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Copyright 2015 John Fraser All rights reserved Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com http://www.eBookIt.com ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2495-8 Except for quotations in discussions of it, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author or his estate. A number of the items here have come from http://www.jottings.ca/ john/voices/index.html, where it was posted in 2002. Cover design: John Fraser and Barbara Bickle. The collage of doorways comes from the Web. This book is without the customary scholarly apparatus. For information about quotations or allusions, see [email protected]. Pushing Back is for George Elliott Clarke and David McGimpsey Contents “This is good stuff.” New England pizza-maker I Preface Introduction II Playing for Real In Defence of Language Communication, Communion, Communality Mind-Forged Manacles III Reading Mallarmé “Suspiciousness” Reading Hopkins: I Reading Hopkins: II Reading Woolf IV Referentiality and Stanley Fish Going Tertiary Northrop Frye and Evaluation V Music, Words, and the Construction of Meaning Vision and Analogy Winters, Leavis, and Language VI Descartes’ Discourse on Method Swift and the Decay of Letters Gérard de Nerval and the Martians VII Intellection and Honour VIII In Front of the Door What’s in a Name? Lagniappe Notes IX About the Author Preface Pushing Back (2014) is the fifth of my eBooks. The previous ones, all appearing in 2013–2014, are Nihilism, Modernism, and Value; A Bit of This and a Bit of That about Poetry; Thrillers; and Desires: Sixty-Five Poems Translated from the French. Most of the pieces in Pushing Back come from my website, (www.jottings.ca, begun in 1992, with Rob Stevenson as webmaster), with new introductory and concluding material. The following have appeared elsewhere. “Playing for Real; Discourse and Authority,” University of Toronto Quarterly 56 (1987). “In Defence of Language; If it Needs it,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 59 (1989). “Mind-Forged Manacles; Reply to a Questionnaire,” University of Toronto Quarterly 58 (1990). “Music, Words, and the Construction of Meaning” is also in A Bit of This and a Bit of That About Poetry (eBook 2014). “Mr. Frye and Evaluation” Cambridge Quarterly II/2 (Spring 1967) was reprinted in my The Name of Action; Selected Articles (Cambridge University Press, 1984). “Descartes’ Discourse on Method; a Look at its Rhetoric” was in GSE, II/3 (1959) under the pseudonym of James English. “Swift and the Decay of Letters” (1955) was in The Name of Action (1984). “Vision and Analogy” and “Winters, Leavis, and Language” are also in A Bit of This and a Bit of That About Poetry (eBook 2014). “Intellection and Honor; Playing the Game” was given as a talk to the Department of English and Philosophy at the United States Military Academy, West Point, in 1988. The cover was designed by John Fraser and Barbara Bickle. Introduction … this eternal looking beyond appearances for the ‘real,’ on the part of people who have never even been conscious appearances. F. Scott Fitzgerald Jerry I can’t ask the guy for more cigars after you burned down his cabin. Kramer Why, what has one thing to do with another? Seinfeld, “The Cheever Letters” I A Martian wants to come calling. But how, he asks on his device, will he attract your attention when he’s at your door? Oh, just ring the door bell. A bell? There’s a bell on the door? Well, not literally a bell, of course, not like when you used to pull a door-bell-pull and a wire would shake a bell inside. With bells in the kitchen for different rooms. Like in country-house movies, you know, or Upstairs, Downstairs. Nowadays it’s electric circuitry and magnetism or something. Anyway just ring the bell. Greta, my wife you know, picked a nice set of chimes. They remind her of the church bells in Bavaria, she says. That’s in Germany, southern Germany. She grew up there. So come on over, old chap. She’s dying to meet you. Ta-ta for now. Something is wrong. The Martian is not happy. He is in front of the door now. He has anxieties. Electricity? Magnetism? What he really needed to be told, it emerges, was something like : In the left side of the door frame there’s a small circular protuberance. Press it in gently with your tentacle until it can go no further, hold for a couple of seconds, and release. No, your tentacle won’t be trapped or shocked, no you can’t damage the button, no I won’t be annoyed by the sound. And I’ll come to the door. II This is realworld here for the Martian, outside the door. Not the circuitry behind it, or the history of house bells, or the lives of the occupants. This is where a tentacle or thumb hurts if you hit it with a hammer or a police interrogator does so. Ethics—hurting or withholding pain from others. Trying to, anyway. Reality? The Real? III In my university, the Psychology Department was heavily into learning-theory for a number of years. The mazes through which grant- supported rats were run would have stretched over the hills and far away. Knowledge, the Real Nature of Things, was being acquired. I rarely missed a meeting of the Arts and Science faculty. But I literally never heard anything said at any of them about how to facilitate learning by students. For all its rats, and pigeons, and a couple of seals, the Psychology Department could have been the Department of Aquaculture. Psychologists rarely came to faculty meetings. They weren’t interested in mere subjective anecdotage. They were in pursuit of Reality, the really real. They had the future in their bones. Or their equipment. IV For a number of summers now there has been a lively jazz festival in my city-by-the sea, with performers coming from hither and yon. There is only one thing wrong with it from my perspective. There is no Trad in it—no New Orleans, Dixieland, Ragtime. Gone the echoes of Louis, Bix, King, Pee-Wee, Sidney, Kid, Scott, Muggsy, Jelly Roll, Wild Bill, George, Bunk, etc. The ears and minds of our organizers are Progressive. They obviously don’t enjoy those sounds and are appalled by the thought of middle- aged white guys in red-and-white-striped blazers and straw boaters drawing affectionate crowds around them on the waterfront with “High Society,” “Twelfth Street Rag,” and so on. That would not be Progressive. It wouldn’t be where Jazz is really going. V In Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), Mr. Toad, shaking the dust of his ancestral manor house from his webbed feet, is out on the highway with his recently acquired gypsy caravan. It is elbowed off the road by a newfangled motor-car. Ratty is indignant, but Toad sits there in the dust blissed out and murmuring “Poop- poop!” Goodbye to little canary-coloured caravans. He has seen the future, and it moves, and he will soon be behind a wheel himself. Later on there’s the teensie problem of his manor-house having been being occupied by stoats and weasels from the Wild Wood during his adventuring, and having to be retaken by force. But let’s not get into that. VI Recently I bought a BIG paperback anthology of post-modern (modernist?) American poetry (2011), The Trad versifying, the sentimental, canary-coloured, horse-drawn gypsy caravans, are GONE. This is the future, authenticated I’m sure by an abundance of Theory. This is the skinny on LANGUAGE. The really real. Except that it isn’t for me. In Steven Soderbergh’s movie The Limey (1999), a large black D.E.A. officer, after durable Terence Stamp has jive-talked at him in thieves’ argot, says with weary patience, “There’s only one thing that I don’t understand, and that’s every motherfucking word that you’ve been saying.” It’s not quite that bad with the anthology. There are some golden oldies like Kenneth Koch and Allen Ginsberg. But after a bit this simply isn’t realworld for me. It’s back out of sight behind that door, being realer than the mere common-or-garden world in front of it, where individuals are doing and saying identifiable things, with identifiable feelings, about identifiable subjects. Identifiable?? VII I know, I know, my ears are simply not attuned. Back in wartime London, when most of our living went on in the dining room to save heat, I tried on one occasion to draw my father and stepmother’s attention to some scratchy but glorious Louis Armstrong that was suddenly emerging from our radio, courtesy of the BBC Forces Programme. Surely, surely they would hear the tunefulness here. We didn’t have a record player. But for them it could just as well have been a traffic jam with horns honking. For that matter, chamber music was just noise to me then. I was thrilled some years later when, as a new immigrant to the States, I was Mike and Norma Zwerin’s schnorrer out in Forest Hills and suddenly I started glimpsing melody in a Beethoven quartet. Paris journalists mocked dapper little schoolteacher Stéphane Mallarmé extruding those gnomic utterances at his “Tuesdays” in his apartment in the Rue de Rome. VIII Nevertheless, when I talk about identifiability, how about: praising, deploring, recalling, grieving, transgressing, playing, seducing, charming, meditating, puzzling, celebrating, taunting, speculating, amusing, explaining, defending, inviting, accusing, soothing, judging, apologizing, regretting, rejecting, reassuring, scorning, reminding, comforting, exhorting, cajoling, reproving, condemning, denying, forgiving, taunting, defying, adoring.