Wednesday, January 25, 2006
On Literary Pleasure
'Learning tends to be, in various ways and for various reasons, pleasurable, and for many of us learning from poems (or novels or movies or pop songs) tends to be doubly pleasurable, to flesh and spirit equally, to mind and heart simultaneously--that harmony, that interdependence of our faculties seems to me of the essence for this enjoyment, for these literary pleasures. But as [Roland] Barthes insists and Aristotle, were he not something of a prude, would agree, without the sensual urge for the satisfaction of the senses, the mind's and the spirit's pleasures, unsummoned by the sensual imagination, would not exist. Delighted cognition would no more exist than would the pleasure of solace or diversion, and so it is the carnal pleasure in reading poems aloud, the heard voice's evoking images and sounds and meanings, that I emphasize. And this pleasure has much less to do with that cunning honey smeared on the rim of the medicinal cup (but what child was ever twice fooled by that ruse?) than it does with the slow and imperceptible nurture that Valery assures us we forget that we ingest, so intent we are on sucking the sweetness from the orange.'
W.R. Johnson, 'The Death of Pleasure: Literary Critics in Technological Societies' (from The Interpretation of Roman Poetry: Empiricism or Hermeneutics?, Karl Galinksy, ed., p.202)
W.R. Johnson, 'The Death of Pleasure: Literary Critics in Technological Societies' (from The Interpretation of Roman Poetry: Empiricism or Hermeneutics?, Karl Galinksy, ed., p.202)
