Tuesday, January 06, 2009
On Pinter
I direct your attention to this engaging, thoughtful response to the news of Pinter’s death by my friend and colleague Dan Rebellato (a pretty notable contemporary playwright himself) on the Royal Holloway Creative Writing course blog. It meditates upon Dan’s own indebtedness to Pinter, the way his dialogue works (’Technically - and boringly - his language is fiercely performative. It’s not what people are saying it’s that they are saying it and what they are doing by saying it‘), his affinity with Python (I think the Python boys are often underappreciated as theatrical writers; their dialogue is often first class) and what he did when Dan accosted him on the street. It’s worth your time.
Monday, January 05, 2009
Teaching the Overdetermined Image
As anyone who teaches funny books or films knows, the task of convincing students that the scene before them is anything other than incidental would try Job’s patience. You show them a panel from the surprisingly awful Superman and Batman vs. Aliens and Predator like, say, this
and ask them to talk about the image as a crafted artifact and they will sit there, stone-silent, for fifty minutes while you prattle on about how (1) the writer wanted Batman represented by a powerful gloved hand and (2) the original alien was a giant penis preying on (a) the crew of the Nostromo and (b) our inborn fear of alien interspecies rape. You show them the H.R. Giger painting that inspired Ridley Scott
and tell them that there’s phallic imagery, phallic imagery, and then there’s the work of H.R. Giger—and still they sit there staring at your Freudian hammer in a World of Nails. You inform them that the lips of the alien were constructed from six stretched and shredded condoms smeared with KY jelly while they quietly compose comments for Rate My Professor about how everything in your course is about sex.
“Not everything,” you insist. “But I mean, come on now, clearly this alien is. It is a giant penis, and within it is another penis, a penis within a penis, and in this panel Batman is firmly gripping that inner penis—”
And you stop because no matter what you say, professors who open semesters with images of Batman giving an alien a hand job get comments on Rate My Professor about how everything in their course is about sex.*
But it doesn’t have to end like this—there is a better way. With the help of erstwhile commenter Luther Blissett, I’ve designed an introduction to visual rhetoric assignment that forces students to understand that all comic and film images are obscenely overdetermined. On the first day of class, I’ll present them with Alan Moore’s script for the eighth panel on the first page of The Killing Joke:
NOW WE ARE LOOKING AT THE POLICE CAR SIDE-ON SO THAT WE SEE THE UNIFORMED OFFICER STANDING FACE ON TO US OVER ON THE LEFT AS HE STANDS WITH HIS BACK TO THE CAR AND COMMISSIONER GORDON FACE-ON OVER TO THE RIGHT, LEANING AGAINST THE CAR AND DRNKING HIS STEAMING COFFEE, MAYBE LOOKING UP WITH A QUIZZICAL AND CONCERNED LOOK OVER THE RIM OF HIS CUP TOWARDS THE EXTREME LEFT OF THE FOREGROUND, WHERE WE CAN SEE THE BATMAN ENTERING THE PICTURE FROM THE LEFT, IN PROFILE. SINCE BATMAN IS (a) CLOSER TO US AND (b) TALLER THAN EITHER THE COMMISSIONER OR THE PATROLMAN IN THE BACKGROUND WE CANNOT SEE THE TOP OF HIS HEAD HERE ABOVE THE BOTTOM OF THE NOSE AS THE FRONT OF HIM ENTERS THE PANEL ON THE LEFT. HIS EYES AND UPPER HEAD ARE INVISIBLE BEYOND THE TOP PANEL BORDER AND ALL WE CAN REALLY SEE IS HIS MOUTH, WITH THE BIG AND DETERMINED SQUARE JAW AND THE GRIM AND DISAPPROVING SCOWL OF THE LIPS. THE BATMAN DOES NOT APPEAR FROM HIS POSTURE TO SO MUCH AS GLANCE AT EITHER GORDON OR THE PARTOLMAN AS HE WALKS PAST THEM EVEN THOUGH BOTH OF THEM STEAL GLANCES AT HIM WITH DIFFERING LOOKS OF UNEASE. THE PARTOLMAN LOOKS UNEASY JUST TO BE IN THE BATMAN’S PRESENCE, WHILE GORDON LOOKS MORE CONCERNED ABOUT THE BATMAN’S POSSIBLE STATE OF MIND. RAIN DRIPS FROM EVERYTHING, INCLUDING THE BATMAN’S JUTTING AND GRIZZLED CHIN. GORDON GIVES THE LARGELY-OFF-PANEL VIGILANTE A PENETRATING LOOK OVER HIS COFFEE CUP, AND THE BLUE LIGHT ATOP THE CAR WASHES OVER ALL OF THEM AS IT CIRCLES.
No Dialogue.
Then I’ll ask them to draw it. After assuring them that I did indeed say draw, I’ll let them have about ten minutes to transform Moore’s prose into stick-figure theater before showing them how Brian Bolland interpreted it:
Discussion will ensue. I’ll show them the scripts to other panels—ask them why, for example, Moore insisted the receptionist at Arkham Asylum be reading Graham Greene’s The Comedians—and if all goes well, I won’t spend the next few months reading essays about how in this panel Alan Moore wanted Batman to punch someone in the face so he told Brian Bolland to draw a picture of Batman punching someone in the face.
(x-posted.)
*Or not. A proper interpretation of that image—one that factors in feminist interpretations of the alien as a species which rapes its prey to death—leads down paths too disturbing to tackle the first day of class.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
It’s always already been the end of epic film.
Whether he knows it or not—and “he” being Adam Kotsko, I’ll bet he knows it—this Weblog post is less about the formal fit between epic and the television serial than the relation of film to the episodic form. I know that sounds backwards—what with MOVIES! being PRESENTED! on SCREENS! the SIZE! of WYOMING!—but the compounded facts of run time and the modern American attention span necessitate we consider film the proper realm of the self-contained episode. Even films which promise sequels announce their completion in terms of whatever -ology they embrace.
Films should be about something in the original, locative sense of the word. They should surround some subject matter, be “on every side” “wholly or partially,” as per the OED. They should be self-contained. Not that they shouldn’t be sweeping—you can frame Guernica or a sublimely panoramic view of the Hudson River and slap it on a gallery wall without robbing them of sweep—but they should recognize their formal limitations. Films can only intimate narrative epicness. They can’t achieve it.
“But!”
“But But But!"
Try me. Start listing epic films and I’ll start listing films with grandiose tableaux. The Lord of the Rings? Shot in that sewer of New Zealand. Blade Runner? The Lord himself envies Ridley Scott’s matte painters. With film we confuse the formal qualities of narrative epic for the GIANT! SCALE! presented by the movie screen. Cases in point: Iron Man and The Dark Knight.
Both were hailed as epic upon release, and yet both are far superior films on the small screen. Before you ask: I do remember what I wrote about The Dark Knight on IMAX, and inasmuch as it relates the experience of watching an obscenely high-quality image projected on the side of an eight-story building, I stand by it. Watching the film on a small screen—one on which a bug of a Batman glides between five-inch tall skyscrapers while Heath Ledger’s Joker licks human-sized lips and establishes human-sized eye-contact—it’s impossible to deny that this supposedly epic performance is better suited to the televisual medium. (This goes doubly for Iron Man, which barely passes for “good" on the big screen but shines when we connect with Robert Downey Jr. as a human actor in corporate world.)
Not that I think we should deny that the serial drama is also better served on the small screen. A solidly written, solidly acted television show can be a better film than most films. To wit: having finished the first four episodes of the blogosphere’s own Leverage, I can’t help but wonder what went so terribly wrong with Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen.
(x-posted about.)
Friday, January 02, 2009
Urine-coloured, pooch-screwing
I had read it before, but at speed; this Christmas, though, gave me the opportunity to read it again. And so I did. It made me think: why do I keep going back to Martin Amis? I suppose it is because I like the idea of Amis. I just can’t seem to get my actually-reading-Amis ducks in a row.
What am I talking about? Yellow Dog (2003) that’s what. Science Fictional (alt-historical) or at the least satiric-phantasmagorical, Yellow Dog is set in a 2003 in which Henry IX sits on the throne of England—his wife is in a coma and his 15-year-old daughter subject to leering, video tabloidesque intrusions into her bathtime frolics. Henry is one character in Amis’s tale; another is Clint Smoker, a hack from a sub-Sun rag called Morning Lark. Another character is the improbable film-star, novelist, rock-star, ideal husband Xan Meo who gets clonked on the bonce and undergoes a change of personality into an obnoxious spoiling-for-a-fight alpha male. Then there’s Joseph Andrews, an elderly Brit-gangster even less believable than those delineated by Guy Ritchie. Hard to imagine, I know, but there you go. Amis sets these different storylines running, but seems clueless as to how to bring them back together again: he ends up literally smashing them into one another—very crudely handled. There’s also an underpowered conspiracy plotline that’s supposed to link them all, but which fails to do so.
It almost goes without saying that Yellow Dog is a terrible novel. Ah, but it is terrible in interesting ways, in ways (indeed) that make it a more worthwhile read than any number of much better but deadened-by-competence pieces of fiction. It is, for instance, not a shabby, or ill-considered or hastily put-together piece of work. Indeed it could have done with being rather more hastily rendered: much of it (clogging its heart with the cholesterol of earnestness) is a series of leaden sermons about masculinity, pornography, pedophilia and the relationship between the genders: clearly very long-pondered if essentialist and wrongheaded. Also the prose has clearly been strenuously worked through. There are moments—images, and occasionally whole sentences—where this work has resulted in actual good writing:
The mist had lifted; out to sea a wildhaired wave collapsed, not all in one piece but laterally, from left to right, like a trail of gunpowder under the torch. [110]
Lovely, that. Amis is good with accounts of the sky, too. During a thunderstorm: ‘arthritic feelers of lightning’ lancing out ‘forming coastlines with many fjords’ [299]. But there’s something about this sort of writing:
The bright sky was torn by contrails in various states of dissolution, some, way up, as solid looking as pipecleaners, others like white stockings, discarded, flung in the air … others like breakers on an inconceivably distant shore. [289]
The more you read, the more it starts to dawn on you: Amis can write nicely when he’s describing stuff that’s far away. The further away, indeed, the better, as far as Amis is concerned. But when he gets close to people his good writing goes all whiffy and off: congeals into a peculiar ugliness that zooms straight past the human organ of imagination without connecting: ‘as he climbed from the car a boobjob of a raindrop gutflopped on his baldspot’ [187]. Or else he falls into a polysyllabic verbosity that very markedly falls short of being Nabokovian (‘there I am,’ he said, with a certain finicky jauntiness embedded in his indignation’, 272).
That’s the problem, right there. Amis has written a novel about people. Novels, after all, are about people. But, in numerous ways (although with a remarkably consistent intensity) Amis despises people. And, you know what? It turns out you can’t write neoDickensian social satire—the thing Yellow Dog egregiously strives to be—when you’re hobbled by such a thoroughly unDickensian contempt for human beings. ‘Dickens’, as a shorthand, is something like the opposite of contempt for people. But more than that, it turns out you can’t write Hogarthian, or even Boschian, phantasmagoria if you’re handicapped by that mode of contempt. You might be able to achieve a Waugh-like sharpness, but to do that you’d need to have Waugh’s extraordinary prosaic self-control and intensity, and Amis doesn’t have it. His objection to the porn industry (and my, what a hard-to-hit target Amis has lighted upon with that one) is gender-essentialist. In his world men all love pornography and women all hate it. In a peculiar little riff he speculates that maybe ‘women wouldn’t mind pornography if reproduction took pace by some other means: by sneezing, say, or telepathy.’ Then he thinks again. ‘But maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe women just couldn’t bear to see it travestied, the act of love that peopled the world’ [335]. So to recap: sex is good if it is about ‘love’ and ‘reproduction’ and a travesty if it is not. And actually, I doubt even Amis believes his ‘maybe’ has inoculated him against the infection of loony rightwingnuttery.
Yellow Dog tries, often, to be funny; but it is not funny at all: its humour either sneering and hateful, or else—an aristocrat with a servant called Love—feebly Blackadder-derivative. Its play, mostly wordplay, is lumpish and continually reaching for a significance beyond its grasp. Of the inherent sexism of porn’s fascination with the money shot: ‘they call it the pop-shot. They don’t call it the mom-shot.’ Yes. Right. I’ll go ahead and file that with ‘they call it mascara, they don’t call it pascara’ and ‘they call it cargo even though it’s carried by lorries and not by cars at all.’
This novel aims to say penetrating things about the world we live in and it doesn’t. It’s a crashing, and an ugly novel. Turns out that even the harshest satire needs a ground in common humanity; that without a sprinkle of the yeast of sentimentality the dough of the Jeremiad will not rise. But I’ll say this: I was glad to have re-read it. There are novels that are ugly on account of bald authorial incompetence, although not too many of those get published. Then there are novels that are pretty (even beautiful), or at the least smooth, or airbrushed, or polished, or diecast or neatly plastic-moulded. Lots of those. But it’s rare, and rather aesthetically bracing (in a good way), to encounter a novel by a thoroughly competent novelist that is, nevertheless, so gnarlily and outrageously ugly. Valuable, in a way. I could embroider upon the merit of this aesthetic of ugliness, but perhaps I’ve gone on long enough.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Congratulations, Mr. Bady
Aaron nabbed the 2008 Cliopatria Award for “Best Writer.” I say “nabbed,” but in truth, he earned it—I wouldn’t have asked him to contribute if I didn’t think he’d land us swag. Congratulations to Aaron and all the winners:
Best Group Blog: The Edge of the American West
Best Individual Blog: Northwest History
Best New Blog: Wynken de Worde
Best Post: Claire Potter, Tenured Radical, “What Would Natalie Zemon Davis Do?”
Best Series of Posts: Tim Abbott on Trumbull’s The Death of General Montgomery, Jan. 12, Jan. 13, Jan. 14, Jan. 17, Jan. 18.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Happy Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment!
I pray neither you nor yours hear the squeak before having the opportunity to wear one for a few decades.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
The Work of Christmas in the Age of TBS’s Twenty-Four Hours of A Christmas Story
If you’re like me, and A Christmas Story is its own kind of Christmas morning tradition, it’s become a unique cinematic experience. I’m not exactly sure when TBS started playing it back to back for the entire 24 hours of Christmas, but when they did, it was transformed from the movie that originally flopped in the theatres into something much more interesting. It was already somewhat formless; originally pieced together from a collection of Jean Shepherd stories (from In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash), the film gets unified as a narrative only by the looming end-times of Christmas, the child’s version of the rapture. Yet piling one screening after the other takes this formlessness to the next level: if you missed Flick putting his tongue on the flagpole the first time around, wait two hours and it’ll come around again. More to the point, the Christmas morning where Ralphie gets the gun is no longer a climax or a telos but simply the still center around which the entire thing turns, always present, always coming or going and coming again. If you know every line, the whole script will play over and over and over again, but thanks to TBS, it will even if you don’t. You can go outside and walk off that turkey if you want, and catch the flag-pole scene on the next viewing.
This kind of long view is inconceivable for the boys in the movie. This year’s Christmas is the only Christmas there will ever be and if they fail to acquire the object of their desire, they will never have another opportunity, ever. Everything is life and death for them, and every twist in turn in their personal narratives is a cliffhanger, a game-changer, and a matter of the highest stakes imaginable. The film tries to show us these boys as just pulsating, grasping ids, perhaps endowed with enough animal cunning to acquire the objects of their desire, but totally incapable of self-denial in any form (or remorse). So what the TBS 24-hours of A Christmas Story makes evident is exactly the thing they are least capable of observing: that life is banal, that Christmas is an elaborate charade ending in Simoniz, and that the object of their desire will—metaphorically—shoot their eye out.
Ralphie and company are also apparently unable to tell fantasy from reality; going to school is like deep-sea diving, Flick saw some grizzly bears near Pulaski’s candy store, Little Orphan Annie really exists, and the prospect of being murdered by one’s father is a daily problem. The cartoonish violence of the radio shows and movies is the key through which they interpret the world at large, a fantasy life as real—more real, in fact—than the dull grown up world of Warren G. Harding elementary school. Christmas is the logical culmination of this confusion, but, after all, who can blame them for confusing the fantasy of Santa Claus with the reality of Christmas avarice? The whole world seems to be in on the conspiracy.
We, of course, know better, and as Jean Shepherd’s own voice-over narration both peers into their innocent minds and laughingly disavows what it sees, we are drawn in both to feeling the un-selfconscious desire of childhood and doing against the backdrop of the cynical self-consciousness of adulthood. His is the voice of an adult still able to vicariously enjoy remembering what it was like to be young and innocent, yet still adult, still distanced. This is a big part of what makes the movie so funny, I think, the dissonance between our knowing what they feel and their inability to feel what we know: after all, while we might laugh at fetishes like the “honors and benefits” which Ralphie anticipates receiving from Little Orphan Annie, part of the humor comes from our secular ability to share in the rapture of that possession. If the callowness of Ralphie’s mind is the attraction by its foreignness, in other words, we also find the logic which drives it legible.
This is more interesting than it might initially seem, I think. These fears and desires are comprehensible precisely because they’ve been displaced onto a kind of mind we can laughingly disavow, the mind of a child, and because we view him from exactly the perspective whose lack defines him as a character. Because we know that TBS will keep showing this same movie over and over again, because we know the ending, because we know he will get the rifle and shoot his eye out, and because we know it will happen again next Christmas (and because, apparently, he knows none of these things), we can laugh. In this sense, just as the subject of a bildungsroman is always legible by reference to the process of maturity which the genre articulates, “Ralphie” is legible only by reference to the knowing and ironic gaze whose knowing irony he is unable to share. This, in fact, is what makes him the audience’s object of desire: by watching him, we get to share in his joy at the thing of which he is innocent, even as we laugh at his innocence to remind ourselves that we do, actually, know better.
I’m struggling to articulate a dynamic that the movie manages to portray much more eloquently. In the movie’s climactic scene, for example, when Ralphie actually gets the BB gun, the triangle of desire which forms between Ralphie, his father, and the rifle is telling: while Ralphie’s face is pretty blank—some combination of stunned and guarded—contrast his masked expression with the almost totally unselfconscious lust and hunger on his father’s face. Ralphie has some difficulty processing the fulfillment of his ultimate desire, while his father’s face is the screen onto which the emotions the boy should be feeling are projected. The most banal explanation, of course, is that Darren McGavin is a fine actor, while Peter Billingsley had less range, and this is probably true. But it is also exactly right that the innocent be completely unable to make sense of his acquisition of the Red Ryder BB gun—he is, after all, innocent -- just as only the father can truly desire the BB gun, because only experience can tell him what it is, and how to take pleasure from it. Yet he can only do so vicariously through his son: only the experienced can appreciate innocence, in a paradox that a theologian would find familiar, because experience of the thing is what locks you out of the garden.
In miniature, this is the economy of Christmas spectacle, the manner in which the children barter a commodified innocence to their parents in exchange for the vicious prizes of eros, toy zeppelins and toy rifles whose symbolic meaning the film makes as transparent as possible. In other words, A Christmas Story celebrates a fictional innocence which its principles adopt strategically, the way they put on a pink bunny suit to placate their crazy Aunt Clara who still labors under the delusion that they are perpetually four years old. Ralphie and his friends understand the instrumental value of innocence as a spectacle: it’s one of the few currencies children have that adults are willing to pay for. When Ralphie’s comically foul-mouthed father expresses shock at Ralphie’s knowledge of the f-word—a wide-eyed horror his mother shares—Ralphie understands instantly that he cannot at all costs tell the truth to his parents. To puncture their illusion would shake the very foundations of his relationship with his parents, just as he will have to wear the bunny suit when Aunt Clara is around.
They might believe in Santa or they might not, but when Ralphie and company blur the line between Hollywood fantasy and reality, “innocence” isn’t exactly the right word for what they are doing. After all, just as we go to movies to suspend our disbelief, so, too, do they, and why not? The mind-numbing dullness of Warren G. Harding elementary school is not a reality anyone should have to face head on. Perhaps more importantly, to demonstrate maturity would end the charade of Christmas, and Ralphie knows the cash value of a belief (as he puts it, “...most of us are scoffers. But moments before zero hour, it did not pay to take chances"). This is the pragmatic essence of Christmas’ economy of spectacle: when weighed against the concrete benefits of playing the game by its rules, the question of what is really real is not even vaguely important. As they trek across the landscape of American consumerism, they have ample opportunity to see through its illusions ("it’s the same old dumb parade as last year"), and Ralphie’s disgust with his Ovaltine commercial illustrates that they are well aware of what Christmas really is. But its also irrelevant: they are rational actors, and if paying lip-service to innocence is the price of admission to Christmas, they are only too glad to pay.
To put it another way, Ralphie’s inability to tell fantasy from reality is far more apparent than real, a spectacle in its own right, and a performance which—counter-intuitively—he is the master artificer, and his parents the unwitting consumers. After all, for all extents and purposes, Santa Claus is real. Doesn’t he get the BB gun in the end? The movie is thus a very particular kind of post-modern text, which the TBS 24-hour marathon fittingly takes to its logical conclusion, and an economy of spectacle in which we, too, are implicated. We, too, purchase the illusion of innocence which Jean Shepherd is peddling, even while we laugh at our own naivete in doing so. Once a year, Christmas becomes a timeless constant, and we are “overcome by art,” as Ralphie puts it, allowing ourselves to suspend our disbelief and forget that it’s a thing both banal and illusionary, as unreal as a “Chinese turkey” for Christmas, and just as satisfying.
Addendum: The author of Excelsior, You Fathead!: The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd just sent me the following links, and if you’ve read this far down, both are totally worth your time. The first is an excellent over-reading of the movie (which I mean in the best sense) at Buttermilk Skyd and the second is a great semi-autobiographical piece about Shepherd at Slate, written by Donald Fagen (yes, that Donald Fagen). Thanks!
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Mama, Don’t Let Your Kids Grow Up to Be Grad Students
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Tip of the hat to an anonymous commenter over at Household Opera’s entry on Adjuncting in the Tar Pits:
I suppose part of the reason why I never considered a career in academia is that I am the child of an adjunct. My father was teaching at three different institutions when I was small, and later, as he gained more seniority, he was able to teach at just one. He teaches at a community college, and he was *finally* made a full-timer this year, at the age of 63, thanks to the union. The only reason we had (barely) enough money or health insurance growing up is that my mother taught in the local public schools. And funny enough, my mother is the one who went to a state school and my dad is the one who went to the Ivy. Dad’s employer, and lots of others are making more and more use of adjuncts and driving wages down to a despicable level. I don’t know why more people aren’t outraged.
You can say that again.
I don’t know why more people aren’t outraged.
Thank you.
If you’re at the MLA annual convention in San Francisco and feeling, well, precarious, the discussion group for faculty serving contingently invites you to a guerilla happy hour at the Hilton’s Urban Tavern, Monday, December 29, beginning 4:30 pm. I’ll be there with young Emile, who may literally have bells on.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Harold Pinter, RIP
Harold Pinter—Undeserving Laureate of a Prize that Doesn’t Matter Anymore Because Who Still Reads Literature Anyway?—died yesterday after a long struggle with esophageal cancer. He will be missed.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
The Rhet/Comp Article “At Least It’s An Ethos…” picked up by Inside Higher Ed
I like my original title pretty well, but otherwise a much improved version of my recent post “At Least It’s An Ethos” is up at InsideHigherEd, along with an up-to-the-minute stream of commenters in various kinds of apoplectic states. God bless them, every one.
Many thanks to IHE for picking up the article, and for their invaluable editorial advice. Here’s the link.
Monday, December 22, 2008
A Pre-MLA Preview of the Annual Post-MLA Article
Every year more than 10,000 literature scholars gather at the end of December for the convention of the Modern Language Association, the 124th of which begins next week in San Fransisco.
Past conventions have yielded papers with titles that were rife with bad puns, cute pop-culture references and an adolescent preoccupation with sex, from “Neo-Victorian Buggery” to “Bambi as a Bottom” and the tragically hip “I Never Got Tenure (but I Owe My Job to Jay-Z): Capital-T Theory, Hip-Hop Culture, and Some Thoughts About the Role of Literature in Contemporary Literary Studies.”
Founded in 1883, the Modern Language Association barely registered on the public consciousness for its first century. Professors attended to doze through papers about Chaucer and Emerson, schmooze one another and lobby for posts at more prestigious campuses. But in the 1980’s the conference became the site of annual skirmishes between old-school traditionalists and the increasing powerful new breed of postmodernists, multiculturalists, feminists and queer-theory advocates.
Basking in this unaccustomed level of public notice, Modern Language Association scholars brought increasingly attention-grabbing papers to the convention through the 1990’s, “queering” the “canon,” some said, and championing the “postcolonial,” proposing wild theories about everything from comic books to hip-hop to television and movies. Last year, perhaps hoping to put a stop to the trend, the Chronicle of Higher Education announced its first Annual Awards for Self-Consciously Provocative M.L.A. Paper Titles (a k a the Provokies) but in 2004 the Chronicle decided to drop the awards. Scott McLemee, a senior writer at Inside Higher Ed, explained that “crafting titles to get them written about and attacked in the press used to be exciting.
“Now it’s become a reflex, and their hearts aren’t really in it anymore.”
Not only are titles no longer intended to amuse, from the looks of this year’s several thousand entries, absolutely nothing of any importance is studied by scholars who present at the MLA. From “‘Nabakov’s Self-Translations” to an entire panel devoted to African literature, these scholars embrace topics no right-thinking person cares about. Would Joe the Plumber attend a talk on “William Faulkner’s Rural Modernism”? Would Tito the Builder enjoy a twenty-minute talk on “History and Memory in [James Joyce’s] ‘The Dead’”? Does Joe Sixpack even know what PMLA is, much less want to be published in it? Why then would he attend the roundtable discussion “How to Get Published in PMLA“? While most Americans never bothered to acquaint themselves with old readings of Renaissance texts, the eggheads at the MLA insist on producing “New Readings of Renaissance Texts.”
And there’s much, much more. But all of it is about unimportant nonsense.
The Reader and the Page
John Lingan’s essay on William Gaddis in the latest Quarterly Converstation is very good, one of the best analyses of Gaddis’s work I’ve read recently. I particularly like this description of The Recognitions and JR:
Gaddis anticipated postmodern American literature’s obsessions with entropy and the “death of the author,” but he shared the high modernists’ attention to form. Like Joyce peppering Ulysses’s newsroom scene with capitalized headlines, Gaddis constructed The Recognitions and JR as mimetic of their subjects—the former is as bulging and ornate as the Flemish paintings that protagonist Wyatt Gwyon is paid to forge, and the latter is one continuous flood of voices, frequently unidentified, that recall either a stock ticker’s relentlessness or an overlapping teleconference. . . .
I also mostly agree with this characterization of Gaddis’s work:
Just as his novels JR and A Frolic of His Own announce their subjects (”Money . . . ?” and “Justice?” respectively) in their opening sentences, William Gaddis’s career could have started with the question, “Work?” No single word better encapsulates the concerns and organizing metaphor for Gaddis’s artistic project, in which he chronicles the myriad ways that postwar industrial American culture devalues and drowns out individual expression in an endless barrage of information. His concerns were weighty—nothing less than the erosion of western culture and society—but Gaddis’s novels are ultimately saved from grim systemic coldness by his emphasis on work, which he defined strictly and defended with religious zeal. To Gaddis, work equaled an individual effort (best exemplified by the sympathetic and underappreciated artists of his first novels, The Recognitions and JR) to sort through the swarming cultural ephemera and create, with monastic persistence, something that no machine or business could adequately reproduce. Since Gaddis believed the two to be tantamount, his emphasis on the value of work was nothing less than a defense of the artistic impulse itself.
I don’t think that Gaddis avoids “grim systemic coldness” simply through his depiction of work (a point on which I elaborate below), but that the “work” of art holds special value for him is clearly enough illustrated in his novels.
However, I can’t really accept the implications of Lingan’s conclusion about the “difficulty” of Gaddis’s fiction:
The Recognitions and JR. . .are not books that function as the literary equivalent of a player piano. They are not “hot media,” to borrow one buzz term that Gaddis quoted in his National Book Award acceptance speech for A Frolic of His Own. Rather, they require effort, metaphorical reading between the lines, and ideally a little research, as evidenced by the encyclopedic website The Gaddis Annotations, devoted to annotations of the novels. They require, in other words, the readerly equivalent of a Protestant work ethic.
Gaddis is indeed one of those modern/postmodern authors whose writing is considered “difficult,” requiring more effort than the casual reader is likely to expend. While it is true that books like The Recognitions, JR, and A Frolic of His Own call for a special kind of attention on the reader’s part, an attention capable of reading not just between but around the lines of dialogue that comprise so much of these novels, I don’t believe that referring to the act of reading Gaddis as encompassing “the readerly equivalent of a Protestant work ethic” is ultimately very useful or very accurate in commending his novels to potential readers. It suggests that, as the “last Protestant,” his “work” privileges moral critique over art, is more ponderous matter than engaging aesthetic manner, and I don’t think either is true.
Lingan quotes Gaddis himself protesting this austere view of his fiction:
. . .I think the reader gets satisfaction out of participating in, collaborating, if you will, with the writer, so that it ends up being between the reader and the page. . . . Why did we invent the printing press? Why do we, why are we literate? Because of the pleasure of being all alone, with a book, is one of the greatest pleasures.
The perception of Gaddis as a moralist depends largely on construing his fiction as essentially a kind of satire of what Lingan calls “postwar industrial American culture.” There is undeniably an element of satire in Gaddis’s novels but in my view to settle for that in responding to these novels is to settle for the least possible interest one might find in them. Satire is ultimately a one-channel mode of discourse: the satirist mocks, and the reader is duly edified. There is no “participation,” no “collaboration” on the reader’s part--except to agree that the subject at hand is worth mocking. When Gaddis says that what his fiction offers “ends up being between the reader and the page,” he is asserting that it provides a much more complex reading experience, one that is itself the source of “pleasure” and that transcends the lesser value to be found in satirical correction.
However much fiction like Gaddis’s challenges some complacent reading habits, it does so in the service of expanding our capacity to read abundantly, and thus our capacity to take “pleasure” in what we read. An assumption that seems to be held by those who decry “difficulty” in fiction is that the ideal reading experience is one in which little is asked of the reader, who judges the value of the experience by how quickly we can get from one sentence to another, one paragraph to the next. A reading experience is worthwhile if reading is in effect concealed, the reader made to forget that words are interceding between him/her and the “story,” that a work of fiction is ultimately a verbal composition the patterns and internal logic of which are more immediately the object of the reader’s engagement than any “content.”
But I think many readers implicitly reject this notion of reading, and many others could be led to do so if confronted by a text whose initial difficulty--which is to say unfamiliarity--is eventually ameliorated by the work itself, which teaches us how to read it as we go, and which proves to be as aesthetically pleasing as any more transparently “enjoyable” conventional narrative--indeed, perhaps even more so, since this pleasure has been earned more rigorously. Gaddis’s novels are of this type, it seems to me, and fans of these novels are not just responding to their invocation of a “work ethic” but are finding the work exerted amply rewarded by the subtleties of effect that become available and by the very heightened attention that makes these effects more visible. Both the volubility evoked by Gaddis’s emphasis on talk and the silences such talk obscures, the reader asked to make those silences speak, act to make Gaddis’s fiction very active, and thus very entertaining in its own way. This is what makes his fiction appealing to most of his readers, not the prospect of gaining glory through hard work.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Combobulated: Being a Play in Which We Laugh at Arrogant Undergraduates
(In a small classrroom, a young professor is discussing an R.P. Blackmur essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets with a group of twelve or so students.)
TEACHER: Blackmur claims “the hues attract, draw, steal men’s eyes, but penetrate, discombobolate, amaze the souls or psyches of women.” What does he mean by that?
CLASS: ...?
TEACHER: Break his sentence down. What does “discombobulate” mean?
STUDENT #1: Bored?
TEACHER: So Shakespeare’s language penetrates the souls of women by boring them? (two engineering majors giggle) How do you amaze someone by boring them?
STUDENT #2: (confidently) It’s a technical term from Switzerland. Watchmakers call the tiny gears inside a watch “bobulates” (beaming) and what a watchmaker does is he brings the bobulates together, and “com” is the Latin for “together.” So the proper technical term for this watch here (points to his wrist), or any working watch, is to say it’s “combobulated.” But over the life of a watch, it gets knocked around, and the gears get unaligned, and when that happens the watch becomes “discombobulated.”
TEACHER: Not “disbobulated”?
STUDENT #2: That’s what I said, but he told me--
TEACHER: He who?
STUDENT #2: My rabbi.
TEACHER: I see.
STUDENT #2: He said the Swiss wouldn’t be taken seriously if they didn’t keep the Latin in there, because “bobulate” sounds silly enough without the Latin prefix.
TEACHER: Isn’t “dis” a Latin prefix?
STUDENT #2: I didn’t know that then.
TEACHER: So what do you think Blackmur meant?
STUDENT #2: ...?
I still don’t know what Blackmur meant--nor why my rabbi conspired with The Future to punk me--but as the MLA approaches, I’m increasingly convinced that the first time I ever spoke up in class foreshadowed some ominous end to my academic career.* So while I’m not exactly sure what end this start augurs, I take comfort in the fact that Dickens didn’t know what he’d foreshadowed for Pip when he wrote the first installment of Great Expectations.** (Or he wouldn’t have written two endings.)
*The other lesson? Never trust the Jews.
**Not that scholars have written much about this. The only exception I can think of is about Buffy--but that might be because I only dipped my toe in Dickensian waters. (Work on Wharton’s serialized novels focuses on how she altered the plot or how she mimicked James, so even though I should’ve encountered something about it researching my Wharton chapter, I didn’t.)
Friday, December 19, 2008
Some Critical Blunders By the MLA
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Part 1: Overview & Key Facts
Part 2: Kudos for Recommendations
Part 3: Complaints and concerns
Part 4: Interview with Paul Lauter
There are some problems with MLA’s representation of the needs and circumstances of the nontenurable faculty. If you want to know how they really live and think, watch Linda Janakos’s documentary, Teachers on Wheels. Really, watch it: she’s a much better filmmaker than I’ll ever be.
All reports of this kind are a compromise, and not all compromises are successful. The authors of this report are frank about being divided on the issue of nontenurable faculty between the meliorative, pragmatic and sometimes apologist position long represented by committee chair David Bartholomae and the view, long represented by committee member Paul Lauter, that a permanently nontenurable faculty is “an illegitimate exercise of institutional authority.” The effective compromise between these positions is the committee’s endorsement of rights and privileges for the nontenurable that are as similar as possible to those of the tenured. (Elsewhere, I’ve written about this kind of compromise under the heading of “the intricate evasions of as.”)
I don’t think this tension would have been magically resolved by having nontenurable faculty on the committee—I co-chair AAUP’s committee on faculty serving contingently, and can say that most welcome just about any melioration of their condition, but not the patronizing apologetics that usually accompany the fairly pervasive intrusions on their academic freedom, sense of professional belonging, personal dignity, workplace rights, and economic security—often by tenure-stream faculty serving as their immediate supervisors, union reps, and department chairs.
But I do think representation on this kind of committee should map closely onto the profession—with graduate students, faculty serving contingently, and tenured faculty with a track record on the issues in reasonable proportion. (On the AAUP committee, I’m the only tenured member, and serve as co-chair over my own repeated objection.) Many of the facts and lived realities that caught the MLA staff and some of its committee members by surprise are decades-old news to the majority of college faculty.
For me, the single most troubling line of apologetic pursued by the report is its discussion of the “freeway flyer” stereotype of faculty serving contingently.
Who’s not a Freeway Flier?
On page 13, the committee suggests that freeway fliers are only those persons who report a household income of less than $25,000, calculating by this arbitrary and whimsical standard that the group comprises less than twenty percent of all those serving contingently. By contrast, the authors note,
as we know from anecdote and experience, some part-time non-tenure track faculty members are also spouses or partners tenured and tenure-track faculty members; others have full-time jobs elsewhere, or want to maintain contact with the university but prefer not to be subjected to the conditions—especially the publication requirements—of a tenure-track appointment.
Hm. Really not good. Is the report saying that someone teaching on multiple campuses and unable to get degree-appropriate tenure-track work isn’t a “freeway flier” or distressed member of the academic community because they are either a) spouses or partners of tenure-track faculty members or b) married to someone else with a decent income? Isn’t it a problem for this largely female workforce regardless of their marital or cohabitation choices? Given the gendered division of labor here, isn’t this veering into sexism?
Few faculty serving contingently would support this definition, which arbitrarily excludes most freeway flyers from their own lived experience and self-definition and imposes the skeptical ignorance of the dominant gaze. Kinda like: “Well, gee, you don’t look gay.”
What’s the big deal? Well, it both excludes and diminishes the experience of Anonymous, who has lived her career, as she says, “thirty seconds from humiliation,” has a spouse with a decent income, but nonetheless works in the field for which she trained because she needs the money. What about Monica Jacobe, who has been an adjunct on multiple campuses for the better part of a decade and has never made $30,000 in a year? Because they are married to men with doctorates earning more than $50,000 and less than $100,000, the household income of both women is in the upper 20 or 25% of all part-time faculty in English: woo-hoo! Nothing to look at here, folks. These ladies are rolling in it.
It’s hard to understand the point of this particular observation except as apologism or an inept swipe at the Cary Nelson crowd. It’s not as bad as those agitators and malcontents are saying. The adjuncts I know always seem pretty happy when they come to dinner with their spouse. Why, if you look at the numbers, lots of these adjuncts are happy and doing pretty well--some of them are married to millionaires!
A better way to get at this issue would be to track the role of gender, and the role of restructured academic employment in how individuals got into these positions. Instead of implying that everything’s peachy if you’re married to a professor (just ask Melanie Hubbard or the blogger Adjunct Whore), and hinting that they don’t really want to publish, why not ask faculty serving contingently if they’re doing so involuntarily because their spouse’s employer doesn’t have a rational spousal hiring policy? Or because the employer doesn’t make reasonable accommodations for childrearing?
Even the discussion of those who “prefer” part-time employment is problematic. It’s not as if preferring part-time employment means that the individual endorses the conditions under which they serve.
Why not ask if the person would prefer secure “fractional employment” over freeway flying?
Why not ask faculty with children if they’d prefer to be able to move from part-time fractional (and teaching intensive) employment to full-time and/or research-intensive at other points in their careers? That would be actual flexibility, by the way, not the cheap administrator tyranny we have at present.
There are other complaints and cavils to make. The report addresses gender, however imperfectly, but not class and race, or the intersection of class and race in the “wealth gap.”
The committee takes the step of recommending a set ratio of full-time and tenured to part-time faculty to graduate students, but doesn’t explain how it got to the different percentages, or justifying those percentages in the context of other recommendations.
Even as it recommends more tenure in the “lower division,” the report privileges the “upper division,” as if it is necessarily worse to have adjuncts in the upper division. Perhaps the resources of full-time tenure-track faculty are best deployed in the “lower” division—as some recent research suggests.
The report talks about graduate employees as instructors of record but bypasses the issue of their workload, their prospects in the profession and—again--the role of class and the ethnic/racial wealth gap in relentlessly influencing who is eligible to make the economically irrational “choice” to even think about the undergraduate major and the graduate education that fifteen years or more down the road will allow them to join the professoriate.
MLA staff need to much more comprehensively engage the scholarship of higher education employment, and should make a much larger effort to bring the majority faculty serving contingently into active membership and leadership.
In general, this report is a very welcome contribution and significant departure from some of MLA’s bad old ways in the bad old days. Many faculty serving contingently will nonetheless feel that some of its compromise moments represent mis-steps.
These mostly have to do with the managerial orientation of the committee’s chair and--column for another time--the administrative bias in the organization of MLA itself, which caters to department chairs in the ADE/ADFL arrangement, and as a result has steadily privileged the dilemma of the person who “doesn’t have enough resources to staff the department’s offerings” over the situation of the person being pushed into one of the scheduler’s McJobs.
I’ll be saying more about this report in my two appearances at MLA, as will Paul Lauter, one of the committee’s authors. (Which, together with our interview, will be an opportunity to correct any errors on my part!) I’d be glad to see you there.
What the MLA Got Right
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Part 1: Overview & Key Facts
Part 2: Kudos for Recommendations
Part 3: Complaints and concerns
Part 4: Interview with Paul Lauter
Along with graduate student activists, and members of the Radical Caucus like Paul Lauter, Cary Nelson has for two decades urged the MLA to commit more resources to the needs and issues of faculty serving contingently. If you’re going to be at the convention, stop by the SUNY booth to meet him and get him to inscribe a copy of the splendid festschrift devoted to his exemplary, selfless career, Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University. Monday, December 29, 2008, 11am - 12pm
In part 1 of this series, I said that the MLA report on the workforce in English is a mixed bag—important new commitments to higher standards of data gathering and analysis and some good recommendations, but also some oversights and blunders regarding the circumstances, views, and needs of the workforce they were reporting on. I also shared some key facts from the report, including that women disproportionately fill the worst-paying jobs, and that English is unique in having lost 3,000 tenure-track lines in the ten years before 2004. All indications are that the bleeding will continue—this year’s advertised positions are down 22%, and many of the advertised searches are cancelled, or will be.
In this part, I want to focus on kudos for some of the report’s key recommendations.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR DEPARTMENTS AND INSTITUTIONS:
Security of employment for nontenurable faculty, conversion of part-time work to continuing full-time positions, and more tenure-track hiring in writing instruction and general education. Millions of students never encounter tenure-track or even full-time faculty in English, and the tenured increasingly spend their time hiring, evaluating, and re-hiring the nontenurable.
Departments should systematically analyze the financial, scholarly, and educational costs of nontenurable staffing, rather than blindly “continue to administer the current labor system.”
Full-time continuing faculty should govern and serve, and develop the curriculum in their field of expertise. They should have salary schedules and benefits packages tied to those of ladder faculty. Plus security of employment, guarantees of academic freedom, and funding for travel, research, and professional development. In other words, as most of us at AAUP would point out, the committee is saying that most faculty will be more effective the more their situation resembles the circumstances we associate with tenure, whether you want to use the word or not.
Part-time hires should be paid at least the MLA’s per-course minimum wage, which currently ranges from $6200 to $8800 per section, a figure that is tied to the minimum wage recommendations for full-time continuing faculty.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE MLA:
These recommendations are part of my mixed feelings about the report. On the one hand, hurray. On the other hand: this was long, long, long overdue. Reagan was in office and our first-year students weren’t born when MLA members were demanding attention to these issues.
A regular survey of staffing practices, correlated to major national data sets. For decades, MLA has not bothered to gather data on the qualifications and working conditions of the vast corps of faculty teaching college English—much less analyze or intervene in those circumstances. The oversight is all the more startling since this data was readily available, and analyzed in major disciplinary publications by many critics, activists, and highly visible public intellectuals. This report is a decisive break.
An inquiry into the status of the terminal master’s degree as a qualification for postsecondary teaching in English. Yup, just like Casablanca: in this report, the MLA staff confess to being shocked, shocked they tell you, to discover that the overwhelming majority of folks teaching college English don’t have a PhD, and aren’t ABD, including at least half of those with full-time nontenurable positions.
But this data has been available since the early 1990s, and outraged doctoral students, made sure that MLA staff heard all about it.
As I said at a “welcome session” a dozen years back, debunking the supply-side-inspired surplus of PhDs theory, “Most North Americans pass through a regime of required language studies and most do it without ever encountering a person holding a Ph.D.”
MLA staff simply chose to shut their ears (and, sadly, to spend a lot of time muzzling student discontent, rather than analyzing reams of pertinent and freely available data.)
This is not to assume that the PhD is always, inevitably a better qualification. As in the case of many successful contingent faculty, and even tenure-line faculty like my friend and comrade Andy Smith, there will certainly be many cases in which the terminal master’s degree is an appropriate qualification. But there are also likely to be plenty of circumstances in which a doctorate, ABD status, or additional graduate study in relevant fields—say, writing pedagogy--is the preferred qualification.
Commercial and K-12 employers find that workplace accommodations and incentives motivate their staff to advance their graduate educations. There’s no reason that campus employers can’t do the same—except their refusal to be accountable for investing in their faculty.
Next, part 3, in which I air a few concerns about the report.