I find the Ern Malley episode a bit puzzling. Yes, if we’re talking about, say the origin of a religious story, then it’s possible to reveal the theory as false. But there isn’t such a thing as “true” or “false” in prose. Even if McAuley and Stewart purposely wrote what they considered to be bad poems, what does their intent matter if they produced poems others thought were good? If I like a book, my liking of it doesn’t become “wrong” or “mistaken” if it’s revealed that the author was actually trying to write a bad book, anymore than me disliking a book becomes mistaken simply because the author was trying to write a good book.
I think modernist poetry is invested in the belief that there is something special about excellent modernist poems; that is, their structure produces emotions or enlightenment not found in random series of words, and modernist poets deserve high status because they can create structures with this emotion or enlightenment.
A competing hypothesis is that the arrangement of words in modernist poetry has no particular value at all, and that people who claim it has value are only doing so to gain status within the modernist poet community.
I think the important part of the Malley experiment was that the two hoaxers created their poems from randomly chosen phrases taken by opening books to random pages. If there’s no way to distinguish a random collection of words from a great modernist poem, then people who can create “great modernist poems” aren’t special and don’t deserve high status, and it supports the hypothesis that people who claim to have been moved by modernist poetry are faking it to look highbrow.
But in reference to your point, I remember reading Lovecraft’s poem “Nathicana” and being very impressed by it. I was astonished to discover a few years later that he wrote it as a parody of people who stick too much emotion into their poetry. I was only slightly mollified to learn I wasn’t the only person who liked it and that it was often held up as an example of how a deliberately bad poem can sometimes be pretty good.
Setting up this sort of experiment, especially in regard to poetry or other humanities topics, seems to be the overwhelming barrier.
We can take at face value that “Malley’s” poems were created from phrases of a limited length selected at random (whatever that really means in this case) and then arranged in a random manner.
This setup would allow us to say that some modernist critics cannot distinguish a modernist poem written by a single person (although with possible allusions and cribbings) from one constructed with phrases less than a specified length from a specific pool of literature.
From what I have found on the affair, it is hard to see if there was much experimental design at all (a criticism that Sokal can share in):
“So, in a series of mischievous creative fugues, they gleaned lines from here and there, even from the American Armed Forces guide to mosquito infestation, and put it together in what they perceived to be a brilliant imitation of the new poetic genre. They dubbed the poet Ern Malley and to avoid the publishers seeking contact with him, they said that, like Keats, he had died young. They then invented his sister, Ethel, who “discovered” the poetry and decided to send it to Harris to judge it for literary merit.” -(http://www.ernmalley.com/text_only.html)
In this specific case, we are stuck with two people who seemed to intentionally create a spoof of modernist poetry which is not a terrible representation of the genre. For a progressive journal to publishing something that was designed to make a strong attempt at passing as modernist poetry using the new technique of collage seems completely appropriate.
Does this seem like an adequate control poem for an experiment of this sort:
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Night Piece
The swung torch scatters seeds In the umbelliferous dark And a frog makes guttural comment On the naked and trespassing Nymph of the lake.
The symbols were evident, Though on park-gates The iron birds looked disapproval With rusty invidious beaks.
Among the water-lilies A splash—white foam in the dark! And you lay sobbing then Upon my trembling intuitive arm
I suspect that a randomly generated poem from a large amount of source material would look significantly different. I tried out some google poem generators (which are probably not acceptable for this sort of experiment either), and the results weren’t as nice http://shawnrider.com/google/index.php?query=modernism&Submit=generate+poem
In the end, problems with authorship and creation by collage are two of the widely recognized features of modernist poetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_poetry_in_English. The hoax seems to prove that some of modernist poetry’s techniques are indeed effective.
I think your point about intentionally created spoofs like Nathicana coming out as good poetry drives home the point that these sorts of parodies aren’t necessarily a good example of control poem construction.
Making these sorts of critiques brings in the distinction between being rational vs rationalizing http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/rationalization.html. If you already have a point you want to prove and proceed to construct a method whereby you’ll prove it, it isn’t truly rational. If you spend a long time working on experimental design and becoming curious about how these methods (structural analysis of myths or modernist poetry) succeed/fail vs a random smattering of words and ideas, then you can build some rational knowledge on the matter.
While I like the idea of the spot the fakes test, I think it would be difficult to come up with good examples where the experimental design really leads to interesting conclusions with the scope of the project.
If a typical randomly-generated work of art is good, then most possible works of art are good, which means you’re setting the bar for “good” (or “liked by me”) too low.
Usually in art-criticism, the critics aren’t really concerned with whether any one particular person likes or dislikes the particular work of art. Instead, they are trying for less value-oriented analysis, such as what themes might be present, what techniques were used, etc.
So probably the embarrassment from the hoax was due to the “fake-critics” claiming that surely one particular passage was a truly inspired example of symbolism of the dichotomy present in male-female relationships or whatever, only for the hoaxers to reveal that there was no symbolism at all, as the passage was randomly generated.
I find the Ern Malley episode a bit puzzling. Yes, if we’re talking about, say the origin of a religious story, then it’s possible to reveal the theory as false. But there isn’t such a thing as “true” or “false” in prose. Even if McAuley and Stewart purposely wrote what they considered to be bad poems, what does their intent matter if they produced poems others thought were good? If I like a book, my liking of it doesn’t become “wrong” or “mistaken” if it’s revealed that the author was actually trying to write a bad book, anymore than me disliking a book becomes mistaken simply because the author was trying to write a good book.
I think modernist poetry is invested in the belief that there is something special about excellent modernist poems; that is, their structure produces emotions or enlightenment not found in random series of words, and modernist poets deserve high status because they can create structures with this emotion or enlightenment.
A competing hypothesis is that the arrangement of words in modernist poetry has no particular value at all, and that people who claim it has value are only doing so to gain status within the modernist poet community.
I think the important part of the Malley experiment was that the two hoaxers created their poems from randomly chosen phrases taken by opening books to random pages. If there’s no way to distinguish a random collection of words from a great modernist poem, then people who can create “great modernist poems” aren’t special and don’t deserve high status, and it supports the hypothesis that people who claim to have been moved by modernist poetry are faking it to look highbrow.
But in reference to your point, I remember reading Lovecraft’s poem “Nathicana” and being very impressed by it. I was astonished to discover a few years later that he wrote it as a parody of people who stick too much emotion into their poetry. I was only slightly mollified to learn I wasn’t the only person who liked it and that it was often held up as an example of how a deliberately bad poem can sometimes be pretty good.
Setting up this sort of experiment, especially in regard to poetry or other humanities topics, seems to be the overwhelming barrier.
We can take at face value that “Malley’s” poems were created from phrases of a limited length selected at random (whatever that really means in this case) and then arranged in a random manner.
This setup would allow us to say that some modernist critics cannot distinguish a modernist poem written by a single person (although with possible allusions and cribbings) from one constructed with phrases less than a specified length from a specific pool of literature.
From what I have found on the affair, it is hard to see if there was much experimental design at all (a criticism that Sokal can share in):
In this specific case, we are stuck with two people who seemed to intentionally create a spoof of modernist poetry which is not a terrible representation of the genre. For a progressive journal to publishing something that was designed to make a strong attempt at passing as modernist poetry using the new technique of collage seems completely appropriate.
Does this seem like an adequate control poem for an experiment of this sort:
====
I suspect that a randomly generated poem from a large amount of source material would look significantly different. I tried out some google poem generators (which are probably not acceptable for this sort of experiment either), and the results weren’t as nice http://shawnrider.com/google/index.php?query=modernism&Submit=generate+poem
In the end, problems with authorship and creation by collage are two of the widely recognized features of modernist poetry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_poetry_in_English. The hoax seems to prove that some of modernist poetry’s techniques are indeed effective.
I think your point about intentionally created spoofs like Nathicana coming out as good poetry drives home the point that these sorts of parodies aren’t necessarily a good example of control poem construction.
Making these sorts of critiques brings in the distinction between being rational vs rationalizing http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/09/rationalization.html. If you already have a point you want to prove and proceed to construct a method whereby you’ll prove it, it isn’t truly rational. If you spend a long time working on experimental design and becoming curious about how these methods (structural analysis of myths or modernist poetry) succeed/fail vs a random smattering of words and ideas, then you can build some rational knowledge on the matter.
While I like the idea of the spot the fakes test, I think it would be difficult to come up with good examples where the experimental design really leads to interesting conclusions with the scope of the project.
If a typical randomly-generated work of art is good, then most possible works of art are good, which means you’re setting the bar for “good” (or “liked by me”) too low.
Usually in art-criticism, the critics aren’t really concerned with whether any one particular person likes or dislikes the particular work of art. Instead, they are trying for less value-oriented analysis, such as what themes might be present, what techniques were used, etc.
So probably the embarrassment from the hoax was due to the “fake-critics” claiming that surely one particular passage was a truly inspired example of symbolism of the dichotomy present in male-female relationships or whatever, only for the hoaxers to reveal that there was no symbolism at all, as the passage was randomly generated.