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July 29, 2007

Surprise!

[see also The Year (Something) Happened above] Take an extract from Fondatore's Understudied Concepts in the Structural Functioning of Modern Poetry, vol. 9, (rev. edn. of 1984):

This is "surprise" as illustrated in Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), an image given to Darwin for his book by the great Victorian photographer O. G. Rejlander. (Rejlander was the person the contents of whose studio inspired Charles Lutwidge Dodson to take up photography.) Darwin comments:

"Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement. The latter frame of mind is closely akin to terror. Attention is shown by the eyebrows being slightly raised; and as this state increases into surprise, they are raised to a much greater extent, with the eyes and mouth widely open. The raising of the eyebrows is necessary in order that the eyes should be opened quickly and widely; and this movement produces transverse wrinkles across the forehead....

"Every sudden emotion, including astonishment, quickens the action of the heart, and with it the respiration. Now we can breathe, as Gratiolet remarks and as appears to me to be the case, much more quietly through the open mouth than through the nostrils. Therefore, when we wish to listen intently to any sound, we either stop breathing, or breathe as quietly as possible, by opening our mouths, at the same time keeping our bodies motionless.... When the attention is concentrated for a length of time with fixed earnestness on any object or subject, all the organs of the body are forgotten and neglected; and as the nervous energy of each individual is limited in amount, little is transmitted to any part of the system, excepting that which is at the time brought into energetic action. Therefore many of the muscles tend to become relaxed, and the jaw drops from its own weight. This will account for the dropping of the jaw and open mouth of a man stupefied with amazement, and perhaps when less strongly affected."

Modernity has made whole swaths of everyday experience infinitely more regulated, stable, repetitive and, if not more repetitive, then more predictable than was once the case. So it is not surprising that, in compensatory fashion, modern culture, and especially modern poetry, places such a premium on the moment of surprise, on the swerve into novelty. For example, "defamiliarization" became a necessary artistic strategy because only what looks strange and novel can be experienced as significant. Yeats (born in 1865, only a few days after Wagner's inexorable Tristan und Isolde had been given its first performance) is full of interesting ideas about the aesthetics of surprise. Thus, for him, the sudden change of tack is a sign of impending insight, for the genuine thinker "approach[es] the truth full of hesitation and doubt." He associates predictablity with the dominance of the managerially- and financially-minded middle-class, which "loves rhetoric because rhetoric is impersonal and predetermined, and it hates poetry whose suggestions cannot be foreseen." Surprise is even more important than truth: "Even if what one defends be true, an attitude of defence, a continual apology, whatever the cause, make the mind barren because it kills intellectual innocence; that delight in what is unforeseen, and in the mere spectacle of the world, the mere drifting hither and thither that must come before all true thought and emotion."

One of Yeats's own most memorable emblems of the unforeseen or of the surprising comes in his January 1914 poem which begins: "Pardon, old fathers, if you still remain | Somewhere in ear-shot for the story's end", the opening poem of Responsibilities. There he celebrates the crazy but memorable, lateral leap of one of his ancestors, William Middleton, a ship-owner and trader, an "Old merchant skipper that leaped overboard | After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay". On deck one moment, abandoning prudence as he suddenly mutates from being a "skipper" to a "leaper", the next the old man is heroically and pointlessly climbing through the waves to rescue a useless hat. An unexpected puff of wind is like a touch of grace, allowing Middleton's hidden, anti-bourgeois qualities to rise into view.

Many Yeats poems veer, twist, decelerate, speed up, or suddenly stop as they enact in their movements this cult of the unforeseen. Think of the end of "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory", for example. Oddly, the poem seems to take several stanzas after its opening before it really begins, that is, before it sets itself to address the ostensible subject of the elegy, Robert Gregory. Then, not long after, just as Gregory's plane unexpectedly plunged to earth, so Yeats's poem — though hardly started in conventional terms — judders to a precipitate halt. Opening verbosity is counterpointed by closing laconicism: "a thought | Of that late death took all my heart for speech." The closing here is a classic instance of "surprise". Remember Darwin: "When the attention is concentrated for a length of time with fixed earnestness on any object or subject, all the organs of the body are forgotten and neglected; and as the nervous energy of each individual is limited in amount, little is transmitted to any part of the system, excepting that which is at the time brought into energetic action. Therefore many of the muscles tend to become relaxed, and the jaw drops from its own weight. This will account for the dropping of the jaw and open mouth of a man stupefied with amazement."(Even as his verse performs the experience of amazement, at another level, Yeats remains in control, as one can see by noting how his mastery of reversals extends here to making "late" in the last line seem like a synonym for "early".)

Yeats treats these formal embodiments of "surprise" as indices of the superior individual's freedom from constraint by the law of the herd. I prefer to think of these disjunctive formal shapes and eruptive thematic moments as something more like algebraic representations of a widely-shared historical experience — surprise is beautiful because it says "It need not be this way." To those relentlessly socialized into a world mainly without surprises, it offers a glimpse into a different mode of experience. Meanwhile, even the actual geo-political "history" which we are living through nowadays seems sombrely unvarying, grimly, direly predictable. It is not that hard to say that the "future looks grim" because it does not seem that difficult to discern what the future will look like. That is, it will unfortunately not be essentially different from the present. Where can deep surprise, which we humans surely need only slightly less than we need security, come from today? One answer is: from theoretical physics. A glance into even a popular book about the universe multiverse shows that. There, whatever is not bewildering or incomprehensible is untrue, and that alone "quickens the action of the heart."

Fondatore (vide supra) concludes with an evasive remark to the effect that much work "remains to be done" by critics seeking to understand the importance of surprise to the modern poem.

Posted by njenkins at July 29, 2007 07:52 PM

With the exception of interspersed quotations, all writing is © 2007-09 by Nicholas Jenkins