Be perspicuous [sic]

Speranza

L. J. Helm notes:

“D. Castro, the popularizer of crossfit (or one of his associates -- I don't recall) describes Anne Thorisdottir (if you heard of her) as "the darling of crossfit;" surely Speranza is something like that (whatever the Griceian masculine equivalent might be) for The Grice Club!”

(As always, I re-phrase stuff a bit). 

Well, thanks!

I think that ‘darling’ is actually gender-neutral! (“Thorisdottir” is _not_ -- a nice Icelandic matronymic – I understand “Madison” is a bit of a matronymic too – but for a totally different reason! "-son" is surely not gender-neutral.)

We are discussing Powers’s review in "The New York Review of Books" of this French essay (I never use 'book' since I am not referring to the actual physical object or 'thing') on Faulkner. 

(The full text is freely available from hacusa.org).

Powers read, alas, the English translation -- which surely did not help! (But then, trust "The New York Times Review of Book" to care a hoot about a proper French essay in proper French  -- sad, given the density of Frenchmen who live in Manhattan!)

But we HOPE that the author of the essay under review (a Frenchman) did read Faulkner’s stuff in ENGLISH and found it ‘very very difficult’! -- 'Difficult' enough to merit a dissertation ('Why write a dissertation on Mother Goose?')

Powers's thing es entitled "The big thing on his mind," and we are analysing various implicata in Powers's review. 

Helm notes:

“Powers seems *also* to be implying [or 'implicating' if you must] that Faulkner is more popular in France than in the US.”

True (But then Colette, to judge by Keira Knightley's recent film on her, seems to be more popular in France than in England! Tid for tat).

Powers’s big implicature -- but one would need to re-read this whole thing -- is what he calls this 'big thing on his mind,’ by which title his review goes. Powers means Faulkner's 'mind,' not the Frenchman's. I notice that this "big thing" features in Powers’s explanation of what he finds to be the ‘second purpose’ of Faulkner’s intentional 'difficulty' -- which does not necessarily contradicts Grice's conversational category of 'modus' -- "be perspicuous [sic]." Since an author can be genuinely difficult AND clear (I never met one, though!). Personally, I do not use the slightly pretentious “big thing on [one’s] mind” phrase (unless it's "Georgia," of course) since I am hardly what you would calla common-or-garden Cartesian mentalist!

But back to Franconian Faulknerphiles. Powers notes, in the passage now extracted by Helm:

“[André] Bleikasten’s ... devotion to Faulkner [begins] 
with a happy accident. [Bleikasten] was [needing] a 
safely dead writer of important novels in English 
for his PhD dissertation.  Bleikasten is close to committing 
himself to D. H. Lawrence just when Faulkner happens to die 
one year after having fallen from a, shall we say, hard-to-control 
horse in Virginia."

This is actually clearly stated in the “Foreword” to the dissertation – in French -- which Powers does NOT quote:

“Dear all, I was all about to write this dissertation, you know, on D. H. Lawrence, the Nottingham popular novelist of "Chatterley" infame – and then I find literary fashions seem to be very much elsewhere! As every schoolboy knows, Faulkner, the renowned American Southern novelist has died, after a very serious thrombosis-provoking injury caused by his fall from one of his horses, Toby, a particularly hard-to-control one. News reach as that this happened after a fatal heart attack (Is ‘fatal’ redundant? It isn't for the Romans!). The observant reader will observe that, unlike D. H. Lawrence, who died aged 44, Faulkner died aged 64 – and so this dissertation will be longer, but in any case, I hereby submit it, in French, to the Department of Foreign Languages, enjoy and give it a pass!”

Helm, who clearly is 'into' the implicature business, notes: “Please note that Powers may be [*also*] implying [or implicating] that Faulkner’s fall from the “hard-to-control” horse counts as, to use Powers's unhappy phrase, a “happy accident.””

Powers indeed rather inappropriately refers to the reviewed author’s “long devotion to Faulkner [having begun] with a happy accident.” 

But one is never sure about ‘happy.’ In Old English, the word of old Roman ‘beatus,’ or ‘felix,’ was ‘silly.’ ‘Happy,' as per explicature, merely refers to things that ‘happen’. And yes, accidents just happen to happen (The implicature chain for 'silly,' incidentally, seems to be as follows: ‘silly’-- happy -- blessed -- pious -- innocent --  harmless -- pitiable -- weak -- feeble in mind, lacking in reason, foolish.

Helm is right in cautiously using ‘MAY.' For surely we need more details of what kind of ‘accident’ it was with Toby, however 'hard-to-control' he was. Falling from a horse, as any horse rider should know may be due to

(a) the *rider*’s foolishness.
(b) the *horse*’s foolishness, or 
(c) none of the above 

– which complicates things in terms of Powers's intended implicature. The fact that Powers uses ‘hard-to-control, granted, seem to implicate, and rather blatantly, too, that Powers thinks the burden lies on a rather ‘foolish’ Faulkner. 

But please note that ‘hard’ to control is quite different from IMPOSSIBLE to control and Faulkner should be forgiven if he was looking for an *experience*.

Helm rightly notes: “Of course the primary meaning may be milder, albeit still a bit unkind, namely that it was a happy accident that Faulkner’s death coincided with Bleikasten’s need for “safely dead writer of important novels in English for his doctoral thesis.”

I take Helm's "primary meaning" to mean ‘primary implicature.' But then again, implicatures are hardly primary (Do they have ‘primary schools’ in France, by the way? Palma should know about this).

Helm is thus referring to a further implicature chain -- so let us revise the rather convoluted (“difficult”) syntax in Powers’s extract:

“Bleikasten’s long devotion to Faulkner began with a HAPPY [addressee: ‘happy?’ wha?] accident. [Let me explain]. In July 1962, Bleikasten was needing a safely dead writer of important novels in English for his doctoral thesis.  He was close to committing himself to D. H. Lawrence when Faulkner happened to die after falling from a hard-to-control horse in Virginia.”

If you think of it, Powers is also implicating (strictly, with implicatures you do not need to use ‘may’ since an implicature is always a 'cancellable' thing) that D. H. Lawrence is totally ‘minor’ compared to Faulkner (and not just in age!)

Helm: “One gathers that Powers does not like Faulkner nearly as much as Bleikasten did, and would not be unhappy if a reader [or addressee] of his review happens to think that he (Powers, not Bleikasten) does indeed consider Faulkner’s fall from the horse as constituting, by itself, a happy accident.”

Finally, Powers is also implicating that we need to revisit Aristotle’s rather silly conceptual analysis of ‘accident’! (“If an ‘accident’ is something that happens – all accidents are happy – “Metaphysics -- The Middle Book – Geary’s free translation from the Arabic).

Cheers,

Speranza

NB: On June 17, 1962, Faulkner suffered a serious injury in a fall from his horse, which led to thrombosis. He suffered a fatal heart attack on July 6, 1962, at the age of 64 at Wright's Sanatorium in Byhalia, Mississippi.

NB2. ‘silly,’ from Old English gesælig "happy," (related to sæl "happiness"), from Germanic sæligas (source also of Norse sæll "happy," Saxon salig, Dutch salich, Old German salig, selig, and Gothic sels.

In “Faulkner’s father, etc.” (elsewhere), L. J. Helm quotes from a review in the NYROB by T. Powers of A. Bleikasten’s “William Faulkner: A Life Through Novels”. 

Bleikasten, while aiming at the novels as per the subtitle to his essay, is reviewed in connection with a _short story_ by Faulkner.

As Geary would say:

“That’s a bit like getting a comment on the South American rhea when you bought a volume on the African ostrich!” (J).

Powers point is a general one, though:

“Faulkner’s family held no great place in Oxford. A feckless farmer in Faulkner's short story ‘Two Soldiers’ is described as always behind; ‘he can’t get no further behind,’ a son remarks.”

Perhaps he was a rear admiral at heart!

Powers goes on:

“Faulkner's father was like that. He failed in business repeatedly and was fired from his last job as comptroller at the University of Mississippi when he refused to contribute to the local politicos. Faulkner's grandfather had been a bigger man locally but was disgraced at the end of his life after he ran off with some Oxford town funds and ‘a beautiful octoroon.’ The pride of the family was Faulkner's great-grandfather, who had fought in the Civil War, built a railroad, and was shot dead in the streets of Oxford by a former partner. Just as remarkable was the great-grandfather’s huge popular success with a Civil War novel called “The White Rose of Memphis,” which prompt[s] Faulkner at nine to say, ‘I want to be a writer like my great-grand-daddy.’”

Helm compares the scenario to Heidegger:

“Some here may recall considering the possibility that Heidegger may have developed an extremely difficult style in hopes that his Nazi overseers would not discover his true beliefs -- whatever they were.”

When it comes to Faulkneriana, Helm notes:

“Something similar may have influenced Faulkner's style.” And goes on to quote from Powers:

"Few Americans ever tackle Faulkner […] But there is a *logic* [emphasis Speranza’s] to Faulkner’s dependence on difficulty […]. In some of the novels, and especially in “Absalom, Absalom!,” the difficulty ensure[s] that Faulkner's neighbor[u]rs [anti-Websterian spelling ‘correction,’ Speranza’s] would not *know* [asterisks Speranza’s] what he was talking about lest they burn his barn […].”

Of course it reminds me, if not of the South American rhea, of Grice!

The Grice papers (now at Berkeley) contain a manuscript where he coined ‘implicature’ (pre-dating the 1967 William James lectures) and where he talks of a ‘desideratum’ of ‘clarity’ (I suppose he is reacting to Lewis’s claim, “Clarity is not enough: essays against linguistic philosophy.”)

When Grice gets the Harvard invitation he is rather ‘echoing’ and playing on Kant, so he finds that Kant’s FOUR categories can become Grice’s four ‘conversational categories’:

quantitas

qualitas

relatio, and

modus.

The ‘modus’ one is the one that has Faulknerian undertones. Grice formulates it as pertaining to a maxim,

“Be perspicuous [sic]”

There is a sub-maxim here, “Avoid obscurity of expression.”

Grice goes on to illustrate this with some poem by William Blake, which MOST Englishmen DO tackle! (Grice’s chosen phrase is Blake’s “love that never told can be.” Does Blake merely mean “love that can never be told,” or, “love that, if told, would cease to exist.”?(Grice is using ‘being’ alla Heidegger, since Helm quotes him!)).

But there are MANY problems here! (Fascinating ones).

Helm’s interest is the more specific political ambiguity or obscurity in “Absalom, Absalom!”.

Who would LOVE to ‘tackle’ that? Grice would possibly say: Let graduate [some of them are American, you know!] students tackle things – and Americans, however few, just _enjoy_ the thing!

Or do we have to restrict to Faulkner’s neighbours, as Powers suggest?

The problems are many (“and varied,” as Geary would add):

Is Faulkner being _intentionally_ obscure?

Would he rely on the assumption that his neighbour would possibly NOT care to tackle ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ anyway?

By the time Grice is delivering the William James lectures he has a whole taxonomy and vocabulary to tackle (er…) these problems.

A ‘maxim’ can be violated, but it can be ‘flouted.’

To flout a maxim is like violating it, only that the utterer [Faulkner, not Blake, in this case] expects his addressee [or his ‘neighbour’] will ‘tackle’ the ‘violation,’ and get some implicature as a reward! (“Or punishment”!)

Blake may be, for example, implicating that Auden is right in considering the seriousness of ‘the truth about love.’

When it comes to burning barns, granted, I suppose Grice may need to add the disimplicature, to boot!

So let’s go back to Powers’s quote and its context.

Powers is Griceian, I like that. He likes to make what Grice calls ‘fine distinctions.’

Powers:

“But there is a logic to Faulkner’s dependence on difficulty.”

Anathema to Grice whose desideratum is clarity (“be perspicuous [sic]”).

“It serves two purposes,” Powers notes. And just because of this I say that Powers is being Griceian. Nothing serves just one purpose.

Powers:

“In some of [Faulkner’s] novels, and especially in “Absalom, Absalom!,” the difficulty ensure[s] that Faulkner’s neighbo[u]rs would NOT know what he was talking about lest they burn his barn, if not worse.”

Grice would possibly think that ‘know’ is possibly too strong – ‘believe’ may do!

“The *second* purpose,” Powers goes on:

“is to force readers [or addressees, as Grice prefers, just in case “Absalom, Absalom!” becomes, say, “Absalom, Absalom! The Musical] to struggle to get the story straight.”

As opposed as to get the story deviant, I imagine (vide Susan Haack, “Deviant Logics.”)

Powers:

“A poem or a short story in Faulkner’s view was too small, too soon over, to encompass the big thing on his mind — the great submerged obsessive guilty burden of slave times, when all whites knew but few said that slaves were not only unpaid laborers but unpaid sexual servants.”

I guess Grice would say that ‘knew’ is strong enough there!

And can we generalize the point? Does a ‘flouting’ (or violation) to “Be perspicuous [sic]” always have at least two purposes?

I like Powers’s “all knew but few SAID.” It has a Griceian ring to it. Powers seems to be, not saying, but implicating what Faulkner might be implicating with his ‘long’ stories, a.k.a. novels. The ‘difficulty’ allows to ‘get the story straight.’ I wonder if this, to use Helm’s comparison, applies to Heidegger, too!?