Acephalous

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.)

What is the Regnant Theory of Naturalism, Anyway?

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

What do you consider the dominant theory of naturalism?

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

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

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

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

I Didn't Know You Were a Reader

Recent Google hits from a certain IP address:

"Do Huck Finn learned that slavery are wrong?"

"Do Huck Finn learning that slavery is wrong?"

"Do Huck Finn learns that slavery is wrong?"

"In Huck Finn is slavery are wrong?"

Only in Huck Finn, Mr. President.  Only in Huck Finn.

Signs the Book You're Reading is a Revised Dissertation and/or Vintage '70s Fredric Jameson

1. It is titled or subtitled The _____ Imagination.
2. Its footnotes reference every single piece of secondary literature on a given subject.
3. The distinction between "high" and "low" literature relies not on any intrinsic feature of the work but on whether or not it was intended to be read by a disciplined bourgeois audience.
4. Claude Levi-Strauss reminds its author to do many things, which he enumerates in grueling detail.
5. Within the first two pages, the author trots out a classic of American Studies, like Constance Rourke's American Humor: A Study of National Character (1933), for the express purpose of bemoaning its naively undeconstructed use of oxymorons like "acting naturally" or "realist performance."
6. Peter Brooks' The Melodramatic Imagination is cited favorably before its argument suffers a violent death-by-uncharitable-rehearsal.
7. The Algirdas Greimas Orchestra keeps you swinging in a semiotic square "Early in the Morning & Late at Nite."
8. The author implores his readers to do their best 19th century German philologist and scrutinize comprehensively the entire historical record, from the fall of the Roman Empire to last week's raucous orgy in the penthouse of the Bellagio ... while presenting little evidence that he has done so himself.

Virgina Tech, Huck Finn, and the Novel of Purpose

(x-posted from the Valve)

Like everyone else this week, I’ve lost more than a little sleep thinking about what happened at Virginia Tech.  I fret over the university context one minute, the comparative one the next—two hundred people died senselesly in Iraq yesterday—but more than anything else, it is the professional context that dogs my mind.  Cho Seung-hui was an English major, after all, and thus an example of the abject failure of the liberal arts to humanize the troubled souls who study them.  His plays are compelling evidence that Plato was onto something in Book X of The Republic: literature originates in the base, irrational place to which it appeals; and the production and consumption of it succours the worst in us.  Put mildly, Cho’s work was not cathartic.  He fell prey to the vicious cycle of unreason Socrates described. 

As a senior English major at Virginia Tech, he could have taken courses that appeal to the most hardened culture warrior—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Augustan Literature, Romantic Literature, Renaissance Literature, &c.—or those the cultural studies side considers morally edifying—Ethnic Children’s Literature, Introduction to Women’s Literature, Introduction to African-American Literature, Literature and Ecology, Postcolonial Cultural Studies, Contemporary Horror, Women in Sport, &c.  My intention is not to declare a pox on both houses, but to point to how thin this justification of our work is.  One course in postcolonial literature does not a progressive make, nor will reading Shakespeare transform a troubled soul into a humanist.  On one level, we know this—witness the photograph of the SS officer, feet on desk, reading Goethe—but on another, our professional identity intertwines with the notion that good books make good people, so long as someone teaches them how to read. 

Which is what we say we do, careful as we are to pepper our conversations with “critical thinking” whenever we interact with the outside world.  All of which dovetails with a long, unsatisfactory post I’ve written on The Novel of Purpose.  In her discussion of Mark Twain, Claybaugh addresses Huck Finn‘s belated purposiveness via Jonathan Arac’s Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target.  I have written previously of my admiration for Arac, but Idol and Target has always bothered me.  Arac is right to say that the book has always been an exercise in self-congratulation—it is an abolitionist novel published in 1885—but as someone who has taught the novel three times now, I think his critical distance shows here.  Students latch onto Huck’s declaration of war against Southern custom: “All right then, I’ll go to hell,” Huck says after recognizing his shared humanity with the captured Jim.  It is a powerful epiphanic moment, even if it leads to the odd fact, as Claybaugh writes, “[g]enerations of readers have identified with Huck and have in the process congratulated themselves as if they were alone in recognizing that slavery was wrong, that African Americans are human beings” (175). 

Huck Finn may only obliquely be a novel of purpose, but its characterization of Jim is perhaps the finest argument for the novel as a moral tool.  As Claybaugh notes, when Huck Finn opens, Jim is little more than a caricature; over the long middle section of the novel, Jim displays ever more intellectual and emotional complexity; when Tom Sawyer returns, so too does the caricature.  Only now, it is mediated by effects of the Bildungsroman that supplanted it.  Jim is not a flat character, but a flattened one.

Claybaugh’s emphasis on the reformist tradition leads her to follow Arac and consider Huck Finn a belated antislavery novel.  Though still central, I would say that “All right then, I’ll go to hell” is less significant as an antislavery sentiment than a promise broken by the horrors of the final act.  Huck’s declaration makes Tom’s dehumanization of Jim all the more harrowing, which points to the moral content of the novel: it is one thing to say words—no matter how hard-won—another to act upon them when faced with cultural precedent. (Which is what Tom represents for Huck, as established in the opening chapters.) The perfidy of the otherwise sympathetic Huck bothers readers not because Twain conned them into self-congratulation, but because it demonstrates the weakness of Huck’s conviction. 

This is not to say that I disagree with Claybaugh’s reading of the novel overall—Twain toys with the conventions of reformist literature throughout the novel—only that the focus on the belatedness foregrounds the issue of slavery, such that it is difficult not to read the novel as self-congratulatory con.  She is correct to insist on Twain’s reluctance to consider literature morally edifying: Huck Finn‘s unfinished sequel, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians, a realist counterpart to what he would later call “Fenimore Cooper’s literary offenses.” 

The sequel picks up where Huck Finn left off, with Tom applying what he has learned—from “Cooper’s novel,” as he admits to Huck—only instead of imposing generic conventions on life, Huck and Tom learn that such conventions aren’t drawn from it.  They expect to meet honorable “Injuns” Fenimore Cooper portrayed, and reality seems to conform with literature at first.  As Huck says, “we was all stuck after the Injuns, kind of in love with them, as you may say, and I reckon I never had better times than I had then.” The good times came to a quick close, however, when the Indians betray them, killing all but one member of the party Huck and Tom had befriended and kidnapping Jim.  This is when Huck discovers Tom learned “about Injuns, how noble they was” from Fenimore Cooper; the rest of their journey to find Jim is an exercise in perpetual disabuse.  The symmetry is telling: in Huck Finn, Tom uses literary convention to enslave Jim; in Among the Indians, Tom must shuck literary convention in order to free him.  In neither book, then, can a case be made that Twain thought much of the novel of purpose.

And yet, the third act of Huck Finn brutally enacts a failure of conviction.  I can think of no other discussion in which the students become as enraged at a character than the one spanning the last two classes on Huck Finn.  They feel betrayed by Huck—so betrayed, in fact, that I wonder whether that anger is a permanent bequest.  Has reading the novel increased the thought they put into a promise?  Has literary study improved them, even if only in this smallest of ways?