Timothy Morton. Cause. Effect.

So, my roommate Wall and I have been listening to itunesU lectures by professor of English Timothy Morton from UC Davis (by way of Oxford) and discussing his treatment of the Romantics. Definitely worthwhile, but we're having different experiences. for Wall, Morton is helping to collapse dualisms (the old Western subject-object dualism has plagued Wall for much of his natural born life, methinks) through his discussion of nature, biology, dark ecology, "ecology without nature," etc. Listen to the lectures for more on this (although for me, the class is a bit overmuch "Romanticism as an occasion for Mortonism," a common pitfall in academia). But for me, there's a simultaneous sense of refreshing thought, intellectual stimulation and the sense of displeasure by that arises by contrast with, what to call it, mundane mind? The network of TV, household chores, small talk, errands, a sense of trivialized work, and resource allocation of the everyday is rendered so utterly banal by comparison, that all things that distract from, call it transcendent mind, are cast in a negative light, unnecessary hindrances to purity of thought, to precision of expression. I am left enlightened, but slightly more arrogant and dissatisfied by the lectures, coarsened, not softened. There are layers to this, no doubt. One is the fact that this man is much smarter than me, manages to have a wife and child and a professorship and combine a vast knowledge of lierature and science, whereas I struggle to teach High School honors English adequately (it's own set of challenges, of course), was unable to get accepted to respected PhD programs in the field, and don't even have a child, yet am hard pressed to carve out a space to grow intellectually. Acceptance of one's current station without allusion is one of my current spiritual hurdles and this is throwing a wrench in the gears. I continue to listen to the lectures, selectively. One such selection came last week, as I was wrapping up Chopin's "The Awakening" with my 11th graders and trying to articulate "feminist criticism" in teenagese. In preparing for the day, I noticed the similarity between Chopin's realist writing and Morton's description of Jane Austen, from whom Chopin obviously learned a thing or two. Indirect speech, point of view, and focalization to use Morton's terminology, referencing "structural narratology." Essentially, there is ambiguity about the shift from description to speech, moving back and forth fluidly, allowing access to the interiority of the characters, because the speech is indirect and its unclear if something is spoken or only thought by a character. The speech is implied. He goes on to say this is the proper focus of literary criticism. i turned this over in my head for a few days and decided that here is where we part ways. He wonders why we should focus on some made up characters when we might just as well write about someone we went out for coffee with. He's essentially trivializing literary criticism that focuses on character and action in favor of linguistic and rhetorical analysis. And while I'm interested in both, it is for different reasons. I'm interested in the focalization technique as a writer, but as a reader, I'm more interested in what's going on with the characters in the story. Why is this more important than someone I went to coffee with? Because my coffee date exists in a fluid space of life, not an intentionally structured narrative to enact some sort of social criticism or other. There's structure, there's authorial intent, however ambiguous or elusive. Call me a Bakhtinian, but there's a speaker and a listener, not just a text existing in and for itself, with techniques to be analyzed in and for themselves. To use an analogy from my Saturday morning activities, this would be like giving the "making of" features of Lord of the Rings, the rigging, the costumes, the set design, the CGI, primacy over the story, which is, after all, what all those pieces are in service of. I'm not entirely sure what camp this puts me in, or if I'm even adequately understanding Morton enough to mount and intelligible counterargument, but there it is.