Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Invidiousness and Parentheticals: Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club
Obviously, this book is now nearly ten years old (perhaps I should have waited a few months so I could make this a decade-after assessment), but I just read it a couple of weeks ago and thought I’d offer some thoughts, especially since it’s been so well read.
One word crops up unexpectedly often in The Metaphysical Club: “invidious.” Well, it only turns up seven times (and two of those are actually “invidiousness"), but I sincerely doubt I (or you) have read many books, even of greater length, which use the word or its inflections more frequently.
This frequency should not, after some reflection, be all that surprising; one of the consistent themes of much writing about pragmatism—particularly the version we receive from Richard Rorty—is its impatience if not antipathy toward dualisms which smuggle preferences in under the cover of either nature or truth, a trick which makes for a pretty good definition of the word “invidious.” What Menand says of Dewey here goes for the most part for his readings of James, Peirce, and Holmes, as well as for the secondary characters like Chauncey Wright, James Marsh, Horace Kallen, Franz Boas, Jane Addams, Alain Locke, and (a little distortedly) Randolph Bourne:
The “Reflex Arc” paper is the essential expression of Dewey’s particular mode of intelligence. It is the strategy he followed in approaching every problem: expose a tacit hierarchy in the terms in which people conventionally think about it. We think that a response follows a stimulus; Dewey taught that there is a stimulus only because there is already a response. We think that first there are individuals and then there is society; Dewey taught that there is no such thing as an individual without society. We think we know in order to do; Dewey taught that doing is why there is knowing.
Dewey was not reversing the priority of the terms he identified in these analyses. Invidiousness was precisely what he wished always to avoid. In condemning (as he did) the elevation of thinking over doing as a reflection of class bias (Veblen would have said that philosophical speculation is a form of conspicuous consumption: it shows we can afford not to work with our hands), Dewey was not proposing to elevate doing over thinking instead. He was only applying the idea Addams was trying to explain to him when she said that antagonism is unreal: he was showing that ‘doing’ and ‘thinking,’ like ‘stimulus’ and ‘response,’ are just practical distinctions we make when tensions arise in the process of adjustment between the organism and its world. Later in his career, Dewey would criticize, in the same manner, the distinctions between mind and reality, means and ends, nature and culture. As Henry Steele Commager testified, a generation (or part of a generation, anyway) seems to have found Dewey’s manner of calmly and often rather colorlessly chewing through received ideas irresistible and indispensable.
What is striking about Menand’s writing in The Metaphysical Club (but which uncharacteristically does not come across in this passage) is the linearity and curtness of the vast majority of Menand’s sentences*; where there are semicolons or colons, they serve mainly to hold a thought just long enough for it to be completed or reinforced. Rarely are they used to extend a point onto adjacent ground or to make even the slightest of tangents. Parallelism or antithesis is also, as far as I can remember, if not infrequent, at least quite understated; strong oppositions are not Menand’s choice for pursuing his narrative. (Even the treatment on Agassiz, who is the closest thing we may have here to a villain, is directed more to showing how William James’s reaction to the fights between Agassiz and the Darwinians was crucial in pointing him toward his notion of pluralism {143}.) Strong oppositions are inevitably always too close to “invidious distinctions.”
The other really notable stylistic trait of the book is its huge number of parenthetical comments, each one basically like the parentheses about Veblen above: basically self-contained, of small pertinence to the sentence off of which it is hanging, usually either recapitulating a point made earlier or tossing in a value-added factoid. Effectively, they’re non-citational footnotes—not meant to direct the reader to a particular source for further research or to acknowledge the origin of the information or quote, just meant to use up all the scraps of information Menand gathered. One of my favorites is this: “(James’s assignment seems to have been to investigate the effects of a particular brand of baking powder on the kidneys—in other words, self-urinalysis. After three weeks, he asked [Charles William] Eliot to assign the experiment to someone else. It was the beginning of a lifelong aversion to laboratory work.)”
The impulse behind this habit probably is a combination of wanting to entertain and also not to waste any research; certainly not bad impulses, and these little nuggets rarely seriously distract, but these ephemera also do the job of making the principal characters of the book a good deal weirder, but in a rather superficial manner. The “lifelong aversion to laboratory work” is kind of funny when one thinks of it as the result of James taking the piss out of himself, but it also truncates a better (and necessary) discussion of James’s relation to the scientific method or to fieldwork. Menand does broach these subjects (particularly in the chapter titled “Brazil") but all too often he abbreviates or curtails such topics with these pat parentheticals. Perhaps this is in fact a method or a principle: maybe Menand means to say that our more immediate reactions like this one are the better places to look for our habits, inclinations, and dispositions, and that the trail of our more thoughtfully considered rationales and philosophies are basically just a forest of garnishes blocking our view of this slenderer meat, to mix metaphors rather carelessly. I actually wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that—Menand does a very creditable (but not overwhelming) amount of source work—but there is a sense in which these parenthetical asides assume a surprisingly foundational role in building the narrative.
* My friend Craig Fehrman pointed out to me before I read The Metaphysical Club how uncannily short Menand is able to keep so many of his sentences. As Craig pointed out, this curtness is in excess of even the relative directness of his New Yorker essays or his other work. It’s my feeling that it is precisely the effort to avoid “invidious distinctions” that Menand is aiming at with these very linear sentences.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Time to get on with it!
A couple of months ago I wrote a post at Novel Readings expressing my impatience with the seemingly endless recurrence of the same questions and topics in academic blogging. It’s not that the questions have been answered or the topics exhausted--or that my own contributions have been especially original or revelatory. It’s just, as I said then, that “having done this dance before, I don’t think I want to do it again”:
At this point I just want to get on with it: trying to find a critical voice, and to hone and articulate perceptions that reflect both rigorous reading and a more personal, affective, and engaged vision of criticism.
What that resolution has meant for me, in practice, is that I have spent a lot of time this summer working on a couple of writing projects that (while they certainly draw on my academic experience and expertise) are not themselves academic projects--or at least, they aren’t, strictly speaking, scholarly projects. It has meant that I have become increasingly interested in the editorial work I’m now doing at Open Letters Monthly, which provides a forum for the kind of crossover critical style I want to develop. It has also meant a decline (indeed, nearly a collapse) in my interest in jumping into the never-ending debates that always resurface, in one form and forum or another, about academic writing, the value or scope of the humanities, the future of academic publishing or of peer review. And it has meant a decline in my posts here at The Valve, because however loose the official parameters of the site, it has always felt to me like a place best suited to more academic or theoretical discussions, not a general repository for either literary or personal reflections. These aren’t lines that are always very clear, and when the energy at The Valve seemed higher overall, it seemed natural enough to post a wider variety of things and just see where the conversation went. But lately, I have found myself hesitating about posting or cross-posting,and more often than not, I haven’t contributed anything. Rather than simply and silently joining the fairly long list of ghost bloggers here, people whose names are listed but who don’t in fact write for The Valve any more, I’ve decided that it’s better to make a clean break and ask the editors to remove me from the list of current authors.
I want to thank Joe Kugelmass and Scott Kaufman for inviting me to write for The Valve back in March 2008. It was a great two years: the conversations were varied and invigorating, and I appreciated the chance to participate. I know I’ll always look back on the Summer of Adam Bede as an inspiring example of the kind of cooperative intellectual experience blogging can become! I’ve learned a lot from all my fellow Valve-ers, who always showed both generosity and wisdom in their responses to my posts, not to mention rigor and intellectual curiosity in their own. There’s still a lot of interesting material going up here on a pretty regular basis, and I certainly expect to keep on reading and commenting. But I’m going to concentrate my own blogging energy just on Novel Readings for a while. I hope some Valve readers will come over and visit sometimes.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Obama Gets His Report Card on Ed Policy
When the president named Arne Duncan as his first Secretary of Education, he was doing a lot more, and a lot worse, than just naming a Chicago crony and basketball buddy to a critical Cabinet position. He was adopting one of the most aggressive, least tested, top-down, pro-corporate philosophies toward education administration ever promoted in this country.
Despite clear evidence that Duncan’s methods had failed to improve Chicago Public Schools by the only measure he overwhelmingly targeted (test scores), reporters from the corporate media tripped all over themselves to lavish friendly coverage on Duncan’s efforts to bring the same tactics to bear on a national scale. Taking advantage of state revenue shortages, Duncan took command of a massive fiscal war chest and turned it into a reality legislation show called Race to the Top.
“Want a piece of my billions?” Duncan asked the states, shaking his money bag. “Fight for it, winners take all! Whichever five or ten state legislatures enact law coming closest to my cruel, unproven vision of test-driven education, well, you folks can ride out the money storm in relative comfort. The rest of you, with your pie-in-the-sky ideas from John Dewey, you can rot in fiscal hell--no cash for the disobedient!"
Poll: Parents Won’t Be Fooled Again
Despite 18 months of press love, yesterday’s Gallup/Phi Delta Kappa poll shows Americans completing a resoundingly negative report card on Obama’s education initiatives, with a mere 34 percent giving the president a “B” or better, and 59% giving him a C, D, or F. 8/26: updated after the break
These numbers are significantly lower than his overall approval rating (currently near his lowest, at 42 percent favorable, 51 percent unfavorable). They represent consistent, bipartisan drops from the previous year, and come after sweeping legislative “victories” by the administration in dozens of states.
With similar clarity, the public overwhelming rejected point by point the aggressive, market-ideological thuggery comprising Duncan’s arsenal of “school reform” tactics: paying students for grades, mass firings, using punitive funding schemes, etc.
So far the main result of Obama and Duncan’s adventures in school reform is that now a startling 80 percent of respondents believe the federal government should play no role in school accountability.
In stark contradiction of the administration’s views, respondents shared the beliefs of most teachers and their unions, that the largest problem with schools is a shortfall in funding, that the major issue with teacher competence is support for retraining and keeping up to date, and that the primary purpose of evaluating teachers is helping them to improve teaching (rather than assessing eligibility for merit pay or providing evidence for dismissal). Only a small number of Americans (19 percent, down from 25 percent in 2000) agree with the administration that teaching pay should be “very closely tied” to students’ academic achievement (though a clear and growing majority feel that it should be “somewhat” closely tied, whatever that means).
It turns out that most Americans like the public schools they know most about, the ones their children attend—and they like those schools a lot.
Seventy-seven percent of public-school parents give an A or B to the school their oldest child attends, the highest such figure since Gallup first posed the question, in 1985.
However, respondents rate other schools in their area—the ones they only read press reports about—lower, or just over half favorably.
Most interestingly: Respondents rated public schools in the nation as a whole—schools they only know about from national corporate media—very poorly, with just 18 percent giving an A or a B.
Even in this context—with widespread concern about the schools for other people’s children—respondents actively rejected the draconian close-the-school, fire-them-all approach. Gallup’s discussion of the poll concludes: Overwhelmingly, Americans favor keeping a poorly performing school in their community open with existing teachers and principals, while providing comprehensive outside support. This finding is consistent across political affiliation, age, level of education, region of the country, and other demographics.
What’s next?
From the point of view of actual electoral politics: well, I’d watch out if I was Arne Duncan. The teachers’ unions may not be able to hold out on Obama in the next national elections, but they can sure choose to let a few Democrats dangle in the cool breeze of public disapproval. Especially in those 40 or so states dubbed “losers” by Duncan’s Race to the Top chicanery.
And how better to signal a change of direction than to ask Duncan to fall on his basketball? In fact, displeased Dems have already trimmed a few hundred million from Duncan’s war chest, a legislative shot across the executive bow.
I’d say Duncan’s days of spanking the states are soon over—either that, or he’ll spend a lot of time eating love-the-teacher crow through the next national election campaign.
All the news fit for education corporations?
Closer to home, I guess I’d like to see a few more of us start to question the objectivity of The New York Times and Washington Post, both corporations with increasingly large hopes that profits from their education ventures will prop up sagging journalism revenues. The Post, which owns Kaplan and shocked readers by blatantly pushing Kaplan’s legislative agenda in print and in person, is already an education corporation that owns a newspaper as a sideline.
The Times is only aspiring to that level, but as they say of the number-two organization in any field, that just means they’re trying harder.
x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Breaking the Primacy of Print
From a post by Karen Hellekson at the Symposium blog at Organization for Transformative Works:
...lots of academics who might otherwise submit to TWC find that they ought not, because their university has rules that online-only publications do not count for promotion and tenure.
What’s up with that? Does your institution have such an idiotic rule?
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Frank Kermode R.I.P.
From The Guardian:
Widely acclaimed as Britain’s foremost literary critic, Sir Frank Kermode died yesterday in Cambridge at the age of 90.
The London Review of Books, for which the critic and scholar wrote more than 200 pieces, announced his death this morning. Kermode inspired the founding of the magazine in 1979, after writing an article in the Observer calling for a new literary magazine.
Prominent in literary criticism since the 1950s, Kermode held “virtually every endowed chair worth having in the British Isles”, according to his former colleague John Sutherland, from King Edward VII professor of English literature at Cambridge to Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London and professor of poetry at Harvard, along with honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He was knighted in 1991, the first literary critic to be so honoured since William Empson.
A renowned Shakespearean, publishing Shakespeare’s Language in 2001, Kermode’s books range from works on Spenser and Donne and the memoir Not Entitled to last year’s Concerning EM Forster.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Jane Austen’s Fight Club: Kick Ass or Die Single
Coming to a theatre near you:
We were no longer “good society.” janeaustensfightclub@gmail.com
Directed by Emily Janice Card & Keith Paugh
Written by Emily Janice Card
Director of Photography: Keith Paugh
Editing and Visual Effects: Jeff Dickson
Produced by Jeff Dickson, Emily Janice Card, Wendy Crompton
Stunt Choreography: Michelle Crompton
Sound Department: Leslie Paugh & Russell Lloyd
Makeup and Hair: Farrah Walker
Cast: Esther Rawlings, Emily Janice Card, Farrah Walker, Wendy Crompton, Michelle Crompton, Julie Hinton, Jessica Preece, Bonnie Anderson, Tiffany Jordan, Renee Miller, Kristen Hill, Kathryn Kulish, David Axelgard, Travis Morgan
© 2010 [RELATIVELY BADARSE PRODUCTIONS]
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Cushy for Whom?
An interesting piece in last week’s Chronicle, Goodbye to those Overpaid Professors in their Cushy Jobs, attempts a possibly premature farewell to a stereotype, the enduring myth that “college professors lead easy lives." According to reporter Ben Gose, once-rampant complaints about the imaginary prof on a three-day workweek are now hard to find.
Nonetheless he notes an interesting source for some doozy “last gasps” of lazy-prof stereotypes--faculty themselves. Gose speculates that the prof-on-prof stereotypers are trying to do the profession a favor, in the front line of faculty “policing their own” and targeting “perceived slackers,” etc.
The photograph and first third of the article are devoted to the emotional and contradictory views of Prof. John Hare, chair of English at Montgomery College, Maryland. According to Gose, Hare “became furious” at a distinguished scholar he doesn’t know, Florence Babb, the Vada Allen Yeomans Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Florida and former president of the Association for Feminist Anthropology, then serving as graduate coordinator for the Center for Women’s Studies and Gender Research. Recruited with the named professorship to Florida from the University of Iowa in 2005, her scholarship and service to the profession has been massive: multiple stints as department or program chair, numerous editorial boards, etc.
The trigger for Hare’s rage? Prof. Babb contested the university’s attempt to violate the contractual terms of its appointment letter in recruiting her and unilaterally downgrade the 2-course release associated with her service obligation in the Center to zero. Arbitrators eventually settled on reducing it to a one-course release, citing the figleaf of fiscal exigency.
One way of parsing Hare’s emotion is to see him as the chair of a teaching-intensive department himself trading in stereotypes about faculty with research-intensive appointments. Babb, by any reasonable estimation, works pretty hard, so Gose allows Hare to qualify his position pretty carefully.
It seems that Hare’s problem with Babb doesn’t depend on the factual question of whether she’s actually a slacker or not. It’s that she’s willing to look like one, fueling “public perceptions” that he claims harm all of us.
But the article itself says that these public perceptions are way down, so Hare’s own account of his rage just doesn’t make much sense.
What does? Is it the resentment of someone on a teaching-intensive appointment?
I wonder, but I don’t think so. By his own frequently contradictory account, Hare--like most folks with his kind of appointment--loves his job. Most of the folks I know on teaching-intensive appointment feel fortunate, like Hare, not to be subjected to the constant pressure of publishing, and to be paid for spending a lot of time with students on topics that interest them.
And as many irate commenters on the piece substantiated, it’s a fact that many jobs “in industry” are far easier than faculty appointments, especially research jobs, which tend to be radically underpaid for the difficulty of the work--it’s not the “ease” of the position, but the challenges and the self-directedness that accounts for the willingness of many to work twice as hard for half the pay.
Given what the most successful people in other fields earn these days and the kind of accomplishment it takes to earn the rank, it’s fairly hard to argue that distinguished research faculty in Babb’s bracket-- earning $90,000 to $100,000 a year--are either overpaid or underworked.
In fact, as I’ve written before: plenty of undistinguished civil servants, firefighters and military officers have retirement compensation higher than the salaries earned for 60-hour weeks by extremely accomplished teachers and/or researchers in the humanities!
So what explains Hare’s irrational, data-free anger at Babb? Especially when the supposedly benighted “public” is increasingly able to do the relevant math?
The Gendering of Professional Service
One dimension of Babb’s situation that didn’t factor into Hare’s position or come out in Gose’s otherwise well-reported piece is the role of gender in who the University of Florida demanded “pitch in” and make “sacrifices” during the fiscal crisis.
It appears that Babb is the only female distinguished professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, and the only one actually forced to teach more. According to one source and multiple commenters on press reports of the case, of the many male faculty with her load and rank, many earning more, only one man was even asked to teach additional courses and, being eligible to do so--apparently as expected--chose to retire instead.
I was happy to see the comments on the Chronicle article overflowing with faculty, including the intrepid Bill Pannapacker, hastening to question Hare’s suitability as “our” spokesperson. Pannapacker targets Hare’s implication in the ideology of teaching for love, a topic I’ve written about several times before.
It’s too often assumed that “teaching for love” is a win-win situation: some people are happy with psychic rewards instead of pay, which saves a few bucks that institutions or legislators can then spend on other important projects. What’s the harm?
But a labor market arranged around working for love--rather than fair compensation--is actually one of the most sexist, racist and economically discriminatory arrangements possible. From a class point of view, as I emphasize in Gose’s piece and elsewhere: by making the professoriate an economically irrational choice, you stop sorting for the most talented people and begin to sort for the people who can afford to discount their wages. That cuts out most people, period, making the best jobs in the academy largely a preserve for persons with fortunate economic backgrounds or circumstances. And via the wealth gap, that primary economic discrimination has direct consequences for the racial composition of the faculty. By making it too hard to get a job, too arduous an apprenticeship, too poor of a return on education investment: only the wealthier among us are able to “irrationally choose” to accept psychic wages--and the wealthier among us are disproportionately white, just for starters. All of this has tremendous, documented consequences for the achievement and persistence of students from less advantaged economic circumstances and ethnicities poorly represented among the faculty.
As for gender, the rendering of faculty positions to the extreme of economic irrationality (six courses a year for $15,000, eg) assigns them disproportionately to women, especially persons--whether male or female--married to professionals and managers. The other, primary wage earner supports the economically irrational partner, a person teaching for what used to be called pin money. This structural feminizing of the job was traditionally associated with converting the positions formerly held by men (such as secretarial positions, once a high-status job) to those held increasingly by women, as Michelle Masse explains in a 2008 interview and is just one of the ways that she says higher ed forms a “pyramid scheme” especially for women faculty.
Broadly speaking across many disciplines and institution types women still tend to disproportionately hold low-paying, low-status, insecure teaching-only or teaching-intensive jobs while men continue to disproportionately hold high-paying, high-status, secure research-intensive and top administrative positions.
In an important new book, Over Ten Million Served: Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces Masse and Katie Hogan take the conversation about gender and the distribution of academic rewards & responsiblities beyond the relatively well-understood territory of research and teaching to service labor. (Disclosure: the book includes a chapter adapted from HTUW.)
The book surveys the complexity of academic service, from the manifold senses of a calling (ranging from communitarian, sociable, and professional impulses to an opportunity to rebel or transform the academy) to close connections with the rise of a service economy, to specifically feminized forms of exploitation--ie, doing the university’s “housework,” or an undercompensated labor of care that in many circumstances falls harder on women. Women faculty face larger career penalties for not seeming to “care sufficiently” for the institution, and their research contributions are correspondingly discounted--I think analysis of the comments on Babb’s case at the Chron and other media outlets strongly supports this view!
Among the countless insights that Masse and Hogan develop in the collection is the emergence of a complex and contradictory “service unconscious” among feminized faculty, male and female (ie, such as the angry and confused John Hare):
We know that our [willingness to serve] sometimes damages us and supports organizational structures we don’t want to reinforce. And yet we nonetheless persevere in these behaviors and articulate their value for the best of all possible reasons: the ways in which ‘helping’ and ‘serving’ please us and fulfill our deepest-held beliefs about the importance of existence in a community and the need to achieve change and support for our colleagues and students. We know that service and sacrifice are often necessary to bring about more just workplaces, but much of the service we are pressed into is not about creating just and fair workplaces...
Hogan’s analysis alone is worth the price of the book. She contends that academic women, and men in feminized sectors, are expected to be “superserviceable,” ie to williingly do labor not recognized as such. Across vast swathes of the academy, faculty have service-intensive appointments (especially involving labor of care for students or the institution) in which the nature of their service is not even recognized.
Using data from significant assessments of the labor performed by women in both nontenurable and tenured positions, Hogan documents the unspoken demands of the academic service economy. In a final twist, she argues that the same is true for the intellectual output of persons in feminized positions, especially feminism itself--ie, that feminist research and teaching is meant to be especially “serviceable” as well.
xposted: howtheuniversityworks.com
Hawthorne’s Letters
In 1855, Hawthorne famously wrote a letter to his publisher complaining about how hard it was to get anyone to read your books because of all the chick-lit they were publishing nowadays:
America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public is occupied with their trash— and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of The Lamplighter, and other books neither better nor worse?—worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the hundred thousand.
That infamous letter has provided us with the phrase “damned mob of scribbling women” (here and here, for example) as a kind of shorthand for American criticism’s generalized disdain for sentimental fiction. I’ll get back to Hawthorne in a minute, but I thought of it when I read this review of the recent documentary about Italian pop culture, Videocracy:
“The problem of becoming famous is that there are so many girls,” observes Ricky Canevali. “They’re willing to do anything to get on the fast track to stardom. Nowadays, Italian television is full of girls.” An aspiring celebrity, Ricky practices karate in his backyard and dance moves in front of his bedroom mirror. He sees himself as a combination of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Ricky Martin. He’s been working at his dream for years, he says, but still, “The girls always steal our places. It’s the girls that attract an audience. People at home here in Italy, as soon as they see half-naked girls in G-strings, they’re interested…Gazing out on the rain from the balcony of the home he shares with his mama, he explains, “If you had to give a part of your body to some powerful man, there’d be rumors.” Because, of course, there are no such costs for women, who only do what they must.
Videocracy is, ostensibly, about Silvio Berlusconi and his effect on TV in Italy, and as such, it’s a historically and geographically specific engagement with a particular media empire and national public attached to it. Yet there’s something interestingly consistent about the way the specter of the unjustly preferred—and apparently less talented—woman becomes the scapegoat for the otherwise unthinkable fact that a real star like Ricky Canevali (this incredible “combination of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Ricky Martin”) cannot seem to find his just audience, the same displacement of personal artistic failure onto those who have the unfair advantage of being born female.
After all, Ricky actually seems sort of wistful for that beautiful day when he, too, will be able to sell his body to some powerful man without there being “rumours.” And Hawthorne wrote another letter a month later “praising” Fanny Fern—pseudonym of the bestselling Sara Willis Parton—in terms that, well, this is what he wrote:
“The woman writes as if the Devil was in her and that is the only condition under which a woman ever writes anything worth reading. Generally women write like emasculated men, and are only to be distinguished from male authors by greater feebleness and folly; but when they throw off the restraints of decency and come before the public stark naked, as it were—then their books are sure to possess character and value.”
The great thing about great women writers is that their books are really just their naked bodies, see? Or something. Does Hawthorne, too, wish to throw off the restraints of decency and flash his audience? Hard to tell, but I‘m sure if he had, his friend Herman would have been ready to help him figure out how. In any case, placing Hawthorne’s moment of ugly pettiness in that first letter within the larger context of his career makes it a lot more interesting; after all, just before writing the bit that’s always quoted, he fed his publisher this line about how great it was for his writing career that he had the office of the US Consulate in Liverpool:
“But I had rather hold this office two years longer anyway; for I have not seen half enough of England, and there is the germ of a new romance in my mind, which will be all the better for ripening slowly. Besides, America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women.. [etc.]”
As Nina Baym points out, it changes the sense of that scribbling women crack, perhaps, if we recognize that the line preceding it is almost certainly nonsense. After all, it’s generally accepted that he didn’t even begin his next novel—1860’s The Marble Faun—until a trip to Italy in 1858. Which is why, most likely, it was nothing more than the sort of thing a writer says to their publisher to keep the lines of dialogue open when they‘re completely blocked. And Hawthorne was completely blocked. He wrote that letter to his publisher right smack in the middle of a very unproductive seven year period, in which, after having published three magnificent novels and two books of short stories in less than four years (1849-1853), he sold out with a vengeance, writing a hack campaign biography for his old school friend Franklin Pierce (which Horace Mann called “the greatest work of fiction he ever wrote”), and in doing so inaugurated both a comfortable living as a political appointee in Liverpool and seven years of essentially ceasing to be a writer. As his son Julian charitably wrote:
…the date of his first popular success in literature also marks the commencement of a worldly prosperity which, though never by any means splendid (as we shall presently see), at any rate sufficed to allay the immediate anxiety about to-morrow’s bread-and-butter, from which he had not hitherto been free. The three American novels were written and published in rapid succession, and…[t]here is every reason to believe that during the ensuing years other romances would have been written; and perhaps they would have been as good as, or better than, those that went before. But it is vain to speculate as to what might have been. What actually happened was, that Hawthorne was appointed United States Consul to Liverpool; and for six years to come his literary exercises were confined to his consular despatches and to the six or eight manuscript volumes of his English, French, and Italian Journals.
And the most obvious explanation is also the one Hawthorne circa-1849 would have given: being a political hack was not conducive to being a writer. Hawthorne had had a burst of creativity when he lost his job in 1849, and when he got another political appointment in 1854, he stopped being a writer until he lost it again.
Which brings me back to that letter; I’m struck by the word “office” in the line preceding the scribbling women business. After all, the word “office” is a hugely important term in The Scarlet Letter, as most critics have had, on one way or another, to contend with. And this is especially the case in the Custom-House sketch that introduces The Scarlet Letter, in which Hawthorne makes much of the fact that he could only write his most famous novel once he was fired or lost his “office,” that when he got his job in the Custom-House, as he had put it:
I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all…examining myself and others, I was led to conclusions in reference to the effect of public office on the character, not very favorable to the mode of life in question…Suffice it here to say, that a Custom-House officer, of long continuance, can hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and another, the very nature of his business, which—though, I trust, an honest one—is of such a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.
The Scarlet Letter was mostly written when he composed the Custom-House sketch. But as a counter-text to The Scarlet Letter, in fact, “The Custom-House” sketch almost forces us to contrast the benefit he gets from his forced liberation from the house of “custom”—the literary freedom he tells us he got from being uprooted—with Hester’s inability to uproot herself, the fact that she stays in Boston and is eventually reincorporated into the community. And its hard to see that contrast in any other terms than gender. I don’t have a fresh take on the issue, really, but it does stand out to me as to sharp and obvious a reference point to overlook: while (as Sacvan Bercovitch argues) the “office” of the Scarlet Letter is, in some sense, to domesticate and redeem the wayward Hester by bringing her back within the bounds of the community (and in this sense, it eventually does do “its office”), Hawthorne was able to write his romance about grey old patriarchs wearing Hester down and socializing/domesticating her at the very moment he escaped from the stultifying effect that withered old patriarchs were having on him. He gets to write about how she’s the object of an office by getting out of the office himself.
As I said, I don’t so much have a clear argument about how the term is used in The Scarlet Letter, except to emphasize how ambiguous it is, and how closely that ambiguity is tied to the problem of how gender patrols the border between community and freedom, a problem the book does much more to explore as such than really solve. And while the Bercovitch reading gives you a very conservative Hawthorne—since he argues that the Scarlet Letter’s work is to domesticate a woman whose actions have taken her out of pocket—actually extending that sense of Hawthorne’s conservativism to “The Custom-House” seems sort of weak: while the job he needs to support his family is the only thing holding him back from fulfilling his literary vocation, in a certain sense, it’s actually the grey bearded custom house officers who sterilize Hawthorne (not a nagging wife or something). And since they’re also identified with the puritans in sad-colored hats that give Hester hell, Hester and Hawthorne get quite interestingly/confusingly identified with each other, both writers of letters whose struggles with society are far too interestingly complicated for a political label to give us much more than a very superficially satisfying sense of what’s really going on there.
In short, as always happens when I read Hawthorne, the most interesting thing to me is the way his best writing ultimately resists easy characterization, easy summary, the way his terms and metaphors turn over on themselves like a Möbius strip. But it’s precisely by contrasting the meaning(s) of “office” in the dialogue between The Scarlet Letter and the custom-house sketch with his use of it in that letter—in which exactly none of the creative-spirit-stultifying connotations seem to be active—that we see a contrast between Hawthorne the writer and Hawthorne the purveyor of stereotypes. They were the same man in reality, of course. But there’s nothing more opposed to the spirit and letter of what makes The Scarlet Letter such a great novel than the spirit and voice that animated that letter to his publisher in 1855. Which is, in its way, precisely a vindication of what he had been up to in 1849 in the first place, whatever that was.
Sunday, August 08, 2010
Language About Language
How is it, then, that we can talk about talking? If you are willing to assume the existence of basic perceptual and cognitive capacities, a relatively simple answer follows immediately. The sounds of talk are, after all, sounds like any other sounds. We can perceive them in the same way we perceive the sound of a waterfall or a bird’s song, a thunderclap or the rustling of leaves in the wind, a cricket’s chirp or the breaking of waves on a beach. All are things we can hear, easily and naturally, and so it is with the sound of the human voice.
Roman Jakobson famously theorized that language has six functions: referential, emotive, poetic, conative, phatic, and the metalingual function. That’s the function we’re interested in, our capacity to speak about speech. Jakobson talked of the metalingual function as an orientation toward the language code, which seems just a bit grand. For I’m led to believe that many languages lack terms for explicitly talking about the ‘code.’ Thus, in The Singer of Tales (Atheneum 1973, orig. Harvard 1960), Albert Lord attests (p. 25):
Man without writing thinks in terms of sound groups and not in words, and the two do not necessarily coincide. When asked what a word is, he will reply that he does not know, or he will give a sound group which may vary in length from what we call a word to an entire line of poetry, or even an entire song. [Remember, Lord is writing about oral narrative.] The word for “word” means an “utterance.” When the singer is pressed then to way what a line is, he, whose chief claim to fame is that he traffics in lines of poetry, will be entirely baffled by the question; or he will say that since he has been dictating and has seen his utterances being written down, he has discovered what a line is, although he did not know it as such before, because he had never gone to school.
While I’m willing to entertain doubts about the full generality of this statement – “man without writing” – I assume the it is an accurate report about the Yugoslavian peasants among whom Milman Perry and Albert Lord conducted their fieldwork and that it also applies to other preliterate peoples, though not necessarily to all.
Given those caveats, the paragraph is worth re-reading. Before doing so, recall how casually we have come to see language as a window on the workings of the mind in the Chomskyian and post-Chomskyian eras. If that is the case, then what can one see through a window that lacks even a word for words, that fails to distinguish between words and utterances? And what of the poets who don’t know what a line is? The lack of such knowledge does not stand in the way of the poeticizing, no more than the lack of knowledge of generative grammar precludes the ability to talk intelligently on a vast range of subjects.
Continued at New Savanna.
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Astronomy? Astrology? & Literary Studies
Cross-posted at New Savanna.
In a recent post, Aaron Bady quotes from Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, published in 1947: “The poem, if it be a true poem, is a simulacrum of reality . . . an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience.” My own favorite expression of such a sentiment dates from 1926 in Archibald McLeish’s “Ars Poetica”:
A poem should not mean
But be
Some such distinction seems to recur time and again.
Northrup Frye presents his version in the “Polemical Introduction” to his 1957 Anatomy of Criticism, where he distinguishes between the silent and incommunicable act of reading (“like prayer in the Gospels”) and the noisy business of criticism (Frye’s complete text is available online here; I discuss that passage in an old Valve post). In the title essay of his 1975 collection, The Fate of Reading, Geoffrey Hartman frets that “modern ‘rithmatics’-semiotics, linguistics, and technical structuralism . . . widen, if anything, the rift between reading and writing,” apparently believing that the noisy business of criticism is an attempt to enter into, or at least recover, the silent act of reading. Perhaps a little noisiness is just what the doctor ordered, but the new ‘rithmatics are too noisy. More recently, Hans Ulrich Gumbrich has launched a full-scale assault on meaning in the name of presence: Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford U Press 2004).
Why does this discussion of experience vs. criticism (of this or that sort) come up over and over?
Let me offer a suggestion. For some time now I have felt literary studies to be in the process of differentiating into one set of discourses that, like astronomy, seek objective knowledge of literary phenomena, and another set of discourses that, like astrology, are more concerned with the meanings texts have for us. Many of my old Valve posts are, in whatever particular terms, about such a distinction, though I have never before used the astronomy/astrology analogy. I’ve avoided it because, in a more or less academic intellectual context, it is a deeply loaded and potentially incendiary analogy, but not one that affords understanding sufficient to offset that loading.
The loading is obvious. For those on the side of astronomy, such as the vast majority of the academic intelligentsia, astrology is mere superstition, best forgotten. The universe is so constituted that the positions of the stars signify nothing about the fates of individual humans nor about their personalities.
The world of human desires and affairs, however, is different. That world is, in effect, the world of astrology. The experience of texts is often profound and, profound or not, it is ineffable. Talk about that meaning, and about which texts are good, which are not, and why, such talk is central to the social circulation and sharing of literary texts and culture. It is what we are.
Thus, as we differentiate literary astronomy from literary astrology, we cannot, we must not slough off and abandon literary astrology. Nor, for that matter, should we decry literary astronomy as scientistic work of the devil. As individual critics we may opt wholly for astronomy or wholly for astrology, or we may even chose to play the astronomer on one occasion, the astrologer on another. Collectively, we must go forward with both.
The question of experience vs. criticism, then, is a rhetorical device we use to negotiate our way through the process of differentiation. Experience is always astrological in character and criticism, by its ineradicable nature as a discourse other than literary experience, will always be attracted to astronomy. The terms of our discussions will change from one decade to the next, as will institutional structures and affiliations. But both discourses are inescapable and necessary. The recurrence of experience vs. criticism is a token of that necessity.
Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Agora: Impurity, thy name is knowledge
This is a movie review, and it has spoilers. Cross posted at New Savanna.
As fate would have it, and along with Nina Paley and two other members of her free culture posse, Barry Solow and Clyde Adams, I went to see Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora last evening. Yes, there were moments during the film where I was thinking, ‘come on guys, can we just move it along.’ But at the end I was in a pensive mood, the kind that comes over me a film has, in whatever way, gotten to me. And so I really wasn’t into the after-movie debriefing session that Nina, Barry, and Clyde held in the downstairs lobby of the semi-ratty little movie house in the West Village. I did manage, however, to get in a word for menstrual symbolism, about which more later.
The film is set in ancient Alexandria during the rise of the Christians and centers around the philosopher Hypatia. It ends with Hypatia’s murder by a Christian mob. According to this post at Armarium Magnum it makes a hash of the history, a time-honored tradition in historical flix. In sum, this is what got botched:
Over and over again, elements are added to the story that are not in the source material: the destruction of the library, the stoning of the Jews in the theatre, Cyril condemning Hypatia’s teaching because she is a woman, the heliocentric “breakthrough” and Hypatia’s supposed irreligiousity. And each of these invented elements serves to emphasize the idea that she was a freethinking innovator who was murdered because her learning threatened fundamentalist bigots. The fact that Amenábar needs to rest this emphasis on things he has made up and mixed into the real story demonstrates how baseless this interpretation is.
OK, Amenábar blew it. I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t read that post, which I did before I went to see the film. Now that I’ve seen the film, you know what? I don’t give a termite’s ass. That is, assuming termites have asses, or what will pass for one.
I figure that when film-makers, or novelists for that matter, botch the history they pretend to be telling us, they do so because they want to tell us something other than history. They’re just using historical material to give us a myth dressed up to look like it really happened out there in the world. But that’s not where myths happen, ever. They happen in the mind and in the heart.
So what’s Amenábar’s myth about? Yes, it’s about knowledge and religious fundamentalism and intolerance and you can certainly read those Christian thugs as Taliban thugs if you wish I’m not going to try to stop you from doing that because you know your mind and so on. But that’s not the part of the myth that interests me, that’s not what drove me to silence by movie’s end.
The myth that held me is one about knowledge. Hypatia was a philosopher and a teacher. We see her in the classroom several times and listen to long disquisitions and demonstrations on matters mathematical and scientific – way more than would be necessary to a movie content and eager to score points against fundamentalist Christians. One of Hypatia’s students, Orestes, falls in love with her and declares his love publicly. She answers him the next day in class by presenting him with a handkerchief stained with her menstrual blood.
Now, imagine that you are a high status young male, alpha type, and your chosen mate hands you, in front of all the other young high status males, and a few slaves as well, hands you a used menstrual pad. Whoa! Insult City! Sound the alarms! Start planning vengeance, show the bitch who’s boss.
But that’s not what this Orestes does. Actually, we don’t see what he does, not immediately. But when the film zooms forward to the time when Orestes is Prefect of Alexandria, a converted Christian too, he does his best to protect this woman philosopher who publicly humiliated by giving him her stained rag. She is his most trusted advisor. Does this make sense? Would any rational man turn the other cheek rather than holding a grudge? No. But then Agora is not a puff piece for the primitive wing of evolutionary psychology.
Let’s go back to that kerchief. When Hypatia presents it to Orestes she tells him what the stain is, otherwise, how would he, how would we, know? I forget just exactly what the line was, but the crucial word was “cycle,” so the line was something like this: “This handkerchief is stained with the blood of my cycle.” Such phrasing is a bit odd, not deeply odd, but a bit, enough so that one notices. It sounds a bit coy, a bit euphemistic. Why not be straight-forward and call it menstrual blood?
Because the word “cycle” and the concept are important in this film, very important. That’s why.
Hypatia is depicted as a geometer and astronomer. She’s puzzled about the movements of the stars and planets. Her puzzlement is the standard one about all this junky mess of cycles and epicycles needed to reconcile the observed motions of the heavenly bodies with the mathematical requirements of a model based on perfect circular motion in a geocentric universe. This is much discussed in the film. Orestes himself remarks on how junky the model is. And one of Hypatia’s slaves, Davus, has built a model of the system, which earns Hypatia’s praise. He falls in love with her, though that may well have happened before this incident.
The word “cycle,” then, connects Hypatia’s biological sex, female, with her intellectual vocation, mathematics and astronomy.
Later in the film we’ll hear how Aristarchus had already proposed a heliocentric model of the universe, which cuts down on the number of cycles needed. And we’ll see Hypatia test an implication of that model aboard a ship, accompanied by Prefect Orestes. There’s no reason to believe that any of this actually happened, but it’s in the movie. For some purpose. It’s one of many little vignettes exemplifying rational thought, making it real and palpable, giving it weight and mythic dimension. We’re not simply told that Hypatia’s a woman of reason and learning, we’re invited into her workshop to see and experience her reasoning directly.
The word “perfect” keeps coming up in the astronomy talk. The circle is the most perfect curve. That’s why it’s central to thinking about the cosmos. For some unexplained (and undoubtedly neo-Platonic) reason, it’s important that the motions of heavenly bodies be perfect, be circular. Amenábar didn’t invent this mode of thinking and then foist it upon his fictional ancients. Such considerations were real and powerful.
The Keplerian breakthrough (a millennium later), then, was to get beyond this misplaced veneration of perfection, and use the imperfect ellipse as the curve that best fits the data. Here’s where, in my reading, Amenábar makes a false move. No, it’s not that he has Hypatia anticipating Kepler, about which we know nothing. I don’t care about that. No, the problem is in how he presents the final breakthrough. He frames it as one of mathematics, of simply realizing that the ellipse fits the data better than any claptrap construction of circles and epicycles.
He should have framed it as simply getting over this need for circular perfection. And that’s what he seemed to be doing, what with all that talk of perfect circles, and that talk coming from a cyclic-bleeder (symbolically apt, if otherwise terribly reductionist). Once you drop the need for perfect circles, then the math of ellipses just falls into place. No big deal.
In this reading, then, Hypatia is killed, not simply because she refused to convert to Christianity, nor even because she is a person of knowledge. No, she’s killed because she is a woman, and impure as such — a witch — and because knowledge too is impure. No perfect circles in the heavens. Sorry.
I find that to be a rather stunning conception: Knowledge, thy name is woman.
But then we live in an age of impure knowledge. The biological species conception, whatever it is, is a statistical one. No pure essences needed here. Quantum mechanics is statistical, impure, messy. But the math fits the data very nicely, thank you. Emergence, complexity, fractals, chaos, whatever they are, they’re messy, monstrous, statistical. That’s the contemporary intellectual world. Platonic perfection be gone.
Which leaves us with Amenábar’s depiction of Hypatia’s death. Historically, she was stoned, then dismembered and the pieces burned. He spares us most of the stoning and the the rest. And he spares Hypatia the stoning. Rather, by her consent, she is throttled by that slave, Davus, who’d once fallen in love with her.
There was a point in mid-film when Davus came close to raping his beloved Hypatia. He relents, and she frees him. He leaves her service and joins up with the Christians. At the end, when the Christian thugs set out to get her, he tried to find her and save her. Instead, he meets up with the thugs just as they find her. He’s at the back of the pack when they drag her into the (now sacked) library to kill her. They strip her and leave her standing there while they pick up the stones. Davus comes up behind her, puts his arms around her, and glances at her face. She nods assent. He strangles her and then leaves, her body falling to the floor.
She’s dead, the stoning begins. And the movie’s over. Amenábar allowed Hypatia to choose her death. It’s a small thing, such redemption of an ugly history. But a mythology of truth as impure and female, that’s no small thing. It’s a wonder.
Sunday, August 01, 2010
Are We Busted, Irrevocably?
Cross-posted in two other places. Why? Because I can.
By we I mean students of the human sciences.
* * * * *
Sometime in the early 1970s I read an article in Linguistic Inquiry, the house organ of Chomskyian linguistics, lamenting the lost promise of the Chomsky revolution. As I recall, the lament went something like this: In the early days it seemed possible that a complete grammar of English, or French, or Russian, or Quechua, or any other language was right around the corner. Then the articles began to get narrower and narrower in scope until finally the cutting edge of research discussed mere fragments. And the prospect of a complete grammar for some language, any language? Forgotten.
Almost four decades have gone by, with perhaps as many major revisions in Chomsky’s views on language. I don’t know what the official line is on the state of the Chomsky revolution, but, as far as I can tell, the situation hasn’t changed. It’s not just that the Chomskyians have failed to deliver on early promises, but that linguistics itself remains many. Chomsky never carried the day completely and, while some of the holdouts just wanted to remain stuck with the old ways, just as many wanted to forge ahead, but not under the Chomsky banner. As far as I can tell linguistics is, say, a half-dozen or so competing and apparently mutually incompatible schools that, for the most part, simply ignore one another. Linguists hold no deep conception that is as significant to all of linguistics as evolution is to biology.
And that goes across the board to all the human sciences. The cognitive revolution went flat in the 1980s. The neuroscientists have frittered away two or three decades taking pretty picture of the brain that benefit no one so much as the workers and stockholders of companies in the brain imaging business. Economists have been fiddling while the world economy burns and literary critics have been congratulating themselves on how revolutionary and counter-hegemonic they’ve been.
Up until recently I’ve believed this was the case because the problems are deep and compelling answers are hard to find. And, yes, that is true.
And, yes, I certainly have strong opinions on what approaches make sense, and which are garbage — not for the whole range of the human sciences, of course, but for those areas where I’ve been most active: literary studies, cognition and knowledge representation, cultural evolution. It’s not that I think all extant ideas and approaches are equally worthy. I don’t.
But I have thought that, after all, there is no other way to advance than to let 10,000 flowers bloom.
Perhaps I’ve been wrong. 1000 flowers? Sure, why not? 10,000? Really? Do we really need to sample the space of intellectual possibility at 10,000 points? Rather, are we really sampling the space at 10,000 points? Or are we only sampling the space at 1000 points, but pretending to sample it at 10,000 points by dressing up our ideas in funny but colorful costumes?
Are we bull-shitting ourselves about our intellectual productivity?
One of the standard ploys that curmudgeonly literary critics have deployed against newer ideas is that these new-fangled ideas with their technical terminology do not reflect any intellectual necessity. Rather, they are simply a response to institutional pressures for idea production. Institutions demand prestige, prestige requires publications, publications require new ideas, so let’s at least give them new terminology, which they’ll happily mistake for new ideas.
That’s the argument — it’s still alive and well. I’ve always resisted it despite the fact that, more often than not, it’s being deployed against ideas I don’t much care for myself. But, if those curmudgeons knew of my work, they’d deploy their argument against it as well, as I too employ abstract concepts and even a strange term or two.
But I’m beginning to wonder whether or not those curmudgeons have a point. Perhaps institutional pressures are bringing about needless over-production of useless ideas. It’s not that I’ve decided that our intellectual problems aren’t all that deep, after all. No, they’re deep. But these many ideas we’re tossing about aren’t plunging into the depths. They’re just padding out the CVs of the senior investigators.
What, then, can we do?
I wish I knew. As long as I can remember there has been calls for intellectual reconciliation and cooperation among disciplines. And those calls continue. E. O. Wilson has called for consilience. Herbert Gintis has called for the unification of the behavioral sciences around the idea of evolution. I’ve made a similar plea on behalf of cultural evolution.
But we are late-comers to this game. Calls for unification had become another genre of academic discourse long before we weighed in.
Can we do nothing? Nothing at all?
Come to think of it, doing nothing might give us a chance to chill out and do some real intellectual work.
Party in the U.S.A.: Nineteen Nineteen, by John Dos Passos
As with the first post for The 42nd Parallel, I’ll begin by running through some of the basic details of characters, plot, etc.
There are eight “biographies” in this volume: John Reed, Randolph Bourne, Paxton Hibben, Woodrow Wilson, J. P. Morgan, Joe Hill, Wesley Everest, and the Unknown Soldier who is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Hill and Everest are sort of labor movement folk heroes; Reed is as well, but is larger than that, occupying a position within our national consciousness as probably the “romantic revolutionary"—someone Warren Beatty could play in an Oscar-winning movie. Paxton Hibben is not even a folk hero, exactly—you’ll notice that his link is the only one that doesn’t go to Wikipedia; that’s because he doesn’t have a page (not that this is a definitive sign of one’s obscurity). Randolph Bourne is certainly better known, but not by a very wide circle, I think. The ambit of most of these men is certainly tighter than those Dos Passos wrote about in The 42nd Parallel, an interesting contrast to the differences between the plots of the two books: 42nd is mostly confined by the U.S. borders; almost all of 1919 is running around Europe and the Atlantic.
We have five new characters who headline the plot-driven sections: Joe Williams (4 sections), Eveline Hutchins (4 sections), Richard Ellsworth Savage (4 sections), Daughter (2 sections), and Ben Compton (1 section). Well, actually, only Daughter and Richard Ellsworth Savage are “new”: Eveline, Joe, and Ben appeared in other people’s sections in volume one.
- Joe is Janey Williams’s sister; like her he grew up in Washington D.C., but after the death of a close friend, he took to the sailor’s life, and most of his sections in Nineteen Nineteen depict him either on the sea, in port, or trying to get back to the sea. Joe is a basic seaman for most of the novel, but after he gets married and gets torpedoed (unrelated events), he is given an opportunity to rise from the ranks and takes some classes to become a third and then a second mate. Joe gets in his share of scrapes but he’s not particularly belligerent; he sleeps with a lot of women (most of whom give him a venereal disease, it seems) but he’s not particularly lusty; he’s undirected and frequently “blue” but not particularly anhedonic or mopey. He’s much more of a proletarian than other American heroes who went to sea or than any of Conrad’s sailors; while, like Ishamel, he sails to avoid the onset of the “damp, drizzly November[s] in my soul,” Joe’s Novembers blow in when he blows all his money or knocks some girl up or something. He’s closer to O’Neill’s Hairy Ape, but far less primitive.
- Eveline Hutchins is Eleanor Stoddard’s best friend—the one she meets in the Art Institute of Chicago (an event I wrote about previously). Eveline, unlike Eleanor, is not making up her solidly upper-middle-class origins, and perhaps as a (surprising) result, she seems less self-assured, more wary among the cosmopolitan milieu that the two pursue from Chicago to New York and, in this book, to Paris, Rome, and the French Riviera. Being born with half- or three-quarters of a silver spoon in one’s mouth, it seems, induces more timidity (or suppresses temerity more) than being born with none at all. Eveline and Eleanor separate, to some extent, while in Europe, although both are working for the Red Cross and share almost entirely the same social circle, which includes J. Ward Moorehouse, who was having an equivocal (and possibly non-sexual) affair with Eleanor at the end of The 42nd Parallel. Eveline actually has a sexual (but still quite equivocal) affair with Moorehouse, but ends 1919 with another man rather unintentionally on her arm, the younger Paul Johnson. She is pregnant with Paul’s baby, and a party celebrating their marriage is the last narrative scene.
- Also present at that scene is Richard Ellsworth Savage, who after first going to Europe as an ambulance volunteer, gets himself in trouble in Italy by expressing too loudly some pacifist and sarcastically pro-Central Powers remarks. At first he wants to fight for his right to free speech and to take the pacifist message back to America, but just before embarking from France, he runs into one of his old Harvard chums, and his convictions sort of melt away. Through some connections back home he is able to get back to Europe, this time in the Army proper, although his skill with languages and his general charisma get him a fairly cushy job as a courier. He meets the Moorehouse crowd and, eventually, finagles himself into a job working for Moorehouse after the armistice. In the meantime, he has met and become entangled with another character:
- Anne Elizabeth Trent, whom everyone calls Daughter, is a Texan belle. Her father is wealthy, and his wealth enables her, even though she seems to fit in well with Texan society, to run off to New York confidently. She signs up as a special student at, I think, Columbia (although she lives in University Heights—I don’t know New York that well, but might Dos Passos have meant Morningside Heights?) and “went to lectures about Economics and English Literature and Art and talked a little occasionally with some boy who happened to be sitting next to her, but she was so much younger than anybody she met and she didn’t seem to have the right line of talk to interest them.” She has a couple rather innocent affairs, including one with a Veblen-spouting social worker which ends in a broken engagement after she seeks admission from the Columbia Journalism School over his disapproval (he wants her to study to be a teacher). Daughter meets another Columbia journalism student who introduces her to the world of radical politics; she meets Ben Compton (our next and last main character) during a textile workers strike in Paterson, New Jersey (the 1919 strike, not the more famous 1913 one). There she also has her first real run-in with the law; she slugs a police officer in the face and makes national headlines, causing her father to come out and take her home to Texas. She joins the Red Cross and applies to go abroad. There she runs into both G. H. Barrow, the labor leader from The 42nd Parallel, who falls for her. But she ends up with Dick Savage (you couldn’t use that name in a novel today), who impregnates her and then tries to convince her to get an abortion; he had previously talked about marriage with her but backs out. She finds a drunk French aviator whom she convinces to take her on a late night aerial acrobatics display; they crash and she dies.
- Ben Compton appeared very briefly in The 42nd Parallel as the brother of a secretary in J. Ward Moorehouse’s p.r. firm (Janey Williams very briefly stays with the Comptons). The first words of Ben’s section have frequently been read as an indication of the ethnic and racial narrowness of Dos Passos’s gallery of Americans: even his one Jewish protagonist’s section begins “The old people were Jews, but at school Benny always said no he wasn’t a Jew, he was an American, because he’d been born in Brooklyn and lived at 2531 Twentyfifth Avenue in Flatbush and they owned their home.” Assessing just what Dos Passos’s intentions are by introducing such a vehemently assimilating Jew is rather difficult; one could about equally as well say that he was trying to effect in fiction a sort of whitewashing of the history of labor radicalism as one could say that he was trying to illustrate (and maybe ironize) the pressures of assimilation on Jews and, by proxy, other ethnics (Ben becomes good friends with an Italian). To be frank, I find it difficult to come to any single interpretation or even a satisfactory conjunction of interpretations. Whatever the case may be, Ben’s section (he only gets one in this book) is my favorite so far; it seemed to be written with greater intensity—even to the point of desperation. Sandwiched between the Joe Hill and Wesley Everest sections, these 36 pages (in my copy) combine spectacularly to protest the reactionary violence perpetrated against the labor movement. Ben is not a terribly likable character, but he doesn’t need to be to make Dos Passos’s point: perhaps many young men (and women) were foolhardy or just desperate on the picket lines, but the ferocity of the men on the other end of the billy club and at times at the other end of the rope and always at the other end of the law is sheerly breathtaking.
The fact that all the violence is really bottled up into those 36 pages near the end of the book rather than taking place in the war sections is an obvious statement about where the real violence of the war was directed: at the working class. The only other character who is under consistent threat of physical harm is 1919‘s other working stiff—Joe. Dick Savage faces fire once, I believe, and I suppose technically Paris is under siege, but the very pronounced effect of the Savage, Hutchins, and Daughter sections is to minimize any real sense that the war is a violent thing being executed by violent men. A line is repeated with variations throughout the novel: “This ain’t a war… it’s a goddam [whorehouse, Cook’s tour, madhouse, etc.].” A more appropriate description of these sections would be “this ain’t a war… it’s a goddam cocktail party.” For that’s what most of the action either is or resembles.
The interesting structural choice that Dos Passos made was to avoid building the sections as a simple ironic counterpoint between episodes of real violence against the working class with the longueurs of cocktail party bedhopping and flirtation of the Moorehouse circle. You have a few Joe sections interspersed through most of the first five-ninths or so of the book, but these actually soften the divide between the violence against the working class and the lassitude of the cosmopolitan class because Joe has connections among them more or less and because Joe has an ideal of (some) personal advancement, of rising from the ranks. But then the Joe Hill, Ben Compton and Wesley Everest sections burst on you almost without preparation, and only then is a note of ironic juxtaposition allowed to emerge, when the book wraps up with Savage’s last section, with him pretending to come to terms with the (honestly a little ridiculous and probably intentionally so) death of Daughter. The party’s over, and he can walk away whistling Kip Marlowe’s line, “but that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.”
I think opinion is generally against 1919 relative to the other two volumes of U.S.A., but I have to put my name down as a defender of it. I think it is a better structured book than The 42nd Parallel, and while tedious, I found the cocktail party sections here much better than the Alger-esque Janey, Moorehouse, and Stoddard sections there; these are more patient, more attentive, and more accurate—most socializing is dull. I can see, however, why it is not so appealing to all readers, and why it might be considered the most boring of the three: like a lot of other middle novels in trilogies, it has the disadvantage of being compared both to one novel the virtues of which you know because you’ve already experienced them and to another whose virtues and pleasures you are constantly imagining. The first and the third have to deal only with either one’s knowledge or one’s imagination, but not both. I think 1919 succeeds very well within these terms.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Tweeting Art
Whatever you think of the New Critics, an interesting way to frame what was going on in that weird Ebert column I was banging on about last week would be Cleanth Brooks’ claim that
“The poem, if it be a true poem, is a simulacrum of reality…an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience”
That’s a quote from his chapter on “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” in The Well Wrought Urn in which Brooks puts forward an idea of art as a thing which has to be actively experienced. He’s working to combat the sense that criticism’s job is just to reduce a work of art to its meaning, its essential core, the kind of reading where Heart of Darkness becomes Racism, Moby Dick becomes Obsession, and The Scarlet Letter becomes Puritanical Prudery. Repeat ad infinitum.
I’m switching from poetry to novels, here, for no better reason than its because it’s easier. But I think the point remains: the problem with reducing a massively complex novel to a few words, Brooks might suggest, isn’t simply the scale of complexity that’s being lost, but the experiential structure of both its composition and the active way we render that complexity meaningful. However much there might be a kernel of truth to each of those one-word summaries, they erase something vital about the works they purport to describe, and less because they summarize badly than because they summarize at all, thereby misplacing the thing that’s important about the aesthetic object, which, as Brooks, might say is not what we abstract from or paraphrase a poem, but how we experience it. Here’s how he does say it, in fact:
The essential structure of a poem (as distinguished from the rational or logical structure of the ‘statement’ which we abstract from it) resembles that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern of resolved stresses. Or, to move closer still to poetry by considering the temporal arts, the structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme.
It’s interesting how close this comes to the definition my friend Dan offered for a sense of video games as Art (though he admitted to being uninterested in actually making that claim). As he quite nicely suggested, we could put video games
“…in roughly the same category as sculptures that are about modifying the space of display and conceptual pieces that expose or distort the ecology of spectatorship. The core artistry in game-design lies in building complex interactions out of relatively simple rules and behaviors, in establishing spaces that carry some kind of genre-specific decorum. When they are a vehicle for narrative, the story itself becomes secondary to the way that it conditions the gameplay.”
They’re not quite the same, of course; being the kind of critic he was, Brooks was interested in one particular form of poetry—harmony and balance being key terms—while Dan, being a Melville and media guy, seems more interested in the kinds of video games and sculpture that work to make easy distinctions like text-and-reader or game-and-player more and more difficult to sustain. Just as sculpture is something you experience in space, the kinds of video games he was talking about insert you into the space they produce, producing an experience, perhaps, not completely dissimilar from what Marina Abramovic was doing with her “Imponderabilia”.
Anyway, I’m saying all of this to call attention to the tension that I think we find, in all of this, between, on the one hand, the idea that an art form’s reality is its experience (and, thus, a thing irreducible and resistant to paraphrase, or maybe even commentary) and, on the other, the idea that art requires or benefits from some kind of discursive supplement, whether that be explanation, criticism, or interpretation. A video game is something you play, in a way that makes video-game commentary seem sort of stupid or perverse (though also oddly fascinating; watch some Starcraft 2 youtube videos to see what I mean). At the same time, if you think of a movie as an immersive experience, it starts to make sense why we would talk about “spoiler alerts” in the way we do (while “spoiling” a novel or poem seems, to me, sort of counterintuitive); as Nate Freeman nicely describes, we understand, on some level, that talking about a movie ruins something central and important about the experience. Which, of course, tempts me to irresponsibly speculate that part of Ebert’s stake in this debate might be that it’s a version of a debate within cinema-discourse that sort of strikes at the heart of what he more or less defines himself by doing: if we were to privilege the immersive and unmediated experience of a movie—rather than the kind of experience one has when the canon of film history is seen as a necessary contextualizing frame—then what need do we have for film critics?
I’ll resist that temptation, though; Ebert’s tendency to note that he’s seen a lot more films than you have is actually pretty muted compared to his more general attitude of it’s-good-if-you-like-it. And I’m less interested in Ebert and his argument anyway than in the kinds of questions the example helps us think about. Which brings me to the thing I started writing this post thinking about, the kind of film criticism that proceeds not by consuming, digesting, and re-processing but by replicating, in real time, the experience of the viewing itself. I’m thinking, for example, of Jezebel’s live-tweeting of Sex and the City 2, or, to put it even more broadly, a review composed like Millicent reading The Fantastic Mr. Fox or Subabat’s series of tweets about Inception:
I’m not sure what to say about Inception. Great visuals. Nice gravity-less fighting scene. Cillian Murphy troubled, pouty, and wet.
Ellen Page with three facial expressions: stunned, concerned, stunned concern. All appear the same.
The premise is disturbingly rudimentary and clinical in its conception of dreams and memories vis a vis reality. And!
The only subconscious worth exploring was the tortured subconscious of a male. The ideal woman is quite naturally beautiful and dead.
Also, being dead, she is a blank slate of loveliness; tortured male can thereby project EVERY DAMN FUCKING THING onto her. Excellent.
I find something really attractive about the way a particular critical burden is quite pointedly not being taken up here, the way these responses to the movie don’t try to contain, within themselves, the movie itself. Traditional criticism, after all, often has a problem of voice; too much of the critic’s own voice and you feel like you’re getting Ebert rather than the movie (which, with some critics, is what you want), but too much of the movie and you feel like you‘re just reading a synopsis, or being “spoiled.” In contrast, each of these three twitter and twitter-esque responses to the experience of watching those films outlines a kind of framework of questioning without imposing it on you; to the extent that they are simply subjective, the opposite of authoritative claims to objective analysis, they offer an approach into the film that is simply available if you need it, something much more like tools for experiencing. They produce certain blinders too, of course. But by refusing to paraphrase the actual movie itself, there’s an interesting way in which they manage to retain (and reinforce) the experience as the central thing.
The Anti-Theory Wing of Literary Studies
Nina Paley is the creator of Mimi & Eunice and is unleashing them on the world under a copyleft license.