Thursday, 29 September 2005

The Criterion Beneath the Criteria We Profess

Everyone thinks this all the time, but rarely in public, much less the pages of American Literary History (Spring 1998):

Neither Hendler, Klein, nor Nackenoff treats the issue that most interests me about [Horatio Alger's] Ragged Dick. 

(To be fair, the issue that interests this reviewer is interesting: "Why does nobody notice that this model of boyish honesty is lying all the time?")

Sep 29, 2005 6:15:00 PM | Academia, Dissertation, From the Archives, Literature

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The Horatio Alger Hoax; or, Why Dissertations Like Mine Ought to Be Written In 1928, Herbert Mayes published Alger: A Biography Without a Hero. The young journalist had discovered the lost diary of Horatio Alger, in which the famous author recounted the marriage to Patience Stires his fathered initially opposed and ultimately quashed; one affair with a Parisian café singer and another with a married woman (which, when revealed, forced him from the pulpit); and the adoption and tragic trampling of a Chinese toddler named Wing. The lost diary provided Mayes with irrefutable evidence of that Alger was a Freudian study in repression, his novels of “luck and pluck” little more than pathetic exercises in psychoanalytic wish-fulfillment. In 1938, Kenneth Lynn’s The Dream of Success counted Alger alongside Theodore Dreiser and Jack London as frustrated (in the psychoanalytic sense) little men who pour “out all [their] dammed-up ambitions and repressed desire into more than a hundred novels and countless short stories about adolescent boys who, beginning in poverty and obscurity, took the fabulous city…by storm.” Lynn’s source was, as you may suspect, Mayes. In 1959, Norman Holland followed suit in “Hobbling with Horatio, or the Uses of Literature.” Holland considered Alger “an emotional cripple” for whom the writing of books was a means of surpassing his father while avoiding direct competition with him. In 1963, another psychoanalytic critic, John Tebbel, praised Mayes in the introduction to From Rags to Riches: Horatio Alger and the American Dream, saying “it is a tribute to the research he did at twenty-eight to note that it can hardly be improved upon nearly four decades later. The primary sources of Alger material are meager, indeed, but Mr. Mayes appears to have examined all of them, and no new original material has turned up in the intervening decades.” In 1964, amateur collector and Alger enthusiast Ralph Gardner published Horatio Alger, or The American Hero Era, in which he declared that, given the paucity of biographical information, “some situations were dramatized and dialogue created, but always within the framework of existing facts.” Reviewers discredited Gardner’s speculative biography, calling it a “whitewash” and noting its patent inferiority to Professor Tebbel’s stylishly Freudian account. Tebbel’s academic credentials are significant: because Gardner was “an admirer,” Cecil B. Williams argued in American Literature (March, 1965), “he includes only what suited the image he wanted to present, omitting Patience Stires, Wing, and the illicit affairs, but emphasizing young Alger’s standing in his Harvard class and the prizes he won for Greek prose.” The coup de grace: “Tebbel’s book is indexed; Gardner’s is not.” Instead of extrapolation, Williams suggests, it is better to mourn the fact that “no new original material [had] turned up” since 1928. Except some had. In 1961, another amateur collector and Alger enthusiast, Frank Gruber, had privately published Horatio Alger, Jr: A Biography and Bibliography of the Best Selling Author of All Time. In it, Gruber noted that he had been “compelled to discard virtually everything in [Mayes’] book with one single exception, the date of his birth. Even the date of...
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Concerning Psychoanalytic "Truths," the IWW & Gangesa's Tattvacintamani [Note: an update for interested parties.] The area below contains some very typical sophistry which, for reasons I can't entirely explain outside of a general sense of annoyance, I took some time I don't have to respond to. You can see the original (as well as other objects worthy of hearty ridicule) by putting your eye to glass and peering deep into the heart of faux-liberatory dogmatism. I should add: although this thinker belongs to the Long Sunday collective, he belongs there as much as Eugene Debs would have "belonged" on the current Cabinet (if you reversed the political valences such that Debs were neoconservative and the Bush Cabinet composed of Wobblies). I may've squeezed more volatile political history into that sentence than the rest of everything I've ever written in my entire life combined. So proceed, if you dare, and place your eye firmly 'gainst the glass: I typically refrain from reposting comments I post elsewhere, but since I suspect it's not long for his blog, I want to memorialize my response to [PR]'s breathtakingly blinkered post about those who don't worship the ground the feet with which Lacan did his thinking walked on.[1] It reads (minus some embarrassing praise for the genuinely praiseworthy folks at Long Sunday): I've been thinking about the charge so often launched by Anglo-American academics at French theorists, that they are "charlatans". Sometimes, they're right. Baudrillard, surely, does often over-reach with his theoretical adventures, thereby showing up his actual lack of `knowledge' in the field under consideration/theorization. But this is also part of what makes him so great, and such a great thinker to think with. (Lacan, on the other hand, I could never accept the term 'charlatan', since his is an almost perfect system. Now, he might not have the best philosophical knowledge, but he doesn't cite it anyhow in the same way as Baudrillard.) But it's a sort of mirror-image (or Moebius strip), this charge against the French, for, from another angle, it is the Anglo-Americans who are the charlatans. They refuse to theorise, and call themselves instead 'Post-theorists' (i.e. in contemporary film studies), whose only defining commonality is a negative one: resistance to (Lacanian) psychoanalysis. The great irony is that the psychoanalysis they are rejecting is Anglo-American bungled appropriations/bastardizations of Lacan, not Lacan's work itself. After all, most of the early writings on the Gaze and whatever based themselves on a single essay of Lacan's (that, in fact, never mentioned the Gaze!). To refuse the theorise, but to instead surround oneself with the shiny trinkets of knowledge (discourse of the University) ... this is the true charlatanism. When one doesn't argue a position, as Anglo-Americans don't, then one is only ever protecting oneself, perhaps for the hope of tenure. But without exposing oneself to critique one is just filling up space, and heck, I'll even follow the conservative line here, wasting taxpayer's money. Now that's charlatanism. Refusing to defer to psychoanalytic sophistries is charlatanism? So if you're still with me after...

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