Hi all,

Now that we’re finished with the novel-based portion of the course, I thought I would share a couple of passages I found interesting in a book I’ve been reading for another class. The book is about American modernist poet Hart Crane, and this particular section of the book is concerned with Crane’s elaborate use of descriptive language. While these passages are concerned with verse, I’m wondering if there are any comments we can make on the ‘economy of language’ in any of the novels we’ve read, or novels in general.

“A case can be made, however, on behalf of such an ‘immature’ way of writing. In ‘Writing as a General Economy,’ the Canadian poet-critic Steve McCaffery vigorously defends wasteful expenditure as a defining characteristic of good poetry. He builds upon Georges Bataille’s distinction between a ‘restricted economy,’ one whose ‘operation is based upon valorized notions of restraint, conservation, investment, profit, accumulation and cautious procedularities in risk taking,’ and a ‘general economy,’ which includes ‘all non-utilitarian activities of excess, unavoidable waste and non-productive consumption’ such as ‘orgasm, sacrifice, meditation, The Last Supper, and dreams’. […] McCaffery takes a stand on behalf of that rare poetry that exhibits ‘deployment without use, without aim and without a will to referential or propositional lordship’. Drawing upon Marcel Mauss and Bronislaw Malinowski, he argues that such special poetry operates not according to the restrictive economy of capitalism but according to the logic of the ‘gift exchange,’ in which ‘the object is exhausted, consumed in the very staging’ of the gift and no return or reward is expected. As in a potlatch, a perspicacious poet displays and exhausts the abundance of his or her most prized possession, language. ‘TO WASTE,’ McCaffery writes, ‘IS TO LIVE THE EXPERIENCE OF WEALTH’.” (Reed 84-85, McCaffery and Bataille qtd. in Reed 84-84).

I’d love to know what you guys think!

Reed, Brent. Hart Crane: After his Lights. University of Alabama Press (2006). Print.