Erving Goffman, the 50s and Literature

Sociology: what is it good for? For students of literature, that is. I'm pondering this question as generals loom. Still on my list, yet to be cracked, are Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction and Jurgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere — both works that have already influenced my thinking via my hazy preconceptions of what they are likely to say, but which I must admit I'm scared to actually confront. And even more scared to have to talk about in front of a committee who might actually know something about them.

One sociology book I have managed to read, however, as previously mentioned, is Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. I have some ideas about how I might eventually be able to work this into a developing thesis idea about the social self-presentation of poets and the genealogy that stretches from Eliot to Auden to Ashbery, but I will leave those aside for another day. In the meantime, I'll just give a sketch of some first impressions of Goffman, in the hope that they might lead to something more fruitful later.

I was turned on to Goffman originally by Jeff Nunokawa, who used a little bit of I think Frame Analysis in his Victorian novel seminar as a conceptual framework to talk about "awayness" and the evasion of the social totality (Jeff, in his own personal conceptual system, plays Goffman off against Foucault). He is (still?) highly regarded as a sociologist who facilitated a paradigm shift within the discipline from the macro- to the micro- level, i.e. studying not broad social trends or "laws" but actual human behavior as collected by experts in the field operating similarly to anthropologists.

Anyway, The Presentation of Self is a weird, crafty, idiosyncratic little book that is equal parts empirical survey, philosophical treatise, etiquette guide and public relations manual. Its basic subject is "the art of impression management": how people strive to make other people feel a certain way about them, or to limit or control the information others have about them. (This theme gets its best literary expression, to my knowledge anyway, in the works of David Foster Wallace.) To this end, Goffman uses "some language of the stage," speaking of performances, backstage areas, rehearsals and improvisations, etc., only to retract this conceit on the second-to-last page in a headspinning rhetorical move: "The claim that all the world's a stage is sufficiently commonplace for readers to be familiar with its limitations and tolerant of its presentation" (254) — that is, this very claim, on which the whole book has been based, was itself an impression-management strategy. It made me slap my forehead when I read it.

Though Goffman focuses on real-time interactions and thus is naturally led to use theatrical terminology, the manipulations he describes could just as well be those of a novelist, or a poet, both of whom also work by carefully controlling the amount of information, both literary and extra-literary, given to the audience of their work. In fact, one thing that distinguishes Goffman from sociologists past (Weber, Durkheim) and future (Bourdieu) is his conscious literariness. Not only is his own prose style economical and attractive, clearly learned from reading short stories and New Yorker profiles, but he often takes his clinching examples from literary sources: some of the authors he quotes from at length include Kenneth Burke (25, 175, 194), Henry Mayhew (41), Kafka (96), Warren Miller (97), Evelyn Waugh (101), Orwell (122), Melville (137), Gore Vidal (193) and Mary McCarthy (219) (as well as stuff like Character, Manner and Customs in the People of India and Ebony magazine). And it must be admitted that he sometimes comes off like a frustrated novelist himself ("So, too, members of the team must not exploit their presence in the front region in order to stage their own show, as do, for example, marriageable stenographers who sometimes encumber their office surroundings with a lush undergrowth of high fashion," 214). There's a lot of that sort of thing, sometimes a little too much: a number of Goffman's categories seem like opportunities for examples rather than helpful distinctions in their own right.
Goffman is also, noticeably, a creature of the 50s, receptive to the literary and intellectual influences of that time. One of the more interesting features of Goffman's book are its periodic mentions of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre's Being and Nothingness supplies a description of a waiter in a café who "is playing at being a waiter in a café": "The child plays with his body in order to explore it, to take inventory of it; the waiter in the café plays with his condition in order to realize it" (76). De Beauvoir's The Second Sex is quoted a few times to describe the attitude of women (problematically labelled "woman," a usage not followed by Goffman) to their performances in the presence of men: "Confronting man woman is always play-acting; she lies when she makes believe that she accepts her status as the inessential other … With other women, a woman is behind the scenes; she is polishing her equipment, but not in battle; she is getting her costume together, preparing her make-up, laying out her tactics…" (113).

On the one hand, Goffman's quotations from Sartre and De Beauvoir clearly have something to do with the widespread popularity of Existentialism in America in the 50s; this vogue both explains why the quotes impressed Goffman and why he feels they will bolster his argument with a "lay" "literary" reader. But in another sense Sartre seems an odd choice of hero, given that Goffman (a) doesn't seem to be much interested in metaphysics, or abstract thinking of any kind, and (b) avoids any explicit discussion of politics. And yet Sartre and De Beauvoir were also associated with and influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, author of The Structure of Behavior and The Phenomenology of Perception — both Goffman-ish titles. And while I don't know squat about phenomenology — just that it was also being enthusiastically received in the art critical world at about this time, by Michael Fried for instance, and that it made my eyes glaze over in college — it's clearly this aspect of Existentialism, and not so much its concern with "being" or "commitment," that interested Goffman.

Well, how about this. A vogue for phenomenology suits a sudden awareness of an explosion of phenomena: and that's what the affluence of the American postwar economy, with all its attendant cultural renaissances, produced. And there was apparently also an explosion of sociological research conducted and published in the 1950s (much of it, I think, under Goffman's supervision). Reading The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life you get the feeling that we have so much more data on 1950s America than we do on any previous society. While Goffman occasionally dips back into earlier eras (often Victorian or eighteenth-century England) for his examples, he rarely "historicizes" in the sense of accounting for changes in values or social agreements from one period to another. I would have to think that this close focus on the current day was fairly radical for the field of sociology, which, in its development out of Hegelian philosophy and traditional social history, would have been interested in nothing so much as epochal change. My question is, how much of Goffman's contentment with "now" was tied to a general sense in the America of the 50s that, after centuries of talking around the subject, everyday life itself was finally being discovered, a notion that is connected both to the public events of the time — the Kinsey Report comes up in passim — and the gradual permeation of such intellectual events as Freudianism and phenomenology into American life? It's a notion, at any rate, that prepares the way for Confessionalism, and for the Beat poets.

A final question. Can Goffman meaningfully be called a Modernist, or even placed in respect to the intellectual influence of Modernism? This is tricky. His literary sources (with a few interesting exceptions, like Kafka) are straight-ahead novelistic realism, because that's where the source of the best information lies. He shows little concern with language, and much with physicality and expression, making his work hard to subsume under the heading of "the linguistic turn" that is often seen to be Modernism's theoretical counterpart. (On the other hand, it suggests points of contact with the later Wittgenstein.) In his concern with "everyday life" rather than "culture," with the facts of contemporary social life rather than what it evolved out of or might be tending toward, he is not at all in the semi-metaphysical tradition of Eliot, Leavis and Raymond Williams. But clearly he's in no way a throwback to 19th century intellectual traditions either: he engages with Freud, with Simmel and Durkheim, with literature. He recognizes modernity has taken place, but he prefers to anatomize and catalogue it than to situate it in a larger historical or theoretical framework. For this reason the Modernist he most resembles is probably Joyce, the Balzacian Joyce who bragged about Ulysses being a blueprint from which turn-of-the-century Dublin could be reconstructed.
Or maybe Beckett: "Performers are aware they foster and ordinarily also possess destructive information about the show," Goffman states on page 144. Waiting for Godot had its American premiere in 1956, Endgame in 1957; a dedicated follower of Existentialism would presumably have been aware of them. This last point raises the question of what I'll risk calling the postmodernity of Goffman's approach, and it's closely connected with one of my biggest problems with his book in general. It seems to me that Goffman's concept of "destructive information" (first used on page 141) is seriously flawed. Putting my objection in short, analytically unrigorous form: just how sensitive are we, anyway? Goffman sometimes talks as though the merest breeze that happens along could destroy the delicate ecosystems of human interaction that he so minutely anatomizes. Social relations are more adaptable and impervious than that, as the early work of Stanley Cavell (in my view a direct inheritor of Goffman: but more on that trajectory another day) shows quite extensively. Goffman, for one thing, is so eagle-eyed himself that he fails to account for the fact of repression, or willful not-noticing, that the more Freudian Cavell so doggedly attends to in essays like "Knowing and Acknowledging." But this emphasis on the ever-present possibility of destruction, far from being a mere weakness on Goffman's part, may point to something bigger, a distinctively postwar epistemic framework that extends inexorably to where we are now: that is, we are getting used to being disillusioned — perhaps Adorno would say "disenchanted" — consistently, and in every aspect of our cultural life. (This is a condition perhaps also anticipated by Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations was made available and became influential only after the Second World War.)

Hypothesis: in the postmodern period, disillusionment itself becomes the frame in which cultural activity — and not just, but especially, literary activity — is automatically viewed.

Corollary: it's time for a nap.

Naiveté, Irony, Repetition, Repetition

So I have finally started reading Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, and I'm struck, as who wouldn't be, by this sentence at the end of his first chapter: "I am saying that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War" (35).

Yeah? You and what army? As always with this kind of pronouncement, it depends when, and where, you situate the "modern," and Fussell is situating it in the England of the 1910s, by which point modernity, by most people's lights, had already been going on for some forty years, if not fifty or sixty. (It's a weird experience to read critical texts semi-chronologically and see the date of the beginning of "modernity" recede further and further into the past; I think it's about at 1550 now.) All of this is just semantics, though, and doesn't affect Fussell's basic argument (in his first chapter; not in the whole book) that a form of irony associated primarily with Thomas Hardy became, as a result of the colossal social disillusionment by the events of World War I, the modern literary temperament, preparing the way for Eliot, the later Pound, and all the rest of the Modernist gloomy gusses. This irony, put in the simplest possible way, posits an innocent Before and a terrible After, with the author/speaker situated firmly on the latter side, the After (whether it be of war, modernity, death, classicism, revolution).

While not exactly disagreeing with this analysis, I'm interested in the fact that it so obviously doesn't apply to the two modernist writers I've been reading most intensively lately, namely Gertrude Stein and Guillaume Apollinaire. While Fussell locates the force of Hardy's irony in "a collision between innocence and awareness" (5), it seems to me that both Apollinaire and Stein skirt these categories in favor of a thoroughgoing, incorruptible naïveté which simply cannot be mapped on to the before/after structure Fussell sets up. This naïveté seems, more than anything else, to be what links these two seminal figures, and on Fussell's reading it is utterly opposed to the definition of "modern" sensibility that the Great War puts forward and that, on his reading, is apotheosized in a postwar modernist like Eliot. So, is it only because Stein and Apollinaire came of age well before the War that they are so invested not in knowingness (which is what irony, in Hardy's sense, is all about) but in ignorance, in lack of knowledge? Is it because they are American, and French/Italian/Polish, rather than British? Or what?
I'll start with Stein. I keep thinking of a remark made I think by Tristan Tzara in that amazing Pamphlet Against Gertrude Stein that Jeremy assigned us last semester, to the effect that Stein has a "baby style": not quite right, I don't think (she's more like an extremely excited and confident six-year-old) but close enough to suggest the lack of sophistication that Stein so willfully projects in her writing, a lack of sophistication coupled with a dogged urge to pronounce, to state, to display authority.

Two procedures seem important to Stein in maintaining this tricky balance between naïveté: repetition (yes, that again) and time-framing. I was very interested, Greg, in what you wrote a while back about Yeats "testing" his words through repetition, or, to quote you specifically, "asking his rhythm to test ideas and words til they become old in the way polished stones in creeks are old." It's tempting to apply this description to Stein as well: certainly, The Making of Americans (when it's not reminding me of a vacuum cleaner) has the feel of a verbal laboratory, in which the author tries tiny variations on a limited number of formulae, hoping to produce some long-promised extraordinary effect. But Yeats' testing, one could say, attempts to create a sort of eternal present through the construction of a usable mythic past; whereas Stein is always oddly oriented toward the future, at the expense of the past and present. What's interesting in The Making of Americans is how she continually dispels the incantatory power of her repetitions with little reminders that she's driving at something: "soon there will be a history of the Hersland children," "later it will become clearer the kind of being that each one had in them," etc. (I'm paraphrasing; you know how it is, the book's all the way on the other side of the room). These reiterations aren't allowed to seem old, or familiar, or even properly symbolic, the way Yeats' (or Eliot's or Pound's) repeated words are, because they're so obviously temporary: they're not mantras but coordinates on an enormous map we will soon (but when?) be able to step back and admire.

All this to say, Stein is not a Symbolist: where Mallarmé or Verlaine or Symons or Yeats take aesthetic pleasure in the symbol, the image and the word in and of themselves, Stein is so focused on her version of the novelist's traditional "big picture" that she refrains from putting too much weight on any one detail or image or construction. What's happening in The Making of Americans is happening sentence by sentence, but it's not happening within the sentence; and it is, for that reason, impossible to excerpt. One could say that it's happening in the next sentence, only by the time we get there it no longer is. Again and again, we confront Stein's "sometime," "someday," "soon," and, occasionally, a "now" that projects us into the next sentence or paragraph hopefully only to confront us with another delay, or another restatement. This stops being incredibly frustrating only once (and if) you begin to view Stein's progress as incremental, that is, that she is actually accomplishing what she claims to be putting off until later: viz., narrating the history of a family's progress.
Another kind of modernist naïveté is displayed by Stein's contemporary and friend Guillaume Apollinaire. Even more than poétès maudits like Rimbaud and Verlaine, Apollinaire writes a style of French that is intentionally awkward: polyglot, crude, often obscene, syntactically either overly simple or ridiculously muddled. (It may or may not be necessary to emphasize that he did this on purpose; his critical prose is perfectly literate, even elegant.) The title of his most famous volume is Alcools and I think more than a few times in it he is endeavoring to mimic drunkenness (and in the last poem he turns into the mouth of Paris and drinks the blood of Europe like wine). Like Stein, he uses repetition to an effect that is less authoritative than childlike ("Les anges les anges dans le ciel," e.g.). And he also likes to play with the time-frames of his works, most obviously in his landmark poem "La Chanson du Mal Aimé," which begins:

Et je chantais cette romance
En 1903 sans savoir
Que mon amour à la semblance
Du beau Phénix s'il meurt un soir
Le matin voit sa renaissance

(And I sang this ballad
In 1903 in ignorance
Of love's resemblance
To the Phoenix dead at evening
Resurrected by morning) (Alcools, 14-15)

Apollinaire is effectively beginning his poem with a disclaimer: this poem was written in 1903, when I knew less about the subject; I no longer feel this way. But somehow rather than undermining the lyric intensity of the poem that follows, this bizarre flash-forward heightens it (and the tension builds as Apollinaire goes on to interpolate three further poems, taking place further back in the speaker's past or in his fantasy, all of which complicate the lyrical "now" of his "Chanson"). The reason for this is that the ignorance of the speaker is exactly what conditions his utterance: it is Apollinaire's favored pose to be bewildered, melancholy, and slightly drunk-seeming, just as it is Stein's to be earnest, relentless, and positivistic. The poem works if we are affected by this state of confusion and ignorance, and identify with it. But unlike in traditional dramatic irony, where the speaker's ignorance helps us to attain a position of interpretive power over him (because we know more than he does), here the effect relies on us sharing for the most part in the speaker's ignorance, while still recognizing it as ignorance.

Like Stein, then, Apollinaire makes us feel that we aren't fully in possession of the equipment we need to read his work: that it would not just be a matter of understanding how he feels now, but also who he used to be. And of course this knowledge is not just difficult to acquire, it's impossible, and not just for us, but for the speaker himself. The proper time of understanding the poem is not now and not then, and not a simple mediation between the two (as in Hardy's customary irony). For in Apollinaire's poems, each line is an experience of its own: they float on the page, abutting but not intruding on each other (an effect which is enhanced by Apollinaire's removal of all punctuation from the book at the proof-correcting stage).

What I am (very provisionally) theorizing here is a sort of naïve irony common to Apollinaire and Stein, a chosen naïvete, one which always retains the suggestion of a state of greater knowledge to come but which prefers to write out of ignorance (thus, perhaps, anticipating Beckett and his epochal rejection of Joyce's "omniscience and omnipotence"); and that this stands apart from the essentially ironic, elegiac strain of Modernism that Fussell sees as coming to fruition during the Great War. I can't decide whether this type of irony — if it even is irony — is the opposite of Hardy's, or just a lot more complicated: for Hardy there is only before and after, now and then, while for Apollinaire there is a complex weft of nows and thens, perhaps as many as there are lines in the poem.

Question: does this kind of naïve attitude make irony, as such, impossible?

OK, I am probably sounding like Marjorie Perloff with a couple of drinks in her. Sorry to go on so long.

I haven't even gotten to Apollinaire's war poetry yet, but I think it will make a fascinating comparison with the kind of stuff Fussell writes about in his book (about which also more anon).