and how they vary here from Benjamin's employments of the terms:

The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By 'enstranging' objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and "laborious." The perceptual process in art has a has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity. The artifact itself is quite unimportant (Shklovsky, 6).

This quote exemplifies a different employment of the concept of recognition from Benjamin's use, and also gestures to the concept of enstrangement, vital to Shklovsky's criticism.

What in this translation of Shklovsky's essay is reffered to as "sight" might more appropriately approximate the meaning of "recognition" employed in Benjamin's writing.

The concept of enstrangement seems to be potentially fruitful when considering particular ways in which images, moments are "enstranged" in Capote's place-portraits: for example, when he first describes New York as "floating in river water like a diamond iceberg," the urban, the city is made strange to the reader, and it is this strangeness which pulls out the fundamental "objective" truth of New York city that is expressed through the use of the image of an iceberg.

Shklovsky, Victor. Theory of Prose. Trans. Benjamin Sher. Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.

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Simultaneously Material and Symbolic

In the section of his chapter devoted to Benjamin's interaction with Marxist thought, Pensky makes this observation regarding Benjamin's particular reading of material and cultural production:

By regarding the relation between material and cultural production as expression rather than determination, Benjamin claims that the distinctive cultural expressions of an epoch are simultaneously material and symbolic, economic and cultural... (Pensky, 183)

This simultaneity of cultural and material production, and the ebb and flow into each other of making and meaning making is legible in Capote's place-portrait depicting New Orleans:

The torn lips of golden-haired girls leer luridly on faded leaning house fronts: Drink Dr, Nutt, Dr. Pepper, NEHI, Grapeade, 7-Up, Coca-Cola. N.O., like every other Southern town, is a city of soft-drink signs; the streets of forlorn neighborhoods are paved with Coca-Cola caps, and after rain, they glint in the dust like lost dimes. Posters peel away, lie mangled until storm wind blows them along the street, like dessert sage - and there are those who think them beautiful; there are those who paper their walls with Dr. Nutt and Dr. Pepper, with Coca-Cola beauties who, smiling above tenement beds, are night guardians and saints of the morning" (Capote, 4).

This image, of streets lined with fading soda signs, and posters of Coca-Cola beauties hung above beds where a cross might have been, beautiful encapsulates this Benjaminian sentiment of the simultaneity of the material and symbolic. The soda signs in the "Southern town" of New Orleans mark capitalist materialism and consumerism upon the streets of the town, yet, the littered soda caps have the capacity to "after the rain...glint in the dust like lost dimes," lending the refuse of material culture an undeniable beauty. The Coca-Cola beauties adorning the soda advertising posters are hung above beds, are "night guardians and saints of the morning:" here, symbolic meaning certainly accompanies the material purposes of the posters.

Capote, Truman. Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote. New York: Random House, 2007.

Pensky, Max. “Method and time: Benjamin’s dialectical images." The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. Ed. David S. Ferris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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Historical Truth

Pensky describes how Benjamin conceived of historical truth and how it interacted with hid writing within this chapter as well:

… Benjamin was convinced that the historical truth of the nineteenth century was objectively present in his assembled fragments, and that this truth would be lost, not recovered by the imposition of a theoretical superstructure upon them. Historical truth, Benjamin came to believe, is not simply available to any theorizing subject at any given historical moment; rather historical truth becomes “legible" or “recognizable" only at specific points… (Pensky, 180).

This fact of historical truth existing objectively in the fragments that make up Benjamin’s Arcades Project provides an interest point from which to examine Capote’s place-portraits as potential sites of “historical truth." The dialectical images - legible through tier linguistic rendering upon the page - contained in Capote’s sometimes fragmentary place-portraits can be interpretable as “moments" of historical truth: a historical truth that is able to be experienced through reading. 

However, taking into account the other point made by Pensky here, that Benjamin is taking a stance against the imposition of a theoretical superstructure which would extinguish the potential moments of historical truth, my act of theorizing is taken to task! I feel, however, that by adopting a utopian reading method, where affect and the impossible is embraced, the kind of theorizing I am performing does not foreclose any glimpses of historical truth.

Pensky, Max. “Method and time: Benjamin’s dialectical images." The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. Ed. David S. Ferris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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Pensky on Benjamin's Dialectical Images

After opening his chapter "Method and Time: Benjamin's Dialectical Images" in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, Max Pensky makes this eloquent reading of the quote I just posted:

The breathtaking evocation of an alternative temporality that this quote contains in characteristically elliptical and compacted form, the glimpse at an entirely new conception of historiography that breaks with previous categories of interpretation, the notion of an image-based historical sensibility as the genuine mode of historical interpretation... But at the same time, one cannot avoid the feeling that this quote , and others like it in Benjamin's Arcades Project, is a theoretical promissory note that would prove difficult if not impossible to redeem (Pensky, 177).

Pensky here expresses a very definite difficulty with reading Benjamin; the eloquent brilliance of his voice and ideas, and the impossibility of the potentialities his writing and ideas propose. Yet it is this beautifully impossibility which makes his writing so captivating and desirable. There is an almost utopian tone to his writing, and it must be read, I believe, in such a way that adopts a kind of utopian reading strategy.

Following this observation, Pensky goes on to state some of the theoretical problems and questions posed by and that can be posed against Benjamin's dialectical image - and this question in particular struck me:

What possible philosophy of history could explicate the difference between past and "what-has-been," between the present and the "now?" (Pensky, 177).

Distinguishing the differences between two such similar and yet so different ways of understanding things that might not immediately seem different has always intrigued me. What strikes me here as the difference being distinguished is the descriptive from the experiential; I understand this distinction as being where the past and present are descriptive and the "what-has-been" and the "now" as experiential. Both descriptors are used to reference discrete temporal moments, but the tenor of what these two descriptors refer to marks an important difference regarding how time, images, moments, and history are made legible.

Pensky, Max. "Method and time: Benjamin's dialectical images." The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. Ed. David S. Ferris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. - Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language"

"Awakening" (Arcades, 462; N2a, 3)

Quoted by Max Pensky in "Method and Time: Benjamin's Dialectical Images."

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Surroundings: Interior vs. Exterior

In the section of his paper exploring the dialectical image and dream images, Friedlander makes this observation, following a description of the Parisian arcades of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project as an attempt to make the exterior interior, this comment is made on the topic of surroundings:

Surroundings are essentially different from an object of attention. They cannot be simply individuated, broken into isolated parts, and take in, bit by bit. Assuming the initial incorporation of an environment, its internalization, we would have to treat the perceptible phenomena in which it is gathered as having an aura of meaning extending beyond what they are literally speaking. One could conceive, at the individual level, of the imagination as this gathering power of meaning in images, but it would be even better to consider this process to take place in the space of memory. That is, the claim is not that certain experiences such as strolling in the arcades have a dreamlike quality but rather that insofar as a world is put together in recollection, its initial coalescing would not be as a “totality of facts” but have the striking strangeness of a dream (Friedlander, 25).

 The first part of this quote’s delineation of “surroundings” as being indivisible into parts, constituting a thing existing only when assembled, when together, is potentially useful when considering the importance of Capote’s emphasis on and depiction of “surroundings” as experiential and holistic within his place-portraits. This “aura of meaning extending beyond what they are literally speaking” is a sense that is palpable within the place-portraits; the loving way in which surroundings are constructed and depicted to constitute an affective experience of “place,” in particular, through his use of elaborate metaphor in certain places, highlights these pieces as not only depicting his “place” understandable as constructed, but also as depending on the necessarily holistic nature of “surroundings.”

Friedlander goes on to further delineate the holistic nature of “surroundings” as being “insofar as a world is put together in recollection, its initial coalescing would not be as a “totality of facts” but have the striking strangeness of a dream.” His delineation of a “totality of facts” from “the striking strangeness of a dream” in relation to world-imagining, and place-constructing, emphasizes the unplaceable nature of both the dream-like, and the dialectical image.

Friedlander goes on to state, in regards to dream images, that:

[w]ith this understanding of the necessity of dream images as concentrations of the surroundings, we rejoin the temporal dimension of realization. The dream images are the reflection of a broader reality to be given expression to. It is therefore with respect to them that one can speak of a potential or a tendency, as well as of a task of expression (Friedlander, 26).

While the dream image is unplaceable and strange, it is also the vehicle for the expression of a truth or reality that is only expressible through linguistic representations of these images – dialectical images.

Friedlander, Eli. “The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image.” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture 35.3 (2008): 1-26.

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Time

In Eli Friedlander's examination of how time is implicated in the dialectical image, he notes:

One of the striking aspects in Benjamin's understanding of the dialectical image is its temporality, in particular the relation formed between the past investigated and the present that can recognize its image... One might say that in the dialectical image Benjamin brings together the two senses of "realizing." Realizing as making something real, actual, on the one hand, and recognizing something clearly, on the other. (Friedlander, 20-21).

This relation between the past and present manifested in the dialectical image certainly has implications when reading Capote's place-portraits. The place portraits seem to be a combination of impressionistic, in-the-moment writing/ recording, and later reflection on moments recorded in fragments. These works oscillate between the past and present, and the reader reading them is implicated in the temporal process as well. This emphasis on the temporality of the dialectical image certainly is also significant when considering the concurrently static and timeless nature of the way Capote invokes the places - and the concept of "place" itself - within these pieces; a number of his reflections invoke the traveller as constructing a mythical place through their presence/recording through writing of a place. "Place" as containing the potentiality for myth and legend - "place" as constructed to satisfy some kind of primal need for narrative, meaning, and connections through time - constitutes a grounds for connecting it with the temporality implied by the dialectical image.

Friedlander, Eli. “The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image.” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture 35.3 (2008): 1-26.

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Further Peculiarities of the Dialectical Image - And Capote Connections

The third peculiarity of Benjamin's dialectical image that Friedlander outlines is that:

we usually think of the image as a kind of representation, distinct from, say, linguistic signs in that it resembles the reality it represents. But the dialectical image is not the image of anything. It is indeed common to find Benjamin using a turn of phrase suggesting that the image is a dimension of reality made recognizable rather than a representation in the mind, whether past or present (Friedlander, 4).

Again, we see here the concept of "recognition," and that the dialectical image invokes or leads to a state of recognition of a state of reality, rather than the observation of a representation of reality.

This delineation between states of recognition and acts of observation presents an interesting question in regards to my project: Do Capote's travel writings, which could certainly be read as his act of recording his observations of a places, potentially constitute more than that? Is there a fundamental quality that ignites a state of recognition in the reader - the revelation of another reality - which potentially demonstrates a particular quality of this kind of writing or work?

Capote's place-potraits are written in such a way that they reflect certain aspects of Benjamin's writing in One-Way Street and The Arcades Project: his short pieces meld together - for lack of a better word - observations, affect, and personal reflection in what goes in and out of a kind of fragmentary form. Capote's pieces have a different degree of interest in the people inhabiting places than Benjamin does, but there is something similar about the tenor of these works. Significantly, many of these pieces also seem as though they were lifted from a diary and expanded/ meditated upon - in fact, one of the portraits does this within it's structure itself (I will write more on this in a later post); with the date they were written recorded in the pieces themselves - this "fragmentary" nature, investing a kind of experiential value in the fragment, in the fragment as containing the potentiality for a kind of affective recognition, strikes me as a particularly important aspect of my reading of the dialectical image.

Friedlander, Eli. “The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image.” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture 35.3 (2008): 1-26.

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Benjaminin' in the Thomas Fisher Rare Books LIbrary.

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"Manifest" or "Recognized"

Eli Friedlander’s article “The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image,” has been my first serious foray into understanding this concept and seeing if it will be useful for my project. I will be reading more theorizing/criticism of the concept as well as Benjamin’s own writing on the subject.

  The dialectical image is part of the nondiscursive theoretical methods that are legible in Benjamin’s work. It not easily definable, so I will not attempt such a process here. Friedlander “guides [his] reading by certain peculiarities in Benjamin’s use of the dialectical image,” (Friedlander, 2). In this entry I’ll briefly reflect on one of these peculiarities he outlines.

  The first peculiarity is as follows: “we think of an image as an object of vision, yet Benjamin never uses the word see, or even imagine to characterize our relationship with the dialectical image. It is ‘manifest’ or ‘recognized’ but nor perceived. More striking, he thinks of the image a legible, as an ‘image that is read’ “ (Friedlander, 2). This perhaps hearkens back to my first reflection on Dennis Porter’s Haunted Journeys; in this entry, the one title “What Is Being Seen,” I have taken care to note that “The scopophilic traveler records the wonders of what is observed to make a record not only of their existence, but of their being seen … I am also interested in an analysis that takes into account the literary particularities of the act of observing and recording an “elsewhere.” My use of “seen” here to denote a particular timbre of seeing can be read as a looking forward to Friedlander’s description of this first peculiarity of Benjamin’s dialectical image: that rather than being seen or imagined, dialectical images are “manifest” or “recognized;” the image rendered through language is an impression of a world only recognizable in that particular state.

  Friedlander, Eli. “The Measure of the Contingent: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image.” boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture 35.3 (2008): 1-26.

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Confronting Colonialism in Travel Discourse and Criticism

          Caren Kaplan’s monograph Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, performs a number of important interventions into the often uninterogated colonial privilege at play not only within travel writing and literature, but within the travel literature criticism itself. The book makes a number of important moves, unpacking the inherent timbre of the “traveler” and the local, among others, and forms of displacement and migration:

  Euro-American modernisms celebrate singularity, solitude, estrangement, alienation and aestheticized excisions of location in favor of locale – that is, the “artist in exile” is never “at home,” always essentially alone, and shocked by the strain of displacement into significant experimentrs and insights… the formulation of modernist exile seems to have best served those who would voluntarily experience estrangement and separation in order to produce the experimental cultures of modernism (Kaplan, 28).

  This is certainly an important consideration to keep in mind when reading travel literature and its criticism; an entire section of Kaplan’s book is devoted to unraveling the implicit privilege in the figure of the traveler as espoused in Fussell’s monograph Abroad. While such interventions are vital to keep in mind when doing this kind of scholarly work, I remain convinced that there is an aesthetic quality, a love of “place,” whose examination deserves attention and interrogation, while acknowledging the privileged nature of the performance of such aesthetic and impressionistic endeavors.

Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Duke University Press, 1996.

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Fussell on The Travel Book

One of the interesting threads throughout scholarship on travel writing and literature is the question of what to call, and how to categorize these works. Paul Fussell, in the final chapter of his book vital to the field of the study of travel writing and literature Abroad: British Literary Travel Writing Between the Wars, considers it in the following terms:

  A travel book, at its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders, and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply. Travel books are a sub-species of memoir in which the autobiographical narrative arises from the speaker’s encounter with distant or unfamiliar data, and in which, the narrative – unlike that of a romance – claims literal validity by constant reference to actuality (Fussell, 211).

  Fussell’s definition here struck me in its attention to the reader, the audience, the “public,” of the work itself. The ways in which these works are read is vital to Fussell in terms understanding and delineating the particularity of the travel book, and is vital to me in terms of understanding the affective quality of reading such works. This kind of “discourse” or “touching” between the writer and the reader, the evoked place and the imagining reader, could be potentially interesting and useful additionally in further considerations of the Benjaminian dialectical image.

Fussell, Paul. Abroad: British Literary Travel Writing Between the Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.