Acephalous

Because, of course, Jack London sucks harder than many comics, Part II

(My commenters wrote my first response to Bill's post for me.  They nailed it so accurately posting what I'd originally written seems unnecessary.  I'm neither kidding nor, it seems, necessary.  So in the [likely] event of a [hilariously hi-jinxed] tragedy, Acephalous can [and should] live on.)

Let me start with a statement that will annoy everyone: if a close-reading reveals that a work flirts with the formal elements of its genre or genres—whatever they may be—that work should be canonized.  Not that works that fail to engage the formal limitations of their genre are uncanonizable, mind you, but works that succeed both as an example and a critique of a given genre deserve canonization.

But canonization into what? 

In an age of inexpensive and practically limitless storage, the question of canonization need not be hidebound to the idea of preservation.  Within its first month of operation, Google digitized the 99 percent of the Western Canon, and even though some of those works are too recent to be viewed, they'll all eventually be released as copyright expiration rolls forward.  When I began my Mark Twain chapter in late 2005, for example, only the 1894 edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson was available through Google Book Search; by the time I began revising the chapter in the summer of 2008, I could track revisions of the novel over the span of two decades.  Because Twain is culturally significant and canonical, the saturation of Google Books with variant editions of his most important works was inevitable.  

This was not.

When I began working on The Youth of Washington (1904), I had to order it through interlibrary loan.  It took three months to arrive.  Henry Cabot Lodge's George Washington (1889), Paul Ford's The True George Washington (1896), Woodrow Wilson's George Washington (1896), Worthington Chauncey Ford's George Washington (1900) and Norman Hapgood's George Washington: A Biography (1901) trickled in.  Had I held off on writing my chapter until I'd looked over all 140 of the novels of English Colonial or Revolutionary America published between 1895 and 1908, I'd still be waiting for interlibrary loan.  Now all those Washington biographies are available, as are most of the historical novels I wanted to read for deep background. 

Are those novels good?  No.  Do they deserve canonization?  No.  Is it significant that as tensions between Spain and America strained and Americans became uncomfortable with the imperial pretensions of their leader, an appetite for works relating to Revolutionary figures or set in the Revolutionary period become incredibly popular?  Might that not have something important to say about what Americans thought it meant to be American at the time?  Is that not a viable object of study?  Do I not ask a shitload of rhetorical questions when I get polemical? 

For a few of generations, English professors claimed that cultural knowledge was the provenance of the literary (what with perceptiveness being the core feature of literary sensibility).  So when a scholar wanted to know how things stood between America and Europe at a given time, they would not turn to any of the countless travel narratives written by Americans in Europe and Europeans in America, but to the most acutely literary accounts of the current state affairs.  To wit:

The problem with Lucy's account of the canon and cultural knowledge should be obvious: however you define the literary, it is not the same thing as cultural knowledge.  An alternate canon, based on how a text registers and reflects the conventions of its time, is required; a subset of that canon would include texts that fought against their cultural constraints in order to articulate something convention had difficulty accommodating.  No matter what you call those texts, they are the ones deserving of close-reading.  

Note that I slipped from speaking of genres in the first paragraph to cultural conventions in the last.  I did that on purpose.  Genre focuses too intently on what a thing made from words looks like.  ("My novella's a long short story in 10-point Times Roman and a short novel in 14-point New Courier," says the aspiring writer.)  From the get-go, however, these things made from words contained stuff like this.  Texts have always had visual components, and while those components are sometimes abstracts (as with the afore-marbled page), the introduction of visual representations of the world into the textual economy of a novel alerts readers to the presence of a realist ethos.  But remember: 

Verisimilitude is not an end.  It is an always imperfect—because always filtered—means.  What matters is not the presence of supplementary gestures of verisimilitude but the manner in which they interact with the text.  For example, this comic sucks:

The image of Red-Eye (from Jack London's 1906 novel Before Adam) adds nothing to the description provided by the text; in fact, it looks like what a sketch artist would draw if provided the description in the text.  Now compare that to this or this or this or this or this.  Why do I have to justify studying the subject of all those thises but can write about Red-Eye with nary a care?  Is it because Before Adam was written by London?  Because he wrote it a century ago?  Because a quinquagenarian with Ivy credentials stretching four generations back wouldn't feel mortified if caught reading it on the subway?

(x-posted.)

How to teach the interrelatedness of historical context and audience via Warren Ellis's Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth

Someone emailed to ask how it is I teach historical context via a single comic.  The book in question: Warren Ellis's one-shot cross-over between the Wildstorm imprint Planetary and the DC franchise that is the Batman.  Ellis created the book as a means of investigating the enduring popularity of the superhero genre.  Over the course of thirty-odd issues his team of quasi-cultural anthropologists tore through the history of the 20th Century in an attempt to answer that deceptively simple question: Why have impossible people in tights mattered so much for so long? 

Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth (2003) opens by jiggering that old comic standby: the multiverse.  An incidental murderer named John Black has been having seizures, and every time he seizes, a blue dome extends from his body and shifts him and everyone else from one dimension to another.  The dome looks like this:

 

The people who shift from a point in their dimension to an already-occupied point in another end up like this:

Not a pleasant way to die.  So the Planetary team is called in to investigate.  They learn that Black's fingerprints were recently found outside a soup kitchen and go to investigate.  They corner him in an alley when:

Justifying comics as legitimate objects of study, Part II: HELL STALKS ON FOUR PAWS!

I concluded the previous post with a nod to William Blake as someone who explored the word-picture relationship and I will get to that, but first I should clarify a few issues I raised without fully addressing yesterday:

1. Vance rightly noted that titles of paintings were often left to benefactors and history, so putting that much interpretive weight on such thin ice might not be the best idea.  I agree.  I fully intend on leaving this series of posts immersed and hypothermic.
2. JPool noted that treating paintings like panels could be a category error and Miriam and Gene implicitly agreed, suggesting I might be better served by a Hogarth or one of his ilk.  I agree.  But I chose to go with Caravaggio and Blake over Giotto and Hogarth because I wanted to focus attention on an individual image before I moved to discussing the interaction between multiple images arrayed in narrative.  
3. Andrew liked the arrows and will be disappointed with this post. 

Now that I have well and cleared my throat, let us venture forward to William Blake and "The Tyger" from Songs of Experience (1794).  It reads:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Where to start?  Should I go full Keats and spend a day on each stanza?  Probably . . . especially when you consider that 1) his manuscript looked like this:

Because 2) he spent tedious years perfecting the placement of every word on every line.  Maybe I'll declare next week Blake Week and do just that.  But tonight I want to focus on the general impression of feline bad-assedness created by the text of the poem.  What we have here is a TYGER! MADE OF FIRE FORGED BY DREAD HANDS AND SHARP TOOLS OF METALLURGY TO HAVE DREAD PAWS.  So FEROCIOUS is this FIRE TYGER! that the poet cannot even imagine THE ABOMINABLE FOUNDRY in which SOME DEMENTED LORD created SO GRIM A BEAST. 

TRIGGER WARNING: IF YOU ARE NOT PREPARED TO LOOK INTO THE BRUTAL MAW OF HELL ITSELF DO NOT CONTINUE READING THIS POST BECAUSE I AM ABOUT TO POST THE PICTURE OF THE FIRE TYGER! BLAKE INCLUDED WITH THE POEM.  SERIOUSLY IT'S WAY TOO MUCH FOR YOU I MEAN YOU CAN BARELY EVEN WATCH R-RATED MOVIES THIS WILL BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU TURN AWAY I TELL YOU TURN AWAY!

The long walk back to the real world.

How do conservatives reconcile their cultural tastes with their partisan politics? I don’t mean generally, because generally the answer is they don’t think about their media consumption any more than your average liberal. I mean specifically, that is, when they do consider how the media they consume intersects with the beliefs they profess, what happens? Thanks to Andrew Breitbart, we now have a daily glut of valuable insight into what it is to be a conservative for whom music, literature and film don’t nadir after Beethoven, Shakespeare and Bogart. Admittedly, some of the revelations are old hat, as with Breitbart’s confession of how certain conservatives really feel about the working poor:

Whoever cast the Boston grotesques that littered the film, my hat’s off to you. These profoundly ugly people really created a backdrop that made you want to root for the kid not to be found and brought back to her natural origins.

But most of Big Hollywood is so awesomely counter-intuitive Walter Benn Michaels wouldn’t touch it with your ten-foot pole. Exhibit A: Evan Sayet’s post on Bruce Springsteen’s secret conservatism, in which he claims

that, while Springsteen the multimillionaire, rock star with the mansion in Beverly Hills may be a Liberal, Bruce Springsteen the poet is one-hundred percent Republican.

Those of you currently reading Dante in your sophomore English classes take note: Sayet someone out. Not that I need to tell you this, but the Commedia is written by Dante the Man about Dante the Pilgrim as narrated by Dante the Poet. The Poet is the fiction’s conceit—the character who remembers and recalls what happened after he found himself per una selva oscura—and is not to be treated coextensive with Dante the Man. I invoke Dante here because Springsteen, like Dante, is frequently confused for his narrators by people who should know better. No one reads “Caliban upon Setebos” and mistakes the theological musings of Prospero’s deformed manservant for a definitive statement of Browning’s philosophy; whereas with Springsteen, every word his narrators utter is an expression of his personal beliefs even when he opens with a lyric like “[m]y name is Joe Roberts.”

Bolaño's 2666, Part I: "They supplied the stamp of ultraconcrete canonical literature, a nonspectulative literature free of ideas, assertions, denials, doubts . . ."

So submits Roberto Bolaño, in the universally praised 2666, about scholars like me.  He falls prey here to the Robertson Davies' romance of academic life, in which even minor disagreements are elevated to shrieks against creed as red in claw as they are long in the tooth.  Scholars like myself and Bolaño's "insignificant Serbian critic" argue passionately but ultimately purposelessly, for the "ideas, assertions, denials, [and] doubts" we don't have are

free of any intent to serve as guide, [are] neither pro nor con, just an eye seeking out the tangible elements, not judging them but simply displaying them coldly, archaeology of the facsimile, and, by the same token, of the photocopier. (55)

That Bolaño flips Benjamin the finger here is obvious enough.  A work of art emancipated from "its parasitical dependence on ritual" bobs on the restless and relentless tide of technological progress, degraded first by facsimile, later by photocopier, today by scanner, by email, tomorrow by technologies of reproduction yet to be invented. 

His academics drift aimlessly, a cult without a leader, dependent upon the ritual of reading Benno von Archimboldi (the author whose biography is as mysterious as his novels are spectacular) but incomplete without personal, unmediated contact with the him.

They coagulate into a cult and embrace its trappings, its curdled factions, apostasies, anathemas, the evidences of intellectual combat in extremis.   Their soft solid masses attend conferences devoted to German literature, chair panels in which their opponents counter their "festive, Dionysian vision of ultimate carnival" by "[speaking] of suffering . . . civic duty . . . [and] humor" (12). 

They do this often, eleven times by my count, across a Europe overteeming with conferences devoted to high modernist literature about which Bolaño only speaks of obliquely through a critical language emptied of everything but the academic clichés, brood references to solitary men and their signal women. 

When this sullen lot "[meets] their Moses" (23), a Swabbian journalist who once spoke directly to their absent father, Archimboldi, they discombobulate like jealous underlings: Pelletier (male) and Espinoza (male) bed Norton (female), ignore Morini (cripple), contemplate polyamory and redirect their incestuous agresssion away from their totemized father and toward the hapless Pakistani cabbie disgusted by the frankness of the conversation.  The cabbie confessed

that London was such a labyrinth, he really had lost his bearings. 

Which led Espinoza [male] to remark that he'd be damned if the cabbie hadn't just quoted Borges, who once said London was like a labyrinth—unintentionally, of course.  To which Norton [female] replied that Dickens and Stevenson had used the same trope long before Borges in their descriptions of London.  This seemed to set the driver off, for he burst out that as a Pakistani he might not know this Borges, and he might not have read the famous Dickens and Stevenson either, and he might not even know London and its streets as well as he should, that's why he'd said they were a labyrinth, but he knew very well what decency and dignity were, and by what he had heard, the woman here present, in other words Norton, was lacking in decency and dignity, and in his country there was a word for what she was, the same word they had for it in London as it happened, and that word was bitch or slut or pig, and the gentlemen here present, gentlemen who, to judge by their accents, weren't English, also had a name in his county and that name was pimp or hustler or whoremonger.  (73)

Had but the cabbie been aware that these well-dressed gentlemen were Freudian primitives he might have been prepared for the violence of their ugly surprise,

the hail of Iberian kicks that proceeded to rain down on him, kicks delivered at first by Espinoza [male] alone, but then by Pelletier [male] too, when Espinoza flagged, despite Norton's [female] shouts at them to stop, despite Norton's objections that that violence didn't solve anything, that in fact after this beating the Pakistani would hate the English even more, something that apparently mattered little to Pelletier, who wasn't English, and even less to Espinoza, both of whom nevertheless insulted the Pakistani in English as they kicked him, without caring in the least that he was down, curled into a ball on the ground, as they delivered kick after kick, shove Islam up your ass, which is where it belongs, this one is for Salman Rushdie (an author neither of them happened to think was much good but whose mentioned seemed pertinent), this one is for the feminists of Paris (will you fucking stop, Norton was shouting), this one is for the feminists of New York (you're going to kill him, shouted Norton), this one is for the ghost of Valerie Solanas, you son of a bitch, and on and on, until he was unconscious and bleeding from every orafice in the head, except the eyes. (74)

Here my sad parody collapses before the force of Bolaño's prose.  The slack parenthetical screams would sound forced or tinny were they deployed inexpertly or paced differently or not so damn distanced from the bloodied, beating immigrant body sprawled dumbly before character and reader alike. 

Not that Bolaño nails acadmic life, what with his hammer being fixated on imaginary prey, and what with his romantic obsession with authenticity and unmeddled communion of artist and critic, but a complaint about how he depicts the chill aftermath Espinoza and Pelletier's outburst must be lodged by actual academics, the ones whose breath is caught and heart broken with every blow, because if I beat some ignorant fuck near to death I tell you now it wouldn't matter how ignorant or much of a fuck he was, it would take two  hands and a foot to count the decades before I could return to my "labors as fresh as daisies" or begin "writing and attending conferences again with uncommon energy" (85).  

P.S.  Not every post will fall to the thrall Bolaño's prose quite so deep or earnestly.  I have a problem, I admit it, a desire to emulate clumsily what I read, but if I have any ear for tone, and I'm not saying that I do, it owes a blood debt to this compulsion.

(x-posted.)

The high price of idealism

(x-posted.)

On this day in 2008, Jim Beaver—a.k.a. Ellsworth—commented on my post about the language of Deadwood.  I know that’s not really historical, but damn it, it’s cool.  Now for something completely historical:

On this day in 1929, Ursula K. Le Guin was born to Alfred and Theodora Kroeber—though you wouldn’t know it from this article, in which no mention of him having fathered one of the 20th Century’s most influential science fiction writers appears.  Her Wikipedia entry was adapted from a bad student essay, as is evidenced by how thoroughly the narrative of how-I-came-to-learn-this pervades it.

Her mother’s biography of Alfred Kroeber, Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration, is a good source for Le Guin’s early years and for the biographical elements in her late works, especially her interest in social anthropology.

Bully on you, anonymous person, for evaluating your sources.  That said, the aforelinked review ain’t much better.  We’re told:

Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960) is amply known through his works—more than five hundred publications of which eight are books—and he was familiar in varying degrees to students, because he taught at [universities].

I’ve edited out the list of illustrious institutions, but really, I wish I’d been an academic in an earlier era, when such sentences could be published. (Not too early, though—say, Post-Trilling-as-Columbia’s-sole-Jew or thereabouts.) But I digress. Alfred Kroeber, known through his 500 publications and by students, was a proponent of “salvage ethnography.  Here’s a picture of him with Ishi, who claimed to be the last of the California Yahi:

Cultural preservation takes a place of pride in Le Guin’s work, albeit backwardly, via her frequent evocation of cultural obliteration. In her anti-reform novel extraordinaire The Lathe of Heaven, she skewers the idea that society can be changed for the better. All progress, she argues, entails the destruction of a society whose current form is the by-product of an evolutionary process. It may not be a just society, but it’s not an invented one, and thus is far more stable than the proto-totalitarian imaginings of well-intentioned liberals. As Sean McCann and my adviser, Michael Szalay, argue, the novel

offers an all but direct allegory in which a passive aesthetic sensibility comes to replace an illegitimate effort to transform the world through instrumental means. Le Guin’s George Orr discovers that his dreams change the world; almost nightly he has what he calls “effective dreams” that reshape existence. Upon waking, Orr is the only one who recalls what the world used to be like, the only one who realizes that each night his mind refashions the lives of the planet’s billions. Orr turns to government therapists to find assistance in ending his dreams, but is understood instead to be delusional and irrationally afraid of his unconscious. He is thus committed to the care of one William Haber, a state-employed psychiatrist who quickly discovers that Orr does indeed dream effectively, and who then tries to use Orr’s dreams to rid the world of misery. Orr objects, and Le Guin organizes this novel around the ensuing debate between the two men over whether it’s right to change the world . . . .

[But] this kind of idealism comes at a high price. Every time Haber induces Orr to dream a better world, something in Orr resists; when told to solve the color problem, Orr dreams a world in which all are a dull and listless battleship gray; when told to end all human conflict, Orr invents an alien invasion that threatens earth from the sky. Awake, he tells Haber, “it’s not right to play God with masses of people. . . . just believing you are right and your motives are good isn’t enough.” Le Guin’s sympathies are unambiguously with her dreamer, whose resistance to Haber’s megalomania resembles both the New Left’s resistance to traditional politics and the Women’s Movement resistance to the New Left itself. Haber does eliminate the many ills on which he set his sights: he brags to Orr that they have “Eliminated overpopulation; restored the quality of urban life and the ecological balance of the planet. Eliminated cancer as a major killer. . . . Eliminated the color problem, racial hatred. Eliminated war. . . . Eliminated—no, say in the process of eliminating—poverty, economic inequality, the class war, all over the world.” But Orr refuses to grant the importance of these accomplishments because, regardless of the outcome, he doesn’t “want to change things.” These were views consistent with the widely shared sense that technocratic solutions to social problems were invariably misguided. But, like Mailer and many of her contemporaries, Le Guin does not merely worry about the unintended consequences or heedless arrogance of technocratic power; she counters it to what by contrast appears a more fundamental spiritual and political accomplishment—a therapeutic acceptance of reality itself. “We’re in the world, not against it,” Orr responds, “you have to let it be.”

Their treatment of Le Guin (tackled previously) is particularly compelling given what we all hope is the imminent rise of a new technocracy made of Hope and Change and Yes We Cans. I mean, can you believe that? Academic work that’s immediately relevant coming from an English department?  What’s the world coming to?  (And why can’t it arrive sooner?)

As Abish attests, all American art is alliterative.

(x-posted.)

Not really, of course.  Only if it’s postmodern or romantic, and today it’s romantic.  Edwin Markham’s The Real America in Romance (1909) sought to blend “authentic history and romance … to their mutual advantage.”  His rationale:

Here are set before us the examples of great men of earth, men great in their patriotism and self-sacrifice; and side by side with them are romantic characters typical of the times, men and women only less great in their kindliness and unselfishness, all affording a high expression of the art of Anglo-Saxon romance. Instead of reading about historical characters and events, we see the persons themselves in action, and live with them through the events of their day and generation. The reader loses himself in the irresistible fascination of the story, and the impressions resulting are made on the heart as well as on the intellect.

You do not merely read about Columbus: you endure with him his hardships, share with him his disappointments, rejoice with him in his achievements. You actually feel the thrill of discovery when the New World swims into his vision. Not content with telling you merely that Washington wintered and suffered at Valley Forge with his army, the author takes you straightway into the camp, shows you the torn and bleeding feet of the soldiers, and makes you stand watch with the half-fed sentries, with little to warm your blood except a fiery determination to die of cold, hunger, or British bullets, rather than give up the fight for your country.

That’s a single paragraph in the original, but I’ve sliced it up 1) because it’s overlong, and 2) to emphasize a rhetorical shift from “the reader” to “you.” What opens as a theory of literary affect quickly pivots into admonishment — the reader who doesn’t endure, share, rejoice, winter, suffer or stand watch isn’t merely a bad reader but unpatriotic.  “If you have fail to empathize with those who fought ‘for your country,’” Markham as much as says, “you’re a terrible American.”  He never considers a reader might withhold sympathy not because he or she possesses a paucity of patriotism, but because his bathetic prose betrays an ear unworthy of enthused encomium.  Consider the first sentence of Volume IX, The Stars & Stripes:

A band of boys was abroad in the streets of Boston.

But Scott, you say, happy accidents have happened heretofore! Granted.  Now consider the first two sentences of the second paragraph:

But it was not mirth nor mischief that brought them forth to throng the streets.  So much might have been inferred from their eager and excited talk as they hurried over the flagging, covered thinly with snow.

Those alliterative pairs — “mirth nor mischief” and “eager and excited” — bespeak a deliberately alliterative aesthetic agenda.  Still don’t believe me?  Turn to the twenty-first page and proceed to ponder this passage:

Then the people, or such of them as did not feel the restraint of the more orderly element, rose in riot.  The answer to the riot came in the shape of red-coated soldiers, two regiments of them, under Colonel Dalrymple; and the appointment of hated Hutchinson, Tory townsman, as lieutenant-governor.  [...]  Now the tension of nearly two years had been drawn taut within three days, and peace thus strained had snapped.

The last phrase — “peace thus strained had snapped” — demonstrates why authors aim alliterative for effect.  (My last sentence, not so much.)  It is, in fact, a rather awesome example of alliterative effect: the initial “s” links both words, but the long diphthong of “strain” enacts a straining snapped by the short monothong of “snapped.”  However, since Markham’s every sentence subsists on said diet, this felicitous phrase fails to find favor.

The reader turned off by Markham’s abusive alliteration isn’t unpatriotic per se, merely in possession of refinement and taste.  But if the above hasn’t convinced you of Markham’s “talent,” try this:

With a whoop, the band broke toward the sentinel.

“Kill him!” they cried.  “Kill the bloody-backed scoundrel!”

They fell to pelting him with snowballs.

“The lobster is going to fire!” cried the lads, pressing closer.

What happens when you pelt lobsters with snowballs?  Death or Fafblog.

Thank god for avid reds!

(X-posted.)

Searching for a quotation in response to John Holbo’s post on revolutionaries and patriotism, I stumbled across this Google Book artifact:

“Thank Heaven he isn’t [alive today]” is quite a sentiment to say about the disabled, but what can you do?   Hunchback or no, “he would probably be an avid RED!”  I wonder when this exchange took place—the red-baiting obviously dates it, but then again, maybe it doesn’t.  We hear about “reds” and “commies” from contemporary conservatives now too, but I doubt any of the current commentariat would have heard of, much less read, Bourne.

As for the quotation I sought:

We have been kneaded so successfully that we approve of what our society approves, desire what our society desires, and add to the group our own passionate inertia against change, against the effort of reason, and the adventure of beauty.

Goldberg and his ilk have little choice but to evince “passionate inertia against change,” no matter what form that change might take. They believe, mistakenly, the status quo is a castle keep in which we were born and must defend — Bourne reminds us society is a La Madeleine on wheels staffed by mad tireless bakers, adrift on the plains of history.

Quelle autre interprétation proposer?

Scott McLemee may bite his thumb at Valentin Temkine, the French schoolteacher who claims to have cracked the Godot code, but I think he’s onto something:

Godot, whom Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for, is a Resistance smuggler, who is supposed to smuggle them out of occupied France into the Italian zone. The two of them are Jews on the run who come from Paris’ 11 arrondissement. They are probably waiting to be rescued in the spring of 1943 on the dry, limestone heights of the Southern Alps, somewhere like the Plateau de Valensole.

My French is terrible, but here, roughly, is what Temkine says:

Waiting for Godot is very nearly a fable of the occupation. People sleep in ditches and aren’t surprised to be beaten. A man and his servant, laden with possessions, are in flight from somewhere to somewhere. Everything was different “a million years ago, in the nineties.” And two people are to meet a third whom they know only by a single name, a code-name as it were; they don’t know why they’re to meet him, but it matters. If the assignation fails they’re to try again in 24 hours, meanwhile hanging about as inconspicuously as possible. It takes little insight to recognize details from some tale about Resistance groups[.]

Like I said, my French is terrible … which is why I quoted Hugh Kenner recapitulating the argument he first made in 1973’s A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett.  Few understand the compulsion to “make it new” better than Kenner—his best work embodies the ethos it describes—but enlivening moribund themes, forms or arguments entails more than mere repetition.

Because, as we all know, repetition breeds zombies.  (The unenlivened dead arise, chase away the interlopers and hold mandatory office hours, &c.)  Grouse away about Google eating brains, it should have a beneficial effect on the duplication of scholarly arguments.  See?

[I planned on writing about someone declaring they can prove Homer was a woman, complete with links to Samuel Butler's The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), but it turns out someone has already staked claim on my insufficiently absurd example.  I'm not sure whether I feel chastened or depressed, but I do know that I don't know how to finish this post now.  I should just stop.  I can't go on. I'll go on.  Or not.]

Dear John Carlos Rowe: SHUT UP!

Some of us don't have tenure yet.  This is completely uncalled for:

In Connecticut Yankee, Twain warns the reader that the United States is already following the lead of the European imperial powers, a message he would repeat with growing volubility in his anti-imperialist writings from 1898 to 1905, most of which require little interpretation.  (Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, 139, emphasis mine.)

You are an evil liar, John Carlos Rowe.  You may have total recall.  You may be right charming.  I may even respect you mightily.  That changes nothing.  This is beyond the pale.  Don't believe me?  Ask anyone without tenure and brace yourself for a brutal what for.  Fact:

Everything requires loads of interpretation.  All of it.  (Even that.)

Just because you have tenure doesn't mean you can give up the gig.  Some of us still have to slog through six sets a night.

Characters Discussed in My London Chapter Whose Names, in Aggregrate, Infantilize Me

1. One-Eye, a wolf
2. White Fang, a wolf-dog
3. Buck, a dog-wolf
4. Earnest Everhard, a porn star dead socialist revolutionary
5. Big-Tooth, a hominid
6. Lop-Ear, his companion
7. Red-Eye, an atavism
8. Ab, a man of the Age of Stone
9. Uk, a paleolithic literalist
10. Oan, an early Shakespearean hack
11. Wax-moth, an agent of creeping socialism
12. Long-Beard, the sole survivor of a capitalism
13. Afraid-of-the-Dark, one of his three nephews
14. Deer-Runner, another
15. Yellow-Head, the last of them
16. Fith-Fith, failed chief of Long-Beard's ruined tribe
17. Three-Legs, inventor of agriculture
18. Pig-Jaw, father of domestication
19. Big-Fat, née Twisted-Lip, discoverer of God
20. Crooked-Eyes, corn liquor magnate
21. The Bug, first minister of propaganda
22. Tiger-Face, chief of the jointed staff
23. Long-Fang, obviously doomed socialist revolutionary
24. Split-Nose, professional scapegoat

No real punch-line here, other than I'm amazed I'm able to take myself seriously writing about these folk.  (Or, possibly, an explanation as to why I really can't.)  Sadly, this is my strongest chapter, the one that should be my writing sample and/or job talk, but I'm thinking I should go with something else, like the one in which I prattle on about a fish. 

Crap.  I'm never going to land a job, am I?

MAN-BOOKS FOR MAN-MEN!

WHO WANTS TO BE A MAN?  YOU DO!  SO READ THESE BOOKS THEY ARE MANLY!  BUT HOW WILL THEY MAKE YOU MORE MANLY?

I WILL TELL YOU!

THIS ONE WILL CHALLENGE YOU ON MANY LEVELS AND WORK YOUR BACK AND BICEPS!  THIS ONE IS MARKED BY EXTREME VIOLENCE AND CONTAINS MANY RELIGIOUS REFERENCES!  IN THIS ONE THE AUTHOR IS JUST THERE!  YOU WILL BE TOO!  THIS ONE WILL BE RELEASED AS A FILM NEXT YEAR AND IT WILL MAKE MONEY!  MONEY IS MANLY READ IT READ IT READ IT!

Because I'm All Out of Clever Titles, I Christen Thee "History & Literature"

Eric and Ari's discussions about how to best incorporate literature into history classroom inverts the problem I face when designing a syllabus: "How do I demonstrate the significance of a novel outside the context in which it acquired its importance?"*  I feel compelled to contextualize for reasons best understood by the example of Huck Finn.  Consider Huck's classic epiphany in Chapter XXXI.  He's written a note informing Miss Watson where she can find her runaway slave, only to

get to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, for ever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to hell"—and tore it up.

The reader's annoyance with Huck dissipates because Twain allows them to participate in his recognition of shared humanity.  Twain yokes together those clauses with semi-colons, crafting a sentence like a cartoon snowball on a mountaintop.  With a gentle nudge, he tips it down the mountainside, and minutes later everyone cheers as two stories of packed snow smashes into prevailing wisdom.   

Students cry when they read this passage.  They talk of Huck's heroism in voices trembling with patriotic pride:

"How brave!  For this boy to forsake the only moral order he has known!  'And a child shall lead them!'  How brave of Twain to condemn the South in this manner!" 

I allow them to talk in this vein for a couple of minutes, then ask them to open their book to the title page and read what it says below the title:

Then I ask them when it was published.  They don't know what to make of any of it.

"It was written twenty years after the end of the Civil War," I say.

Blank stares.

"That means slavery had been abolished two decades earlier."

Blank stares.

"How brave would it be to condemn Hitler now?"

Little bulbs appear above a few heads.

"How brave would it have been to condemn slavery after it had been abolished?"

Now they get it. 

How a work relates to the historical moment it represents is crucial interpreting its meaning.  Huck Finn would've been a different novel had it been written in 1844.  It would've been the braver novel the students ardently desire it to be.  It would be another novel still were it written in 2004, especially if it kept the conceit of having been written in 1884 about events that took place in 1844.  The question I would pose to Ari and Eric—the one I fumbled here—would be whether they're more concerned with how a work represents or embodies the ethos of a particular historical moment.   

The Killer Angels says more about what people thought about Gettysburg in 1975 than the battle itself: its representation of the battle tells us about what passed for realism in the 1970s, i.e. how the grit of 19th Century American English was presented, how much of the ubiquitous grime of 19th Century America was preserved, &c.  [Edited because it'd been a long, long day.]

---

*Table questions about The Great Western Canon for the moment.

New Goal in Life:

To be the first person to cite an article from Homing News and Pigeon Fanciers' Journal in a dissertation submitted in an English department.*

---

* Francis Galton's "Notes on Fitting Normal Curves to Distributions of Speeds of Old Homing Pigeons" (6 April 1894): 159-60.  That my discussion will focus on the shuffleboarders of the homing pigeon community is pure gravy.  Sadly, no one has thought to upload the "PASSENGER PIGEONS!" scene from Ghost Dog and my copy is VHS, so this is the most pigeon I can muster.

Retract the Humanities: No, I Despise It Despite How Often It's Been Cited

I generally oppose explaining jokes, but when genuinely bright people miss the point, evidence points to me missing the mark.  An article in which someone argues that repressed negrophilia motivates the actions of Ben Cameron in The Clansman would be unspeakably stupid.  (I thought the caption to the accompanying photograph would've made that plain.)  Dixon is admirably frank about his intentions:

"The Clansman" is the second book of a series of historical novels planned on the Race Conflict ... [It] develops the true story of the "Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy," which overturned the Reconstruction regime ... How the young South, led by the reincarnated souls of the Clansmen of Old Scotland, went forth under this cover and against overwhelming odds, daring exile, imprisonment, and a felon's death, and saved the life of a people, forms one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of the Aryan race.

Early in the novel, Austin Stoneman presents President Lincoln with the following argument:

The life of our party demands that the Negro be given the ballot and made the ruler of the South.  This can be done only by the extermination of its landed aristocracy, that their mothers shall not breed another race of traitors ... Nature, at times, blot out whole communities and races that obstruct progress.  Such is the political genius of these people that, unless  you make the Negro the ruler, the South will yet reconquer the North and undo the work of this war.

The Southerners may have been defeated, but their stock is as hale as their minds are sharp.  If not put to the Negro's boot, Anderson argues, the South will rise again.  He quickly learns the gravity of his error, and by novel's end he entreats the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan thus:

My will alone forged the chains of Negro rule ... When I first fell a victim to the wiles of the yellow vampire who kept my house, I dreamed of lifting her to my level.  And when I felt myself sinking into the black abyss of animalism, I, whose soul had learned the pathway of the stars and held high converse with the great spirits of the ages—

At which point he is interrupted.  The plot thickens until Stoneman feels compelled to declare:

The Klan!—The Klan!  No?  Yes!  It's true—glory to God, they've saved my boy!

The novel ends with the Grand Dragons of six states wiring in election results so favorable Cameron announces

That Civilization has been saved, and the South redeemed from shame.

THE END

In short, The Clansman is so profoundly racist it precludes even the cleverest of scholars from reading against its grain.  Any theoretical model allowing for such a reading would be invalidated by its ability to allow for such a reading.  Granted, an article claiming Dixon's novel is structured by Cameron's repressed negrophilia should never have been published in the first place.  But were one to slip past the gatekeepers, it would be out there.  Forever.  Articles in the humanity can't be retracted. 

This is a bad thing.  For one, it means we will always be held accountable for everything we publish.  Unless, that is, we happen to be a big-enough-of-a-shot to compel a refereed journal to print our clarification.  The irony stings: top scholars can refine their market-persona by disowning previous work, whereas the majority of us must make do with the publications we have and backtrack in personal statements, MLA interviews and campus visits. 

For example, were Hillis Miller invited to speak, no one would ask him about his Poulet-inspired early work because his move away from it is documented in numerous publications.  Were you or I invited to speak on campus, however, we would be grilled about work we published five or ten years previous because it would be, quite literally, our last word on the subject. 

Would it not be wonderful to slap "RETRACTED: DECEMBER 12, 1998" on an article whose methodology you no longer embrace?  Then you would only be asked why you chose to retract the article, instead of being forced to negotiate numerous flanking maneuvers as you hastily retreat.*  Because as Ahistoricality points out, the growth of digital archives means these embarrassments will be easily available in perpetuity. 

Do you really want some kid on Mars in 3031 citing an article you wanted to disown the very moment it was published?

---

*Of the many job talks I've attended, I can only remember one in which the retreat was dignified.  Mostly, candidates hem-and-haw, say something about this committee member, that reader feedback, &c.

Anonymity (Doffs, Tips a Macintosh)

People disappear. 

They wake up Tuesday morning and decide it's better to be a no one somewhere else than some damn fool soul here. 

Happens all the time. 

You expect a familiar face and are greeted by a stranger with a story.

"He moved to Michigan."

"Michigan?"

"To Dexter, I think.  Not even a town.  A village."

"What's in Dexter?"

"A village.  He wanted to live in one."

Who could blame him?  The living in hamlets ain't easy.  (Settlements neither.)  No one with any sense plants roots in unincorporated municipalities anymore. 

Why not abscond to villages distant and remote? 

Why not abandon the inessential and reinvent yourself somewhere pleasant?

The appeal's as obvious as it is compelling: no one appreciates the person rank circumstance created.  Everyone thinks they could be more given a fair shake in honest environs.

Only everyone is wrong.

Some people are destined to fail spectacularly.  Doesn't matter where they move to or who with, in two months their straits choke desperate. 

They disappear into and become the Man in the Macintosh. 

This they desire, to be anonymous and unknown, to flit from mourner to mourner without explaining anything to anyone. 

Tortuous anonymity is palpable from space. 

(Even in Michigan.) 

Like Joyce I wonder who it is who makes this מנין sing:

Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I'd like to know? Now, I'd give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of. A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life. Yes, he could. Still he'd have to get someone to sod him after he died though he could dig his own grave. We all do. Only man buries. No ants too. First thing strikes anybody. Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.

We all come to look at it eventually.

Then we die.

(cue earnest horns)

Michelle Obama's Senior Thesis: Representative, though not as Embarrassing as Mine, Damn It

Travis Kavulla has some "Thoughts on Michelle Obama's Thesis."  As his title suggests, they are neither smart nor sound thoughts: they are merely thoughts.  Kavulla is not a dumb man.  He may even be a nice man.  So I grant, for the moment, that his thoughts on Michelle's Obama's thesis represent neither his mind nor his character; because if they did, they would speak quite poorly of both. 

First and foremost, the object of his critique is an undergraduate thesis.  It is not written deliberately—with the care a graduate student would write a seminar paper or a law student compose a sample brief—but in bursts of research crammed in between unrelated coursework.  (No scholar works on a paper while simultaneously trying to master studentized range distributions and Bowen's reaction series.*)  So undergraduate theses tend to resemble fun-house reflections of their committee's interests.

For example, remember my undergraduate thesis?  Were someone to dredge it up when my wife went up for tenure on the assumption it reflected my current beliefs and standards, I would dismiss them as frivolous.  My senior thesis is the product of an immature mind warping John Protevi's passion for continental philosophy into an embarrassing melange of big words and bad ideas.  Like any successful undergraduate, I could outline [.pdf] other people's thoughts but had problems generating any of my own.  So I did what every undergraduate does:

I mimicked.  I experimented.  I minced the careful prose of my betters until it emitted a fragrance I thought odoriferous, everyone else odorous. 

But I've changed.  In the years since I wrote my undergraduate thesis, I've learned how to parrot the conventions of my betters more convincingly, and that research consists of more than finding a theory that conveniently accounts for what I've already determined to be very important facts.  In short, I've honed the skills I once wielded with all the subtlety of toddler with a broadsword. 

Now for the ironic part:

I'd still be an oversized infant struggling to hack with a sword twice as wide as he was tall were it not for one of Kavulla's co-bloggers.  When I first arrived in Irvine, I talked BIG TALK.  I impressed people with my manifest impressiveness.  One day, after witnessing me conquer fellow graduate students in an after-seminar bull-session, a fellow by the name of Jim Zeigler pulled me aside and recommended I read Mark Bauerlein's Literary Criticism: An Autopsy. 

I was humbled.  Not that I agreed (or agree) with Bauerlein, but the idea that someone was challenging the theoretical orthodoxy I'd come to believe sacred was exactly the corrective I needed.  I'd uncritically embraced post-modern/post-structuralist theory as an undergraduate and needed some distance.  I needed to read something like this:

["Discourse"] has a loaded meaning, but a vague referent, and the vagueness is necessary to this mode of inquiry.  In using it, critics can attenuate their descriptions, yet still sound authoritative.  "Discourse" usage converts a methodological weakness into a theoretical exigency.  "Discourse" is an essential constituent of inquiry, description, definition, and so an inquiry into any particular discourse must hold off from being too determinate, too positive.  The ubiquitousness of discursive products (norms, values, distinctions, etc.) fosters a healthy skepticism toward the methods of empirical investigation (hypothesis testing, observation, fact-finding).  Hence critics can make incidental citations of this and that discourse, the mention of them indicating a world of relevant sociopolitical processes, and rightly neglect to fill in the concrete sociopolitical ingredients of the discourses cited.  The meaning of "discourse" and the methodological evanescence of it vindicate empirical thinness and oblique statement. (57)

Before you ask: I'm only quoting the conclusion; Bauerlein shows his work in the book.  Reading that forced me to refine my vague Foucauldian notion of what constituted "discourse" into something methodologically respectful ... something I couldn't use to lord over my fellows in a cloud of abstraction.  I became a respectable scholar in graduate school. 

Would that Kavulla could give Michelle Obama the benefit of that same doubt. 

---

*Lynn Fichter is right: Mineral pictures are hot.

I Imagine Him at His Desk, His Ire Rising with Every Sentence He Composes ...

... until he cracks mad.  From an early American review of The Origin of Species:

Theorizing on empirical grounds is no better than theorizing on rational and a priori principles; but rather it is worse, for it is at once more crude and facile, and more pretentious. 

[...]

Mr. Darwin may be no metaphysician, least of all a Hegelian.  He may even hold all metaphysics in supreme contempt.  And yet his theory is but a crude expression or application of the abstrusest speculations of the modern German scholasticism. 

[...]

With all its show, or rather promise, of induction, it is really a pure a priori assumption, an assumption resting on other assumptions which reach down to the bottomless abyss of Hegelian nihilism.

[...]

[Darwin] can more readily believe that the ox, with his lower as well as rudimentary upper teeth, and man with his rudimentary papillae, his hands, feet, head, brain, his eye in fine frenzy rolling, his discourse of reason looking before and after, his conscience, and all, have come by natural generation from the same hermaphroditic, vegeto-animal, primordial form from which have come the gnat and the elephant, the ichthyosaurus and the megatherium, the mammoth and the maggot, the cabbage and the pumpkin, than to believe that God could have made these species of men and oxen as they are.

[...]

Why do men have the same number of fingers on one hand as on the other, and the same number of toes as fingers, if every thing is determined by use, and nothing by creative laws of beauty, proportion and harmony?  Why is not human hair sometimes green or blue, or the iris of the eye purple or yellow?  Why should men have a beard and women none?  If it is of use to men, why should not natural selection have multiplied the few women who have it?  Why are not men eight or ten feet high, and as strong as elephants; would it not be useful to them?  Why are there no races of winged men or flying squirrels; is it only for want of the happy accident for natural selection to start with?  It would be so convenient!

It would!  It really would!

If I Could Parse This Sentence, The Dissertation Would Be Done

On the eve of the Spanish-American War, Colorado Senator Edward Oliver Wolcott stuffs all my concerns into one gloriously unwieldy sentence:

Who is to say that in the evolution of such a Republic as this the time has not come when the immense development of our internal resources and the marvelous growth of our domestic and foreign commerce and a realization of our virile strength have not stimulated that Anglo-Saxon restlessness which beats with the blood of the race into an activity which will not be quenched until we have finally planted our standard in that far-off archipelago which inevitable destiny has entrusted into our hands?

Evolution and domestic policy and foreign affairs and hyper-masculinity and race-pride and refined blood and imperialism and American exceptionalism all colliding in one impenetrable interrogative!  If I could unpack it succinctly with conviction I'd be long done.

Birds on The Wire

In response to Ari Kelman's post on The Wire at (on?) The Edge of the American West, Sandie writes:

What, for example, are the lives of the “Miss Annas,” the foster mothers like? What would it mean to focus on the foster care system and social work, another occupation/institution that is female-dominated? How do all of these areas fit into the puzzle that is Baltimore? Again, I suppose that one could make the argument that the writers are writing what they know, but would it kill them to find out some things that they do not know?

To which I responded:

You can’t let Simon off the hook so easily.  The Corner’s very much about the place of women in the masculine world, and its central character, Fran Boyd, is a script-consultant/on-set verisimilitude-guarantor. Simon knows the effect of this life on women, he just chooses to focus elsewhere.  That women aren’t involved in the day-to-day drug operations, or in the dock workers union, isn’t a matter of making masculine what is, in fact, more diverse—it’s a legacy of the extant misogyny in the groups being depicted.

Simon knows the toll "the game" takes on those who ply its margins.  Consider the families of the Barksdale crew: Donette finesses her way through relationships with one of its top soldiers, D'Angelo Barksdale; and when D'Angelo goes to prison, she insinuates herself with its de facto leader, Stringer Bell.  Brianna Barksdale negotiates the increasingly strained relations between Avon and Stringer, and more significantly, their relationship to her son, D'Angelo.  Brianna also works to support the families the incarcerated, managing the delicate egos and strident demands of De'Londa Brice and the like.  While you may not respect the positions these woman occupy, Simon and his staff portray them with a keen sympathy for the pained decisions which have brought them there.  (Even De'Londa becomes sympathetic by proxy, if only as Wee-Bey's wife and Namond's mother.)

That said, these figures do exist on the margins of Simon's Baltimore, so you can legitimately criticize him for choosing to depict a world in which women are marginal.  Before doing so, rent The Corner, the mini-series Simon helmed for HBO.  (Or read the book.)  If The Wire neglects to document the toll of the game on women, The Corner focuses so intently on the human cost of the drug war that the structural critique central to The Wire's narrative appeal never emerge.  We see the effects of systemic failure, but only hints of its origin and extent. 

This is more true of the mini-series than the book, as the latter contains explicit criticism of the infrastructure of everything from drug organizations to the political entities who task incompetent law enforcement agencies to incarcerate the dealers et al. in brutal, corrupt correctional facilities.  (But only after they're sentenced by number-crunching prosecuting attorneys who overwhelm the meager talents of drunken public defenders before august, indifferent judges.) 

The Wire contains these beshitted multitudes, weaving their mercenary narratives into something so grand, it deserves it own post. 

[UPDATE: Before I tackle that other post, I should mention one more thing about gender on The Wire: namely, that the traditional roles are often reversed, such that the most motherly character on the show is a homeless drug addict who helps other even more destitute souls learn how to survive the streets.  More on this later.]