In a message dated 4/2/2015 12:38:36 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes on Bloom on Dickinson:
"I could almost forgive Bloom if he helped me appreciate
Dickinson’s poem more than my earlier reading of it, but he didn’t and I
can’t. He strove mightily to reduce her poem to prose, to so encompass
it with definition and finite lists of possibilities that nothing is
left over to be mere poetry; which I find dismal and in the end
unacceptable."
The same could be said of Ruskin on Turner. In this new film by M. Leigh,
Ruskin is brilliantly played by a pedant who enjoys conversation in the very
presence of Turner, about the MEANING of Turner's paintings! One should
get the screenplay, which is brilliant!
So I would say that there is art (poetry) include, and so-called Criticism
(or Lit. Crit. in the case of poetry) and while 'in the end unacceptable'
for L. Helm, provided it does not promote the understanding of its object
of study, it is often practiced with other purposes in mind?
Bloom's dissecting the Dickinson lines may not be poetry, and may not help
appreciate the essential pervasive obscurity, ambiguity, etc. that is at
the core of Dickinson's _exploiting_ the rules of common use, as it were,
that strive at clarity and reason -- and it's interesting that in this
particular instance what Bloom did Helm happened to find unacceptable (for we
have Helm claiming that such an exercise in criticism is futile if not
furthering our appreciation of the object of study: criticism as an auxiliary
science as it were!
I enjoyed the point about the 'visible' and what is hard to see. I would
distinguish the visible (in Turner, say) and the INvisible, and am reminded
of de Saint Exupéry's brilliant oxymoron:
Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est
invisible pour les yeux.
But back to Turner and Ruskin. As the reviewer in the Telegraph put it,
"Picking favourites is too difficult, but let’s just say the lisping writer
and patron John Ruskin, hilariously played by Joshua McGuire as an
oblivious smartypants, has stwuck a chord with a few of us cwitics."
Oddly, the New York Times reviewer, A. E. Scott, starts his own review of
the film with a quote by Ruskin:
"“Cynicism has no place in the reviewing of art.” Words to live by, for
sure, and all the more so for being uttered by John Ruskin, one of the giants
of 19th-century British art criticism. But nothing is quite so simple."
Cheers,
Speranza
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