Late_Cretaceous

Ah, post-modernism. THe philosophy that even philosophers wont touch. As far as I understand it, pomo thought became quite trendy in english and anthro departments for a while. Even after Alan Sokal came clean with his decetion- admiting that his paper "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," submitted to "Social Text" was garbage, many pomos actually tried to claim that his paper actually had some merit.

If you guys want some really good laughs just read some pomo view on the validity of science. Especially amusing are claims about how the scientific method is oppressive (cause it was invented by victorian era white males), and even the law of gravity is a social construct.
Some of them even go so far as to claim that scientific knowledge regarding the universe is equally valid as any primitive mythology

Sowthistle

This is what one gets when you get your literary criticism from "Answers in Genesis" -- an amusing article, but one that does try to center its argument in close reading. However I have several problems with it.

First of all, and quite picky too:

Ok, long or short, it is really is a poem not 'poem' -- as if the term does not have widespread acceptance or only a tenuous claim to the term. If the work of Bukowski and Carolyn Forche are considered poems, then certainly Tennyson with his impeccable iambic tetrameters and a rhyme scheme would qualify. This seems like an attempt to somehow discredit the literariness of the poem because it doesn't jibe with the article's author.

Second, Graham Leo consistently confuses "speaker" with "Tennyson." These are not necessarily the same voice, and it is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain Tennyson's intent through a poem.

I would like to make some specifc critiques about Leo's article and the language of two of the poems he discusses therein. For your interest and reference, here is the complete text of In Memoriam, poems LV & LVI so you can see them in context.

It appears that Graham Leo is unfamiliar with the tradition of strophe-antistrophe in longer poems. He is correct in identiying Tennyson's examination of seeming conflict between God and Nature. And while LV is proposing that the comforts of religion might not seem adequate against the realities of the natural, proveable world, LVI ultimately affirms those comforts.

In the first stanza of LV, we see the troubled thought of the poet asking these questions:

This opening statement is posed as a question, rephrased "Is not the wish that we live on after death derived from the evidence we have of a God that is our Creator and sympathetic to our concerns." The imperfect rhyme of "grave" and "have" gives a feeling of inadequacy, that the two halves do not exactly meet, and provides an idea what the answer to this question might be. The rest of the poem provides the answer to the question "What is that evidence?"

This evidence is weighted towards Nature, though Nature is not sympathetic or comforting: she gives only "evil dreams" (line 6) and seems to disregard the individual in favor of the species (lines 7-12).

Shaken by the preponderance of the evidence, the poet still moves towards religious faith. And though he "falters" where he once "firmly trod", he still "falls upon" the "altar-stairs" of religion. One usually "falls upon" someone they are asking for mercy or pity, so the poet is still turning to religion for comfort.

This affirmation of the tools of faith, thought they may be inadequate, comes in the final stanza:

The language of this stanza is straight out of the Epistles and the early Church fathers. As human beings, our knowledge and efforts are meager compared to the power of God -- we "peer through a glass darkly" at God, we are unworthy of salvation and are granted that boon through the "grace" of an infinitely compassionate Creator. How using this language would support a claim that the speaker has abandoned his faith is beyond me.

I've been going on long enough, so let me confine my comments about LVI to what Leo addresses specifically. He states:

Hmmm, I don't see it. He makes a huge jump with this stanza, one that I do not feel he can make without extreme ideological violence to the text.
LVI has set up Nature and more specifically the metaphysical materialist worldview as bestial and cruel (it is described in line 15 as "red in tooth and claw," and in the next line its "shrieking against his creed" is done "with ravine" or rapacity) as opposed to a figure who has "suffer'd countless ills" in his battles for "the True, the Just" -- a very Christ-like figure that is perhaps standing in for both Christianity and the figure of Tennyson's dearly departed Hallam (for whom the entire elegy is addressed). This "monster" is then dismissed by line 21: it is again a "dream" and then a "discord" that is eclipsed by the "mellow music" of Christian salvation. Additionally the "dragons of the prime/ Who tare each other in their slime" can be little else but dinosaurs, primaeval dragons -- but these too account for little compared to Christian faith.

The final stanza of LVI is an appeal to the mysteries of faith, and an affirmation of its inexplicability:

This is not necessarily an apostrophe to Hallam as a man. Hallam is addressed here as the one who would have firsthand knowledge of whether salvation is reality. For all others, that hope of the afterlife is hidden "behind the veil." The questions of the last three poems have been resolved in a renewed sense of faith in religion.

At some level, Leo's problems with the spirit of the poem have to be centered in the speaker's need to ask questions of his faith. Many of our experiences here at IIDB have shown that to a fundametalist even the asking of a question like that is wrong. What Leo might see as apostatism, I would look at as Tennyson's intellectual integrity. On a literary level, though this is unhelpful.

In Memoriam is an elegy, and there is a tradition in this sort of poem to examine the questions of death, life, memory and accomplishment from a starting point of raw grief, which then becomes refined through intellectual consideration to a resting point, which absolves the grief or places it into a context by which life for the living can progress. Feelings that the God[s] are unfair, that heaven is not sufficient solace, and that the mortal lot in life is unfair are all part of the elegy from its earliest moments. Does this mean that the elegy is inherently antireligious? Probably not.

Is Darwinian evolution even a concern of Tennyson's? Probably not as well -- the question of the origin of species is not that relevant to consoling himself on the death of a close friend.

In closing, Graham Leo could have constructed a stronger argument by trying to draw an intertextual relationship between Tennyson, Shaw and Hardy and the writings of Charles Darwin with specific quotes from Darwin that would prove Leo's assertion that evolution = religious skepticism & finally atheism. Leo would have to actually have read Darwin, a move I find implausible in light of his apparent intellectual integrity.

So I hope this is an answer of sorts to Coragyps' original post. Granted, my area of expertise is 14th Century English poetry, but this has been fun. I have a paper on Piers Plowman I need to get written, so this has been a good way to get my tools sharpened.

Thanks,

ST

WORKS CITED --

Leo, Graham. <a href="http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/3568.asp" target="_blank">Evolution and English Literature: Darwin's Contemporaries: Tennyson, Shaw and Hardy</a>

Tennyson, Alfred Lord<a href="http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/tennyson36.html" target="_blank">Selected Poetry (1809-1883)</a>

[ June 27, 2002: Message edited by: Sowthistle ]

[Edited to address comment by Tharmas -- thanks!]

[ June 28, 2002: Message edited by: Sowthistle ]</p>

KC

You might get a laugh from the review of Sokal's book by Richard Dawkins:

<a href="http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/Dawkins/Work/Reviews/postmodernism_disrobed.htm" target="_blank">http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/Dawkins/Work/Reviews/postmodernism_disrobed.htm</a>


Cheers,

KC

[ June 27, 2002: Message edited by: KCdgw ]</p>

Late_Cretaceous

That was hilarious.

Check out the postmodern random generator. It can actually, randomly generate a pomo essay. <a href="http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern" target="_blank">http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern</a>

Sowthistle

Hey all, I'm going to send that long rebuttal to AiG and hopefully, they'll forward it to Graham Leo. Any final thoughts on Darwin I should pass on?

ST

Coragyps

ST - They won't know what the big words mean, but send it! A round of Guiness says they won't even reply!

Tharmas

I enjoyed your essay Sowthistle and wish you the best of luck with your submission to AiG. Since you are taking it before the public I’ll make one REALLY picky picky comment. Either in my dotage I’ve lost the ability to count to five or them ain’t pentameters!

Personally I’d look forward to reading your essay on Piers the Ploughman…

Cheers!

Sowthistle

You are absolutely right about the tetrameters, I didn't scan enough lines to get the preponderance. I had thought the nine-syllable lines were headless iambic pentameters, but they're not.

I'm not looking for anything spectacular -- I just requested that they forward the critique to the author. See what he has to say about it, because he seems to be able to walk the walk talk the talk as far as lit crit goes.

Cheers back!

ST

G V

If the AiG article under discussion was published in March 1981, then there should be some previous critique in a big library.

Sowthistle

Hey, the folks at AiG responded to my email -- they basically referred me to their own articles about Darwin's statements that "life started in some warm pond somewhere" (now if that's a direct quote from CD I'd be quite impressed) and the fact that he was an atheist from an early age. Which I guess in their mind invalidates my whole point, which was that Tennyson was hardly an atheist. They said they were not qualified to comment on the more academic portion, but they would forward the feedback to Graham Leo (if he's an academic I couldn't find him, probably teaches literature at Bob Jones University or something...)

Here's the text of their response:

It's basically what I expected.

ST