Thursday, November 30, 2006
All in All, a Decent Close-Reading of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
The meager fruits of my late labor:
- A Good Bad Reading of Keats’ "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Part I
- A Good Bad Reading of Keats’ "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Part II
- A Good Bad Reading of Keats’ "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Part III
- A Good Bad Reading of Keats’ "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Part IV
- A Good Bad Reading of Keats’ "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Part V
Upon review, my exercise in close-reading John Keats’ "Ode on a Grecian Urn" revealed an intense—some would say obsessive—interest in the cultivation of tactical ignorance. In my reading, Keats stages Joshua Reynolds’ argument in Seven Discourses on Art:
[P]erfect form is produced by leaving out particularities, and retaining only general ideas ... the usual and most dangerous error is on the side of minuteness, and, therefore, I think caution most necessary where most have failed. The general idea constitutes real excellence. All smaller things, however perfect in their way, are to be sacrificed without mercy to the greater. The painter will not inquire what things may be admitted without much censure. He will not think it enough to show that they may be there; he will show that they must be there, that their absence would render his picture maimed and defective.
The association of poetry with painting implicit here is, I assure you, a sound one. 
(Even John Ruskin agreed with Reynolds on this point.) So, too, is the association of Keats and Reynolds: the "Ode" first appeared in the Annals of the Fine Arts, edited by Benjamin Haydon, a close friend of Keats and Reynolds partisan. Not only would Keats have been familiar with Reynolds through the Annals, he would’ve expected its audience to be.
So I’ve established that the poem’s famous parting shot alerts the reader to Reynolds’ influence. What of it? Someone like Keats—a keen student of Greek sculpture and pottery—would have known, or been able to guess, the answers to the questions he asks at the close of the first stanza. Had he been asked "What men or gods are these?" (8), he may have responded with any number of contemporaneous theories about the scene depicted on the Portland Vase (pictured right):
Consider the treatment the young man advancing from the left, his right hand holding his cloak. Is he clutching it? Is it dangling? All evidence points to the former. The right hand lifting the cloak off the bare stone indicates that the figure had previously been seated beneath the Doric entablature. As anyone who spends countless hours studying Lucian amphorae knows, such positioning—beneath a column, his cloak a prophylactic against the cold, smooth stone—announces the presence of a god or immortal hero. If it be a hero, the cloak upon which he sits represents the mortality he doffed...
Keats could have thought and written as much, but had he, the poem would not have achieved its general (philosophically speaking) effect. Keats’ coy ignorance convinces readers that answering the questions in lines 5-10 would divest the urn of the very uncertainties responsible for its beauty. The poem feigns ekphrasis the same way Reynolds enjoins his pupils to feign representation: by sacrificing, without mercy, the smaller things to the greater.
Given his druthers, Reynolds would have his students eschew a laundry list of "smaller things" for "the whole beauty and grandeur of the art consists ... in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities, and details of every kind." Keats eschews this brilliantly, championing a mode of productive ignorance in which what matters is not what happened but how one represents it. Shrouded in sublime mists of unknowable unknowingness, history becomes exemplary or extinct. Such, at least, is the lesson lisping minions learn:
"The Mists of Avalon is tremendously superior! Once and Future King sucks!"
"So says you! You sleight slayers soundly still, so why should she listen to such sluice-speak?"
"No."
[ ... ] "Yes."
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
The Paranoid Style in American Academia
I’ve just read a book (I’m not going to name names); and now I need a name for a temperamental disorder. It is, Nietzsche might have said, a garrulity of paranoia.
Everyone always thinks they are right and that everyone else is wrong, especially where philosophy is concerned. But only some people are then compelled to write as though everyone else is therefore perversely - one is almost compelled to say: wilfully - missing what is perfectly obvious to the author (although the author is also proud of having noticed it, whatever it may be.) There is a relish to phrases that run: ‘this strenuous output and effort, much heralded, had the single effect of obliterating the one, slender insight the originator of this school might have had.’ Multiply that by at least 100 occasions. Things sound like they are going, by design, far worse than seems really psychologically plausible. Everyone but the author is not merely unproductive but uncannily, remorselessly, exclusively counter-productive in all their works and deeds. The exception that proves the rule will be a few long-dead figures whom the author clutches to his bosom, insists are unjustly neglected or radically misunderstood, whom he sets forth to champion against a world peopled otherwise exclusively, apparently, by blockheads. (There is some line from a McCarthy red-baiting speech about how there must be communists in Congress because, however stupid they might be, even a postulate of utterly random legislation would predict that eventually that body would do something that did not run actively counter to the interests of the American people!)
I realize I have sometimes written a bit in this vein myself. Large delight in narrating a spectacle of perverse wrongness. Well, sometimes people really are quite perversely in the wrong. (Just because you’re paranoid ... ) Surely you grant as much, dear reader. And, when people are well-known yet not generally acknowledge to be perversely in the wrong, it’s fun to point that out. Also, this sort of thing is always ok when it is used strictly in self-defense in a comments box. (Someone is being just obnoxious and you play it straight, which amounts to accusing them of being absolutely perverse in their wrongness.) I think if you only do it in self-defense it’s no worse than spraying the cat with water, to teach it not to jump up on the counter. You are teaching manners by doing something a little rude. As Nietzsche might say: you are trying to breed trolls with the right to leave comments by instilling in them one or two ‘thou shalt not‘s. But if you aren’t acting in strict, warranted self-defense it’s actually quite distasteful. And when it attains a book-length, dire, glowering, Schopenhauerian/McCarthyite aspect, it has gotten quite out of hand. Does anyone want to give examples? I mean: besides Arthur Schopenhauer, obviously. Mine is a living author and I do not want to give offense, before God and google, without shouldering the burden of demonstating that he really is writing in this silly way.
Memo to self: write less this way, on pain of being a crank. (Probably even in comments. Yes, even in comments. ‘jholbo’ has often been associated with some funny stuff.) As Wittgenstein writes on the subject of blogging and comment boxes: “It is like looking into the cabin of a locomotive. We see handles all looking more or less alike. (Naturally, since they are all supposed to be handled.) But one is the handle of a crank which can be moved continuously (it regulates the opening of a valve); another is ...” (PI, §12). Und so weiter.
UPDATE: I just came across a remark by Nietzsche that seems apposite. “Heaping hot coals on another’s head is usually misunderstood and miscarries.” He goes on to give a brief explanation.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
The Love of Argument: A Response to Michael Bérubé
In this essay, I want to offer a response to Bérubé’s new book What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts, rather than writing a review. My review is quite simple: if you are an academic, or are concerned about the prominence of left-wing politics in college humanities courses, you should read Bérubé’s book. It is a decisive refutation of David Horowitz’s charges, and (as others have written) a marvelous account of how English professors actually teach their courses.
In my response to Bérubé, I will focus on the fact that Bérubé considers himself to have a vested interest in argument qua argument, and specifically in the continuance of certain political debates that have a long history in the United States. Bérubé’s love of argument is representative of a widespread trend in both academia and the blogosphere. In my opinion, this bodes ill. Argumentation is a regrettable means, not an end; believing otherwise leads one to fetishize intelligence, misinterpret opponents, maintain incompatible ideas, and worse.
I will try to outline, briefly, a different account of what should be liberal about the liberal arts.
Bérubé opens his book with a story about a volatile student named John, who became increasingly outspoken about his conservative beliefs over the course of a class on postmodern literature.
John’s story begins when Bérubé is explaining the historical context for a reference (in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo) to something resembling the Black Muslim movement. Bérubé lectures on the comparisons that were made between the Church of Latter-Day Saints and the Nation of Islam, and John responds by “snorting loudly and derisively” (2). John exclaims, “That’s completely ridiculous!” (2). The class ignores this outburst, but Bérubé initiates a conversation with John after class, correctly intuiting that he is smoldering about the incident.
John tells Bérubé that “membership in the American community requires one to subordinate his or her ethnic or national origin” (2). Bérubé responds,
Your position has a long and distinguished history in debates over immigration and national identity. It’s part of the current critique of multiculturalism, and to a point I have some sympathy with it, because I don’t think that social contracts should be based on cultural homogeneity.
The problem with seeking John out, and re-assuring him in this way, is that Bérubé is unwittingly misunderstanding John. Bérubé sees John as a representative of a “long and distinguished” position in debates over the social contract, which means that he is thinking of John as an unliving piece of discourse. The proof that he has started to think of John this way is his response: “I don’t think that social contracts should be based on cultural homogeneity.” This is not extemporaneous speaking. Bérubé has clearly pondered this issue, and winnowed his thinking down to one dense nugget that already takes John’s views somewhat into account. The problem is that John probably can’t scan this pre-fabricated statement, and moreover he isn’t going to lie there passively like some library copy of Edmund Burke. As far as John is concerned, the time to overthrow identity politics is right now—and not to Bérubé’s well-considered liking, either, but in toto. Thus, all John takes away from their conversation is the idea that he was right to feel aggrieved.
Bérubé says as much:
We parted amicably, and I thought that though he wasn’t about to agree with me on this one, we had, at least, made our arguments intelligible to each other [...] But the dynamic of the class had been changed. From that day forward, John spoke up often, sometimes loudly, sometimes out of turn [...] he occasionally spoke as if he were entitled to reply to every other student’s comment—in a class of seventeen. (5)
Bérubé spends the rest of the term doing damage control. He has to use all sorts of subtle devices, often behind John’s back, in order to make the course valuable to the rest of the students without making John feel oppressed. I admire Bérubé’s resourcefulness as a teacher and his obvious compassion for his students. However, I think the problems John created were an inevitable result of the disconnect between John’s world, in which one argues to win, and Bérubé’s world, in which one argues merely to make one’s arguments intelligible.
Bérubé elaborates on this criterion of mere intelligibility a little later in the book, when he goes into an extended analysis of the discussion of foot massages in Pulp Fiction. Jules and Vincent argue about whether a foot massage is sufficient grounds for “Marsellus to throw Antwan off a building into a glass-mutherfuckin-house, fuckin’ up the way the nigger talks” (quoted on 234). Vincent, having just trapped Jules into admitting that he (Jules) wouldn’t give a man a foot massage, goes on to explain the hidden sexuality of foot massages. Jules responds, “That’s an interesting point.”
Bérubé’s take on this is crucial:
I acknowledge that Jules’s is not the most eloquent of demurrals/deferrals [...] Yet in one way it is superior [...] for it leaves open the possibility that Jules himself may be mistaken; he is not convinced by Vincent’s argument, but he has understood it as an argument, and he appears to have taken it under advisement. (235)
Bérubé is doing two things here. First, he is showing us how Vincent uses Jules’s heterosexuality (and possible homophobia) to make Jules admit something about foot massages. That is a perfectly good example of what we might call an “immanent” form of argumentation. Second, he is demonstrating his approval of the scene’s open-ended resolution. Unfortunately, though, we really have no idea whether Jules’s comment means a) that Jules now agrees with Vincent, but is saving face, or b) that he can’t think of how to argue back, but isn’t going to change his mind. Bérubé’s comment on the scene allows (b) total legitimacy, since all Jules is really required to do is understand Vincent’s argument “as an argument.” In that case, the two positions become something like complementary tiles in a mosaic of argument, rooted perhaps in the differing, contingent histories of Vincent and Jules. (Also, Bérubé is so intent on preserving them in direct opposition to one another, that he doesn’t ask whether Jules may be talking about a reasonable standard of punishment in addition to doubting whether a foot massage is sexual. The two characters may be talking right past each other as much as arguing.)
Thus the romanticization of argument leads to an aesthetics of ambivalence. Bérubé models this kind of ambivalence in his own discussion of William Dean Howells’s novel The Rise of Silas Lapham. Bérubé, after asking his students a series of questions about their sympathies, find that they are
This is just to Bérubé’s taste: he is at odds with his class, the novel is at odds with itself, and Howells too is “rather ambivalent” (157). He concludes, “That’s why I think this is so fascinating a book” (158). “Interesting” is a more common term in academia than “fascinating,” but the purpose of the two words is the same: to put an end to discussions without resolving them, as though one had a personal stake in seeing both sides of every argument persist.basically echoing Silas Lapham’s ambivalence about society and culture (or, if you like, its contradictions), endorsing both the novel’s portrait of social mobility and its image of simple country people with their simple country culture. Very well, so they find Howells’s account of Silas more compelling than mine. That’s understandable: Silas is Howells’s creation, not mine. (157)
The political consequences of this position are fairly predictable. Bérubé writes,
I often wish I had more conservative colleagues in literary study. I’m serious about this. I don’t mind in the least having substantial political disagreements with colleagues, just so long as they’re smart colleagues who hit the rhetorical ball back over the net with gusto and topspin. (83)
Bérubé is trying to assert his solidarity with “conservative American economists who believe in honest budgets and honest business practices” and “conservative American environmentalists who respect scientific evidence,” but finds that almost none exist. He doesn’t examine the possibility that (for example) the contradictions between conservative notions of self-determination, and environmentalist warnings about global warming and etc., are becoming too great for these amiable instances of self-limiting conservatism to survive. Similarly, he sees no contradiction between embracing the free market, as conservatives do, and shunning the sort of practices that enriched the executives at Enron.
As with the student John, the problem here is seeing discourses like “conservatism” as static objects with an enlivening role to play in the tennis game of democratic debate. In fact, as globalized markets become more and more competitive, and environmental pressures become increasingly severe, the right wing responds dynamically to protect its core values, and the resurgence of the far right in the United States is part of that response. Thus the shift further right isn’t just an outbreak of lunacy, as Bérubé (quoting Brian Leiter on “bonkers” Republicanism) seems to want to believe.
I have no interest whatsoever in seeing right-wing positions (say, for example, the “flat-rate” income tax, or the privatization of social services) preserved out of respect for their long and distinguished histories. I am only willing, as a private citizen, to continue to participate civilly in debates over taxes, social services, abortion, etc., because it is my hope that these debates will one day be ended, replaced by a steady state of reasonable policy and maximal human welfare.
This desire for an eventual political consensus may strike Bérubé as a textbook Habermasian fantasy. I would counter that the fantasies of his text are much less appealing. Occasionally, the text desires its own defeat, as when Bérubé spends a great deal of time applying Richard Rorty to politics and academia, only to allow a student who finds Rorty incoherent to claim the last word.
Bérubé also seems to countenance some kind of forcible solution to an argumentative impasse: this is a fantasy of cutting the Gordian knot, as Mia Wallace does when she dismisses the debate between Vincent and Jules. Bérubé talks both about Harrison Ford shooting an adversary in Raiders of the Lost Ark, instead of fencing with him, and of potentially excluding Hitler from the roundtable of liberal discussion. I think it is reasonable to claim that the Habermasian fantasy of consensus gives one more patience in looking for the kind of loophole Vincent exploits with Jules, no matter how dogmatic or dangerous the opponent.
I should add that I see definitive limits on the amount of “intelligence” one can muster in defense of right-wing arguments, since they always reason from false premises. I write this with a wincing awareness that it shows some disrespect to conservatives. I apologize for that, because this isn’t the forum for arguing the specifics of the issues. I am just very disturbed by the genteel notions of abstract “smartness” which have replaced other ideas of what literature and criticism can be and do, and which have prevailed because abstractable “intelligence” fits in with the valorization of argument as a permanent condition. The demand for originality can be just as good a goad as the experience of opposition—a better one, even, if the opposition reasons poorly.
* * *
As a teacher of English, I intend neither to protect students like Bérubé’s John, nor to impose upon them a set of contrasting views. My problem with John’s remark (“That’s ridiculous!”) has already been discussed somewhat by Dr. Virago. “That’s ridiculous” isn’t a reading of the text. What Bérubé calls the “capaciousness and uncontainable mimesis” (11) of literary study seems to me to be the standard for objectivity in professors and students alike. Ideally, John’s frustration with identitarian positions would lead him to the fact that “reductive brand[s] of nationalism [are] ultimately undermined in the course of the narrative” (2), and pursuing this thread would ultimately make him a good reader and a more insightful observer of situations beyond the text.
I would have no difficulty teaching a poetry course exclusively on Alexander Pope, T. S. Eliot, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, if some rationale for such a course existed. I would trust my students to discover Pope’s critique of the cult of virginity, Eliot’s hatred of the consequences of mechanized war, and Tennyson’s occasional outbursts against the bourgeois. In other words, I would trust that mimetic readings, and the exchange of views in the classroom, would produce the sorts of sympathies that Bérubé advocates in Rortian terms for his son and for all people. If one of my students chose to write about Eliot’s “crisis of faith,” with its potentially conservative implications, I would have no problem accepting her argument. The contexts Eliot provides justify his journey to faith in a manner incommensurate with the Left Behind series. If this throws us back upon the thorny problem of selecting a canon, so be it. I would rather face that problem, than the task of treating the political views of myself and my students as complementary aesthetic objects.
I am not suggesting that something like “Eliot’s hatred of the consequences of mechanized war” is a particularly interesting reading of Eliot. However, my definition of “interesting” involves a closer, more daring exposition of some feature of the text, one that still never loses touch with its most blatant properties. It has nothing to do with creating irresolvable arguments about Eliot. Bérubé wants to leave Howells at the point where the contradictions of Silas Lapham are at their most fascinating, whereas I want to see whether students can move towards interpretations that make sense out of an apparent muddle. If their sympathies are really with Howells’s Silas, and not Bérubé’s, let them prove that the value of his text lies in its ability to reconcile the apparently opposite modes of pastoral rurality and social climbing, in ways that go deeper than the overt marriage plot.
Literature is a site for the expansion of sympathy; as a statement, that is nothing new. As a phenomenon, it is one of the more rewarding things a teacher can observe in her students. Literature is something else as well. The suspension of the self necessary for the best mimetic readings (as well as the best intellectual work period) is, in the case of literature, also a very subtle elucidation of the self. John might have achieved this sort of subtlety studying how Mumbo Jumbo subverts the identitarian nationalisms he despises. Therefore literary studies can be a proving-ground for a more familiar synthesis of selflessness and enlightened self-interest – the realization that I am one among many, but no less than that. That realization has always been the firmest ground of support for policies that promote the common weal.
Monday, November 27, 2006
3Tops II: Graffiti Update
At the beginning of the month I made a long post on graffiti, Shrine of the Triceratops (aka 3Tops). I’d wandered into a fairly extensive graffiti site and got curious about grafs. Since that post, I’ve begun keeping field notes of my site visits, have purchased a new camera so that I can take better pictures, and taken 100s of more photographs. I’m pursuing one major idea:
Graffiti is to the contemporary world what rock art and cave are were to early humankind. Or, perhaps a more challenging formulation, that we would do well to see it as the rock art of a New Savanna. I hinted at this notion toward the end of that previous essay.
This notion involves more than the formal or pictorial aspects of the grafs. It is about how those designs arise from and are embedded in social space, about how people’s lives intersect through those images. But I don’t intend to pursue that one here, though I address a companion notion in another post, Grooves, Grafs, and Toons.
My aim is less systematic, more informal. I simply want to make a few more observations about the graffiti I’ve been exploring locally, and note some changes that have taken place at the site reported on last time.
The Sites
There are four main sites within walking distance of my apartment in the Hamilton Park area of Jersey City. The piece in Figure 3 of the triceratops (3tops) post is at one of the cites, call it the 10th Street Site, while the other pieces are at the Brunswick Tracks site - so-called because the railroad tracks run near Brunswick St. The other sites are a bit to the north of Brunswick tracks, both near Hoboken Avenue as it sidles up the Jersey Palisades to The Heights. I hadn’t discovered these sites at the time I wrote that earlier post.
By way of calibration and reference, On the Waterfront (1954) was set in Hoboken, which was a working port at the time, as was Jersey City. Neither are working ports now.
The two Hoboken sites - call them Hoboken North and Hoboken South - are located amid the ruin and rubble of buildings. A homeless man living at Hoboken North, as I call it, told me that one building was a chemical factory while another was a chocolate plant. There are several homeless people living at these sites - I’ve also talked with an Indian man (judging by the accent) at Brunswick Tracks - but no one bothers their stuff. It remains neatly in place from one visit to the next. I’ve also seen the remains of expended fireworks at Hoboken North. As that location is readily visible and accessible, I can only assume that the police are not interested suppressing the illegal use of fireworks that takes place there two or three times a year.
Two large concrete slabs at Hoboken South - I assume they were once floors in some large building whose walls have been demolished - are set up as a skate board ground. There are several low ramps and a sign that says “locals only.” The day after Thanksgiving I saw three teen-aged boys skate-boarding there. It is thus in active use. There is also a small improvised enclosure that, presumably, functions as someone’s homestead.
Part of the Brunswick Tracks site is an active work site. This site is beneath Routes 1 and 9 as they go to and from the Holland Tunnel. These roads are under repair and work crews and large machinery are working there during the week. I’ve been there several times, and been noticed by workers, but no one has approached me or said anything. I’ve also noticed locals walking through the work-site on the way up to or down from The Heights.
That’s the kind of place the graffiti zone is. It is governed by informal norms. People in these site mind their own business and let others go their own way.
Note also that the boundaries of these sites are not very specific. There are tags and throw-ups all over the place in the area. What makes these sites particularly interesting is the high density of elaborate pieces, but the existence of pieces pretty much implies throwups and tags in the neighborhood.
The following piece isn’t in any of the four sites I’ve designated, but it’s in the same general part of Jersey City, off of 14th St. between Jersey and Coles just inland from the Holland Tunnel.
This wall, bearing the ghosts of old Bull Durham painted signs, is on 16th between Grove and Erie:
The Writers
Susan Farrell, of Art Crimes, told me that the piece in Shrine: Figure 3 is by one Jersey Joe, aka rime. He’s got another piece up on that 10th Street embankment, but you can’t see it from the street. He’s gone legit, has a website, a blog at myspace, and has toured the Far East with a crew called Seventh Letter. They’ve been active at Hoboken North, though I don’t know how long ago that’s been.
A writer who calls himself faroinc (that is, faro inc) has been active at Brunswick Tracks, and has put some pieces on a trailer parked at the construction site. A design student of Pratt Institute who was taking pictures at Hoboken North knows him and tells me that he’s Egyptian. That would explain the Arabic script I’ve seen on some of the pieces, such as (look at upper right, upper center):
This odd looking creature is a mummy, hence the white wrappings.
The Pieces
Two of the pieces I displayed in that older post have been painted over with new work, those in Figures 6 and 7.
The flying saucer and “crop circles” (Figure 7) used to be on the stanchion at the left while ZAR (Figure 6) used to be on the stanchion to the right. (Note: the water isn’t a permanent feature of that area. It pools there during a rain and may lie around for days afterward at this time of year, when it does not evaporate rapidly.)
More Photos
I’ve set up an account at flickr and will be posting more photos there. I’ve set up a number of sets for my graffiti images. The set “Colonade at Brunswick Tracks” will give you some sense of the overall context of the grafs there - at the bases of tall columns. Note that not all my sets are about graffiti.
There’s lots of graffiti images on flickr and its clear that a number of writers post photos of their own work on flickr.
More later.
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Grooves, Grafs, and Toons: Transnational Cultural Forms
For the last three years or so I’ve been telling myself - and a few others as well - that anime and manga will do for the visual culture of this century what African-American music did for the musical culture of the last century:
Provide idioms that are adopted everywhere and adapted for local use.
I’ve now added graffiti to the list - not graffiti in general, but the kind of grafs I discussed in Shrine of the Triceratops, the contemporary sort that originated in America in the late 60s and early 70s and was then assimilated to hip-hop culture. The purpose of this post is simply to play around with the notion that grooves, grafs, and toons have been providing and will continue to provide the basic transnational idioms of musical and visual culture in the global age. This is an exercise in throat-clearing, thinking out loud, sizing things up.
Outa’ Here
Grooves
African American music - Europe meets Africa in North America - has been around the longest. I’ve seen a reference to minstrelsy in India in the mid-19th century, but have been unable to follow up on it. For the most part it seems to me that this florescence happened mostly in the 20th century; first jazz, then rock and soul (with the blues tagging along), and finally hip-hop. Each time a new set of idioms arose, they went international. By the late 20th century all the major idioms were performed in all continents (Antarctica excepted, though I suppose some of the folks working there might play a little something sometime - surely someone has taken a guitar or a harp there) and local hybrids have given rise to so-called world beat music - a marketing category for fusions of this or that African American idiom with anything else.
Why did this happen? Well, there is good old Western Imperialism organizing a international flows of goods, services, and ideas. But that just gets the music around; that doesn’t make it stick, much less flourish and breed. For that the only reasonable answer is that it is locally attractive, not to everyone (it’s not even that attractive at home), but to enough people to make a home for it. Why is it so attractive? The answer to that is not obvious, so let’s leave it alone for now.
Grafs
Then we have graffiti. The standard story is that the modern idiom arose in Philadelphia and New York City in the late 60s and early 70s with simple “tags” aerosoled in publicly visible places. Ornate elaboration started in Philadelphia and then spread to New York, which it achieved its first flourishing on the sides of subway cars. As that died in chemical baths, the idiom spread to any and all available surfaces. When hip-hop came along in the late 70s, it picked up graffiti as one aspect of general hip hop culture and hence graffiti made the world trip along with hip hop. (At least I think that’s what happened. I don’t know how far it had spread before hip-hop picked it up.)
Photography and the internet have had a strong influence on graffiti culture. In a 2004 honors thesis at the University of Sydney, Ilse Scheepers notes:
Tags have always functioned as constant reinforcements that writers are still active, but with the development of the Internet and the growth of graffiti magazines, it is enough now to do a panel, take a photo, and walk away. The fact that the panel runs, that it even leaves the yards, is incidental, and in a way, a bonus. It is the photographic evidence that becomes most important in this case, and not the actual spotting of the work by another writer in another part of the city on the train it was done on.
Accordingly, graffiti is all over the internet (cf. Art Crimes) and if you googles “graffiti fonts” you’ll find graffiti-styled fonts that you can download and use on your PC or Mac.
Ubiquitous though it is, my sense is that graffiti is still just below the mainstream radar screen, perhaps a reflection of the ambiguous legal status of what remains its defining activity, writing grafs in public spaces. Just why it has spread is not obvious, though I’m inclined to see it as a contemporary analogue of the cave and cliff art of early humankind and seek an explanation there.
Toons
That leaves us with manga and anime. Though manga as we know it originated in 20th century Japan, it’s roots go back a millennium earlier in books where image and text often shared the page without a clear boundary between them. The modern form reflects the influence of Western comics and cartoons - e.g. Mickey Mouse was known in Japan in the 1930s - and began its florescence after World War II. Manga went anime in the 1960s with Astro Boy (a very popular and long-running manga title) and since then manga and anime have been moving along in tandem as two aspects of one larger visual and narrative idiom. Both have spread from Japan to the rest of the world, with America being perhaps the slowest to warm up to these forms.
It is by no means clear what will happen with manga and anime in the future. The issue that most interests me is that of pros and amateurs, for lack of better terms, which plays out differently in these three cultural forms.
The musical forms have always had a more or less professional class and acknowledged stars. At the same time, the idioms have always been within the reach of amateurs, from children though adults. Musical instruments and lessons are relatively cheap and informal performance opportunities and venues are plentiful. Graffiti culture is different. It is mostly a culture of amateurs, though some writers have managed to make a living as designers and a few have managed to paint grafs for hire. But there is no well-established professional class and no real “stars” with a capital “S.” Nor is there a considerable commercial establishment devoted to graffiti, as there is for both the musical idioms and manga and anime.
Manga is much like African-American Music, at least in Japan, with a large contingent of amateurs, some of whom go on to make a living at it. I’m not aware of a substantial amateur manga culture in America - though there is certainly some activity - but it is an idiom that is, at least in principle, accessible to amateurs. Pen and paper are cheap and plentiful, as are PCs and printers.
Anime is different from these other forms. In general, animation may be the most labor intensive expressive idiom humankind has invented - other than architecture and building, which have functional foundations. Amateurs can and do make animations, but it is not easy. The emergence of YouTube has encouraged the creation of AMVs (anime music videos), in which people take a favorite song and set anime clips and stills to the song. Some of them are quite creative, but this is a long way from scratch animation. It is conceivable that computer technology will put high-quality animation within reach of individual and-or small groups of amateurs. In fact, this seems rather more likely than the much-vaunted “Singularity” where computers surpass humans to become the most intelligent beings on the planet.
Regardless of how this falls out, anime is a very attractive idiom and is increasingly popular. Just as we need to account for the popularity of Afican-American musics and graffiti, so we must account for popularity of manga and anime.
And...
Looking back over this, several things strike me:
1. Both African-America music and manga-anime have resulted from the cross-breeding of cultural strains that have had, up to the point of irrevocable contact, considerable distance and independence from one another. Graffiti isn’t like that.
2. Both African-American music and manga-anime have become substantially legitimized and commercialized whereas graffiti has not. It remains at the margin.
3. Because of its marginal status, graffiti still gets some of its energy, its practice, from the mere space in which it exists. It’s existence in those spaces is itself transgressive. This is not true of the music or the manga and anime. They may well have transgressive content, but their means of existence is not transgressive, hence the problem of commercializing them.
Finally, there is the question of the cyber-frontier: What’s the role of digital hi-tech wonderment in all this? At least since Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article, “As We May Think,” in the Atlantic Monthly, there’s been a large literature about the wonders that computing technology has in store for us at some unspecified date, but possibly very (very (very)) soon. Where’s the techno-happiness in grooves, grafs, and toons?
Obviously, digital technology has had, and will continue to have, a major role in the creation and dissemination of these expressive forms. That’s not quite the issue I’m interested in. My sense - and here more than anywhere else I’m making it up on the spur of the moment - is that much of the imaginative force of both techno-utopian and dystopian thought comes from older visions of humankind, society, and the world. Futurism has been a creature of the past, following the mandates of hopes and fears given form and direction in previous centuries.
We need a new sense of possibilities, for good and for ill. That sense is not going to come by continuing to weave a techno-weft into a 19th-century imaginative warp. Perhaps these emerging grooves, grafs, and toons will provide a more suitable basis on which to weave the hopes and dreams of life on the New Savanna.
Goin’ to the New Savanna
Malformed Philosophical Request
Earlier today I was looking something-or-other up (in fact some stuff on Adorno and identity) on the Online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – a very useful web-resource for philosophical neophytes such as myself. But this is the message their search-engine flashed up:
Your request appears to be malformed.
Please try another search.
There’s something simultaneously so elegant and so insulting about the particular styling of that error-message. I’m abashed, and a tad annoyed, and strangely thrilled by it. Malformed? Malformed? Was the software to this programme written by an actual philosopher, or by somebody with a grudge against philosophers? Do the thinkers of Stanford realise they’re being parodied like this? What’s wrong with a simple “No results found”?
It’s things like this give philosophy a bad name amongst hoi polloi, you know. (‘MALFORMED? I’ll malform you, philosophy boy --’)
Ladies and gentleman, Elvis has left the Bildung. Thank you, and good night.
My daughter, Zoë, can imitate Elvis (badly). But only because she has learned to imitate me, imiitating Uncle Giz, who is an avuncular Elvis-oid boon companion to the protagonist of Rolie Polie Olie. Today she saw someone in a big foamy star suit, on Barney, singing “Twinkle, twinkle” in an Elvis voice, doing Elvis-style air guitar. She said: he’s imitating Uncle Giz.
It’s an interesting phenomenon. The imitation that has lost its origin in the imagination of the audience, raised on the imitation. Obviously we’ve all gone through this, watching those Looney Tunes cartoons we grew up on, not having any idea who the hell Peter Lorre was, enjoying watching Bugs get the better of him.
But obviously I just wanted to use that title. (Dark horse contender in Adam’s good/bad title contest. Also, I’m still stung from Ben W. coming up with that perfect future/future perfect thing that was staring me in the face.)
Friday, November 24, 2006
Little Professor in the House
[Some holiday silliness, crossposted from The Little Professor by popular demand (OK, by Scott’s demand). In case you’re wondering, lecturing on Walter Pater just before Thanksgiving break appears to be contraindicated.]
[As the episode begins, the PATIENT OF THE WEEK--a small Victorianist--is striding about the classroom, gesticulating as she goes.]
PoTW: What is a "hard, gemlike flame," exactly? Have any of you ever seen a hard flame? No?
[The STUDENTS, perhaps understandably unenthusiastic about Walter Pater at this late date in the semester, wearily shake their heads.]
PoTW: Well, let’s think about what Pater means. [Gesticulating even more energetically.] Can we connect the image to Pater’s earlier allusions to flames? [Moves about with greater determination.] What about his interest in energy and intensity?
[Suddenly, the PoTW stops moving. As the bemused STUDENTS look on, her face, neck, and hands suddenly blaze out in what appear to be letters of fire.]
STUDENT 1: Damn. I thought we were learning about Pater, not the One Ring.
STUDENT 2: Does this mean that she’s about to be reduced to a "tremulous wisp"? Because if she is, then she probably won’t be able to grade our papers.
[The PoTW collapses, screaming in agony. CUT to a hospital in Princeton, NJ, although why a PoTW from upstate NY has been transported to Princeton is not immediately clear.]
[CAMERON and and FOREMAN are fighting over who will have the most lines this week; CHASE is nowhere to be seen. HOUSE enters.]
HOUSE: If you kids don’t start playing nicely, I’m going to dose you with Kaopectate’s new formula for logorrhea. [Sudden silence.] Fine. Twist your tongues around this tasty treat. English professor, female, 35, entirely covered with mysterious texts. Thoughts? And where’s Chase?
CAMERON: Wow. She’s been...inscribed? That’s so nineties.
HOUSE: We’re debating her symptoms, not her belatedness. Unless she’s in Bloom, so to speak. Where’s Chase?
FOREMAN: Remember, il n’y a pas dehors du texte. It’s quite possibly an allergic reaction brought on by prolonged exposure to some literary theorist. No way to tell which one without running the tests, though.
HOUSE: Since when are tests any use on this show? Just skip the tests, inject her with some Derrida, and send her packing back to upstate NY. Where’s Chase?
CHASE: Behind you. [Everyone stares.] Sorry--I fell into a lacuna.
FOREMAN: Look on the bright side--at least the posters at Television Without Pity will have something to discuss now.
[Cut to the PoTW’s room. CAMERON and FOREMAN are injecting her with Of Grammatology; Chase, once again, is nowhere to be seen.]
CAMERON: That’s funny...she doesn’t seem to be responding. Her binary oppositions aren’t destabilizing at all.
FOREMAN: No wonder! Her chart says that her BA is from UC Irvine; she must have developed a resistance to Derrida. I knew we should have gone with Foucault.
CAMERON: You know, I’ve been reading Judith Butler lately, and I’m wondering if we’re seeing "regulative discourses" in action. Maybe the cultural "scripts" through which we perform gendered identities have become somehow manifest on this woman’s body!
[FOREMAN stares at CAMERON, mouth agape.]
CAMERON: Or not.
[CUDDY runs into the room for her token appearance, screaming.]
CUDDY: LawsuitsmmmmNNNNNmmmmmproceduresmmmmNNNNmmmmNNNNmmmmHousemmmmNNNNmmmdead!
[CUDDY exits, still screaming.]
FOREMAN: Um, some logocentrism would have been mighty helpful there.
CHASE [apparently out of nowhere]: Why? It’s not as though we ever pay attention to anything she says.
FOREMAN: You know, we’d feel more confident of your abilities if you could just keep yourself from falling into random lacunae.
CHASE [shrugging]: The writer left the hole in the bloody plot, not me.
[CUT to HOUSE, standing on a balcony and looking pensive. WILSON--like CUDDY, making his token appearance--enters from an elevator.]
WILSON [looking puzzled]: That’s funny--I could have sworn this balcony used to be somewhere else.
HOUSE: Thanks to the clods supposedly in charge of continuity, we’re in the only self-deconstructing hospital known to mankind. Next thing you know, my office will be in the women’s locker room.
WILSON: And I’m sure you’re just so depressed about that possibility.
HOUSE: No, I’m depressed about the moral pablum you’re about to spew. Can’t you make yourself entertaining during any of your token appearances? Do your best Bette Davis imitation, perform a five-minute version of Fiddler on the Roof, juggle flaming clubs...Heck, you could even, I dunno, practice some medicine.
WILSON: Actually, the script says I’m supposed to contribute some gratuitous homoeroticism at this point in the plot. Although it isn’t clear if the writers are trying to appeal to fanfic writers or queer theorists...
HOUSE: I can see it now--"Wils(on)House: Dialogue and the Construction of Eroticized Professional Masculinities in Twenty-first Century Popular Entertainment."
[He pauses. Wilson stares at him, mouth agape.]
HOUSE: That’s it! It’s elementary, my dear Wilson!
WILSON [looking hopeful]: You mean...we’re about to make fanfic writers everywhere overjoyed?
HOUSE: No, that will have to wait for the next sweeps period. Dialogue, you fool, dialogue! [He rushes off to the elevator, but can’t find it.] Where’s the damn elevator?!
WILSON: Uh...I think the continuity demon got it.
[We’re back in the PoTW’s room, where things are looking bleak. CAMERON and FOREMAN hover over the bed; CHASE, predictably, is invisible. HOUSE bursts in, out of breath from racing down the stairs.]
HOUSE: How many minutes before the episode is over?
CAMERON: About eleven. Why?
HOUSE: Great! That means it’s time for the correct answer, now that we’ve spent the last hour making random guesses. Since all of us forget basic diagnostic procedures whenever the writers think it’s necessary, we neglected a vital clue. What’s actually written on the patient’s body?
CAMERON: A novel by Jeanette Winterson?
FOREMAN: Nah. It looks like...poetry?
HOUSE: They’re dramatic monologues! [In his best plummy English accent] I see Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Tennyson...
CAMERON: It’s so cute when you try to do an English accent, but I’ve got to say that it always sounds fake.
[HOUSE rolls his eyes at the camera.]
HOUSE: She’s suffering from monologism, you no-good New Critics! Once she’s pumped full of Mikhail Bakhtin, she’ll be up and around in no time.
CHASE [from somewhere near the ceiling]: I don’t suppose we could inject a little more dialogism into the writing of our scripts? I’d love to have some actual lines...
ALL: Damn it, Chase...!
[Fade to black.]
*Mobile balcony originally pointed out at TWoP.
Martin Amis, House of Meetings (Cape 2006). To quote Dylan, “I don’t be-leeeeeve you!”
Amis’s new novel is narrated by a World War II Red Army veteran. He fights in the war. He’s locked up in the gulag afterwards. He clashes with his brother, also in the camp, over a beautiful Jewish Muscovite called Zoya, not imprisoned, whom they both love. The narration is positioned from an end-of-the-century perspective, round about the time of the Beslan siege; our hero is now a wealthy expatriate, telling the story for the benefit of his young American niece. Or step-daughter. To be honest I can’t remember what her relationship is to the narrator. She’s barely there, as character. Mind you, none of them are; not even the garrulous narrator. House of Meetings is a short book, 196 pages, and it attempts to give us a through-a-chink vision of the vastness of human suffering of the War, the Gulag, of Russia then and now. But Amis doesn’t pull it off. House of Meetings doesn’t compel.
It’s not that it’s a badly written book, or at least not badly written at the level of the sentence, although paragraph-by-paragraph, or page-by-page, it can clog. Who needs to be told that:
In the 1930s there was a miner called Aleksei Stakhanov who, some said, unearthed more than a hundred tons of coal – the quota was seven – in a single shift. Hence the cult of the Stakhanovites, or ‘shock’ workers etc etc…
It’s not as if Stakhanovite is excluded from the dictionaries. Or there’s the Look-and-Learn history of:
Georgi Zhukov, General Zhukov, Marshal Zhukov: I served in one of his armies (he also commanded a whole front) in 1944 and 1945 … Georgi Zhukov was the man who won the Second World War.
But this isn’t where the problem lies. (We can say: well, he is supposed to be an old man explaining himself to a teenage American …). Nor does the problem inhere in the frequent, ‘er, say what?’ apothegmatic moments (‘When a man conclusively exalts one woman and one woman only “above all others”, you can be pretty sure you are dealing with a misogynist. It frees him up for thinking the rest are shit.’ Really? You think so?) The problem lies somewhere else.
Reading it made me wonder: what does it profit us for a British writer to write a Russian novel? Not what does it profit the writer, for he’s free to indulge himself as he pleases (free speech, naturally). Amis is free to respond to the extensive research he’s done amongst the published historical accounts (all carefully noted and acknowledged in a two-page endnote); to inhabit an idiom that clearly fascinates him. But what does it profit us? It’s not as if there’s any shortage of brilliant Russian writers of Russian novels, many of whom lived through the experiences they are describing, and can therefore write passages such as:
In the Gulag, it was not the case that people died like flies. Rather flies died like people. … The death rate was determined by the availability of food. In “hungry ’33” one out of seven died, in 1943 one out of five, in 1942 one out of four. By 1948 it had gone back down again, system-wide. [60]
-- without causing the reader to picture Amis (as I once saw him) in Browns, on Saint Martin’s Lane in London, scoffing a lavish, well-oiled and long-lasting lunch with fellow novelist David Lodge. Eating, indeed, with an almost Stakhanovite relish. Or to take another example: I wonder if we can labour through Amis’s passages on ‘the dirt and the cold, the hunger and the hate’ [18], on how the cold comes ‘like pain’ and how
in the space of three minutes we saw a bitch sprinting flat-out after a brute with a bloody mattock in his hand, a pig methodically clubbing a fascist [a fellow prisoner, this] to the ground, a workshy snake slicing off the remaining fingers of his left hand … and, finally, a leech who, with his teeth sticking out from his gums at right-angles (scurvy) was nonetheless making a serious attempt to eat his shoe. [25]
-- without turning to the back-flap and noting that Amis lives half the year in balmy Uruguay with his beautiful wife. (But there’s the question of teeth, of course. Amis had famous trouble with his teeth, of course. Not scurvy, but nonetheless …. a point of imaginative entry into his hellworld, perhaps?)
The protagonist is a rapist. The narrator commits one rape that swings the plot about. Moreover he has a history of serial rape (‘I marched with the rapist army … In the rapist army everybody raped’). But the handling of this jars badly, specifically the way Amis emphasises the issue of the remorse of the serial rapist. Can we read about how ‘we know quite a lot about the consequences of rape – for the raped’, but how nobody considers ‘the consequences for the rapist … the peculiar resonance of his post-coital tristesse for example: no animal is ever sadder than the rapist’ [30] without wondering whether Amis knows what the fuck he’s talking about? He marches, of course, with the sensitive middle-class liberal writers army. In the sensitive middle-class liberal writers army everybody experiences the regret, and guilt, the muted remorse that liberal writers feel, in their pampered and artificially comfortable way. I carry a spear, way off in the back, in this selfsame army, so I think I know what I’m talking about. But I do not know, and have every reason to doubt, that the catastrophically widespread phenomenon of rape as an act of war is performed by suchlike sensitive flowers. It seems to me more than insensitively wrongheaded to suggest that it is. It seems amazingly obtuse and stupid; as if rape is only something that happens a little way along the line of a continuum that also includes ‘persistent courtship’ or ‘taking advantage of a person’s weakness of judgment’. Which is pretty much how it comes over in this novel.
I’m making, I think, a very straightforward point here. It is not that a writer must have personal experience of what s/he writes about. That would be a stupid thing to say. Shakespeare was not a 90-year-old Dark Age British King, or a Moorish soldier in the service of the Venetian republic, or a Scottish mass-murderer. But he did at least know how to represent these people such that we believe in them. I didn’t believe in Amis’s narrator, or his brother, or the perfectly blank piece of sexual fetish for whom they both fall. I didn’t feel in my gut, the way I ought to have done (the way the book requires me to do in order to work) the depth of horror of the topics Amis has tapped out here on his wordprocessor. I didn’t believe any of it.
I am not saying that a wealthy Western writer is somehow disqualified by virtue of his/her wealth or Westernness from writing about Eastern suffering. That also would be a stupid thing to say. I’m not making a prescriptive judgment: writers can write whatever they want. But I am suggesting a criterion of post factum judgment, and one that goes to the heart, I think, of Amis as a writer. What is wrong with House of Meetings is, I think, what was also wrong with Yellow Dog, and The Information and most of Amis’s big recent fictional endeavours. Not that they are badly written, for Amis devotes a goldsmith’s attention and detail to every single sentence, a strenuous and fernickerty attempt to scratch-in and pound-on eloquence and memorability. Neither is it that his books are particularly ill-conceived. House of Meetings tackles an important subject; the Russian 20th-century is certainly as pressing a subject for great art as it has ever been. But I just didn’t find it to be believable. I wasn’t hostile to the book when I picked the book up; I was as ready as I ever am with a new novel to suspend my disbelief; but nevertheless my disbelief remained there on the ground. I didn’t invest emotionally in, didn’t connect with, didn’t feel on my pulse or accept with my subconscious mind, that this is a real world.
When the heckler called our ‘Judas’ at that 1966 Manchester Free Trade Hall Bob Dylan concert, Dylan famously replied, with his characteristic drawl: ‘I don’t be-lie-e-e-eve you! You’re a lie-ar!’ Perhaps he meant ‘I don’t believe you just said that!’ but I like to think he meant something else, something along the lines of: ‘are you kidding?; maybe that’s how you feel; but believe me kid it simply doesn’t work. It’s really not a believable heckle.’ Dylan, however annoyed you may be that his strings are vibrating over electric pickups, is not Judas. The heckler is making the noise of heckling, going through the heckle-motions, but he hasn’t really got the knack of heckling. Amis, however much detail and whatever finesse he brings to the process of transforming his historical data into a novel, is not a Russian novelist of the grand school. He can’t ventriloquise the necessary.
There is a quality that some writers have, and which some writers, no matter how technically gifted and skilled they are, simply lack: and it is that ability to make us believe in the story they are telling. To generate the smoke and to angle the mirrors so that we invest faith (the evidence of things not seen) in the reality of the world they are building. Amis lacks this ability. This may sound like an ad hominem observation, as if I’m saying that the caricature grotesque celebrity-figure of Amis as Writer somehow intervenes between us and our pleasure: but I don’t mean it that way. I’m talking about the missing component in the text, not in Amis’s own personality (for this latter is something about which, after all, I have no first hand knowledge). It’s not easy to pin down how or why his writing lacks it, or to suggest ways in which he might work his craft to achieve it. It’s the spark that would make his Frankenstein’s monster into more than a slab of decaying meat. That spark. You know the one I’m talking about.
Thursday, November 23, 2006
The Hardy Boys, Siegfried Kracauer, Ornithopters
I just read a pleasingly strange essay in the latest issue of the Southwest Review: “Even the Hardy Boys Need Friends: An Epistolary Essay on Boredom.” The essay includes all of the things mentioned in my title, and also the Oakland A’s, Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Oprah, Kafka, relief maps, extravagance, modernity, a squirrelfish, a spiny dogfish, and of course Sandor Ferenczi. The essay takes the form of a series of plaintive, irritable, slightly mad letters addressed to Franklin W. Dixon, the author of the Hardy Boy novels, who was probably not a single person but many different anonymous authors, most of them now dead.
The author of this essay, Ramsey Scott, seems to have reread the books in the original Hardy Boys series, revisiting a kind of simulacrum of his own childhood, unable to stop reading despite his boredom, his diffuse and unpredictable tendrils of desire (reading the Hardy Boys does not inspire thoughts of self-abuse in everyone!), and his loathing for these creepily innocent boyish adventures in an alternate universe where every mystery has a solution and every phenomenon is a clue.
Ramsey Scott is apparently a student at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. I taught a course at the Graduate Center last spring, but I don’t think I ever met Ramsey. I have a hunch, though, that he has worked with Wayne Koestenbaum, a brilliant, constantly surprising man of letters who has recently taught courses on sleep, on humiliation, and on “the lyric essay,” a flexible and capacious term which he defines as follows: “A lyric essay is a hybrid form, borrowing, as it pleases, from poem, story, drama, diary, and manifesto. Often autobiographical, a lyric essay reveals an idiosyncratic personality, obsessively attends to its own unfolding, and trespasses on the territory of other genres.” Instead of assigning the usual semester paper, Wayne asked students to write a two-page lyric essay every week. This is a wonderfully subversive aberration within a doctoral program: it preserves a small zone for the playful, the useless, and the unauthorized. I think that graduate education needs this kind of tiny inner antagonist, and I would be interested in hearing of other courses with similar projects. I would also be interested in hearing nominations for a syllabus for a course of this kind. Wayne’s course description mentions the following possibilities: “Thomas Bernhard’s Concrete, Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, Lydia Davis’s Almost No Memory, Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death, Lyn Heijinian’s The Language of Inquiry, Jamaica Kincaid’s My Brother, David Markson’s Vanishing Point, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value, Roland Barthes’ Sade, Fourier, Loyola, book reviews by Marianne Moore, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, and more.” Off the top of my head, I would nominate the prose of Ben Jonson, J. M. Coetzee, Susan Stewart, Francis Bacon, Susan Sontag, W. G. Sebald, Thomas de Quincey, Soren Kierkegaard, Elizabeth Bishop, Marcel Proust, Mark Strand, Italo Calvino, Thomas Carlyle, Marina Warner, Baudelaire, Laura Kipnis, and Wayne Koestenbaum himself (his brief essay on logorrhea, which appeared in the Southwest Review many years ago, is an exemplary specimen of this genre, or non-genre, or counter-genre).
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
A World Apart: “Contemporary Literature” and the Academy"--Part IV (and Last)
By 1980 “contemporary literature” had indeed been established as a subject of academic inquiry and criticism—in many ways it was increasingly identified with the avant-garde in academic scholarship, and would continue to be associated with the subsequent rise to prominence of critical theory—perhaps more quickly and readily than Ihab Hassan or Marcus Klein (or Jerome Klinkowitz) would have been able to anticipate. In turn, the study of contemporary literature as a regular part of the curriculum was firmly established in most universities and would soon enough be so pervasive in all colleges and universities as to seem thoroughly unexceptional. Many such courses would develop into ordinary survey courses in which efforts to “cover” as representative a sample of postwar fiction would be made, but the published scholarly and critical coverage of contemporary fiction at least in 1980 and for many of the years following was focused intensely if not exclusively on the postmodern. (In retrospect, very little academic criticism of “minimalism” and neorealism was published until much later—and, comparatively, really very little at all—even though these challenges to postmodern practice began appearing as early as the mid 1970s.) Although this will likely turn out to have been the most significant movement in American fiction of the second half of the century, its central place in the newly respectable academic study of the subject ultimately worked to in effect push aside the criticism of contemporary writing as such in favor of a more concentrated consideration of the effects of the postmodern approach, at least as this was understood by individual critics operating under their own particular assumptions.
Thus academic books on contemporary fiction throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s come bearing titles such as The Metafictional Muse (McCaffery, 1982), Dissident Postmodernists (Maltby, 1991), Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction (Barr, 1992), Postmodern Sublime (Tabbi, 1995), or simply Postmodernist Fiction (McHale, 1987). Other books, such The Art of Excess (LeClair, 1989) or Fiction in the Quantum Universe (Strehle, 1992), that filter their critiques through the lens of external sources of knowledge nevertheless still focus on the most eminent of the American postmodernists as the subjects of interest. Furthermore, by far those books dedicated to the explication of a single author’s work—Coover, Barth, Pynchon, Gass, Gaddis, etc.—feature predominantly the postmodernists as subjects. The extent to which the scholarly discussion during the period was dominated by the debate over postmodernism is even plain to see in a book such as Alan Wilde’s Middle Grounds (1987), which although it attempts to find that territory announced in the title—more room for conventional techniques, less insistence of the experimental—does so as much by interpreting the same postmodernists (Elkin, Barthelme, Pynchon) in less radical ways as by emphasizing new uses of realism.
Eventually the spread of critical theory, especially the feminist, neo-Marxist, and historicist varieties, would bring to the study of contemporary fiction an effort to refocus attention on alternatives to postmodernism. But the model of scholarship established in the previous two decades would continue to prevail, so that, for example, even studies designed to displace postmodernist fiction from the center of critical attention do so only to replace it with some practice, some identifiable movement or association of writers or texts, even more in consonance with literary theory, even more advanced in the techniques employed to critique postmodern American culture, even more representative of the direction in which a truly progressive or socially relevant or historically necessary American writing must be heading. In some cases the attempt seems to be to outflank or surpass postmodernism by appropriating those of its features that are perceived to be of continuing value—its iconoclasm, its inferred “subversive” qualities—and attributing them as well to the alternative practices or new groups of writers. Thus books like Jay Clayton’s Contemporary American Literature and Theory (1993) or Robert Rebein’s Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists (2001), both of which focus on the return to conventional techniques and the advent of “multicultural” writers but both of which also see this new fiction as having supplanted postmodern fiction (or at least the sort of postmodern fiction that rejected narrative in favor of “language games” and “self-reflexive experiments” (Clayton 91)) as the cutting edge, the authentically insurgent.
Each of these books as well typify the way in which notions about the insurgent, rebellious qualities of literature are now conceived by almost all academic criticism to be gestures of fundamentally political significance, literature’s indirect way of engaging in political discourse, which in turn has become the ultimate subject of interest to academic critics. Although the politicizing of literary study in general, and the study of contemporary fiction in particular, has had an especially numbing, enervating effect on literary scholarship and criticism, the more or less uniform acceptance of this brand of analysis is even more consequential than its specific characteristics. Academic criticism might just as easily have converged around some other method or outlook; it has converged around this politicized approach with, unfortunately, criticism of contemporary fiction in many respects the first to arrive there. In the process, both contemporary literature and literary criticism have all but lost the authority to determine the way they are to be understood—the latter to determine the way in which it is to be practiced—to the scholarly fashions of academe.
No one book or critic can, of course, be held to account for this state of affairs (all of the books I have discussed have played their part). But in concluding this survey of its antecedent developments I would like to focus on a final academic study that does, in my view, exemplify the unfortunate consequences for the critical reception of contemporary literature of subjecting it to the kind of analysis that has become the currently favored style of academic literary criticism—which, because academic criticism is now the only source of serious and sustained attention to literary works of all kinds, are the likely consequences for the future of literature as a whole. Steven Weisenburger’s Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel 1930-1980 (1995) is one of the later academic books to take as it subject what might be called “classic” postmodernism, although it could also be said to belong to the initial stages of the consideration of postmodern American fiction as a historical phenomenon. Clearly intended as a favorable treatment of this fiction (Weisenburger is also the author of the very valuable A “Gravity’s Rainbow” Companion), Fables of Subversion nevertheless ultimately has the effect of diminishing, if not trivializing, the works that Weisenburger ostensibly is trying to celebrate.
The book’s title reveals much about Weisenburger’s assumptions. It might even be said to sum up the essential critical concepts developed by the central line of commentary on postmodern fiction: that this fiction rejects narrative realism in favor of the creative distortions of the fabular; that the challenges posed by the various forms of this rejection are profoundly “subversive”; that the impulse behind much if not most postmodern fiction is, in one way or another, comic and satirical. However, Weisenburger’s notion of postmodern satire as “degenerative” satire—“Loosely in concord with deconstructionist thought, it functions to subvert hierarchies of value and to reflect suspiciously on all ways of making meaning, including its own” (3)—seems to be an attempt to identify a unique feature of postmodern fiction that separates it from conventional (“normative”) satire, making it both more than merely “humorous” and less than straightforwardly moral and narrowly political in the traditional mode. Further, Weisenburger seems to regard this new mode of satire as largely an aesthetic achievement, taking the literary works that employ it beyond simple engagement with transitory political conditions. In this way one could say that the books makes a case for the “fable of subversion” as a form of literary art.
Yet, Weisenburger finally can’t rest satisfied with an image of postmodern texts simply as works of literature. He is still concerned to defend it against the imputation by other academic critics, such as Fredric Jameson, of reactionary political implications and to decry the depredations of American political conservatives, settling ultimately for a version of “cultural work” as the external source of validation for the exertions of postmodern satire. Although “the demand for recuperated or even new norms of polity and community has never been a modal convention for satire of the subversive, degenerative kind,” it nonetheless “[does its] best work in shouting ‘Fire’ or in otherwise firebombing the cultural theater where meanings are made” (261). However much Weisenburger has invested in the coinage of this “degenerative” satire as a hedge against the “recuperation” of postmodern fiction into “norms of polity and community,” the very idea of the subversive has been so thoroughly transformed by critical theory and cultural studies into one of purely political significance that his insistent use of it can only in the end recuperate this fiction into the norms of politicized academic scholarship—at best into those of a tepid and conventional anarchism.
Thus even a critic professing admiration for the literary accomplishments of the fiction he examines seems compelled even so to give even closer attention to the concerns of his well-regarded fellow academics and to the overriding importance of ruling academic suppositions. It betrays a scholarly establishment every bit as stagnant and buttoned-down in its assumptions as that against which Jerome Klinkowitz recoiled but then proceeded to join. In the meantime, contemporary literature becomes less an ongoing exploration of the possibilities of imaginative writing to be studied and judged on its own terms than an addition to the docket of cases for academic interrogation. Less an extension and revision of a literary history to which current writers unavoidably belong than an instrument for the institutional aggrandizement of the academy in the most egregiously ahistorical of ways. And less a collection of disparate texts and writers of divergent inclinations than an accumulation of specimens selected to reinforce a predetermined doctrine. As a result of all this, contemporary writers are left with a literary culture in which serious regard for their work is left to the few popular book-reviewing venues that survive, while in turn critics who might wish to give such work more sustained and serious attention have little if any opportunity to do so. In an era witnessing the visual and cyber media intensifying their claims on those who would be needed to preserve an audience for works of literature, the current inflexible approach dominating academic criticism of contemporary literature might very well prove fatal.
Top Blog on Campus
The New York Times today is running a story entitled Erasing Divide, College Leaders Take to Blogging. It opens with an account of Dr. Patrician A. McGuire, president of Trinity University in DC, replying to one ‘trinity gurl’ snitching on a fellow student. The article is not about McQuire, but about college and university presidents who blog:
While some colleges and their presidents have seen their reputations shredded on student blogs, and others have tried to limit what students and faculty members may say online, about a dozen or so presidents, like Dr. McGuire, are vaulting the digital and generational divide and starting their own blogs.
Veterans of campus public relations disasters warn that presidents blog at their peril; “an insane thing to do” is how Raymond Cotton, a lawyer who advises universities and their presidents in contract negotiations, describes it. But these presidents say blogs make their campuses seem cool and open a direct line, more or less, to students, alumni and the public.
“When I first started learning about blogs, I said, ‘Well, here I like to discourse on issues of the day, connect with the campus community,’ ” recalled Dr. McGuire, who said she wrote all her own entries. “Here’s a way I can talk a couple of times a week to everybody.”
What, if anything, does this portend for the academic blogosphere? Is academia poised to make a great leap forward into the 21st century?
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Dave Maier on Michael Bérubé - A Bunch of Picky Philosophy Points
Dave Maier has a long post about Bérubé’s book, focusing on the problems you can get into, being a Rortyan.
My first gripe concerns the cutting of philosophical corners. It’s understandable that people, especially non-philosophers, try to deal with the issue of realism and relativism in the moral/political context without first deciding what to say about scientific or commonsense facts.
I agree with that. I think those accused would mostly deny making this mistake - but I think they mostly are. But actually I don’t think Bérubé is a model offender. Cutting corners in the classroom, i.e. simplifying for the kids, is more defensible than cutting them in certain sorts of straight scholarly argument, by trying to treat certain issues as springboards into discussion of something else. When properly they are only suited to being bogs, to bog down in.
MB applauds Rorty for not claiming that what he says (about truth and knowledge) is true, but saying instead merely that it’s useful to act as if it were true. MB says this on his own behalf in other places, seeing this as a virtuous consistency, necessary to foil the traditional realist accusation of self-refutation. (Is Rorty’s pragmatism “really true”? If we answer “yes,” the familiar thought goes, then we affirm and renounce its truth in the same breath, a contradiction; but if we answer “no,” then, Rorty feels, there’s no problem.) Again, this is skepticism; and the problem with skepticism is that it makes hash of the notion of belief (and with it of meaning; of this more below). It is true that in particular cases we may intelligibly advocate acting, for instrumental reasons, as if something were true that we do not in fact believe to be the case. But this cannot be our general attitude. It makes no sense to argue passionately for a particular view, and then, when familiar muddles cause the conversation to grind to a halt, or spin its wheels uselessly, to cut the Gordian knot by saying, “oh well, I wasn’t saying my view is true.” Of course you were. If you weren’t, then I was wrong to take you as believing it, and now I am more confused than ever.
I agree. I just gave a conference paper on Rorty and Dewey and pragmatism where I talked about a related Rortyan tic. He does this weird thing I call ‘imminent critique’ - or ‘soon you will have been critiqued’. (More coloquially, this anti-foundationalist anticipatory retrospective mood might be glossed: ‘all your bases will have been belong to us.’) He doesn’t give you reasons to believe him. He invites you to consider the possibiity of a future when ‘we’ will no longer think this way, i.e. by which time the person he is disagreeing with will, ex hypothesi, have had their paradigm shifted. But the fact that my paradigm might shift - true enough - doesn’t give me a reason to shift my paradigm. Life must be lived in a forward direction. So preaching paradigm shift in this meta-sort of way is not just intellectual weird but rhetorically unmoving. (I mean: Galileo didn’t just shout at the Pope ‘did you ever consider that someday you will have had your mind changed about astronomy?’ Lenin didn’t write an essay: ‘What is to have been done?’ [have had been done?]) The fact that he finds himself obliged to address us in this mode very much has to do with a tension between what Dave recognizes as his Pyrrhonism, and his progressivism. It’s a hard hortatory row to hoe. But Rorty is a pretty good philosopher all the same, it’s true. Also, Bérubé managed not to pick up this anticipatory retrospective habit during his time with the master, although he did maybe catch a case of thinking there’s virtuous consistency in what seems to be a species of irrationalism, as Dave says. (Not that irrationalism is always bad, but it never makes sense.)
I think Dave’s post will be very interesting to folks who are a little interested in all this stuff. Roughly: how analytically-trained philosophers tend to scratch their heads a bit at this stuff.
Monday, November 20, 2006
Received Wisdom: Empson and the New Critics
In the 1950s, the New Criticism, championed by F.R. Leavis, I.A. Richards and, ironically, the troilistically inclined Empson, was the dominant literary ideology. This insisted that the text and only the text mattered; the life was nothing. Subsequently, literary theories such as structuralism went further, claiming there was no such thing as an author; texts were written by the culture, not the individual.
So it was with what he called the Wimsatt Law, which maintained that the intention of an author should be of no concern to the interpreter; if the poet succeeded, all the relevant evidence of intention was there in the poem. Wimsatt regarded the poem as a ‘verbal icon’: an autonomous verbal structure, an aesthetic object independent of the truth or morality of whatever it says. This places Wimsatt on the Richards side of the argument with Empson, who found the Wimsatt Law disgusting: it violated his strongly Romantic notion of what poetry is and does; and he thought he saw that the entire profession of literary criticism, on both sides of the Atlantic, had been corrupted by it.
Which is the correct account of Empson’s relation to the New Criticism?
The author of the Times article—not to mention people who have or desire employment in an English department—should read Mark Jancovich’s The Cultural Politics of New Criticism. For once, the Amazon description of an academic book is pithy and cogent:
In this book, Mark Jancovich concentrates on the works of three leading American writers—Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate—in order to examine the development of the New Criticism during the late 1920s and early 1930s, and its establishment within the academy in the late 1930s and 1940s. This critical movement managed to transform the teaching and study of English through a series of essays published in journals such as the Southern Review and the Kenyon Review. Jancovich argues that the New Criticism was not an example of bourgeois individualism, as previously held, but that it sprang from a critique of modern capitalist society developed by pre-capitalist classes within the American South. In the process, he clarifies the distinctions between the aims of these three Southern poets from those of the next “generation” of New Critics such as Cleanth Brooks, Warren and Welleck, and Wimsatt and Beardsley. He also claims that the failure on the part of most contemporary critics to identify the movement’s ideological origins and aims has usually meant that these critics continue to operate within the very professional terms of reference established through the New Critical transformations of the academy.
Empson and Richards don’t factor largely in Jancovich’s account, which is my point—the term “New Criticism” transforms all literary scholarship written before 1968 into a caricature of second generation of American New Critics. Much of what passes for the “political” in literary scholarship relies on the contradistinction between the current face of literary studies and that caricature. I share with those who commented on Bruce Robbin’s review of the Bérubé the belief that literary studies tilts left for some reason—but “not being a New Critic” isn’t it.
(I wrote a similar encomium last August. Ignore the post and dash to the comments, in which, this idea acquired much-needed refinement.)
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Bruce Robbins on Michael Bérubé - Liberalism as Dirty Word
Bruce Robbins is a professor in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He’s also sort of pals with Bérubé, so you can factor that in. For that matter, ‘the management’ once sat next to him on a bus and talked to him at some length. Clearly it’s a rich tapestry of factors. - the management
Could I try out one view of Michael Berubé’s book I haven’t heard mentioned? Sure, he’s speaking for academics in the humanities and social sciences whom non-liberals would properly see as liberal. And sure, these people (myself included) are a majority in our departments. But do they see themselves as liberal? Maybe on the phone at home, when reluctantly answering some pollster’s questions in a tongue they know to be alien. But at work, I don’t think so. In literature departments (I teach in one) “liberal” is more often than not a dirty word.
For example, Berubé’s liberalism means secularism. But secularism is by no means English department dogma. On the contrary, the big fashion these days is to declare oneself post-secular; it’s everywhere. This unbending to religion should not be a surprise. After all, the critique of Enlightenment rationality is what English departments were founded on. You can still get more or less automatic assent, if not necessarily wild cheering or a reputation for originality, by rising to denounce any of that rationality’s assumptions or moving parts. Remember, Nietzsche is still the biggest philosopher in this neighborhood. Not a democrat, and not a liberal.
No, I’m not crazy about this. But there are sides of the deep anti-liberal bias in English departments that I have more time for. The active discussion about Burkean conservatism where I live–and you should know that there is one– centers on whether Burke wasn’t after all the true leftist, given that the people to his left never had the qualms he had about British imperialism and that his version of agricultural organicism, though it didn’t stop him from welcoming enclosures, certainly offered a better defense of India than anything else in the British public sphere. I personally have my reservations about Uday Mehta’s argument for Burke as anti-imperialist hero, but it’s certainly a strong one. Adam Smith is also having a resurgence these days, in part because it has become clear that he was not a Smithian, in part because he didn’t approve of colonialism, and in part because of his Theory of Moral Sentiments, which has been taken to underlie today’s humanitarian compassion. The fact that we’re thinking in this way about Burke and Smith is not a “victory for the right"– it’s just doing what we do, thinking through the heritage of thought and feeling as vigorously as possible and looking for what will serve us.
I’ve had the word ‘liberal’ used in my vicinity with unmistakable venom merely because I wanted my fellow lefties to consider making common cause with liberals over this or that issue, if only as a way of getting something done. Therefore I could only be a closet member of the fraternity… (Which I suppose I must be on some level since I did like almost everything about Berubé’s book.) It will perhaps amuse readers of The Valve to consider that this insinuation hurt, since like those around me I too took an instinctive distance from various liberal premises (possessive individualism, contracts, consent, indulgence for market capitalism, and so on). But there we are, not liberals at all, at least to ourselves.
The point of all this is to suggest the following: to the extent that he is addressing those who are disciplinarily closest to him, Berubé may not be defending the liberalism of his colleagues so much as trying to get them to think of themselves as liberals.
Something which I continue to think of as both good and bad. Good: this means trying to get them to think of themselves less exclusively as academics and more as citizens. And trying to get them to give us a break on all very tiring critiques of Enlightenment rationality. Bad: this means, for Berubé as for his teacher Richard Rorty, getting them to feel prouder of their country. Compare, say, Walter Michaels on inequality in America’s system of higher education with Berubé’s qualified but much more patriotic account: “The United States is the only country in which half the population enters college (though only half of that half manages to graduate, and we’re gradually scaling back on our fitful efforts to expand the franchise to the poor)...”
I’m not sure what difference if any the thought of Berubé’s local choir as not converted at all will make to the readers of this blog. But I suppose this is the way to find out.