The Rabbit Hole of Argument

     Recently, while working on a paper, I came across a problem: argument is a difficult task to do well and do thoroughly. I believe I am good at argument. I have been creating what I believe to be effective arguments for quite some time. However, if one resists the urge to create a polemic, and one endeavors to do the question at hand justice, argument becomes arduous. Ups become downs, lefts become rights, and at the end of your paper even though you are saying the same things you are saying them differently. You may have convinced yourself of the opposite polemic, you may have found something else that catches your eye in the argument, you may not know where the hell you are.

     So how does one combat this? Its hard to out-think yourself. Even harder is it to contend with your own cleverness. A good argument is like shadow boxing in a mirror except that the person in the mirror is real. If you construct your argument well enough you will win, but chances are if the argument is that one sided that victory is the goal, then you are only defeating yourself.

     This may sound strange, I know, but I have come to the conception that one needs an argument that ends in illumination instead of  definitive conclusion. A definitive conclusion is binary, has an opposite, and that opposite can be argued with anything, refuted with anything, including ignorance. If you say, definitively, that x=y you automatically leave out the possibilities that x could equal anything else at all. No matter how good your argument is, no matter how all encompassing your argument is, you leave out possibilities.

     Science is a place where argument has absolutes. Earth has gravity, things fall down, the end. But could there be a case where this is not true? Perhaps not, but perhaps yes. People thought that, without a doubt, large boulders in certain areas of the planet where left by the great flood. You know, the one with Noah. Well wouldn't you know it people eventually found out that Ice Ages were the cause? Large flowing rivers of ice, glaciers, came and carried things, grated against mountains, and left deposits.Things changed. Science changes. That's what the word theory means. Theory is a well tested hypothesis that seems irrefutable. They use the word theory because it is mostly proven, but there could always be another possibility. It is becoming increasingly hard to tell if this years science fiction will be next years science fact.

     So where do we go from here? Where do I go really? I am somewhat talking to myself. I hope you are listening. Well, we go to a place where our conclusions seem strong, but allow themselves to be illuminating rather than finite. This is hard to do when constructing a good argument but it should be where good argument leads. Those arguments that I have found most revealing and most explosive are the ones where the explication speaks for itself, and the author takes no definite path down a "side" to create a polemic. Instead those great authors let what they say speak for itself. They hand you the magnifying glass and say "see, look! it's right there" instead of painting you a picture. Reading articles like that always leaves me electrified, like I had discovered something incredible on my own instead of being led there by a bridal.

    If all I have said about argument is true, one thing is also true: I have a longer way to go down this path than I originally thought. Going back and re-reading the argument I am currently creating I see so many more possibilities, so many avenues, and so many more voices that would help add to my own and, in turn, refute my own. Its going to be hard to go out on this limb, but the prize seems worth the risk.

Good arguing Loafers....
    

Baudelaire on Poe

Mr.Poe, Where Is America?

In a class on Gothic literature in America it is inevitable that you will read Edgar Poe. Although the class I am currently in only takes a cursory glance at Mr.Poe, it was enough to embroil my imagination. Reading many of Poe's stories led me to ask the question "where is America?" Poe sets his locations in Europe. His most enchanting and prolific protagonist, Dupin, is a Frenchman and the "Pit and the Pendulum" is set in Spain. Yet it was reading Poe's ""The Man of the Crowd" coupled with a wonderful essay by Robert Byer, that made me search for more about Poe and specifically led me to Baudelaire.

Baudelaire translated much of Poe's work into French and was an ardent defender of Poe's work. In his essay "Further Notes on Edgar Poe" he touches on many subjects. Most exquisite is his reading of America and why it was, at the time, not a fertile ground for the Imagination. Much of the rhetoric has to do with Baudelaire's own stance against "progress" but much of what Baudelaire says makes sense in the culture created in the industrial revolution and the culture expressed in "The Man of The Crowd". Industrial capitalism coupled with democratic identity simply does not leave room for the realm of the imagination to flourish. This needs to be unpacked and perhaps defended more than I am willing to do in an informal forum such as my own blog. Sufficed to say, what is meant is that Poe sought alien scenery for his tales because America was a hostile ground for his exact tales.

Baudelaire states that in America "it will always be difficult to pursue at once nobly and fruitfully the profession of man of letters without laying oneself open to the slander and calumny of the impotent" and that "what is difficult enough in a benevolent monarchy or a regular republic becomes well-nigh impossible  in a kind of nightmare chaos in which everyone is a police-constable of opinion and keeps order one behalf of his own vices--or of his virtues" (101). He then goes on to list the problems with the American state including pious hypocrisy, slave owning scandal, and bohemianism. These issues shied Poe away from engaging his tales on American soil. Nathaniel Hawthorne even confined most of his stories to New England--and in many of them subjects such as the crushing of the Native American, or the brutality of the slave trade--are virtually invisible. So Poe, who wanted to engage in ideas of the mind and radical ideas of modernity, was put upon to use another climate: Europe.

In tales that take place in Europe, Poe could explore the creation of the uncanny. Europe has a dense and long history. Thus Poe could explore the idea of progress, of the old and the new clashing, of replacement, in a climate that had been experiencing it for years.However there could be even more reason, or no reason at all, why Poe would refuse many of his stories the setting that was his birthplace. Yet, noticing at least that Poe had chosen against America, can lead one to ask the question of why.

In my own project over the next few months, I intend to tackle this question and have been led to some insightful materials on the subject. Stay tuned, whoever it is that reads this blog!


Baudelaire, Charles. Trans. Mayne, Jonathan. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays by Charles Baudelaire. London, England: Phaidon Publishers Inc. 1964. Print.

And Now For Something Completely Different...

I haven't written in this blog for probably well over a year and a half and not for lack of things to say. It seems to me that, though I love poetry and could now create a vary viable collection of criticism on Wallace Stevens, I need to do more than just criticism to keep me writing. I need a place to openly field ideas. Perhaps a place to talk about what I am currently working on or reading or whatever. 

So why not this blog? Why stick to one thing? I began thinking that the life of an academic was creating a body of work that could speak for you. Something along the lines of "so and so's reading of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest shows their natural talent for close reading and attention to America's post colonial discourse". Yet after spending some time in a graduate program, and observing one of my professors who is often on social media, I have come to the conclusion its more about the conversation and less about the speech.

So what does this mean for this blog? Well, it means several things. First I will be more regularly  posting my ideas on not just literature, but the state of education, the state of the world, and the state of my state. Secondly I may start using this as a grounds to air ideas about what I am currently working on--this means its gonna get sloppy--and what is currently on my mind. Thirdly, I will still analyze literature and put up some critical ideas on poetry, but this may be the back burner.

Hopefully changing my ideas about what this blog is all about will get me writing again. If anyone is reading this then thank you, feel free to comment whether positive or negative, and stay classy.