Acephalous

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.

How Professional Literary Critics Address Ambiguity in a Text (with Visual Aids)

My current problem is deciding which of the two conclusions I've written I'm going to append to the Pudd'nhead Wilson chapter.  I don't mean "conclusions" as in "concluding paragraphs," either.  I mean "conclusions" as in "what I think Twain is up to in the final chapter vis-a-vis race and American culture."  On Tuesday, I found a pessimism tinged with commonplace racism more convincing.  This morning, I'm inclined to consider his racism idiosyncratic and profound.   To aid others who may be in a similar plight, I thought I might diagram my pain for general amusement edification.

Coming to a conclusion in an academic essay is very much like looking at the red square pictured below.  Stare at it until it pops:

Now focus on the other red square until it does:

Then first again:

And the second:

Now both simultaneously:

Until it turns into one of these things:

This would be your argument.  It is unique and critical and it is genius.  Your timely interrogation of "box" will not go unnoticed.  The market rewards incisive interventions and yours will be no exception. 

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.

What Does Being "More Pessimistic" Actually Entail?

The concept of "pessimism" as a quantity seems utterly foreign to me.  I've spent the early afternoon charting the events responsible for the growth of Mark Twain's pessimism.  The resemblance to Kurt Vonnegut's diagram of The Metamorphosis is uncanny:

Transpose those plot points into the real world and you get a sense of why Twain became increasingly pessimistic during the 1890s.  Not that I know what that means anymore, mind you, because I can't currently wrap my head around pessimism as a quantifiable concept.  Like when you repeatedly write your name until it no longer belongs to you then scribble it a couple hundred times more until the very concept of naming ceases to be meaningful.  I doubt my befuddlement will abate anytime soon.  You could say I'm pessimistic.  How pessimistic am I? 

I am 23 pessimistic.  I began this post 96 pessimistic.  (In pessimism as in golf, a lower score is better.)  Although I'm better pessimistic now than when I began writing, forecasters say my inability to account for the 74 point shift will likely cause a 16 point pessimistic swing. 

Would that it were so easy.  Instead, I'm forced to determine whether Twain's more pessimistic after his business fails or his eldest daughter dies.  Or after his youngest daughter develops epilepsy or his wife slips into permanent invalidism. 

Does his pessimism simply accumulate over time or does it fluctuate?  Does his bankruptcy create a baseline of 54 pessimistic or does it temporarily knock him to 54 then allow him to recover?  Does a minor tragedy at 51 pessimistic feel like a major one at 54?  Is pessimism exponential? 

I'm not sure.  I don't even know if pessimism is a limited resource.  Does my being 18 pessimistic mean someone else must compensate for the other 14 dour points I should be feeling?

In Memoriam: Jim Zwick

When I was writing my Silas Weir Mitchell chapter, I happened across Jim Zwick's comprehensive website on Twain and anti-imperialism.  So it should come as no surprise that when I started writing my Twain chapter, I sought out the two books Zwick had written on Clemens and anti-imperialism.  He and I exchanged a few emails and he was aggressively generous, sending me copies of a numerous documents I was having trouble laying hands on. 

Tonight I read Shelley Fisher Fishkin's email to the Americanist listserv informing us that he had passed away.  I never met him, and I only exchanged a handful of emails with him, but let me say this:

He was generous when he didn't have to be.

It may sound banal, but when you think about it, what better epitaph could a scholar wish for?

What is the Regnant Theory of Naturalism, Anyway?

As there's confusion over basic procedural issues like how long a dissertation abstract should be (one single-spaced page, two single-spaced pages, five single-spaced pages), I figure there's no harm in asking a basic intellectual question:

What do you consider the dominant theory of naturalism?

If I'm to be redefining it, I ought to know what the majority of scholars think it is.  I'm tempted to follow Lisa Long, who, in her review of three recent attempts at defining naturalism, threw up her hands in defeat:

In the end, naturalism turns back on itself, becomes the uncategorizable category, precisely because the taxonomic and evolutionary tendency of literary history is naturalist in and of itself—concerned in its own way with determining what nineteenth-century critic Hippolyte Taine theorized as the ubiquitous "race, moment, and milieu" that have produced literary naturalism and other generic categories. American literary genres emerge as living, breathing, and ever-changing entities in these texts and in critical history as a whole; much collective scholarly energy has been spent, like that of biological taxonomists, looking for similarities between genres/"species" of literature, and hierarchicalizing those groups based on evolutionary relationships.

She identifies the current attempt to define naturalism as one more lost battle in a long, unwinnable war ... which means the best I can accomplish in my introduction is another pointed setback in an unending campaign of failure.  Of course, I could really surrender and claim, as one critic recently did, that naturalism is "less a movement than a jumble of proffered peculiarities."  The mind rails against the brutal honesty of that definition, but I admire its bravado.

So which naturalism should I be redefining?  The most current consensus?  The most powerful? 

Get Out Your Red Pencils: a Dissertation Abstract Awaits

For those curious as to what literary historicists do (Anthony) and those convinced I do absolutely nothing at all (Emerson), I present my dissertation abstract. 

Behold! 

Everything I've slaved over lo these many years, condensed into five paragraphs ... thereby ensuring that what I've written makes absolutely no sense.  See, I've been over this thing so many times—made so many piddling changes, emphasizing so many stakes here, dropping so many arguments there—I can no longer read the words before me. 

I don't know what they mean.  So invested am I in the history of its revisions—the agonizing decision to delete this, the writhing that accompanied the diminishment of that—I'm unable to judge whether it even makes any sense.  Are the stakes of my argument apparent?  Can you tell how necessary my corrective is to the health of the discipline? 

Does it even make any sense?

(Note: The final version of my dissertation contains a chapter on Twain which is, at the present moment, too excreable to include in the abstract.  Also, my fifty-five page intellectual history of evolutionary theory at the turn of the last century will likely become my first chapter, thus necessitating the writing of an introduction which resembles my abstract and, you know, talks about literature.)

How to Write a Dissertation, Part MCMXCVI

Option #1:

Spend weeks skimming seventeen volumes of Mark Twain's letters for references to Darwin, Lamarck, evolution or social development.  Collect all relevant references into a single file.  Collate according to potential usefulness.  Accidentally delete one or twenty of them.  Copy them again.  Feel confusion.  Know that you had that one reference.  Remember that it was right there.  Right there. 

Skim letters again for the phrase "unfortunate development."  Picture where you were and what it was like when you wrote it down.  Think: "It was overcast that day ... which was when I looked at Volume IV!"  Skim Volume IV. 

Fail. 

Cry. 

Leave library.

Drink.

Option #2:

Put off starting Twain chapter for a month.  Feel pure bliss when the Mark Twain Project launched this week.  Search Mark Twain's letters for "Darwin," "Lamarck," "evolution" and "social development."  Save relevant letters to "My Citations."  Feel "Happiness!"

Drink.

Option J:

Not an option.

Read Happy Books; or, Hell, Learn How to Read

The folks at Phi Beta Cons are waxing anti-intellectual about Mary Collins' complaint in The Christian Science Monitor.  According to Collins, her daughter has stopped reading because her school requires her to read novels with "distressing plots [and] sad, even sinister, story lines."  Most interesting to Carol Iannone, however, is Collins' account of a conversation she had with some of her daughter's classmates:

The string of searing plot patterns has resulted in some very peculiar unintended consequences. Most of the students I spoke with from my daughter's middle school claimed that the readings made them feel inadequate because they never "experienced these horrible things."

"It becomes awkward," one student said, "because you're constantly made to feel spoiled or privileged."

Her co-blogger, David French, picks up the baton and—in a move calculated to prove, definitively, his nub-mindedness—promptly thwacks the first professor he sees:

I enjoyed Carol’s post highlighting how the typical college reading assignment seems designed to make students feel “spoiled or privileged.”  In fact, professorial contempt for “spoiled or privileged” students is nauseatingly common.  Yet this is yet another example of academic blindness.  It is tough to imagine a more “privileged” person than a tenured faculty member at a major university.  Six figure income.  Ten month work year.  Absolute job security in the absence of actual fraud or criminal behavior.  No other profession in America enjoys such benefits.

That Collins and Iannone spoke of middle school reading lists is irrelevant.  The point is to drub academics wherever and whenever you can; in this case, for their contempt for the "spoiled and privileged."  You know that varnish spoiled, privileged children are taught to apply to their elitism in (ahem) finishing schools? 

French forgot to apply it.  He speaks here, openly, for the downtrodden, i.e. the spoiled, privileged children of wealth.  He is nauseated by the contempt in which these spoiled, privileged children are held.  That they behave in spoiled, privileged ways is irrelevant.  That is their culture, see, and these postmodern multiculturalists are hypocrites for shitting on these children's unearned pretensions. 

They come from a better culture—one with money and power—and these arrogant professors have the nerve to inform them that the world shouldn't bow to their every wish and whim?  Who do these professors think they are?  Did they go Andover?  Groton, even?  Who are they to spit upon our spoiled children?

To return to my original point—which, to be honest, I've yet to even hint at—Collins suggests that these children can be cheered up by reading something chipper like Huck Finn.  Because once Huck and Tom fool Jim into thinking he's still enslaved, then torture him for a little while in order to satisfy Tom's love of historical romance—well, those are an absolute hoot.  Guaranteed to cheer up a sallow youth any day. 

For that matter, why not have them read Connecticut Yankee?  It's finale is clean, wholesome fun for children of all ages.   I mean, The Boss insists that the electrocuted knights be delivered a coup de grace, when he could have left them on the field to die horribly and alone, save for the screams and rattles of their compatriots.

My point, then, is that the canon debate factors into these issues in ways we shouldn't, but do, ignore.  If Twain wrote Huck Finn today, I guarantee Collins and her ilk would complain about it being taught to their children.  (They do, of course, but for different reasons.)

pastcast, v.

To ascribe, assign, bestow to historical personages, as a defining property or characteristic, contemporary theories, doctrines, beliefs which they did not or could not have held.

1939 J. Joyce, F. Wake. 314 Paradoxmutose caring, but here in a present booth of Ballaclay, Barthalamou, where their dutchuncler mynhosts and serves them dram well right for a boors' interior (homereek van hohmryk) that salve that selver is to screen its auntey and has ringround as worldwise eve her sins (pip, pip, pip) willpip futurepip feature apip footloose pastcast with spareshins and flash substittles of noirse-made-earsy from a nephew mind the narrator but give the devil his so long as those sohns of a blitzh call the tuone tuone and thonder alout makes the thurd. 2007 S.E. Kaufman, Diss. 171  In Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), written during the decade in which the [Modern] Synthesis gradually coalesced, Richard Hofstadter pastcasts a heavily synthesized Darwinism into fin de siècle American culture as a means of justifying New Deal social policy through an implicit comparison of the consequences of Roosevelt's interventionist approach to the depredations brought about by the laissez-faire policies of the Gilded Age.