Blographia Literaria

Hiatus

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 03:27:00 +0000

I finished Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars a few days ago, and, while it offered a tremendous amount to think—and, presumably, to write—about, I can't quite summon the necessary energy actually to gather my thoughts and present them.

The fault is certainly not in the book: I am beyond eager to read the next two installments in the trilogy and I cannot praise Red Mars highly enough. It is almost precisely the kind of book which should lead me to all kinds of verbosity, and which almost certainly should provoke at least an attempt at sustained engagement with the text. I mean, Fredric Jameson is in the acknowledgments and provides a blurb for the novel—I'm not sure any other work of fiction can make that boast.

And if that is the case, I think it is probably time to put this blog into something like hibernation, at least until the end of the year, when my academic obligations shift not so much in their weight or density but in (I believe) their distribution, and I may find some time to try out my ideas here once more.

My neglect of the past few months (if not longer) has probably already winnowed this blog's reader base, but I assume (or rather, Google Reader tells me) that some people are sticking around on RSS, for which I'm quite grateful.

"Desire Is a World by Night," by John Berryman

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:01:00 +0000

The history of strangers in their dreams
Being irresponsible, is fun for men,
Whose sons are neither at the Front nor frame
Humiliating weakness to keep at home
Nor wtnce on principle, wearing mother grey,
Honoured by radicals. When the mind is free
The catechetical mind can mincn and tear
Contemptible vermin from a stranger's hair
And then sleep.

In our parents' dreams we see
Vigour abutting on senility,
Stiff blood, and weathered with the years, poor vane;
Unfortunate but inescapable.
Although the wind bullies the windowpane
Are the children to be kept responsible
For the world's decay? Carefully we choose
Our fathers, carefully we cut out those
On whom to exert the politics of praise.

Heard after dinner, in defenceless ease,
The dreams of friends can puzzle, dazzle us
With endless journeys through unfriendly snow,
Malevolent faces that appear and frown
Where nothing was expected, the sudden stain
On spotless window-ledges; these we take
Chuckling, but take them with us when we go,
To study in secret, late, brooding, looking
For trails and parallels. We have a stake
In this particular region, and we look
Excitedly for situations that we know.
—The disinterested man has gone abroad;
Winter is on the by-way where he rode
Erect and alone, summery years ago.

When we dream, paraphrase, analysis
Exhaust the crannies of the night. We stare,
Fresh sweat upon our foreheads, as they fade:
The melancholy and terror of avenues
Where long no single man has moved, but play
Under the arc-lights gangs of the grey dead
Running directionless. That bright blank place
Advances with us into fearful day,
Heady and insuppressible. Call in friends,
They grin and carry it carefully away,—
The fathers can't be trusted,—strangers wear
Their strengths, and visor. Last, authority,
The Listener borrow from an English grave
To solve our hatred and our bitterness..
The foul and absurd to solace or dismay.
All this will never appear; we will not say;
Let the evidence be buried in a cave
Off the main road. If anyone could see
The white scalp of that passionate will and those
Sullen desires, he would stumble, dumb,
Retreat into the time from which he came
Counting upon his fingers and toes.

-from The Dispossessed, (1948), reprinted in Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and Other Poems, (1968)

Amelia Atlas on Gabriel Josipovici

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 04:19:00 +0000

I had intended to write about Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? but I don't think I need to anymore: Amelia Atlas has said nearly all of what I would say, and has done so much more articulately than I could have. Read the whole thing on n+1, but here is what I consider the clinching argument:

To say [in Josipovici's earlier book, The World and the Book {1971}] that we are reading modern novels incorrectly is very different from—and more persuasive than—saying all novels should, accordingly, be modernist [Josipovici's argument in What Ever Happened…]. There are multiple traditions at work in the literary canon, and modernism isn’t the only one with a living inheritance from which to draw. Should it be? Josipovici grounds his case for the primacy of modernism in its ostensible moral superiority, its formal honesty. What separates the modernist novel is the “shock administered to the reader when the work reveals itself as a ‘pure object’”—that is, in accordance with his title, as a book, and not actually the world. “The final meaning of a Robbe-Grillet novel (or, as we have seen, of a Nabokov or a Golding or a Bellow novel),” he writes, “resides in the effect which this discovery has upon us, an effect far greater than that which a novel by George Eliot or Tolstoy could have, since it is a shock administered to that most precious part of ourselves, our pride or inherent narcissism.” The sensation Josipovici describes here may be a powerful one, but the notion that it should fall to the novel to jolt us, over and over, out of the reality of our solipsism is itself the worst form of solipsism.

Can the explosive feeling of being transported by a book into the world really only be achieved by the revelation of form? What happens when we turn a novel’s last page and pick up a new book? Must we go back into ourselves in order to again be rooted out? Josipovici’s self-referential vision of what it is to read dooms us to begin always with the self. It implies that the imagination turns endlessly inward. Call me an idealist, but I think novels by Eliot and Tolstoy administer a shock by daring to traffic with the world in a way that doesn’t take our narcissism as a given. Josipovici’s claim that the “classic” novel “confuses possibility and actuality” seems to me a fundamental misreading of the prerogatives of realism. He writes as if its only ambition were mimetic, as if the realist novel—from the nineteenth-century to the present—aspires to nothing more than the collapse of all distinction between art and world. Quite the contrary. It’s by producing an apparently real, but sensorily heightened world that novelists like Tolstoy and his brethren explore this very boundary. In returning from the novel to the real, we come away with a sense of what could be: how the world would look if we forced ourselves into contact with all the subtleties and subtexts that are actually at play. [my italics]

The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:44:00 +0000

[Wikipedia article for your reference]
I doubt I will find many fellow readers of Le Guin who will agree with me, but I was shocked (and obviously seriously dismayed) to find a subterranean similarity to Ayn Rand, and particularly to Anthem, in this novel.

There are a couple of positive references (1, 2) to libertarianism in The Dispossessed, but that is somewhat misleading and not what I am talking about; Anarres, the homeworld of the novel's protagonist, is diametrically opposite to the unfettered market and ultra-individualism that mark Rand's political visions. Anarres lacks any form of market whatsoever, and its basic unit of political organization is not the individual nor even a family but a syndicate or a work gang; the only forms of exchange are carried out in central depots or stockrooms where one may swap a broken chair for a new (or more likely a newly repaired) one, a mended pair of boots for a worn set. Possessiveness is absolutely minimal in Anarresti society, and if its inhabitants have a fault, it is that they push back too reflexively against anyone "egoizing"—drawing attention to themselves or attempting to consolidate power or authority, preventing either from being continuously and randomly distributed and redistributed. And if this weren't clear enough, Le Guin offers us a sort of techno-capitalist society for contrast: A-Io, a nation on Anarres's twin-world Urras, is much like the United States, only it reveres scientists and engineers much more, treating them like pashas. The class structure is also much more openly defined; the only societal arrangements that Le Guin shows resemble the upstairs-downstairs divisions of British manor houses. This isn't very much like Rand either.

What Le Guin's book holds in common with Rand, however, is an unfailing excitement at the quite adolescent belief that genius, like murder, will out, that the brightest lights can never be smothered or hidden, that even if you try, no bushel-basket will obscure nor occlude nor even diminish the full force of one's magnificence. "But you are not like other men," Shevek, the galactically brilliant physicist-protagonist, is told, "There is a difference in you." "Since he was very young he had known that in certain ways he was unlike anyone else he knew. For a child the consciousness of such difference is very painful, since, having done nothing yet and being incapable of doing anything, he cannot justify it." "If there was a circle of silence around him, it was no bother to him, he had always been alone." The scientist (or industrialist, for Rand) is a hero not so much for specific real achievements, but for being a sort of symbolic force in and of himself, a natural aristocrat, uncontainable, transcendent, magnetic. His suffering, which is a sort of Passion, occurs because (or occurs if) he feels slightly bad for being so naturally transcendent and wants to try to be ordinary, to put his shoulder against the common load.

I frankly found the supposedly charismatic Shevek to be fairly flat and dull, although I suppose some will claim that his blandness and generally self-righteous insipidity is beside the point—I forget, the focus of the book is the world-building, the world-building. I would believe that, only the world-building falls into some grey limbo midway between ethnography or microhistory and allegory; we get lots of lovely and highly textured detail, but Le Guin seems dissatisfied with letting anything remain a detail—her worlds don't just function (and frankly, I feel that at some points, their functionality is very open to question), but more importantly, they mean. Le Guin's world-building is too efficient—all material problems, such as famine, communication, violence, sexual reproduction, and so on, are squeezed for every drop of potential macro-level political analysis: every situation, every feature, every difference is an opportunity not for description, but for observation and a full-scale society-wide evaluation—an opportunity to turn the society into a metaphor, singular, smooth, and homogeneous.

Unlike many readers, I don't particularly mind preachiness or even propaganda in literature—or in film: concurrent with reading this novel, I watched and hugely enjoyed the USSR-Cuban collaboration Soy Cuba, which one might say is on the didactic side. I adamantly do not think that undigested political content is objectionable or automatically flaws a work. What I am objecting to about Le Guin's novel is not that its fingers of rhetoric are blunt and rather clasping. My objection is simply that Le Guin, rather like Rand, fails to acknowledge that those fingers might not grasp firmly enough: Le Guin has too much faith that her political analysis and her world-building are mutually supporting, that the worlds she builds furnish all the evidence she needs for the hypotheses she is testing, and that those hypotheses adequately encompass the worlds she is building. Nothing escapes.

It's not that there isn't variety within Anarresti society (or Urrasti society): there are people of many kinds, certainly. But society isn't really made up of people or even structures for Le Guin: it's made up of ideas—big solid ones, like anarchism or social Darwinism, which can be chosen as if on a menu, only not ever a la carte but always prix fixe. Furthermore, these big ideas, and the choices between them, are always present, even immediately available, to all the characters. There is no mediating term, or set of mediating terms, between the symbolic and the material—everyone is always conscious of the full ideological ramifications of each decision, each action, each word—there is basically no such thing as false consciousness or even indifferent consciousness. No one writes, no one works, no one speaks without considering where they stand ideologically. Everything is a clash of ideas, a validation of one idea or a rebuttal to another. It's somewhat exhausting, like an all-night freshman year bull-session. Or, perhaps, like certain moments in the Cold War.

This super-consciousness of ideology is, in a kind of brilliant but also a very overstated way, a politicization and massive enlargement of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (which Wikipedia pointed out to me is a major theme of the novel). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is, in simplistic terms, that the language you use (more accurately, the language that your society gives you to use) determines the way that you can think about the world. For instance, early in the novel, Shevek notes that the way Anarresti society acknowledges the importance of something is to say that it is "more central," whereas the way that Urrasti society flags importance is through height—better things are "higher," worse things are "lower" (15). The political ramifications of this basic divide are clear and rather elementary, although for a truly radical anarchism (as Le Guin claims Anarresti society is), ranking things based on their relationship to a center would still be a form of hierarchy; to some extent, it is that Le Guin's own conceptual categories are impeding her ability to form a clear distinction between the societies—she assumes hierarchy can only be vertically oriented.

Yet that is not the vindication of Sapir-Whorfianism that one might think, as the whole distinction makes little practical or experiential sense. It is worth noting, as it is rather indicative of my issues with Le Guin's schematism, that most English-users, at least those I have encountered, often use a mixture of these categories, and at times even invert the "high-low" valuation—when you say something is "more fundamental" or "more basic" or that you are "getting to the bottom of something," isn't the idea that the more valuable or more important things reside lower down? We may also conjoin temporality with significance: something that has greater "priority" is obviously more important, better for you to attend to. Even weight may serve to order degrees of importance: a light matter is a lesser matter. For Le Guin, as for the stronger versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, these kinds of mixtures are at least unlikely if not illusory; one can divide and analyze societies based on the metaphors or conceptual categories they employ because they are assumed to employ only one.

I think Le Guin probably knows that, actually, but the reason she makes things so stark and univocal is that she believes that a revolutionary society (like Anarres) will enforce such univocality (how that explains the starkness of Urrasti linguistic categories, I don't know). And to some extent, this is historically correct: in the wake of many revolutions, an attempt to "correct" or standardize language is common, from the renaming of months and the abolition of hereditary titles after the French Revolution to the distribution of Mao's pamphlets in the Cultural Revolution. Yet the story she tells about her revolutionary society—150 years before the action of the novel, there was a minority religious dissident group who convinced the Urrasti majority to transport (and abandon) them to their habitable but desolate "moon," Anarres, where this dissident group founded a new anarchist society and invented a new language—is peculiar, or rather inconsistent.

The point of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, at least as I understand it, is that someone is generally not aware of the conceptual limits placed upon her by the language she uses: she doesn't experience her language as insufficient, as "not having words for some things." The conceptual limits of a language are experienced as natural limits. Natural, that is, unless one comes into contact with a language that has words which have no possible cognate, or none that is easily articulable. Now, Le Guin attempts to isolate her revolutionary society so that these limits should not be experienced; communication with Urras is extremely limited, taking place within a very small circle of people, and knowledge of the Urrasti language is highly controlled. Yet the fact that the Anarrestis originated on Urras makes this isolation sort of hopeless: for instance in one scene, Shevek addresses his partner Takver thus: "What are you doing—indulging guilt feelings? Wallowing?" And Le Guin tells us in an aside:

The word he used was not "wallowing," there being no animals on Anarres to make wallows; it was a compound, meaning literally "coating continually and thickly with excrement." The flexibility and precision of Pravic [the revolutionary language of Anarres] lent itself to the creation of vivid metaphors quite unforeseen by its inventors. (332)

The Pravic word that Shevek uses—whatever it is—may be new, revolutionary, not indebted to Urras, but the concept "coating continually and thickly with excrement" is unthinkable apart from a memory of something that actually does this action—an Urrasti memory. Humans do not undertake this action and no one would think to associate self-indulgent self-recrimination with this action merely out of the blue; it seems implausible that anyone would even conceive of this action without some awareness of it being done by something somewhere. The name may have changed, but the persistence of the concept proves a continuity that suggests that Anarrestis must, from time-to-time, still experience linguistic lacks, unnameable residual concepts that make visible the artifices of their recently created language.

It is possible—in fact, it is definite—that Le Guin knows that the Anarresti revolution, the overthrow of "archism" (as in the opposite of anarchism) is always going to be incomplete, that power collects, aggregates, if not in the hands of individuals, then in the customs of society. This is largely the "lesson" one gets from reading the book. Yet that does not really let her off the hook. The point is not that no revolution can ever be complete (or, in slightly different language, that any revolution is perfect), but that the distinctions she draws between Anarres and Urras are not supported by the world she describes. The incomplete revolution is still so nakedly different from the lack of a revolution, and no one ever forgets that, not even while dealing with "excrement." Le Guin seems to assume that this permanent consciousness in fact determines the social being of her characters, but it becomes quite clear that this idealism is no more convincing than a vulgar materialism—social being mechanically determining or producing consciousness.

The Dispossessed is an experiment that quietly buries a number of its variables under the weight of metaphor. It wants to dramatize ideas without dramatizing enough life, and even on its own terms, I think it misses the mark it sets for itself.

Winter on Mars?

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:53:00 +0000

Would anyone be interested in another reading project? Or reading about another reading project?

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy has been on my reading list ever since I started (and disappointingly never finished) reading Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future, a study of utopian thought and science fiction. Robinson's trilogy gets significant attention in Jameson's book, and I was pretty enthused about it but failed to follow up. About a year and a half ago, a number of commenters on a post on this blog (and on The Valve) pushed me toward it yet again, but once more I thought "that sounds awesome! and I'll get to it later!" and later kept being later.

No more! I plan to follow a simple schedule similar to Party in the U.S.A.—one book every month, posts coming at the end of the month or the beginning of the following month. January is Red Mars; February is Green Mars; March, Blue Mars. (I'm ignoring The Martians.) Depending on how things go, I might try to read Icehenge alongside, but that will be strictly extracurricular.

I hope (despite the short notice) this might encourage a few people to join the reading; I imagine some readers of this blog may already have read the trilogy, or parts of it. If you have, and you've written something about it or about Robinson, or have run into something written about it or him, please post a link in the comments—it'll be a great way to get things started.

My Year in Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 15:42:00 +0000

It would probably be gratuitous to round-up the things I have written this year, or to remark further upon the reading I have already posted about (to your right is the archive, and posting has been relatively light this year, so it should be unfortunately quite easy to navigate), but I want to attempt to account for some of the general trends in my reading for 2010, and to point to a few books that I have not yet brought up here.

2010 fiction:
Probably the greatest casualty of grad school has been my ability to keep up with newly published fiction. For many readers and many critics, this is no tragedy: the common assumption of the critics rounded up by the NYTBR for a seminar on ~~"Why You Should Continue to Read and Pay for the NYTBR Instead of Those Annoyingly Popular Blogs"~~ "Why Criticism Matters" seems to be that criticism is beleaguered not just because the educated reader is a (hardy but) menaced species, but because contemporary fiction is impoverished, dull, and repetitive. I tend to believe that if I haven't read a good novel published recently, then it must be from my lack of trying and not the fault of the literary community, but I believe I am in a minuscule minority in that sentiment. I find complaints of this sort ('it was a bad year for fiction'; 'there are no great writers anymore') generally unpersuasive; how is it possible to characterize the entire literary output of an industry whose scope of production we often have difficulty quantifying, much less evaluating? It's like saying it was a bad year for jeans or something: the fact that you bought a few pairs that don't fit you well says very little about the quality of production industry-wide. (On the other hand, it might say something about the accuracy of your self-image.)

At any rate, what new books did I read? I read The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte, about which I had high hopes after having read Home Land a few years ago. The Ask didn't disappoint; it's a great novel in all dimensions. I think, though, if you haven't read Lipsyte before but have been intrigued, I would read The Ask first; Home Land is so much more spontaneous but not quite as involving, and I think both books would look their best read in that order. But read both. I also read Alejandro Zambra's The Private Life of Trees which, on the other hand, should definitely be read after Zambra's previous effort, Bonsai, as Zambra plays a couple mini-meta- or intertextual games. I remember hearing that The Private Life of Trees is not quite as good as Bonsai, but I would say that it is worth reading regardless; after all, it is very short—if one finds it in a bookstore, one could read it without drawing attention for loitering.

Then there is Freedom, which I already wrote about here. I am of two very different minds about the novel's reception: it's not worth all the fuss, but it's also good enough to be worth fighting for against its most obnoxious bashers.

Comics/Graphic Novels:
I had a pretty enjoyable year, although in large part that's the product of knowing so little about the medium; nearly everything impresses me. But some of the titles I read—Asterios Polyp, Sandman, Ex Machina, James Sturm's The Golem's Mighty Swing, Joe Sacco's The Fixer—have impressed a lot of other people as well, to say the least. I tried Grant Morrison's The Invisibles and, well, I'm going just to assume I'm not a Grant Morrison person.

Major novels/classics:
I think I did an adequate job filling in some gaps this year; the big project was John Dos Passos's U.S.A., but I also really enjoyed reading Vanity Fair, Call It Sleep, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Ambassadors, Fathers and Sons, The Octopus, The Education of Henry Adams, The House of Mirth, Billy Budd, Sister Carrie, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Le Père Goriot, and, way back at the beginning of the year, Middlemarch. I should have had something to say about Vanity Fair, Call It Sleep and Tess; I think I have mentioned all the others on here in one way or another, but unfortunately the fall semester got away from me. Allow me to say now, though, that Call It Sleep is dull for about 100 pages, and then is among the best lyrical writing in American literary history for the next 250 pages or so, and the ending is among the finest in all of literature.

Short novels:
Some that I have not mentioned, but deserve to be highlighted: Miramar, by Naguib Mahfouz; Wittgenstein's Mistress, by David Markson; Old Masters, by Thomas Bernhard; Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson; So Long a Letter, by Mariama Bâ; Bread Givers, by Anzia Yezierska.
Other odds and ends: Diary of a Nobody and Cranford are two books of rather similar temperament: they both seem like they could be filmed by Mike Leigh and would turn out very well.
The Thirty-Nine Steps, by John Buchan, is as good as the film, which for a suspenser directed by Alfred Hitchcock is pretty large praise (can you say it about any others? maybe Strangers on a Train, although I haven't read it).
The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides, was an alright novel, although I feel rather indifferent about it which, given the subject matter, was not likely Eugenides's intention. It's entirely possible I did not give it sufficient attention, though; I read most of it on an airplane ride, an environment which I think is conducive to some wonderful reading experiences (I read the whole of Netherland on a cross-country flight and that was nearly perfect), while others I think require the different pressure of solitude and reflection; a metal tube crowded with people is probably not ideal.

Non-fiction:
I cannot recommend highly enough two very unusual histories of popular music, both of which focus on how sound is recorded and manipulated post-recording: Albin Zak's The Poetics of Rock and Greg Milner's Perfecting Sound Forever. Both will in all likelihood vastly change how you think about not just the technological processes that shape what we hear, but also the social processes—the experiential recalibrations that are brought about by being enveloped by certain types of sounds—that shape how we hear, what we think music "sounds like," and what are good sounds.

Also recommended are some excellent histories of specific genres or artists: Louis Armstrong's New Orleans, by Thomas Brothers; Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century, by Virginia Danielson; Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South, by Patrick Huber; and Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio, by Louise Meintjes.

Those books were assigned in a course I took this fall about the history of recorded vernacular musics; in another course, which covered the rise of the "new middle class" (and, to some extent, the supposed "decline" of the genteel society) from the Civil War through the Great Depression, I would like particularly to praise George Fredrickson's The Inner Civil War; Highbrow/Lowbrow (covered here); The New Radicalism (covered here and here); Making America Corporate, by Olivier Zunz; and Selling Culture, by Richard Ohmann, which I'm having some trouble getting around to posting about, but which I intend to, I promise! It really is an immensely useful and brilliant book; it's like reading about fifteen histories all at once of the rise of mass culture, advertising, and what Warren Susman calls the culture of abundance. Zunz's book is much shorter but is also really incredible at synthesizing a number of different ways of thinking about the cultural and economic transformations that were occurring across the continent at the turn of the century. Few straight-up social or economic histories that I have read use literature and culture so effectively and so imaginatively. And I really cannot say enough good things about Fredrickson's book.

Well, that's about all the books I care to talk about for now, and my apologies for the abbreviated and probably unhelpful nature of this hodge-podge omnibus. I hope I can do better this year at keeping pace on this blog with my reading. Happy new year!

From Warren Susman, Culture as History

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 19:16:00 +0000

From the Preface (pp. x-xi):

In the beginning there are the words, all kinds of words from all kinds of places: words from philosophical treatises and tombstones, from government documents and fairy tales, from scientific papers, advertisements, dictionaries, and collections of jokes. There are, of course, other sources of information: images, sounds, objects of use and of enjoyment, ledgers of debits and of credits, gathered statistics—countless cultural artifacts, each of enormous value but analyzable only when translated into words. Thus the historian's world is always a world of words; they become his primary data; from them he fashions facts. He can then go on to create other words, propositions about the world that follow from his study of those data.
This creation of fact is never an easy task. The historian must discover the precise nature of the human experience the words attempt to describe, the particular attitudes toward that experience they define. Thomas Hobbes warned us centuries ago that "words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon with them, but they are the money of fools." The historian must learn to tell the wise man from the fool—and then learn from both of them. He must learn how people do in fact "reckon" with words.
But the good historian is not done when he has presented the facts. He must be able to take words seriously but not always literally. He must pay special attention not only to what writers "parade but what they betray": the unstated sassumptions that make the stated words intelligible. The historian searches not only for truth but for meaning. In that process the very words the historian uses become symbols themselves. Each age has its special words, its own vocabulary, its own set of meanings, its particular symbolic order. This is true of the world about which the historian writes; it is equally true of the world in which he [sic] writes. Turning facts into interpreted symbols, the final stage of the historian's craft, becomes the most difficult and the most intellectually dangerous.

(Warren I. Susman, Culture as History. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003. Reprint of New York: Pantheon Books, 1973.)

Provincialism and the Intellectual as a Social Type

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 14:55:00 +0000

Christopher Lasch opens this book about as directly as one possibly can: "The main argument of this book is that modern radicalism or liberalism can best be understood as a phase of the social history of the intellectuals. In the United States, to which this study is confined, the connection is particularly clear. There, the rise of the new radicalism coincided with the emergence of the intellectual as a distinctive social type" (ix).

It is interesting to compare this very plain thesis statement, however, with later iterations of the book's "main argument." For instance, although I think he reads feminism incorrectly as being seamlessly assimilated to his larger typology (his thoughts on feminism are face-palmingly bad), the following articulates very well how Lasch conceives of what goes into this "social history of the intellectuals":

When one sees the feminist impulse as an aspect of a more general development—the revolt of intellectuals against the middle class—one begins to understand the feminists' acute fear that life had passed them by. For this conviction that life lay always outside the narrow confines of one's own experience was common to all those, of whatever sex, who felt themselves imprisoned in the stale room of a borrowed culture.

Or later (though still quite problematically as it applies to feminism and as it applies to Bourne's physical disability):

[I]ndeed the sense of being cut off from "life," the sense of being in some way disabled and deformed, weighed heavily upon a whole generation of American intellectuals. As intellectuals they envied the working class. As women they envied men. But so did men envy women, and for the same thing, their easier access to experience… th[is] sense of "alienage" was a highly subjective state of mind, one which cannot be traced to any such simple source as the deprivations of American women or even to so real a disadvantage as a physical deformity. The pervasiveness among intellectuals of the fear that life had somehow passed them by suggests that the fear reflected the growing isolation of the intellectuals as a class from the main currents of American life. It was both cause and consequence of their rejection of their middle-class origins. Seeking experience, they rejected a culture which seemed to them increasingly artificial, increasingly cut off from life; yet, having broken away from the middle class, intellectuals often found themselves no near to "life" than before (100-101).

Only one more (long, but still quite interesting) passage before I try to make a slight alteration in Lasch's model and a few miscellaneous comments/critiques:

The originality of the new radicalism as a form of politics rested on a twofold discovery: the discovery of the dispossessed by men who themselves had never known poverty or prejudice, and the mutual self-discovery of the intellectuals. The combination of the two accounted for the intensity with which the intellectuals identified themselves with the outcasts of the social order: women, children, proletarians, Indians, and Jews. At the very moment when they became aware of the other half of humanity, they became aware of each other and came to see themselves as yet another class apart. In time, their very sense of kinship with one another made them all the more painfully conscious of their collective isolation from the rest of the society. Then the "submerged tenth" came to be seen not only as the visible representation of the unsublimated selfhood of mankind but, more immediately, as a potential political ally. The intellectuals came to court the dispossessed with an ardor doubly endowed. (147-148)

"The mutual self-discovery of the intellectuals" is a lovely, evocative phrase, and when one thinks of the vibrant energy behind all the "little magazines" and coteries being formed in the early years of the twentieth-century, it also seems remarkably apt. However, Lasch's description of this process is both rather weakly existential and abstractly or ethereally un-located ("they became aware of each other") and yet also, in another sense, implicitly quite concrete, located, and very embodied: the "mutual self-discovery of the intellectuals" was, for many though not quite all, carried through by the physical congregation of these intellectuals with one another and with "the submerged tenth" in the city—in bohemias and settlement houses, at strikes and on the street, in museums and lofts.

If we do add this more located history of the "mutual self-discovery" into the record, then the painful consciousness of "their collective isolation" must also be read in something more than existential terms, less as a "sense of 'alienage'" and more as a quite material experience of either separation, deprivation, or involuntary seclusion. It is the memory of distance not just as an emotional or even intellectual problem or as a figure of speech, but as a physical limitation or constraint, as a condition which removes many options for what one could do, acquire, and know, and makes still other options rare and strange—that memory, or the continued experience of it, is, I believe, the more potent "social history of the intellectual" at this time, at least for a very large number of the figures Lasch would have categorized as intellectuals.

One word to describe this more located history (although I think it is still too abstract and notional, or too metaphorical) is provincialism—it at least retains or includes, necessarily, some overtly spatial, if not actually embodied, meaning, whereas, I think, "isolation" or "alienation" lead inexorably toward over-abstraction, toward more primarily mental or emotional "senses"—"discontent" or Jackson Lears's (and Nietzsche's) "weightlessness," or "angst" or even "Weltschmerz" from an earlier epoch. I prefer "provincialism" not as a superior synonym for "isolation" or "alienation" (it is, clearly, not synonymous with them, as it is frequently used as a pejorative description of the condition of other people, not of the self, while "isolation" and "alienation" are generally more self-applied or self-inclusive), but as an alternative or substitution. A phrase like "the main currents of American life" (which Lasch uses on 101, 294, and 349) requires an objective correlative, a physical location that "isolation" only suggests figuratively. I feel that "provincialism," with its primary reference to actual geographical distance from "the main currents" of culture, power, and activity, better grounds the condition that Lasch is trying to identify and to theorize.

Lasch's intellectuals felt like provincials, physically unable to access "the main currents," either by the obstruction of gender, of geography, of class, or of (although this does not enter into Lasch's discussion) race or ethnicity. "Provincialism" is the belief that one is located wrongly—removed from where the action is when one belongs in the action. Print culture and correspondence can't fully make up for this dislocation; it requires re-location, and, at least for part of the history of the formation of Lasch's intellectuals, the destination of that re-location was not entirely taken for granted, as Europe still retained quite a hold, and the hierarchy of domestic cultural centers was at a moment of flux, with new centers (Chicago, San Francisco) emerging and older ones (Boston) waning. New York was (as Lasch argued in the passage I quoted from before) only now, at the turn of the century, consolidating the full range of activities and resources which would make it "the spiritual home of the American intellectual" (320), with an emphatic underline beneath the definite article. In a strong sense, this confusion meant that everyone had some claim to feeling provincial: when no one knows where the action is (or where the action next will be), all are peripheral to it.

Yet still we see that Lasch is content with New York as merely the intellectual's "spiritual home" when the point is that for many at this moment (though, of course, by no means all), the "spiritual" was insufficient. I think that part of what makes the "status group" that Lasch was trying to assemble actually cohere is the common experience of provincialism, of realizing that aspects of one's material life—one's geographical location, one's gender, class, or ethnicity—obstruct or put one at a distance from the "main currents," from where the action is. This recognition is what made the "mutual self-discovery of the intellectuals" so energetic, so intense, and so transformative.

From "The Comedian as the Letter C," by Wallace Stevens

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 13:32:00 +0000

The moonlight fiction disappeared. The spring,
Although contending featly in its veils,
Irised in dew and early fragrancies,
Was gemmy marionette to him that sought
A sinewy nakedness. A river bore
The vessel inward. Tilting up his nose,
He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells
Of dampened lumber, emanations blown
From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes,
Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks
That helped him round his rude aesthetic out.
He savored rankness like a sensualist.
He marked the marshy ground around the dock,
The crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence,
Curriculum for the marvelous sophomore.
It purified. It made him see how much
Of what he saw he never saw at all.
He gripped more closely the essential prose
As being, in a world so falsified,
The one integrity for him, the one
Discovery still possible to make,
To which all poems were incident, unless
That prose should wear a poem's guise.

Teaser

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 15:39:00 +0000

As you may have noticed, blogging has not gone particularly well around here for the last few weeks. Once the term ends (or maybe even before, but not until after I get the first draft of a research paper I'm working on), these are some topics I think I'll be covering:

The promised second post on Christopher Lasch's The New Radicalism in America, where I will try to add something to his theory about "the intellectual as social type"
Two posts about Richard Ohmann's sweeping study of turn-of-the-century mass culture, Selling Culture: the first dealing with Ohmann's definition of mass culture (I think there's a good discussion to be had about how we might adapt it to the present, or whether we should); the second dealing with the concept of a "national market" or a "national audience," and what is really entailed in invoking the "nation" in this manner.
Some thoughts about this year's music
Some contrarianism about the aesthetic and moral presumptions of modernism, or, rather, of the felt need to elevate it continuously

At the Crossroads: Middle America and the Battle to Save the Car Industry, by Abe Aamidor and Ted Evanoff

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 19:39:00 +0000

Oddly enough, this book tells a similar story to the David Brooks column I just shook my head over—but it tells that story responsibly and with a more than rhetorical sympathy for the economic struggles of Middle America.

Like Brooks's column, At the Crossroads admonishes the Obama government for essentially dropping the ball on the Midwest, but where Brooks sees this as inept political maneuvering—somehow Obama allowed blue-collar Midwesterners who "were willing to take a flier" on him in 2008 to become "disillusioned with Democratic policies"—Aamidor and Evanoff, the authors of At the Crossroads understand that the reality is quite a bit more complicated than poorly-managed political theater. Brooks acknowledges that "voters in this region face structural problems, not cyclical ones," but seems not to understand that "structural" means something more than "big, ugly, persistent mess."

At the Crossroads differs from Brooks and his ilk, therefore, not just by virtue of the fact that it is a book, not an editorial column, and can therefore bring to bear an armature of both statistical and quasi-ethnographic data about the collapsing industries of the Midwest and the political ramifications of that collapse, but also because At the Crossroads recognizes that elections and exit polls are not the only way to figure out what is going on within the electorate, or a portion thereof.

Aamidor and Evanoff also understand that Midwesterners are not, as Brooks depicts them, simply waiting around for the federal government to figure out how to talk nice enough to win their votes. At the Crossroads tells the story of how efforts by auto-city mayors and union leaders to retain jobs and find innovative ways of gaining some economic security for their communities. Traveling around mostly among a network of small Indiana cities that are, or were, satellites of the Detroit auto industry, the two authors fill in a rich picture of the challenges facing these communities and the obstacles that impede economic redevelopment—two of the most significant being the guiding political-economic philosophies of the past ("What's good for General Motors…") and the present ("What's good for Wall Street…").

I came across this book as part of the excellent Eco-Libris campaign to raise the profile of books printed on recycled/FSC-certified paper; At the Crossroads is printed by ECW Press in Canada.

This is the weirdest thing I've read in awhile

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 01:36:00 +0000

I had stopped reading David Brooks (and the rest of the NYT columnists, honestly), but I'm glad I took a peek back at this one.

It's amazing that anyone is paid to write something like, "[Republicans] score[d] gains nearly everywhere where disapproval of President Obama and his policies was high." Yeah. But that's not even the weird part:

It would take a Balzac to understand the perplexities and contradictions one finds in these [Midwestern] neighborhoods. On the one hand, people are living with the daily grind of getting by on $40,000 a year, but they’re also living with Xboxes and smartphones. People in these places have traditional bourgeois values, but they live amid a decaying social fabric, with high divorce rates and skyrocketing single parenthood numbers.

It would take a Balzac to understand that people are using credit cards to live beyond their means? Sucks for us that we only have Jonathan Franzen.

Populism, the Tea Party, and Historiography

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 22:12:00 +0000

Part of the challenge of avoiding presentism in thinking and writing about history is the difficulty of abandoning attractive analogies before they become convincing to you, before it seems as if, yes, there might be something to calling Jon Stewart a sort of neo- or postmodern (post-post-modern?) Mugwump, for example.¹ Blogs probably do not help this process—toying with an idea and pursuing it far enough to think "this might make for an interesting post" exist on a very slippery slope.

That said, for one of my classes this term I have read a few books about Populism, including the one at the left, The Populist Vision, by Charles Postel, and it was difficult not to wonder whether the gradual rehabilitation of the Populists' image might not predict what will one day be an attempt to recover the economic rationality underlying the wild actions and rhetoric of the Tea Party. That is to say, I'm not trying to suggest a parallel between the Populists and the Tea Party as groups with similar agendas or even similar demographic compositions, but rather a possible parallel between what has been the evolution of our understanding and characterization of Populism and what may be the future trends of our understanding and characterization of the Tea Party.

There are, I think, limited options for how to place and characterize (and I am using both verbs quite literally—how we think about where these people come from and how their actions reflect certain interior tendencies, values, and dispositions) movements of this sort. These limited terms fasten onto one or the other side of a basic question: whether, to use Raymond Williams's terms, the movement is alternative or oppositional—whether it is a sort of abrupt but transient effluence of resentment and conspiracy-mongering, or whether it is in fact a proper (and viable) challenge to the dominant system of (primarily) economic relations.

The historiographic trend for Populism, at least since Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform (1955), has been, I think, increasingly to emphasize the oppositional nature of Populism and either to sideline the aspects that look merely alternative or to transform them into more properly oppositional components. Postel's book is in fact the culmination of this trend (I'll elaborate on this in a moment), even though it reverses many of the arguments that have been made on Populism's behalf to re-assess it as truly oppositional; where multiple historians have sought to valorize the aspects of Populism which are the most anti-modern, Postel not only foregrounds (and in some cases, genuinely excavates) Populism's embrace of science and more "modern" forms of religious thought, but also re-codes as modern and progressive many of the structures and ideologies (e.g., farmers' cooperatives and protection of public lands from speculators {cf. p. 38 and 28, respectively, for brilliant analyses of these two issues}) which his predecessors have hailed as resolutely antagonistic to the mainstream notions and programs of progress and modernization.

So my question is whether the historiographic trend for thinking about the Tea Party will also follow this basic shift from seeing the Tea Partiers as alternative (and essentially assimilable if still quite nettlesome) to seeing them as fully oppositional (and therefore representing a full-bodied challenge to the current system of relations between, to adopt their cast of characters, Big Government, Wall Street, and "real Americans"). I certainly do not expect this trend to begin, much less come to fruition, immediately or even in the near future, and therefore I am not terribly attached to this line of questioning; it is, frankly, pretty idle and purely speculative, and probably ill-advised. Furthermore, I definitely do not mean to suggest by this hypothetical that I think that the Tea Party actually is an oppositional movement or culture, and that future historians will see it more clearly than we do now. I am, in fact, agnostic on this point, and somewhat indifferent. There are, of course, a variety of ways to be "oppositional;" Williams's term wasn't meant as a direct or eo ipso valorization, but rather as a tool for evaluating relative positions.

Back to Postel, though, because I think a brief analysis of his argument and what I think is missing from his characterization of the Populists exposes what I consider to be a larger problem in Populist historiography stemming from Hofstadter's infamous (and invidious) division of the Populist psyche into a "soft side," characterized as "the injured little yeoman" who is conspiracy-mad and virulently resentful; and a "hard side," characterized as "a harassed little country businessman" who took rational measures to improve his threatened economic position. The nature of these terms has generally meant that the analysis of Populism has been to push both "sides" toward a sort of uneven or flawed synthesis, where the rationality of some of the "soft side" behaviors and actions is revealed, and the "hard side" gains a bit of "vision," borrowing some of the vim and vigor of the more apocalyptic imagination of the "soft side." The "soft side" is still mostly deprecated, but now can be recuperated to some extent.

I would argue that Postel's book is the culmination of this trend because, by reversing field and arguing that instead of the usual emphasis on what the Populists opposed or protested, we should rather look at what they planned and valued, he in fact completes this synthesis, allowing the hard and soft sides of Populism to fuse while yet allowing the stress to fall ultimately on the hard side. Populists, essentially, were "country businessmen," as Hofstadter said, but they weren't so little and they weren't so harassed. They were active and innovative, full of initiative and "vision," eager to pursue big ideas but disciplined enough to do so through a "narrow materialist lens" (Postel 10). So it is because they were not latter-day Luddites or Diggers but were, as Robert McMath, Jr. puts it in his review of Postel, "tr[ying] to beat the captains of industry at their own game"—i.e., at consolidation, innovation, use of new transportation and communications technologies, etc.—that they were better positioned as a legitimately oppositional force. (Or at least, that was their plan—as McMath later notes, "it is sometimes hard to distinguish facts from aspirations.") "Progress," in this case, is more effectively opposed by progressing in a different direction rather than by a digging in of the heels.

Postel presents his case with extraordinary cogency, yet I feel that there is something missing from Postel's narrative, and that is, for lack of a more artful term, the all-or-nothingness that I have encountered among Populists and their precursors, the sense that the only available option is to "go all in"—most clearly exemplified by the preference of many for a single panacea for change (single taxers, greenbackers, free silver, et al.). In literature (not the best proof, but the one that I am most familiar with), it is the spirit which causes the grain farmers in The Octopus to arm themselves and resist the railroad company at all costs, including (or especially) death. It is the type of imagination that can lead to (and eagerly consume) the utopic vision of Looking Backward as well as the apocalyptic vision of Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column. It is the people who at least felt something satisfying could be found in the injunction to "raise less corn and more hell."

In Hofstadter's terms, this is clearly "soft" (maybe soft-headed) behavior, which I don't think is entirely the case (from certain positions, "all-or-nothing" does look like the most rational course), but in Postel's terms, this type of behavior can barely be acknowledged. But that is, I feel, because he is still caught in Hofstadter's terms, still looking to justify "soft" things as secretly "hard" or as providing the necessary ideological energy for driving the "hard" side. Surely, though, the point of the "all-or-nothing-ness" in Populism is that it wasn't experienced as a decision between "soft" or "hard," but that it was experienced as a necessity, and that, I think, is what is missing from Postel's account—the hard edge of felt necessities. Planners and visionaries often depend on people who find they have no course of action left but throwing their lot in completely with someone else's plan or vision, and that dynamic needs to be acknowledged to move truly beyond Hofstadter's limiting categories.

¹ Not in the sense that he'd bolt the Democratic party, but in the sense that he's advocating a rejection of the crassness of the current political climate, and that, arguably, he has reduced structural problems to problems of personality or (implicitly) character—that contemporary politics encourages only the worst characters to engage in political action (and media commentary on that action).

From Old Masters, by Thomas Bernhard

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 00:11:00 +0000

When I think that even super-intelligent people have been taken in by Heidegger and that even one of my best women friends wrote a dissertation about Heidegger, and moreover wrote that dissertation quite seriously, I feel sick to this day, Reger said.

Reger's opinion about Heidegger is quite surprising to me, actually, although I can see how Bernhard and Heidegger would be a sort of oil-and-water combination, but I really like that Reger has to specify that his friend wrote her dissertation quite seriously—is there an Austrian habit of writing unserious dissertations? I've written unserious abstracts before (e.g., "The Awkward Ache: Castration Anxiety in Henry James"), but, you know, that was college. I know better now.

From The New Radicalism in America, by Christopher Lasch

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 18:14:00 +0000

I will discuss this passage (and the book's argument more generally) at a later date, but for now, I just want to put this interesting analysis of the geographic shape of American culture out here:

The convergence of the world of culture with the world of advertising and entertainment was only incidentally a function of the rise of mass communications. It was primarily a function of the concentration of cultural life in the city of New York, a development, in fact, which was indispensable to the creation of an intellectual class in the first place. In the nineteenth century the United States was a country without a cultural capital, the best example of such a country in the world. The years between the Civil War and the First World War, however, saw the steady dissolution of provincial culture and the concentration of intellectual life in Chicago and New York, and by the time of the Second World War the isolated preeminence of New York had long been assured. Neither the newspaper business nor the publishing of books and periodicals nor, indeed, any form of cultural activity escaped the centralizing pull that governed the economy as a whole. The economic advantages of large-scale production gave rise to the popular press and the national magazine, both of them geared to an urban readership. Publishing, accordingly, gravitated to the cities. In publishing as in every other industry, moreover, a fierce competition tended to eliminate the smaller producers and to concentrate the control of the market in the hands of a few firms strategically located at the financial heart of the nation. By the turn of the century most of the major magazines and all but a handful of the publishers of books had taken up residence in New York. Journalists, writers, artists, intellectuals of all kinds had no choice but to follow. The demands of this process again and again gave a new shape to men's [sic] careers. William Dean Howells moved from Ohio to Boston to New York. A whole group of intellectuals—Floyd Dell, Susan Glaspell, Carl Van Vechten, and others—migrated from Iowa to New York by way of Chicago. The 'renaissance' in Chicago at the turn of the century was short-lived because by the time of the First World War most of its leading figures had gone on to New York. From then on, New York was unmistakably the spiritual home of the American intellectual. The New York Times and The New Yorker became national institutions because they provided, for the exiled multitudes, a tenuous link to the Mecca of the East (319-320).

I imagine few historians of ideas or of popular culture would give geography this kind of primacy; far more, I believe, accept the mass communications argument that Lasch immediately rejects. I am perhaps overly inclined to accept Lasch's geographic emphasis as it dovetails very nicely with a number of my interests and projects, but I also see some limitations to his understanding of what this "concentration" entailed, and certainly I think it can be noticed immediately that the chronology of this concentration business is unhelpfully loose, smearing a few different processes or fields, each with their own shape and dynamic, together to achieve a thick and bold effect. On the other hand, even among the examples given, Lasch clips off some details (for instance, he elides Howells's very important Italian residency from the itinerary given of his career) which would make this a less unified narrative (although in Howells's case, I think the addition of a transatlantic or, rather, a transcontinental dimension improves the argument rather than weakens it, but I'll return to that perhaps in the coming post about Lasch's book).

Yet, like the book as a whole, Lasch's argument brings to light some isolated (one of Lasch's favorite words) recognitions of particular cultural shifts and moments—for instance, it is quite interesting to note the geographical shift signaled by the difference between the nineteenth-century's leading intellectual periodicals, The Atlantic Monthly and The North American Review, and the twentieth-century's dominant publications, The New Yorker and The New York Times. I think a few different conclusions can be drawn (if, that is, any should be) from this shift, but it is plausible, at least, to read it in just these terms that Lasch is laying out here.

Franzen's Favorite Fiction

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 13:56:00 +0000

Via Mark Athitakis, I find that Oprah has induced Jonathan Franzen to list his favorite works of fiction. Some are a little surprising (though others aren't), so I thought I'd run the list (alpha by author) here for your comments:

Continental Drift, Russell Banks
Seize the Day, Saul Bellow
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
The Chaneysville Incident, David Bradley
Ms. Hempel Chronicles, by Sarah Shun Lien Bynum
Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, Evan S. Connell
White Noise, Don DeLillo
The End of Vandalism, Tom Drury
The Hamlet, William Faulkner
Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
Something Happened, Joseph Heller
Jesus' Son and Angels, Denis Johnson
Corregidora, Gayl Jones
Independent People, Halldor Laxness
The Assistant, Bernard Malamud
A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
The Beggar Maid; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway, Alice Munro
A Personal Matter, Kenzaburo Oe
Eustace Chisholm and the Works, James Purdy
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
In Persuasion Nation, George Saunders
Enemies: A Love Story and The Family Moskat, Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Greenlanders; The Age of Grief; Ordinary Love and Good Will, Jane Smiley
Endless Love, Scott Spencer
The Man Who Loved Children, Christina Stead
Taking Care, Joy Williams

Going Everywhere

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 22:37:00 +0000

The school term means I've been reading less fiction (and what I've read recently hasn't quite provoked a blog-worthy response, unfortunately, but blame me, not the books), and so to feed the blog, have some links:

To begin, I'd like to point you to (you may have already seen it) an essay which, by internet standards, is no longer contemporary, but Chris Fujiwara's "To Have Done with the Contemporary Cinema," in the first issue of the n+1 Film Review, will probably be worth visiting long after it's no longer contemporary by journalistic or even academic standards. Less polemical than that title sounds, Fujiwara brilliantly questions not only what is usually meant by the term "contemporary cinema," but also the limits of who is able to be "contemporary."
Borrowing the New Yorker's 20 under 40 schtick, The New Haven Review lauds a different 20 under 40, and, although many of the laureates have published novels or poetry, they're being recognized for their non-fiction writing. A number of names I'm glad to see, a few I'm not familiar with, and at least one provoked a snort. I find the idea of listing 20 Non-Fiction Writers Under 40 list a much more interesting proposition than a 20 Fiction Writers Under 40; there is, I think, much more variety possible: feature writers, film, music, and lit critics, tech columnists, environmental writers, humorists, food writers, sports writers, political reporters are all kind of represented here. Any suggestions for who was left off?
To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, the book's three authors, David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Steiger, look back over the book in a long but very rich post here. A shorter introduction providing some background for what the book was trying to accomplish in 1985, and what previous efforts to understand Hollywood as a specific mode of production the book was responding to.
Saul Bellow's letters, or rather a selection of them, are coming out November 4th, and The Guardian has published a fairly intimate piece about his widow. The article has a number of interesting anecdotes (Janis Bellow is, as the writer notes, surprisingly unguarded for someone married to such a gossip-magnet), and appended are a few of Bellow's letters, also containing some curiosities.
Also, check out the newest project from Ted Gioia, who has previously created The New Canon, Conceptual Fiction, and The Great Books Guide. The new site is Postmodern Mystery, covering "experimental, unconventional and postmodern approaches to stories of mystery and suspense." Some of the first essays discuss Paul Auster, Witold Gombrowicz, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Perec, and Jonathan Lethem.

From Raymond Williams, "Culture Is Ordinary"

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 19:27:00 +0000

Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society expresses its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land. The growing society is there, yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind. The making of a mind is, first, the slow learning of shapes, purposes, and meanings, so that work, observation and communication are possible. Then, second, but equal in importance, is the testing of these in experience, the making of new observations, comparisons, and meanings. A culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tested. These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that is always both traditional and creative: that is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings. We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life—the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning—the special processes of discovery and creative effort. Some writers reserve the word for one or the other of these senses; I insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction. The questions I ask about our culture are questions about our general and common purposes, yet also questions about deep personal meanings. Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind…

The Marxists [that Williams met at Cambridge] said many things, but those that mattered were three… [the first two being] a relationship between culture and production and the observation that education was restricted. The other things I rejected, as I rejected also their third point, that since culture and production are related, the advocacy of a different system of production is in some way a cultural directive, indicating not only a way of life but new arts and learning. I did some writing while I was, for eighteen months, a member of the Communist party, and I found out in trivial ways what other writers, here and in Europe have found out more gravely: the practical consequences of this kind of theoretical error. In this respect, I saw the future, and it didn't work. The Marxist interpretation of culture can never be accepted while it retains, as it need not retain, this directive element, this insistence that if you honestly want socialism you must write, think, learn in certain prescribed ways. A culture is common meanings, the product of a man's [sic] whole people, and offered individual meanings, the product of a man's [sic] whole committed personal and social experience. It is stupid and arrogant to suppose that any of these meanings can in any way be prescribed; they are made by living, made and remade, in ways we cannot know in advance. To try to jump the future, to pretend that in some way you are the future, is strictly insane. Prediction is another matter, an offered meaning, but the only thing we can say about culture in an England that has socialized its means of production is that all the channels of expression and communication should be cleared and open, so that the whole actual life, that we cannot know in advance, that we we can know only in part even while it is being lived, may be brought to consciousness and meaning. (11, 14, 15)

Highbrow/Lowbrow, by Lawrence Levine

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 01:41:00 +0000

It is worth reading this book for the anecdotes about Shakespearean performance alone, but it should also be pointed out that the book's argument has aged much better than have those of its disputants. Those who wish still to defend the exclusive or near-exclusive teaching and appreciation of a Western Canon now have to find ways of side-stepping the intensely pessimistic and vituperative late-80s Culture Wars polemics, while any writer or speaker wishing to defend a pluralist approach to pedagogy or even mere appreciation can quite unashamedly return to any of Levine's books not only for their language and phrasing but also for many of their facts. (I read Levine's Opening of the American Mind a few years ago and also found it highly valuable as a polemic and, to a slightly lesser extent, as history.) And, even despite the extent to which it has become the dominant historicist interpretation of the "emergence of cultural hierarchy in America," Levine's twenty-two-year-old project still transmits the excitement, boldness, and freshness with which Levine framed his arguments in 1988.

However, twenty-two years is not all that brief, and particularly not for a field of inquiry which has, in that almost-quarter-century, proliferated and subdivided so much as has popular culture studies. The basic type of narrative that Levine constructs is, I think, a little dubious at this point, and some of the assumptions he makes regarding the motivations of both his individual actors and the classes in his account are perhaps a little less complex than they ought to be. Of course, one needs to remember that the basic shape of Levine's account was created to answer a very different set of questions and anticipate a very different set of responses than a historian of popular culture might face today, and that not having to make the case that "high culture" has a more egalitarian and a shorter history than its guardians would like to acknowledge is directly due to Levine's work here. It should also be mentioned that the material of Highbrow/Lowbrow was mostly drawn from a series of lectures—an origin which is not a disadvantage so much as it is a different genre from the monograph.

Highbrow/Lowbrow works with a few different examples—Shakespearean performance, opera, symphonic music, and public exhibition of painting and sculpture—but its argument is virtually identical across each: in the early through the mid nineteenth century, American public culture was shared across classes, but over the latter half of the nineteenth century, the ruling or upper classes began designating certain cultural practices or elements as proper to themselves, and they began building—architecturally as well as ideologically—defenses against the indiscriminate mixing of both content and consumers. Shakespeare would no longer be performed with vaudevillean antics intruding between (and sometimes into) the acts of the play; symphonic music and opera would no longer be leavened with Stephen Foster songs or light dance music; opera singers and illustrious actors would no longer re-shape their performances or their lines to meet the crowd's approval; great paintings would no longer hang between cabinets of curiosities. What had been an integrated culture of all manner of cultural performances and artifacts became dissociated into new categories and newly formed practices, and this dissociation took place on multiple levels, no less profound for their subtlety:

The changes were not cataclysmic; they were gradual and took place in rough stages: physical or spatial bifurcation, with different socioeconomic groups becoming associated with different theaters in large urban centers, was followed inevitably by the stylistic bifurcation described by George William Curtis, and ultimately culminated in a bifurcation of content, which saw a growing chasm between "serious" and "popular" culture. (68)

Levine is masterful at turning up the most apposite examples of how this transformation was effected: how posters advertising performances of Shakespeare were re-formatted and re-phrased over the years to shift audiences' expectations for the kind of show they were going to see, moving from a diverse bill-of-fare with lots of different acts and entertainments to a single pièce-de-resistance which should only stand on its own; how applause between movements was discouraged in the performance of a symphony; how museum hours were set up to draw certain audiences and deter others.

But the story is largely—and I think wrongly—one-sided. Here is Levine on the central problem of his study:

The problem that requires thoughtful attention is not why Shakespeare disappeared from American culture at the turn of the century, since he did not; but rather why he was transformed from a playwright for the general public into one for a specific audience.This metamorphosis of Shakespearean drama from popular culture to polite culture, from entertainment to erudition, from the property of "Everyman" to the possession of a more elite circle, needs to be seen within the perspective of other transformations that took place in nineteenth-century America. (56)

Levine's narrative is one of simple expropriation: Shakespeare originally belonged to everybody, and then a few decided that he belonged only to the educated and the rich, and that was that. And within the terms of what the upper class meant to do, it is a fairly convincing story, with one fairly large exception I'll get to later. But as a narrative of expropriation, it needs to be more interested in the responses of the people who were being excluded from all this Shakespeare-enjoying and Don Giovanni-listening. The "other transformations" which Levine acknowledges as the context of this specific transformation of Shakespeare are depicted as going on entirely within the (urban) bourgeoisie—professionalization, incorporation, the absorption of the nouveaux riches. No transformations originating in and primarily affecting the working class are considered; all we see is the new labels "popular culture" and "lowbrow" being applied to them by the elites. Are we, then, to presume that the working class was static through this period, that their tastes—if left alone—would have remained within the same field of cultural practices and values, that new technologies as well as new living and working environments might have had only negligible effect? I don't think Levine asks us to presume this, but he spends no time considering whether or not there might have been independent forces pulling the working class away from this "shared public culture" and into its own forms of consumption—dime novels, newspapers, amusement parks, dance halls, sporting events*, etc. Levine doesn't prove—and doesn't attempt to prove—that "popular" culture ever missed the things that the urban elites supposedly took away from them unilaterally.

Secondly, while Levine acknowledges that Shakespeare never really disappeared from popular culture, he plays down too much the ways he has persisted. For instance, Levine quotes Richard Burton as saying that in Hollywood, Shakespeare was box office poison, but that certainly seems at odds with the huge number of attempts Hollywood has made (and continues to make) to break that supposed curse. Nor does Levine adequately consider Shakespeare's presence on radio or in schools. Well, in fact Levine considers the latter, but he assumes that the association of Shakespeare with rote memorization and declamation exercises was part of his dissociation from "the broader world of everyday culture" (33), a conclusion which I find questionable; instead, I think it would be more likely that the memorization of Shakespeare would make him available for the type of parodies and re-codings that enrich an experience of, say, Kiss Me Kate or West Side Story or Loony Tunes which Levine acknowledges have always been an integral part of Shakespeare's place in that broader world (14-15). And while, as Levine argues, references to Shakespeare "have become increasingly limited to the handful of Shakespearean scenes and characters that remained well known in the society" (55), I question to what extent this constriction is really an index for or a product of Shakespeare's dissociation from "everyday culture," or if it isn't rather a sign that everyday culture has been increasingly filled up with other things, competitors for the cultural space that Shakespeare occupied. There is a very implicit assumption running through Levine's book that Shakespeare is fundamental to all people (or at least all Americans), and that his dominant place in this "shared public culture" is almost natural—and therefore that this dominance could only have ended through some form of expropriation. The idea that Frank Merriwell or Nick Carter (no, not that Nick Carter) might have shoved aside Prince Hal and Falstaff seems to be something Levine didn't consider.

To return to that "fairly large exception" which I referred to above, I think the premise of a "shared public culture" as the original condition of American culture deserves a little more scrutiny and the word "shared" needs more than a little bit of examination for the assumptions it's hiding under its egalitarian conviviality. This is a very similar problem to what I have said earlier about Leo Marx's use of the word and its inflections—and it is entirely possible, I think, to see Levine as still writing vaguely under the shadow of consensus history and particularly under the older American Studies. There is a moment of real conflict narrated in the book—the Astor Place Riot—but for the most part the gradual nature of the changes he outlines tends to minimize the disturbances or disequilibria of the transformations in late nineteenth-century popular culture.

Part of the problem, I think, is what Levine presumes is actually being "shared" in this antebellum public culture. Levine assumes that because people of all classes and tastes were going to the see the same performances of Shakespeare in the same place and at the same time, we can safely bracket the separateness of their reasons for doing so; the important thing was that they went, and we can read their choice as an affirmative one for the event, if not for all parts of the event (i.e., some may have gone for the poetry but resented the bawdiness, others for the inverse). Regardless, Levine sees the "shared public culture" as the product of a nearly ideally free market:

When Shakespeare, opera, art, and music were subject to free exchange, as they had been for much of the nineteenth century, they became the property of many groups, the companion of a wide spectrum of other cultural genres, and thus their power to bestow distinction was diminished, as was their power to please those who insisted on enjoying them in privileged circumstances, free from the interference of other cultural groups and the dilution of other cultural forms. As long as they remained shared culture, the manner of their presentation and reception was determined in part by the market, that is, by the demands of the heterogeneous audience. They were in effect "rescued" from the market place, and therefore from the mixed audience and from the presence of other cultural genres; they were removed from the pressures of everyday economic and social life, and placed, significantly, in concert halls, opera houses, and museums that often resembled temples, to be perused, enjoyed and protected by the initiated—those who had the inclination, the leisure, and the knowledge to appreciate them. (230)

I am not convinced that many of the situations Levine describes as locations for a "shared public culture" really count as sites of free exchange. Many of his antebellum anecdotes are urban, and we can assume that many of these people had some variety to choose from, although I think this variety should not in most cases be overstated. But a number of his anecdotes concern frontier, rural, or basically non-urban performances of Shakespeare, and there I feel we are much closer to something like a monopoly than we are with the custodial culture of the urban elite "rescuing" art from the marketplace. When you're in a town with only one movie theater, sometimes you see what's on simply because you want to see a movie, and anybody else who wants to go out that night has to see it too. I wonder how often this enforced "sharing" underwrote the more egalitarian "sharing" Levine envisions: how many times did classes mingle for the simple reason than that it was better than staying at home? More pertinent to the elites who would go on to cordon Shakespeare off into the "serious" sphere: how many of these elites went to see Shakespeare performed in the old manner simply because there wasn't yet the (local) surplus capital to put into taking the necessary steps (building theaters, hiring directors, actors, support staff, forming boards of directors, etc.) for seeing him in their own way? It would of course be a very different story if Levine simply argued that, as soon they had that capital, they did just that, but how right might it be? Obviously, I would need to do quite a bit of research to back it up, but it seems intuitively right.

Of course, none of this answers the "why Shakespeare?" question which, after all, undergirds or buttresses (I'm not sure which) Levine's project more generally: Shakespeare is possibly the one figure whom we can believe would draw a truly motley crowd anywhere. Even if we've been taught, as Levine's elites tried to instill, that Shakespeare is only truly appreciated by the educated, we've also all been taught that he is the most universal dramatist, the artist with the clearest insights into human nature, perhaps the only genuinely transhistorical figure of modernity. I don't mean to knock Shakespeare at all, but I feel that Levine's answer to the "why Shakespeare?" question—why was he the one who consistently drew such diverse crowds in antebellum America?—is a rather hopeful, Because he's Shakespeare: anyone who is allowed really to feel him will respond, and, unfortunately, I find that a little insufficient.**

Levine's trust in the market and his trust in Shakespeare are essentially the same, and while I very much admire the product of that trust—a call for a renewal of a shared public culture—I think they, or at least the market, are not very stable pillars on which to build such a renewed culture. Our notion of "sharing" also must have more meat on it than co-presence and the possibility of conviviality, which I think even Levine acknowledges was the extent of those motley Shakespearean performances. Levine's book, however, is irreplaceable as a step in that direction; it is certainly great enough to present clearly the problems which it doesn't resolve and to point the way to the tools which will improve it.

* Levine actually argues that sporting events and the movies were—and are—the only forms of a "shared public culture" still surviving. However, sporting events arguably don't feature the key element of this "shared public culture"—the diversity of types or levels of entertainment which one found in mid nineteenth-century Shakespearean performances or operas. While a lot more than the game is going on during a sporting event, rarely is there the kind of mixture of poetry and pratfalls (except, I suppose, metaphorically) that Levine has in mind.

** So does Levine, briefly: he allows for some structural reasons why Shakespeare was the most popular playwright of antebellum America on page 45: he could more easily be presented as a moral playwright; he aided the development of the star system, whereby a star and not an entire company could travel more easily and, because the local company knew their Shakespeare, could perform with him or her; Shakespeare's plays similarly had one large role, also nurturing the star system; American dramatists had not developed sufficiently.

Theodore Dreiser's Library of American Realism

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 20:44:00 +0000

While doing his research on an excellent article on David Markson's "lost" personal library, my friend Craig Fehrman sent me a copy of a 2002 essay on Theodore Dreiser's own private library, or rather, on one special part of his personal book collection which he curated as a "Library of American Realism." The article is by Roark Mulligan and is in fact available [yay, open source!] here.

There is an appendix to the article which itemizes all the known inclusions in Dreiser's "Library of American Realism." It's a fascinating document not only for what it tells us about Dreiser's reading (I'm noticing a heavy Midwestern contingent in here, although perhaps that's just because I'm looking for it) but also for what it tells us about a sort of culture of naturalism: the division between fiction and non-fiction is very fluid here, and one can see much further down into the second and third tiers of naturalist or realist authors, producing a better understanding that these aesthetics were built much more on quantity of than on the quality of a few exceptional novelists (Norris, Crane, Dreiser himself, et al.).

I've made a quick pass over it to mark it up with some of the easier links to Wikipedia and such; I'll update it over time to include more links to other resources as I find them.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. (1907)
Adams, Samuel H[opkins]. Revelry. (1926)
Ade, George. Fables in Slang. (1899)
Anderson, Sherwood. Dark Laughter. (1925)
Anonymous. My Actor-Husband. (1912)
Bercovici, Konrad. Crimes of Charity. (1917)
Black, Jack. You Can’t Win. (1926)
Bronson-Howard, George. Selected stories. [no specific title listed]
Boyce, Neith. The Eternal Spring. (1906)
Boyd, Thomas. Through the Wheat. (1923)
Bullen, Frank. Cruise of the Cachalot. (1899)
Bullitt, William. It’s Not Done. (1928)
Canfield, C. L. The Diary of a Forty-Niner. (1920)
Carlisle, Helen Grace. Mother’s Cry. (1930)
Cather, Willa. My Antonia. (1919)
Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky. (1917)
Chambers, Robert W. The King in Yellow. (1895)
Cohen, Lester. Sweepings. (1926)
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. (1895)
Croy, Homer. West of the Water Tower. (1923)
Dahlberg, Edward. Bottom Dogs. (1930)
Davenport, Homer. [no specific title listed]
Dell, Floyd. Moon-Calf. (1920)
Dos Passos, John. Manhattan Transfer. (1925)
Edwards, Albert. A Man’s World. (1912)
Faulkner, William. Sanctuary. (1932)
Ferber, Edna. Girls. (1921)
Fergusson, Harvey. Capitol Hill. (1923)
Fitzgerald, Francis Scott Key. The Beautiful and Damned. (1922)
Flagg, Jared. The Crimes of Jared Flagg. (1920)
Ford, Paul Leicester. The Honorable Peter Sterling. (1894)
Fort, Charles. The Outcast Manufacturers. (1909)
Frederic, Harold. The Damnation of Theron Ware. (1896)
Frederick, John T. Druida. (1923)
Friedman, Isaac Kahn. By Bread Alone, A Novel. (1901)
Fuller, Henry B[lake]. With the Procession. (1895)
Gale, Zona. Miss Lulu Bett. (1920)
Garland, Hamlin. Main-Travelled Roads. (1916)
Glasgow, Ellen. Barren Ground. (1925)
———. The Romantic Comedians. (1926)
Goodman, Daniel Carson. Hagar Revelly. (1913)
Graham, Carroll, and Garret Graham. Queer People. (1930)
Granberry, Edwin. Strangers and Lovers. (1928)
Grant, Robert. Unleavened Bread. (1900)
Green, Helen. At the Actors’ Boarding House and Other Stories. (1906)
Hapgood, Hutchins. The Autobiography of a Thief. (1903)
———. The Story of a Lover. (1919)
Hecht, Ben. Erik Dorn. Introduction by Burton Rascoe. (1924)
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. (1929)
Henry, O. The Best of O. Henry. (1929)
Hergesheimer, Joseph. The Lay Anthony. (1919)
Herrick, Robert. Together. (1908)
Heyward, Du Bose. Porgy. (1925)
Hobart, Alice Tisdale. Oil for the Lamps of China. (1933)
Holding, Elisabeth. Invincible Minnie. (1920)
Howe, Edgar Watson. The Story of a Country Town. Introduction by Carl Van Doren. (1926)
Howells, W. D. Their Wedding Journey. (1894)
Hughes, Langston. Not without Laughter. (1930)
Hull, Helen Rose. Islanders. (1927)
Huntington, Elizabeth. Son of Dr. Tradusac. (1929)
Ireland, Alleyne. Joseph Pulitzer. (1914)
James, Henry. The American. (1879)
———. Roderick Hudson. (1875)
Jewett, Sarah Orne. The Country of the Pointed Firs. (1896)
Johnson, Josephine. Now in November. (1934)
Kantor, MacKinlay. Diversey. (1928)
Kelley, Edith. Weeds. (1923)
Kelley, Ethel. Heart’s Blood. (1923)
Kelly, Myra. Little Citizens. (1904)
Kemp, Harry. Tramping on Life. (1922)
Lewis, Sinclair. Main Street. (1920)
Lewisohn, Ludwig. The Island Within. (1928)
Loos, Anita. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. (1925)
Lowrie, Donald. My Life in Prison. (1912)
Lyon, Harris Merton. Sardonics: Sixteen Sketches. (1908)
Marks, Henry K. Undertow. (1923)
Masters, Edgar Lee. Mirage. (1924)
Matson, Norman H. Day of Fortune. (1928)
Melville, Herman. Typee, A Real Romance of the South Sea. (1892)
Munger, Dell H. The Wind Before Dawn. (1912)
Neumann, Robert. Flood. Trans. William A. Drake. (1930)
Norris, Frank. McTeague. (1899)
Oliver, John Rathbone. Victim and Victor. (1928)
Ornitz, Samuel Badisch. Haunch, Paunch, and Jowl: An Anonymous Autobiography. (1923)
Ostenso, Martha. Wild Geese. (1925)
Payne, Will. The Story of Eva. (1901)
Peterkin, Julia. Black April. (1927)
Phillips, David G[raham]. Susan Lenox, Her Fall and Rise. (1920)
Post, Melville D. The Man of Last Resort. (1892)
Rumsey, Frances. Mr. Cushing and Mlle. De Chastel. (1917)
Sachs, Ermanie. Red Damask. (1927)
Sandburg, Carl. Smoke and Steel. (1920)
Scott, Evelyn. The Narrow House. (1921)
Sinclair, Upton. Oil! (1927)
Smits, Lee. Spring Flight. (1925)
Steele, Robert. One Man. (1915)
Stein, Gertrude. Three Lives. (1915)
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. (1937)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Dred. (1856)
Stribling, Thomas S. The Forge. (1933)
Suckow, Ruth. Farm stories. [no specific title listed]
Sullivan, Edward. Rattling the Cup on Chicago Crime. (1929)
Sweeney, Ed. Poorhouse Sweeney. Foreword by Theodore Dreiser. (1927)
Tarkington, Booth. Penrod (1914) or Seventeen (1916).
Train, Arthur. The “Goldfish.” (1915)
Twain, Mark. Huckleberry Finn. (1884)
Van Vechten, Carl. Parties, Scenes from Contemporary New York Life. (1930)
Vance, Joseph Lewis [sic - Louis Joseph Vance]. Joan Thursday. (1913)
Vandercook, John. Black Majesty, The Life of Christophe King of Haiti. (1930) [review]
Westcott, Glenway. The Grandmothers. (1927)
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. (1920)
———. The Custom of the Country. (1913)
Wharton, James. Squad. (1928) [review]
White, Hervey. Quicksand. (1900)
Whitlock, Brand. The Turn of the Balance. (1907) [a sort of muckraking novel about capital punishment]
Whitman, Stephen. Predestined. (1910)
Willard, Josiah. Tramping with Tramps. (1899)
Williams, Fred Quick Benton [pseud. for Herbert Elliot Hamblen and William Stone Booth]. On Many Seas: The Life and Exploits of a Yankee Sailor. (1897)
Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward Angel. (1929)
Wood, Eugene. Back Home. (1905)

In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, by Perry Anderson

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 20:25:00 +0000

What exactly is Jacques Lacan [bottom left] doing in the photo on this book's cover? My copy from the library doesn't have the dust-cover, so all I can see are the product pictures from Amazon and the like, but wtf, Verso? It looks rather like, to use a lovely euphemistic phrase from Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, Monsieur Lacan is partaking in "a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies," but I imagine Freud, if not so much Lacan, might have a great deal to say about my interest in making that association.

At any rate, this is a great little book: one of the better transformations of a series of lectures into a book that I have read (although I hope to be blogging about another fine example in a few days). Delivered in 1982 as the second installment of the yearly Wellek Library Lectures, Anderson(not this Perry Anderson)'s subject is a sort of continuation (though "not exactly a sequel") of his 1976 Considerations on Western Marxism: "As I had already attempted a sketch in the mid seventies of the evolution of Marxism in Western Europe since the First World War, offering some predictions as to its likely future directions, it seemed opportune to review intellectual developments since then and to look at how my earlier conjectures had fared" (7). However, he notes, particularly within the period in question, "a survey of recent developments within Marxism was not practicable without some consideration of concurrent philosophical developments outside it, as they affected, or appeared to affect, its fortunes" (ibid.) and for that reason he devotes the second lecture to structuralism and poststructuralism, focusing on Lacan, Derrida, Saussure, Foucault, and Lévi-Strauss, and considers Habermas in the third lecture.

The second lecture is, I think the most interesting. Anderson begins by noting a "Latin [i.e., French, Spanish, and Italian] recession within the international map of contemporary Marxism" (32): where France and Italy were "the two leading homelands of a living historical materialism in the fifties and sixties" (30), they had become, by 1982, sites of "a precipitous descent" and a "massacre of the ancestors" (ibid.), with the new generation not only rejecting but anathematizing their elders and a consequent "demoralization and retreat" of any still-living Marxists. Anderson lays out a surprising hypothesis for this turn of events: "after French Marxism had enjoyed a lengthy period of largely uncontested cultural dominance, basking in the remote, reflected prestige of the Liberation, it finally encountered an intellectual adversary that was capable of doing battle with it, and prevailing. Its victorious opponent was the broad theoretical front of structuralism, and then its post-structuralist successors" (33).

Anderson next goes on to note that, rather unusually, "the passage from Marxist to structuralist and then post-structuralist dominants [sic—probably a transcription error for "dominance"] in post-war French culture has not involved a complete discontinuity of issues or questions. On the contrary, it is clear that there has been one master-problem around which all contenders have revolved; and it would look as if it was precisely the superiority of—in the first instance—structuralism on the very terrain of Marxism itself that assured it of decisive victory over the latter. What was this problem? Essentially, the nature of the relationships between structure and subject in human history and society" (ibid.).

Following some very lucid intellectual history regarding the debates between Sartre and Lévi-Strauss and the entrance of Althusser into the fray as well as a consideration of the impact of the events of May 68, Anderson lays out a "demarcation of a basic space in which structuralist and post-structuralist theories can be unified, as a series of possible moves or logical operations within a common field" (40). Anderson allows that this demarcation does not emphasize the internal differences of the thinkers commonly classed together by these terms, and that none of them makes all the moves he will describe. "Yet all their major themes and claims fall within the boundaries of this shared purlieu" (ibid.).

First is what Anderson calls "the exorbitation of language." It's a shame that term hasn't caught on, because what it names is brilliant: identifying the decisive origin of structuralism in Saussure's linguistics and more specifically in the langue-parole distinction (not in itself an original move on Anderson's part), Anderson then analyzes how Lévi-Strauss's "intrepid generalization of [this distinction] to his own anthropological domain" and specifically to kinship systems: "Once this equation was made, it was a short step to extend it to all the major structures of society, as Lévi-Strauss saw them: the economy itself was now added, under the rubric of an exchange of goods forming a symbolic system comparable to the exchange of women in kin networks and the exchange of words in language" (41). Then, Lacan joined the party, announcing that the unconscious was also "structured like a language."

Again, none of this is particularly original, and neither exactly is the following, although the clarity of its extension all the way to Derrida is tremendously helpful:

After such fundamental expansions of the jurisdiction of language, there inevitably followed a host of lesser adventures and annexations: clothes, cars, cooking, and other items of fashion or consumption were subjected to diligent semiological scrutiny, derived from structural linguistics. The final step along this path was to be taken by Derrida, who—marking the post-structuralist break—rejected the notion of language as a stable system of objectification, but radicalized its pretensions as a universal suzerain of the modern world, with the truly imperial decree, 'there is nothing outside of the text', 'nothing before the text, no pretext that is not already a text' (42).

"Fundamental expansions of the jurisdiction of language" is, I think, tremendously apt, an excellent definition or re-articulation of the "exorbitation of language" which isolates precisely how and where to put our finger on what, exactly, was the import of structuralism and post-structuralism and how we might, if we wish, shrug off its grip—simply rein in its "exorbitation," acknowledge that there are domains of human existence which are not best analogized to or analyzed by structural linguistics.

Anderson also gives us an excellent reason why we might be justified in doing so:

It was Saussure himself, ironically, who warned against exactly the abusive analogies and extrapolations from his own domain that have been so unstoppable in past decades. Language, he wrote, is 'a human institution of such a kind that all the other human institutions, with the exception of writing, can only deceive us as to its real essence if we trust in their analogy'. [Wow!] Indeed, he singled out kinship and economy—precisely the two systems with whose assimilation to language Lévi-Strauss inaugurated structuralism as a general theory—as incommensurable with it… Saussure's whole effort, ignored by his borrowers, was to emphasize the singularity of language, everything that separated it from other social practices or forms… In fact, the analogies that were to be promptly discovered by Lévi-Strauss or Lacan, in their extension of linguistic categories to anthropology or psychoanalysis, give way on the smallest critical inspection. Kinship cannot be compared to language as a system of symbolic communication in which women and words are respectively 'exchanged', as Lévi-Strauss would have it, since no speaker alienates vocabulary to any interlocutor, but can freely reutilize every word 'given' as many times as is wished thereafter, whereas marriages—unlike consversations—are usually binding: wives are not recuperable by their fathers after their weddings. Still less does the terminology of 'exchange' warrant an elision [sic?] to the economy… No economy… can be primarily defined in terms of exchange at all: production and property are always prior… Far from the unconscious being structured like a language, or coinciding with it, Freud's construction of it as the object of psychoanalytic enquiry precisely defines it as incapable of the generative grammar which, for a post-Saussurian linguistics, comprises the deep structures of language: that is, the competence to form sentences and carry out correctly the rules of their transformations. The Freudian unconscious, innocent even of negation, is a stranger to all syntax (43).

Anderson drives the point home further: the langue-parole relation is a "peculiarly aberrant compass for plotting the diverse positions of structure and subject in the world outside language" (44) for three reasons:

because the rates of change are so different as to be fatally incommensurate—language alters itself far more slowly than do the economic, political, or religious structures which are supposedly so assimilable to linguistic models;
language as a structure is fairly rigid relative to the "inventivity" of the subject—that is, "utterance has no material constraint whatever: words are free, in the double sense of the term. They cost nothing to produce, and can be multiplied and manipulated at will, within the laws of meaning. All other major social practices are subject to the laws of natural scarcity: persons, goods or powers cannot be generated ad libitum and ad infinitum. Yet the very freedom of the speaking subject is curiously inconsequential: that is, its effects on the structure in return are in normal circumstances virtually nil. Even the greatest writers, whose genius has influenced whole cultures, have typically altered the language relatively little" (44).
Speech is "axiomatically" understood to be produced, when intelligible, by a single subject: some individual speaks for a collective (or individuals speak sequentially on behalf of the same collective); when collectives actually speak collectively, it is generally considered a din or a cacophony or something similar which indicates, as Anderson, that "plural speech is non-speech" (ibid.). This is in great contrast to "economic, cultural, political or military structures which are first and foremost collective: nations, classes, castes, groups, generations. Precisely because this is so, the agency of these subjects is capable of effecting profound transformations of these structures" (44-45).

Anderson concludes, "This fundamental distinction is an insurmountable barrier to any transposition of linguistic models to historical processes of a wider sort. The opening move of structuralism, in other words, is a speculative aggrandizement of language that lacks any comparative credentials" (45).

Anderson traces this initial illegitimacy to two consequences: what he calls "the attenuation of truth" (ibid.) and "the randomization of history" (48). These deserve their own expositions (which will have to be shorter and held for a subsequent post), but the "exorbitation of language" is, I think, the crucial leg of Anderson's answer to the hypothesis he poses. The form of that answer, if I may anticipate my next post, is a little questionable, though. The hypothesis that Anderson presents—that structuralism/post-structuralism drove historical materialism out of business because it had more satisfactory resolutions to the structure-vs.-subject problems—is disproved by a demonstration of its insufficiency (and even superficiality) in dealing with that problem at all, much less resolving it. Yet Anderson takes this as a dead end for what he calls "intrinsic" answers "from within the logic of the ideas of the time" (56) to the question of why historical materialism declined in France so rapidly and so thoroughly and so, he argues, we must turn to "extrinsic,"i.e., geopolitical answers—roughly, "the fate of the international communist movement" (68). One of the extrinsic factors that Anderson barely considers, however, is the surprising eagerness of American academics to take up French structuralism/post-structuralism, a factor which arguably has less to do with the fate of the international communist movement and more to do with issues and conflicts internal to U.S. academia; it is notable (and come to think of it, surprising) that one of the primary vectors of "French theory" was Fredric Jameson's The Prisonhouse of Language. The impact of American popularity on these thinkers' prestige within France, however, is rather difficult to assess—I started reading François Cusset's French Theory—which purports to explain this—awhile ago and just got bogged down in its small-bore trivialities—viewed as gossip, I'm sure it's fascinating to anyone who was involved or on the outskirts, but to someone whose introduction to Theory actually was Derrida's death, it seems pretty turgid intellectual history.

Returning to Anderson for one last point, however: I am not sure that Anderson's dismissal of "intrinsic" reasons for the triumph of structuralism/post-structuralism is completely warranted. It is not that I disagree with his conclusion that structuralism/post-structuralism failed to engage with (and a fortiori to resolve) the structure-subject problem in a superior or even equivalent manner compared to Marxism's own efforts. It is not that I am not convinced that successful engagement or successful resolution is the only "intrinsic" factor that counts when accounting for the triumph of one idea or one system over another. Could we not see structuralism/post-structuralism's victory over historical materialism as the result of an exhaustion of a writing style as much as or more than of a set of answers, that writing in the structuralist (or even more, in the post-structuralist) fashion became "intrinsically" more pleasurable, not to mention more capable of commanding attention? This is also not a particularly original insight (post-structuralism is all about style, who knew?) but it is an angle that Anderson neglects, and I think his oversight is fairly serious.

Žižek in the New Left Review; Elections as Experiences

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 14:34:00 +0000

This article, which unfortunately is paywall-blocked, is a fairly pithy recapitulation of a number of Žižek's recent (and not so recent) themes, or at least it seems to be; he is so prolific it is difficult to follow him closely. At any rate, I thought I'd put up a few of the choicer quotes from this typically provocative piece:

There is no lack of anti-capitalists today. We are even witnessing an overload of critiques of capitalism’s horrors: newspaper investigations, TV reports and best-selling books abound on companies polluting our environment, corrupt bankers who continue to get fat bonuses while their firms are saved by public money, sweatshops where children work overtime. There is, however, a catch to all this criticism, ruthless as it may appear: what is as a rule not questioned is the liberal-democratic framework within which these excesses should be fought. The goal, explicit or implied, is to regulate capitalism—through the pressure of the media, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations—but never to question the liberal-democratic institutional mechanisms of the bourgeois state of law. This remains the sacred cow, which even the most radical forms of ‘ethical anti-capitalism’—the Porto Allegre [sic] World Social Forum, the Seattle movement—do not dare to touch.

It is here that Marx’s key insight remains valid, perhaps today more than ever. For Marx, the question of freedom should not be located primarily in the political sphere proper, as with the criteria the global financial institutions apply when they want to pronounce a judgement on a country—does it have free elections? Are the judges independent? Is the press free from hidden pressures? Are human rights respected? The key to actual freedom resides rather in the ‘apolitical’ network of social relations, from the market to the family, where the change needed for effective improvement is not political reform, but a transformation in the social relations of production. We do not vote about who owns what, or about worker–management relations in a factory; all this is left to processes outside the sphere of the political. It is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things by ‘extending’ democracy into this sphere, say, by organizing ‘democratic’ banks under people’s control. Radical changes in this domain lie outside the sphere of legal rights. Such democratic procedures can, of course, have a positive role to play. But they remain part of the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie, whose purpose is to guarantee the undisturbed functioning of capitalist reproduction. In this precise sense, Badiou was right in his claim that the name of the ultimate enemy today is not capitalism, empire or exploitation, but democracy. It is the acceptance of ‘democratic mechanisms’ as the ultimate frame that prevents a radical transformation of capitalist relations…

I am unconvinced that the inadequacy of extending democratic forms into the "'apolitical' network of social relations" requires naming democracy as the ultimate enemy of freedom today, as Žižek and Badiou would have us do. Žižek's line that "It is the acceptance of ‘democratic mechanisms’ as the ultimate frame that prevents a radical transformation of capitalist relations" seems to me to be a misdiagnosis which even he must see directly conflicts with his other diagnosis of the increasing tendency toward public-private partnership as a preferred style of rule, as we'll see in the passage below. If this tendency is as severe a problem as he (and many others) thinks it is, surely it indicates that rather than "democratic mechanisms" being the ultimate frame, it is much more the case that free market ideology remains the ultimate frame as it rapidly engulfs democracy itself (where it hasn't already been confused with democracy for some time).

What has happened in the latest stage of post-68 capitalism is that the economy itself—the logic of market and competition—has progressively imposed itself as the hegemonic ideology. In education, we are witnessing the gradual dismantling of the classical-bourgeois school ISA: the school system is less and less the compulsory network, elevated above the market and organized directly by the state, bearer of enlightened values—liberty, equality, fraternity. On behalf of the sacred formula of ‘lower costs, higher efficiency’, it is progressively penetrated by different forms of PPP, or public–private partnership. In the organization and legitimization of power, too, the electoral system is increasingly conceived on the model of market competition: elections are like a commercial exchange where voters ‘buy’ the option that offers to do the job of maintaining social order, prosecuting crime, and so on, most efficiently.

On behalf of the same formula of ‘lower costs, higher efficiency’, functions once exclusive to the domain of state power, like running prisons, can be privatized; the military is no longer based on universal conscription, but composed of hired mercenaries. Even the state bureaucracy is no longer perceived as the Hegelian universal class, as is becoming evident in the case of Berlusconi. In today’s Italy, state power is directly exerted by the base bourgeois who ruthlessly and openly exploits it as a means to protect his personal interests.

I also want to change the terms of Žižek's argument that "the electoral system is increasingly conceived on the model of market competition;" it seems to me that the way he means for this argument to function reflects an (arguably) outdated reality. (I should say that he may in fact have in mind exclusively European elections, so my disagreement may be merely a product of my U.S. parochialism, but I have certainly seen and heard this argument being made about U.S. elections as well, particularly in connection with moments (as this year miserably promises to be) of a switch in control of one or more of the branches of government.)

It is not that I see no truth in this argument, but, for one thing, I question the historical accuracy of Žižek's implication that this is an emergent tendency or that it is newly dominant in electoral politics. What I think he is also implying, though, seems to me even farther from the truth: that parties have given up on attempting to demonstrate real essential differences from one another and seek merely to convince voters that they will deliver the same things as the other party, only better—with "lower costs, higher efficiency." This is also a popular argument made about U.S. politics, but it completely ignores the intensity of partisan rancor which, while not new, has become (arguably) newly inescapable with the emergent media technologies of cable television and the blogosphere. The idea that a voter is just like a shopper choosing between negligibly different brands of laundry detergent seems absolutely disconnected from the demands being placed on her by this constant assault of animus and extremism. If there is an analogue in the world of consumer goods for this polarization, it would not be laundry detergent, but something more like the Mac-PC divide (which most people happily map directly onto the political divide, even if that really doesn't work well), in which the consumer's choice is not seen as an attempt to maximize efficiency and lower costs but as a conversion (or an apostasy) and a public act of self-definition.

Žižek's argument also (strangely naively) presumes that most voters retain a belief that electoral choice imitates consumer choice in that you can expect product satisfaction from your purchase. Maybe the ambient disillusionment of 2010 is greater than is usually the case, but even while campaigning in 2008, I found that enthusiasm was generally located at the point of the symbolism of electing Obama as president, rather than the expectation that he would govern with "lower costs, higher efficiency." This was, I think, not just a reflection of the general understanding that all politicians break their campaign promises, but a more acute sense that the election of Obama was the "purchase" itself, and that his presidency—the actual details of his governance—was something separate. Again, this may be specific to the 2008 election and may not recur, but I feel there is still somewhat of the same thing going on at the present with the Tea Party: candidates are products not in the sense of what they do in office—that's not what you're purchasing—but products in the sense of a specific electoral (or more generally political) experience. The campaign—or more accurately, the campaigning process (which has been stretched out as never before) is the primary product which is being purchased, and not the act of governance. The idea of politics as consumption has been delimited to the experience of enjoying (and perhaps participating in) their campaigning, and not to the experience of being governed by them.

The talk this year of an enthusiasm gap acknowledges these realities better than prior years' emphasis on the way that independents were leaning; while the idea of the enthusiasm gap is not new, I feel that this year there has been a softer focus on the battle for the Independents and more a fretting about whether the people who are going to vote Democratic no matter what might just stay home. (I don't watch much cable news, though.) Electoral politics seems to me to be mostly about mobilization rather than persuasion at this juncture; success is premised less on convincing the unconvinced to vote for you than it is about convincing the already convinced to vote at all. Again, this may be a geographically specific situation (if I have even diagnosed the U.S. situation correctly), and I would be interested if anyone has some insights into whether or to what extent this may apply elsewhere in the world.

Elif Batuman and Mark McGurl

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:52:00 +0000

According to the Internet, Elif Batuman's review of Mark McGurl's The Program Era (or, rather, since the review is published in the London Review of Books, The Programme Era) is a hit. Although I think it is actually an extremely valuable addition to the theorization of the significance and value of writing programs, let me register a dissent. In fact, a sequence of dissents.

Let's start with some basic stuff. How about this:

I should state up front that I am not a fan of programme fiction. Basically, I feel about it as towards new fiction from a developing nation with no literary tradition: I recognise that it has anthropological interest, and is compelling to those whose experience it describes, but I probably wouldn’t read it for fun.

I think everyone will probably have some trouble finding these sentences palatable, if only for reasons of political correctness. That's not so much what bothers me, though: what irks and rather surprises me is that, for someone who appears to be so worldly, Batuman thinks she can find a culture that has "no literary tradition" from which to draw. What she means to say, patently, is no indigenous literary tradition from which to draw, because as we know from reading any of a very, very large number of novels from "developing nations," the legacy of imperialism has left quite an ample literary tradition in all parts of the world from which a writer could draw. And, it goes without saying, that Batuman is assuming that oral or other narrative traditions are inadequate for inspiring Literature—a claim I'm skeptical about, but which I suppose one might let pass if for no other reason than that I want to make a different point. What really bugs me about this comment is that, despite her distaste for the literature of "developing nations," she holds up Don Quixote as a great beacon of literature when, if there is any single work of literature which justifies a belief that an extraordinarily talented writer can invent a new fully-fleshed form almost ex nihilo, it is Cervantes's novel.

Batuman is also under the impression that workshop writers are intent on maintaining a pose of being "tragically and systematically deprived of access to the masterpieces of Western literature, or any other sustained literary tradition." She attributes the notion that this babe-in-the-woods attitude is a staple of workshop culture to McGurl, although the citation she gives directs the reader toward a different conclusion about just what is meant by a "a commitment to innocence" (his phrase); McGurl's exemplar for what Batuman calls "this sense of writing being produced in a knowledge vacuum" is Vladimir Nabokov (10), who certainly did not give many people the impression that he "seldom refer[red] to any of the literary developments of the past 20, 50 or a hundred years… rarely refer[red] to other books at all," which is how Batuman sums up the workshop's attitude toward its literary forebears. Much later in the piece, she says, "The value placed on creativity and originality [in the workshop] causes writers to hide their influences, to hide the fact that they have ever read any other books at all and, in many cases, to stop reading books altogether." This has genuinely not been my impression of how the products of workshops portray themselves. The sense of a lineage is often invoked by Iowa graduates (Nam Le is the example most familiar to me), and I find much program fiction to be plagued rather by the opposite problem: so eager are young writers to prove that they've learned their lessons from past masters that their influences—Chekhov, Lahiri, Flannery O'Connor, Carver—are crudely displayed. How can read something like American Salvage or Knockemstiff and not think, "I'm in Carver Country?" How many multicultural sagas of the past ten years chatter loudly of White Teeth?

Even if Batuman apparently doesn't pay attention to the products of workshop fiction, she knows who likes it: White People. As a running gag, she notes when things which are associated or tangentially connected to writing programs appear in the coffee-table book Stuff White People Like: "Stuff White People Like #44: ‘Public Radio’… #116: ‘Black Music that Black People Don’t Listen to Anymore.’"She makes some excellent points about the racial dimensions of the authority to speak through an Other, but her reliance on the Stuff White People Like line to drive her point home is more than a little lazy and actually undercuts any serious examination of why "white people" find things like "Being an Expert on Your Culture" so appealing and why program fiction is so successful at supplying it. Batuman shorthands it by saying that it's due to "the loss of cultural capital associated with whiteness, and the attempts of White People to compensate for this loss by displaying knowledge of non-white cultures," but it should be quite obvious that not liking workshop fiction—or any of the things which appear in the Stuff White People Like book—makes no one any the less "white," even in the very limited sense of 'bourgie-quasi-hipster.' Preferring Dunkin Donuts to Starbucks or James Patterson to Toni Morrison makes no white person any the less part of the system of reproducing white privilege. The reasons why William Styron could write a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel ventriloquizing a black man go well beyond the coffee table.

(Additionally, Batuman's essay reveals more than a little deficit in self-consciousness about who the "white people" in the book are; surely a comment like, "I think of myself as someone who prefers novels and stories to non-fiction; yet, for human interest, skilful storytelling, humour, and insightful reflection on the historical moment, I find the average episode of This American Life to be 99 per cent more reliable than the average new American work of literary fiction" could feature as a highlighted exhibit in the kind of taste that the Stuff White People Like book skewers.)

Batuman snarks at McGurl's claim that the post-G.I. Bill university created a writing environment in which shame became an intrinsic aspect of the writer's formation:

In his fascination with the GI Bill, McGurl occasionally conveys the impression that writers didn’t go to college before 1945… The GI Bill dramatically increased the percentage of college-educated Americans, but did it really affect the percentage of college-educated American writers? According to the internet, writers have, in fact, been going to college for hundreds of years. The claim that the GI Bill produced a generation of unprecedentedly shameful young people, meanwhile, is weakened by the fact that outsiders, from Balzac’s parvenus to Proletkult, have been joining the intelligentsia for nearly as long as there has been an intelligentsia to join.

In what was a consistent theme for my frustrations with Batuman's piece, I find this reading to be so uncharitable as to be genuinely distortive of McGurl's basic point about the effects of the G.I. Bill on American fiction. (It also, for the purposes of being able to stick in that "according to the internet" barb, neatly ignores the rather substantial material in McGurl's book about pre-WWII writing programs, the discussions of the educational backgrounds of the founders of the programs--who were obviously educated before WWII, etc.) A careful and attentive reading of even just the passage that Batuman cites as evidence of McGurl's muddleheadedness about the Big G.I. Bill Divide allows us to understand that the point McGurl is making is not that no or few writers went to college before WWII, but that few if any thought of college or higher education in general as preparation for a writing career. Journalism was very much the type of career choice that aspiring writers made before the start of writing programs, or in some cases (Sinclair Lewis, for example), publishing. At best, a literary or humor magazine at college would be joined to establish connections with other aspiring writers, but again, very few of these men or women went to college for the express purpose of joining a magazine.

Batuman's rebuttal to McGurl's claim about the importance of "shame" as newly constitutive of the writer's experience after the G.I. Bill is very similarly constructed scrupulously to remove the parts of McGurl's argument that give it coherence and cogency. Batuman ignores (this too is a repeated problem throughout her essay) the brute fact of the collegiate or university workshop experience as the actual site of McGurl's argument: in introducing the application of various theories of shame to this literature, McGurl says, "What I am calling lower-middle-class modernism is the meeting of all these phenomena—social dislocation, affect, narrative, and the individual—in and around the scene of creative writing instruction in the postwar period…" (286, emphasis added). Batuman just extends this specificity to higher education in general and literary practice in general, but McGurl is not saying that shame was absent from literature or from higher education before the G.I. Bill; he's saying that having the workshop experience as part of one's writerly formation at an institution of higher education produces a historically unique form of shame (and pride—McGurl mentions pride as part of a dialectic with shame, but Batuman almost completely erases it). It is the specific confluence of these factors—and not their separate existences—which is genuinely new after the G.I. Bill.

Batuman's indifference to this specificity leads me to a more general frustration—her adamantine feeling that there is nothing new under the sun, and if someone's telling you differently, he's an idiot. When Ken Kesey thought he had put a new spin on the ancient problem of point-of-view, well, he deserves this kind of censure:

Although he recognises that Kesey is reinventing the wheel – a technology apparently pioneered by Henry James – McGurl treats this reinvention as the sign of a bright student. So it would be, in a schoolboy, or someone who grew up in a preliterate tribe. But there is something disturbing in the idea of a Stanford creative writing student – a college graduate pursuing an advanced degree in ‘fiction’ at a world-class university – who appears to believe that he invented intradiegetic-homodiegetic narration.

(Again with the sneers toward preliterate tribes!) But seriously, what kind of sin did Kesey really commit in convincing himself that he was "revolutionary" when he wasn't? Intradiegetic-homodiegetic narration isn't copyrighted, and surely the proof is in the pudding, not in the theory: if his book convinced his readers that it was revolutionary, it would be, regardless of whether Batuman could point to a precursor we all should have known about. That's the power of literature (or music, for that matter), that it can convince us at least momentarily that it has rearranged its limited number of possible elements into a configuration we've never encountered before, even if we've encountered it many times? Or even if we are too experienced to believe it is "revolutionary," we at least experience it as fresh, as new-in-this-moment.

I don't dissent from Batuman's debunking because I resent the application of scholarship to literature or worry that it can impede enjoyment (anyone who has read this blog before should surely know I hold the diametrically opposite views in both cases). I dissent because the logic of Batuman's formalism—if it's been done before, it's no longer revolutionary—doesn't admit of the fact that literary texts interact with the times in which they are written and read, and their revolutionary quality or their hackneyedness isn't a formal problem but a social one. We can only assess the "newness" of a technique within its social context because "newness" itself is produced by and through the society of any given moment. To fantasize otherwise is to abdicate any responsibility for accounting for why literature matters to people—something I would think the author of a book subtitled "Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them" might be concerned about.

Edit [10/2]: Mark McGurl has responded in the LRB's letters section here, and has a lengthier rejoinder here.

U.S.A., by John Dos Passos

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 13:20:00 +0000

What is to be done with U.S.A.? Like a few other novels, John Dos Passos's trilogy is one whose stature substantially exceeds the general reader's familiarity with it, and so one of the inevitable questions that arises when bringing it up is "what kind of novel is it?" a question which is code for "what relationship might it continue to have to readers today?" a question which is itself code for, "why should I read it?"

U.S.A. is a tricky novel to place, and therefore it's surprisingly difficult to make a case for why "you," the general reader, should knock about through its 1300 pages. For reasons I will get into in a moment, it's not exactly a historical novel, or at least it will not satisfy someone looking for a historical novel. It also fails to satisfy as a modernist novel, regardless of whether your flavor of modernism comes in Hemingway or Joyce. It is experimental, but its experiments push against language and narrative in ways that will probably seem too regular, too machined, and not "difficult" enough to someone of the latter persuasion. To a reader of the former, the Lost Generation mythos is here as well, but the glamour of war-time Paris and Italy or the Jazz Age is much shabbier, less heroic. Drinking here is occasionally if not often boring (one might compare the liquors consumed in Hemingway relative to Dos Passos; I imagine those in Dos Passos are typically cheaper, less savored, and less specific), and violence and sex aren't Capital-T Themes so much as things characters do or don't do.

It also won't really do as a "relevant" novel, a novel which "speaks to our time." It would take a great deal of effort to discover more than a partial reflection of 2010 in its characters, its plot, or especially its concerns. And yet, unlike, say, Mad Men, it would also be difficult to glean contrasts—favorable or unfavorable—which allow us to congratulate or castigate ourselves on our progress or backsliding. The stories of emergent industries or professions (automobiles, airplanes, public relations) look so little like the internet start-ups of today, and the enormity of class conflict and working-class consciousness which makes up so much of the trilogy is basically unrecognizable in the present.

Race and gender roles are more crudely created and enforced by the characters than we are used to seeing today, but there is also a casualness and simplicity to them that undercuts any feeling of knowing better; in a very disturbing way, Dos Passos does not make race and gender into problems for the reader, giving her no real opportunity to feel more enlightened than the characters in the way one is directed to take very conscious note of Don or Betty Draper's prejudices and insensitivities, or in the way one can't avoid squirming at a particularly caricatured portrayal of a black servant in a 1930s film. There is certainly a shock, as there always is, at running into an epithet or a mark of prejudice in the trilogy, but that shock does not reverberate into the book in any way we are by now accustomed to, and that lack of reverberation impedes the formation of any sense of where one stands in relation to the book or to the characters.

In a very similar manner, Dos Passos's whole attitude toward history—or even to the United States—interrupts the formation of any stable relationship to the reader's own views of the U.S. or U.S. history. U.S.A. as a whole is neither comfortably historical or comfortably "contemporary;" somehow Dos Passos blocks both the feeling that his novel is safely in the past and the feeling that it can serve as an analogy for the present. This is perhaps not too surprising, though. Even among his peers, Dos Passos's feelings about America were, shall we say, idiosyncratic and arguably unstable; after years of being a both vocal and visible activist in Leftist politics, Dos Passos took a hard swing to the right during the Cold War; hardly unique in his time, but, for a variety of reasons, his apostasy was much more puzzling and less explicable. Yet that idiosyncrasy is not the reason for this neither-past-nor-present feeling of the novel, or not quite.

A quite substantial part of the problem—or, if it's not a problem, and I don't think it is, it is at least a situation that appears to the reader as an obstacle to understanding—is that the U.S.A. trilogy takes part in what might validly be called a myth (or a grand narrative) which has very little purchase on the minds of Americans (or readers of American fiction) today. Michael Denning, in his book The Cultural Front, calls this myth "the decline and fall of the Lincoln Republic." (And I should probably say now that by myth, I mean to emphasize less the validity or truth-content of the narrative but rather its role in people's lives, as a story that organizes experience and history into a knowable and comprehensible shape). In a subsequent post I'll examine that myth and where it has ended up in the present, and why it is difficult to access today.

In the meantime, if you've been reading along, or have read the U.S.A. trilogy in the past—or other Dos Passos novels—please consider this an open thread; talk about your experiences with Dos Passos and how you think it fits into the larger literary landscape.

Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Seal) — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 21:03:00 +0000

Multiple reviews have now picked up on the placement of Tolstoy's War and Peace in Jonathan Franzen's new novel. The two reviewers I linked to in fact make this allusion into a sort of master-code for the novel, titling their coverage "Peace and War" and "The Tolstoy of the Internet Era." This is absurd not only because comparison of this sort is the laziest and least valuable form of criticism, but also because the allusion on which hangs this invidious comparison is in fact rather slight. Arguably, a reference to a now quite obscure Greek film, O drakos, or The Fiend of Athens, is of much more considerable relevance to the book's plot.

It's true, Patty Berglund does read the novel while she is at something of a crossroads in her adult life and she does identify with Natasha, caught between two men: "The autobiographer [Patty is writing a third-person autobiography] wonders if things might have gone differently if she hadn't reached the very pages in which Natasha Rostov, who was obviously meant for the goofy and good Pierre, falls in love with his great cool friend Prince Andrei. Patty had not seen this coming. Pierre's loss unfolded, as she read it, like a catastrophe in slow motion. Things probably would not have gone any differently, but the effect those pages had on her, their pertinence, was almost psychedelic" (166).

This pertinence is deceptive, even within Franzen's own terms. Later, Patty gives a more complete recapitulation of Natasha's story which now fits her own quite imperfectly: "Natasha had promised herself to Andrei but then was corrupted by the wicked Anatole, and Andrei went off in despair to get himself mortally wounded in battle, surviving only long enough to be nursed by Natasha and forgive her, whereupon excellent old Pierre, who had done some growing up and deep thinking as a prisoner of war, stepped forward to present himself as a consolation prize; and lots of babies followed" (175).

I don't know whether Franzen means for this allusion to War and Peace to be a red herring of sorts or not, the kind of thing which is designed to catch a critic who is on a hunt for a hook to bite down on, for something portentous to compare the year's biggest novel to. Franzen does preface Patty's later recounting of Natasha's story with the comment, "And she became a better reader. At first in desperate escapism, later in search of help." Patty's first connection to War and Peace is escapist; she uses it to justify sleeping with the Andrei character, Richard, literally making life resemble art. Later, Patty becomes a better reader by accepting that the analogy between Tolstoy and her life is imperfect and not to be lived through, just to be consulted for truth or "help."

This, in a nutshell, is in fact Franzen's own ethics of reading, at least as they are articulated in the Harper's essay: Franzen's own autobiographic narrative there is a similar story of recognizing that the imperfect fit between life and art is the real source of its power—just as long as we recognize that art is not meant to make a perfect fit, is not meant to act directly as a model, that we're not supposed to act like characters. Understanding characters helps us understand ourselves, yes, but we err when that understanding is of ourselves-as-characters. And the fact that War and Peace is in fact only mentioned five times in the novel—and four of those instances within twenty pages—suggests that this episode similarly is not meant to be so fundamental to our understanding of the novel: not a code or a key but a symptom, a single instance of a leitmotiv at most. To do more with War and Peace or Tolstoy is merely to fetishize allusion for its own sake—exactly the type of conflation of art and life that Franzen is (at least in my reading) trying to guard against.

Yet there is, perhaps, something we can recover from this comparison between Franzen and Tolstoy: consider the bald singularity of Franzen's title relative to Tolstoy's: "Freedom." "War and Peace." For Franzen, "freedom" is already its own antithesis; freedom is the name of a dialectic, not a state or event.

That's a common story, particularly in the libertarian strain it takes when trying to negotiate the harm principle: you're free to do as you like as long as your actions don't hurt anyone. (Amelia Atlas, whose excellent blog I recently discovered, has a fascinating discussion of this engagement with political philosophy in the novel.) Exercising freedom completely freely always leads to a variety of unfreedom: one inevitably becomes so committed to one's own process of self-liberation that one cannot change course: Freedom becomes a demand external to the self, no longer a healthy intrinsic desire. Some version of this narrative fills the space between (at least every Boomer if not) every person and his morning reflection.

What is missing from this story is the other thing filling that space: self-pity. Self-pity would not have made a good conjunctive term for the title ("Freedom and Self-Pity" would get nixed quickly, I imagine, by the editors), but it is at least equal to freedom in thematic weight in the book¹, although I would not necessarily assume that Franzen sees it in those terms. Self-pity is not, after all, a perfect antithesis of freedom, at least not in a traditional understanding of the term. It functions rather something like an enzyme or reagent, corroding the feeling of freedom into the belief that one is unfree, catalyzing that unfreedom into a desire for some other form of freedom. Self-pity acts when one realizes that the freedoms one has worked toward have merely been the raw materials of a more complicated set of confinements: when, to be a little more specific and more germane to Franzen's novel, one's rebellion against one's parents ends up shaping the terms of one's own errors in child-rearing or marital life or career.² In the bluntest statement of this theme, Patty querulously comments, "The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free" (181). A few pages later she comes across a small monument on the Swarthmore campus engraved with the words "USE WELL THY FREEDOM." (Franzen, a Swarthmore graduate, actually gets one of the details about this carving wrong: he attributes it to the Class of 1920, but as you can see from the linked picture, it was given by the Class of 1927.)

Because of these lines and many others like them, the heavy-handedness of Franzen's novel has been the aspect most frequently used to suggest that, "yeah, it's pretty good, but," which is essentially the tone of Ron Charles's hilarious video review. And it is quite valid to complain about the way that Franzen insults his readers with the incredible obviousness of the "freedom" theme, particularly when he begins sloppily to equate³ freedom with unchecked growth (361-362); other, healthier traditions of freedom are ignored or subordinated.

But the heavy-handedness of the freedom theme seems connected to the other theme I have tried to outline; in fact, I'm compelled to ask: Isn't portentousness a writer's equivalent of self-pity? That is, if self-pity is what keeps our dissatisfactions with the idea and experience of freedom from completely curdling into bitterness and misanthropy (two outcomes that Franzen identifies as very real possibilities), then isn't portentousness also a kind of stopgap for preventing our dissatisfaction with the basic banality of words and ideas from turning into a Beckettian minimalism or a Jamesian super-refined obliquity? In plainer words, isn't heavy-handedness what keeps the realist novel "real"? Repetitions of thematic keywords, overdetermined allusions to meaningful books or films or events, plausible impossibilities, extraordinary coincidences, "meet-cutes," etc.—it is Franzen's argument that they are necessary to hold art in a place where we may be tempted to escape but ultimately where we choose to return for help.

Franzen has two of his characters attend a Bright Eyes concert; Walter, Patty's husband, and Richard, her lover and Walter's best friend, have the following exchange after the show:

"A few too many songs about adolescent soap operas."

"They're all about belief," Walter said, "The new record's this incredible kind of pantheistic effort to keep believing in something in a world full of death. Oberst [the boy genius behind Bright Eyes] works the word 'lift' into every song. That's the name of the record, Lifted. It's like religion without the bullshit of religious dogma" (370).

It's almost too easy to see Franzen's signature here, a sort of excuse and rationale for the portentousness: we need this word "freedom," just as we need to be lifted by hope. (At any rate, it is extremely likely that Franzen would not be scared off by Conor Oberst's own reputation for breathtaking self-pity or for heavy-handedness.)⁴

It is this confidence, this assuredness in the continued necessity of realism that accounts for Franzen's commercial and critical successes; he is, along with only a very few other writers at work today, capable of convincing his audience that he writes "serious" fiction in the nineteenth-century sense of that word: not just fiction meant to be read by smart people, which is what "serious" so often means today, but solid bourgeois fiction that one can trust to talk about adult things (sex and business, mostly) without blushing but also without prurience or disproportionate avidity. Franzen fits pretty well the quote that I cited a few days ago from William Dean Howells about the role of the novelist in society:

They require of a novelist whom they respect unquestionable proof of his seriousness, if he proposes to deal with certain phases of life; they require a sort of scientific decorum. He can no longer expect to be received on the ground of entertainment only; he assumes a higher function, something like that of a physician or a priest, and they expect him to be bound by laws as sacred as those of such professions; they hold him solemnly pledged not to betray them or abuse their confidence. If he will accept the conditions, they give him their confidence, and he may then treat to his greater honor, and not at all to his disadvantage, of such experiences, such relations of men and women…

It is probably inevitable that having written this, I will be assumed to be myself defending this form of "serious" fiction, and to be lauding Franzen. But I'm ambivalent about Franzen's novel (it's worth reading), and I think realism can have and should have a wider compass than the one Franzen (or Howells) is likely to give it. I think that those who are ready to scorn Franzen for being what he is are generally impatient and narrow, but anyone who is willing to give Franzen more than what he's asking for (which is, I think, the case with the absurdly grandiose plaudits being bestowed upon this book) needs a bracing splash of very cold water. Franzen is complicit in this irrational exuberance, no doubt, but the novel itself is much, much more modest than anything the majority of his reviewers, blurbers, and marketers have put into circulation.

¹ It is an incredibly significant theme for everyone but the one non-white character—Lalitha—whom Franzen draws as too ingenuous and submissive to be subject to something as whitely complex as self-pity; his idea of adding depth to this representative of the non-Western world is making her an aggressive driver. Srsly.
² One of the more interesting (to me) examples that Franzen gives of this basic structure is geographical: "Patty, with a frozen smile, sat looking at the glamorous and plutocratic parties at other tables in the restaurant's lovely discreet light. There was, of course, nowhere better in the world to be than New York City. This fact was the foundation of her family's satisfaction with itself, the platform from which all else could be ridiculed, the collateral of adult sophistication that bought them the right to behave like children. To be Patty and sitting in that SoHo restaurant was to confront a force she had not the slightest chance of competing with. Her family had claimed New York and was never going to budge. Simply never coming here again—just forgetting that restaurant scenes like this even existed—was her only option" (123).
³ By the way, what is Franzen's deal with splitting as many infinitives as he can? Is this some kind of compositional principle? Does he have some sort of vendetta against pedants? It was maddening to me.
⁴ It is interesting to compare the well-remarked upon heavy-handedness of Freedom with comments Franzen made last year about the social novel: "I couldn’t smoke enough cigarettes in a day to interest myself in using a novel to illustrate points I already understood very well. I think, although he is extremely kind and erudite and a lovely person, Richard Powers’s books are good examples of what happens when you try to illustrate a social reality that’s already known to you." More here.

Edit: Charles Baxter has another Tolstoy comparison in the NYRB: "Franzen, judging from the evidence of this novel, doesn’t want to be Jane Austen; he wants to be Tolstoy." Maybe this idea of the Tolstoyan ambitions of Freedom went out with the promotional materials/ARCs?