Acephalous

Fellowship of the Ring: Conventions of film, conventions of genre

(One of the visual rhetoric posts born of this course. If it seems a little more basic than the rest of those posts, that’s because it’s the first real day of class and I have to start somewhere.)

I have one goal here: to define "high fantasy" as a genre through Fellowship of the Ring. There will no doubt be academic arguments about the particulars—the true extent of Tolkien's influence, for example, or the necessity of orcs—but I want to sketch out the basic generic qualities of high fantasy in a portable manner, i.e. one that will also apply to Game of Thrones. Meaning the most commonly argued generic feature to qualify as unnecessary baggage is this one:

Works of fantasy exist in a world utterly unrelated to the one in which we live and are therefore purely escapist.

Because, at the very least, whatever work I do with Fellowship also needs to apply to Game of Thrones. That and it's just wrong. Anything written by a human being in a particular historical moment belongs to that particular historical moment even if it depicts a different or invented historical moment. The rest of the generic features of high fantasy I want to pull from Fellowship via an immanent analysis of the film itself, and what better place to begin than with maps?

Maps are important because 1) sentences like "Go north until you hit Chicago and hook a left and you'll end up California" don't make intuitive sense in fantastic worlds, and 2) the most common plot elements in fantastic works, quests and wars, are map-driven affairs. You need to know who's where and in relation to what in an invented world, and that requires special attention be paid to maps. Though the visual presentation and manipulation of maps is prevalent in high fantasy—as is evidenced both above, viewing Peter Jackson's zooming around the map of Middle Earth, or in the opening credits of Games of Thrones—it should be noted that as a film convention, it predates high fantasy as a genre. (Spielberg's clearly referencing something here.) Another common element in high fantasy would be a token of power:

Like one of those. In the case of Fellowship, the ring functions as both a token and embodiment of power, whereas in Game of Thrones, the Iron Throne will merely be the token awarded to the winner of the game, but in both cases there's an item whose acquisition is certral to the plot. In Fellowship, Jackson establishes and maintains the significance of the ring by constantly zooming in on it. The frame above, for example, belongs to a sustained zoom:

But Jackson's always zooming in on the ring. To wit:

That's Frodo at The Prancing Pony, but note the difference between the sustained zoom on Sauron's hand and the interrupted zoom on Frodo's fingers. Jackson's taking advantage of our implicit understanding of filmic convention when he zooms in on Sauron's hand: he knows that such zooms are sometimes intended to convey a thought process-in-process, so by sustaining the zoom it appears as if the ring itself is thinking. The edit from the extreme close-up of the ring to Frodo's face and back to an even more extreme close-up on the ring breaks up the continuity of the zoom, meaning the ring doesn't appear to be thinking so much as conversing with Frodo. It's asking Frodo to put it on, and from one shot to the next is becoming more insistence, hence the increasing extremity of the zoom. That's a literalization of the typically figurative allure of a token of power. Who falls victim to this allure?

Depends on what you mean by "victim." In one sense, the victims are a few singularly important people through whom the narrative will be focalized; in another, it's the anonymous hordes whose fates will be decided by which of those singularly important people acquire the token of power. For example, here's a singularly important person surrounded by his anonymous horde:

You can tell Elrond's important both because of the central framing and the difference in costume: it's not just that he's not wearing a helmet, but that not wearing a helmet makes his full face available to the audience. (See here for a preview of why that's important.) It goes without saying that in terms of genre it's the singularly important people who undertake quests and the anonymous hordes that go to war. It's also worth noting the color of Elrond and his anonymous hordes, which for historical reasons typically fight against anonymous hordes that look like this:

I'm not saying that dark skin and unconventional jewelry decisions necessarily indicate that a character in a high fantasy will be less-than-noble, but neither am I denying it. (There's a reason that conversations like this one happen, and about Peter Jackson, no less.) But more on that later, because at this point it would behoove us to unify the generic conventions I've identified as succinctly as possible:

High fantasy consists of narratives in which singularly important people go on quests for tokens of power in order to facilitate or forestall wars between anonymous hordes and all of that can be tracked on maps.

That seems like a fair assessment of the genre, as established in Fellowship, don't you think? If you don't, what essential features do you think I've missed?

The world's most difficult books?

The Guardian responds to the Million's list of the most difficult books, and to be frank, the results are underwhelming. Here is what the Millions managed:

• Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
• A Tale of a Tub, Jonathan Swift
• The Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel
• To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
• Clarissa, Samuel Richardson
• Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
• Being and Time, Martin Heidegger
• The Fairie Queene, Edmund Spenser
• The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein
• Women and Men, Joseph McElroy

Granted, like all lists, this one is shit. Its flaws include, but aren't limited to the fact that it has a size fetish, the fictional works are entirely in English, and the philosophical works are philosophical works and so why should they count? I'd scratch Being and Time and The Phenomenology of the Spirit off on that account, and add The Guardian's suggested amendments: Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. But the amended list is still problematic, because I'm not sure anyone finds To The Lighthouse a difficult read, and Women and Men is only difficult inasmuch as it's been out-of-print for so long a paperback copy will cost you $180. McElroy's Plus is a far more difficult novel, because it's narrated from the perspective of an ornery satellite. (And it'll only run you $187.90.)

Maybe it's because of my unusual graduate school career path, but of the novels listed only The Making of Americans, Nightwood, Finnegans Wake and Gravity's Rainbow seem to me to be genuinely difficult novels. Except they're not really that difficult for the people who read them, because the people who read densely poetic world-building novels do so because enjoy doing so. I know that Gravity's Rainbow isn't for everyone, but there's a subset of the reading population for whom it's very much for. I'd have no qualms, for example, recommending it to someone who's obsessed over Infinite Jest.

A better list of the world's most difficult books would expand its purview to "the world," and it would be comprised of books that people who love difficult books find difficult, instead of ones that people who don't do. I'd suggest adding:

• Appleseed, John Clute
• Dhalgren, Samuel Delany
• JR, William Gaddis
• The Tunnel, William Gass
• Anything in German or Chinese, Because SEK Can't Read German or Chinese

My list isn't exhaustive, either, but at least it suggests that The Glass Bead Game might be tremendously complex or The Man Without Qualities can match Clarissa page-for-page. Since my list is a list and, as stated above, all lists are shit, I invite you to give me the what-for in the comments.

Only, there's no such thing as Social Darwinism.

Erik's posts (here and here) on the seemingly Darwinian politics of modern conservativism aren't wrong about the lilt of these contemporary thinkers, but they do a bit of injustice to the historical ones, because there was no such thing as "Social Darwinism" during the Gilded Age. There was such a thing as William Graham Sumner, and his collected essays bear the title Social Darwinism, but those essays were collected in and published in 1963. The editor of those essays was following the lead established by the historian Richard Hofstadter, whose Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944) identified Sumner as the brains behind the social Darwinist movement in the Progressive Era. The problem is that there wasn't a social Darwinist movement during the Progressive Era. I'm not just kicking against the pricks here—as people writing dissertations are wont to do—as will become clear if you ask yourself a simple question:

When was the Modern Synthesis formulated?

The Modern Synthesis, if you don't know, is the combination of Mendelian genetics with Darwinian evolutionary theory, and represents the moment when the previously theoretical Darwinian model finally found itself a mechanism of transmission. Darwin's theory of natural selection was elegant, but prior to the Modern Synthesis scientists lacked a means of proving that it could exist in nature. When was it formulated? Between 1936 and 1942. Why is that significant?

Because prior to the Modern Synthesis there was little consensus as to the driving force behind the development of species. Russian scientists, for example, were working under Lamarckian assumptions about the heritability of acquired characteristics well into the 1960s. (The had an ideological commitment to keeping the Lamarckian faith after the Modern Synthesis, but eventually even they relented.) Point being, during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Darwinian thought wasn't the dominant strain of evolutionary theory. It lacked the evidence required to back up its elegance, and so its status in the scientific community was as tenuous then as its competitors are now. Vernon Kellogg, then president of Stanford (or not?), wrote a book entitled Darwinism Today (1908) that basically argued that there really wasn't any. It devoted itself to explicating "the various new theories of species-forming with ... names, such as heterogenesis, orthogenesis, metakinesis, geographic isolation, biologic isolation, organic selection, or orthoplasty." So why do we associate Darwinism with this period?

Because of the Whigs and their history. The aforementioned Hofstadter wrote Social Darwinism in American Thought in 1944 in order to create a bogeyman whose existence would justify the policies of the New Deal. From what Stephen J. Gould called the "maximal diversity" of evoultionary thought during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Hofstadter selected those thinkers whose work contained implications dire enough that politicians in the 1940s could point to them to frighten the masses. Darwinism, as I demonstrated above, wasn't regnant during the period, much less the social application of it, but Hofstadter had handed New Deal liberals their bogeyman and they weren't about to give it up.

Ironically, the scientific community bolstered Hofstadter's claim during the centennial of the Origin in 1959. In a book titled Darwin's Century, Loren Eiseley and his fellow scientists created a teleological narrative of Darwinism's development in which all evolutionary thinkers were groping their way towards the Modern Synthesis. Which is ironic because the key insight of Darwinian thought is that development isn't teleological—that natural selection isn't based on forethought and doesn't working according to a plan. Eiseley and his colleagues transformed the development of Darwinian thought into the stuff of Intelligent Design, and when that narrative was welded onto Hofstadter's, the result was the impression that Darwinism reigned supreme during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

It didn't. It only seems to have because people have forgotten all the other evolutionary theories that were in play at the time, the most prominent of which was Lamarckian, not Darwinian, prompting prominent medical thinkers (and popular novelists) like Silas Weir Mitchell to declare:

I have sometimes been led to think that over brain-work tends not only to stunt the body and to contract the pelvis, but, by the law of evolution, to develop bigger headed offspring, or at least offspring with heads relatively disproportioned to the pelvis of the mother.

That's correct. The most prominent neurologist in America opposed educating women because they would become smarter, pass on their larger brains to their children, then die during childbirth. Outside of giraffes, it's difficult to find a more classic formulation of Lamarckian thought. I could go on for ages—or pages, hundreds of them—but I think I've established that "the Social Darwinism movement" is an ahistorical construct designed to justify policies and theories with which I otherwise agree.

What we talk about when we talk about hands.

As I was writing and writing and writing and writing about Jack London in my dissertation, I noticed something I was never able to fully incorporate into my argument: the man's obsession with hands. He not only wrote about them regularly in his fiction, but his letters are heavily peppered with references to his own "deformed" mitts. I scare-quote "deformed" because history has no record as to whether his hands were as he believed them to be—the scarred and calloused collection of fingers that his life of hard labor had created. That a leading voice for the working class was embarrassed by the signs that he'd once and long been a member of the same is one of those historical ironies that's better left for braver souls to judge. I'm more interested in the evidence. For example, were you a photographer taking a profile picture of London, he would present you with this:

 Or this:

Decent shots, no doubt, but ones in which the palms of his hands have been deliberately obscured. If you were a different sort of photographer entirely—one who wanted to take pictures of famous authors in diapers, for example—London would oblige thus:

On Teaching Fight Club to Students Inclined to Love It

(This be yet another one of them posts.)

Fight Club, like its latter-day counterpart Inception, is the sum total of its wasted talent. Unlike Christopher Nolan, for whom Inception represented his personal white whale chased, captured, and carved, Fincher can't be held accountable for the many weaknesses of Fight Club. That can be blamed on his source material: the singular novel Chuck Palahniuk's been writing for the better part of the past two decades—Fight Club is merely an early incarnation. Read in isolation, it's possible to believe than any one of Palahniuk's books contains the potential to be more than it is—that its strengths, few though they are, may augur the arrival of a more sophisticated writer. Unfortunately, Palahniuk's development as an author could never eclipse the logic behind shampoo: He lathers. He rinses. He repeats. So if I seem particularly annoyed with any isolated moment in Fight Club, know that I'm not merely annoyed with that particular moment, but with its many kin. All of which is merely a long preface to a fairly simple argument:

David Fincher's film far outstrips its source material. He accomplishes this not by altering fundamental elements of the plot, but by filming those elements in a way that undercuts, for example, explosive statements or implications of masculinity. For example, when charged to locate and lose a fight with a stranger, Fincher presents the scene comically:

He uses a long shot to emphasize how unnecessary this altercation is. That priest can turn his other cheek and exist the mise-en-scène without being goaded by the mechanic and his hose a second time. The priest isn't, to paraphrase the narrator, doing just about anything he can to avoid a fight. He's walking away. It's not until the mechanic steals and waters his Bible that the priest becomes disturbed enough to muster a shove. The ensuing "fight" consists of the priest slapping the mechanic twice before running away. Moreover, the goofy non-diegetic sound playing throughout this sequence undercuts the bravery of all involved. The priest doesn't embrace his masculinity when he confronts the mechanic, nor is the mechanic's masculinity challenged by the priest's feeble attempt to confront him. Compare the Keystone Kops routine above with Palahniuk's description of the same in the novel:

By this time next week, each guy on the Assault Committee has to pick a fight where he won't come out a hero. And not in fight club. This is harder than it sounds. A man on the street will do anything not to fight. 

The idea is to take some Joe on the street who's never been in a fight and recruit him. Let him experience winning for the first time in his life. Get him to explode. Give him permission to beat the crap out of you. 

You can take it. If you win, you screwed up.

"What we have to do, people," Tyler told the committee, "is remind these guys what kind of power they still have." 

Fincher took what had, in the novel, been a call to male empowerment and castrated it. Combined with the punctuated humdruming of the non-diegetic track, the long and extreme long shots Fincher uses throughout that scene undermine Palahniuk's insistence, voiced by Tyler, that the purpose behind this random violence "is to remind these guys what kind of power they still have." Fincher disagrees. In addition to the altercation with the priest above, he presents two more:

The first he shoots from quite a distance—one might even call it a safe distance. Moreover, the level of framing is so high above its subjects that the angle of framing is necessarily high too. The camera looks down upon the members of the Assault Committee, that is, it diminishes them by emphasizing their smallness. Nothing so small could exist independently, and the fact that this assignment's called "homework" hammers home that point. Fully fledged adults may have to take work home, but they're not assigned "homework." Only children are. Speaking of which:

Here's the audience's vantage point for the third "homework" assignment. Instead of being safely across the street, as we were with the priest, or ensconced two stories above the action, as we were in the lobby, Fincher shoots this fight sequence from behind what appear to be the bars of a crib. Whatever happens in that parking lot, the audience need not fear. If even those tiny men in the distance were to traverse the deep space between their current location and ours, Fincher provides us protection in the form of an infantalizing set of iron bars. The lesson Palahniuk's Tyler would have all men learn? Fincher's actively working against the possibility that his Tyler might communicate it to his audience. 

That's not to say it didn't (and doesn't continue to) happen, only that those who fail to pay attention end up reading Palahniuk's book through Fincher's film, which would be all well and good if the former weren't so simplistic. Treating film as the sum total of the words spoken by characters in it denies the medium its unique ability, for example, to ironize any phrase by means of its delivery. Such irony is lost to the majority of the film's fans because they find the subculture depicted in it (and the novel) as too seductive. These are the boys Robert Stacy McCain fears won't grow into men:

In much the same way as the Bolsheviks claimed to speak for the workers and peasants, feminists nowadays claim to represent the interests of all women. On the basis of that usurped authority, feminists wield the awful fury of revolutionary terror against their enemies, so that even Jeff Goldstein seems afraid to openly oppose them.

Am I alone in seeing this? Is there no one else who recognizes the dictatorial ambitions of feminism, the steel fist inside the velvet glove? Do you not understand that you can no more placate these would-be tyrants with soft words of reasonable compromise than you can negotiate with a ravenous shark?

This is the world Palahniuk's readers believe they inhabit. Hemmed in on all sides by distaff-wielding forces, the only alternative is to reembrace a violent and muscular culture of masculinity. Society has let these boys become men unworthy of the word, and Fight Club taught them how to do something about. The fact that it taught them that doing so entailed acquiring the radically bicameral image of a self that can only communicate with its parts through flagellation (temporary) or mass destruction (permanently) is lost on these literalists.

Fincher's film appeals to uncritical viewers because they fail to understand it as a film. They read it. They take from it the notion that there was once a Golden Age of Masculinity and they assign themselves homework designed to bring it back. Critical viewers appreciate a film that undermines and undercuts everything their uncritical compatriots take from it. In short, Fight Club bears the same relation to its source material as I argued Kick-Ass did to its.

I keep giving conservative cultural criticism a chance, and I keep getting burned.

This post is about a book review I do not understand, but as it appeals to conservatives and I've committed myself to trying to understand conservatives, I'm going to try to make sense of it.

Those who are familiar with [Stephen Hunter] will understand, and those who are not–well, what are you doing reading a book review by me when there is writing out there carved by a master?

The man carves his books? A little Old Testament for my taste, but to each his own.

“Soft Target” is the new Hunter thriller that takes place in a thriller writer’s fantasy land: America, the Mall. Appropriately, it combines the two things America loves the most: shopping and violence.

If I wrote that the author of this review would number me among the terrorists. That said, the fact that he puts quotation marks around the title can only mean he aspires to write for the New Yorker, which is fortuitous given his obvious hatred of America. (He doesn't even mention Jesus among America's favorite things, which means he's obviously at war with Christmas.)

Ray Cruz is Hunter’s new John Wayne ... The novel fleshes out so many characters and tells the story in such a thorough way that Tarantino would be jealous.

The best advice about what books to read comes from people who only watch movies.

Hunter’s greatest gift is his style, his prose. He’s been called the “populist Faulkner” and for good reason.

I have no idea what that means. Perhaps the sentences that follow that one will illuminate.

He’s no Vince Flynn and he’s no Tom Clancy. His characters inhabit a harsh world that is unforgiving and follows no set code of good wins over evil. His characters inhabit a place called reality where Hunter’s simple yet delicate and violent prose comes alive. His heroes are not perfect and his villains are never black and white.

Nothing about prose there. Maybe further on in the review?

Hunter’s novels also appeal because of their visual style, and this one is no different ... He feeds us the exact images and verbs our inner beasts need to gobble up in order to be completely consumed by the story. Hunter has perfected the craft of the thriller by keeping his prose simple a la Hemingway and giving us the details other writers shy away from, all while providing these in the context of a visually striking world only a man who reviewed films for decades could give us.

This book is like a movie! You should watch it in your brain! It's like Hemingway only also Faulknerian! They were both writers I am name-dropping!

Less human than human.

Alyssa's post on the sentimental core of Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman is spot on:

I was surprised by how incredibly sweet the comic is. I wasn’t really expecting that. The basic premise, for those not in the know, is Lex Luthor finds a way to essentially give Superman fast-developing cancer, leaving Superman to do a lot of bucket-list things: give Lois Lane the chance to experience his powers for the day; nail one last scoop for the Daily Planet; go back and visit the grave of Jonathan Kent, his adopted father; save the world one last time.

However, the hallmarks of Morrison's work, according to renowned comic scholar (and Alyssa's occasional interlocutor) Douglas Wolk, are:

reality-bending metaphysical freakouts dressed up in action-adventure drag; metaphors that make visible the process by which language creates an image that in turn becomes narrative; a touch of feel-good self-improvement rhetoric; faith in the the power of pop and popularity to do magic; and skinny bald men who are stand-ins for Morrison himself, heroically conquering sadness and making the world evolve. (Reading Comics 258)

If those two descriptions seem at odds, that's because they are. Morrison is a talented but unintegrated artist. What do I mean? He can be as aggressively annoying as Wolk's flattering account of him suggests. Incorporating proxies of himself into narratives about the nature of narratives and claiming that magic makes these metaphorical selves visible? That is, to quote my advisor, pure "postmodern gee-whiz wankery." It's cleverness for the sake of being hailed as King Clever, and it grates on my every last nerve because it's so clinical and intellectualized.

AND YET.

I came to graduate school to study the works of James Joyce, whose complex wankery far outstrips anything Morrison's attempted, much less accomplished. So why does Morrison bother me in a manner Joyce doesn't? The short answer is that, at his best, Morrison doesn't bother me at all. When is he at his best? As Alyssa notes, it's when he's stripped a story to its emotional core and presented its complexities not as worthy subjects in and of themselves, but as natural consequences of a human narrative. Of course, the protagonists of these "human" narratives are rarely human: in All-Star Superman, it's Superman; in We3, it's a trio of weaponized house-pets.

That is to say: Morrison seems to have a problem elevating actual humans to a position worthy of simple human sympathy. A kidnapped pet or an orphaned alien are worthy of sympathy because they aspire to be more than their outsider status allows them to be. But an average human being? He or she is what he or she is—short of a magical authorial intervention that's as likely to land him or her in Sade's castle as provide anything resembling hope or help. The only transcendence average people can acquire is by proxy, e.g. Lois's "acquisition" of Superman's powers on her birthday.

In short, I don't find in Morrison much in the way of human sympathy for ordinary humans. This is where—their shared love of verbal and narrative pyrotechnics aside—I find Morrison lacking what Joyce possessed in abundance: because behind the modernist wankery that is Ulysses is a simple story about a man dealing (poorly) with a crisis he knew was coming but couldn't avert. It's a powerful story because of its fundamental humanity, not, as would be the case with Morrison, despite it.

Archaeology of the Impossible

Given that I have all of four days to wrap up the Winter quarter and vault into the Spring, lesson-planning's taken the bulk of my time of late.  I'm thinking, as per the tentative title of this post, of delving into meta-fictional accounts of the origin of comic "heroism" this quarter, and have come up with the following (largely other-side-of-the-pond) syllabus:

"The Origin of Batman" (excerpt from Batman 47) - Bob Kane

You begin with the almost-begin: this is the first time Joe Chill's mentioned, by which I mean implicated, in the death of Wayne's parents.  There's an earlier reference to their murder in Detective Comics 39 (November 1939), but it's abridged in a way that makes the story itself unrecognizable.  (Which is, yes, the very opposite of the point I make below about Morrison's All-Star Superman, but that's because you can't already assume an audience is familiar with a story before it's ever been told.)

Batman: Year One (comic) - Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli

See what I did there?  In terms of comparative styles, now I can introduce Asterios Polyp.  To wit, Mazzucchelli in Year One:

Compared to Mazzucchelli in Asterios Polyp:

Those aren't as different as I thought they'd be.  ("I have a hole in my cape," you can almost imagine Mazzucchelli's distraught Wayne saying.)  But outside the cleanliness of the lines, there's little to make you believe that the person responsible for the first image would later be responsible for the second ... and that's a belief I'm going to try to disabuse my students of.

Batman Begins (film) - Christopher Nolan

Because you think I'm capable of teaching this course without bringing up Nolan's film?  I didn't think so.

Planetary/Batman (comic) - Warren Ellis

This'll be the fourth re-telling of the Batman origin myth, only this time endlessly looped.  The point, rhetorically speaking, in having them encounter four versions of the same story is 1) to emphasize that there's some inherent appeal there, but 2) to demonstrate that even if a story has inherent appeal, the manner in which a given rhetor presents it actually matters.  The raw stuff is all well and good, but the power's in the telling.

Planetary #1 -10 (comic) - Warren Ellis

They're billed as "the archeologists of the impossible," after all, and Ellis's engagement with both the history of the genre and its conventions could hardly find a more suitable course to be taught in.

All-Star Superman (comic) - Grant Morrison

I'm thinking of teaching only the first page of the first issue, as it's the most brilliantly compact origin story ever, and after that Morrison's metafictional games might be a bit too much for students to handle.  There's a genius to its concision, i.e. the manner in which it boils down a story everyone already knows to its barest bones, and then presents them to a knowing audience in a way that is, quite frankly, moving.  (Sorry, sorry, I couldn't help myself.)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume One (comic) - Alan Moore

Introducing students to old-school, public-domain heroism ... plus plenty of opportunities to talk with my largely Asian-American classes about how "The Yellow Peril" is depicted.

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (comic) - Mike Mignola

Being an origin story that involved someone other than Batman, so the students can reevaluate their premises about mythos in American culture at the end of the quarter, etc. etc.

Hellboy (film) - Guillermo Del Toro

Etc. etc.  That's quite a bit of material for a composition class, and textually speaking—i.e. despite it being all film and comics—it's historically and allusively dense to boot.  But it seems doable.   That said, if there's anything very obvious I'm missing, feel free to point it out ... until Tuesday, because believe it or not, that's when the Spring quarter starts.

Enid and Rebecca aren't winning Ghost World

Given that I already related my attempt to make the final day of my "Slow Horror" course memorable, it only makes sense to do the same for the "Confessional Narratives."  The final works we studied were the print and film versions of Daniel Clowes' Ghost World, both of which I hate with a pre-critical vicerality that—to pat myself on the back for being responsible—doesn't prevent me from acknowledging their importance and teaching them anyway.  That said, I find the book far more unlikeable than the film.  Consider the scene in which Enid and Rebecca first meet the waiter they dub "Weird Al" in the novel:

It's not that they mock the decor of a restaurant they patronized solely to patronize, but the manner in which they treat Allen.  Enid responds to his "Hi! My name is Allen" with "Hi, Al!"  If he had wanted to be called "Al," presumably he would have introduced himself as such.  Enid renames him on the spot, and without getting all pop-philosophical about the significance of the act of naming something, her behavior here is indicative of her general belief that she's superior to people who look and are employed like him.  But Rebecca's response is even more indecorous: the insult that had been implicit in Enid's renaming is explicit in Rebecca's question, "Can we call you 'Weird Al'?"  That she asks whether "we" can call him "Weird Al" is significant, because throughout the book she's only emboldened to behave in this manner when Enid initiates such encounters.  In short, then, Enid's culpable both for her own statement and for Rebecca's, because Enid's responsible for the dynamic that makes Rebecca feel perpetually, if not always consciously, egged-on.  

At this point in the analysis, it's possible for readers to attribute the pair reveling in their unearned sense of superiority to an authorial critique, i.e. that Clowes is representing their reprehensible behavior, not endorsing it.  But as I noted in my earlier post, Clowes' own—albeit earned—sense of superiority infects most of his work, in this case in the fifth panel above.  Despite my formalist tendencies, I don't normally place too much stock into matters like the placement of speech bubbles, but between teaching this and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, I'm compelled to ditch my insistence that where the text is placed on a page matters less than whether readers can quickly ascertain the manner in which it was intended to flow.  

So, for example, in the second panel above Enid's conversation-stopping "Whatever" is separated from the mock-Fifties banter not only for the pragmatic reason that it wouldn't fit, but because it's meant to indicate a distinct break in the established conversational rhythm.  Clowes could've drawn the panel in a manner that placed it immediately beneath Rebecca's question, but that would suggested that Enid responded immediately; instead, placing it beneath the table suggests that she paused a beat before humiliating Rebecca for playing the language game Enid herself had initiated.

Apply the same logic of placement to the fifth panel's "You loser!" and you have a speech bubble that doubles as a caption, in effect branding the server what the pair's entitled renaming of him already indicated they thought him to be.  The difference here is that it's not Enid who chooses where her remarks are placed on the page, but Clowes, and if Enid's partly culpable for Rebecca's question, Clowes is wholly guilty for Enid's "captioning" of the server here.

Of course, Clowes can only accomplish this little feat if Enid and Rebecca frame the server as they do in the panels above.  His occupation of the central area of the frame is fundamentally ironic: he's not a person so much as a function of a restaurant they're only there to mock.  They (and Clowes) can dehumanize him because, as a "loser" who sacrificed his social mobility for a regular paycheck, he doesn't number among the human race anyway.  

Now, consider the same scene in the film.  It opens with a pan-out from a close-up of a radio playing decidedly non-Fifties music to a medium shot of Rebecca and Enid seated in the booth:

How a person becomes a body

Since some complained that my lack of detailed anatomical knowledge or emergency room experience undermined my larger argument in my first Kick-Ass post, I thought I'd approach the same argument from another angle.  If you'll recall, in that post I argued that

Vaughn's shot selection is essentially critical of Millar and Romita, Jr.'s excessive lust for representing broken human bodies.

To put it another way: in Millar and Romita's book, the characters aren't people so much as bodies to broken; whereas in Vaughn's film, the characters are sympathetic people with lives to be invested in.  This dynamic, it turns out, also exists in scenes that don't involve the quantity of blood that a body can realistically bleed out.  Consider the scene in which the titular hero, Dave Lizewski, teases the audience with a typical origin story:

In the first panel, the dead mother is a headless body sprawled on the floor.  The high angle of framing only allows for the reader to register the shock of her death via Lizewski's body language, as his face is so distant that the only visible emotional marker is his oblong, half-opened mouth.  That's not a shot that's liable to build sympathy for a character; in point of fact, the almost omniscient perspective in the panel creates a sense of the narrator's distance from the events being narrated (despite said events being the death of his mother). 

The second panel transposes the reader from the reality (however coldly rendered) of a mother's death to the decidedly unreal world of superhero origin stories.  Again, the distance of the reader from Lizewski places the emphasis on his body; his face is an open howl, but his vengence (such that it is) is communicated through the Liefeldian posturing.  (I have a strong memory of Sunspot frequently being in an identical posture during Liefeld's run on New Mutants, but Google's being unforthcoming.)  All of which is only to say that, in the book, grief is demonstrated not through facial expressions that might lead readers to sympathize with Lizewski, but with exaggerated postures that render him less of a person than a trope.

Compare that to the same scene in the film.  It opens with an establishing medium shot of the family at breakfast:

Then zooms to the right and into a medium close-up of the dead mother:

For narrative reasons the cereal occupies the center of the screen, but it also divides the scene between the mother's head and Lizewski's reaction to it falling to the table.  His face is visible; his reaction is measurable.  The woman at the table is not a headless anonymous thing called "Mother," but a woman who once was, but is no longer, a presence in a life.  The camera then pans up into the next shot, which mirrors the one from the book:

Before panning back down to the table:

This shot is identical to the previous with the exception of the fact that the mother is missing.  It then pans back into a reestablishing shot:

Which also emphasizes the mother's absence: medium pans in to a medium close-up, she dies; medium close-up pans out to a medium, she's gone.  Her death and subsequent absence are rendered visibly memorable despite the fact that the explicit content of the narrative is that they shouldn't be because it's irrelevant to his origin story.  In the Millar, hers is an irrelevant dead body and is framed as such; in the Vaughn, it's an irrelevant woman whose presence is missed by both of the other characters on-screen. 

In short, in one she's just a body; in the other, a mother.

Cerebus and Modernist Freedom Revisited

Some of you may remember this series (Part I, Part II, Part III) from long ago.  The Interwebs did, and so arose an opportunity for revision and publication (complete with preapproval from Sim and Gerhard to include panels and pages from the series) in a forthcoming collection.  Below is the abstract I concocted while foolishly spending much of my time writing the actual essay, but that's neither here nor there.  The close readings of the texts themselves will commence somewhere near the end of this capsule history of what I'm calling "modernist freedom," but previews of them can be found at the links above.  That said:

Cerebus and Modernist Freedom

When Dave Sim and his fiance, Deni Loubert, founded Aardvark-Vanaheim, Inc. in 1977, its express purpose was to publish Sim's own parody of the sword and sorcery genre typified by titles like Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja.  Two years, twenty-five issues, countless tabs of LSD, and a stint in a psychiatric ward later, his increasingly threadbare parody—later collected in phone book-form as Cerebus—was re-envisioned as a project of almost unimaginable magnitude when the 23-year-old Sim declared that the series would run for 300 issues, at which point he would be 48 years old.  For a writer to dedicate 25 years to a single project is not merely unheard of in the domain of serialized comics, but in literature at large, comparable in stamina to the 26 years William Gass labored on The Tunnel and superior in final effect to the nearly half-century in which Ralph Ellison failed to complete Juneteenth.  Moreover, Sim rarely had—or, at least, rarely abused—the luxury of stopping production on Cerebus to write essays in the mode of Gass or Ellison, as the schedule required to produce a monthly comic demanded that he work without cessation.  Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, the serial nature of monthly comics eliminated the possibility of revision in the traditional sense.  Sim could not simply revise a previously unpublished chapter to accord with another of similar status, he had to incorporate previously published material into his increasingly complex cosmology—a feat he accomplished sometimes brilliantly, sometimes not.  He possessed, in 1979, the kind of creative freedom editors can afford Grant Morrison today: he could remake this fictional world so that it functioned in accordance with his vision of it.  When coupled with the increasingly popularity of his title, this freedom from editorial interference allowed Sim to develop Cerebus solely in reference to his expectations and those of his readers, a financial and artistic arrangement that shares more with that of Continental modernist literature than not.  James Joyce knew Ulysses would continue to be serialized in The Little Review because of the number and influence of its subscribers and the unflagging support Sylvia Beach; this knowledge afforded him the opportunity to risk formal and narrative strategies at which an artist lacking it might balk.  Despite Joyce's constant anxiety about money—he once wrote his mother, "Your order for 3s 4d of Tuesday last was very welcome as I had been without food for 42 hours (forty-two)," as if the gravity of his situation could not be communicated unless he literally spelled it out—the commercial success of the book was assured long before its serialized chapters were bound, so the question of whether the final version of Ulysses would represent Joyce's vision of it never needed to be asked.  In short, at issue was not whether Joyce had creative freedom, but what he would do with it.  Because Sim worked under circumstances that are, at the very least, analogous—only with independent comics in the 1980s taking the tenuous position of little magazines in the 1920s—the central question should not be whether he possessed creative freedom, but how he exercised it.  Joyce is not the singular Irish modernist for Sim—that title belongs to Oscar Wilde—but the comparison warrants further investigation.  In what follows, I will trace the evolution of Jaka from an early parody of a foreign stripper, complete with references to herself in the third person ("Jaka thinks you are cute!" [Cerebus 126]); to the complex subject of an Oscar Wilde novel charting her life as a Princess of Palnu in Jaka's Story; and ending with her being, as Sim wrote in Going Home, "pretty consistent ... All that changed was that Cerebus switched from not really wanting Jaka to really, really wanting her ... As soon as you switch, they switch [because] Jaka is a self-absorbed aristocratic airhead.  She always was."  This final diminishing in her author's eyes sells his characterization of her short, but it is indicative of how Sim would later come to abuse the very creative freedom that once allowed him to become one of the strongest and most innovative in literature, of the graphic variety or otherwise.

Quick qestion for fans of anime and manga:

Is there any particular cultural or historical reason why the anime and manga all seem to have an epic nonsensical climax followed by a grossly sentimental denouement?  Hayao Miyazaki directed both Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Princess Mononoke, so I thought it might simply be a personal tic—epic nonsensical disaster followed by a natural renewal—but it even extends to works merely influenced by anime and manga. 

For example, I just finished watching the series Avatar: The Last Airbender (because Scott McCloud told me to) and there it is again: an epic nonsensical climax followed by a grossly sentimental denouement—this time the resolution of the love stories and a natural renewal—which leads me to believe that what I took to be tics are actually a rhetorically relevant structural element of these works.  

My working thesis is that it has something to do with the scouring of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—which were epic and nonsensical events followed by personal, natural and societal renewals—but before I head down the rabbit hole of secondary literature, it would be keen to know whether there isn't some more straightforward cultural or historical explanation.

A list of people whose deaths I have permission to mourn.

An annoying anonymous person writes:

Why is it any time anyone hipsters or academics are supposed to like dies, they just so happen to be very important never-before-mentioned influences on your life? Are you really so needy that there's no death you won't use as an excuse to call attention to yourself?

Although this comment belongs to the tedious category of "complaints about bloggers having blogs and writing about stuff on them," it nevertheless struck a chord: first, because the size of the community grieving for Alex Chilton surprised me; and second, it seems to be a dangerous time to be a living artist or academic who changed my life.  That said, this annoying anonymous person is reading in bad faith: not everyone who influenced me did so greatly or uniquely, which is why I noted Kurt Vonnegut's passing in passing, as a "Vonnegut phase" is required to join the community of readers.  The same cannot be said of those academics and artists with whom I shared an intimate relationship over many years, which is why I wrote individual remembrances of Octavia Butler, David Foster Wallace, Howard Zinn, or Alex Chilton. 

If I seem to be too familiar a type, blame central casting: academics play the part because that's the part they've been asked to play.  That there seems to be a wider community of similarly interested intellectuals is, to my mind, a sign that while academic disciplines may be irrevocably balkanized, something resembling a larger intellectual culture still exists.  Whether this cultural homogeneity is a good thing depends on what it actually contains, and given how surprising Chilton's inclusion image was to me, I probably should refrain from saying much more about it. 

However, in light of the recent proliferation of lists like this, I think I'll take a moment to silence future scolds by listing all living authors, musicians, and filmmakers with whose work I feel a deeply irrational kinship.  They may not still move me as they once did, but they once did and when they die a little bit of me will too.  

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

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

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

But canonization into what? 

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

This was not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(x-posted.)

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The long walk back to the real world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(x-posted.)

The high price of idealism

(x-posted.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Abish attests, all American art is alliterative.

(x-posted.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With a whoop, the band broke toward the sentinel.

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

They fell to pelting him with snowballs.

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

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