Acephalous

The increasingly forgettable work of Malcolm Gladwell

G.D. pointed out the latest Gladwell article to me, and now that I’ve read it, I’m at a loss for words: rarely in the history of long-form journalism has the pitch been more obvious or the product more strained. Gladwell decided to write an article on violence in the National Football Leauge, went to his editor with his Vick-topical article and was told to run with it. The problem, of course, is that the entire article boils down to this question:

Is [football] dogfighting or is it stock-car racing?

And that question, I think we can agree, makes little sense for the simple reason that its analogy isn’t analogous. I know that blunt counterintuitive statements are a hallmark of literary journalism, but they need to be founded on something more substantial than this:

[I]s the kind of [tau deposit-induced dementia] being uncovered by McKee and Omalu [in former NFL players] incidental to the game of football or inherent in it? Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It’s a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so.

The relevant analogy is right there—preventable injuries in Nascar versus the NFL—but had Gladwell went with that, he would have to ditch the dogfighting angle.* The problem, then, is that the once venerable New Yorker would rather be clever and topical than deeply informative. Consider, for example, the career of the go-to literary journalist for me and Ari, John McPhee. His first book was about A Sense of Where You Are, was about the professional basketball player, long-tenured Senator and former Presidential candidate Bill Bradley, but was written before Bradley graduated from Princeton. McPhee did a superlative job outlining what would make Bradley successful, but he didn’t write about him because the New Yorker wanted an article about the Senatorial or Presidential candidate.

Similarly, after Katrina the magazine saw fit to print McPhee’s brilliant (and to my students, hilariously unpronounceable) essay “Atchafalaya,” which was first published in in 1987, long before most people outside of Louisiana cared about the state of the levees. My point, as you probably guessed, is that the odds of the New Yorker dipping into their archives and pulling out a Gladwell essay on the strength of its reporting or the depth of its intelligence decrease with every superficially clever, patently topical article they allow him to write and consent to publish. This isn’t to say that Gladwell is incapable of strong reportage or intellectual depth—only that that people can’t seem to convince him to slow down and write something with heft enough to be as relevant twenty years down the line as it is this week.

*I have nothing against clever analogies when they actually, you know, work. My friend Barry Siegel combined a thrilling narrative of a crashing B29 and a legal case that led to . . . something else both topical and relevant which I won’t spoil. (If you want spoilers, consult Ira Glass.)

That's not a Doctor of Journalism. This is a Doctor of Journalism.*

Our arrival was badly timed. Most of the pigs from The American Spectator had already arrived. I saw this at a glance. They were just standing around trying to look casual. It was a terrifying scene.

"I thought you should know about this," the boy said finally.

"Know? Me? Know about what?" I asked.

"Nothing. Nothing at all. Just that this guy . . . this white supremacist guy . . . he says he's you."

My brain locked up. I couldn't think. The drugs were taking over. "Is he?"

"No . . . I don't think . . . but he did say something about guns and booze."

"Guns and booze? Guns and booze? Must be me." Jesus. What a terrible thing to lay on somebody with a head full of acid. Alright, I thought.

"Alright," I said. "This Nazi me with guns and gin, where . . ."

"No gin . . . he's just talking about gin like you talk about it when you . . ."

"Look," I said. "I'm a Doctor of Journalism. If I can't minister to my own sober self, what good am I?" I demanded the boy take me to myself.

He led me to a dense thicket of birches fit for Frost and introduced me as Manuel. "Well," I said. "Pleasure to make my acquaintance."

That me looked at this me confused. Something there is that loves a wall, I thought, and ain't that bastard something.

There he was, talking about my Samoan attorney, and here I was, looking at myself talking about my Samoan attorney . . . but what white power me said made no sense.

"Wherever you find guns, cigars and whiskey, good-looking womenfolk are sure to be flocking 'round, and I had my camera handy for the occasion."

"Flocking 'round"? Sounds nothing like me. Strange memories of nervous nights on who knows what I can handle . . . but this was an impostor. No . . . a robot.

I was being impersonated by a robot. Programmed to say what I say but like I was Rhett Butler. To trick it would require saying something it wouldn't expect me to . . .

"All this white shit on my sleeve is LSD," I heard myself say. Shit. I stole a glance at myself and saw his face turn white. I noted the effort it took for him to keep up my façade. Not that he didn't try.

"Folks around Sperryville won't go anywhere near the place at Pig Roast time, what with the rumors of cannibalism, human sacrifice, bizarre pagan rituals and so forth."

"And so forth?" I asked. "And so forth?"

"Wherever you find guns, cigars and whiskey, good-looking womenfolk are sure to be flocking 'round, and I had my camera handy for the occasion."

"You already said that you fucking robot!" I threw myself at the robot but must have licked my arm on the way there because the next thing I remember I was in a bathtub surrounded by six angry pairs of Dockers.

"You shouldn't have done that," one said.

"Stacy is delicate," said another. Fuck, I thought. I'd attacked some poor girl.

"Sorry," I said. "I went after the robot." They shot me looks I deserved. Calm down. Learn to enjoy pain. The important thing now is to leave with my balls intact.

"Stacy is not a . . ."

Intact and where they should be. My balls. Fuck would I miss them.

"Stacy wants you to apologize."

"Send her in." Don't run, I thought. They'd like an excuse to shoot you. Menacing vibrations . . . I felt them all around me. The door creaked open and there she was . . . there he was . . . there I was . . .

"Some fucking robot you are!"

"Get back here!" he shouted, but I knew she couldn't catch me.

---

*Written in honor of the lamest Thompson impersonation I've ever read . . . and I spent four years teaching literary journalism to starry-eyed undergraduates who idolized Thompson, so I know of what I speak.

(x-posted.)

Mother Jones and the National Review on the dubious quality of Sotomayor’s prose: “This apple’s the worst orange I’ve ever tasted.”

This past week, the attacks on Sotomayor have turned from what she’s said to how she’s said it.  Conservatives began by hammering away at the “weird, unidiomatic constructions and errors of punctuation and grammar [in] her infamous 2001 ‘Wise Latina’ speech.”  Now, I advocate writing conference papers that “contain few expensive words and no Faulknerian feats of subordination” on the grounds that no human being—not even the academic ones—can parse grammatically complex arrangements of jargon on the fly, so I’m more attuned than most to the fact that what passes for grammatical in English as she is spoke doesn’t pass muster in English as she is wrote.  You can imagine, then, why I chafed at Heather McDonald’s criticism of Sotomayor’s unscripted speeches for containing errors endemic to spoken language.  Just because an unscripted speech is transcribed after the fact doesn’t make it written; or, as per my talk, just because it can be put to paper doesn’t mean it was meant to be read there.

Judging the quality of her prose from her speeches, as McDonald and fellow Bench Memos writer Ed Whelan did, is an intellectually dishonest exercise for the simple reason that nobody (outside of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) speaks in paragraphs. Not that this stops the other member of the Bench Memos team, Matthew J. Franck, from claiming Sotomayor “writes” sentences that were clearly spoken aloud; or that those sentences “begin with a thought and trail off without saying much of anything after all, or double back and contradict themselves,” i.e. that the transcription of her unscripted speech transcribed sentences that were clearly spoken aloud.

When I taught literary journalism, I always included Mark Singer’s profile of Errol Morris on the syllabus because it works both as an introduction to New Yorker-style profiles and a meta-methodological essay on how to approach transcriptions critically and responsibly.  Here’s Singer transcribing Florence Rasmussen’s speech in Morris’s Gates of Heaven (1978):

If I could only get out. Drive my car. I’d get another car. Ya . . . and my son, if he was only better to me. After I bought him that car. He’s got a nice car. I bought it myself just a short time ago. I don’t know. These kids—the more you do for them . . . He’ s my grandson, but I raised him from two years old . . . I don’t see him very often. And he just got the car. I didn’t pay for all of it. I gave him four hundred dollars.

Singer responds to her outpouring by noting that

[w]ith an arresting instinct for symmetry, Florence Rasmussen manages to contradict most of what she has to say. It seems that she knows certain things, but then, in the next moment, she trots out contrary information[:] I’d like to drive my car; but I might not even have a car any longer, might have to buy a new one. I bought my son—O.K., he’s not my son, he’s my grandson—a new car; well, I didn’t pay for the whole thing, I gave him four hundred dollars, but anyway I want my money back.

As viewers of The Fog of War (2003) know, this technique works as powerfully on former Secretaries of Defense as elderly Floridians, not because either is particularly muddleheaded, but because Morris takes advantage of the infelicitous glitches that accompany the spontaneous production of spoken language.  McDonald, Whelan, and Franck seem not to understand how language works.  They scoured “virtually all [Sotomayor's unscripted] speeches on the Senate website” and discovered damning evidence that they were, in fact, unscripted speeches; then, they lambasted those transcripts of her unscripted speeches for failing to meet the standards demanded of the written word, which proved to them that Sotomayor is “a mediocrity as a writer.” Whelan even suggests she’s a hypocrite for “present[ing] herself as a stickler for good grammar” when her speeches contain constructions that would be ungainly, if not outright ungrammatical, on the page.  How about we hoist Whelan by his own petard?

Well, it’s an unguarded moment where she says what folks on the left think which, their job is to use judicial robes to make sound policy and the law is largely a vessel for them to fill with their own preferences.

Sure, very much along the same lines, talking about what he calls the criterion but which selecting judges.

Well, how is that honoring people who put their lives at risk in public service and, look, at 9/11 we understood for a while what firefighters do.

Whelan clearly offends Franck’s standards: he “writes sentences that begin with a thought and trail off without saying much of anything after all.” The first sentence subordinates a clause about as clunkily as you can imagine; then you read the second sentence, observe that it doesn’t even include the subordinate clause it introduces, and marvel at the paucity of your imagination.  I suppose that second sentence meets Franck’s standard on a technicality—the sentence defies the laws of grammar and stops before it has a chance to trail off without saying much of anything—but that third sentence turns on a dime “and, look,” informs us that we know “what firefighters do.” Does that count as “much of anything”?

They do eventually get around to criticizing Sotomayor’s prose on the basis of what she’s actually written: they find that while it’s not “ungrammatical,” it is “tedious and ‘impenetrable.’” That link leads to Stephanie Mencimer’s article in Mother Jones, in which she pings Sotomayor’s prose for “rarely hit[ting a] sort of breezy cadence [because she] devotes the bulk of her legal analysis to quotes from statutes, regulations, and other opinions ad nauseam[.]” How she’ll legislate from the bench when she’s busy citing dull precedent is as mysterious to me as, for example, how a prose-scold could write “quote” instead of “quotation” in the middle of a complaint or believe Diane Wood’s summary of Merchant of Venice signifies much of anything in the Age of Wikipedia.

In the end, the case against Sotomayor basically amounts to this: on the one hand, her speeches betray all the ungrammatical tics common to spoken language, and if you treat those speeches as prose, you must conclude that she’s a poor writer; on the other, the prose of her legal opinions isn’t ungrammatical, but because it betrays the tedious tics common to lawyerly prose, you must conclude she’s a poor writer.  You see where this is headed.  If word leaked out that “Ed Whelan” was actually Sotomayor’s pseudonym, the Bench Memos team would argue that, because Whelanmayor did all that I documented above, you must conclude that s/he’s a poor writer.  Were it then revealed that Whelanmayor did Diane Wood one better and actually wrote Merchant of Venice, the Bench Memos team would claim that, in light of the difficulty of Shakespelanmayor’s prose, the Western Canon requires immediate revision and you must conclude s/he’s a poor writer . . .

(x-posted.)

Would that I had this writer's senses of comedic timing and telling detail.

Before I continue with some bits on Blake, I wanted to share this truly extraordinary bit of literary profiling from the current issue of Rolling Stone.  Everything about the opening anecdote to "The Last Outlaw Poet" works perfectly: the selection of the moment, the setting of the scene, the cadence of the prose, the timing of the punchline.  They all conspire to produce a powerful (and powerfully funny) introduction to a profile of Kris Kristofferson.  But you'll shit your pants when you learn—I'll save that bit of information for the moment.  Here's the text:

Standing backstage at the Beacon Theatre in New York, leaning against a crumbling brick wall in the dark, I could barely see Kris Kristofferson standing to my left.  Willie Nelson was in the shadows to my right.  Ray Charles was standing beside Willie, idly shifting his weight back and forth.  A bit farther along the wall were Elvis Costello, Wyclef Jean, Norah Jones, Shelby Lynne, Paul Simon and respective managers, friends and family.  Everybody was nervous and tight.  We were there for Willie Nelson's 70th birthday concert in 2003.

Up from the basement came one of country music's brightest stars (who shall remain nameless).  At that moment in time, the Star had a monster radio hit about bombing America's enemies back into the Stone Age.

"Happy birthday," the Star said to Willie, breezing by us.  As he passed Kristofferson in one long, confident stride, out of the corner of his mouth came "None of that lefty shit out there tonight, Kris."

"What the fuck did you just say to me?" Kris growled, stepping forward.

"Oh, no," groaned Willie under his breath.  "Don't get Kris all riled up."

"You heard me," the Star said, walking away in the darkness.

"Don't turn your back to me, boy," Kristofferson shouted, not giving a shit that basically the entire music industry seemed to be flanking him.

The Star turned around: "I don't want any problems, Kris—I just want you to tone it down."

"You ever worn your country's uniform?" Kris asked rhetorically.

"What?"

"Don't 'What?' me, boy!  You heard the question.  You just don't like the answer."  He paused just long enough to get a full chest of air.  "I asked, 'Have you ever served your country?'  The answer is, no, you have not.  Have you ever killed another man?  Huh?  Have you ever taken another man's life and then cashed the check your country gave you for doing it?  No, you have not.  So shut the fuck up!"  I could feel his body pulsing with anger next to me.  "You don't know what the hell you are talking about!"

"Whatever," the young Star muttered.

Ray Charles stood motionless.  Willie Nelson looked at me and shrugged mischievously like a kid in the back of the classroom.

Kristofferson took a deep inhale and leaned against the wall, still vibrating with adrenaline.  He looked over at Willie as if to say, "Don't say a word."  Then his eyes found me.

"You know what Waylon Jennings said about guys like him?" he whispered.

I shook my head.

"They're doin' to country music what pantyhose did to finger-fuckin'."

I would Soltan through that, pointing out the few missteps (like the ambiguous "he" in the "Don't 'What?' me, boy!" paragraph) and the many grace notes (catching Kristofferson's lack of contractions in the same paragraph, then gesturing to the Jennings impersonation via the dropped gs in the last line), but I can't.  Do you know why I can't? 

I can't because do you know who wrote that?  Do you know who so deftly captured Kristofferson's demolition of Toby Keith? 

Ethan Fucking Hawke. 

If you're like me and unable to accept that Ethan Fucking Hawke can write circles around you, go listen to the playlist Hawke put together to accompany the story and try to comfort yourself with the fact that Ethan Fucking Hawke had the help of a Rhodes Scholar turned Airborne Ranger turned boxer turned singer-songwriter in writing that. 

The web really is a different medium, people.

We rightly complain when Google and company generate inappropriate ads—be they on a video of the recent BART tragedy; a firsthand account of the the US Airways crash; a search for certain keywords; an LGBTQ site; or a report of a gruesome death.  Happens all the time.  So often, in fact, you almost miss it when someone’s being deliberately crass.  To wit:

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.]

More on the Mendacity of Scott Thomas Beauchamp

The comments to my previous post chug along, and like them, The Once and Future Literary Journalism Instructor Within keeps returning to the issue of what can and cannot be verified.  You see, he spent terminable office hours wrangling with students over what sounds like a very simple question:

What do you know and what can you prove?

There are ways to incorporate what you know but can't prove into an article.  Why would a journalist do that?  Because sometimes what someone knows is important even if it can't be proven.  For instance, it may well be that Beauchamp can't prove what he wrote in "Shock Troops" about the private who wears a skull under his helmet.  It may well be, as an anonymous soldier writes to The Weekly Standard, that

[T]he [Army Combat Helmet] does not have a gap between the helmet and the liner, only pads. It would have been impossible for him to have placed and human skull, of any size, between his helmet and his head.

You’ll note, though, that Beauchamp says “[t]he private wore the skull for the rest of the day and night,” i.e. on his head, without his helmet. You can tell because it sets up the contrast in the next sentence: “[e]ven on a mission, he put his helmet over the skull.” No one would refute that a person can place a piece of skull on the crown of his head and walk around with it, so as the verifiable part of the story, Beauchamp is in the clear.

Furthermore, no one would refute that a person can’t see what someone else has on under his or her helmet. In the next sentence, Beauchamp relates that “[the private] observed that he was grateful his hair had just been cut.” In other words, the private is talking about wearing the fragment under his helmet.  Whether he actually is is another matter entirely from him saying he is.

It may well be that Beauchamp was more concerned with the private's desire to have others believe he's wearing the skull beneath his helmet than with whether he actually is wearing it.  This isn't to say—as someone will say I say it means momentarily—that the truth doesn't matter.  It does.  Think of it this way:

In my podcast, I admitted to lying about the existence of toys I didn't own.  I claimed to have a Hasbro Death Star in my attic.  I didn't.  That I wanted people to think I did says something about it me.  I was upset when I wasn't invited to play Star Wars with my friends because all I had was a X-wing and two Ewoks; which means I was aware, albeit dimly, of the influence of class on the constitution of social groups.  The lies of the toddler may tell you some truths about the man. 

Lies can signify.  Desires are meaningful.

Which is only to say, sometimes you take people at their word even if you don't believe them, because the desires themselves are meaningful even if they don't correspond to reality.  As for the rest of the evidence marshaled against Beauchamp:

First, there are the anonymous stories from soldiers currently stationed at FOB Falcon. They put “Scott Thomas” in quotation marks. This could mean many things: FOB Falcon is large enough that they don’t know Beauchamp, since they didn’t recognize his pseudonym. It is, after all, nothing but his name. If they don’t know Beauchamp, that suggests that there are enough people moving in and out of FOB Falcon that the woman Beauchamp described could have been there and been unknown to the people who also don’t know Beauchamp.

Second, the anonymous soldier writes:

IF there had been a woman with burns covering her face, and IF some undisciplined Soldier(s) had done something like described in this guys story, he would have been dealt with swiftly and harshly.

The anonymous contractor agrees:

Furthermore, even if such a female existed, any Joe would have adjusted the attitudes of those fictional soldiers. Mocking the wounded is simply not done. Period. Full stop. Do not pass “GO”. Do not collect 200 dollars. For a soldier to not only mock, but sexually harass a wounded woman would have brought down the wrath of every senior enlisted and officer in the mess hall.

They say this as if it refutes Beauchamp’s story. It doesn’t. Last we hear, “[t]he disfigured woman slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall, her half-finished tray of food nearly falling to the ground.” For all we know, the beatdown the two anonymous conrtibutors suggest should take place did take place.  So that’s an evidentiary non-starter.

Third, Beauchamp claims to find “children’s bones: tiny cracked tibias and shoulder blades.” He continues: “[n]o one cared to speculate what, exactly happened here,” then he does exactly that, speculating that “it was clearly a Saddam-era dumping ground of some sort.” As to the evidence, the first anonymous correspondent verifies it as fact:

There was a children’s cemetery unearthed while constructing a Combat Outpost (COP) in the farm land south of Baghdad International Airport. It was not a mass grave. It was not the result of some inhumane genocide. It was an unmarked cemetery where the locals had buried children some years back.

Soldiers in Beauchamp’s unit did find the remains of children.  The issue then is not whether Beauchamp is lying about what he found, but whether his interpretation of it is incorrect.  So Beauchamp’s factually accurate, but he misinterprets the evidence.  Is it possible that he was simply never corrected, i.e. that no one ever informed his unit that they’d found a cemetery instead of a dumping ground?

It most certainly is. 

The matter of the turning radius of the Bradley is debatable—I’m still waiting to hear back from a friend who drives one, both about the possibility of doing what Beauchamp described and on the differences between Bradleys—so I’m reserving judgment on that one.

As it stands, there’s no proof Beauchamp lied, only that he may have wrong and/or misled. All the rest is speculation (as to the beatdown that did or did not follow the mockery), speculative character assassination ("He must be lying because he wants to be a writer," &c.), and bizarre wishful thinking ("Shit happens and there are bad apples, but the brass doesn't stand for it or them, so there are no bad apples and no shit happens").

Stay tuned!  Tomorrow I'll write about literature again.  I promise.

That Nick Ut?

When I taught Michael Herr's Dispatches, one of the photos I used to familiarize the students with the place of journalism (and photojournalism) in Vietnam was Nick Ut's iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph:

So you can imagine my surprise when I saw the AP credit to this future monument to Schadenfreude:

We all must earn our bread ... even if it reduces us to photographing Paris Hilton reduced to tears.

A Gruesome Reminder: Part I

Exhausted from a week of writing nonstop, I decided to spend the day—wait for it, wait for it—reading for fun.  I know, I don't believe me either.  But like the fellow whose "autobiography" looms large in my current chapter, I cannot tell a lie: I whittled away the day reading books and magazines irrelevant to my dissertation.  Or so I thought:

[Seymour] Hicks wrote, "There is no doubt that as the years rolled on, the home life of this little peddler of patent medicines must have been anything but a rest cure..." (130)

I've written about this phenomenon before, but the experience of reading Erik Larson's Thunderstruck doesn't fit the "Strawberries Under Ice" paradigm.  As I wrote the April before last, David Quammen's essay "demonstrates how a scholar's research colors all aspects of his or her life, creating meaningful but ultimately irrelevant juxtapositions of research and lived experience."  How?

Dull, Dry Historicism, Eminent Medievalists, Literary Journalism and Rank Despair, Laughed Away

[A response to Luther Blissett's comment instead of a post.  Why?  Because minutiae oppress me, words fail me and with every day the odds of my future career in real estate increase ever so slightly.]

Part of the problem with our profession is that wowing gets jobs, but people need to fill in the details. So, for example, David Wallace's Chaucerian Polity is a brilliant book, but one Wallace couldn't have written without much of the "drudge work" accomplished by "lesser" scholars in the pages of Speculum. The profession needs both, but only recognizes one. (Not so true in medieval studies or early modern studies, but you see my point.)

At times, the historicist critic is afraid to venture out of the realm of brute facts, because of the Hayden White conundrum: the belief that all narrative forms are "fictions" and so are lies.

Well, I wouldn't call them "lies" but "creative transformations." What I'm interested in is the way people take this body of scientific knowledge and transform it to conform with preexisting beliefs, other bodies of thought (aesthetic theory, romantic individualism, &c.). So I'm uninterested in narrating events, because that's the realm of the historian proper. I think many historicists are intellectual historians who focus on shifts in thought as reflected in literature, i.e. Menand focuses on the Civil War's effect on William James' thought in The Metaphysical Club, whereas I'd focus on its influence on brother Henry. (Not that I am, just making a point.) That said, I still want to ground my accounts of shifts in thought to the material I've dredged up.

For example, at a talk I attended recently, someone asked the speaker "Wouldn't it be reeeeeeeeeally interesting if the person you're talking about was familiar with this particular strain of theory?"

"Yes," the speaker replied, "but I have no evidence that she was."

The questioner followed: "Maybe, but could you speculate about what it would mean if she had?"

The speaker obliged, but sitting there in the audience, I couldn't help but feel there was something deeply wrong with whole performance—and that "something" has to do with the oddity of historicist projects in literature departments. I'm still thinking about how to frame this, though, because it seems like it should be part of some larger conversation about the profession. Right now, it's an anecdote and an uneasy feeling but little more.

Let's remember that "the non-fiction novel" is just an awkward way of saying "history." And historians have successfully negotiated the need to balance truth and meaningfulness for several centuries.

I'm not buying that definition of the non-fiction novel.  History, as a profession, had moved away from the techniques of fiction employed by the New Journalism because they were considered "unprofessional." While it may be another mode of "historical" writing, the concomitant commitment to truth and the storytelling was innovative. You had both present, in differing degrees, in something like Hersey's Hiroshima or Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel, only Hersey wasn't much of a novelist and Mitchell frequently created composite characters to better communicate the mood he sought. You could venture further back—and I did when I taught the "Evolution of Literary Journalism" course, a historical survey beginning with Thucydites and working forward—but the genre lacked an ethos before the New Journalism. (I know Capote invented that final scene in In Cold Blood, but that just means he failed to live up to the courage of his commitments. Wolfe sharing the interior monologue of a dead monkey shot into space, on the other hand, is just plain weird.)

The short version is a tidy corollary of my historicism—my interest in literary journalism is the result of my investment of the literary-qua-literary, the techniques which warp history into something greater, more revealing, than brute chronicled facts. The attitude of the literary journalist is fundamentally different from that of the historian, a fact which alters both how and what they produce.

The Best Science Book Ever Written...

[That's odd.  I x-posted what I wrote on the Valve yesterday, but it didn't stick.  Now it will.  Be sure to read the comments over there, as they're already quite substantial.]

...is a novel?

Jonah Lehrer links to The Guardian‘s account of the Royal Institution of London’s crowning Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table “The Best Scientific Book Ever Written.” Not that Levi’s quasi-modernist memoir doesn’t deserve acclaim.  Every chapter’s prefixed by an element which plays some crucial part in the plot or symbolizes—like Linati’s Joycean kidney, with all its attendant frustrations—some moment of personal, cultural or historical of import.  It’s brilliantly executed—but its brilliance lies in Levi’s deft imbrication of the scientific and the personal, the personal and the historical, the scientific and the historical, &c.  The Periodic Table is not a scientific work with literary merit, but a literary work informed, to take one example, by practical applications of modern chemistry.  I wouldn’t complain, except that books like Levi’s receive lay-praise daily.  More worthy of celebration is the rare scientific book able to move a public forever on the brink of scientific illiteracy. 

I don’t want to rehearse the thesis of Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots here, but the Royal Institution’s inclusion of Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle over On The Origin of Species on the shortlist demands it.*  The Voyage of the Beagle is an important but utterly conventional document in literary and scientific history.  It lacks The Origin‘s novelistic flair.

Beers:

The sense that everything is connected, though the connections may be obscured, gave urgency to the enterprise of uncovering such connections.  This was the form of plotting crucial to Dickens’s work, as we can see, for example, in Bleak House, where the fifty-six named—and many more unnamed—characters all turn out to be related by way either of concealed descent (Esther and Lady Deadlock) or of economic dependency ("The dependency of one organic being on another, as of a parasite on its prey, lies generally between beings remote in scale of nature") .... As [Bleak House] proceeds the immense assemblage of apparently contingent characters is ordered and reordered into multiple sets of relations so that we discover that all of them are interdependent.  What at first looks like agglomeration proves to be analysable connection.

The unruly superfluity of Darwin’s material at first gives an impression of superfecundity without design.  Only gradually and retrospectively does the force of the argument emerge from the profusion of example. (42)

Darwin accomplished in The Origin what the popular explication of Pinker’s The Blank Slate doesn’t even attempt: namely, to explain a scientific concept in all its complexity to a world which mostly only understood novels.  Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene actually moves in the opposite direction—it is most powerful when Dawkins oversimplifies, e.g. when he reduces lived complexity into “memes.”  (The Dawkins and Pinker books were also shortlisted.) 

I suppose my bias shows here, but I think Darwin’s literary-scientific achievement in The Origin towers over the solid work of popularization, The Voyage included.

*That second link takes you to the E.O. Wilson-introduced collection Adam Gopnik recently reviewed for The New Yorker.

Dissertation Arcana #9,871: In Coincidences, My Head Swims

[This is the second installment in a series on the unaccountable appearance of chess-related arcana in my dissertation researches.  The first installment can be found here.  Unlike that one, however, this one happens to be true.]

In 1857, two unsigned articles appeared in Chess Monthly explaining how the infamous chess automaton known as the Turk worked:

The chest was divided into two apartments above, and a drawer beneath.  In the smaller apartment, occupying about a third of the longitudinal dimensions of the box, was placed a number of pieces of brass, made very thin, and designed only for the purpose of deception .... Behind this movable back of the drawer, there was therefore left an unoccupied space of the whole length of the chest, and rather more than a foot in breadth.  In this through was fixed an iron railroad ... upon which was placed a low seat.

So shiny knobs, bells and whistles above; below, a cramped seat into which tiny grandmasters could squeeze their emaciated selves.  That's the "mystery" of the Turk, according to these anonymous articles.  However, given that they were published in 1857 and the Turk had been destroyed in a fire in 1854, I'm not sure what would incline a person to trust those anonymous articles. 

After the death of Maelzel, its inventor and operator, on route to Cuba in 1838, the Turk had been auctioned off to "a noted professor of medicine."  Sometime thereafter, it had been sold or gifted to the Chinese Museum in Philadelphia, where it would burn with the rest of the building.  Curious, I started digging around. 

The obvious place to start would be Edgar Allen Poe's "Maelzel's Chess Player" (1836).  As one of The Obvious' biggest fans, I went for it.  Learned quite a bit about how Poe supposed it worked, but not much in the way of proof.  So I started digging through his letters.  Found this one, dated 29 February 1840:

Dr Sir,

It will give me great pleasure to accept your invitation for Feb: 29th—this evening.

Edgar A. Poe

To whom was this letter addressed?  Dr. J. K. Mitchell.  I could barely contain my excitement.  Four years after Poe writes about automaton and two years after it had been purchased by a "noted professor of medicine," Poe accepts the invitation of a Dr. J.K. Mitchell.  You see, I'm very familiar with a particular Dr. J.K. Mitchell, one who, though born in Virginia, spent his adult life practicing medicine in Philadelphia—where, you'll remember, the Turk ultimately meets its fiery end.  What could Poe and this Dr. Mitchell have been discussing on that cold February evening?  More to the point, what mechanical contraption could they have been jamming their too-tall frames into? 

I can't be certain, but I feel like I can hazard a guess.  I know, I know, guess-work doesn't befit an historicist.  Thing is, I went back and looked at those articles.  Sure enough, they're unsigned ... but flip to the index and you'll find your attribution:

"S.W. M."

Will he be my Itchell?

Proudly Giving You Wings for 116 Years

Were I not an historicist who knows tone shold always be contextalized, my mid-morning coffee and this passage from F. Savary Pearce's "A Clinical Report on the se of Testiclar Flid Injections" (1896) wold've been the death of my keyboard:

B.S. injections* made him feel stronger and checked his rolling gait.  At the end of twelve days, the marked beneficial action obtained.  At this time a violent syphilitic explosion occurred and a roseolar rash appeared with absolutely complete alopecia.

* "B.S. injection" both totally does and most certainly does not mean what you think it does.

The Macbeth Effect: Wipe that Conscience Squeaky Clean

In the 8 September Science, Chen-Bo Zhong and Katie Liljenquist studied what they call the Macbeth Effect:

that is, a threat to one's moral purity induces the need to cleanse oneself. This effect revealed itself through an increased mental accessibility of cleansing-related concepts, a greater desire for cleansing products, and a greater likelihood of taking antiseptic wipes.

After a quick history of religiously-motivated cleansing rituals, the pair turn their attention to The Bard:

Thus, Lady Macbeth's hope that a little bit of water would clear her of the treacherous murder of King Duncan might not have been a product of literary creativity, but of Shakespeare's acute understanding of the human psyche. If physical and moral purity are so psychologically intertwined, Lady Macbeth's desperate obsession with trying to wash away her bloodied conscience while crying, "Out, damned spot! Out, I say!" may not have been entirely in vain.

Contemporary psychology may have disowned Freud, but it shares his penchant for literary appropriation.  Like Freud, who found in the works of Sophocles and Shakespeare a complex examination of the entry of Man into Civilization, Zhong and Liljenquist saw a student production of Macbeth and discovered bathing:

"Look at her!  What is she doing with her hands?"

A round of vigorous shushings later, the pair exit the theater and park themselves in front of their favorite frozen yogurt stand. 

"Do you think that Shakespeare fellow was onto something?"

"Could be.  Should we do a study?"

"Sounds great!  But how would we study that?"

"First, we'll determine whether a threat to moral purity increases the mental accessibility of cleansing-related words."

"Yeah!  We'll ask participants to recall in detail either an ethical or unethical deed from their past and describe any feelings or emotions they experienced!"

"Then we'll have them engage in a word completion task in which they convert word fragments into meaningful words!"

"And of the six word fragments, three could be completed as cleansing-related words or as unrelated words!"

"Like W_ _ H, SH_ _ ER, and S_ _P!"

"Then we'll see whether those who recalled an unethical deed generated more cleansing-related words than those who recalled an ethical deed, suggesting that unethical behavior enhances the accessbility of cleasning-related concepts!"

Or maybe they thought the Shakespeare brand would help them find an audience. 

Seriously though, I have more of a problem with the unexamined theory of the symbolic favored by contemporary psychology than its psychoanalytic equivalent.  Not that depth or complexity necessarily mean anything, but the ease with which Zhong and Liljenquist place cleanliness next to turpitude disturbs me:

Physical cleansing may wash away moral sins through symbolic self-completion; that is, people are motivated to complete their self-definitions (e.g., musicians) when indicators or symbols of this definition are lacking (e.g., skills) by engaging in activities that complete the symbols (e.g., training). Thus, when moral self-definition is at stake, such as when one has indulged in morally questionable activities, one should naturally be motivated to engage in activities that will restore moral integrity.

It must be more complex than that.  Why seek symbolic self-completion for an actual offense?  But why address those assumptions when you can prescribe a possible remedy for all human ills:

Future studies that specifically address the psychological and behavioral consequences of physical cleanliness will provide valuable insight into regulatory mechanisms that drive ethical decisions. Given the boost to one's moral self afforded by physical cleansing, how might it influence subsequent behavior? Would adherence to a rigorous hygiene regimen facilitate ethical behavior? Or, would cleansing ironically license unethical behavior? It remains to be seen whether clean hands really do make a pure heart, but our studies indicate that they at least provide a clean conscience after moral trespasses.

Some of the People, Some of the Time

The new issue of Bookforum features James Shapiro's excellent review of Ron Rosenbaum's The Shakespeare Wars and Kenneth Gross's Shylock Is Shakespeare.   As I noted last month, I've come to Shakespeare through the criticism.   Instead of having my love of The Bard desanguinated by years of graduate study, I've acquired a taste for the man whose works inspired Dead Poets Society to inspire generations to hazard a thwack at the GRE Subject Exam in Literature in English.^[1]   Not only that, I've been inspired by the very works which earn Rosenbaum's ire:

SAT : ANALOGY :: STUPIDITY : REPETITION

[The original whose conceit I shamelessly plunder.]

1)  DISSERTATION : PROGRESS ::

(A)  development : montage
(B)  Iraq : nation-building
(C)  steroid : muscle
(D)  flower : sunshine

2)  MOOD : HAPPY

(A)  demeanor : pleasant
(B)  head : acephalous
(C)  children : glee
(D)  pain : masochism

3)  OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN : QUIET

(A)  Katrina : spring shower
(B)  postmodernism : family values
(C)  inconsiderate parents : neighbors
(D)  toddlers banging : pots and pans

4)  NIGHT : SLEEP

(A)  day : awake
(B)  work : productive
(C)  life : worth living
(D)  living dead : not brain

The New Republic's Open University

[X-posted from the Valve per the x-posting policy mentioned Monday (soon to be codified).]

As its illustrious competitors for “Most Prestigious Group Blog” have noted, The New Republic‘s Open University went online today.  The roster is nothing short of spectacular:

David A. Bell, David Bromwich, Daniel W. Drezner, David Greenberg, Jacob S. Hacker, Michael Kazin, Sanford Levinson, Jacob T. Levy, Darrin M. McMahon, John McWhorter, Elisa New, Steven Pinker, Eric Rauchway, Christine Stansell, Lawrence Summers, Cass R. Sunstein, Abigail Thernstrom, Ted Widmer and Alan Wolfe.

I’m not entirely sure what its establishment means for the future of academic blogging.  Does it bode well?  Does it mean academic bloggers have already “made it”?  How will these titans interact with established bloggers?  Will they participate in discussions or will they merely initiate them? 

Over the past three years, I’ve corresponded with four of its contributors; all four struck me as personable, charitable scholars willing to engage their opponents.  (A few months back, I heard Pinker was “stubborn, arrogant, uncooperative and chewed with his mouth open.” That description—sans flourish—didn’t jibe with my experience.)  What effect will having to deal with trolls, sorrowful or otherwise, have on them?  I’m as curious as I can be (without wishing it upon them).

Also, everyone should check out Eric Rauchway’s post on Deadwood.  In addition to being an exceptionally gifted historian—his Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America is one of the finest books on my period (Gilded Age/Progressive Era) I’ve read to date—he has impeccable taste in links.

Oh Yes, I Put the "Der" in Derridean

A few months back, I wrote a long post about why I don't "do theory" anymore.  In it, I identified what initially drew me to theory-doing:

There's something about modernist literature which lends itself to and/or is consonant with continental philosophy.  Joyce, Proust, Woolf, &c. attract people who study Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, &c.

That's what I said.  What followed that statement, however, had little to do with it.  I tied my intellectual development to my progress to and through graduate school, moving from one charismatic professor to another, adopting and discarding perspective after perspective until I became who I am.  As CR pointed out, my development seemed "a bit overdetermined."  At the time, I wanted to reply that the overdetermination was a function of the narrative, or that I would consider charismatic those with whom I was already inclined to agree.  Both responses seemed inadequate.  The first because you can always blame the narrator for his narrative, which he could have, but chose not to, narrate differently; the second, because I adopted and discarded with proselytical glee.

I think I have an answer now:

In a conversation elsewhere about the relation of thinkers to their adjectives, I mentioned a crack Derrida made about feeling "insufficiently Derridean."  Possessive pronouns aside, his legacy would not be his, nor would it relate to the body of his thought.  Neither would it belong to other philosophers.  It would be the property of English professors; so much so, he mused, that the adjective "Derridean" didn't even refer to him.  It was an abbreviation for "The Yale Derrideans" (Paul De Man, J. Hillis Miller and Geoffrey Hartman).  I remember thinking the obvious question—"What does the 'Derridean' in 'The Yale Derrideans' refer to?"—and being struck by the profundity of the obvious answer:

"Not Derrida." 

Not the man, his words, his thought, or anything he could control, but the tradition he inspired.  As traditions are wont to evolve, that means his name could be attached to thought which bore little resemblance to his own.  (Which is why he could be "insufficiently Derridean" in the first place.)  While there are many possible referents for "Derridean," the only viable one is "what people who describe their work as 'Derridean' do."  The connection is incidental, not inherent.  Certainly not essential. 

"Derridean" means what it means because Derrida was embraced by English departments in the United States at a particular historical moment.  In retrospect, you can muster a convincing explanation for how it came to mean what it means.  But only in retrospect.  And only for "Derridean."  You can't generalize from its adoption how, for example, English departments in the States at a different historical moment  adjectivized a different thinker. 

I didn't think this at the time.  Back then, I banged my head bloody against walls of theoretical necessity:

There (bang!) must (bang!) be (bang!) some (bang!) essential (bang!) connection (bang!) between (bang!) thinkers (bang!) and (bang!) their (bang!) adjectives (bang!).

Head pounding, hair blowzy, I decided to drop the issue and do some investigating.  How had "Derridean" come to mean something other than "closely associated with the thought of Derrida"?  The answer, as everyone else knew but I'd yet to learn, was the New Criticism.  Derrida influenced a professoriate trained to value certain methods and concepts over others.  When an English professor picked up Of Grammatology, she would read:

To produce this signifying structure obviously cannot consist of reproducing, by the effaced and respectful doubling of commentary, the conscious, voluntary, intentional relationship that the writer institutes in his exhanges with the history to which he belongs thanks to the element of language.  This moment of doubling commentary should no doubt have its place in a critical reading.  To recognize and respect all its classical exigencies is not easy and requires all the instruments of traditional criticism.  Without this recognition and this respect, critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything.  But this indispensable guardrail has always only protected, it has never opened a reading. (158)

That "respectful doubling of commentary" bears an uncanny resemblance to the mode of "close reading" she'd been doing since her undergraduate days.  Her ignorance of structuralist theory, however, would render sections of that passage opaque.  Her commitment to radical politics would encourage her to disregard all talk of "indispensable guardrails."  She might not even have read that far, since the entire profession had orgiastically authorized critical production to develop in every direction and say almost everything.  Why?

Because the structuralist tradition to which Derrida refers lacked the political implications of the tradition to which American readers applied Derrida: New Criticism.  Unlike structuralism, which sounded and aspired to be scientific, the New Criticism was born of an agrarian, anti-scientific sentiment.  It blossomed into the pedagogical tool of a white male elite and was reviled.  When an American critic heard talk of "indispensible guardrails," he would think it the equivalent of William Faulkner's advice for the Civil Rights Movement: "Go slow."  Like Thurgood Marshall is reputed to have said:

"They don't mean go slow.  They mean don't go."

Deconstruction, then, allowed them to keep the professional tools they've long cultivated while unburdening them of the politics associated with New Criticism.  This, then, is the school of thought "Derridean" would come to describe.  Not the man, not his words, not his thought, but a particular amalgam of close-reading techniques and hostility to New Critical politics. 

Derrida may have written Of Grammatology in an environment in which New Critical politics had no purchase, but the American scholars who gave his name purchase did.  This realization constituted perhaps the greatest leap in my intellectual development.  Words stopped relating to concepts and started commingling with the history of the acceptance and dissemination of those concepts. 

Theory began to matter less.

The history of theory began to matter more. 

All of which is only to say, in response to CR's comment of months back, that I had prepped the fields for the crops my string of advisors would plant there.  Intellectually speaking, I had already begun moving in an historicist direction.  Perhaps the best way to say it is that I've been influenced by those scholars I'd prepared myself to be influenced by. 

(I should add that I want to thank CR for presenting me the opportunity to think through this.  As every reader of Freud knows, introspection is fun.  Useful too, I think.  More to me than you, probably.  I should get back to writing funny things, shouldn't I?  In my mind, Woody Allen's fans from Stardust Memories rove in bands, lamenting my fall from grace.)

Well, Who Would Conservatives Have Us Footnote?

[This inflammatory baby originally appeared on The Valve.  But you're welcome to comment and/or link to it here.]

Laura Ventura, a law student from Indiana, picked up the then-latest issue of Critical Inquiry and read Anne H. Stevens and Jay Williams’ article The Footnote, in Theory.  She was horrified:

For those who doubt the far leftward tilt of college campuses, one needs to look no further than an article published in the University of Chicago’s Critical Inquiry to dispel such doubts. An article by Anne H. Stevens and Jay Williams titled “The Footnote, in Theory” chronicled Critical Inquiry’s most frequently cited theorists throughout its existence.

The number one cited theorist by the magazine was none other than Jacques Derrida, “the father of deconstruction.” Exactly what deconstruction means is hard to say because even Derrida himself could not give a definition. In a nutshell, deconstruction is a method for discrediting historical theorists such as Aristotle and Plato for the sole purpose of promoting Derrida’s own beliefs.

Her deep familiarity with Derrida’s oeuvre notwithstanding, I question Accuracy in Academia’s decision to publish such a laughably ignorant article.  Maybe a friend should’ve told her that anti-Derridean polemics account for half of Derrida’s appearances in CI.  Proof?  Of course I have proof.  Responsible scholars—future lawyers, even—read the works they criticize, lest they risk writing the equivalent of this:

For those who doubt the anti-Americanist tilt of college campuses, one needs to look no further than an article published in the German Studies Association’s German Studies Review to dispel such doubts. An article by Anne H. Fritzsche and Jay Ametsbichler titled “Die Fußnote, in der Theorie” chronicled German Studies Review’s most frequently cited theorists throughout its existence.

The number one cited theorist by the magazine was none other than some German Guy, “the father of some German school of thought.” Exactly what some German school of thought means is hard to say because even that German Guy himself could not give a definition. In a nutshell, some German school of thought is a method for discrediting historical theorists such as Aristotle and Plato for the sole purpose of promoting some German Guy’s own beliefs.

Before you protest how unfair my parody is, consider what Ventura follows that with:

Notably absent from the list is C. S. Lewis. It is a fair assumption that he was most likely left off the list because of his strong Christian beliefs and influences. This factor certainly sets him apart from number two on the list, Sigmund Freud, who did not have any religious convictions. Realistically, the fact the Lewis was a Christian most likely sets him apart from all the “theorists” on the list.

I’m so blinded by the fact that C.S. Lewis rarely appears in CI because he’s a Christian, I can’t see her argument to refute it. “Realistically,” it is such “a fair assumption” I can do nothing but accept its accuracy.  Sure, sure, the actual reason Lewis “was most likely left off the list” was that he wasn’t cited often enough to warrant placement on it.  But c’mon now, we’re being “realistic” here, and the obvious reason for his omission is that his 4,837 citations in CI paled in comparison to his overt espousal of Christian doctrine. (Anyway, we all know the tricks the left plays with numbers.  To them, math is but another masculinist discourse, &c.) After she’s proven that it’s probably fair to guess that Lewis was most likely left off due to his Christian beliefs, she addresses two other notable theorists absent from the list:

Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain.

Before you think no one could read that without ruining a keyboard (or two, depending on how much coffee you’ve yet to swallow) Candace de Russy seconds Ventura’s outrage:

Those absent from the list?  Such theorists as Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, and C.S. Lewis.

And people accuse John of using “theory"/"theorist" in the slippery sense?  I love Mr. Clemens as much as the next 19^th Century Americanist, but the man was a novelist.  He wrote the things theorists theorize about, not the things they produce.  (Not that there aren’t exceptions, mind you.)  Where to begin?  Maybe it’s better I don’t. 

Alexander Riley did, however, only to be spanked by the executive director of Accuracy in Academia, Malcolm Kline.  In 896 words—in fairness, only half of them are his—Kline said things. Some stuff, too.  Like, in response to Riley’s question

What precisely, one hastens to ask, in Derrida’s work have they honed in on, in their painstakingly expert reading, as evidence for this?

He said:

Ironically, Riley devotes more than 1,000 words to an attack on Dr. de Russy’s 99-word and Miss Ventura’s 364-word post.

Read the article.  That is his response to Riley’s question.  Again, I’m at a loss where to begin.  A pedantic statement about the unironic nature of the allegedly ironic question?  A note that the explanation as to why the sky is blue would be lengthier than the statement “the sky is green”?  Would pointing out that the response is a total non sequitur suffice? 

I’m tempted to write that any engagement with people as intellectually irresponsible as Ventura, de Russy, and Kline ought to be avoided.  Their commitment to empiricism, accuracy, and in Kline’s case, common sense, is as strong as is absolutely necessary to make the point they want to make when they want to make it. 

ADDENDUM: While I question the company he’s keeping, I can’t help but applaud [the approach of] former Valve contributor Mark Bauerlein’s contribution to this kerfuffle.  His assessment’s harsh [but unlike that of Ventura, Kline and de Russy, informed, i.e. incorrect but] not unfair.  Of course, were it not for “scholarly” interventions by the likes of Ventura, de Russy and Kline, many devotees would’ve [and have] moved on to other things long ago.  [Revised to to make what I said bear some relation to what I meant to.]

On the Power of Psychoanalytic Theory. No, Really.

forgottenboy's version of my feelings about Gladwell's Blink sounds overly sanguine to these ears.  Wilson's Strangers to Ourselves may lack the narrative drive of Gladwell's books, but it is a far better introduction to the field.  His narrative may stutter through the disciplinary history case-study-by-case-study, but even a shot transmission can push the needle above 55 on occasion.  But I want to talk argument, not ornament.  Wilson cites the articles being summarized or criticized, and his assessments are responsible and generous.  Perhaps too generous.  So far, I've found Wilson to be a serial under-exaggerator (even in reference to his own work) who steps delicately to avoid tripping any bullshit detectors.  Still, he compels readers to connect the dots he lines up.  (In Blink, those debates are obscured by the litany of experts he interviews, none of whom think it's a bad idea to present radical positions as if they were the disciplinary norm.)

The most salient and alluring undotted line suggests, forcefully if not persuasively, that a person can acquire a Freudian or Lacanian unconscious by sheer force of belief. Not an actual one, mind you, since it would still reside "above" the adaptive unconscious; and not a truly "unconscious" unconscious, since it would be the product of conscious deliberation; but it could be there.

In chapter four, he delves into the research into constitution of "personality," and presents the consensus opinion that people's conscious beliefs and unconscious behavior are at odds. He cites numerous studies which demonstrate, for example, that when a person and all her friends are asked to rate her on character traits like "conscientiousness" and "temper," there is almost no correlation between the person's self-evaluation and her friends' evaluations; however, there's a significant correlation, damn near a consensus, among her friends. What this speaks to, Wilson argues, is the fact that the adaptive unconscious manifests its "personality" more forcefully in social situations, in moments when reactions are instant, or almost so, and thus rely not on conscious deliberation but on the unconscious modules. Their contours are clearly visible to everyone except the person who must infer the disposition of implicit processes they can only access indirectly. We can't control those processes despite the fact that they constitute the bulk of our personality. We are what we do, not how we rationalize it. (On its face, this is a familiar model. Keep in mind, however, that the processes involved work in no way like their psychoanalytic counterparts. No family romance and all it entails.)

How does Wilson know this? Like anyone interested in human cognition, he studies people with unique and/or extensive brain damage. He cites the Gazzaniga and LeDoux's famous study of the lobotomized patient whose right hemisphere (controlling the left side of his body) is flashed a picture of a snow scene on it and asked to pick the card which corresponds to it: a shovel, a can opener, a screwdriver and a saw. With his left hand he picks the shovel every time; with his left-hemisphere controlled right hand, he did no better than chance. Then they flashed different pictures at the same time:

[I]n one trial they flashed the snow scene to [the patient's] right hemisphere and a picture of a chicken claw to his left hemisphere. Hepicked the card with a shovel with his left hand (because that was the one most related to the snow scene seen by his right hemisphere) and a card with a chicken with his right hand (because that was most related to the chicken claw seen by his left hemisphere.

The researchers then asked [the patient] why had picked the cards he did. Like most people, [the patient's] speech center was in his left hemisphere, which knew why he had picked the chicken with his right hand (because he had seen the chicken claw) but had no idea why he had picked the shovel with his left hand (because the snow scene was viewed only by the right hemisphere). No problem; the left hemipshere quickly made up an answer: "I saw a claw and picked a chicken, and you have to clean out the chicken shed with a shovel. (96)

A basic example of "mind-blindness," I know, but a powerful indication of what the deliberative consciousness constantly does; namely, it confabulates rational—typically narrative—explanations when confronted with any situation.  It acts as if it possesses all the facts, understands all the motives, and produces an plausible explanation. The superficial resemblance to psychoanalytic theory reappears, but in this case, the distinction is definitive: there is no repression involved, no psychic defense mechanism at work here; the conscious mind is merely as ignorant of these unconscious modules as the distribution of liver enzymes. Our tiny, perhaps even epiphenomenal, conscious mind lies because that is all it knows how to do.

I prefer the modified "executive model" of consciousness. In the unmodified version, the legislative and judicial branches and the executive staffers work for—albeit not at the behest of—the President. He issues directives, sets "the course" which everyone else follows. Wilson, himself following Owen Flanagan, thinks the consciousness-as-President model grants it too much power; he prefers what Flanagan calls the consciousness-as-Reagan model, because

Reagan was the entertaining and eloquent spokesperson for a cadre of smart and hardworking powers (actually layers of power), some known to outsiders, and some unknown. This is not to deny that Reagan felt as if he were in charge in his role as "The Great Communicator" ... The point is that one can feel presidential, and indeed be presidential, but still be less in control than it seems from either the inside or outside. (7)

Obviously, the narratives we use to rationalize our behavior are interdependent with the processes they obscure. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves can alter our disposition to our environment and our reactions to it. Short of a neurological event, we are more plastic than the interminable cure would have us believe; we are so plastic, in fact, that we can create a working model a Freudian, Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian, Zizekian &c. "unconscious" where none previously existed. We can alter our social situation such that we relate to people as our preferred psychoanalytic model predicts, which forces the adaptive unconscious to behave in accordance with the altered social environment. We can slip a conscious psychoanalytic "unconscious" between our Inner Reagan and actual unconscious.

What this means for the study of literature is that the already strong argument in favor of teasing psychoanalytic models from works authored by writers of the psychoanalytic persuasion contains more explanatory power than I initially apportioned it.  Even better—or worse, if you've taken a hardline anti-psychoanalytic stance like some people I am—to the extent that psychoanalysis is literary theory, the superstructural relations it identifies are, if they appear with the frequency with which scholars claim, of extreme, perhaps central, importance. There's a catch:

Advocacy criticism is fundamentally, perhaps fatally, flawed. Any theory which considers fundamental a psychoanalytic account of human cognition finds itself with a literary trope in the place their theory of mind resided. They have unwittingly confused a highly sophisticated, literary manifestation of deliberate thought for the basic workings of the human mind. The mind is not a work of art, and cannot be treated as such. I will track this line of thought further tomorrow, but I think you can see the general direction I'm headed.