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.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Fans: A New Public for Literary & Cultural Studies
In continuing to think about fan culture I sent a query to Francesca Coppa, a long-time student of fan culture and one of the founders of the Organization for Transformative Works, a non-profit that is all about fan culture, serving it, studying it, and advancing it. In her reply she mentioned several kinds of ongoing fan scholarship and observed:
I think of all of these as “real” research; the question, perhaps, is what sort of umbrella it would have to be gathered under to “count.” But everyone knows that “fans” are a kind of grassroots academy who know more about the things they are fans of than any “TV and media” scholar!
So, I’m thinking that if the literary academy really wants to reach the general public, these folks should be high on the list. But just what would that entail? These people are actively creating their own artistic expressions in words, images, and sound, and are actively pursuing their own research agendas. What does the academy have to offer these people? Can the academy conceive of a relationship that’s more of a partnership than a relationship conceived around more evaluative essays in intelligible prose?
Because I’m thinking that that’s where the deep action is going to be. Not in trying to reconstruct the glory days of Leavis and Trilling and the rest, but in doing something that’s of this 21st century, something that’s new.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Dianetics For Higher Ed?
Should The New York Times (NYT) exist? Ha--you’re thinking, “What an unfair question!” Or “You’ve framed the debate in an obviously unfair or careless way."
And right you are. But since I’m a rich and powerful chunk of media capital with a stake in the answer, I don’t care what you think, and I’m free to compound the injury by holding a false “debate” on a question that unfairly asks one side to argue for its existence.
Enter The New York Times and its latest bungled attempt at analyzing higher ed, which just riffs on a piece reported by Robin Wilson for the Chronicle. As if framing a loaded question weren’t enough, they stack the deck, a couple of different ways. In the more obvious manipulation of the lineup, opponents of tenure outnumber proponents 3-2.
More importantly: in a debate about the “demise” of tenure,” the debate’s framers don’t include any voices of persons who are living the circumstances they purport to examine: the life of career faculty, full time or part time, with a teaching-intensive load and a nontenurable contract. One participant is on a nontenurable research contract--for a Harvard outfit that does management consulting for higher-ed administration, natch. But that’s like dressing up the testimony of someone who’s always driven a Rolls as the honest voice of straphangers--the near-volunteer faculty on freaking food stamps, like Monica, Andy, and many others.
As it turns out, 95% of the sense made in this debate is contained in the 40% assigned to the pro-tenure folks. AAUP president Cary Nelson patiently explains the centrality of tenure for academic freedom, and USC’s Adrianna Kezar, points to the real debate we should be having--about the high cost of nontenurable hiring in higher education, especially for the majority of faculty whose appointments are teaching-intensive, and the students they try to serve in the unsavory conditions management has created.
In the Opinion of L. Ron Hubbard...
Excepting a couple of minor points by the nontenurable researcher/management consultant, the anti-tenure side had little to offer beyond witless praise for The Market. Remember the the Planet of the Apes sequel where the surviving mutant humans live in a cave and worship the Holy Bomb that destroyed them?
It’s like that, including the gallows flavor to the campy humor, once you rip off the masks of the robed ritualistas:
Batting first for the NYT education-capitalist home team is Richard Vedder, perennial flack for the neo-cons at the American Enterprise Institute. His line here, that tenure “reduces intellectual diversity,” is just warmed-over David Horowitz, long debunked by any serious study. The fact is that more academics fear for their academic freedom today than in the McCarthy era--because they lack access to tenure, not the other way around.
Playing new kid in the lineup is Mark C. Taylor, a distance education entrepreneur with books and interests ranging from religion and organization theory to management and--I am not making this up--stealing dirt from the graves of famous persons.
Taylor’s data-free ruminations bear as much connection to the actual world of higher education as Scientology does to particle physics. He’s the fellow that bemoaned per-course salaries “as low as” five grand (!) and basically acts as if you could still arm-chair analyze the academic labor system, which is nearly 80% contingent, as if it were a “market” in tenure-track jobs.
Taylor’s retread analysis is straight outta 1972: “If you were a CEO,” he begins, and races downhill from there. Dunno, Mark: If I was the CEO of my neighborhood… If I was the CEO of my marriage… If I was the CEO of this poker game… If I was the CEO of your church… If I was the CEO of the planet… If my dad were my CEO… If I were the CEO of this one-night stand… If I was the CEO of this classroom… If I was the CEO of this audience at this Green Day concert...
Gosh, Mark. Seems like some social organizations and relationships shouldn’t have CEOs at all.
Wait, there’s more. Taylor goes on to, like, use math and stuff because it sounds good when you’re talking about money. He figures out the lifetime cost of paying tenured faculty and boggles, claiming that funding this commitment “would require” four million in endowment now and thirty million thirty years from now. Et voila! Clearly, then, paying faculty anything at all is impossible! QE freaking D, lads and ladies.
Of course the fact that most faculty aren’t paid out of endowments at all but, like, from tuition and appropriations and grants and stuff, does create some stumbles among the seraphim in Taylor’s elegant pin-top choreography.
I did say that the anti-tenure side contributed 5% of the sense out of the 60% of the space allotted to them.
That modicum goes to Cathy Trower of Harvard’s COACHE, like the handbag, with an elegant E for education.
Her project is like a higher-ed stepchild version, less mean and less well-funded, of Harvard’s toxic b-school/ed-school partnership--you know, the folks that brought you Arne Duncan.
Unlike her comrades, Trower actually thinks about tenure and correctly advocates for a less rigid understanding of it. Somewhat overdramatically, she proposes blowing up the tenure system and starting over with a new constitutional convention:
Some features of a newly imagined faculty workplace might include variable probationary periods, with extensions for parenthood, rather than a fixed seven-year up-or-out provision for tenure; a tenure track for faculty members focused on teaching; a non-tenure track that affords a meaningful role in shared governance; interdisciplinary centers with authority to be the locus of tenure; broader definitions of scholarship and acceptable outlets and media to “publish” research....
Most of these notions, of course, are very sensible, and versions of them are in place all over the country. No need to lug jerrycans of petrol to the bonfire. It’s not until we get to Trower’s stealthy last two suggestions ("tenure for a defined period of time; and the option to earn salary premiums while forgoing tenure entirely") that we see that the NYT was perfectly fair to run her piece under the headlines “How to Start Over” and “Get Rid of (Tenure).” Trower conveniently left these out of the version she published two years ago in AAUP’s Academe.
Most Tenured Faculty ARE on a Teaching Track
If Trower were better informed about what’s actually going on, she’d be aware that all of her reasonable suggestions have distinguished histories as well as plenty of contemporary reality. Rendered most invisible by Trower’s crowing from the business-administration battlements is the suggestion that we need to invent a “tenure track for faculty members focused on teaching."
Huh?
In 1970, the overwhelming majority of tenured faculty were on teaching-intensive appointments. Even today, after four decades of hiring teaching-intensive appointments nontenurably (full-time and part-time), tenured teaching-intensive faculty out-number tenured research-intensive faculty as much as two to one.
The idea that “tenured” equates to teaching 6 hours a week or fewer is just silly propaganda. And I for one am sick of liberal bastions like Harvard and the NYT passing off propaganda as scholarship.
Including propaganda that has numbers in it: for crying out loud, my math-avoidant friends, the whole meaning of the expression that “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics“ is that any paid mouthpiece, windbag or liar can claim to be “data-driven."
I mean, Cathy, let’s be real here.
MANAGEMENT has spent the last four decades actively dismantling a long-existing “tenure track for faculty members focussed on teaching.” Now you lean out from the windows of your Lear jet to shout that we need to hold a constitutional convention to invent it?
You folks at Harvard oughta know that “data-driven” should mean something more than running a bunch of surveys. It should mean some reasonable attempt at a connection with the facts.
Regular readers know I’ve been pointing out the epic badness of the New York Times’ reporting on higher education for some time now. For what it’s worth, I have it on good authority that more than one academic journal is interested in taking a closer look at media bias in higher education coverage.
Of course this is a little like saying I know several clever Davids prepared to flip the bird at slow-witted Goliath. On the other hand, one of them might prove to own a slingshot.
xposted: howtheuniversityworks.com
thinking, “What an unfair question!” Or “You’ve
framed the debate in an obviously unfair or careless way."
And right you are. But since I’m a rich and
powerful chunk of media capital with a stake in
the answer, I don’t care what you think, and
I’m free to compound the unfairness by holding
a false “debate” on a carelessly-phrased question. (Any first-year student in one of my classes learns that “are you for or against” any proposition is always a trick question--you’ve allowed someone else to put you in an intellectual box at the outset.)
This is exactly what the New York Times has done, in its latest bungled attempt at analyzing higher ed. As if framing a loaded question wasn’t enough, they stacked the deck on the against side, 3-2. Against two actual scholars theypolitical hacks, business
administrators and fringe bloviators to say the
paper shouldn’t exist. For window dressing,
I’ll hire two scholars that honestly represent
the situation.
Of course I’ve been pointing out the epic
badness of the New York Times’ reporting on
higher education for some time now. But with
this waxworks, I wasn’t the only one--the
blogosphere spotted faux in this debate from
the first nanosecond.
Furthermore I have it on good authority that
more than one academic journal is interested in
taking a closer look at media bias in higher
education coverage. Of course this is a little
like saying I know several clever Davids
prepared to flip the bird at slow-witted
Goliath. On the other hand, one of them might
prove to own a slingshot.
Dianetics for Higher Ed?
Most prominent is their pimping for the
eccentric Mark C. Taylor, a distance education
entrepreneur and self-proclaimed universal
savant. Taylor’s data-free ruminations on what
the academy bear as much connection to the
actual world of higher education as Scientology
does to particle physics.
Vedder? Three letters for you: AEI. He’s just a
stand-in for David Horowitz in this celebrity
death match. His claim, that tenure “reduces
intellectual diversity,” is unsubstantiated
crap. The fact is that more academics fear for
their academic freedom today than in the
McCarthy era--because they lack access to
tenure.
Trower? She directs COACHE, like the handbag,
with an elegant E for education. Her project is
like a step-child, less mean and less well-
funded higher ed version of Harvard’s toxic b-
school/ed-school partnership--you know, the
folks that brought you Arne Duncan. Unlike
Vedder and Taylor, she actually thinks about
tenure, and correctly advocates for a less
rigid understanding of it
Friday, July 23, 2010
Toward a Fan-Based Research Collaboratory
Cross-posted at New Savanna.
Despite some reservations about fan scholarship—e.g. I’ve seen pointless edit wars at Wikipedia & pros are adept at pointless quarrels as well—I’m seriously thinking about an initiative to see if fans are interested in doing at least some of the descriptive work I call for in the piece on cultural evolution I recently did for the National Humanities Center (cf. this “quasi-festo" for naturalist criticism, and this piece on “Kubla Khan"). I see little prospect that academy-based scholars will under take such work in the near term. The sort of descriptive work I have in mind is not obviously subordinate to an inquiry into the “meaning” of a text. That pretty much means that the work is not unpublisheable on its own; there’s no obvious way to earn professional credit for doing it.
But fans may well be interested in doing such work, but on the texts that interest them. And those texts are only rarely going to be canonical high culture texts. And that’s just fine with me. I’ve done such work on manga and cartoons and would have no problem with doing it on episodes of, e.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Star Trek (any generation).
I’ve recently been doing quite a bit of work on Sita Sings the Blues, an animated film by Nina Paley, which I discuss in the Humanities Center post. As some of you may know, the film is done in four different visual styles. So I’ve made a table with a column for each style and then gone through the film from beginning to end and briefly annotated each segment in the proper column. You can find that table online in a Google docs file here. One of those segments, the Agni Pariksha, is done in a fifth style. I’ve gone through that segment an annotated each “shot” or sequence within it. You can find that here. In prinple each of the some 60+ segments in the film could be described at the level of detail I’ve used in the Agni Pariksha segment.
In fact, one could easily describe a film frame-by-frame. Would that be worthwhile? In some cases, yes, and in some cases no. It depends. There’s really no way of knowing until the work’s been done in at least some cases and we can take a look at it.
It’s clear to me that such descriptive work is a necessary precondition to a deeper knowledge of texts, whether written, filmed, or videotaped. All the cognitive psych and evolutionary psych and neuro-psych in the world is not going to accomplish what can only be accomplished through description. If the pros aren’t going to do the work, then it’s up to the fans. If the fans get into it, then in a decade or two the pros will have no choice but to follow or simply to drop off the edge of the earth.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
If Andrew Breitbart Edited It
The always excellent Amanda Marcotte has been tweeting movie and book reviews if they were edited by Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing hack who doctored a video to get an innocent woman fired (or merely passed along fraudulently doctored video) for petty political gain, and in the face of whose transparent dishonest our president and the entire mainstream media are, at the moment, quivering helplessly. Some of hers:
- “American Pie” is a testament to sexual abstinence
- “Jaws" is a diatribe against the Endangered Species Act.
- “Night of the Living Dead” - Arizona citizens are besieged by shiftless Mexicans in an isolated farmhouse. “ET” demonstrates the necessity of a harsh government response to illegal immigration.
- “Milk" illustrates why gays should stay out of politics.
- “The Stepford Wives” shows why feminism is dangerous for women.
- “Carrie" shows that we all need Jesus in our lives.
- The Scarlet Letter is about good American values attacked by radical feminism
- “The Crucible” argues that you must come down on witches with a swift fury or they will curse your crops. “12 Angry Men” laments how liberalism has caused our justice system to go soft.
- “Brokeback Mountain” is about how gay men aren’t to be trusted.
- “The Accused” is a morality tale about the dangers of false rape accusations.
- “To Kill a Mockingbird” is about corrupt lawyers fomenting racial unrest. Fire Atticus!
- “Glory" is the sequel to “Birth of a Nation”.
- “JFK" is about how Nixon should have won the 1960 Presidential election.
- “Dr. Strangelove” glorifies the nuclear arms race.
- “Easy Rider” is about how dirty hippies have it coming.
- “The Apartment” glorifies the life of the corporate rat race and the executives who rule the roost.
- “Norma Rae” lambasts unionizing as the worst thing that could happen to the American worker.
- “Deliverance" is a heartwarming tale of city slickers learning how to love from salt-of-the-earth rural folks.
- “Dances With Wolves” is about how subjugating Native Americans was all for the best.
- “The Grapes of Wrath” is a diatribe about how the only solutions are free market solutions.
- “Inherit The Wind” is about why creationists are right, and evolutionary theory is Satan’s work.
- “The Shining” glorifies the nuclear family as the only decent way to raise children
- “West Side Story” is about why a little racial animosity works out so well for everyone involved.
- “Annie Hall” is about why it’s dangerous to educate women.
- “Apocalypse Now” is about how war is a morally uplifting adventure.
- “In The Heat Of The Night” is about the dangers of affirmative action.
- “It’s A Wonderful Life” is about why big bankers are great, and why suicide is painless.
- “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” is about what’s wrong with interracial marriage.
- “Citizen Kane” is about the spiritual fulfillment one gets from capitalism.
Anyway, what’s really funny about this exercise is to ask yourself how many of these books and movies actually support this reading. The Scarlet Letter, for example, is a lot more reactionary than most readings of it tend to realize, and the entire ethos of (the original) American Pie is at least about being able to abstain from having your pie and eating it too, so to speak. I also feel like Easy Rider sort of is about how the dirty hippies have it coming, or at least makes it seem like their moral decadence brought their fate on them.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Debating Tenure, Again
By now, many readers will have seen the story in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about the dramatic decline in the number of tenure track faculty at American colleges and universities. The Valve’s own Marc Bousquet is quoted in the story. There is also a series of columns under the “Room for Debate” rubric at the New York Times, called “What if College Tenure Dies?"
The comments on the Chronicle story expose some of the problems in the way the story is framed. The basic graph shows a decline in the percentage (not number) of tenure track jobs in academia across the board (from 57% in 1975 to 31% in 2007), which then provokes a round of debate amongst pro-tenure (i.e., Cary Nelson) and anti-tenure (i.e., Mark C. Taylor) academics, who are quoted in the article and then expand on their views in the Times. No one disputes that there’s been a surge of adjunct hiring at established universities in recent years, and no one disputes that colleges and universities often try to downplay through reclassification the amount of teaching that is done by graduate students (that said, I think it’s incorrect to include graduate student instructors as “non-tenure track,” since in principle graduate students are on their way to tenure track jobs in the future; the number of courses/students taught by graduate students should be in its own category).
But what if the sharp decline in the percentage of tenure track jobs is not due to decisions to eliminate the idea of tenure, so much as the growth of community colleges and the rise of for-profit institutions? The former only rarely have tenure track positions, while the latter never do. As I understand it, very few traditional colleges or universities have actually decided to abandon tenure in recent years. The Chronicle only cites Evergreen State College; Bennington College, not cited in the essay, also abolished tenure in 1994. Does anyone know of other colleges or universities that have gone this route? If that’s it, this is almost certainly a misdirected debate.
Questions by commenter “bmartin” (#12) at the Chronicle fall along the lines of my own objection:
An interesting analysis, but I would like to see the actual numbers not just the percentages. By what amount has the overall higher education enterprise increased since 1975? Is the increasing percentage of non-tenured positions due in part to the increase in for-profit institutions? Has the actual number of tenured positions decreased? I presume the actual report will include the numbers but it would be helpful to include these in the summary.
The actual Department of Education/AAUP report from which the Chronicle derives its numbers hasn’t been publicly released yet; when it is, we’ll be able to get a more exact picture of what exactly is happening vis a vis community colleges and for-profit institutions. Unfortunately, this Chronicle article, extracting one factoid without sufficient “internals,” as Nate Silver might call them, seems to be designed to provoke a contentious debate over “abolishing tenure,” which remains for most universities a non-issue.
Florence Nightingale, Letters from Egypt
Having cleared at least the semblance of a path through the draft thesis chapters that have taken up the bulk of my time since my summer class wrapped up at the end of June, I’m finally turning my attention back to my summer research project, which is to extend and perhaps even complete the essay on Ahdaf Soueif that I’ve posted about here before. Yes, that’s right, it’s not done yet. It got as far as a conference paper last year, and since then, in between other projects, I’ve been collecting references and sources for it and trying to conceptualize what it is I hope that the final essay will do, or be about and where exactly I might submit it. My basic idea is to fill in more details about In the Eye of the Sun and then develop a comparison between it and The Map of Love--which I’ve just finished re-re-reading. The Map of Love has a more complex form than In the Eye of the Sun, interweaving the story of two 20th-century women (Isabel, an American, and Amal, an Egyptian who turns out to be Isabel’s cousin) with the story of Lady Anna Winterbourne, an Edwardian Englishwoman who travels to--and eventually marries and lives in--Egypt. While my motivating interest is still the intertextual relationship between Soueif’s work and George Eliot’s, The Map of Love clearly has strong ties to other literary sources, particularly accounts of “lady travellers” in Egypt. Lucie Duff Gordon is probably the most famous, but I’ve also signed out of the library a lovely illustrated edition of Florence Nightingale’s Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile 1849-50, which turns out to be quite entertaining. For instance, like me she wages war on biting insects:
I and the gnats have so many ways of outwitting each other. X and Mr B. look as if they had the small-pox; but I, who would sleep in an Indian rubber tub with a tallow candle in my mouth if it were suggested, shut my windows before sundown; and I hear those who are in, furling their wings and uttering little infernal cries of triumph. Then I set my door open, and put a light in the passage, and they think I’m there, and follow; but I’m not,--don’t tell them. Then, when night comes, I take out a large sheet of paper and begin to write, and they believe I’m not thinking of sleep. But I leave off in the middle of a word, run with all my might at the Levinge [an elaborate netted sleeping bag], where I insert myself by so small a hole that you would say a camel could get through the eye of a needle; and then I clap my hands, and sing a little ode in honour of Mercury, the god of theft, because I have stolen myself from the gnats. Meanwhile I hear their whistle of rage and disappointment, and I see their proboscises coming through the curtains, as if they would fly away with the whole concern.
In a more serious vein, she often reflects on what she perceives of “Mahometism.” Carefully fitted up in “Egyptian dress,” including a complete veil, for instance, she is able to step inside a mosque to observe:
That quarter of an hour seemed to reveal to one what it is to be a woman in these countries, where Christ has not been to raise us. God save them, for it is a hopeless life. . . . Still, the mosque struck me with a pleasant feeling; X was struck with its irreverence. Some were at their prayers; but one was making baskets, another was telling Arabian Night stories to a whole group of listeners, sitting round him--others were asleep. I am much more struck with the irreverence of a London church.
It is so pleasant to see a place where any man may go for a moment’s quiet, and there is none to find fault with him, nor make him afraid. Here the homeless finds a home, the weary repose, the busy leisure,--if I could have said where any woman may go for an hour’s rest, to me the feeling would have been perfect,--perfect at least compared with the streets of London and Edinburgh, where there is not a spot on earth a poor woman may call her own to find repose in. The mosque leaves the more religious impression of the two, it is the better place of worship,--not than St. Peter’s, perhaps, but better than St. Paul’s.
I don’t know why it surprised me, from the author of Cassandra, after all, but I was struck by how often her interest and enjoyment in the scenes she observes are undercut, or at least rendered more problematic, by her consciousness of her sex and the complications it brings:
We have had a delightful week at Cairo. I wish we were going to stay longer. It is the riding in the streets, above all, which is so delightful, of which one never wearies; the latticed windows meeting overhead, the pearls of Moorish architecture at every corner, the looking up to the blue sky and golden sunlight from the wells of streets and in the bazaars, the streets entirely roofed in; and as you stand bargaining for a pair of yellow slippers, you see the corner of a street with the spring of an arch covered with Moorish network, and the sunlight pouring through the square holes left in the roof which shuts in the street. . .
In riding home by moonlight, ... there is not a corner which is not a picture; and no picture can give an idea of the colouring. But you don’t enjoy all this for nothing. A Christian female dog has two titles of dishonour here, and she cannot stir out without her ass, her running ass-driver, and at least one gentleman or a dragoman. A la langue this dependence becomes tiresome beyond what a European can conceive. It is not that one minds being spat at (which I have been) for a religion which one loves, but one is so afraid of the gentlemen of one’s party noticing any insult, as an Englishman’s complaint would bring a bastinado upon the poor wretch, which has often ended in death.
Like Soueif’s Lady Anna, she is particularly fascinated and spiritually moved by the desert. “The oftener you are astonished at it, the more like a stranger a mysterious power it seems,” she remarks;
While the earth in our country is rich and variegated with light, and crowded with animation, the sky above contrasts with its deadness. Here, on the other hand, the sky is radiant, the light is living, the golden light which seems to pour not only from the sun, but from all the points of the transparent blue heavens. One looks down, and the ungrateful earth lies there, hopeless and helpless, a dying, withered desert: one almost fancies one hears the Devil laughing as he dares even Almighty power to bring forth bread.
This is what gives one a supernatural, mysterious feeling in Egypt,--the looks naturally turn to the sky when the earth has no beauty that one should desire it, and the heavens have all beauty. The struggle between God and the Devil is perpetually visible before one’s thoughts, for the earth seems the abode of the Devil, the heavens of God; and you do not wonder at the Orientals being the mystical people they have become, nor at the Europeans, where all beauty is of the earth, and the thoughts turn to the earth, becoming a practical, active people.
Here’s an excerpt from Lady Anna’s (fictional) journal:
We rode on, and we stopped only twice. Once when we made camp for the night. The other earlier: when the sun set beyond the Gulf of Suez, making clear to me whence came the name the ‘Red’ Sea, for the setting sun brought out the red and black of the ore in the mountains and the sea reflected it all back. All the reds, and yellows and orange and purple, were in that wonderful landscape, and as it faded and the colours all round us melted more and more into gentleness, I thought there should be some act--some formal recognition of this daily magnificence. Even as the thought formed itself in my mind, we came to a halt as if by agreement. The animals knelt, the men dismounted and turned towards the South-East. One voice was lifted: ‘Allahu Akbar’, and they prayed silently together.
I might think that Soueif is delicately parodying the orientalizing English tendency to translate the Egyptian landscape into something exotically mystical, except that in her scene, Anna too is moved to prayer and to peace--and after all, isn’t there something spiritually uplifting about extraordinary natural beauty? For George Eliot, it’s the landscapes of one’s childhood that carry one towards “religious” peace and truth. What’s interesting in these examples (well, one among many interesting things) is the way an unfamiliar landscape opens up new spiritual ideas or possibilities.
(x-posted)
Monday, July 19, 2010
Art art Art
Apparently, Roger Ebert recently declared that “Video games can never be art.” After making him “an object of scorn and incredulity for members of the gaming press, not to mention the Great Unpunctuated out there on the boards,” as a friend of mine put it, this categorical statement also provoked an interesting response from “Game innovator Kellee Santiago” which provoked Ebert, in turn to offer a more careful and considered effort to clarify his position:
I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say “never,” because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.
I find the conversation interesting and thought provoking, though—full disclosure—I’m more or less totally apathetic towards video games themselves; having once been an avid gamer in the days when Starcraft hadn’t yet become the Korean national sport, video games are sort of an addiction I’ve kicked and, all things considered, am as fearful as an ex-smoker of revisiting. I’m also some combination of uninterested in the question and un-persuaded by Ebert’s argument, which is probably telling in its own way. But if these kinds of conversations tend to do more to reveal our own underlying preconceptions and beliefs than actually lead to any effective resolution, then maybe that, in and of itself, is a kind of useful mirror held up to reality. If you’re interested in the actual debate, you should really view Santiago’s video response to Ebert; though I think she’s hampered by adopting his critical orientation, it’s still a nicely put together presentation of the state-of-the-art of game design, which she frames as being still at a “cave-painting” stage of development, full of a potential that has yet to fully blossom. But I’m more interested in the rhetoric Ebert uses to argue with her (in a post, by the way, which has received well over four thousand comments).
After carefully finding fault—in turn—with each of the definitions of “art” which Santiago puts forward as ways of including video games under the rubric, he gets to his own argument:
Kellee Santiago has arrived at this point lacking a convincing definition of art…My notion is that it grows better the more it improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might call the artist’s soul, or vision. Countless artists have drawn countless nudes. They are all working from nature. Some of there paintings are masterpieces, most are very bad indeed. How do we tell the difference? We know. It is a matter, yes, of taste.
…These three are just a small selection of games, she says, “that crossed that boundary into artistic expression.” IMHO, that boundary remains resolutely uncrossed…The three games she chooses as examples do not raise my hopes for a video game that will deserve my attention long enough to play it. They are, I regret to say, pathetic. I repeat: “No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."
I hope that trimming his words down a bit helps demonstrate the appeal to authority at the core of this argument, the extent to which his argument is essentially this:
1. None of her definitions of Art—which would include video games—are good enough. This is true because I know it to be so.
2. Here’s my definition of Art: the difference between good art and bad art is that I know it to be so.
3. The games she selects as good are not good, because I know it to be so.
Now, that’s a bit of an injustice to Ebert, but only a bit. And I wonder if it’s possible to discuss whether or not something is “art” without making the argument, ultimately, into a contest between the authority to arbitrarily decide which arbitrary definition will be the one that obtains. I suspect it isn’t.
A friend to whom I often send one-sentence email queries and receive, in return, carefully thought out and insightful analysis, sent me the following:
…this vein of curmudgeonism reveals him as some kind of modernist; he seems convinced that the dispersed expressive touches in videogames will never match the formal concentration of poetry, which is probably true. Videogames are unconvincing as that kind of art. I would find it at least a little embarrassing to claim that my favorite games, even the winningly pretentious ones, are expressive or moving like film is. They start to look more credible next to some kinds of minimalism, 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. Besides which, Benjamin would tell us that the question of whether videogames count as art defers the question of how they have already changed the arts just by existing (and, since the name’s been dropped, the ebay sweatshop economy of World of Warcraft is a pretty shocking literalization of Benjamin’s insight that the conditions of aesthetic appreciation mimic the conditions of labor).
That’s a lot smarter than I would have been able to come up with, but I think the difference between a reading like that and the fairly fruitless debate Ebert and Santiago were having illustrates the extent to which marshalling arguments that video games (or whatever) are or aren’t “Art” just underscores the essentially arbitrary nature of that distinction, making the argument from authority the unavoidable destination. Comparing video game to sculpture, by contrast, lets us think through how different “Art” is from “Art,” letting us put into play all the interesting ways that the various objets we’ve all decided to acknowledge as art are radically different from each other in practice. And that difference, it seems to me, is actually interesting, even useful. The manner in which one experiences a film is just so different from how one experiences a novel, a sculpture, a painting, something it’s almost shocking to see Ebert fail to recognize. There’s something totally bizarre, in fact, about seeing him place screen-captured stills of various video games next to a still of George Melies’ 1902 A Voyage to the Moon; what on earth would lead a film critic to imagine that a still could in any way represent what was interesting about a moving picture? By the same token, when he places a series of youtube clips of A Voyage to the Moon next to you tube clips of video games, what on earth would lead him to think that it was a useful comparison to place a viewing of a medium meant to be viewed side-by-side with a viewing of a medium meant to be played? If you strip the experience of playing a game from it—if you simply render it into a movie—you sort of remove its reason for existing. You don’t take pictures of sculptures and think you’ve captured their essence; why would we imagine that a youtube clip of a video game tells us anything useful about what it is (much less can be)?
To give the last word to someone who actually knows what he’s talking about, Austin Grossman—a video game designer and novelist (and Berkelyan apparently, though I’ve never met him) happens to have just written this:
I think a great deal of aesthetic confusion arises from the fact that the form is still deeply, hopelessly invested in competing with or besting cinema — the idea that video games would be the successor, the completion, the fulfillment of film; that it would make the plane of the movie or television screen porous, and you the gamer would find yourself in the place of a film’s protagonist. This is a fantasy by which the medium is still judged, even though it’s hopelessly poor at delivering the satisfactions we’re most sensitized to, the experiences of narrative and psychologically sophisticated characterization that the film and the novel have accomplished at such a high level. And it’s a confusion that makes the voice of the interactive medium, if there truly is one, harder to hear.
…I would rather call it “art half-accomplished.” It fails a lot, and when it succeeds, it does so in ways we only partly sense and don’t even have an aesthetic language to describe. (Some developers banish the term “fun” from their vocabularies entirely, in order to force the development of more specific, substantive, useful critical terms). The sense of fulfillment, of a real aesthetic experience unalloyed by a feeling of falseness, is still fleeting and anecdotal. It shows up when it isn’t expected, often emerging from an unplanned coming-together of various game elements. It’s usually off the narrative point, a subtler note in a bombastic storyline that keeps crashing along without anyone — designer or player — much caring about it. I played Zork with less attention to solving puzzles than with letting the space of an underground empire grow in my imagination, stretching out from under my ordinary white house. Doom (1993) was a brilliant accomplishment, and I played dozens of hours, but the thing I remember with the most feeling is being able to look out a window at the lush, tropical surface of Mars.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Garbage In
Bashing the romantic notion of the artist against the computational power of an algorithm and you get, if nothing else, amusing (and likely short-lived) internet memes. You may have heard of the “I write like” thing that a programmer in Montenegro, Dmitry Chestnykh, put together. Basically, you copy and paste some chunks of your or someone else’s prose into a window and it uses code developed for detecting spam to tell you which famous writer you “write like.” I write like Dan Brown, I was delighted to find. For fun, I had it analyze some Nigerian 419 spam emails and discovered that while most write like David Foster Wallace, “MISS STEPHANIE UJU” writes like Shakespeare. It’s received sufficient notoriety in the last few days to spark some media attention and even some backlash (originally, it would tell you which of thirty-seven white male authors and three white female authors you wrote like; apparently the canon has been opened up a bit in response).
Anyway, having randomly also just come across digital artist Jason Huff’s “AutoSummarize” project, however, an experiment presented itself. Huff took “the top 100 most downloaded copyright free books” and used Microsoft Word 2008’s AutoSummarize function to summarize them, in their entirety, into ten sentence versions (“Word has examined the document and picked the sentences most relevant to the main theme”). The result is sort of wonderful. Here, for example, is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain
“All right. “All right. “Why, Jim?”
“Blamed if I would, Jim.”
“Jim!”
“Jim!”
“WHAT raft, Jim?”
Jim says:
“Where’s Jim?”
“Why, Jim?”
And I’m satisfied. That makes me happy. But that gave me an idea: plug that in to the “Write like” program and see who it “writes like.” And guess what? It writes like Mark Twain!
Better Critics Please
On hearing that Shirley Jackson is getting a Library of America volume, Malcolm Jones was suspicious that “the Library of America is running out of writers”:
Latest reasons for suspicion: at the end of April, the LOA will publish a slim volume containing John Updike’s famous New Yorker farewell to Ted Williams, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” fleshed out with a little more eulogizing, published when Williams died. There has already been a LOA volume devoted to baseball writing, joining other volumes about American subjects (food, New York, Los Angeles, the legacies of Lincoln and Twain, the environment). You could file all these volumes under the heading, “Cleverly Curating the Franchise.” But somehow the Updike volume seems not just physically thin but insubstantial—too much made of a good thing. And then, in May, here comes an entire volume dedicated to …. Shirley Jackson? A writer mostly famous for one short story, “The Lottery.” Is LOA about to jump the shark?
…In uniform, black-jacketed editions, the works of Melville, Twain, Wharton, Faulkner and dozens of other Rushmore-sized American authors have marched onto our bookshelves…In the last couple of years, as John Cheever, John Ashbery and Raymond Carver got their own volumes, it became clear that the LOA wasn’t going to wait any longer for time’s verdict. It was almost like the production schedule was dictating the editorial decisions. Hurry up, we’ve got to have some more great writers for the fall list! But the inclusion of those authors never raised critical eyebrows (perhaps they should’ve—taken a good look at all of Cheever lately? Not pretty). Nor did the more interesting editorial choices of the past few years—Nathaniel West, Powell. But Shirley Jackson? Not a bad writer, but her inclusion seems so random, haphazard. Why Jackson before Jean Stafford, or Peter Taylor, Wallace Stegner, or why not simply more of James M. Cain than The Postman Always Rings Twice?
Laura Miller, on the other hand, is suspicious of Malcolm Jones:
The question of whether a figure like Jackson is sufficiently “Rushmore-sized” (Jones’ term) to deserve inclusion in a series of collections dedicated to such writers as Mark Twain and William Faulkner was again brought to mind by a blog posting by Lee Siegel at the New York Observer. [here] “Where Have All the Mailers Gone?” it was called, and in it Siegel lamented the irrelevance of fiction since the heyday of such titans as “Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Roth, Cheever, Malamud” and pointed to the ascendancy of nonfiction in its stead. Even the commercial fiction of yore, Siegel maintains, “mattered to people” more than today’s bestsellers. The soapy epics of Herman Wouk and Marjorie Kellogg “illumined the ordinary events of ordinary lives ... and they were as primal as the bard singing around the pre-Homeric fire.”
While Siegel’s posting was for the most part too silly and uninformed to bother responding to, it serves as a reminder of just how arbitrary, unreliable and tiresome the Literary Greatness Sweepstakes can be. Make no mistake: Mid-20th-century Americans believed that novels by the jostling alpha males on Siegel’s list were important and “central to their lives” largely because a chorus of cultural authority figures united to tell them so. That’s not to say that those novelists weren’t fine writers, or that the depiction of an upwardly striving middle-class descended from relatively recent immigrants (many of them Jewish) didn’t provide lively new subject matter. But it certainly wasn’t everyone’s story (as it was often made out to be), or a literature that everyone found interesting or that everyone would have consumed with “existential urgency and intensity” in absence of those endorsements.
Jackson, mostly unendorsed, wrote during more or less the same period, but where the fiction of Mailer and Bellow is expansive, hers is (intentionally) claustrophobic. She was the bard of the domestic nightmare (as Ruth Franklin astutely pointed out in a recent essay for the New Republic), of people who were trapped, excluded, usurped and pushed in a corner to wither away unnoticed. If there was anything Homeric about her—and come to think of it, I believe there was—it was the serene pitilessness with which she dispensed their doom….Those “meek little wives” Raymond Chandler wrote about at the beginning of “Red Wind”—the ones who, under the influence of the Santa Ana, suddenly begin to “feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks”? Those are Jackson’s people. Was their experience any less American—or any less “central”—than Alexander Portnoy’s or Rabbit Angstrom’s?
Is Jackson as “great” a writer as Bellow or Malamud? Oh, I don’t know. I suppose not, by whatever conventional standards of greatness are still being propped up by the mugs who advocate such competitions. But, as someone who has manfully hacked her way through the anecdotal thickets of “The Adventures of Augie March” ("What I want to know,” I crankily asked a friend about two-thirds of the way through, “is when the adventures are going to start"), I can say that such questions come to seem more meaningless to me every day.
Among other things, I’m struck by the performance aspect of both Jones’ and Siegel’s pieces. Miller actually makes a positive case for the terms in which Shirley Jackson is good—the case for the defense, as it were; biased, but usefully so -- and you can agree or disagree, however you want. But I feel like both Jones and Siegel are just performing the usual rote rendition of “literary curmudgeon” without any burden to defend or define the alternative to whatever it is they’re diagnosing (except some vague sense that something would/could/should be better). Perhaps this is what the Newsweek website means when it describes Jones as serving as an “all-purpose culture writer”?
After all, while I get a clear sense for why Miller values Shirley Jackson’s work—which would seem to be an important thing for a critic to do—one looks in vain for a sense of why “Jean Stafford, or Peter Taylor, Wallace Stegner, or more of James M. Cain” seem so obviously a better choice than Shirley Jackson. He just says it as if it’s obvious. Which is to say, even if we grant that Malcolm Jones could recount their virtues as writers in glorious detail, the fact that he didn’t is more telling to me: his argument proceeds not so much by asking you to take his word for their superiority, but rather, by implying that the case is so intuitive and obvious that he doesn’t even have to make it, establishes an “us” of the critical know-betters, defined pretty much only in terms of our preference for writers besides Shirley Jackson. Note, for example, that he doesn’t actually argue that Jackson is undeserving, either; to do would mean actually to engage with the nature of her writing, and he has no apparent interest in doing that. Easier to damn her faint praise (“A writer mostly famous for one short story…Not a bad writer”) and then rely on your ignorance (now officially confirmed) of all the other stuff she wrote.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
The United States of Alabama
Only way to please me
turn around and leave
and walk away
--Alabama Getaway, lyrics by Robert Hunter
Many who learn that the University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB) amputated a $650,000 state appropriation, not to mention a flow of grant money, just to rid itself of a labor center (and Glenn Feldman, the accomplished historian who directed it) will focus on regional differences. One early commenter to Peter Schmidt’s report for the Chronicle blamed “Dixie” culture, saying that this is what happens to someone who “bucks the system in that part of the country. The more the South changes, the more it remain the same."
As a veteran of the Southern-gothic, All-The-Kings-Men style politics of one right-to-work state university with close administrator connections to UAB, I guess my first impulse was at least similar: I can still remember the liberation I felt when I left my tenured position at the scandal-ridden University of Louisville (UL), where concerned faculty were run out of town for questioning the wall-to-wall administrative solidarity that protected a dean embezzling his federal grants, a scheme of extreme work-study that has turned thousands of students into the serfs of UPS, and claims of “research-1” status for a campus with a six-year graduation rate hovering around 30 percent.
As just one small instance of my own experience: the aforementioned embezzling dean tried to shut down the academic labor journal I founded (then being edited by one of my graduate students and my friend and colleague Wayne Ross, one of the many who left UL-- in his case moving on to Canada’s answer to Cal-Berkeley, the University of British Columbia). That little act of nastiness wasn’t even one of the 30+ official faculty complaints about that one individual that the UL administrative Borg was covering up. But what drove us away was in most cases not one act; there were dozens of acts that each dissenter experienced, some raising to the level of grievable offenses, others just making life hard.
‘Sweet Home USA’ for Business
But despite that temptation, my second impulse is more analytical. The point isn’t any minor differences (even differences of degree) displayed by scandal-plagued politicos and jet-setting higher ed “leadership” in Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee over the past decade. The real point, as commenter Ellen Schrecker points out, is the similarities--that labor and labor scholarship continue to be under assault across the country.
I’d go further than Ellen with the similarities--it’s a question of the turn toward steadily more anti-democratic practices of education administration more broadly. Not to mention the related notion that politicians are, effectively, the “managers” of the public sphere that we can trace to Democrats Clinton and Gore, right on down to their intellectual heir and Wal-mart admirer currently occupying the White House.
It’s a pretty big picture, and one that clearly doesn’t yield to partisan analysis: the scary stuff is what Democrats and Republicans agree on. Obama’s ed secretary Arne Duncan made Tennessee sole winner of the reviled Race to the Top competition because of the state’s willingness to do to both K-12 and higher ed what he’d already done in Chicago: turn schools over to private and for-profit managers; silence teachers, students, and parents; strip down the curriculum; increase the direct voice of commercial interests in administration at every level.
Likewise, the UAB business school dean (Klock) responsible for pushing first practiced his hatcheting ways here in California. It’s not a regional issue at all or even restricted to higher education workplaces.
The many things that should concern us about Feldman’s experience in Alabama are all things happening in schools at every level across the country:
+ Administrator pro-business bias
+ Consolidation of administrator power
+ Declining faculty power and declining faculty solidarity
+ Abuse of credentialing (UAB has demanded that full-professor Feldman go back to school and earn a year’s worth of credits to retain his tenure)
+ Ever-closer ties between corporations, politics and the campus
+ Business influence on curriculum
+ The culture-struggle practice of administration, designed to produce compliant subjectivities and expel dissenters
+ A growing legal web that muzzles faculty governance speech at public institutions
+ The abuse of standards of civility and collegiality to paint an understandably upset victim as unreasonable, a tendency in which I have to say that Peter Schmidt’s reporting unfortunately participates (though to be fair to Schmidt I haven’t seen the documents he characterizes).
In general, though, on this subject I agree with the complaints of commenter “thomasjefferson”:
“Let’s see. He was a tenured, full professor at UAB for 14 years. They shut down the labor center of which he was director and then they tried to set him up for termination by trying to get him to take 18 grad hours in a subject in which they’re planning to shut down the department. And he’s not happy about that. I wonder why?”
And with commenter “mchag12”:
“The relationship with the faculty at public universities is just becoming untenable as faculty are treated as line items to be dispensed with at will by high paid administrators. What would you do, azprof, if your department was slated for demolition and your university actually asked the state legislature to defund it? Back out of the room shuffling and bowing and repeating thank you, thank you? If you think you are safe, you’re not."
That last line by mchag says it all.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Romantic Love, Conversation, Biology, and Culture
Note: This post grew out of reflection on an earlier post on bundling.
Cross-posted at New Savanna.
When I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins I took a course in Medieval literature and was thoroughly gobsmacked when I learned that romantic love had been invented in 12th century France. Until then I’d believed it to be a human universal – one and only, forever and ever, that was just how it was, no? Well, not quite.
What arose in Medieval Europe is something called Courtly Love, a set of conventions used by high-born men in wooing their lovers. And these lovers were not their wives, nor wives to be. For aristocratic marriage had little to do with personal preference; it was politics. Powerful families would forge alliances by arranging marriages among their young.
In time, over the course of centuries, so the story went, romantic love was transformed from an aristocratic game into a set of conventions used to define the necessary, or at least the ideal, precondition for any marriage. This set of conventions was in place, at least among the middle class, by the time Jane Austen wrote her novels in the early 19th Century. Those conventions have remained more or less in place up to the present, though they’ve become a bit tattered in the last decade or three as a soaring divorce rate has made it abundantly clear that true love does not last forever. That, of course, is not exactly news – why, for example, did Flaubert write Madame Bovary? – but the myth is so attractive that it dies hard.
That was the state of things during my undergraduate years – which coincided with the emergence of feminist activism in the late 1960s. Whatever their personal experience, everyone gave lip service to one and only forever and ever and believed that it was human nature. In that context, then, the revelations of the learned scholars shook my world.
Counter-Revolution
Learned scholars, however, do not constitute a single tribe. Their tribes are many, and often contentious. Even as the literati were blissfully proclaiming the recent and Western origin of romantic love, other scholars set out to prove them wrong. In 1992, for example, W. R. Jankowiak and E. F. Fischer published “A cross-cultural perspective on romantic love” (Ethnology 31: 149-155). They defined romantic love as “any intense attraction that involves the idealization of the other, within an erotic context, with the expectation of enduring for some time into the future” and they contrasted this with “the companionship phase of love . . . which is characterized by the growth of a more peaceful, comfortable, and fulfilling relationship.” They examined ethnographic data on 166 societies from around the world and discovered romantic love in 88.5 percent of them, suggesting “that romantic love constitutes a human universal, or at the least a near-universal.”
More recently Jonathan Gottschall and Marcus Nordland, published Romantic Love: A Literary Universal? (Philosophy and Literature 30: 450-470, 2006). They conducted a cross-cultural study of folktales from 79 cultures and at least one reference to romantic love in 55 of those collections and multiple references in 39 collections. They assert that their study “offers staunch support to the existing evidence that romantic love is a statistical cultural universal. It would also seem to increase the probability that romantic love may be an absolute cultural universal offers staunch support to the existing evidence that romantic love is a statistical cultural universal.” “Statistical universal” is a term of art meaning that something is in a lot of places, but not everywhere, yet. It seems clear that if Gottschall and Nordland were to place a bet, they bet that further research would find that romantic love is a true cultural universal, present in every culture for which we have reliable records.
Still more recently, just yesterday in the time-scale of academic publishing, Brian Boyd has asserted, with the calm assurance of senior scholar in command of wide learning, that “cross-cultural, neurological, and cross-species studies have demonstrated the workings of romantic love across societies and even species” (The Origin of Stories, Harvard 2009, p. 341). To this, Michael Bérubé has replied, with the calm assurance of senior scholar in command of wide learning, but learning leavened with a dash of school-boy wit:
This just won’t wash. Other species might court and mate for life, but they do not engage in romantic love in the sense that humanists employ the term, save perhaps for the cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew. “Romantic love” does not mean “mammals doing it like mammals”; it refers to the conventions of courtly love, which were indeed invented in the European middle ages and cannot be found in ancient literatures or cultures. Those conventions are culturally and historically specific variations on our underlying (and polymorphous) biological imperatives, just as the institution of the Bridezilla and the $25,000 wedding is specific to our own addled time and place.
What’s going on here? Who’s right?
Back to the Drawing Board: There’s that pesky elephant
I don’t know. We don’t know. Not any more.
I’m inclined to invoke that hoary old story of the blind men who, upon examining a large beast, are unable to decided what beast it is, or even whether or not it is a beast at all. We, of course, know that they’re examining an elephant, but such different parts of the elephant – tusks, years, legs, tail – that they reach vastly different conclusions about the object under scrutiny.
In the case of romantic love, I believe we’re in much the same position as those blind men. But, in our case, there is no transcendent story-teller who actually knows what creature is under scrutiny. Rather, it is up to us to approximate that story-teller by making more and more sophisticated observations and examining them through richer concepts and models about human culture and behavior.
There is no point in continuing to argue using existing observations, methods, and theories. In light of the existing contretemps we would do well to consider such arguments to be ideological in nature and thus pointless, except, of course, to all-knowing ideologues. Meanwhile, let’s take a look around and see what else is there to be explained.
Companionship, Conversation, and the Novel
Let’s return to Jankowiak and Fischer, and their contrast between the romantic phase and the companionship phase of love, a distinction, I believe, that is common, and which I accept. This companionship, is it too universal?
Take those Medieval aristocrats who were playing courtship games on the side: Did they have a companionate relationship with their spouses? I’m guessing that in some cases, yes, and in other cases no. These marriages, after all, were arranged by parents for political ends. If companionship developed in the marriage, fine; if not, no big deal. For companionship was not the point, it was not part of the ideology.
And then we have my standard passage from John Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Preface to Book 1:
God in the first ordaining of marriage taught us to what end he did it, in words expressly implying the apt and cheerful conversation of man with woman, to comfort and refresh him against the evil of solitary life, not mentioning the purpose of generation till afterwards, as being but a secondary end in dignity, though not in necessity: yet now, if any two be but once handed in the church, and have tasted in any sort the nuptial bed, let them find themselves never so mistaken in their dispositions through any error, concealment, or misadventure, that through their different tempers, thoughts and constitutions, they can neither be to one another a remedy against loneliness nor live in any union or contentment all their days…
That strikes me as an assertion of the need for companionship between spouses – cheerful conversation – and a rather emphatic assertion at that. Would Milton have made such an assertion if it had, in fact, been the common understanding of the day? That seems unlikely to me, though I could be wrong, as I am not a scholar of 17th century English family practices.
But the late Lawrence Stone was, and in 1977 he published a ground-breaking study, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (Harper & Row) in which he argued that, over a period of three centuries, family organization underwent a transition that started with the Open Lineage Family – permeable by outside influences, with strong “loyalty to ancestors and to living kind” (p. 4). It was succeeded by the Restricted Patriarchal Nuclear Family P. 7):
which saw the decline of loyalties to lineage, kin, patron, and local community as they were increasingly replaced by more universalistic loyalties to the nation state and its head and to a particular sect or Church. As a result, ‘boundary awareness’ became more exclusively confined to the nuclear family, which consequently became more closed off from external influences, either or the kin or of the community.
Finally, during the last half of the 19th Century, the Closed Domesticated Nuclear Family emerges among “the upper bourgeoisie and squirarchy” (pp. 7-8):
This was the decisive shift, for this new type of family was the product of the rise of Affective Individualism. It was a family organized around the principle of personal autonomy, and bound together by strong affective ties. Husbands and wives personally selected each other rather than obeying parental wishes, and their prime motives were now long-term personal affection rather than economic or status advantage for the lineage as a whole … Patriarchical attitudes within the home markedly declined, and greater autonomy was granted not only to children, but also to wives.
This was a family in which companionship between husband and wife was important, for that companionship was now the foundation of family organization. And this is the family structure that is at the heart of the British novel in the late 18th century and into the 19th century. The novel and the family structure had a reciprocal relationship (dialectical?) in which the demands of this family structure created an audience for the novel and the novel, in turn articulated the inner-workings and hidden designs of the family.
Out of what biological equipment did the novel help people construct their familial relations? Let us speculate, and freely – for what else can we do? If we’re to search for evidence, we’ve got to make a guess about what we’re looking for before there’s any point to setting out. However, we do want our speculation to be biologically plausible. So, calling on chess as a metaphor, let’s select our pieces from biology while our speculation will be the game play.
Biology: Attachment and Caring
In a parenthetical remark which I elided from my quotation, Jankowiak and Fischer glossed the companionship phase as attachment, which has been a term of art since John Bowlby published a book of that title (Attachment, Basic Books 1969). Bowlby was interested in the relationship between and infant and it’s mother and used the term “attachment” to name that relationship. The mother is the center of the infant’s (psychological) world; as such, she is the infant’s primary point of attachment to the human world. Subsequent to Bowlby, other thinkers have used his idea of attachment in thinking about adult love relationships (e.g. Shaver, Hazan, and Bradshaw, 1988).
What is particularly interesting about the model developed by Shaver et al, is that it involves three independent behavioral systems, attachment, care giving, and sexuality. Attachment is the relationship the infant has to the mother. No matter how strong the attachment, however, it would not be biologically efficacious if it were not reliably answered by the mother’s care giving behavior. As for sexuality, I take it as given that it is independent of the other two. But let’s set it aside for the moment.
The assertion about attachment is that this system that originally bound the infant to its mother is now, in adolescence and adulthood, being repurposed to bind the lover to his (or her) beloved. The sense of the beloved’s supreme perfection, often in contrast with one’s own unworthiness, was a staple of courtly love and seems characteristic of romantic love. Here’s Romeo about Juliet:
O she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear—
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows
As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows.
And Cleopatra on Antony:
His legs bestrid the ocean: his rear’d arm
Crested the world: his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There was no winter in’t; an autumn ‘twas
That grew the more by reaping: his delights
Were dolphin-like; they show’d his back above
The element they lived in: in his livery
Walk’d crowns and crownets; realms and islands were
As plates dropp’d from his pocket.
That’s not the description of a man. It’s a description of a transcendent being.
But one cannot build an on-going relationship on such (abject) adoration. Indeed, such adoration doesn’t even require interaction with one’s beloved. After all, Dante only met Beatrice twice, yet he wrote a book about his lovge for her, La Vita Nuova, and had her be his guide in the Divine Comedy. No doubt it takes a peculiar, and gifted, temperament to find fulfillment in such intense love at a distance, but the mere possibility underlines the peculiar nature of adult attachment.
And so, attachment is, in fact, complemented both by care giving and sexuality. So, Shaver et al. suggest (p. 89):
Sexual attraction can increase very quickly and pull people into a relationship. Attachment and care giving, both perhaps aspects of what Sternberg calls intimacy, develop more slowly. In a secure relationship, attachment and care giving probably develop in tandem, each person providing responsive kindness and support which the other person comfortably relies upon.
But what is it that “determines” how these different behavioral systems are recruited into the ongoing relationship? It might be biology, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Rather, I suspect it is a combination of the individual preferences of those involved in the relationship and the cultural models available. Many of the models are provided in expressive works of literature and other narrative media, such as movies, opera, and so forth.
Attachment, sexuality, and care-giving, those are game pieces provided by human biology. They are universal. People in every social group in every culture experience each of these during their lives. But how they are combined into a single relationship, that is not at all dictated by biology. Cultures have great leeway in telling stories that combine these systems in various ways. Individuals within those cultures, they too have some room to move. Their biology doesn’t dictate their lives. But it places constraints on them, as does their culture.
It is not easy to live a life that differs from those laid out in the dominant narratives of one’s society. But it is possible, especially in the large and diverse societies that exist in much of the modern world. The very open-ness of biological possibility, of one’s human nature, thus provides the possibility of escaping the strictures of an oppressive social regime.
Reference
Phillip Shaver, Cindy Hazan, and Donna Bradshaw, Love as Attachment: the Integration of Three Behavioral Systems, in Robert Sternberg & Michael Barnes, eds. The Psychology of Love. Yale, 1988, pp. 68-99.
Tuesday, July 06, 2010
The Country and the City: The U.S. Case--The Machine in the Garden
In my first post on Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, I wrote that “at least for U.S. literature, there have been attempts to write literary histories of depictions of the city and there have been attempts to write literary histories of depictions of the country, but there is no single study which actively attempts to fuse those together and read them as not only the same history but the result of a single process or regime (capitalism), which is what Williams does.”
A commenter here pointed out that Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden is “the book that comes closest, I think, to the kind of AmLit history you want to do.” That probably is true, but it doesn’t actually come that close for a number of reasons which I find demonstrate pretty well some of the basic reasons why there still hasn’t been a study of American literary history which does what Williams did and why it would still be quite difficult to write such a one. I didn’t initially plan on spending so much time on The Machine and the Garden in trying to puzzle out why I feel this is so, but that comment led me back to a closer look at the book, and I’ve found the comparison rewarding. Marx’s book is rightly renowned, even if, like most myth and symbol criticism from the 1950s and 1960s, it has worn a little shabbily. Most of my comments on it will be in a critical vein, but my point in doing so is not to question its worth on its own terms but to suggest the continued necessity of some other terms in which to think about the literary histories of the country and of the city in the U.S.
The first, most elementary, point about The Machine in the Gardenis that even Marx acknowledged that his book isn’t a literary history:
My purpose is to describe and evaluate the use of the pastoral ideal in the interpretation of American experience. I shall be tracing it adaptation to the conditions of life in the New World, its emergence as a distinctive American theory of society, and its subsequent transformation under the impact of industrialism. This is not meant to be a comprehensive survey. If I were telling the story in all its significant detail, chronologically, I should have to begin at the moment the idea of America entered the mind of Europe and come down to the present—to the death of Robert Frost in 1963. But I have chosen to concentrate upon selected examples, “some versions,” as William Empon might put it, of American pastoralism. Nor have I confined myself to the richest of literary materials. At points I shall consider examples which have little or no intrinsic literary value. In fact, this is not, strictly speaking, a book about literature; it is about the region of culture where literature, general ideas, and certain products of the collective imagination—we may call them “cultural symbols"—meet.
It is to Marx’s credit that he recognizes that a study focusing on the classic handful of U.S. writers—Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Twain—is not a comprehensive history of American literature. And the use of “examples which have little or no intrinsic literary value,” while still quite bold for its moment (and much the best part of the book, in my opinion), is somewhat undercut by the fact that what Marx assumes is important about these writers—Thomas Jefferson, Tench Coxe, St. John de Crèvecoeur, and Robert Beverley—is that they have turned up these powerful cultural symbols for later artists to use. The point of contact between them and Hawthorne, et al. is primarily and preeminently on the symbolic plane, as Marx defines the “cultural symbol:” “A ‘cultural symbol’ is an image that conveys a special meaning (thought and feeling) to a large number of those who share the culture” (ibid.).
“Share” may be the most important—and least well-defined—word in that sentence. So much analytical and ideological work is accomplished by it, and so very much is obscured with it. The nature of this “sharing” is ambiguous, if not indeterminate in its directionality: does it mean receiving culture or transmitting it? Both? Something else more nebulous, like “participation?” Regardless, the long specter of ideology is raised—just what understanding of ideology does Marx have? How is this sharing process orchestrated, and who or what, if anything, controls it? I’ll cut to the chase for you and tell you that Marx doesn’t offer a clear answer or even really acknowledge the question. (Another important instance of this “sharing” business is on page 143: “Americans, so far as they shared an idea of what they were doing as a people, actually saw themselves creating a society in the image of a garden.” And Marx characterizes Henry Nash Smith’s thesis in Virgin Land by using the word: “In Virgin Land… he ascribed much of American thought and behavior to a shared vision of the nation’s future, heritage of biblical myth, as the new Garden of the World.")
If Marx comes close to an explicit theory of ideology, it is on page 193:
[I]ts [the machine’s] meaning is carried not so much by express ideas as by the evocative quality of the language, by attitude and tone. All of the writers of our first significant literary generation—that of Emerson and Hawthorne—knew this tone. It was the dominant tone of public rhetoric. They grew up with it; it was in their heads; and in one way or another they all responded to it. It forms a kind of undertone for the serious writing of the period, sometimes rising to the surface spontaneously, the writer momentarily sharing [!] the prevailing ebullience, sometimes brought there by design for satiric or ironic purposes. In its purest form we hear the tone in Emerson’s more exuberant flights; but it also turns up in Thoreau’s witty parodies, in Melville’s (Ahab’s) bombast, in Hawthorne’s satires on the age, and in Whitman’s strutting gab and brag. To say this is not enough, however; one must hear the words, for their meaning is inseparable from the texture—the diction, cadence, imagery, or, in a word, from the “language."
This is practically Jungian, an image of ideology as a giant aquifer of ideas which can be extracted in purer or siltier forms depending on how deep you go. Now, this image has its recommendations and I don’t mean to call it inadequate, but it also leads quite easily to a sort of adjectivization of power: Marx can speak of “certain controlling facts of life in nineteenth-century America” (343) without asking who has the control or how it is being used. (In fact, it seems “controlling” is used in just this way eleven times in the book, “compelling” another six, as if these words have no direction, no compellers and compelled.) “Controlling ideas” are simply an ether in which one finds oneself, “turn[ing] up” here and there and everywhere in purer or dingier (or in Marx’s other key terms, complex or simple) terms, depending, but always “shared." This is what the consensus school of history looks like on the level of diction.
Marx’s intense interest in “shared” culture and “shared” visions is also ironic in one sense; the critical tension within Marx’s work—and maybe within myth and symbol criticism generally—is that between the primacy of “sharing” and a phrase that Marx borrows from Melville—"mistaking a temporary feeling for a lasting possibility.” How ephemeral is the hold of these cultural symbols which we Americans “share,” and to what extent is that ephemerality a check on their power? That is, is the nature of our participation in this shared culture or vision an immersion or a dip, and if it is a dip, or a series of dips, how do we weigh the amount of time we’re all wet against the time that we are dry? Marx loves that Melville critiques “the spurious pastoralism of the age… While Hawthorne [in “Ethan Brand"] hints guardedly at the false character of the essentially moribund, Augustan pastoralism of the dominant culture, Melville’s witty attack embraces the flummery of the romantic avant-garde as well—including, to a degree, himself [in Typee].” Melville does this by telling Hawthorne that (and I’ll quote his note, or rather his postscript, in full because it’s beautiful, and sums up how I feel about myth and symbol criticism very well)
This “all” feeling, though, there is some truth in. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.
To what extent is Marx’s work an insistence upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion? Marx (probably self-consciously) walks the thinnest of edges in resting his entire book upon just such a temporary feeling or opinion—the stray moment in Hawthorne’s journal which provides the master symbol for Marx’s thesis—a train’s shriek breaking the silence of a wooded glen. Marx takes this fugitive (and, as I read it, fairly casual) thought as paradigmatic of the entire experience of industrialism at least in the nineteenth century, the pattern upon which to cut all similar encounters with technology in a still-quite rural nation. Marx badly wants Hawthorne’s moment to be something which Williams might call a whole structure of feeling, but he risks the possibility that it is, in the end, actually a moment, one which many of us—from the U.S. or elsewhere, 19th, 20th or 21st century—may have shared, but which may have had little—and certainly not universal—application or influence.
Williams, whose marxian concept of ideology is, you have to admit, more defined even if you disagree with it, does not run into this problem of ephemerality because for him, symbols are tools, not drops of some ideological aquifer beneath our feet. As such, the key question for Williams is when the tools are being used and to what ends, questions which to a large extent take ephemerality into account. Recurrence of the same symbols—a major concern of both Williams and Marx—is explained not by a “shared” culture which poets keep dipping into, but by persistent contradictions within a single system and consistent strategies used to try to resolve those in favor of the interests of the same class or class fraction. Marx’s emphasis on a “shared” culture ultimately cannot identify these contradictions or these strategies except as tensions inherent in the ‘way things are,’ directionless, miasmic, inert in their repetitions. It is notable and characteristic, I think, that (so far as I can recall) not once does Marx inquire about the direction of the many trains which dart through the pages of his authors’ notes and stories. Is Hawthorne’s “train in the Concord woods” coming into Concord or leaving it? Moving toward Boston or away from it? The city, or the country? No matter—the dynamics of power between country and city are ultimately not what interests Marx—not that they have to—but rather the fact that the train is there, is seen or heard, and that its presence can be shared as a defining, foundational moment for the experience of industrialization.
Myth and symbol criticism is so good and so focused on getting at the roots—or what look like roots—the primordial images, the deepest ideas that American culture (supposedly) “shares,” that it ignores almost all the dirt around those roots. What I want to ask for is instead a study that focuses on all that dirt, that is interested in which direction the “train in the Concord woods” is running. The closest thing I can think of to doing that is not a study of literature: it is William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis.
But that leaves alone the question of why there isn’t a study of American literature interested in those things, and instead why we have The Machine in the Garden and why it might still be difficult to think in Williams’s terms instead of Marx’s. This post is already running long, and I hope there is enough to chew on for now, so I’ll push those questions into a third post, but for now I’ll offer one longish quote from near the end of Machine:
Precisely because it is relatively unformed, wild, and new, James [in The American Scene] is saying, the scenery of America is peculiarly hospitable to pastoral illusions. It invites us to cross the commonsense boundary between art and reality, to impose literary ideas upon the world. (351-352)
The word “hospitable” here is quite as interesting as “shared” is above, and “peculiarly” does all the exceptionalist work an Americanist can ever hope for. The first settlers upon the land evidently could not help themselves from pastoralizing it, so “hospitable” and “inviting” was it to their illusions. This is more than just personification of the land; it is turning a made thing—the pastoral illusions, the desire to impost literary ideas upon the world—into a found thing. The fact is that this has been such a frequent ideological move for Americanists—not only but, as they might say, “peculiarly.” Much of this is adopted from the rhetoric of and about the frontier, and while Frederick Jackson Turner receives only a single page reference in Marx’s index, The Machine in the Garden is, it goes without saying, impossible without him.
The “peculiar” situation of settler colonialism is the seedbed for the made-into-found conversion because such a conversion can be convincingly made; a frontier booster or an American studies professor alike can take representations of non-urban areas to be found things—found whole, entire, at a glance—not made things, or only secondarily made things—the virginity (or pastorality) of the land is not a concept we created but a property of its very existence. Williams’s case, however, is different. The enclosures which are so important to Williams’s history and the land tenancy structures in general are so obviously only made things (only things which men made up) and never found things (never basic properties of the land’s existence or essence) that this problem barely exists in English literature.
***
For what it’s worth, Marx did publish a review of Williams’s City and the Country (in The Sewanee Review 82.2 {Spring 1974} 351-362): he called it a “searching, wise, and important book,” but he also felt that Williams “seems to miss the essence of the [pastoral] mode.” That in fact misses the essence of Williams, who was not writing a book about the pastoral mode (which explains why Empson is absent from the index, something which Marx wonders at) but about how the countryside is depicted, a focus which Marx apparently can only turn into a question of genre or form because he assumes it is through formal or generic analysis that the tensions and contradictions inherent in the practice of writing about the countryside will be resolved or will settle into a pleasing ambiguity. When Williams does talk specifically about modes or forms, it is largely to introduce the term “counterpastoral,” in order to group the poetry and prose which attempts to pierce the general habits of depicting the countryside, habits which may well be prevalent in the pastoral, but which also suffuse whole structures of feeling which well exceed that particular mode or form.
However, Marx accurately summarizes the most important part of Williams’s book with the following paragraph:
In Williams’s view our whole way of thinking about country and city, our tendency to identify the country with “nature” and the city with “society,” is only one of the many false divisions nurtured by our alienating system of production, which constantly reproduces its contradictions within our minds. As Williams says so well, it “teaches, impresses, offers to make normal and even rigid, modes of detached, separated, external perception and action: modes of using and consuming rather than accepting and enjoying people and things.” If there is a cardinal metaphor expressive of the divisions in our world, it may well be the contrast between city and country. (362)
Monday, July 05, 2010
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, beginning at the end
The subtitle of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom is “A Triumph,” and yet he frames the story in such elegiac terms; it is a story, he writes, of “what we felt, what we hoped, what we tried” and you can feel the teleology of tragic failure even before he makes it explicitly clear that “Damascus” was where the train went off the rails, where the light of “Arab freedom” failed. This dissonance has to be the point of it, I suspect, because there is simply too much brilliant, glorious erudition here, too much incredible prose to let the subtitle be simply a bitter irony. This book is titanic, operatic; if anything (I find myself shocked to suggest), David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia is the paler, less ambitious copy. This is not the story of the light that failed; this feels like a story of success in failure.
I’m just getting into this as a reading project—and feel free to join me—so I’m still talking in terms of feelings, a sense of how the book works that I’m trying to pin down without trying to prove yet. But if you’ve seen David Lean’s movie—and if you haven’t, what’s the matter with you?—you probably know what he’s talking about, the triumph that wasn’t: having won the war against the Ottomans, Lawrence‘s Arabs fall apart when they have to create order out of the victory, and can‘t. This ending is present from the very beginning; as he puts it in the introduction,
“…when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.”
It’s not quite clear to me yet whether this is an Arab youth or not, if the problem is, in his mind, a basic insufficiency of the Arabs themselves as a people. It’s true that when he sets down the historical backdrop for the Arab Revolt, he tells the story of the middle ages as opening with Muslim conquests but closing with a Turkish bureaucratic consolidation made possible by some particular insufficiencies of “the Semitic mind”:
The first great rush round the Mediterranean had shown the world the power of an excited Arab for a short spell of intense physical activity; but when the effort burned out the lack of endurance and routine in the Semitic mind became as evident. The provinces they had overrun they neglected, out of sheer distaste of system, and had to seek the help of their conquered subjects, or of more vigorous foreigners, to administer their ill-knit and inchoate empires. So, early in the Middle Ages, the Turks found a footing in the Arab States, first as servants, then as helpers, and then as a parasite growth which choked the life out of the old body politic.
Certainly this picture of a “Semitic mind” with its will to conquer but no ability to govern is not one his narrative will do much to disprove, and you can see why people like Edward Said saw in Lawrence just the typical—if modern—Orientalist adventurer. But as I happen to have been re-reading Orientalism recently (and have been, parenthetically, struck by how much better parts of it are than I remember), his account of Lawrence is almost completely un-salvageable, so burdened by the broad thesis that he had to do so much work in 1978 to prove that its particularity and individuality as a text is almost completely lost.* The easiest Orientalist reading of the text would be one where the Arab Revolt was betrayed by the Arabs, by their “sheer distaste of system,” and yet what can we do with Lawrence’s frank admissions and complete foregrounding of British perfidy? What do we with his bitter clarity in describing how Britain not only openly lied about their intentions but made the well-intentioned Lawrence their tool in doing so? He is quite clear that their trust in him, as a person, was always misplaced because of the fickle, fraudulent empire he served; while “[t]he Cabinet raised the Arabs to fight for us by definite promises of self-government afterwards,” he emphasizes that while these promises were believed because the institutional bureaucracy made him their face to the Arabs, there was never any real intent to hold to the promises Lawrence found himself making:
“Arabs believe in persons, not in institutions. They saw in me a free agent of the British Government, and demanded from me an endorsement of its written promises. So I had to join the conspiracy, and, for what my word was worth, assured the men of their reward. In our two years’ partnership under fire they grew accustomed to believing me and to think my Government, like myself, sincere. In this hope they performed some fine things, but, of course, instead of being proud of what we did together, I was bitterly ashamed.
It was evident from the beginning that if we won the war these promises would be dead paper, and had I been an honest adviser of the Arabs I would have advised them to go home and not risk their lives fighting for such stuff: but I salved myself with the hope that, by leading these Arabs madly in the final victory I would establish them, with arms in their hands, in a position so assured (if not dominant) that expediency would counsel to the Great Powers a fair settlement of their claims. In other words, I presumed (seeing no other leader with the will and power) that I would survive the campaigns, and be able to defeat not merely the Turks on the battlefield, but my own country and its allies in the council-chamber. It was an immodest presumption: it is not yet clear if I succeeded: but it is clear that I had no shadow of leave to engage the Arabs, unknowing, in such hazard. I risked the fraud, on my conviction that Arab help was necessary to our cheap and speedy victory in the East, and that better we win and break our word than lose. The dismissal of Sir Henry McMahon confirmed my belief in our essential insincerity.
This is not a sub-theme of the book, but in terms of how he frames it at the start, the theme of the book, and if you emphasize the shortcomings of the Arab mind that allowed the Turks to rule them, you have to notice that these same qualities are what cause the Arabs to get picked off by a parasitic British imperium, an empire, thus, explicitly aligned with the Ottoman empire, and not in a good way. After all, read this account of how he sought to become an Arab:
I was sent to these Arabs as a stranger, unable to think their thoughts or subscribe their beliefs, but charged by duty to lead them forward and to develop to the highest any movement of theirs profitable to England in her war. If I could not assume their character, I could at least conceal my own, and pass among them without evident friction, neither a discord nor a critic but an unnoticed influence…A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been. Then he is exploiting his old environment to press them out of theirs. Or, after my model, he may imitate them so well that they spuriously imitate him back again. Then he is giving away his own environment: pretending to theirs; and pretences are hollow, worthless things. In neither case does he do a thing of himself, nor a thing so clean as to be his own (without thought of conversion), letting them take what action or reaction they please from the silent example.
In his self-gratifying affectation that they imitated him without realizing they did—that he was an “unnoticed influence”—I think we see more than simply the white man’s belief that a little browning of the skin is all it takes to be indistinguishable to those from whom your ignorance makes it impossible for you to distinguish yourself. I suspect he is protesting too much because he came to think himself an Arab in more ways than he can comfortable retrospect, from the comfort of All Souls College. Which makes me want to read the following paragraph, the closing of chapter one, as one of the most telling of the book, both for his ability to see through his own illusions and his effort to make that failure into triumph:
In my case, the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only. Easily was a man made an infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another faith. I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed’s coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do. Such detachment came at times to a man exhausted by prolonged physical effort and isolation. His body plodded on mechanically, while his reasonable mind left him, and from without looked down critically on him, wondering what that futile lumber did and why. Sometimes these selves would converse in the void; and then madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments.
* This is the substance of Dennis Porter’s “Orientalism and its Problems,” which uses Lawrence’s book as a cudgel to knock on Said. I’m not in love with it as a reading of Lawrence, but he does make a lot of the right points on how and where Said’s general argument forces him away from what’s interesting about the specific text.