Acephalous

Damnable confabulation.

I'm presently torn between two alternative means of interpreting the uninterpretable.  Because I'm a lit-git, I'm tempted to go with the unscientific advice Gertrude Stein belatedly offered her mentor William James:

[Y]ou do not really believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right. 

That I'm the sole source of that seminal articulation of the grit that chokes the gears of our cognitive grind to a halt is a national tragedy . . . because how are there no modernists whose Steinian veins have bled out and into Google more stainingly than mine?  (I'm not even a modernist anymore you know.)  Now where was I? 

I do not really believe myself why should I, I know so well that it is not myself, it could not be myself because I cannot remember right and if I do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right.

That would be where I was.  But keeping in mind my abiding interest in things neurological—I did write a chapter on the Founding Father of American Neurology after all—you probably won't be surprised to learn that I've spent the past few days researching why it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right.  Then Jonathan Dresner damn near channeled Stein in his comment the other night:

Memory is a funny[.]*

It is.  Jonathan's story of seeing a pink bow in a black-and-white cartoon is a poignant funny that also happens to be relevant, as I'm currently seeing things that I couldn't have seen, e.g. I remember seeing the car slam into the semi's trailer even though, as I mentioned in the original post, the fog was so thick I couldn't even see the semi once it passed me.  So why do I think I saw what I couldn't have seen?

My brain did the math.  It calculated what must have happened between the time I last saw the car in my mirror and where it landed and then turned that understanding of what must have happened into a memory of having witnessed it happen.  So even though I couldn't have seen the crash occur, I'm burdened by a nightmare-inducing memory of it.  Intellectually, I know this to be the result of garden-variety non-pathological confabulation, indicative of nothing more than the procedural drills required to produce an unbroken experience of consciousness; emotionally and ethically, however, it feels wrong to bear witness to a tragedy that I did not, in fact, witness. 

Put differently: I know my eyes have two blind spots (punctum caecum) because there are no rods and cones where the optic nerve exits the eye and that the brain fills in details to occupy that absence; however, I've never felt betrayed by this perceptual white lie before, or that there was anything ethically dubious to the claim that I "saw" something that was actually in a blind spot.  My brain behaved no differently in reconstructing my memory of the crash than it does when it allows me to experience an unbroken field of vision, yet there does seem to be something ethically dubious about its behavior here.  Moreover, the fact that it performed this reconstruction in order to torment my sleep with visions of it strikes me as an appalling cosmi-cognitive joke.

*Had he been less concerned that his words accord with the dictates of English, I don't doubt that Jonathan would've embraced his inner lesbian modernist and went with the impactively tacky "Memory is a funny" over that grammatical sentence he actually wrote.

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.)

Enemies made or enemies born?

On this day in history, two men—one of whom would say that the other’s life work represented “the utmost human degradation[:] an idiot’s vegetative existence”—were born. In 1885, the author of that statement, Marxist literary critic Georg Lukács, dewombed in Budapest. Often cited as the founder of Western (or philosophical) Marxism, Lukács can be considered the grandfather of the armchair academic activists who fought the radical fight from tenured positions at illustrious institutions. I only half-kid here: his claim in The Historical Novel (1937) that the role of the literary critic was to examine “the relation between ideology (in the sense of Weltanschauung) and artistic creation” (147) allowed otherwise sedentary scholars to label as revolutionary action an exegesis on Dickensian realism.  Anyone whose work analyzed critical or socialist realism, i.e. literature which displayed “the contradictions within society and within the individual context of a dialectical unity,” could consider him or herself a soldier in the Great Class War Against Mystification. Like Susan Sontag, I find his definition of realism—socialist, critical or otherwise—unnecessarily reductive and his dismissiveness of non-realist works short-sighted (if not out-right anti-intellectual).

In 1906, the same year Lukács received his Ph.D., was born the man whose work depicted “an idiot’s vegetative existence.” That Samuel Beckett’s novels, plays and poetry trafficked in “human degradation” was reason enough for condemnation: unlike realists novels, which were capable of creating dialectical conversations between singular narratives and the social totality of history, modernist novels wallowed in the singularity of their narrators:

Lack of objectivity in the description of the outer world finds its complement in the reduction of reality to a nightmare. Beckett’s Molloy is perhaps the ne plus ultra of this development. (152)

If an author grounds that nightmare in “the Aristotelian concept of man as zoon politikon” (151); that is, if an author provides a reference against which the consequences of the actions of social animals can be judged: only then can reader or critic differentiate between the concrete potentialities (what happens) and the abstract potentialities (what the character thought could have happened). Authors who refuse to declare what happened—who mess in the pseudo-realization of abstract potentiality—create readers who will never know from dialectical. They will not be social animals critically examining the societal structuring of their lives through the power of realist narratives; they will be unwitting dupes forever mired in the pathological subjectivity of Molloy, forever sucking pebbles. Their lives, such that they are, will be spent in the Grand Hotel Abyss, which Lukács describes as

a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered. (qtd. 22)

Needless to say, I disagree.

I’ll close on an historical odditiy: not only was Lukács born on April 13th, so too was the French psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic theorist, Jacques Lacan. It’s as if the day conspired to give birth to the thought of Louis Althusser (which, as you can probably guess, is one part Lukácian, one part Lacanian and three cans of crazy).

(x-posted.)

271 notes (two hundred and seventy-one) from a novel I don't remember reading.*

Before I could return The Damnation of Theron Ware to my beloved library, I had to remove all the notes I'd stuck to its pages. It took me a while:

The resulting note wheel is as lovely as it is meaningless, because I remember absolutely nothing about The Damnation of Theron Ware. From my notes, I can almost reconstruct why I read it:

Theron enjoys the "primitive" pleasures of Catholic picnics; contrast to earlier (235-6) image of it as orderly machine; no, from sociological & intellectual perspective it's orderly, from internal is primitive

If only I knew the antecedent of "it" I might be able to reconstruct my reason for reading the book. Am I the only one for whom the Five Year Rule applies? (And do I really want that question answered?) (x-posted.)

---

*Notation borrowed from a letter Joyce wrote to his mother after arriving in Paris: "Your order for 3s 4d of Tuesday last was very welcome as I had been without food for 42 hours (forty-two)." How's that for passive-aggression?

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.]

Help Share the Terror: an Exercise in Communal Revision

During the hour I'd be codifying my stray silliness into material suitable for you, dear readers (you no doubt remember my schedule) I'm

1. frantically preparing for next week's talk and how to deal with the inevitable, nay, threatened interruptions
2. finishing a related article on book-events and the (hopelessly busted) professional reviewing apparatus, and
3. polishing the London chapter while researching the Wharton (as per my afore-posted itinerary). 

Posting for the next few weeks will, of necessity, be related to one of those itemized adventures ... but that doesn't mean we can't keep things lively.  Take tonight, for example.  I could've posted some extremely dull noodling about Jack London, telic action, and collective stupidity, but I didn't.  Why? 

Because that would be boring.  Instead, I present to you one of the paragraphs from the article on book-events.  Not because I'm particularly proud of it.  Just the opposite, in fact.  I'm extremely unhappy with it in all its many, many iterations.  So I ask for your assistance.  The point is that I want this to be as terribly accurate as possible ... only when I'm accurate, the passage is needlessly, tediously, soporifically overlong.  Too many words and it becomes a disposable complaint; too few, a cryptic, unjust grievance.  I need to squeeze more terrible into fewer sentences, and I ask for your assistance in this.  Here is what I have:

Consider the life of the average scholarly monograph.  At first no more than a glimmer in the mind of a graduate student preparing for her qualifying exams, over the next three years it becomes something more. Chapters are polished and delivered to the disciplinary flagships—ELH, American Literature, Critical Inquiry—then to their period escorts—Nineteenth Century Literature, Twentienth Century Literature, Postmodern Culture—before landing in the holds of the undead authors—The James Joyce Quarterly, The Henry James Review, &c.  A few respectable publications to her name, the reversion from independent articles to interdependent chapters begins.  Large sections are reconceptualized in an effort to create a manuscript more representative of the sum of its parts.  Years devoted to tinkering and conceptualizing, razing and reconceptualizing, rebuilding and resubmitting pass.  Seven, perhaps eight years after winking into existence, her monograph is accepted by one of the few remaining reputable scholarly publishers.  More corrections are made.  Covers are designed and approved.  Permissions are obtained.  Ten, perhaps eleven years later, she holds her monograph in her hands.  Friends and mentors who have already read it receive copies, as do the very journals which rejected parts of it years earlier.  Her colleagues congratulate her—a raise is imminent, tenure now seems assured—but make little effort to read it.  They have their own books to write.  She moves on to her next project, and the process begins anew.  Then, three years later, she finds evidence that someone other than herself has read her book: a 250-word review tucked away in the back of an academic journal.  The review never engages her argument; neither praises nor condemns; and betrays little evidence of the reviewer having made it past the introduction.  To paraphrase one of the great nineteenth century novelists, over the next few weeks she will acquire a passionate resistance to the confession that she had achieved nothing. 

The next paragraph identifies the author (George Eliot), the work responsible for this manifestation of scholarly despair (Casaubon's The Key to All Mythologies) and says something clever.  But I want to emphasize the horror that typically accompanies the publication of a scholarly manuscript—especially that first one—so that I might unfavorably compare it to the blessing that is one of our much-desired book-events.  So please, tell me, what indignity have I missed?  What crushing disappointment have I overestimated?  How can I improve this paragraph?

Better Than Ezra?

No, you won’t find—especially when he’s reading his own work.  Be warned, however, as he does do the police in different voices.  His reading of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley in 1939 sounds like his answer to Joyce’s reading of Finnegans Wake, right down to the exaggerated (and, in Pound’s case, affected) Irish accent.  Listen to how Joyce reads the line “a man and his bride embraced between them” and tell me he doesn’t ham it up.  (You can try.  I won’t listen.) The Joyce reading is from the ALP section of the Wake, and the text he reads is transcribed here.