Acephalous

Cerebus and Modernist Freedom, Part II: Snow-Machines, Archaeology, and the Damage Done

(This is the second in an ongoing series.  Part one can be found here.)

If I'm to discuss Jaka's Story, I should at least be polite enough to introduce to you to Jaka, pictured here in a rare happy moment.  Her life has not been an easy one: she was born into the royal family of Palnu, but a life of royalty she did not lead.  From the moment she awoke, her nurse hounded her every movement—and perhaps this was for the better.  In the few hours when the nurse wasn't roughly scrubbing this or manhandling that, the six-year-old Jaka was molested by an unknown member of the royal family or the palace staff.  (These nightly molestations are alluded to on a single page, but it is a significant page, and one I will return to later.) 

The reader is first introduced to Jaka as a young woman dancing in a nightclub.   According to Sim in his editorial introduction to Cerebus 114—the "Prologue" to Jaka's Story—she is based upon the mistress he had when he first married his wife, Deni: "I was naive and ridiculous and the poorest imaginable husband material (still am) but my subconscious was at least able to dredge up what I considered a particularly interesting character out of a singularly unstable period of my life."  Then again, in response to a letter in Cerebus 268, Jaka is "a spoiled, myopic, insensitive, self-absorbed and self-important harlot princess (quite apart from her position in the heirarchy of the city-state of Palnu)."  I mention this not to point to Sim as a hypocrite, but as a way to track the development of his thought: Jaka begins as a complex character with a fraught and troubled past, but in the end becomes a symptom of feminist effrontery.  In the strict allegory into which Cerebus will eventually descend, Jaka will come to mean something.  She ceases to be a character with motivations the minute she becomes this meaning-laden symbol in possession of an established allegorical function. 

To belabor this point, indulge me in a brief discussion of another allegory, Dante's Commedia.  Every character in the Commedia symbolizes and personalizes the sin.  In the Inferno (Canto V), the soul of Francesca da Rimini is blown about by the winds, the perfect contrapasso for a woman whose lust led to her ruin.  Dante uses a familiar figure from (then) recent Italian history in order to prevent his readers from falling into a purely allegorical mode of the sort found in Le Roman de la Rose, in which a Lover is thwarted by Jealousy.  Sim's revisionary account of Jaka shovels abstract generalities on top the rich character he had created, much like a snow-machine transforming the rugged terrain of an archaeological dig into a pristine white field.

Why would someone take a snow-machine to a dig?  Because life is easier when less complicated.  Because history can be rewritten with a little effort and lot of alcohol.  Those are fine, if ultimately inadequate, answers.  What I want to argue here is that coming to understand individual lives with the bulldozer of a comprehensive world view flattens people into allegory.  Once Sim underwent his idiosyncratic religious conversion, he had no choice but to deny Jaka her individuality.  The strength of Jaka's Story comes then not from a full-fledged recognition of her humanity, but from the inchoate desire for system which will one day result in his endless talk of Woman and The Void.  It is this very teetering—this desire for a system, this need to impose upon the world a narrative—which invigorates this book. 

Which is, to return to our story, the tale of a young girl, molested at age six, who leaves the "comforts" of the royal palace for stripping in the slums.  She is a divinely good stripper—so talented, so lovely, the future Prime Minister and Pope, Cerebus, spends both glorious careers pining for her.  When they both have ended, he seeks solace in her company, only to find her (still) married to a dolt named Rick, but without any children.  When he was Pope, she cited her pregnancy as the reason she could not leave Rick for him, so from the moment we see her in Jaka's Story, the absence of any children is palpable.  Tomorrow I will discuss how this absence is made wrenching by the various frame narratives Sim employs, but I want to end this post with a brief discussion of Pud, the barkeep who takes Jaka and Rick in.

Pud stands in neatly for the kind of narrative tension Sim eschews in the later books.  He is a simple man with simple pleasures: unbeknown to Jaka, he houses and employs her at great personal expense, and their relationship is touchingly unsettling.  He longs for her, but knows he cannot win her directly.  So he practices his lines—the little manipulations which he hopes will bring harvest—and while they should disenchant the reader, they never do.  Pud is the portrait of a man struggling with lust who, despite himself, is not the beast he could have been.  Like Sim at this point of his career, Pud is infinitely better than he thought himself to be.  Had he a faith forcing him to repress his lusting, his victory over it would not be so moving.  Now, that victory is not complete—circumstances intervene, and it could be argued that he merely lacked the opportunity, that he would've taken it when the moment finally ripened—but I have a panel which says otherwise.  It'll be the last one in the (fairly lengthy) series of images linked to below the fold.

Cerebus and Modernist Freedom, Part I

(This is part one in a series of ... some undetermined number.  Part two can be found here.)

I want to accomplish a number of things here, so bear with me as I approach Dave Sim from a couple of angles.  Given my interest in the ideological conflicts within an author, I think it best to start from the biographical.  Here's the condensed version:

• 1977: Begins publishing Cerebus
• 1979: Drops acid, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, and decides Cerebus will run for 300 issues.
• 1980: Publishes the first issue of what will later be collected in High Society, inaugurating an unprecedented decade-long run of brilliance.
• 1990: Jaka's Story concludes, inaugurating an unprecedented 14 year run of published mental instability.

That may sound harsh, but what I have in mind here is the notion of high art as the product of unsound minds.  My modernist bias may be showing here, but with good reason—Sim possessed a kind of creative control unseen since the days of the high modernists.  He could publish what he wanted, when he wanted to and expect to be taken seriously.  That last part is more significant than it might seem. 

It's one thing to be a James Joyce; another entirely to be a James Joyce who expects his works will be read and discussed by his peers.  The expectations that you'll be read by a committed audience changes how you approach your material.  (No more self-indulgent slap-dash, my stuff must sing!)  Writing one of the three most popular [independent] comics of the 1980s—expanding the political slapstick of Duck Soup into sprawling medieval allegory of the intrusion of kings and popes into the lives of individuals—convinced him he was above the petty squabbling he so brilliantly depicted. 

With no publisher holding editorial power over him, Sim was charmed by the power he once parodied.  As Daniel notes, Sim is convinced that the late complaints against "the feminist-homosexualist axis" are nascent in the earlier works.  I bring this up now only to dismiss it: I'm sure he believes that, the same way I sometimes believe my thinking about Silas Weir Mitchell is nascent in my dissertation prospectus—which is only to say, I address the very same issues about which I'll one day draw entirely different conclusions. 

They are there, only the parody has turned to homily.  For example, here's the back cover to Cerebus 126:

Four years later, in Cerebus 186, Sim would appear, thinly disguised and ranting:

The point, of course, was that the Male Light was not the exclusive property of Men. It was very close to being the exclusive property of Men, but as Viktor Davis had reminded himself, "there are exceptions." In the case of self-publishing (Viktor Davis' idea of self-publishing was best summed up by Don Simpson's promotional slogan: "One Comic Book. One Universe. Why Pay More?"), there were the indisputable contributions of Colleen Doran and Teri Wood. The problem, of course, in acknowledging exceptions in the Female Void-Dominated Age, was that exception was always extrapolated into being a Universal Truth. This was the shaky foundation upon which Feminism was (and is) built. There were (and are) women who begin their sentences with "I believe..." or "I think..." And they do think. They have reasoned and coherent world views. They realise that inspiration is simply the starting point, that without dedication, hard work, and an avoidance of the Rapacious Voids which dominate our civilisation, the "hard, gem-like flame" becomes wavery or is extinguished. This sensibility occurs more often—far more often—in men than it does in women. This is not bigotry, this is not sexism, it is a fact which is supported by empirical evidence. The Bronte Sisters are not William Shakespeare, Madame Curie is not Albert Einstein, Florence Nightingale is not Louis Pasteur, Penny Marshall is not Orson Welles, Joan of Arc is not Jesus Christ. The Male Light is not a genderless thing, but it occurs where it occurs and sometimes (not often) it occurs in women. Where the Male Light occurs, it must overcome all manner of adversity, not the least of which is the war between the Heart and the Mind. The mistake Feminism makes is in thinking (or, rather, feeling) that legislation can be passed to eliminate adversity and, in this, it has been quite successful, to the general detriment of society. The Founders of Feminism, those with Good Brains and the ability to Reason and Contribute, in regarding the babbling cacophony of the "I feel..." Brigade they have unleashed upon the world in the name of numerical parity in all areas of human endeavour, have much to reflect on. I doubt that they do (or will). But I think they should.

That is but a portion of what he wrote in that issue.  I'm not attacking his opinion here, merely commenting on how he violated the very conventions of the genre in order to do exactly what he had earlier inveighed against.  In retrospect, I'm sure he believes that the Oscar Wilde meant it ironically, and given his talent for blustery deflection, Wilde may have may actually have.  But at some point Sim lost sight of the fact that even if he did believe that "no artist desires to prove anything," Wilde still produced art over invective. 

All of which is only to say that what I've written tonight is a prelude, a means of laying out the conflicts I believe will play out.  (Which is, yes, dull.  But a necessity, since some of my readers may be unfamiliar with Sim.)  Tomorrow I'll address the framing of Jaka's Story and its implications for the narrative as a whole.  The short version: I don't believe it a coincidence that Sim bound his narrative within the conventions of a 19th century novel at the moment his inner ideologue got the upper-hand on his inner artist.

(I feel obliged to add: unlike the series on Keats' Grecian Urn, I've written this one out in advance.  If y'all would prefer I present it all at once, I can.  I'm just not sure that a 3000 word essay is proper material for a blog.)

More on the Possibility of Conservative Literary Criticism

(I'm elevating this long comment to a post because it's germane to what I'll be posting later about Cerebus.  It is somewhat sketchy—and by no means original—but I think it captures the double-bind deadlock of conservative critics of literary studies.)

When I wrote this, I didn't have a problem wondering what I meant by "conservative." I thought "whatever Kline was angling at" would suffice. Sure, it's incoherent, but so is the predominantly liberal theory we have today. On the one hand, I think it absurd to hold a prospective conservative scholarship to different standards those by which we abide; on the other, since (as Luther notes) one of Kline's objections is the inherent pluralism of contemporary literary studies, I don't think those standards even apply. Building on Waxbanks' elegant defense of Bloom, I think we know where we can start:

Conservative literary theory cannot be based on a particular canon. The Culture Wars and the foetid miasma of its trenches will do us no immediate good, since few believe that Shakespeare, Tolstoy or Melville shouldn't be taught—that'd they're somehow inadequately "literary" in some regard—only that they should be taught alongside Behn, (George) Eliot and Stowe.* That Dickens has acquired literary imprimateur suggests that the criteria are malleable. As does the inclusion of any novels, which until the modernists were considered hybrid beasts; capable of fleeting moments of literariness, but on the whole mere prose, constructions of the sort anyone who could read a newspaper could write.  All of which is beside the point, as the article Paul Cantor article Andrew linked to lays plain.  Still, even Cantor relies on a pluralistic model of cultural production:

The historicist model of culture is fundamentally flawed. Far from being self-contained and monolithic, most cultures are open to outside influences and as a result become multivalent and hybrid in character.

Shakespeare is universal because he embraced cultures and traditions outside his own—although his argument suffers here from being too quick on the triumphalism. Not that he's necessarily wrong—I have a friend working on the appropriation of Shakespeare by Nigerian authors in the 19th and 20th centuries—only that Shakespeare translating well in Germany, the former Soviet Bloc and Japan is not evidence of universality. The fact that Kurosawa's Ran translates King Lear into 16th century Japan may say more about plots involving the abdicaton of power in clan societies; such plots may only resonate "universally" in those countries in which clan obligations are symbolically operative, a source of nostalgia in largely alienated lives. It could be many things, none of them necessarily having to do with the universal quality of the Shakespearean text.

But then there's the problem of what else should be included in the canon. We all agree that Shakespeare should, but what about all those books written by brown people who live on islands we've never even heard of. Can they possibly produce great literature. This is where arguments like Cantor's can easily be reversed: if the power of an individual voice living in a culture in which multiple traditions vie for cultural supremacy is what it takes to make a Shakespeare, there's absolutely no reason Brodber's Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home couldn't be a work of "universal" genius. Were someone to argue that "our" cultural tradition isn't represented, the claim to universality could be wielded as a multicultural cudgel: It doesn't matter, we could say, swinging, because it tells a universal story, as applicable to us and our lives as any native Jamaican.

Kline, I assume, would not be impressed.  Frankly, this is because he's intellectually dishonest.  He would claim the elevation of Brodber to Shakespeare's status is unjustified, the result of a godless theoretical pluralism finding more value, more complexity, in a work than it actually contains. (He would say this despite elsewhere having trumpeted Dickens, about whom many of the complaints he would make about Brodber were made—and by far superior thinkers.) Complaints about deconstructionism would surface, followed by multiple references to the Sokal Affair, and that poll indicating that Gavin P. Albright is the sole remaining conservative employed by an English department in the United States. In other words, when it came to the difficult questions—that is, when it came to that most difficult of questions, namely, the definition of literary, he would retreat into tradition instead of philosophical aesthetics, engaging in rear-guard offenses all the while.

None of this proves that a political conservative couldn't practice a politically conservative literary theory, only that none have up to this point. By which I mean, none of the usual critics of academia have attempted to define the literary in such a way that Shakespeare and Dickens are in, but Brodber and the rest are out. Or, they could have the courage of their convictions and say that if Shakespeare and Dickens are in, so are Brodber and the rest, but I haven't seen that argued either—and doubt I will, since doing so would run contrary to notions of tradition.

In this respect, I think the multiculturalist have cornered the cultural traditionalists, forcing them into a position either visibly incoherent (the false universalism of Shakespeare) or spectacularly racist (Dead and White, That's What's Right! Dead and White, That's What's Right!). The latter's utterly untenable in this political climate; the former's philosophically incoherent and intellectually dishonest in the extreme. They may have people whose goals seem consonant with theirs, like Harold Bloom, but were they to read Bloom, they'd find him equally objectionable to the critics they'd hoped he'd replace.

Where do they go from here? 

*I'm being flip. Practical issues obviously abound. I'm talking about the hypothetical canon here, not what can be covered in a ten or eighteen-week survey.

Briefly Noted

• Leon!  (He's my favorite, too.)
• More blog triumphalism, courtesy of Ray. 
• The new JSTOR?  I'm a fan.
• Loosely translated: "Just because he can do it, doesn't mean you can."
• It's refreshing to have Sean back.
• I could imagine someone I live with wanting to see this.
• Reading a week's worth of unread feeds leaves me feeling scattered.

These Things to which I Link, They are Gracefully Written, and, Mellifluous

From Geoff Manaugh:

This reminds me of an image I've had in my head for several years now, which is a forest, growing at its own faunal pace, over years, decades, and even centuries, yet all the plants are rooted in transparent soil—clear hillsides like plastic or glass—so you can actually sit there in the sun, reading Charles Darwin, every day, every week, watching those slow and ancient roots push deeper and deeper through the surface of the earth.  Worms crawl, as if through space, forming tunnels—underground landscapes of air.

And Scott McLemee:

And so for decades the majority of Jefferson scholars demonstrated their staunch refusal to be taken in by subtle Negroes.

Of Theories and Anthologies; Also, a Syllabus

(X-posted from the Valve)

A brief conversation with Jeffrey Williams and Vincent Leitch at the MLA haunts all my talk of theories and anthologies:

Williams: These are things people don’t think about when putting together anthologies.

Leitch: Which De Man would you include?  And why?

Me: Something from Blindness and Insight, probably.

Leitch: But which one?  And why?

Me: (stares dumbly)

As I said, a brief conversation.  One reason I didn’t answer Leitch’s question is that I couldn’t—I have a terrible memory for essay titles and didn’t want to say, “You know, the one in which he argues X, Y and Z,” only to be informed that I was actually thinking of the “Preface” to Allegories of Reading. The other was that I couldn’t (and can’t) divorce the question of what to include in an anthology from its implicit pedagogical concerns: What would I teach, and why? 

I labor over my syllabus, often spending weeks reading and re-reading material, justifying the inclusion of this text and the exclusion of that one; then reversing course, concocting an equally compelling counter-justification for excluding the former and including the latter; then re-reversing, re-re-reversing, &c.  To be honest, I still don’t know which De Man I’d include in The Norton (although I have many impressively credentialed candidates); but I’m determined to come up with some sort of answer, as I want to create a portfolio of sample syllabi.  So when I stumbled upon Williams’ “Packaging Theory“ [JSTOR] again last week, I read his account of writing a theory syllabus with a keener, more practical eye.

Things to Consider:

• Eileen Joy's response to my article-in-progress.  (Should I dignify her valid criticisms with another response, or will they evaporate if I studiously ignore them?)
• Mark Kaplan's response to my article-in-progress.  (Do I prefer machines, tools or gramophones?)
• Edible pancakes.  (The box claims they're "for eating.")
• Rich P. and N. Pepperell's discussion of my article-in-progress.  (Should I seek shelter from this rain of pings or accept the drenching I deserve?)
• Whether this is a not-so-subtle dig.  (Who considers "near the city of Caen, in northwestern France" the center of the world?  Are people incapable of thinking through the implications of their snark?)
• The Reek of Hegel's Awesomeness.
• The implications of Sisyphus taking refuge behind poststructuralist theory, and the uselessness of tags.
• Whether the Troll of Sorrow realizes he's an asterisk.  (And how amusing it is that he relegates himself to a footnote.)
  
• Mean people and the likelihood that they suck.  (I don't believe they do . . . but I wouldn't, being a mean person myself.)
• Inedible pancakes and their target audience.

The Sharp Report of Mine Owne Petar

(X-posted from the Valve)

As I’ve hinted, gestured at, and occasionally admitted, I’ve been working on an article about the history of theory in the ‘70s and ‘80s.  If you’re interested in reading it—no need to play coy, I know you are—I’ve posted a conclusionless draft of it. (The reason for its conclusionlessness will be apparent to anyone who reads this post, or any other for that matter.) It won’t be the last thing I ever say about theory and the doing of it, but as it’s the culmination of three or four years of thinking seriously about this thing called theory, I’m fairly happy with it. 

Some it may sound familiar, like you’ve read it or something like it somewhere before.  That’s because you have.  Following the example of Michael Bérubé, many of the local arguments—or as I like to call them, maneuvers—were born of blog.  On the whole, though, most of it will be new.  Here’s N. Pepperell’s summary of it:

Scott presents us with a tragedy of unintended consequences: new publication technologies, which on one level were liberatory for their ability to open up spaces for the discussion of marginalised areas of research, also facilitated the rise of isolated and balkanised intellectual micro-communities that incubated mutually-reinforcing in-group discourses and promoted hyper-specialisation and the growth of sub-sub-disciplines—fragmenting intellectual discourse and undermining the ability to recognise commonalities or to benefit from external critique. This process was further augmented by a canonisation of significant theoretical texts into a series of anthologies that were intended to raise the theoretical sophistication of the field by propagating important critical theoretic concepts. Unfortunately, the impact of such anthologies on pedagogical practice undermined this intended effect, resulting in a form of socialisation into theory as an eclectic and dehistoricised toolkit from which students were encouraged to mix and match ill-fitting conceptual tools. A somewhat more tacit narrative suggests that these technological and pedagogical shifts were spun in these particular directions - with these specific unintended consequences - in partial response to the broader context of the transformation of the academic job market in the 1970s and 1980s.

The consequence, Scott suggests, was a kind of institutionalisation of practically—if not necessarily intellectually—incommensurable micro-communities, alongside a general decline in the institutional and personal capacity to engage in serious and sustained critical debates across theoretical divides. This institutionalisation has progressed to the point where it is difficult to see where such engagements would take place, in the absence of the creation of fundamentally new kinds of institutional environments - a position Scott underscores with a poignant concluding quotation from Vijay Prashad, issuing a clarion call for overcoming the balkanised intellectual micro-communities that have developed in ethnic studies, but relegated to publishing this demand in the specialist Journal of Asian American Studies.

So Scott offers a clear, critical vision, articulated in the form of an historical account of how his object of critique has come to be. He advocates for the creation of new institutional spaces for interdisciplinary exchange—with a tacit nod to the internet as a potential technological enabler. He also puts forward some interesting critical standards—particularly in the form of a concept of “dialectical pluralism,” a strategy in which communities that share very few substantive assumptions might nevertheless benefit from the refinement that comes through the confrontation with fundamentally divergent theoretical and empirical traditions. While Scott uses the vocabulary of “incommensurability” in discussing such communities, he also appeals to a sort of meta-context of communicative ideals—those expressed in the notion that discussion amongst communities ought to take place based on “an aggressive commitment to strong beliefs, weakly held”—that point to a background network of shared norms that are conceptualised, at least potentially, to be comprehensible by, and defensible to, communities that might make claims that are incommensurable on other levels of abstraction.

I quote her summary rather than my abstract not only because it’s better, but because she takes the time to incorporate the strongest version of my argument into her critique of my methodology.  (See her post—linked again for your convenience—and marvel as this engineer is repeatedly hoisted by his own petard.)  Given the rumblings about faiths good, bad and unspeakable, I find comfort in the fact that the first substantial critic considered my argument in its strong form.  If recent history is any indication, others may not be so charitable. 

With good reason: they hold positions that can’t withstand the scrutiny a commitment to dialectical pluralism requires.  (Being upbraided for excessive snark should stop me from extending this line of thought, but I have no shame . . . or, possibly, convictions.  Hard to tell sometimes.) Dialectic requires a certain amount of seriousness, lest it become little more than contrarianism multiplied.  If seriousness is not something you take seriously, I’m not your ideal interlocutor.  All of which is only to say: should you want to have me hoisted by mine owne petar, you’ll need to pay your money at the gate.  Metaphorically, of course . . .

In Which I Share the Draft You'd Kill to Read (if Theory's Your Bag)

I've half-finished ... something.  I call it "The Culture of Argument: Virtuosos in the Age of Eclecticism [doc]."  Many longtime readers will be surprised by its conclusion.  In fine, I argue that we need to talk about theory more; think about theory more; argue about it honestly; not dismiss it never.  Know why?  Because those literary things we literary folk analyze ain't much in the way of philosophically coherent, so it don't behoove us to be neither. 

Thing is, I'm mighty unhappy with the conclusion.  So unhappy, in fact, I truncated the paper shy of it.  If you have some time, read your way through and give me the what-for.  Should I conclude with talk of what's possible in the present, or pontificate about the stupendous stuff what will be available next week or some such?  (General criticisms of fallacious arguments, laughable prose and/or definitive proof of my stupidity are also welcome.) 

People Do "Do Theory"

Contra the assertions here.  From J. Hillis Miller's 1986 MLA Presidential Address, "The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of the Material Base":

Even the most conservative scholars have been forced to take account of theory by the immense proliferation of activities associated with it, by the constant need to make evaluations of younger colleagues who "do theory," by the tremendous increase in overtly theoretical works and professional activities: courses, essays, books, collections of essays, new journals, old journals transfigured, handbooks, guides, critical-theory groups, programs in critical theory, conferences, symposia, new positions designated for theory, new publishing programs, and so on. (286)

FILE UNDER: Hillis Miller, Enemies of Theory, Crypto-Conservatives

What Do We Lack?

Dialectical pluralism, which W.J.T. Mitchell defines as

the weeding out of error, the elimination of trivial or marginal contentions, and the clarification of fundamental and irreducible differences ... the kind of communication which clarifies exactly what is at stake in any critical conflict.

We need more of that, less arguing about first principles and the like. 

THIS HAS BEEN ANOTHER VERY BORING POST BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE GOOD PEOPLE OF A.B.D. PANIC, WHO REMIND YOU THAT ONLY ONE FIRM'S BEEN UNDERMINING FRIENDSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS, AND LAST VESTIGES OF SELF-WORTH FOR OVER 70 YEARS.  SO THE NEXT TIME YOU NEED SOMEONE TO OFF HIMSELF, REMEMBER A.B.D. PANIC: WE'RE HERE WHEN YOU NEED US (SO LONG AS HE ISN'T).

Great Moments in Blogging History

From Molloy's classic post, "Now I Begin to Suck":

I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four. In which case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about. But I shuffled them well in my pockets, before I began to suck, and again, while I sucked, before transferring them, in the hope of obtaining a more general circulation of the stones from pocket to pocket. But this was only a makeshift that could not long content a man like me.

But not to go over the heartbreaking stages through which I passed before I came to it, here it is, in all its hideousness. All (all!) that was necessary was to put for example, to begin with, six stones in the right pocket of my greatcoat, or supply-pocket, five in the right pocket of my trousers, and five in the left pocket of my trousers, that makes the lot, twice five ten plus six sixteen, and none, for none remained, in the left pocket of my greatcoat, which for the time being remained empty, empty of stones that is, for its usual contents remained, as well as occasional objects. For where do you think I hid my vegetable knife, my silver, my horn and the other things that I have not yet named, perhaps shall never name. Good. Now I can begin to suck. Watch me closely. I take a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat , suck it, stop sucking it, put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat, the one empty (of stones). I take a second stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck it put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And so on until the right pocket of my greatcoat is empty (apart from its usual and casual contents) and the six stones I have just sucked, one after the other, are all in the left pocket of my greatcoat. Pausing then, and concentrating, so as not to make a balls of it, I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, in which there are no stones left, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. At this stage then the left pocket of my greatcoat is again empty of stones, while the right pocket of my greatcoat is again supplied, and in the right way, that is to say with other stones than those I have just sucked. These other stones I then begin to suck, one after the other, and to transfer as I go along to the left pocket of my greatcoat, being absolutely certain, as far as one can be in an affair of this kind, that I am not sucking the same stones as a moment before, but others. And when the right pocket of my greatcoat is again empty (of stones), and the five I have just sucked are all without exception in the left pocket of my greatcoat, then I proceed to the same redistribution as a moment before, or a similar redistribution, that is to say I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, now again available, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And there I am ready to begin again. Do I have to go on?

But Lacan, He Said Names Were Meaningful

I've always wished my surname was a verb.*  I'll sit there at my desk, chin cupped in palm, wishing my mother had possessed sense enough to marry "Gary Conquers," "Harry Rules" or, I don't know, "Steve Fornicates."  (Better than "Steve Jobs."  No one wants a curious green surname, no matter how it sleeps.)  My passion for verbal surnames was inflamed a few years ago, when I taught a student named "Elizabeth Spies."  (You doubt me?) 

In the age of Google, she is practically invisible, buried beneath the combined noise of her name and its various permutations.  As if the Queen of the same name and her elaborate network of spies (I'm looking at you, Franky) weren't enough to foil casual efforts to locate Elizabeth, Google's insistence that someone searching for "Elizabeth Spies" may be interested in "Elizabeth's pies" and its permutations seals the deal.  Not that I'm looking for Elizabeth, mind you, or that I want a less visible web presence. 

I only mention all this because I've spent the day trying to figure out what Edward said.  In this database, Edward said quite a bit.  In that one, many Edwards have said many things, but none of them are my Edward, so none of them said what I'd remembered my Edward said.  Frustrating in the extreme, I tell you.

So perhaps not having a verbal surname is a good thing.  I could've ended up in the imperative mood, forced to live my life under the strangest of directives:

"Stanley, fish!"

"Susan, sontag!"

"Wolfgang, iser!"

*The desire to change my name may be genetic.  Upon immigrating to America, my grandmother and great-aunt changed their last name to "Starr."  Hollywood, you know.

NAME! THAT! CRITIC!

For $500 and the game, name the author of the following quotations:

Representative of the Mode

Any slightly more than casual reader of literary journals knows either repertoire, and probably yawns at them both—as much as he is also bored by any eclecticist who tries to use all the factional vocabularies to make a transcendental synthesis.  But, in the manner of an impressionistic historian, one can say there are things about what goes on in contemporary criticism today that are typical, even representative of the mode...

From "Fugitive Essays" to Aletheia in Three Simple Steps

If these anthologies serve any real function—aside from being convenient ways for the reader to get hold of fugitive essays—it is to let one think that they make up a consensus for today's critic, an immediate background he presumes to be accurate, from which he launches his own work, to which he responds, against which he defines himself, his allies, or his opponents.  In accepting such a background the critic also presumes a background for the background, and without being too dodgy, he would say that these anthologies and what they represent aim to be different from previous anthologies and consensuses, which in turn were different from previous ones...

"Challenges" of the Lesser Critic

Most great critics are methodical; this perhaps only means that they are able to articulate and rationalize their intuitive awareness of literature.  But it also means that they are not afraid of making their methods and their own writing independently interesting and intellectually consistent, over and above a work.  For the lesser critic such challenges are rare.  He will use the work in order to make it work, which it always will.  His method will demonstrate its effectiveness, which it will always possess.  And on and on, without any sense of the drama underlying method, or of its fundamental ground in intellectual life...

The Will-to-Eccentricity

Some of these dimensions appear perforce eccentric, even determinedly so.  But this will-to-eccentricity, I think, is a major project of contemporary critical discourse...

The Intellectual Shortcomings of Other People's Fields; or, See this Gauntlet? Consider it Dropped (But Politely, in Case I'm Mistaken)

I have a quick question regarding the status of Laura Mulvey’s concept of the gaze in film studies.

(At this point, the hastily crafted “blog-work” cedes pride of place to something I wrote this afternoon.  Now you can account for the ungainly tonal shift you’re about to experience.  Were I not genuinely interested in hearing what you think of the following account of Lacanian influence in film studies, I would take this opportunity to wax free-association about the difference between this here parenthetical prose and what you see beyond its elliptical fortifications.  Now, where was I?)

The first sentence of her most frequently cited article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” clearly states its purview: “This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him.”  Twenty years later, David Roberts summarizes her initial exposition of the male gaze in this essays as having two functions:

The first is narcissistic: male spectators gaze at the male subject they aspire to resemble.  The second is voyeuristic: the same spectators gaze at the female performers they desire to possess and subject.

In the thirty years between Mulvey’s article and Roberts’, the psychoanalytic framework has become invisible, so much so that Roberts can claim that “however [her] ideas are challenged or inflected, they say something important.”  The means by which they do so—the authority of psychoanalytic accounts of human consciousness and social interaction—exist now only subterraneously. 

What had been a decidedly Lacanian argument in which film, abetted by the gaze and its imagined mastery, functions like the mirror stage, deceiving the viewer into believing there is no underlying symbolic structure, becomes a truism whose assumptions need not be addressed so long as the results of its application “say something important.”  Such a subsumption has consequences both for the theory being subsumed and the work to which it is applied. 

As Todd McGowan [JSTOR] notes, the emphasis on the gaze in film studies has pushed the third element of the Lacanian triad, the Real, past the vanishing point, a “crucial omission, because the Real provides the key to understanding the radical role that the gaze plays within filmic experience.”  Doing justice neither to the art object under examination nor the examining theory, the routinization of “the gaze” in film studies speaks to the intellectual deficit caused by professional isolation.

Am I wrong? 

Darwin Loves You Between Women

(That's how he rolls.)

I want to thank the kind soul who mailed me copies of George Levine's Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World and Sharon Marcus' Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England.  The Levine looks to be especially relevant—reading the first chapter, he seems to attribute to Darwin influence which rightly belongs to Lamarck, so my dissertation remains earth-shattering in its potential—and the Marcus was recommended by Amanda Claybaugh at the MLA, so I'm looking forward to reading both. 

However, in the future you ought to slip a note in the box indicating who you are, lest I feel like an ungrateful lout when I run into you (again?) and fail to thank you for the thoughtful, generous gift.

Observations on the Latest Modern Fiction Studies

(x-posted to the Valve )

The Winter 2006 number of Modern Fiction Studies hit the streets this morning.  This issue is special, devoted to what it calls “graphic narrative,” but which everyone I know calls “funny books.” De gustibus, yes, but accompanied by a strong impulse to legitimize the objects they’re studying.  After all, this is MFS, not The Journal of Popular Culture.  For the sake of reference, the previous special issue (Summer 2006) was devoted to Toni Morrison, not exactly a marginal figure in contemporary literature.  Reading the introduction and first three essays, I sense that the audience of this issue is MFS readers, not scholars of the works in question.

More evidence: Art Spiegelman’s Maus rests the on the tip of everyone’s tongues.  Not that Maus isn’t brilliant—although, what with my interest in race and essentialism in contemporary literary studies and fin de siècle evolutionary theory, I find elements of it highly problematic—only that scholars have been embracing it for the better part of two decades.  Project Muse alone pulls up 261 references to it, many of which with serious, scholarly titles like Erin Heather McGlothlin’s “No Time Like the Present: Narrative and Time in Art Spiegelman’s Maus” and Victoria A. Elmwood’s “‘Happy, Happy, Ever After’: The Transformation of Trauma between the Generations in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.”  Being the subject of articles in Narrative and Biography indicates a work has acquired canonical cachet—so much, in fact, that its mention lends prestige to the lowly genre to which it belongs. Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven, the editors of this issue, say as much:

The project of this special issue is to bring the medium of comics—its conventions, its violation of its own conventions, what it does differently—to the forefront of conversations about the political, aesthetic, and ethical work of narrative. For many of us interested in graphic narrative, without any clear-cut methodology established for considering contemporary comics texts as multilayered narrative works (aside from debates within the field of postmodern fiction and postmodernism generally), and, until recently, without a range of examples to sit next to Maus on our bookshelves, Maus itself set the terms for ways to talk about what comics could do. It continues to set the terms, as a great, lasting work.

While I endorse all Chute and DeKoven say here, I’m a little perplexed by the notion that “until recently, without a range of examples to sit next to Maus on our bookshelves.”  Cerebus—about which I’ll say more in a minute—hit its stride thirty years ago with High Society, Church and State and Jaka’s Story; Neil Gaiman started publishing The Sandman in 1988; the first volume of Maus appeared in 1986.  All of which is only to say, if someone couldn’t find something to put on their shelves alongside Maus, they must not have been looking.  And before anyone complains this is my inner enthusiast speaking, let me state plainly:

It isn’t.  It’s my inner historicist—who is, admittedly, no less petulant—compelling me to defend the genre.  Spiegelman may have been key to its acceptance in academic circles, but he sits at the end of a long tradition; one which, as long traditions will, contains a robust culture of immanent critique.  To return to Dave Sim’s Cerebus: it began as a parody of works like Conan, Red Sonja and Prince Valiant, but eventually became a 6,000 page novel about conflicts between political and religious authorities, abuses of power and the feminist-homosexualist axis.  The open embrace of misogyny is certainly unfortunate, but it points to one aspect of funny books the focus on “graphic narratives” or “graphic novels” ignores—being produced monthly, they capture the development of a person’s thought in a way other, more novelistic genres cannot.  The Dave Sim who in 1995 wrote “Male Light does not Merge ... Thinking, Reason, is best served by solitude, isolation” is not the same man who appropriated Oscar Wilde’s voice to tell the story of a young woman coming to terms with her life in Jaka’s Story.

Or maybe he is.  It’s arguable.  However, the inability to revise work once it’s been published—to smooth over stylistic infelicities, to correct errors of fact or judgment—means that what comic artists produce is a record of thought unlike the one produced by novelists. Intellectual and artistic development can be tracked, month by month, in a way only available to students of the novel after their teachers have died.  All of which is only to say that the focus on “graphic narratives” fails to address this particular historicist’s pet concerns.  Which is fine.  In the coming days, I’ll address the articles individually.  Maybe it’s because this is the first time since I renounced my Joycean heritage that I’ve read every single primary text discussed in an article, but for some reason, I feel eminently qualified to analyze this issue of MFS.

Wherever Could I Be Headed with This? Part the First of Many

In June of 2006, a law student named Laura Ventura wrote a critical response to Anne Stevens and Jay Williams’ “The Footnote, in Theory” [.pdf], an article which tells “the story of theory’s reception in the American academy” (219) by tabulating citations in Critical Inquiry.  Her complaints were consonant with the ideology of the venue in which she aired them, the conservative Campus Report. “Academics Footnote Liberals Exclusively” contains all of the nuanced thought suggested by its title. Deconstruction, Ventura declares, “is a method for discrediting historical theorists such as Aristotle and Plato for the sole purpose of promoting Derrida’s belief”; C.S. Lewis “was most likely left off the list because of his strong Christian beliefs and influences”; Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain “were not included because of their patriotism to a country that the cited authors despised.”

While critical in the colloquial sense, her response assumes every citation took the breezy form of the one Stevens and Williams criticize in which “a well-known theorist” submitted an essay containing the footnote “See Jacques Derrida” (221). That is, Ventura assumes all acts of citation entail a tacit acceptance of the ideological beliefs of the thinker being cited. Any citation of Mark Twain demonstrates, to her mind, a patriotism similar to the one she attributes to him. An author would remain a patriot even if the article cited is his infamous anti-imperial tract “To the Person Sitting Darkness,” even if the passage quoted is:

And as for a flag for the Philippine Province, it is easily managed. We can have a special one—our States do it: we can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.

The absurdity of Ventura’s response—her patent ignorance of deconstructive thought, her inability to understand the difference between primary (Twain) and secondary (Jefferson) works—underscores the problem with the way those outside the humanities criticize work done within it. This is especially true of a time of disproportionate access to different venues. Anyone with an internet connection can log onto campusreportonline.net and read Ventura’s article, but it would cost someone $42 to access the Stevens and Williams’ article online.

The price a Campus Report reader would have to pay to fact-check Ventura almost guarantees none will. Instead, the quality of “The Footnote, in Theory” will be judged by an article written by someone not merely unqualified to judge its merit, but one who is ideologically predisposed to declare it valueless. The problem, however, is not primarily of qualifications or ideological disposition but, as Lindsay Waters’ “The Lure of the List,” one of venue. Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Waters uses Stevens and Williams’ article as an occasion for criticizing “the human cost of such list making,” as “the learned duplicate unthinkingly the worst behavior of society as a whole.” His evidence, such that it is, consists of rejoinders that address, without correcting, the limitations of Stevens and Williams’ methodology. “You humanists,” he scolds, “should have looked into the literature on the methodology of lists, which the social scientists who pioneered making them have reflected upon…the way the numbers fall out in CI’s ranking seems to reveal of what [the sociologist, Robert] Merton called the ‘Matthew Effect,’ where fames becomes its own promotion.” The casual, condescending quality of his dismissal fails to embody to the standards it claims to uphold.

He attacks them for what, to his mind, “seems” like a relevant principle without attempting to establish the veracity of his suggestion himself. Of course, a study of the sort Waters proposes would not belong in The Chronicle’s “Review” section: it would be too long, too detailed, contain too many charts, graphs and footnotes to be placed there. For a long time, Critical Inquiry “Critical Responses” section would have been the appropriate venue to write a serious, sustained riposte to “The Footnote,” but with a few exceptions—Christopher Newfield’s response to John Guillory’s “The Sokal Affair and the History of Criticism” and Peter Havholm and Philip Sandifer’s response to Jerome Christensen’s “Corporate Authorship” among them— “Critical Responses” has disappeared from the pages of Critical Inquiry.

This disappearance both diminishes the quality of the work appearing between its covers—writing with the knowledge of inevitable challenge having a salutary effect on a work—and cedes the place of criticism to an unsympathetic public unwilling to acquire the expertise required to produce substantive critique. A new forum, a new venue for critique must be found to revivify the culture of argument we abandoned in favor of artificial comity...

The Zone of Irritation

I'm annoyed.  I'm editing, re-editing and re-re-editing this week, so I have every reason to be.  How else should I feel when facing:

• The awkward phrasing of the words intended to bring to the reader  greater clarity through painful specificity.
• The lapses in register, from arid pedantry to way too fucking casual, often in a single sentence.
• The vocabular nonsense—the nouned verbs, the verbed nouns, the inexplicable revival of the Latin gerundive—any sufficiently detailed technical description requires.
• The vocabularian nonsense any insufficiently secure writer configurates to impress the easily impressed.

And those only speaks to the prose.  There is still the argument, burdened by:

• The claims so laughably overbroad only an idiot would believe them.
• The claims so laughably overboard only an idiot would believe them.
• Those passages only the writer can understand.
• Those passages not even the writer can understand.
• An unseemly penchant for parallel structures which, when coupled with the aforementioned vocabular and vocabularian nonsense, encourages the creation of inscrutable hypocorisms like "Pally."

As I said, I have every reason to be annoyed with myself.  (After those bullets, you do too.)  But that's not why I'm annoyed right now.  No, right now I'm annoyed by the way in which my annoyance radiates, how it establishes a Zone of Irritation from which nothing can escape.  Beards, they can not escape it.  Lettuce, it wilts.  Other people's work?  You must be kidding me.  Take this claim, from an otherwise impressive book:

Many domestic novels open at physical thresholds—such as windows or doorways—to problematize the the relation between interiors and exteriors. (43)

How many?  The author discusses three, but looking through my shelf of roughly contemporary novels, I can find no others.  Not a one.  The nature of the claim-structure is backwards here: I believe X, and "many" cherry-picked novels begin by thematizing it.  This is the academic variation of the classic Sportscenter statistic: "On the second and third Wednesdays in March, Bobby Knight-coached teams have only lost to unranked opponents twice in the five years he's coached at Texas Tech."  Only it's worse.  The Sportscenter infographic remains faithful to its  obscenely specific raison d'être, whereas the academic cousin hides its Wednesdays-in-Marchness behind a facade of general truth. 

The "many" employed in this passage obscures the fact that many, many more domestic novels don't open at physical thresholds.  It also conceals the reason why many domestic novels would do so: they're domestic.  We should expect thresholds and windows to appear frequently for the same reason we expect spaceships to make regular appearances in space operas.  Why even make the claim?  Why not focus on how often tables or children appear instead?

Notice, too, the implication that the physical location where a novel begins is significant.  Should the critic not establish that where a novel opens is more important than, say, where it closes?  How could anyone even write this sentence?  Isn't the dishonesty of the claim evident to anyone involved in any stage of the writing process?  What about all those people thanked on the acknowledgments page, did not a single one of them notice these grievous overstatements?  Why not?  I want to know.  I need to know.

This is what life is like inside the Zone of Irritation.  Everything is judged by the same unforgiving standards we apply to ourselves, and no one looks—or feels, for that matter—the better for it. 

Grad School: A Primer

A is for Anxiety. Who are you, Derrida?

B is for the Bore you are, to all but Ma and Pa.

C is for the Coin you drop on Copies you deface,

D for the Despair you feel, producing at this pace.

E is for the Energy you wasted all these years,

F for Fraud, for Failure, Fake, whatever, these are tears.

G is for the Game you play, imagining you'll finish,

H for Harry Potter. You fancy games of Quiddich.

I's for Isolation, you're alone in this you know?

J for all the Joy you'll feel in this Hell when it snows.

K is for the grade you'd give, to see that student sob,

L for Lucky, like you'll be, to ever Land a job.

M is for the Money you'd be rolling in by now,

N for all the Notes you lost, although you're not sure how.

O is for the wailing, which continues in your sleep,

P for all the Pressure, which you handle [BLEEP] [BLEEP] [BLEEP].

Q is for the Questions, all the dumb ones that you ask,

R for the Revisions, Resubmissions in your past.*

T is for the Time spent, reading this instead of that,

U for Unproductive, like the time spent with your cat.

V is for the Virtues you can always cultivate,

When you have a real life.  At some undetermined date.

X is for the ones you love, but avoid for your cause,

Y for you, you you you you, and working without pause.

Z is for the Žižek, he's really rad, I hear,

And now you know, Grad ABCs, who here wants more beer?

*S is for the Shit you inevitably leave out,
Or maybe for how stupid, you feel foot firm in mouth.