Blographia Literaria

Hiatus

2011-02-06T22:27:00.000-05:00

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

2011-01-19T19:01:00.000-05:00

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

2011-01-10T23:19:00.000-05:00

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

2011-01-10T16:44:00.001-05:00

[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?

2011-01-07T14:53:00.000-05:00

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

2011-01-03T10:42:00.000-05:00

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

2011-01-02T14:16:00.000-05:00

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

2010-12-09T09:55:00.000-05:00

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

2010-12-03T08:32:00.000-05:00

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

2010-11-29T10:39:00.000-05:00

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

2010-11-10T14:39:00.000-05:00

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

2010-11-05T21:36:00.000-04:00

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

2010-11-04T18:12:00.000-04:00

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

2010-11-03T20:11:00.000-04:00

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

2010-10-25T14:14:00.000-04:00

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

2010-10-18T09:56:00.000-04:00

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

2010-10-13T18:37:00.001-04:00

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"

2010-10-13T15:27:00.003-04:00

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

2010-10-05T21:41:00.000-04:00

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

2010-10-02T16:44:00.000-04:00

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

2010-10-02T16:25:00.002-04:00

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

2010-09-25T10:34:00.002-04:00

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

2010-09-15T20:52:00.004-04:00

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

2010-09-13T09:20:00.000-04:00

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

2010-09-10T17:03:00.006-04:00

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?

Party in the U.S.A.: The Big Money, by John Dos Passos

2010-09-06T16:46:00.000-04:00

There will be a post looking at the trilogy as a whole and trying to place it in the landscape of American literary history as that history looks to someone at the present moment, but for now, I'll simply complete the inventorying project of describing the contents of this last volume of the U.S.A. trilogy.

Some of the most famous "Camera Eye" sections of the trilogy are to be found in The Big Money, in particular Camera Eye 50, which some of the more biographically-oriented critics consider the climax of the trilogy, as it depicts Dos Passos's own efforts trying to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti—supposedly the experiential germ or origin of the project:

   they have clubbed us off the streets   they are stronger   they are rich   they hire and fire the politicians the newspapereditors the old judges the small men with reputations the collegepresidents the wardheelers (listen businessmen collegepresidents judges   America will not forget her betrayers)   they hire the men with guns   the uniforms the policecars the patrolwagons
   all right you have won   you will kill the brave men   our friends tonight…
   America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul
   their hired men sit on the judge's bench they sit back with their feet on the tables under the dome of the State House they are ignorant of our beliefs they have the dollars the guns the armed forces the powerplants
   they have built the electricchair and hired the executioner to throw the switch
   all right we are two nations
   America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch
   but do they know that the old world of the immigrants are being renewed in blood and agony tonight do they know that the old American speech of the haters of oppression is new tonight in the mouth of an old woman from Pittsburgh of a husky boilermaker from Frisco who hopped freights clear from the Coast to come here in the mouth of a Back Bay socialworker in the mouth of an Italian printer of a hobo from Arkansas    the language of the beaten nation is not forgotten in our ears tonight
   the men in the deathhouse made the old words new before they died…

Camera Eye 49 is also among the more famous passages in the novel, dealing with basically the same themes, material, and even diction:

rebuild the ruined words worn slimy in the mouths of lawyers district-attorneys collegepresidents Judges without the old words the immigrants haters of oppression brought to Plymouth how can you know who are your betrayers America
or that this fishpeddler you have in Charlestown Jail is one of your founders Massachusetts?

Not only do these passages sit quite comfortably as a sort of midpoint between Langston Hughes ("Let America Be America Again") and Allen Ginsberg ("America"), but they also recall (or rather look forward to) the collective invocation Dos Passos would give to the trilogy when it was released as a one-volume edition in 1938: "But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people."

The Big Money features nine biographies: Frederick Winslow Taylor, Henry Ford, Thorstein Veblen, Isadora Duncan (the only biography of a woman in the entire trilogy), Rudolph Valentino, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright, William Randolph Hearst, and Samuel Insull. Although Veblen was acerbically critical of the way Americans used their wealth, none of these figures can be reasonably called a radical (or working-class) hero; in the previous two volumes, there had been some balance between the portraits of industrialists and those of the advocates for the working class, but Dos Passos denies that a balance exists any longer. The closest we come is Rudolph Valentino, a representative of mass culture, not mass democracy.

The narrative sections follow around just four different characters, and one of them, Richard Ellsworth Savage, has only one section and that only at the very end of the book. So for the whole first 86% of The Big Money, the action is dominated by three protagonists: Charley Anderson (seven sections; he was also one of the protagonists of The 42nd Parallel); Mary French (four sections); and Margo Dowling (five sections). Of course, as with the other two books, many if not most of the previously introduced protagonists run around inside this volume's narratives: Ben Compton is in a relationship with Mary French for a good portion of her narrative; Charley Anderson has an affair with Eveline Hutchins and runs in her circle, encountering Richard Ellsworth Savagee; Savage's own section also features J. Ward Moorehouse, Janey Williams and Eleanor Stoddard, who is marrying a Russian prince. Margo and Charley also have an affair.

Charley Anderson returns from his war-time experiences as a hero; after some time in the ambulance corps, he becomes a pilot and, evidently, an ace. Once back in America, he goes to his brother Jim's in St. Paul; Jim attempts to trade on his war record to get publicity and sales for his Ford dealership, which he appears to be mismanaging. After Charley's mother dies, Jim coerces him into signing a power-of-attorney deed to manage his share of the estate; Jim intends to use the whole estate to pull his dealership back into profitability. Charley, angry, takes a small lump sum and leaves for New York, where he is supposed to start a business for airplane parts with a wartime buddy. The business takes off in large part due to Charley's engineering acumen, but Charley's interests get diverted by playing the stock market and chasing Doris, a frivolous society girl who eventually does sleep with him but arbitrarily marries an Anglo-American who has "people in the Doomsday Book… [and who] have copper interests. They are almost like the Guggenheims except of course they are not Jewish." Unfortunately, Charley ends up with Gladys, who is in her own way probably worse for Charley than Doris would have been (although it must be said that Charley is himself a rotten husband). Already by this time, Charley's drinking has seriously affected his work, but he is spied by a Detroit airplane manufacturer who, impressed with the engine starter he was instrumental in designing, convinces him to leave the small company he helped to found. Now in "the big money," he lives much closer to the edge, drunk most of the time and completely irresponsible, and always putting as much of his money as he fails to spend on liquor and luxury items into the stock market. An airplane crash allows his wife and his rivals in business to make their move, not ruining him but making him completely reliant on playing the market; his job as a vice president at the airplane company is effectively over. Charley does not respond well, drinking even more, spending more, and generally being reckless Margo is a part of this prolonged spree; we get much of the narrative of his decline from Margo's point of view, as he travels around Florida and New York as her lover and patron (Margo is pursuing a performing career of a sort). In his last section he falls completely apart, leaving a dance he's attending with Margo in anger when she becomes jealous of the attention he's paying to another girl; he takes the other girl with him and drunkenly plays chicken with a train. He loses, the girl dies, he ends up in the hospital, eventually dying of peritonitis (like Rudolph Valentino), but not before his brother Jim is able to swoop in to try to convince him to make him his executor and not before Margo is able to get one last check out of him. The check bounces.

Mary French is a doctor's daughter from Colorado; her father is a self-sacrificing soul who eventually dies in the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918. Her mother is less selfless; she disapproves of Mary's public-spiritedness and of Mary's best friend, Ada Cohn. Mary goes off to Vassar for college and Ada follows a year later; eventually both go to Hull-House in Chicago to work for the summer there. After her father dies, she decides not to finish her college education and instead to work full-time at Hull-House. After a few years there she simply leaves, getting a job as a counter-girl in Cleveland. She moves on to Pittsburgh where she gets a job as a reporter; she winds up with an assignment covering a strike. Her editor wants her to find out that there are Russian agitators behind it, but she instead falls in with the organizers and becomes a devoted worker for the union. G. H. Barrow, who has shown up in all three books, comes to town and offers her a job, largely because of ulterior motives, although Mary is a diligent and very competent secretary and researcher. Barrow impregnates her and she runs off to New York to have an abortion, aided by her old friend Ada, who is now an accomplished violinist. She gets involved in radical politics there, and, while sheltering Ben Compton, who has been released from jail and is in a post-traumatic state, falls in love with him. They eventually quarrel, and she leaves New York to work for the Sacco & Vanzetti case in Boston, where she meets Don Stevens, who also appeared in 1919. Mary then goes back to New York and gets involved with a coal strike going on near Pittsburgh; she also gets involved with Don Stevens, although he leaves her for Russia and ends up marrying another girl. Downcast, Mary attends a party with Ada that is being hosted by Eveline. Remarking, "You know, it does seem too silly to spend your life filling up rooms with illassorted people who really hate each other, Eveline wishes Ada and Mary goodnight. Mary finds out the next day that Eveline killed herself later that night. Mary returns to her work.

Margo Dowling is born in New York; her father runs out on her and the woman, Agnes, who is raising her. Agnes gets involved with a vaudeville performer, Frank Mandeville. Mandeville eventually brings Margo into his act as a child actress; when she is perhaps 14, he rapes her. She runs off at 16 with a Cuban young man named Tony; they go to Havana, she hates it, and she gets a young boy at the consulate to smuggle her out of the country. She returns to New York and dances as a chorus girl. A wealthy young man named Tad begins to take her out, and eventually takes her down to Florida to go boating. The trip goes to smash when they run into Tony; Tad leaves. After spending a few days with Tony, he steals what is left of her money and vanishes. She goes to a lunchcounter despairing of what she'll do; it is there she meets Charley. Charley takes her back to New York and sets her up nicely. She becomes a model at a French dress shop; the owner arranges for her to have her picture taken by a photographer named Margolies. Margolies asks her to come to his studio and she poses for some other kind of pictures, which Charley pays for. The French dressmaker kills himself (he's going bankrupt) and Margo decides to head back to Miami to sing in a club there. Charley follows her down there as his decline steepens; he dies and she has to figure out how she's going to make some money (her gig never did very well). Tony shows up again, and Agnes has come down from New York for Charley's funeral; the three of them take off for California. While there, Margo bumps into Margolies, who has quickly become a big-time movie producer; remembering Margo, he casts her as his next big star. Tony is killed by a man he may be sleeping with, an Austrian polo-player named Max. Not that it's exactly been a big obstacle for her seeing other men, but with her marriage now over, Margo marries Margolies, although he in effect pimps her out to her co-star, Rodney Cathcart. Her career is about to take off when her narrative cuts out.

Richard Ellsworth Savage has been employed by J. Ward Moorehouse for a few years now and has risen to Moorehouse's second-in-command. We see the public relations business in full swing (it's a little reminiscent of Mad Men, as it's transitioning to advertising) as Savage tries to win over Bingham, a bizarre millionaire who sells patent medicines. Moorehouse gets very ill, meanwhile, and Savage becomes the de facto president of the pr firm and the responsibility of "the molding of the public mind," a phrase which certainly seems like it has a double meaning. Savage gets really drunk and ends up dancing with a young man in Harlem; the young man follows him back to his room and robs Savage while he sleeps. Savage goes into work the next day worried about blackmail, but it appears everything will work out.

There is a final section which is ambiguous in its relationship to the four modes of the trilogy: titled "Vag" (short for vagrant), it is not exactly a narrative section but seems more allegorical. It might be considered, in fact, one of the biographies; in the Table of Contents it is typeset in the same fashion as the other headings for biographies (italicized, all-caps, indented). It is a peculiar close to the trilogy.

From Fredric Jameson, "History and Class Consciousness as an Unfinished Project"

2010-09-05T12:33:00.001-04:00

Sometimes when I'm reading Jameson on Georg Lukács, I feel like I may be the only one agreeing with him on Lukács's continued relevance and even necessity. Jameson opens this 1988 essay with a challenge which has yet, I think, to be taken up: "The actuality of Georg Lukács has in recent years always seemed to founder on two concepts: the defense of literary realism and the idea of totality. When one considers that these are virtually the two most important and central conceptual achievements of his life's work, no little discouragement tends to surround the project of 'reviving' him" (Valences of the Dialectic 201). And indeed, the task of re-introducing the concept of totality and the view of literary realism as a strategy of resistance to (and not a practice of submission toward) market society is at least daunting if not dispiriting. Very few people want to hear the Lukács side of the Brecht-Lukács debate anymore, and, as Jameson quickly but cogently lays out, very few people want to bother with dissociating the notion of totality from an intimidating ensemble of bad things which have, under postmodernism, come to be seen as inseparable:

these positions [of postmodern intellectuals]… conflate intellectual authority (the subject that knows totality), social relationships (a totalizing picture of society that represses difference, or differentiation), politics (a single-party politics, as opposed to the pluralism of the so-called new social movements), ideology or philosophy (Hegelian idealization, which represses matter, the Other, or Nature), aesthetics (the old organic work of art or concrete universal, as opposed to the contemporary fragment or aleatory "work"), and ethics and psychoanalysis (the old "centered subject," the ideal of a unified personality or ego and a unified life project. In the koiné of contemporary theoretical debate, the name Lukács has become interchangeable with those of Hegel and Stalin as the word that illustrates the enormity of all these values by uniting them in a single program. It would be frivolous, but not wrong, to observe that the undifferentiated identification of these distinct positions with each other is itself something of a caricature of what is generally attributed to "totalizing thought" at its worst. (Valences 210)

Jameson's objective in this essay is to show how these two obstacles to "reviving" Lukács, literary realism and the totality, are in fact crucially linked across Lukács's corpus. In this regard, the essay feels a little truncated; Jameson moves on too quickly in demonstrating this connection, and I would have liked a more in-depth reading of Lukács's writings on realism to show where the totality persists in these later works (I should say I haven't read Jameson's essay on Lukács in Marxism and Form yet; perhaps I will find more there).

But Jameson does something else which is, on its own terms, extremely interesting; he takes a problem many people have with Lukács, his workerism, that is his belief in the epistemological priority of the proletariat in understanding capitalism, and puts it in plain terms which are easily translated into many other projects of emancipation or resistance: he argues that Lukács's point about the working class is a more general truth, namely, that the exploited always understand exploitation better than the exploiters. He proceeds to connect this directly to standpoint theory in feminism (e.g. Nancy Hartsock, Sandra Harding, Alison M. Jagger) by saying, "one has the feeling that the most authentic descendency of Lukács's thinking is to be found, not among the Marxists, but within a certain feminism, where the unique conceptual move of History and Class Consciousness has been appropriated for a whole program…" (Valences 215)

Jameson extends this argument in a very remarkable way for the rest of the essay; taking as his presupposition that what feminism (and, he will argue later, black and Jewish identities) have in common with Lukács's prioritization of the class consciousness of workers is that, "owing to its structural situation in the social order and to the specific forms of oppression and exploitation unique to that situation, each group lives the world in a phenomenologically specific way that allows it to see, or, better still, that it makes it unavoidable for that group to see and to know, features of the world that remain obscure, invisible, or merely occasional and secondary for other groups" (Valences 215-216). That emphasis on the unavoidability of this seeing and knowing is crucial, I think, and Jameson should perhaps have emphasized it even more.

The truly valuable addition that Jameson makes to this not-entirely-original (but often contested) point about collective experience comes when he considers the historical contribution of Jews to Marxism:

Meanwhile, particularly since George Steiner has so often complained of the suppression of the specifically Jewish component in Marxian and dialectical literary tradition—if not from Marx himself, then at least from Lukács all the way to Adorno—it seems appropriate to say a word about this specific social and epistemological situation as well. We are in fact often tempted, as intellectuals, to stress the obvious formal analogies between the Talmudic tradition and its exegetical relationship to sacred texts and the intricacies of modern dialectical reading and writing. But these analogies presuppose a cultural transmission which remains obscure, and which may well be very problematic indeed in the case of assimilated urban Jews whose interest in the tradition (one thinks of Walter Benjamin) was purely intellectual and a development in later adult life. The moment of truth of the Central European Jewish situation seems to me very different from this… This is not first and foremost the formal and aesthetic stress on pain and suffering, on dissonance and the negative, everywhere present in Adorno; but rather a more primary experience, namely that of collective fear and of vulnerability… [T]his experience of fear, in all its radicality, which cuts across class and gender to the point of touching the bourgeois in the very isolation of his town house or sumptuous Berlin apartment, is surely the very moment of truth of ghetto life itself, as the Jews and so many other ethnic groups have had to live it: the helplessness of the village community before the perpetual and unpredictable imminence of the lynching or the pogrom, the race riot. Other groups' experience of fear is occasional, rather than constitutive: standpoint analysis specifically demands a differentiation between the various negative experiences of constraint, between the exploitation suffered by workers and the oppression suffered by women and continuing on through the distinct structural forms of exclusion and alienation characteristic of other kinds of group experience. (Valences 220)¹

Jameson caps this insight off by directing it toward an "unfinished project" which is consonant with (if it does not in fact coincide with) the unfinished project of History and Class Consciousness:

What emerges form the feminist project, and from the speculations it inspires, is an "unfinished project": namely the differentiation of all those situations of what I have tried neutrally to characterize as "constraint," which are often monolithically subsumed under single-shot political concepts such as "domination" or "power"; economic concepts such as "exploitation"; social concepts such as "oppression"; or philosophical concepts such as "alienation." These reified concepts and terms, taken on their own as meaningful starting points, encourage the revival of what I have characterized as an essentially metaphysical polemic about the ultimate priority of the political, say (the defense of the primacy of "domination"), versus that of the economic (the counter-primacy of the notion of "exploitation").
What seems more productive is to dissolve this conceptuality once again back into the concrete situation from which it emerged: to make an inventory of the variable structures of "constraint" lived by the various marginal, oppressed, or dominated groups—the so-called "new social movements" fully as much as the working classes—with this difference, that each form of privation is acknowledged as producing its own specific "epistemology," its own specific view from below, and its own specific and distinctive truth claim. It is a project that will sound like "relativism" or "pluralism" only if the identity of the absent common object of such "theorization" from multiple "standpoints" is overlooked—what one therefore does not exactly have the right to call (but let it stand as contradictory shorthand) "late capitalism."

That absent common object is also, of course, the reintroduction of the notion of "totality."

What remains left out of this project, however, is the whole question, once again, of the connection of the totality to literary realism, and, of course, to the very vexed question of the connection between the realist novel and the bourgeois or middle class audience to which it is generally directed. I need to do a lot more reading in Lukács to begin to understand how these two connections relate, but what interests me for now is how far we might push Jameson's quickly-abandoned comment that "collective fear and vulnerability… cuts across class and gender to the point of touching the bourgeois in the very isolation of his town house or sumptuous Berlin apartment"—in other words, to what ends does fear cut across class lines, and would pursuing this unfinished project of differentiating forms of constraint among the middle class or (more particularly) among the professional/managerial class be a continuation or a deformation of this project as it is carried out among "the various marginal, oppressed, or dominated groups?" What terms are being changed and to what degree when we turn the tools of this project onto analyzing a (self-consciously) bourgeois realist novel like, say, Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, which so nakedly begs for precisely this kind of inventorying of forms of "constraint?" All I can say is stay tuned…

¹Paul Gilroy actually quotes part of this passage in The Black Atlantic, and I heard Cornel West make basically this point in a lecture given right after 9/11: white Americans, many of them for the first time in their adult lives, were experiencing the sort of miasmic, enveloping fear that characterizes an existence subject to random violence and injustice—in other words, the day-to-day experience of many African-Americans.

The Genteel Tradition, Young Girls, and a Different Theory of Prudery in American Fiction

2010-09-03T17:34:00.001-04:00

In an incomplete essay on the short story in his third volume of Main Currents in American Thought, Parrington recovers a quote from William Dean Howells about James: "To enjoy his work, to feel its rare excellence, both in conception and expression, is a brevet of intellectual good form" (Parrington 399; the original source is Howells's introduction to a 1906 re-printing of Daisy Miller). Parrington's full comments should be quoted; enjoying his prose may no longer (as it once was) be considered in its own way a brevet of intellectual good form, but it is still quite fun:

Henry James. His position peculiar. From his youth déraciné—his father hated American vulgarity, American journalism, and would not permit his son to take root. He grew up with an aristocratic conception of civilization—his sole interest lay in such civilization, and the manners of the polite society of that civilization. No other American has so hated and feared contamination from the vulgar. He was thus the last flower of the Genteel Tradition, transplanted to an environment more congenial. As the middle-class became more clamorous, he withdrew to the Continent, to England, where the older ideas still lingered. There in the spirit of the realist he wrote with refined art and persistent detachment—even to a punctilious and princely refinement. As Mr. Howells says… (ibid.)

I think "brevet" is not a terribly common word, so in spite of my feelings about the cliché of beginning a thought with "the Oxford English Dictionary defines…" I'll offer the OED definitions anyway:
1. An official or authoritative message in writing; esp. a Papal Indulgence. Obs.
2. An official document granting certain privileges from a sovereign or government; spec. in the Army, a document conferring nominal rank on an officer, but giving no right to extra pay.

Parrington's opinion is not difficult to parse, but "a brevet of intellectual good form…"? What a weird thing to say. It sounds so much like a backhanded compliment, an acknowledgment that the reason one likes James is because doing so makes one feel worthy of liking James—a circular frenzy of Bourdieusian-level cultural capital accumulation. Yet if it is a genuine compliment, then recognizing that fact may in a way its own little test: to imagine that the achievement of intellectual good form is not only a dignified objective, but even a normative one.

But wait: What makes the compliment even more interesting is its setting—a highly gendered reading of post-bellum literary history which Parrington completely elides:

Mr. James's time is still ours, and while perfect artistry is prized in literature, it is likely to be prolonged indefinitely beyond our time. But he belongs preeminently to that period following the Civil War when our authorship felt the rising tide of national life in an impulse to work of the highest refinement, the most essential truth. The tendency was then toward a subtile beauty, which he more than any other American writer has expressed in his form, and toward a keen, humorous, penetrating self-criticism, which seized with joy upon the expanding national life, and made it the material of fiction as truly national as any yet known. "The finer female sense," in whose favor the prosperity of our fiction resides, Mr. James lastingly piqued, and to read him if for nothing but to condemn him is the high intellectual experience of the daughters of mothers whose indignant girlhood resented while it adored his portraits of American women. To enjoy his work, to feel its rare excellence, both in conception and expression, is a brevet of intellectual good form which the women who have it prize at all its worth.

By 1906, there was already in literary circles a bit of a backlash against what was typically characterized as the tyranny of what might be called the daughter standard:

Remote from and insensitive to the dominant tendencies and major developments of American life, they [James Russell Lowell, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Richard Watson Gilder, et al.] cast a fog of gentility over our literature. They came from and spoke for the least fecund class in the commonwealth, the class of the comfortably situated, governed by prejudice, incapable of realistic thought, committed to the worship of respectability in every sphere of action. Like that class they mistook prudery for refinement, timidity for self-restraint, and abstinence from the taking of bribes for civic duty. They were prepared to take Lowell's absurd dictum that no man should write what he [Lowell] was not willing for his daughter to read, and turn it into the even absurder one that no man should write what they were unwilling for their [own] daughters to read. (Granville Hicks, The Great Tradition 20)

In a similar vein, Frank Norris had said that, "It is the 'young girl' and the family center table that determines the standard of the American short story" (quoted in John Tomsich, A Genteel Endeavor, 5). More examples could be adduced (a particularly bitter—and early one—is mentioned here). In a sense, this bucking against the tyranny of the girl reader is the complement of Hawthorne's griping about the "damned mob of scribbling women." But there is also a quote from Howells to throw into the hopper which addresses the question far more thoughtfully, though he ends up very close to precisely the caricature Sinclair Lewis made of him when he mocked him in his Nobel Lecture ("Mr. Howells was one of the gentlest, sweetest, and most honest of men, but he had the code of a pious old maid whose greatest delight was to have tea at the vicarage. He abhorred not only profanity and obscenity but all of what H. G. Wells has called "the jolly coarsenesses of life". In his fantastic vision of life, which he innocently conceived to be realistic, farmers, and seamen and factory hands might exist, but the farmer must never be covered with muck, the seaman must never roll out bawdy chanteys, the factory hand must be thankful to his good kind employer, and all of them must long for the opportunity to visit Florence and smile gently at the quaintness of the beggars.") Here's Howells:

they [other American authors] ask why, when the conventions of the plastic and histrionic arts liberate their followers to the portrayal of almost any phase of the physical or of the emotional nature, an American novelist may not write a story on the lines of 'Anna Karenina' or 'Madame Bovary.' They wish to touch one of the most serious and sorrowful problems of life in the spirit of Tolstoy and Flaubert, and they ask why they may not. At one time, they remind us, the Anglo-Saxon novelist did deal with such problems--De Foe in his spirit, Richardson in his, Goldsmith in his. At what moment did our fiction lose this privilege? In what fatal hour did the Young Girl arise and seal the lips of Fiction, with a touch of her finger, to some of the most vital interests of life?

Whether I wished to oppose them in their aspiration for greater freedom, or whether I wished to encourage them, I should begin to answer them by saying that the Young Girl has never done anything of the kind. The manners of the novel have been improving with those of its readers; that is all. Gentlemen no longer swear or fall drunk under the table, or abduct young ladies and shut them up in lonely country-houses, or so habitually set about the ruin of their neighbors' wives, as they once did. Generally, people now call a spade an agricultural implement; they have not grown decent without having also grown a little squeamish, but they have grown comparatively decent; there is no doubt about that. 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 as George Eliot treats in 'Adam Bede,' in 'Daniel Deronda,' in 'Romola,' in almost all her books; such as Hawthorne treats in 'The Scarlet Letter;' such as Dickens treats in 'David Copperfield;' such as Thackeray treats in 'Pendennis,' and glances at in every one of his fictions; such as most of the masters of English fiction have at same time treated more or less openly. It is quite false or quite mistaken to suppose that our novels have left untouched these most important realities of life. They have only not made them their stock in trade; they have kept a true perspective in regard to them; they have relegated them in their pictures of life to the space and place they occupy in life itself, as we know it in England and America. They have kept a correct proportion, knowing perfectly well that unless the novel is to be a map, with everything scrupulously laid down in it, a faithful record of life in far the greater extent could be made to the exclusion of guilty love and all its circumstances and consequences.

What is remarkable (for me, at any rate) about this passage is the way that Howells hooks the growing "decentness" of the American writer onto the emerging discourses of scientific detachment (precisely the language that Zola, about whom Howells himself was ambivalent but who was certainly the bête noire of the other genteel American littérateurs) and of professionalism. The writer has become more circumspect because he has turned writing into a profession, and his readers have expectations of him similar to those they would hold when submitting to a lawyer's or a doctor's ministrations: a certain delicacy, and a confidentiality which suppresses rather than just contains unpleasantness. What an extraordinary image of the writer!

The Metaphysical Club, by Louis Menand

2010-08-31T15:58:00.004-04:00

One word crops up unexpectedly often in The Metaphysical Club: "invidious." Well, it only turns up seven times (and two of those are actually "invidiousness"), but I sincerely doubt I (or you) have read many books, even of greater length, which use the word or its inflections more frequently.*

This frequency should not, after some reflection, be all that surprising; one of the consistent themes of much writing about pragmatism—particularly the version we receive from Richard Rorty—is its impatience if not antipathy toward dualisms which smuggle preferences in under the cover of either nature or truth, a trick which makes for a pretty good definition of the word "invidious." What Menand says of Dewey here goes for the most part for his readings of James, Peirce, and Holmes, as well as for the secondary characters like Chauncey Wright, James Marsh, Horace Kallen, Franz Boas, Jane Addams, Alain Locke, and (a little distortedly) Randolph Bourne:

The "Reflex Arc" paper is the essential expression of Dewey's particular mode of intelligence. It is the strategy he followed in approaching every problem: expose a tacit hierarchy in the terms in which people conventionally think about it. We think that a response follows a stimulus; Dewey taught that there is a stimulus only because there is already a response. We think that first there are individuals and then there is society; Dewey taught that there is no such thing as an individual without society. We think we know in order to do; Dewey taught that doing is why there is knowing.

Dewey was not reversing the priority of the terms he identified in these analyses. Invidiousness was precisely what he wished always to avoid. In condemning (as he did) the elevation of thinking over doing as a reflection of class bias (Veblen would have said that philosophical speculation is a form of conspicuous consumption: it shows we can afford not to work with our hands), Dewey was not proposing to elevate doing over thinking instead. He was only applying the idea Addams was trying to explain to him when she said that antagonism is unreal: he was showing that 'doing' and 'thinking,' like 'stimulus' and 'response,' are just practical distinctions we make when tensions arise in the process of adjustment between the organism and its world. Later in his career, Dewey would criticize, in the same manner, the distinctions between mind and reality, means and ends, nature and culture. As Henry Steele Commager testified, a generation (or part of a generation, anyway) seems to have found Dewey's manner of calmly and often rather colorlessly chewing through received ideas irresistible and indispensable.

What is striking about Menand's writing in The Metaphysical Club (but which uncharacteristically does not come across in this passage) is the linearity and curtness of the vast majority of Menand's sentences**; where there are semicolons or colons, they serve mainly to hold a thought just long enough for it to be completed or reinforced. Rarely are they used to extend a point onto adjacent ground or to make even the slightest of tangents. Parallelism or antithesis is also, as far as I can remember, if not infrequent, at least quite understated; strong oppositions are not Menand's choice for pursuing his narrative. (Even the treatment on Agassiz, who is the closest thing we may have here to a villain, is directed more to showing how William James's reaction to the fights between Agassiz and the Darwinians was crucial in pointing him toward his notion of pluralism {143}.) Strong oppositions are inevitably always too close to "invidious distinctions."

The other really notable stylistic trait of the book is its huge number of parenthetical comments, each one basically like the parentheses about Veblen above: effectively self-contained, of small pertinence to the sentence off of which it is hanging, usually either recapitulating a point made earlier or tossing in a value-added factoid. Effectively, they're non-citational footnotes—not meant to direct the reader to a particular source for further research or to acknowledge the origin of the information or quote, just meant to use up all the scraps of information Menand gathered. One of my favorites is this: "(James's assignment seems to have been to investigate the effects of a particular brand of baking powder on the kidneys—in other words, self-urinalysis. After three weeks, he asked [Charles William] Eliot to assign the experiment to someone else. It was the beginning of a lifelong aversion to laboratory work.)"

The impulse behind this habit probably is a combination of wanting to entertain and also not to waste any research; certainly not bad impulses, and these little nuggets rarely seriously distract, but these ephemera also do the job of making the principal characters of the book a good deal weirder, but in a rather superficial manner. The "lifelong aversion to laboratory work" is kind of funny when one thinks of it as the result of James taking the piss out of himself, but it also truncates a better (and necessary) discussion of James's relation to the scientific method or to fieldwork. Menand does broach these subjects (particularly in the chapter titled "Brazil") but all too often he abbreviates or curtails such topics with these pat parentheticals. Perhaps this is in fact a method or a principle: maybe Menand means to say that our more immediate reactions like this one are the better places to look for our habits, inclinations, and dispositions, and that the trail of our more thoughtfully considered rationales and philosophies are basically just a forest of garnishes blocking our view of this slenderer meat, to mix metaphors rather carelessly. I actually wouldn't go quite so far as to say that—Menand does a very creditable (but not overwhelming) amount of source work—but there is a sense in which these parenthetical asides assume a surprisingly foundational role in building the narrative.

* [Later edit:] This was before I read Thorstein Veblen. Theory of the Leisure Class uses the word "invidious" 75 times!

** My friend Craig Fehrman pointed out to me before I read The Metaphysical Club how uncannily short Menand is able to keep so many of his sentences. As Craig noted, this curtness is in excess of even the relative directness of his New Yorker essays or his other work. It's my feeling that it is precisely the effort to avoid "invidious distinctions" that Menand is aiming at with these very linear sentences.

Why Muckraking Was Successful

2010-08-26T22:45:00.003-04:00

Reading Richard Hofstadter's classic (though by absolutely no means unimpeachable) history of the Progressive Era, The Age of Reform, I came across this very provocative quote from an article by Robert Cantwell in a collection of essays about American culture. Here's the quote:

The political side of the muckrakers' contribution was unquestionably great, but it has been overvalued, and the simple journalistic boldness and effectiveness of their writing has been overlooked. After thirty years the simple bulk of their work is astonishing; in five years' time a handful of gifted writers conducted a searching exploration of American society—industrial, financial, political, moral. Moreover, they did this with a wealth of local color, with wonderful savory names and places that had never been elevated into prose before. It was not because muckrakers exposed the corruption of Minneapolis, for example, that they were widely read, but because they wrote about Minneapolis at a time when it had not been written about, without patronizing or boosting it, and with an attempt to explore its life realistically and intelligently.

They wrote, in short, an intimate, anecdotal, behind-the-scenes history of their own times—or, rather, they tried to write it, for they often fell down. They traced the intricate relationship of the police, the underworld, the local political bosses, the secret connections between the new corporations (then consolidating at an unprecedented rate) and the legislatures and the courts. In doing this they drew a new cast of characters for the drama of American society: bosses, professional politicians, reformers, racketeers, captains of industry. Everybody recognized these native types; everybody knew about them; but they had not been characterized before; their social functions had not been analyzed. At the same time, the muckrakers pictured stage settings that everybody recognized but that nobody had written about—oil refineries, slums, the red-light districts, the hotel rooms where political deals were made—the familiar, unadorned, homely stages where the teeming day-to-day dramas of American life were enacted. How could the aloof literary magazines of the East, with their essays and their contributions from distinguished novelists, tap this rich material?

For literary, and not for political reasons, the muckrakers were successful. Their writing was jagged and hasty, and their moralizing now sounds not only dull but a little phony, yet they charged into situations that were deliberately obscured by the people involved in them; they sized up hundreds of complicated and intense struggles at their moment of greatest intensity; they dealt with material subject to great pressure and about which journalists could easily be misled. In a time of oppressive literary gentility they covered the histories of the great fortunes and the histories of corporations—something that had not been done before and that has scarcely been done well since—the real estate holdings of churches, the ownership of houses of prostitution, insurance scandals, railway scandals, the political set-ups of Ohio, Missouri, Wisconsin, Chicago, Cleveland, San Francsisco, New York. The new huge cities of the West had not been explored after their growth through the 70's and 80's (just as, say, Tulsa, Oklahoma, has not been written about after its astonishing growth through the 1920's) and because they wrote of them, the writing of the muckrakers was packed with local color, the names and appearances of hotels and bars, crusading ministers and town bosses and bankers. They told people who owned the factories they worked in, who rigged the votes they cast, who profited from the new bond issue, the new street-railway franchise and the new city hall, who foreclosed the mortgage, tightened credit, and controlled the Irish vote on the other side of the river. Their exposures, as such, were not so sensational. People knew all the scandals, and worse ones. But they liked to read about towns they knew, characters they recognized, and a setting they understood. The old magazines had never given them that.

To some extent, I think this interest or impulse that Cantwell is describing never really has gone away. An argument can be made that HBO is a sort of modern-day McClure's, with its (fictional) shows each carving a subculture off the American body politic and presenting it in the round with all its familiar character types and settings which, in many cases, also have not had the benefit of such devoted depiction, at least not "with an attempt to explore its life realistically and intelligently." The Italian mob, the Baltimore drug trade, Utah polygamists, the vampire underground, Larry David's life (okay, that one's a stretch), a South Dakotan frontier town, New Orleans music (?—haven't seen Treme yet, sorry), etc. The new Boardwalk Empire even looks like it's supposed to be a sort of attempt at historical muckraking—its source material was subtitled, "The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City."

Even if the muck's not always there in these shows (though it almost always is), something's generally being raked out into the open, and mostly with a more systematic mentality than the more "private life of…" approach than, say, Showtime takes to its programming. (In this sense, Mad Men certainly does demonstrate its HBO roots—it's a lot more panoramic, or panoptic. If it were on Showtime, I imagine it being called Draper.)

Nicholas Dames on Attention and the Future of the Book

2010-08-14T09:32:00.001-04:00

Rather than picking a single paragraph (or even a few) from Dames's excellent (and very terse) essay in n+1, I'll just offer the link. It should be read in its entirety. I would phrase a few things differently in terms of tone, perhaps, but his points about how we measure this "decline" we're supposedly in are absolutely what I would have liked to have said when I was talking about Gary Shteyngart and distraction a few weeks ago.

Oh well, I'll grab a specific chunk for highlighting anyway:

[E]ven if one grants that cultural standards of concentration or attention have declined, one has to ask what conditions of life for most individuals (industrialized labor, for a start) make it hard to “attend” to text. The answer is not simply that technologies of text, or literary standards, changed. It is a more complicated and possibly more discouraging picture of the needs and capacities of those outside the boundary of high-literate schooling. As Williams put it: the question isn’t whether ephemeral, fragmented consumption of text or images is a drug of choice for many; it’s what social conditions make such a drug necessary—ways of life that produce no satisfactions, only a momentarily appeasable itch for sensation.

I most certainly agree, although I would probably change the language of narcotics to something that emphasizes the actual social usefulness of this form of consumption, particularly for the class which has undergone "high-literate schooling." "[E]phemeral, fragmented consumption of text or images" are frequently not merely enjoyed in solitude, but are often part of a process of "sharing" in various forms. These forms of communication (Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader/Buzz, etc.) are among the primary means of maintaining a network of friends who may be widely dispersed geographically or even just temporally (i.e., all your friends work crazy hours). And even if they are not, social media memes or items quite often serve as conversation topics "in real life" in much the same way that sports or politics or film do. In fact, I think the analogy is pretty good between those realms and watching YouTube clips or whatever. One watches a sporting event or checks up on the news in part for private enjoyment, but these experiences also are constitutively social, even when they are being enjoyed alone. One expects to talk about sports or about politics or film with one's friends, even if that is not the conscious reason one consumes them.

Assuming that the main purpose of social media is private, individual enjoyment seems like an odd premise, but I find it is often the underlying concern for many attacks on the degradations of our digital life. But the emphasis that Dames (via Williams) makes about the necessity of examining the social conditions which make a given form of consumption necessary or at the very least useful is extremely important to remember.

Some Thoughts on Kunkel's Letter to Norway

2010-08-12T18:50:00.002-04:00

Mark Athitakis brings to my attention a piece by Benjamin Kunkel in n+1, a "report on American fiction of the last decade." Kunkel's piece is short—the prompt to which he is writing limited responses to 1200 words—and ostensibly directed toward a non-American audience—the prompt came from the Norwegian literary journal Bokvennen.

Kunkel makes five basic points about the past decade's American literature:

like all decades, the rate of change has been slow; thus, the 2000s are more characterized by what he calls "the perennial novel" than by anything else. Kunkel returns to this point at the end by invoking the dread term "middlebrow": "The disappearance of the term 'middlebrow' over the last decades only confirms the triumph of the thing itself: enjoyable books, not too trashy, not too hard, sentimental and well-plotted but not so much so as to totally traduce the world."
yet this perennial novel has also gravitated toward a greater degree of self-consciousness in its traditionalism, to a "neotraditionalism"—an attraction toward well-rounded characters, accident and coincidence as crucial plotting devices, and "a relatively high degree of sentimentality"
perhaps as a subset of this neotraditionalism (I think it's a subset, although Kunkel may consider it something distinct—he does call it "another big development," which is a pretty ample overstatement) is what Kunkel's confrère Marco Roth has termed the "neuronovel," a category with which I have some issues, but which is defined here simply as a book "in which novelists bless or afflict their characters with one or another recognizable neurological disorder." Kunkel and Roth adduce Rivka Galchen, John Wray, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Lethem, Mark Haddon, and Richard Powers (two of whom are English) as exemplars
Kunkel waves away what many feel to be a significant development in the last ten year's fiction: the "genre-bending" or incorporation of genre elements into "literary" fiction. This trend, Kunkel says, "shouldn’t be given too much credit for formal experimentation or artistic bravery: remodeling a house is not the same as architecture."
fifth, Kunkel basically repeats the Katie Roiphe argument that, in Kunkel's words, "a fair amount of fiction by younger writers of the 0’s celebrates moral and sexual innocence and therefore childhood if not childishness." Roiphe used Kunkel as an example in her essay, and the point must have stung a bit. At any rate, Kunkel adds some intellectual firepower to Roiphe's thesis by bringing in Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel, which I've discussed here.

Mark points out that Kunkel's argument about the middlebrow flavor of the 2000s is virtually tautological: "it’s forever true that people, in general, gravitate toward things that are more comforting than not, and that trends are created by the stuff that large numbers gravitate toward. If you want to argue that a decade’s tastes are largely middlebrow, you’ll pretty much by definition be right." I agree completely, although I think Kunkel is being a little bit slippery—the term "middlebrow" really abuses the purchasers of the books being indicated more than it does their writers, their publishers, or the critics who praise them, and I feel Kunkel could have been a bit more direct in assessing the origins of this "return" of realism—whether it is the taste of the reading public that has led the way toward neotraditionalism, a more timid publishing establishment that has pushed writers to it, critics (Wood and Grossman are cited momentarily) who have championed it to its resurgence, or writers themselves who have found themselves drawn to older models. Even if (as it always is) the answer is multivariable, a little bit of an attempt to epidemiologize this "spread of the middlebrow" would have been useful.

Turning to what is left out of his account, I am surprised that Kunkel doesn't touch on what I see as the most significant development of the past ten year's literature, which is mostly a sort of personnel change: a large percentage of the most successful novelists have immediate roots in a country other than the U.S. The internationalism or transnationalism of the American novel has become even more direct, less about the struggle for assimilation among the second generation and more about the efforts of the first generation to cope with the transplantation. I'm sure you can fill in your own examples.

Secondly, and maybe this is just a factor of what I've been reading and not a genuine trend, but it seems to me that the comic novel has gotten a new lease on life in the 2000s with Sam Lipsyte, James Hynes, and Ken Kalfus (among others) leading the way. Or, perhaps, this is again a return to a sort of traditionalism—to a more classic form of the comic novel as established by Waugh—and a turn away from the more antic comedy of, say, Vonnegut (although his latter-day disciple George Saunders is obviously going strong).

Thirdly, one should make mention of the proliferation of what might be called peri-literature—books about authors or characters from the classics, books that in a sense take up a position around "Capital-L Literature" (hence the prefix peri-). One might also call it, simply, fan fiction, although generally that term is used demeaningly or at least deprecatorily. Examples of peri-literature range from Colm Tóibín's The Master (Henry James) to Edmund White's Hotel de Dream (Stephen Crane) to Jerome Charyn's The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson to the plethora of books about Jane Austen or her characters (e.g., The Jane Austen Book Club, the Pemberley Chronicles) to the Android Karenina type books. This, if anything, is the real sign of a neotraditionalism at work in the fiction of the 2000s, and not some "practical and an ideological return to 'realism,'" which I suspect may be a sort of cover-term for "domestic fiction." The examples given (Franzen, Zadie Smith, Haslett) lead me to wonder if this isn't the case and if a gripe about domesticity wasn't, essentially, Kunkel's point all along.

An Unexpected Confluence Between Emerson and The Wire

2010-08-08T09:46:00.001-04:00

I'm reading Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club now, and I just ran across these lines:

[I]t is clear that [Oliver Wendell] Holmes [Jr.] had adopted [Ralph Waldo] Emerson as his special inspiration. A few years later, he wrote an essay on Plato expressly for Emerson's approval. (Holmes found Plato outdated on one or two points. Emerson's reaction, when Holmes showed him the essay, is choice: "When you strike at a king," he said, "you must kill him.")

Remind you of anything?

A Quintessential Jamesian Sentence

2010-08-03T23:21:00.000-04:00

I've been reading Henry James's The Ambassadors, about which I may post in the next week or so although I am still processing. Rather late in the novel I ran across the following sentence which strikes me as perhaps the most characteristically Jamesian sentence of the whole book. I wouldn't say it is my favorite sentence (actually, an aggregation of all my favorite sentences in the book would make a decent post in itself), but it seems to me to have all the touches one expects of James—expects either with pleasure or a roll of the eyes. Best of all, though, it is a short sentence (relatively speaking); these elements are represented, but not in profusion.

He perceived soon enough at least that, however reasonable she might be, she wasn't vulgarly confused, and it herewith pressed upon him that their eminent "lie," Chad's and hers, was simply after all such an inevitable tribute to good taste as he couldn't have wished them not to render.

Qualifications, qualifications to qualifications, value-laden adverbs clinging desperately to their rather generic adjectives, appositions which are meant to clarify but are in fact doing their best merely to direct traffic, immensely complex negations—all combining to form a sentence that is basically un-paraphrasable and certainly irreducible. To say it differently would, one feels, be to invite a complete semantic collapse—either nonsense or the barest triviality would result.

What is your favorite Jamesian sentence, or one you consider particularly characteristic of his style?

Party in the U.S.A.: Nineteen Nineteen, by John Dos Passos

2010-08-01T09:01:00.001-04:00

As with the first post for The 42nd Parallel, I'll begin by running through some of the basic details of characters, plot, etc.

There are nine "biographies" in this volume: John Reed, Randolph Bourne, Theodore Roosevelt, Paxton Hibben, Woodrow Wilson, J. P. Morgan, Joe Hill, Wesley Everest, and the Unknown Soldier who is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Hill and Everest are sort of labor movement folk heroes; Reed is as well, but is larger than that, occupying a position within our national consciousness as probably the "romantic revolutionary"—someone Warren Beatty could play in an Oscar-winning movie. Paxton Hibben is not even a folk hero, exactly—you'll notice that his link is the only one that doesn't go to Wikipedia; that's because he doesn't have a page (not that this is a definitive sign of one's obscurity). Randolph Bourne is certainly better known, but not by a very wide circle, I think. The ambit of most of these men is certainly tighter than those Dos Passos wrote about in The 42nd Parallel, an interesting contrast to the differences between the plots of the two books: 42nd is mostly confined by the U.S. borders; almost all of 1919 is running around Europe and the Atlantic.

We have five new characters who headline the plot-driven sections: Joe Williams (4 sections), Eveline Hutchins (4 sections), Richard Ellsworth Savage (4 sections), Daughter (2 sections), and Ben Compton (1 section). Well, actually, only Daughter and Richard Ellsworth Savage are "new": Eveline, Joe, and Ben appeared in other people's sections in volume one.

Joe is Janey Williams's sister; like her he grew up in Washington D.C., but after the death of a close friend, he took to the sailor's life, and most of his sections in Nineteen Nineteen depict him either on the sea, in port, or trying to get back to the sea. Joe is a basic seaman for most of the novel, but after he gets married and gets torpedoed (unrelated events), he is given an opportunity to rise from the ranks and takes some classes to become a third and then a second mate. Joe gets in his share of scrapes but he's not particularly belligerent; he sleeps with a lot of women (most of whom give him a venereal disease, it seems) but he's not particularly lusty; he's undirected and frequently "blue" but not particularly anhedonic or mopey. He's much more of a proletarian than other American heroes who went to sea or than any of Conrad's sailors; while, like Ishamel, he sails to avoid the onset of the "damp, drizzly November[s] in my soul," Joe's Novembers blow in when he blows all his money or knocks some girl up or something. He's closer to O'Neill's Hairy Ape, but far less primitive.
Eveline Hutchins is Eleanor Stoddard's best friend—the one she meets in the Art Institute of Chicago (an event I wrote about previously). Eveline, unlike Eleanor, is not making up her solidly upper-middle-class origins, and perhaps as a (surprising) result, she seems less self-assured, more wary among the cosmopolitan milieu that the two pursue from Chicago to New York and, in this book, to Paris, Rome, and the French Riviera. Being born with half- or three-quarters of a silver spoon in one's mouth, it seems, induces more timidity (or suppresses temerity more) than being born with none at all. Eveline and Eleanor separate, to some extent, while in Europe, although both are working for the Red Cross and share almost entirely the same social circle, which includes J. Ward Moorehouse, who was having an equivocal (and possibly non-sexual) affair with Eleanor at the end of The 42nd Parallel. Eveline actually has a sexual (but still quite equivocal) affair with Moorehouse, but ends 1919 with another man rather unintentionally on her arm, the younger Paul Johnson. She is pregnant with Paul's baby, and a party celebrating their marriage is the last narrative scene.
Also present at that scene is Richard Ellsworth Savage, who after first going to Europe as an ambulance volunteer, gets himself in trouble in Italy by expressing too loudly some pacifist and sarcastically pro-Central Powers remarks. At first he wants to fight for his right to free speech and to take the pacifist message back to America, but just before embarking from France, he runs into one of his old Harvard chums, and his convictions sort of melt away. Through some connections back home he is able to get back to Europe, this time in the Army proper, although his skill with languages and his general charisma get him a fairly cushy job as a courier. He meets the Moorehouse crowd and, eventually, finagles himself into a job working for Moorehouse after the armistice. In the meantime, he has met and become entangled with another character:
Anne Elizabeth Trent, whom everyone calls Daughter, is a Texan belle. Her father is wealthy, and his wealth enables her, even though she seems to fit in well with Texan society, to run off to New York confidently. She signs up as a special student at, I think, Columbia (although she lives in University Heights—I don't know New York that well, but might Dos Passos have meant Morningside Heights?) and "went to lectures about Economics and English Literature and Art and talked a little occasionally with some boy who happened to be sitting next to her, but she was so much younger than anybody she met and she didn't seem to have the right line of talk to interest them." She has a couple rather innocent affairs, including one with a Veblen-spouting social worker which ends in a broken engagement after she seeks admission from the Columbia Journalism School over his disapproval (he wants her to study to be a teacher). Daughter meets another Columbia journalism student who introduces her to the world of radical politics; she meets Ben Compton (our next and last main character) during a textile workers strike in Paterson, New Jersey (the 1919 strike, not the more famous 1913 one). There she also has her first real run-in with the law; she slugs a police officer in the face and makes national headlines, causing her father to come out and take her home to Texas. She joins the Red Cross and applies to go abroad. There she runs into both G. H. Barrow, the labor leader from The 42nd Parallel, who falls for her. But she ends up with Dick Savage (you couldn't use that name in a novel today), who impregnates her and then tries to convince her to get an abortion; he had previously talked about marriage with her but backs out. She finds a drunk French aviator whom she convinces to take her on a late night aerial acrobatics display; they crash and she dies.
Ben Compton appeared very briefly in The 42nd Parallel as the brother of a secretary in J. Ward Moorehouse's p.r. firm (Janey Williams very briefly stays with the Comptons). The first words of Ben's section have frequently been read as an indication of the ethnic and racial narrowness of Dos Passos's gallery of Americans: even his one Jewish protagonist's section begins "The old people were Jews, but at school Benny always said no he wasn't a Jew, he was an American, because he'd been born in Brooklyn and lived at 2531 Twentyfifth Avenue in Flatbush and they owned their home." Assessing just what Dos Passos's intentions are by introducing such a vehemently assimilating Jew is rather difficult; one could about equally as well say that he was trying to effect in fiction a sort of whitewashing of the history of labor radicalism as one could say that he was trying to illustrate (and maybe ironize) the pressures of assimilation on Jews and, by proxy, other ethnics (Ben becomes good friends with an Italian). To be frank, I find it difficult to come to any single interpretation or even a satisfactory conjunction of interpretations. Whatever the case may be, Ben's section (he only gets one in this book) is my favorite so far; it seemed to be written with greater intensity—even to the point of desperation. Sandwiched between the Joe Hill and Wesley Everest sections, these 36 pages (in my copy) combine spectacularly to protest the reactionary violence perpetrated against the labor movement. Ben is not a terribly likable character, but he doesn't need to be to make Dos Passos's point: perhaps many young men (and women) were foolhardy or just desperate on the picket lines, but the ferocity of the men on the other end of the billy club and at times at the other end of the rope and always at the other end of the law is sheerly breathtaking.

The fact that all the violence is really bottled up into those 36 pages near the end of the book rather than taking place in the war sections is an obvious statement about where the real violence of the war was directed: at the working class. The only other character who is under consistent threat of physical harm is 1919's other working stiff—Joe. Dick Savage faces fire once, I believe, and I suppose technically Paris is under siege, but the very pronounced effect of the Savage, Hutchins, and Daughter sections is to minimize any real sense that the war is a violent thing being executed by violent men. A line is repeated with variations throughout the novel: "This ain't a war… it's a goddam [whorehouse, Cook's tour, madhouse, etc.]." A more appropriate description of these sections would be "this ain't a war… it's a goddam cocktail party." For that's what most of the action either is or resembles.

The interesting structural choice that Dos Passos made was to avoid building the sections as a simple ironic counterpoint between episodes of real violence against the working class with the longueurs of cocktail party bedhopping and flirtation of the Moorehouse circle. You have a few Joe sections interspersed through most of the first five-ninths or so of the book, but these actually soften the divide between the violence against the working class and the lassitude of the cosmopolitan class because Joe has connections among them more or less and because Joe has an ideal of (some) personal advancement, of rising from the ranks. But then the Joe Hill, Ben Compton and Wesley Everest sections burst on you almost without preparation, and only then is a note of ironic juxtaposition allowed to emerge, when the book wraps up with Savage's last section, with him pretending to come to terms with the (honestly a little ridiculous and probably intentionally so) death of Daughter. The party's over, and he can walk away whistling Kip Marlowe's line, "but that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead."

I think opinion is generally against 1919 relative to the other two volumes of U.S.A., but I have to put my name down as a defender of it. I think it is a better structured book than The 42nd Parallel, and while tedious, I found the cocktail party sections here much better than the Alger-esque Janey, Moorehouse, and Stoddard sections there; these are more patient, more attentive, and more accurate—most socializing is dull. I can see, however, why it is not so appealing to all readers, and why it might be considered the most boring of the three: like a lot of other middle novels in trilogies, it has the disadvantage of being compared both to one novel the virtues of which you know because you've already experienced them and to another whose virtues and pleasures you are constantly imagining. The first and the third have to deal only with either one's knowledge or one's imagination, but not both. I think 1919 succeeds very well within these terms.

From Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut

2010-07-28T12:11:00.002-04:00

Crosby asked me what my name was and what my business was. I told him, and his wife Hazel recognized my name as an Indiana name. She was from Indiana, too.
"My God," she said, "are you a Hoosier?"
I admitted I was.
"I'm a Hoosier, too," she crowed. "Nobody has to be ashamed of being a Hoosier."
"I'm not," I said. "I never knew anybody who was."
"Hoosiers do all right. Lowe and I've been around the world twice, and everywhere we went we found Hoosiers in charge of everything."
"That's reassuring."
"You know the manager of that new hotel in Istanbul?"
"No."
"He's a Hoosier. and the military-whatever-he-is in Tokyo…"
"Attaché," said her husband.
"He's a Hoosier," said Hazel. "And the new Ambassador to Yugoslavia…"
"A Hoosier?" I asked.
"Not only him, but the Hollywood Editor of Life magazine, too. And that man in Chile…"
"A Hoosier, too?"
"You can't go anywhere a Hoosier hasn't made his mark," she said.
"The man who wrote Ben Hur was a Hoosier."
"And James Whitcomb Riley."
"Are you from Indiana, too?" I asked her husband.
"Nope. I'm a Prairie Stater. 'Land of Lincoln,' as they say."
"As far as that goes," said Hazel triumphantly, "Lincoln was a Hoosier, too. He grew up in Spencer County."
"Sure," I said.
"I don't know what it is about Hoosiers," said Hazel, "but they've sure got something. If somebody was to make a list, they'd be amazed."
"That's true," I said.
She grasped me firmly by the arm. "We Hoosiers got to stick together."
"Right."
"you call me 'Mom.'"
"What?"
"Whenever I meet a young Hoosier, I tell them, 'You call me Mom.'"
"Uh huh."
"Let me hear you say it," she urged.
"Mom?"
She smiled and let go of my arm. Some piece of clockwork had completed its cycle. My calling Hazel "Mom" had shut it off, and now Hazel was rewinding it for the next Hoosier to come along.

Hazel's obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the was God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows—and any nation, anytime, anywhere. (89-92)

***
This passage reminded me of a line I've noted before on this blog: in My Ántonia, Willa Cather wrote,

We were talking about what it is like to spend one's childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate… We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.

Cather's not talking about Indiana, but to some extent, I think that what Vonnegut's making fun of is a more general Midwestern phenomenon, although I find that it is strongest among Hoosiers—although geographically, we're one of the easternmost states of the region, in a certain sense, we're the Midwest of the Midwest, the Heart of the Heart of the Country, as Gass has it, and so the "kind of freemasonry" which Cather describes and which Vonnegut ribs is most pronounced among us. As a Hoosier myself, I can personally attest to this sense of sodality, of a sort of immediate and unspoken mutual understanding which flashes up the moment you realize you're talking to another Hoosier abroad (this only works if you're not in Indiana, for obvious reasons).

My hypothesis for why this kind of thing happens is that Hoosiers are taught almost from birth that we are a rooted, immobile people, practically buried, as Cather says, in our wheat and corn, but we are also eager to compensate for the inferiority complex this creates by over-lauding anyone who makes it out of Indiana and makes good someplace else. Yet this excessive adulation further drives home the idea that Hoosiers mostly stay at home, and so when any of us who do leave the state meet someone else who has done so, we fasten onto this meeting quickly as a rare and improbable occurrence, and we trust that the feeling is mutual. It's a very magnified case of innocents abroad, yet even knowing this doesn't really diminish its rather funny power.

The rather amusing flip side of this is that non-Hoosiers, I've found, tend to assume that all Hoosiers know each other. I've been asked more than once if I know some fellow Hoosier who, come to find out, actually grew up in South Bend or in Bloomington or in Carmel—places an hour or two or three from where I grew up. The sad part is that sometimes I do know the person in question, or have a friend in common.

Reviews on the Run II

2010-07-25T18:03:00.001-04:00

Back for more?

Maud Martha, by Gwendolyn Brooks: It is really too bad that Brooks wrote no other novels; this one has an odd sense of playfulness similar to some of her poems, but that really swells within the looser constraints of prose.
On Native Grounds, by Alfred Kazin: A very thick history of "American prose literature" between William Dean Howells and the 1940s, it was amusing to read alongside John Dos Passos's U.S.A.; many of the characterizations of writers or intellectuals—Thorstein Veblen, in particular—and just to the general tenor and texture of the time owe so much to Dos Passos. Kazin is at his best, I think, when he is defending someone; his attacks are more spasmodic and most abstract. His reclamation of Howells, in particular, seems like a very personal—but nonetheless, very effective—project, and some of the smaller niches which he brings forward to the reader as deserving continued attention are quite convincing—I especially found his chapter on the "exquisites" (Thomas Beer, Carl Van Vechten, Joseph Hergesheimer, James Branch Cabell) almost riveting as a story of rising and falling literary fortunes and reputations. His treatment of Ellen Glasgow also made me want to read something by her—has anyone a suggestion?
Appointment in Samarra, by John O'Hara: It is with writers like O'Hara that I feel most keenly the basic arbitrariness of the literary system. O'Hara is fine—there weren't any moments I felt irritated or disgruntled or disappointed, exactly, because very quickly it was apparent that this is only a good book, something you read because someone or some review told you to (it was Kazin that brought him up, actually, and made me decide to try this) and which you keep reading because it gives you no adequate reason to toss it aside—not even its length, which is modest without being slight. There is really no reason why he should be more often read or better remembered than probably about a dozen other novelists of his time, but he had his champions (Hemingway, for one), and his detractors (like Edmund Wilson) had nothing particularly savage to say about him which could render him truly ridiculous, like Louis Bromfield. I'm not particularly resentful of having read this book rather than another, but I doubt there's anything more to be taken from O'Hara.
North of Boston, by Robert Frost: I've always disliked Frost, but I wanted to check that this was still true. It is.
The Education of Henry Adams: There are more interminably tedious episodes in this book than in any other I've ever both read and liked. The whole London chunk (except the bizarre dinner Adams has with Swinburne) is dull to the point of exhaustion, although frankly I think diplomatic history has to be about the least interesting subject imaginable, so I'm most definitely biased. But there are also so many absolutely marvelous passages; the misfortune is that they are not well distributed, so there will be almost a fifth of the book which makes your teeth chatter with boredom and then a few really quick delights practically tripping over one another, and then you're stuck with something else which makes skimming seem attractive. (I didn't skim, though.)
In Our Time, by Ernest Hemingway: If, like me, your exposure to Hemingway's short stories is through those in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, I think you'll find these stories very strange. I haven't decided which I prefer; part of the problem is the appalling casual racism that crops up almost incessantly in In Our Time. One of the effects of this racism, though, is to make these stories seem less polished, less grand, less like something a Writer-making-a-Statement might write. It's not an effect one would like to see repeated, but that is what it does. In Our Time has a very different kind of simplicity from the more celebrated simplicity of Hemingway's later work; there is none of the sententiousness of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" here, nor the overdetermined allegories of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Really, there's very little of the heroism of the novels, either; Nick Adams, even in "The Big Two-Hearted River," is very small in his actions, and his focus on the simple actions of fishing seems genuinely therapeutic, as does Hemingway's lean prose, like an attempt to get down to essentials without trying to elevate those essentials to something metaphysical. Hemingway's understatedness in this book is a way of not saying the Big Things; the understatedness of his later work (especially The Old Man and the Sea) is, I think, an attempt to say all the Big Things. On second thought, I've made up my mind—I like this a lot better.
Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev: Many late nineteenth century American writers (like William Dean Howells) believed Turgenev to be superior to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I think that's a very defensible opinion, although Turgenev probably has a really strong appeal to fewer people. I am among that happy few.
You Know Me Al, by Ring Lardner: It is evident from this fix-up "novel" why Lardner stuck to short stories. The first few times around all the jokes are hilarious; the second couple of times around they're whimsical; the last quarter or so of the book clearly bored the writer, so what do you think happens to the poor reader? The mastery of dialect is so complete and so consistent and so smooth, though, that even that last quarter can be intermittently good—just pay attention to the language, not the plot.
Crumbling Idols, by Hamlin Garland: Available to read in full at Google Books, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. A collection of manifestos, it's tremendously repetitive and repeats itself a lot. Still, it is very useful to me in thinking about the mentality of a Midwesterner trying not just to fight against the Eastern establishment but to convince everyone that there could be more to American literature than an Eastern establishment.
Hunger, by Steve McQueen: A film that somehow has it both ways but doesn't seem like it's trying to have it both ways. I would probably need to see it again to say more intelligent things about it, but I think in certain ways it compares very well to a film like The White Ribbon, which I also liked, but which tries to play the spectacular nature of the act of filming against itself too much. Haneke seems to think that what happens on the screen is what overwhelms the spectator; instead of F I N one expects to see Q E D at the end of his films, even though what is being demonstrated is usually more ambiguous than I think many critics allow. McQueen, on the other hand, is one of the few directors I've encountered who actually thinks that shock is not a paralytic effect, but rather the opening of something deeper. Shock is part of the process of coping and comprehending, not antithetical to it. (On the other hand, my girlfriend had to stop watching Hunger after one particularly brutal scene, so maybe mine is a minority opinion.) I appreciate very much that attitude if it is what McQueen is going for; I look forward to future work from him.
Robin Hood, by Ridley Scott: This completely justifies for me, my intense loathing of Blade Runner. The passage of time does not exonerate Scott; any mind that could ever willfully inflict this upon itself, nevermind the audience, is one I can safely dismiss in its entirety.
Earth, by Alexander Dovzhenko and Strike, by Sergei Esenstein: Two great Soviet silents, but I have to recommend Strike far above Earth; perhaps it is my inner socialist realist, but the poetic touches of Earth are just too much. No one likes tractors that much, not even Kenny Chesney.
Mildred Pierce, by Michael Curtiz: I generally dislike declensionist narratives, but after seeing films like this, so melodramatic but so good, it's easy to argue the absolute decline of Hollywood. No film trusts its star this much anymore, and the results of that lack have not been good.
The English Patient, by Anthony Minghella: Part of the problem, I think, with this film is that, because it is a film and you know it's going to last about three hours, you start waiting for the end. If it were a mini-series of, say, six or seven hours, I think this effect would disappear and you could enjoy it all the way through without worrying about how long it is, which is mainly what I was thinking about in the last hour or so. It's counterintuitive that the answer is to make it longer, but I think I would have enjoyed it more in that form.
Nine to Five, by Colin Higgins: There was so much unused potential here—I would have liked more, but shorter, dream sequences, and I thought Jane Fonda's screen time could have been divided up between Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton to great effect—but the real effect of this film—which made a ton of money—is that it makes one ask why Hollywood is so averse to women-driven comedies. That a film could be this much fun without really being that well directed or written is a pretty strong statement that women can carry a mediocre comedy quite easily if given the chance.
Diner, by Barry Levinson: Not a bad film, but also pretty close to being Exhibit A in terms of Hollywood's willingness to let male directors go chase their dream even without a very good idea (dudes talking about girls, music, and sports in an all-night diner in Maryland—what fires does that light?).
The Marriage of Maria Braun, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder: This is the first film I've seen in a year or so which truly brought home why I love watching movies. I haven't seen any other Fassbinder (tried Berlin Alexanderplatz twice, though), but now I have a feeling I'll be seeing a lot more.

Reviews on the Run

2010-07-25T00:15:00.004-04:00

It's been quite awhile since I've written one of these catch-all/clean-up posts, so some of the following is written not exactly at first blush with the books and movies I'm writing about. But anyway, here are some quick hits of things I've read or seen in the past four or five months:

The Fever, by Wallace Shawn: Who really knows what to do with Wallace Shawn? If he managed his career more like other playwrights (instead of playing iconic self-deprecating bit parts in popular films and television shows), I think that he'd easily be considered one of our greatest living writers. But another problem may be that, among all American writers today, he seems like he least needs recognition to feel good about his work; there is an assurance to his plays that may turn off or alienate those who are used to being asked by the artist for their approval. Of course, Shawn can afford—and in more ways than just financial—to be this self-directed, whereas many genuinely can't. But of all artists of the past fifty years who were born into privilege and connections, Shawn has to be something like a saint for how he has turned that privilege into a genuine artistic problem.
Blood on the Forge, by William Attaway: I read this novel of the Great Migration because I failed to read the back copy closely enough: I thought it was going to be set in Michigan or Illinois or something Midwestern (Attaway himself moved from the South to Chicago). It is instead set in the steel mills of the Pittsburgh area. However, it was well worth the read; it is very little wonder that the New York Review of Books Classics series has revived it. It is among those novels which give the lie to the supposed shallowness and tendentiousness of both working-class and protest fiction; I've been reading a lot of James Baldwin recently, and with books like Attaway's in mind, one has to begin asking just how many protest novels Baldwin really read before penning his philippics against Richard Wright.
Dispatches and Kubrick, by Michael Herr: I just read Herr's memoir-essay on Kubrick, but I read Dispatches a few months ago now. I suppose it is very difficult now to separate Dispatches from Full Metal Jacket, but it was rather difficult to do so when I was reading it as well. At any rate, I find Herr's approach to sorting out the various moral problems of complicity, agency, and memory much more artistically and intellectually rewarding than Tim O'Brien's.
But really, what one-ups Herr in a very provocative and original way with regard to these questions is Joe Sacco's graphic novel The Fixer, which is about Sacco's relationship with a sort of super-guide to post-war Bosnia, someone who helps him find the stories which are dramatic enough to dramatize. I read The Fixer at about the same time as Dispatches, and I probably should have written then about the way that Sacco was able to manipulate his medium to pursue some really provocative lines of thought and representation which Herr simply could not have except through his collaborations with Coppola and Kubrick on Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket (respectively, of course). While Herr's work was obviously extremely innovative for its time, its "characters"—depicted only in words, of course—fade more easily into the larger narratives; it is through actual visual representation that something like the individual dimension really comes alive.
The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte: I really didn't blog about this book? That's tough to believe because I feel like I had so much to say. The short of it is that I think it's a better novel than Home Land, but that is mostly at the level of plotting and secondary characters; the protagonist of The Ask is less believable in his actions but more especially in his words. At times, Lipsyte seems to be borrowing on the job he did in Home Land, allowing Milo a crack or a cracked thought which would probably not have occurred to him, or would only have occurred to him well after the fact. The Ask is, however, one of my favorite novels of the year so far.
Jakob von Gunten (also called Institute Benjamenta), by Robert Walser: If something has told you anything good about Walser, they were probably underselling him. He's incredible.
Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis: I will be reading more Lewis over the coming year, so hang tight for a real post, but for now, I just want to ask why Lewis is supposed to be only a fair-to-middling prose stylist. I think that for a long time people have read him for his social commentary and for his humor, and perhaps some of the later, quite popular books which I have yet to read suffered stylistically, but there are really fantastic lyric passages in Babbitt, and his ear for speech is not just very accurate, but admirably selective: the banalities he transcribes are, if it's not too contradictory to say so, the best banalities he could have chosen, and best not just in the sense of most representative or most typical, but also best in aesthetic terms. Even among dead or overused metaphors, some are still preferable aesthetically, and Lewis always manages to find them, or even things a little better than them.
Shock Corridor (1963), by Sam Fuller: Why can't this film—and not the ultimately maudlin One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest—be our iconic representation of the madhouse? The more I think about this film, the smarter it gets.
Twentieth Century (1934), by Howard Hawks: First of all, how awesome was Carole Lombard. Secondly, I kind of love old Hollywood films about Broadway; it's so strange to see Hollywood as actually having a sort of rival in terms of cultural power, as having yet to break up the theatrical circuits on which the stars used to glide. I saw The Band Wagon (1953, Minnelli) not long after, and while it wasn't very good at all, it depicted a similar arrangement.
So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell: Do yourself a favor: if you have a free afternoon, read this very short book. If I hadn't already said The Ask was so great, I'd probably be getting around to saying that this was my favorite thing I've read since Middlemarch. Well, close anyway.
Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett: Hammett was much better at killing characters than Cain or Chandler. They should have contracted him to be their hired gun.
Penrod, by Booth Tarkington: One of the more successful Tom Sawyer knock-offs of American literature. Unfortunately, it is also shot to hell with casual and not-so-casual racism.
Blacklist, by Sara Paretsky: I can't decide if I'll want to revisit Paretsky's other novels in the future or not. Blacklist was a very good thriller, and the mystery was quite compelling, but I also feel like this book's themes—the legacy of leftist politics and reactionary suppression of those politics—was so exactly targeted to my interests and ideas of what would make a good mystery/thriller that I'm worried I'll be disappointed with other books in the series.

There are actually a few more books and movies I want to say a few things about, so I'll probably write another of these capsule-type posts in the near future. But this should be adequate for now.

Mutually Assured Distraction

2010-07-20T14:29:00.001-04:00

I am not a great fan of Gary Shteyngart's fiction, but I think that, apart from some stylistic idiosyncrasies common to both, my distaste for his novels played little role in the irritation his New York Times Book Review essay caused me this weekend (the fluffy interview in the weekend's Magazine didn't help, though). Although, as we shall see, the content of this essay is, in essence, a justification of his fiction, much like Lev Grossman's ridiculous essay from about a year ago, although not nearly as ignorant or misconceived as that nadir of critical daftness.

Shteyngart writes about the personal effects of owning an iPhone or, more generally, of living among the new social media technologies, both hard and soft. The complaints are familiar:

With each post, each tap of the screen, each drag and click, I am becoming a different person — solitary where I was once gregarious; a content provider where I at least once imagined myself an artist; nervous and constantly updated where I once knew the world through sleepy, half-shut eyes; detail-oriented and productive where I once saw life float by like a gorgeously made documentary film. And, increasingly, irrevocably, I am a stranger to books, to the long-form text, to the pleasures of leaving myself and inhabiting the free-floating consciousness of another.

But as I read further down, the complaint began to sound more familiar still; a melody from the 1950s began to play—the one about The Bomb and a deep change in Human Nature—whose most glorious variation is probably to be found in William Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech in 1950. One can practically re-write a couple of the paragraphs from that speech with a bit of cut-and-paste and it almost isn't ridiculous; it almost sounds like something we hear today.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical distraction so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: Has my page reloaded? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be distracted; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the digital life, the network.

How far off is that really, apart from Faulkner's consciously archaicized tone and the rather sloppy ending I gave it?

I think a number of American writers—New Yorkers, mostly—have either decided or come to some unspoken and maybe half-conscious consensus that the societal changes being brought about by social media are as encompassing and as threatening to the fundamentals of something which used to be called human nature as the threat of nuclear war was in the 1950s. That may sound extreme, and it actually is, but I am not merely trying to be provocative; there is a genuine homology between the threat today's writers perceive in social media and the way they are gathering to respond to it and the twinned discourse of the End of the Novel and the Crisis of Man that Mark Greif (of n+1) has written about and which I covered here.

In both cases, what is being described as a threat is a putatively immersive environment—in the 1950s, the fear of nuclear war; today, the distraction of social media—which is pushing humanity (seemingly as a species, although in real terms the most threatened are the most advanced societies) toward a point of crisis where what has been driven into latency or rarity—in the 1950s, the "dignity of man" or, articulated in more practical terms, the feeling of agency and choice; today, attention, which is often articulated again in practical terms either as genuine connectedness with other people or the ability to read dense works of literature—might in fact become irrecoverably lost.

But more acutely still, these discourses resemble one another because of the identity of their ultimate purposes—to advocate for the renewed importance of serious literature as a bulwark against these threats, as a source of regeneration for an embattled human race—and because they are in effect responses not so much to real material conditions, but to the fear that fiction—"serious literature"—is being outflanked and outstripped by non-fiction and other non-literary intellectual discourses, that pop and real intellectuals are absorbing more and more of the attention (and the buying power) of this country's educated audience. Bluntly and maybe a little glibly put, with essays like Shteyngart's and, to a much less dignified extent, Grossman's, we may be seeing the first skirmishes of a new, massive promotional campaign for serious fiction more energetic than any since the 1950s, when writers like Hemingway and Faulkner and Bellow and Ellison and Trilling undertook to wed the fate of the novel and the fate of the human race together in the minds of America's educated elite. It's a new arms race—can enough Important Novels be written to stave off the Great Distraction?

***
For what is Shteyngart saying, really? That he checks his iPhone too often? He says, "I don’t know how to read anymore. I can only read 20 or 30 words at a time before taking out my iPhone and caressing it and snuggling with it." May I suggest that before he had an iPhone, like most readers, his mind might have wondered momentarily every "20 or 30 words"—not to an iPhone screen, of course, but to some "interior" distraction? Do iPhones and the like really produce distraction, or do they just give a single physical destination for it? I suppose this is empirically testable, but for now mark me down as skeptical that Mr. Shteyngart's once formidable powers of unbroken concentration have been unequivocally obliterated by his new acquaintance with the social media landscape.

Shteyngart then uses a pastoral fantasy to drive home his point about the overwhelmingness of social media and the consequent need to de-link/disconnect/light out for the territory—not very original, but at least simple and very direct. But what this move suggests is that Shteyngart is possessed of a belief that human interaction outside of the mediasphere is equally simple and direct, that "mediation" is only ever the consequence of actual "media" interference, that we bring nothing to an "unmediated" social interaction outside of the "single malts and beers before us," that once we shed our digital shackles, we are free to be fully human. This is more than a little naive, and is probably not what Shteyngart would say if presented that idea so baldly, but it is the gist of his pastoral story. It is not a good sign for a novelist that he can let himself think of people and of interpersonal interactions as being so "naturally" straightforward; even more than we make tools to communicate, humans make reasons to foul communications up, to make our relations more complicated and more difficult. No iPhones are needed to send mixed messages, nor is Facebook required to have a public identity crisis. If Shteyngart truly knows that—and he should if he reads the Russian classics as assiduously as he claims to—then he needs to begin showing it—in his essays and in his novels.

Some Notes on James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover

2010-07-16T15:29:00.003-04:00

The Changing Light at Sandover is a 560-page occult epic/apocalypse published between 1976 and 1982, composed from the transcripts of about 25 years worth of Ouija séances that James Merrill and his partner David Jackson held to communicate with a variety of spirits, including their parents, W. H. Auden, a first century Jew named Ephraim, and various supernatural beings, including the archangel Michael. (A few more details here.)

It's difficult to say what Sandover's standing is today; Harold Bloom put it in his Western Canon in 1994 (gosh, so long ago!) and in the past six years three monographs have come out using Sandover as one of their core texts (if the Library of Congress subject headings are any indication—the actual LOC catalog shows two, but my university's library adds a third: Brian McHale's Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodern Long Poems). It is often difficult to tell if academic attention is a sign of health or of recent demise, though.*

If Sandover is now a dead letter, its fate is at least a little peculiar given the extreme praise it received when it was being published and then again when Merrill died in 1995; people even seemed to mean it when they said that it merited comparisons to "Yeats and Blake, if not Milton and Dante" (that link provides a number of similarly exuberant assessments). While highly-touted "masterpieces" sinking into obscurity are a regular, even anticipated, occurrence in literary history, usually those disappearing acts are either because a different work with similar qualities or attributes soaks up the retrospective attention and memory of later readers, or because the tradition it was read into at its debut has re-shaped itself in a way that now excludes it. There aren't too many occult epics published in the last quarter of the 20th century, so I don't really think Sandover suffers from the success of a competitor. Is it, then, that the tradition it supposedly fell into—Yeats, Blake, Milton, Dante, perhaps T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens—no longer seems to extend to meet Sandover? I think this is largely the case—to a large extent, the shadow of these poets has only lengthened as we have moved further away from modernism, and the inclusion of a contemporary or postmodern poet among their number begins to seem preposterous—more preposterous, at any rate, than it may have in 1982, when Eliot was fewer than twenty years in the grave and Auden fewer than ten.

Of course there may be other reasons why an occult epic would produce less heat today: the tide of New Age spirituality in which Merrill's poem was awash has largely receded, I think. But I would say that the problem is largely the "major poet/major poem" dinner jacket which was provided to Sandover at its initial reception, an outfit which now seems either too roomy or too constricting. That is not to say that it is not a great poem—parts of it, especially the first section, "The Book of Ephraim," genuinely are some of the best poetry of the past half-century that I have read and do, I feel, measure up to Eliot, Stevens, and Yeats. But saying so and throwing in Milton and Dante isn't going to get you taken very seriously these days, I'm afraid: no one expects to find a postmodern poem that deserves such company.

And I don't think it really needs it, and a change in what it is compared to might do it some good. Sandover is a very interesting poem on its own terms, but it also would become a much livelier one if we were to compare it to some more contemporary occultists or world-builders—to works like Lovecraft or Tolkien or Le Guin or Ishmael Reed, even to Neil Gaiman or Philip Pullman or Grant Morrison. (In fact, although I've only read one volume of Morrison's The Invisibles, it above all things was what has kept popping up as I read Sandover.) The point being not to knock Merrill down a few pegs to a more appropriate cultural location, but to get more out of the poem, which I think comparing it to these less lofty figures enables.

Merrill himself actually makes an explicit reference to Tolkien in the work, an allusion which can take one aback if one has strait-jacketed Merrill into the "major poet" tradition—what is this throwaway reference to a teenager's book doing in here? Yet it is anything but a throwaway reference. Here are the lines:

Remember Sam and Frodo in their hot
Waterless desolation overshot
By evil zombies. They of course come through
—It's what, in any Quest, the heroes do—
But at the cost of being set apart,
Emptied, diminished. Tolkien knew this. Art—
The tale that all but shapes itself—survives
By feeding on its personages' lives.
The stripping process, sort of. What to say?
Our lives led to this. It's the price we pay. (218)

These are in fact very significant lines, expressing a crucial reflection on the larger nature of Merrill's project in particular and, more generally, the demands and runaway nature of any large project upon the artist. Throughout Sandover, as Helen Vendler has said, "for rationalists reading the poem, Merrill includes a good deal of self-protective irony, even incorporating in the tale a visit to his ex-shrink, who proclaims the evocation of Ephraim and the other Ouija 'guests' from the other world a folie à deux [mutual madness] between Merrill and his friend David Jackson." But what comes through here quite clearly which I think is elsewhere obscured (especially when Merrill dabs on these strokes of "self-protective irony") is that the project of Sandover affects Merrill and Jackson not primarily by implanting a system of beliefs in their minds but by absorbing them into a process or a practice. The "Quest" and "the tale that all but shapes itself" are identically indifferent to questions of belief, in the sense of articles of faith which one positively affirms; Frodo loses his faith and Sam's wavers, but that is of no matter—what counts is that they are swept up in the process of the Quest, just as Jackson and Merrill are swept up in the process or practice of Ouija board consultation.

That may sound like I'm letting Merrill off rather lightly; certainly, it is quite difficult to set aside the question of belief and ask whether or not, final answer, Merrill thought he was receiving messages from beings independent of himself and his partner. Yet the more important question is in fact whether the work would be substantially different depending on what the answer to that belief question would be. I think that here Merrill is indicating that it wouldn't be. What I believe Merrill to be saying here is that, like Tolkien's saga, the Sandover project, because of its size and density (a key word in Sandover), absorbs and in effect dissolves its subjects not primarily in questions of belief, but through the slow corrosion of the process it requires—in his case, the addictive process of consulting the Ouija board with his partner, in Sam and Frodo's case the un-refusable task of delivering the ring to Mount Doom, and in Tolkien's own case, the process of meeting the undeniable demands already in place in the Quest narrative, the foreordained structures of myth.

Of course, questions of artists' beliefs will never entirely go away—it seems too important to ask whether Merrill thought Ephraim was a real being or whether Grant Morrison really believes in his sigil stuff. But these questions seem to have a greater force if we insist upon reading Merrill into the company of Blake, Milton, Dante, et al. For whatever we actually believe about the origins or inspirations of those poets and their poems, we tend to treat their works like revelations to us—monumental, indivisible, eternal. What is impeded by the "major poets" business but gained by putting Sandover instead in the company of Tolkien, Lovecraft, Reed, and Gaiman is not just the easier recognition that the poem looks ridiculous coming down from a mountainside on tablets but quite intriguing as a mass market paperback, but also that it belongs to a time when much of the world, and even much of the elite to whom Merrill was still addressing his poem, seems to have accepted wholeheartedly the idea that myths no longer come on tablets but are very glad to get them in pulp. That may be merely yet another way of saying Welcome to Postmodernism, but wasn't the insistence on reading Merrill into the "major poet" tradition—or any attempt to categorize a contemporary writer as "the last modernist" or any reactionary Bloom-like attempt to acknowledge that the "Western Canon" is still open to new members—actually a refusal of postmodernism, of the fragmentation of grand narratives?

Changing what company Sandover fits into isn't just an argument about periodization but also a way of giving substance to what postmodernism was/is supposed to be about. By reading it out of the "major poets" tradition and into a loose confederation (not a tradition) of occultists or world-builders like those mentioned above, we not only free the text of Sandover up to be used and interpreted in new and original ways, but we also place it within a context within which we can more easily and perhaps more casually talk about the relation between belief and practice without the pressure of the work's canonicity or "greatness." That should be what postmodernism can do for texts—allow a greater field for comparison, evaluation, and connection. And it is precisely what, I think, needs to be done to Sandover.

* There is also a memoir of sorts which the novelist Alison Lurie published about the Sandover project; Lurie was a friend of Merrill's and Jackson's for many decades, and her book, Familiar Spirits, is an account of the personal consequences of their occult dabbling on their lives. Lurie believes that the Ouija sessions both kept them together and eventually altered them to such a profound extent that they were driven into either self-destructive behavior (Jackson) or a sort of terminal narcissism (Merrill). I suppose that is the other option for what will become of Sandover: that it will exist as a very curious episode in the biography of a great lyric poet.

Difficult Books

2010-07-10T18:11:00.000-04:00

The Millions has an interesting feature in which some of their staff writers introduce and kind of promote some "Difficult Books": The Anatomy of Melancholy, Paradise Lost, A Tale of a Tub, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy, Moby-Dick, The Cantos, To the Lighthouse, Ted Berrigan's Sonnets, The Dream Songs, Ada or Ardor, and Dhalgren so far. According to the introductory post, the series is "devoted to identifying and describing these most difficult books: ones we’ve read/wrangled with ourselves, ones we’ve known students to struggle with time and again, ones that, more simply, 'everyone knows' are hard to read—those works whose mere titles glisten with an aura of rarefied impenetrability."

I think the writers at The Millions and I tend to have different ideas about how to approach literature, no doubt largely because we sit at different positions within the literary ecosystem. I've made known my differences with some of their orientations and values before, so the less said about that, probably the better. And I certainly should say that I respect what they're trying to do and what they have accomplished as a site and as a community.

But what interests me about the project and about many of the responses it has generated in the comments is the very strong emphasis on readerly perseverance, on reading challenging books mostly, it seems, to prove to oneself that one can "get through" them. Many of the phrases used across these posts make reading sound more like arm-wrestling or mountain-climbing or endurance-running than anything else.

Enjoyment is emphasized as well, but usually as a surprise or a bonus: "perhaps, now that we think on it again, having finished, could it be that it was worth the struggle? Could it be that in the pain of it was a tinge of pleasure, of value (not to mention pride)?"

Perhaps pride should not be tucked into a parenthetical here, because it seems like the principal motivating force, both positively and negatively. Closing the book on the final page is both carrot—the self-confidence boost one will receive upon being able to say to oneself and others that "I've read Moby-Dick"—and stick—feeling beaten by the book, guilty about one's lack of self-discipline and intellectual endurance.

Honestly, I feel that there is no reason why most people should feel guilty about Berryman's Dream Songs or even Milton's Paradise Lost if they haven't read them all the way through, and not a lot of reason why they should feel great about themselves if they have. Reading some of both would be a great idea and I would be very pleased if every teenager were given some of Milton's sonnets and at least a few of the Dream Songs in high school (this one would be ideal), but very few people really need to be concerned or dismayed if they don't "finish" it or don't get very far. The amount of time someone might spend reading those works after they've stopped enjoying it is time I, frankly, would much rather see being devoted to reading a less intimidating novel, perhaps, or re-reading the parts of The Dream Songs or Paradise Lost that they did enjoy.

I certainly am not advocating a sort of general strike of readers refusing to finish difficult books or to skip anything that doesn't seem immediately pleasurable. What I chafe at is this sense that difficult books are most meaningful as an experience when you've bested them, outlasted them, pinned them to the ground by enduring them to the bitter end. This emphasis on readerly perseverance ("finished at last!"), on not letting the book beat you, is something I find very bizarre, and pretty counter-productive for encouraging people to try challenging work.

Rather than glorifying the difficulty of getting all the way through "difficult books," it would be nice if critics (myself included) went about removing the obstacles to getting some enjoyment out of them—highlighting really vivid passages, advising them on what parts are particularly tedious, where specific obscurities are or what crucial facts or revelations might be missed, etc. Infinite Summer did a very good job with these kind of tips, and The Millions writers do a little of it, and in places have done it quite well, but I feel like their idea is generally to encourage people to power through to the end, rather than to encourage them to find some bits that they will really like and work their way around the book from there. The latter goal is something I should try to do better myself, especially with forthcoming posts on John Dos Passos's U.S.A.

An Intertextual Moment between The Octopus and U.S.A.

2010-07-09T09:37:00.002-04:00

Right now I'm reading Frank Norris's novel The Octopus alongside John Dos Passos's U.S.A., and the conjunction just turned up what may be a neat little moment of intertextuality between the two novels.

In The Octopus (1901), some of the main characters are in a gentlemen's club (a genuine one, not a euphemistically-named one) where a raffle is being held of a competent but, I think we're supposed to believe, rather dry and imitative landscape painting by a minor character, Hartrath. Here's the scene:

But the focus of the assembly was the little space before Hartrath's painting. It was called "A Study of the Contra Costa Foothills," and was set in a frame of natural redwood, the bark still adhering. It was conspicuously displayed on an easel at the right of the entrance to the main room of the club, and was very large. In the foreground, and to the left, under the shade of a live-oak, stood a couple of reddish cows, knee-deep in a patch of yellow poppies, while in the right-hand corner, to balance the composition, was placed a girl in a pink dress and white sunbonnet, in which the shadows were indicated by broad dashes of pale blue paint. The ladies and young girls examined the production with little murmurs of admiration, hazarding remembered phrases, searching for the exact balance between generous praise and critical discrimination, expressing their opinions in the mild technicalities of the Art Books and painting classes. They spoke of atmospheric effects, of middle distance, of "chiaro-oscuro," of fore-shortening, of the decomposition of light, of the subordination of individuality to fidelity of interpretation.
One tall girl, with hair almost white in its blondness, having observed that the handling of the masses reminded her strongly of Corot, her companion, who carried a gold lorgnette by a chain around her neck, answered:
"Ah! Millet, perhaps, but not Corot."
This verdict had an immediate success. It was passed from group to group. It seemed to imply a delicate distinction that carried conviction at once. It was decided formally that the reddish brown cows in the picture were reminiscent of Daubigny, and that the handling of the masses was altogether Millet, but that the general effect was not quite Corot.

Now, when Eleanor Stoddard and Eveline Hutchins meet in the Art Institute of Chicago, here is what they say:

"What other pictures do you like?" [Eveline said.] Eleanor looked carefully at the Whistler; then she said slowly, "I like Whistler and Corot." "I do too, but I like Millet best. He's so round and warm… Have you ever been to Barbizon?" "No, but I'd love to." There was a pause. "But I think Millet's a little coarse, don't you?" Eleanor ventured. "You mean that chromo of the Angelus? Yes, I simply loathe and despise religious feeling in a picture, don't you?" Eleanor didn't quite know what to say to that, so she shook her head and said, "I love Whistler so; when I've been looking at them I can look out of the window and everything looks, you know, pastelly like that."

Now, Jean-François Millet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot would often have been grouped together as the leading figures in the Barbizon school of painting (Daubigny, also mentioned by Norris was another in the school), so perhaps this isn't so intertextual after all, simply the result of two writers wanting to introduce an explicit discussion of realism into their novels, rather like Ibsen and Strindberg turning up together in conversation in two separate novels.

Yet there is something similar, and perhaps similarly mean, about both scenes of young women grasping at cultural straws to impress other young women; "Corot" and "Millet" de-code in both passages as a sort of feminized, shallow, rather frivolous appropriation of the vitality of realism, the realism of the male writer composing this scene. I don't know a very great deal about the Barbizon school, but the most famous product of it, Millet's "The Gleaners," which inspired Agnès Varda's magnificent documentary The Gleaners and I, would seem visually to corroborate this hunch:

Obviously, they're women, but it's not just that; it is the painting's implied comparison of the unheroic, in a sense unproductive, women who come out to gather the remaining grain from (the men's) harvest to the more noble (and artistically valid) masculine tradition of the pastoral scene or of an agrarian landscape. These women are doing something that is definitively (and definitionally, I think) not man's work. I'm having trouble finding a Corot painting which contains the "handling of the masses" of which Norris speaks, but at any rate, his paintings also seem somehow feminized, especially in relation to an earlier French landscape artist like Poussin or Lorrain. (That is not necessarily to say that Norris or Dos Passos would prefer Poussin or Lorrain to Millet, Corot, and Whistler, though.)

Now, like I said, I don't know very much about 19th century painting, so my characterization of Corot and Millet may be incorrect and I would greatly appreciate any art historians or generally more knowledgeable people to help me out here, but it is my sense that Norris and Dos Passos are each making a slight dig at a more feminized version of realism which is the kind of thing one appreciates with a lorgnette and titters over with a word like "pastelly." In a sense, these women stand in relation to the masculine realism of the authors in exactly the same relationship as the subject's of Millet's painting do to the farmers who cut the grain in the first place: Eleanor and Eveline are aesthetic gleaners, taking the scattered leavings of the trailblazers and geniuses, who of course just happen to be both male and masculine.

There Is No New Media

2010-07-07T23:18:00.000-04:00

There's got to be some kind of underlying joke here, right?

The Country and the City: The U.S. Case

2010-07-06T19:29:00.001-04:00

In my first post on Raymond Williams's The Country and the City, I wrote that "at least for U.S. literature, there have been attempts to write literary histories of depictions of the city and there have been attempts to write literary histories of depictions of the country, but there is no single study which actively attempts to fuse those together and read them as not only the same history but the result of a single process or regime (capitalism), which is what Williams does."

A commenter at The Valve pointed out that Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden is "the book that comes closest, I think, to the kind of AmLit history you want to do." That probably is true, but it doesn't actually come that close for a number of reasons which I find demonstrate pretty well some of the basic reasons why there still hasn't been a study of American literary history which does what Williams did and why it would still be quite difficult to write such a one. I didn't initially plan on spending so much time on The Machine and the Garden in trying to puzzle out why I feel this is so, but that comment led me back to a closer look at the book, and I've found the comparison rewarding. Marx's book is rightly renowned, even if, like most myth and symbol criticism from the 1950s and 1960s, it has worn a little shabbily. Most of my comments on it will be in a critical vein, but my point in doing so is not to question its worth on its own terms but to suggest the continued necessity of some other terms in which to think about the literary histories of the country and of the city in the U.S.

The first, most elementary, point about The Machine in the Gardenis that even Marx acknowledged that his book isn't a literary history:

My purpose is to describe and evaluate the use of the pastoral ideal in the interpretation of American experience. I shall be tracing it adaptation to the conditions of life in the New World, its emergence as a distinctive American theory of society, and its subsequent transformation under the impact of industrialism. This is not meant to be a comprehensive survey. If I were telling the story in all its significant detail, chronologically, I should have to begin at the moment the idea of America entered the mind of Europe and come down to the present—to the death of Robert Frost in 1963. But I have chosen to concentrate upon selected examples, "some versions," as William Empon might put it, of American pastoralism. Nor have I confined myself to the richest of literary materials. At points I shall consider examples which have little or no intrinsic literary value. In fact, this is not, strictly speaking, a book about literature; it is about the region of culture where literature, general ideas, and certain products of the collective imagination—we may call them "cultural symbols"—meet.

It is to Marx's credit that he recognizes that a study focusing on the classic handful of U.S. writers—Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Twain—is not a comprehensive history of American literature. And the use of "examples which have little or no intrinsic literary value," while still quite bold for its moment (and much the best part of the book, in my opinion), is somewhat undercut by the fact that what Marx assumes is important about these writers—Thomas Jefferson, Tench Coxe, St. John de Crèvecoeur, and Robert Beverley—is that they have turned up these powerful cultural symbols for later artists to use. The point of contact between them and Hawthorne, et al. is primarily and preeminently on the symbolic plane, as Marx defines the "cultural symbol:" "A 'cultural symbol' is an image that conveys a special meaning (thought and feeling) to a large number of those who share the culture" (ibid.).

"Share" may be the most important—and least well-defined—word in that sentence. So much analytical and ideological work is accomplished by it, and so very much is obscured with it. The nature of this "sharing" is ambiguous, if not indeterminate in its directionality: does it mean receiving culture or transmitting it? Both? Something else more nebulous, like "participation?" Regardless, the long specter of ideology is raised—just what understanding of ideology does Marx have? How is this sharing process orchestrated, and who or what, if anything, controls it? I'll cut to the chase for you and tell you that Marx doesn't offer a clear answer or even really acknowledge the question. (Another important instance of this "sharing" business is on page 143: "Americans, so far as they shared an idea of what they were doing as a people, actually saw themselves creating a society in the image of a garden." And Marx characterizes Henry Nash Smith's thesis in Virgin Land by using the word: "In Virgin Land… he ascribed much of American thought and behavior to a shared vision of the nation's future, heritage of biblical myth, as the new Garden of the World.")

If Marx comes close to an explicit theory of ideology, it is on page 193:

[I]ts [the machine's] meaning is carried not so much by express ideas as by the evocative quality of the language, by attitude and tone. All of the writers of our first significant literary generation—that of Emerson and Hawthorne—knew this tone. It was the dominant tone of public rhetoric. They grew up with it; it was in their heads; and in one way or another they all responded to it. It forms a kind of undertone for the serious writing of the period, sometimes rising to the surface spontaneously, the writer momentarily sharing [!] the prevailing ebullience, sometimes brought there by design for satiric or ironic purposes. In its purest form we hear the tone in Emerson's more exuberant flights; but it also turns up in Thoreau's witty parodies, in Melville's (Ahab's) bombast, in Hawthorne's satires on the age, and in Whitman's strutting gab and brag. To say this is not enough, however; one must hear the words, for their meaning is inseparable from the texture—the diction, cadence, imagery, or, in a word, from the "language."

This is practically Jungian, an image of ideology as a giant aquifer of ideas which can be extracted in purer or siltier forms depending on how deep you go. Now, this image has its recommendations and I don't mean to call it inadequate, but it also leads quite easily to a sort of adjectivization of power: Marx can speak of "certain controlling facts of life in nineteenth-century America" (343) without asking who has the control or how it is being used. (In fact, it seems "controlling" is used in just this way eleven times in the book, "compelling" another six, as if these words have no direction, no compellers and compelled.) "Controlling ideas" are simply an ether in which one finds oneself, "turn[ing] up" here and there and everywhere in purer or dingier (or in Marx's other key terms, complex or simple) terms, depending, but always "shared." This is what the consensus school of history looks like on the level of diction.

Marx's intense interest in "shared" culture and "shared" visions is also ironic in one sense; the critical tension within Marx's work—and maybe within myth and symbol criticism generally—is that between the primacy of "sharing" and a phrase that Marx borrows from Melville—"mistaking a temporary feeling for a lasting possibility." How ephemeral is the hold of these cultural symbols which we Americans "share," and to what extent is that ephemerality a check on their power? That is, is the nature of our participation in this shared culture or vision an immersion or a dip, and if it is a dip, or a series of dips, how do we weigh the amount of time we're all wet against the time that we are dry? Marx loves that Melville critiques "the spurious pastoralism of the age… While Hawthorne [in "Ethan Brand"] hints guardedly at the false character of the essentially moribund, Augustan pastoralism of the dominant culture, Melville's witty attack embraces the flummery of the romantic avant-garde as well—including, to a degree, himself [in Typee]." Melville does this by telling Hawthorne that (and I'll quote his note, or rather his postscript, in full because it's beautiful, and sums up how I feel about myth and symbol criticism very well)

This "all" feeling, though, there is some truth in. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer's day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.

To what extent is Marx's work an insistence upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion? Marx (probably self-consciously) walks the thinnest of edges in resting his entire book upon just such a temporary feeling or opinion—the stray moment in Hawthorne's journal which provides the master symbol for Marx's thesis—a train's shriek breaking the silence of a wooded glen. Marx takes this fugitive (and, as I read it, fairly casual) thought as paradigmatic of the entire experience of industrialism at least in the nineteenth century, the pattern upon which to cut all similar encounters with technology in a still-quite rural nation. Marx badly wants Hawthorne's moment to be something which Williams might call a whole structure of feeling, but he risks the possibility that it is, in the end, actually a moment, one which many of us—from the U.S. or elsewhere, 19th, 20th or 21st century—may have shared, but which may have had little—and certainly not universal—application or influence.

Williams, whose marxian concept of ideology is, you have to admit, more defined even if you disagree with it, does not run into this problem of ephemerality because for him, symbols are tools, not drops of some ideological aquifer beneath our feet. As such, the key question for Williams is when the tools are being used and to what ends, questions which to a large extent take ephemerality into account. Recurrence of the same symbols—a major concern of both Williams and Marx—is explained not by a "shared" culture which poets keep dipping into, but by persistent contradictions within a single system and consistent strategies used to try to resolve those in favor of the interests of the same class or class fraction. Marx's emphasis on a "shared" culture ultimately cannot identify these contradictions or these strategies except as tensions inherent in the 'way things are,' directionless, miasmic, inert in their repetitions. It is notable and characteristic, I think, that (so far as I can recall) not once does Marx inquire about the direction of the many trains which dart through the pages of his authors' notes and stories. Is Hawthorne's "train in the Concord woods" coming into Concord or leaving it? Moving toward Boston or away from it? The city, or the country? No matter—the dynamics of power between country and city are ultimately not what interests Marx—not that they have to—but rather the fact that the train is there, is seen or heard, and that its presence can be shared as a defining, foundational moment for the experience of industrialization.

Myth and symbol criticism is so good and so focused on getting at the roots—or what look like roots—the primordial images, the deepest ideas that American culture (supposedly) "shares," that it ignores almost all the dirt around those roots. What I want to ask for is instead a study that focuses on all that dirt, that is interested in which direction the "train in the Concord woods" is running. The closest thing I can think of to doing that is not a study of literature: it is William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis.

But that leaves alone the question of why there isn't a study of American literature interested in those things, and instead why we have The Machine in the Garden and why it might still be difficult to think in Williams's terms instead of Marx's. This post is already running long, and I hope there is enough to chew on for now, so I'll push those questions into a third post, but for now I'll offer one longish quote from near the end of Machine:

Precisely because it is relatively unformed, wild, and new, James [in The American Scene] is saying, the scenery of America is peculiarly hospitable to pastoral illusions. It invites us to cross the commonsense boundary between art and reality, to impose literary ideas upon the world. (351-352)

The word "hospitable" here is quite as interesting as "shared" is above, and "peculiarly" does all the exceptionalist work an Americanist can ever hope for. The first settlers upon the land evidently could not help themselves from pastoralizing it, so "hospitable" and "inviting" was it to their illusions. This is more than just personification of the land; it is turning a made thing—the pastoral illusions, the desire to impost literary ideas upon the world—into a found thing. The fact is that this has been such a frequent ideological move for Americanists—not only but, as they might say, "peculiarly." Much of this is adopted from the rhetoric of and about the frontier, and while Frederick Jackson Turner receives only a single page reference in Marx's index, The Machine in the Garden is, it goes without saying, impossible without him.

The "peculiar" situation of settler colonialism is the seedbed for the made-into-found conversion because such a conversion can be convincingly made; a frontier booster or an American studies professor alike can take representations of non-urban areas to be found things—found whole, entire, at a glance—not made things, or only secondarily made things—the virginity (or pastorality) of the land is not a concept we created but a property of its very existence. Williams's case, however, is different. The enclosures which are so important to Williams's history and the land tenancy structures in general are so obviously only made things (only things which men made up) and never found things (never basic properties of the land's existence or essence) that this problem barely exists in English literature.

***

For what it's worth, Marx did publish a review of Williams's City and the Country (in The Sewanee Review 82.2 {Spring 1974} 351-362): he called it a "searching, wise, and important book," but he also felt that Williams "seems to miss the essence of the [pastoral] mode." That in fact misses the essence of Williams, who was not writing a book about the pastoral mode (which explains why Empson is absent from the index, something which Marx wonders at) but about how the countryside is depicted, a focus which Marx apparently can only turn into a question of genre or form because he assumes it is through formal or generic analysis that the tensions and contradictions inherent in the practice of writing about the countryside will be resolved or will settle into a pleasing ambiguity. When Williams does talk specifically about modes or forms, it is largely to introduce the term "counterpastoral," in order to group the poetry and prose which attempts to pierce the general habits of depicting the countryside, habits which may well be prevalent in the pastoral, but which also suffuse whole structures of feeling which well exceed that particular mode or form.

However, Marx accurately summarizes the most important part of Williams's book with the following paragraph:

In Williams's view our whole way of thinking about country and city, our tendency to identify the country with "nature" and the city with "society," is only one of the many false divisions nurtured by our alienating system of production, which constantly reproduces its contradictions within our minds. As Williams says so well, it "teaches, impresses, offers to make normal and even rigid, modes of detached, separated, external perception and action: modes of using and consuming rather than accepting and enjoying people and things." If there is a cardinal metaphor expressive of the divisions in our world, it may well be the contrast between city and country. (362)

Party in the U.S.A. also over at The Valve

2010-07-06T16:55:00.000-04:00

I've been forgetting to cross-link between here and The Valve on my posts on John Dos Passos's U.S.A., but I'll do so now because there's a little bit more discussion going on over there than we've had here so far.

As another brief note of housekeeping, going here will show you all my posts (present and, when they're written, future) about U.S.A.

Finally, I haven't yet acknowledged my inspiration for this reading project. My apologies, Miley (embedding was disabled, so you just get the link).

Structure and The 42nd Parallel

2010-07-04T16:58:00.002-04:00

An inordinate amount of what has been written on U.S.A. has been devoted to its structure—the four modes of biography, Newsreel, Camera Eye, and narrative. I think critics generally fasten onto this tetra-partite structure as the most importantly obvious part of the book as it looks so much like the key to a deeper, substructural meaning, but evaluations of its cumulative aesthetic value seem to be rather mixed or confused. Alfred Kazin is probably typical in saying,

Technically U.S.A. is one of the great achievements of the modern novel, yet what that achievement is can easily be confused with its elaborate formal structure. For the success of Dos Passos's method does not rest primarily on his schematization of the novel into four panels, four levels of American experience—the narrative proper, the "Camera Eye," the "Biographies," and the "Newsreel." That arrangement, while original enough, is the most obvious thing in the book and soon becomes the most mechanical. (On Native Grounds 1970, 353)

Kazin's reaction is interesting, and grows more interesting as he goes along so I'll play out this quote further below, but here he gives things away by referring to this formal "schematization" and to "the narrative proper," as if the other sections are either external to the novel (i.e., not its own) or vaguely inappropriate to its real "achievement."

The book lives by its narrative style, the wonderfully concrete yet elliptical prose which bears along and winds around the life stories in the book like a conveyor belt carrying Americans through some vast Ford plant of the human spirit. U.S.A. is a national epic, the first great national epic of its kind in the modern American novel; and its triumph is not the pyrotechnical display that the shuttling between the various devices seems to suggest, but Dos Passos's power to weave so many different lives together in narrative. (ibid.)

Cold War criticism at its best. The individual life—the origin and destination of all narrative meaning. E pluribus unum rah rah rah. (Happy Fourth of July, by the way.)

It is possible that the narrative sections would lose much of that power if they were not so craftily built into the elaborate framework of the book. But the framework holds the book together and encloses it; the narrative makes it. The "Newsreel," the "Camera Eye," and even the very vivid and often brilliant "Biographies" are meant to lie a little outside the book always; they speak with the formal and ironic voice of History. The "Newsreel" sounds the time; the "Biographies" stand above time, chanting the stories of American leaders; the "Camera Eye" moralizes shyly in a lyric stammer upon them. But the great thing about U.S.A. is that though it sweeps up so many human lives together and intones their waste and illusion and defeat so steadily, we seem to be swept along with them and to see each life perfectly at the moment it passes by us. (ibid.)

What is most interesting about Kazin's reaction is how difficult it is for him to find a way to think of the "narrative proper" and these more experimental or modernist sections as occupying the same space: they are "four panels" or "four levels." Also, Dos Passos "winds [his prose] around the life stories in the book" which are in turn 'woven' altogether, but between these narratives and the other modes he "shuttles" back and forth—inside-outside. Finally, the non-narrative modes are the "framework" which "enclose" and "lie a little outside" the narratives. And he ends with an idea of the reader being swept through the narrative sections, a reading experience which suggests even less time or attention granted to those other sections; if we are swept through the longer narratives, then what are we doing in the others—skimming, presumably?

Other critics (like Donald Pizer) have spent more time and effort marrying the non-narrative sections to the "life stories," and I won't attempt to summarize those (rather elaborate) arguments here. I'm interested in a rather more specific problem caused by the presence and interaction of the four modes, but before I get going, I better say that the following are intended as preliminary remarks to be applied only to 42nd Parallel; I think some of what I see happening in this novel may be altered if not overturned by the next two volumes. Still, I think there is a definite problem which crops up in 42nd Parallel, and I wish to give it some play now so that I can return to it later after having read 1919 and The Big Money and make some kind of assessment of the way the novel's structure changes and develops.

I see the chief difficulty for the reader as not (or not only) one of relating all four of these modes to one another, but really to think of them as building toward the titular aspiration of the novel: a national consciousness, or at least a consciousness of the nation, in a more robust and more profound manner than the general novel does. But I don't think this happens. The main difference between U.S.A. and most other (U.S.) novels is simply its larger canvas; its characters move through more parts of the nation than almost any novel I can think of (even road novels), and on top of that, still other places are mentioned in the Camera Eye, biographical, and Newsreel sections. In a future post, maybe one after I've read all three volumes, I want to talk about the geography of U.S.A.; Google Maps integrates with Google Books in a neat way which plots all the cities and towns mentioned in a given novel, and I hope to have some fun with that.¹

Apart from geography, however, what do we have that really gives a sense of a national—as opposed to transnational, regional, local, or even individual—consciousness? The Newsreel sections seem tailor-made to buttress a Benedict Anderson-type argument about the importance of newspapers and print culture for the creation and absorption of the idea of living within an imagined national community, but as I noted in the last post, the fragmentary and mangled nature of the news reports and popular songs which Dos Passos uses must destroy—even, I think for audiences of the 1930s more familiar with the named referents—the possibility of feeling involved in the often nonsensical amalgamations of references to contemporary figures and events. The feeling of synchrony or simultaneity so necessary for an imagined community to exist is simply lost with a chain of "news items" which seem to have no obvious temporal relationship to one another: "MOON'S PATENT IS FIZZLE insurgents win at Kansas polls. Oak Park soulmates part Eight thousand to take auto ride says girl begged for her husband" (Newsreel X). Even if all of that material were indeed taken from a single day's newspapers, would the knowledge of that simultaneity be available to a reader even in 1930?²

The Camera Eye sections are even less capable of producing something like a consciousness of the nation; not only is it often even more difficult to extract any kind of hard data about the referents of these passages, but they function (intentionally, I believe) as a sort of safety valve for subjective expression in the novel, drawing away all of Dos Passos's personal reflections and emotionally-charged memories from the other sections. So they're not just frequently semantically inscrutable, but they are historically inaccessible in the sense that even if we have places and times to match them against, much of their material has little to do with the kinds of events or even images which might be considered historically common or general. This Camera Eye section (XXV, my favorite so far) is loaded with easily traceable referents and is entirely locatable in time and place as "depicting" Dos Passos's undergraduate years at Harvard, yet it evades any real sense of history. "grow cold with culture like a cup of tea forgotten between an incenseburner and a volume of Oscar Wilde cold and not strong like a claret lemonade drunk at a Pop Concert in Symphony Hall / four years I didn't know you could do what you Michelangelo wanted say / Marx / to all / the professors with a small Swift break all the Greenoughs in the shooting gallery / ... / and I hadn't the nerve / to jump up and walk out of doors and tell them all to / go take a flying / Rimbaud / at the moon"

The biography sections might seem like our best bet for creating a robust consciousness of the nation, as most of them are about national figures who have, to greater or lesser extent, a certain mythic quality about them. But the biography sections evade that mythic quality in some interesting ways. There is a certain abstractness to the free verse form which limits sentimentality and plays up irony; clever line breaks and enjambments turn frequently on a smirk or a cocked eyebrow. But more importantly, they aren't even written up as Representative or exemplary Men. What Dos Passos seems to value about his subjects—heroes and villains alike—is precisely whatever makes them so indissoluble in society that they end up standing out or rising above its surface, some freakish quality or strain in their character that makes ordinariness impossible and exemplarity an even more dubious proposition. They are not types any more than they are average. They are not, in any real sense of the word, representative; most—even Edison and Carnegie—are marginal, even quasi-grotesque.

Many critics, even in Dos Passos's time, noted the surprisingly narrow band of society from which the characters of the narrative sections are taken. The racial and ethnic composition is particularly bland, but even more constricting, perhaps, is the lack of representation of very many types of work or ways of life. This might not be a constriction for another kind of writer, but Dos Passos believed that "people are formed by their trades and occupations much more than by their opinions. The fact that a man is a shoesaleman or a butcher is in every respect more important than that he's a republican or a theosophist" (quoted on Denning 178). So the intense focus on vagabonds and public relations and the absence of (among other professions) factory line workers, farmers, bankers, lawyers, professors, doctors, clergy, government bureaucrats, or police or firemen makes (at least) The 42nd Parallel seem suddenly rather small.

More important still may be the following observation made by Michael Denning:

Perhaps the most striking and unsettling aspect of U.S.A. is the lack of any coherent connection between the characters: no family or set of families constitutes the world of the novel; no town, neighborhood, or city serves as a knowable community; no industry or business, no university or film colony unites public and private lives; and no plot, murder, or inheritance links the separate destinies… Dos Passos's lists of characters are just that, not the genealogies that epic novelists ordinarily create. The characters in U.S.A. come together by accident, usually at cocktail parties (Denning 182).

This would be more accurate if we were to add "single" in front of each noun there: "no single family… no single town… no single industry… no single plot…" but that would just be making explicit what Denning is already implying. If one were to compare U.S.A. either to actual epics like Dante or Homer or Vergil, or to what Franco Moretti has called the "modern epic" (a category including, for him, Faust, Ulysses, Moby-Dick, and Cien años de soledad, among others), or even to the capacious Victorian novels of somewhat similar ambition (Bleak House, Middlemarch), the lack of a single element which stands in the last instance as the novel's unifying force is quite apparent.

The question is what effect this lack ultimately has on U.S.A. At this point, I am only one-third qualified to judge, but I haven't been regretting the absence of unity, and one might make a favorable comparison from Dos Passos's ability to avoid forcing cheapening unities on his materials when they aren't necessary to the mawkish "world-is-flat" stories of the (hopefully defunct) vogue in "network narrative" films from the middle of this decade (Iñárritu's films generally but particularly Babel; Syriana; Crash). In other words, I'm enjoying the loose ends and the hollow center feeling; Dos Passos writes very well on a page-by-page basis without making much attempt to be lyrical—as Adam said, it reads as a little potboilerish, but not, I think, in a particularly manipulative or callow way. I can understand why others find the trilogy rough going or even have strongly negative reactions to it, but I'm glad to be reading it and frankly, right now I'm holding myself back from racing through 1919.

¹The 42nd Parallel map is here. Also notable is obviously the title, decoded in a prefatory note in the first edition of The 42nd Parallel when it was published as a stand-alone novel in 1930; the title comes from "an 1865 book, American Climatology, which suggested that North American storms followed the 42nd Parallel. The novel seemed to follow its characters as if they were so many storms crossing the continent" (Michael Denning, The Cultural Front, 190).
² As Denning has it, the Newsreel sections are "undated and unauthored, they remain less a firm grounding in the spirit of the time or even an evocation of historical color than a repetitive and finally ahistorical serial, establishing the always already contemporary, an emblem of industrial society's 'idiot lack of memory'" (Cultural Front, 171).

Party in the U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel, by John Dos Passos

2010-06-29T23:09:00.005-04:00

In this post, I'd just like to introduce some of the key elements of the first volume and of the work as a whole. Shortly, I hope to have at least one more analytical post written, but for now, just a stocktaking—what's in this novel?

Both description and analysis of the U.S.A. trilogy generally begin with a catalogue of the books' four modes:
1) the interlocking narrative sections, each headed by and following a single protagonist as he or she makes his way across the nation and a few parts of the wider world (in this novel, France, Canada, and Mexico);

2) the famous Camera Eye sections, which are written in a high modernist style and which seem to be a sort of impressionistic memoir. They read to me kind of like a Joycean version of the prose section in Robert Lowell's Life Studies¹;

3) the Newsreel, which comprises various headlines or half-headlines and snatches of news reports and contemporary popular songs. Many of them read like they've been spliced or mangled in some fashion, like RSS feeds mating and churning out gnomics: "DIAZ TRAINS HEAVY GUNS ON BUSINESS SECTION… ASK METHODISM TO OUST TRINITY…"

4) and finally, what seems to be everyone's favorite, a series of free-verse "biographies" of famous or influential figures of the period—in this first volume, Eugene Debs, Luther Burbank, Big Bill Haywood, William Jennings Bryan, Minor C. Keith, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Charles Steinmetz, and Robert LaFollette, who had some awesome hair.

Continuing with a basic inventory of the novel, in the narrative sections of The 42nd Parallel, we meet five different protagonists. Because this is sort of supposed to be a group read (that is, if anyone is reading along with me), there will be spoilers.

Mac, a Wobbly and a printer, whose problems with women and travels about the country and into Mexico resemble, quite pleasantly, a Woody Guthrie or a Billy Bragg song; he starts off the novel when his family moves into Chicago from Middletown, CT. Mac learns the printing trade from his radical uncle, who eventually loses his shop partly because of his politics and partly because of his drinking. Mac takes off from Chicago in the shady employ of a confidence man/door-to-door bookseller, a great character straight out of Huck Finn. Eventually, this grifter is caught and Mac bums around a bit. Somehow he catches the wrong train and ends up in Winnipeg; eventually he makes his way through Vancouver on down the West Coast to (eventually) San Francisco. He meets a girl but nearly loses her (and does lose his eyebrows) in the Earthquake of 1906. Married life doesn't take and he runs away to Mexico for the Revolution. After a period in Ciudad Juárez, he makes his way to México City, where he gets a job first as a printer and then, through some favors pulled by other U.S. expatriates, as a bookstore owner. When Villa and Zapata threaten to overrun México City, Mac sells out and flees to Veracruz. he thinks about returning to the U.S., but decides to stay in Veracruz. Mac is the protagonist of eight sections, but most of them are all at the beginning; while they set the tone for this volume, one almost loses sight of him in the latter half.

Janey Williams is a young Washingtonian girl who might well be described by Henry Adams's (patronizing) view of the type: "the Washington girl, who was neither rich nor well-dressed nor well-educated nor clever, had singular charm, and used it." She does indeed have some charm, but is also fairly rigid politically—she abruptly quits a stenography job because she thinks her boss is pro-German, and later she shows other flashes of a starchy patriotism. Her brother Joe is a sailor; I think he'll play a larger role in the latter two volumes of the trilogy. She's unemployed for a good bit of her sections after she quits her pro-German employer, but eventually she lucks into being personal assistant for the next protagonist, J. Ward Moorehouse, who takes her to México (where they bump briefly into Mac) and then back to his office in New York. In New York, she stays with the Compton family; the son, Ben Compton, will also feature in the later volumes. Janey deeply admires Moorehouse, but her attraction to him is mostly deferential. Janey has four sections.

J. Ward Moorehouse, a Delawarean on the make, a fortune hunter and public relations man. He marries twice, both times to heiresses, although the first heiress fails him both financially and maritally—well, actually the failure's on both sides, and Moorehouse knows it. He falls into an even better marriage, however, and uses his new wife's money to set him up in a cutting-edge PR firm with a specialty in bridging the information gap between capital in labor—which evidently in practice means finding corruptible labor representatives and corrupting them further. Dos Passos is, however, surprisingly warm to Moorehouse; there is far more sympathy or even almost respect in his depiction than one might expect. Dos Passos shows him as a genuinely capable, unexpectedly thoughtful, and legitimately classy sort of guy. Dos Passos somehow gives him a certain gravity despite his scheming. And his descriptions of the businessman's life are, like Lewis's in Babbitt, much softer than they're remembered as being, and occasionally even gentle or lyrical. Here's a good example. Once Moorehouse is introduced, he is in nearly every subsequent section of this volume, although he is the protagonist proper of just three.

Eleanor Stoddard is a quasi-Bohemian interior designer from Chicago, now living in New York and also in an ambiguous relationship with Moorehouse. She started out working in a lace shop (shades of Lily Bart in the millinery) and moved a half-step up to work as a Marshall Fields shopgirl, a job which horrified her. She struck up an acquaintance with a miserly spinster also living in her cheap boardinghouse, and believed for a time that her friendship would earn her the spinster's millions. She received a cheap piece of jewelry upon the woman's death. There is a lovely scene in one of her sections where she takes a day off from her job to read Romola and then go to the Art Institute, where she runs into a better-dressed young woman who asks her, while looking at some of Whistler's paintings, "I like unconventionality, don't you?" Eventually, these two women form a partnership for interior decorating and after some mixed successes, jump abruptly to New York to design the stage dressing for a play, which flops more or less. In New York at last, she manages to make something of a name for herself as a designer, and she and Moorehouse begin a relationship which may be sexual but most likely (it seems to me) isn't. Nevertheless, Moorehouse's wife becomes jealous and confronts him. Eleanor insists on seeing her and when she does, some understanding is reached. Moorehouse informs both women that he has offered his services to the nation and will be in Washington for the duration of the war, and Eleanor chimes in that she is volunteering as a nurse, which is unexpected, to say the least. Eleanor has four sections.

Charley Anderson is the last character introduced and has just one section, a longer one that closes the novel. He is an occasional mechanic and a bum, originally from North Dakota, last seen looking across the ocean toward a volunteer post as an ambulance driver in the First World War. He is the least fortunate of any of the characters, and also probably the least able to make his luck (although I think that will not last). He gets across a lot of the country (most significantly, St. Paul and New Orleans) before he ends up in New York, where he joins the ambulance drivers' initiative just as war is being declared. He also carries the red card of the IWW, but he is less involved in it than Mac.

In the next post, I want to discuss in greater detail how the four modes of the novel work together, but for now I think it's appropriate to say that I think to some extent their cumulative effect comes off a little strangely because there is not much in literature to which one might compare them collectively. This diversity of modes suggests a pastiche or bricolage, but this is not right; they don't seem directly to be imitating, borrowing from, or subverting any specific literary precursor or any particular form of speech or writing. Even the Newsreel seems less like a direct transcript or a cut-and-paste job than a careful composition. And, though I said the Camera Eye sections remind me of Joyce, they don't seem like attempts at writing like Joyce. And the multiplicity of experiments is quite different from simply having multiple forms of narration, or multiple narrators of differing linguistic capacities. Unfortunately, outside of pastiche or hybridity or Faulknerian multiple narrators, there are few ways that come to mind of really thinking about formal experimentation like this on multiple registers. This makes it difficult to figure out how to read these four modes—either individually or collectively.

¹ In fact, I don't know if it's been argued before, but Life Studies may have a more general debt to U.S.A.; it also comprises four parts, one of which is also a sequence of biographical poems about real people. The other two parts match up less well, perhaps, to Dos Passos's Newsreel and narrative sections. It's a thought, anyway.

The Country and the City, by Raymond Williams

2010-06-23T07:43:00.000-04:00

It is both a shame and also perfectly understandable that Raymond Williams's The Country and the City is one of those title-line citation books: those monographs which are obligatorily footnoted whenever certain keywords turn up—in this case, the combination or interaction of "city and country." But that citation is usually no more than a quod vide, a sort of ritual genuflection or ass-covering acknowledgment ("yes, reader, I know the locus classicus too").

This desultory reference is a shame because the book does repay more in-depth discussion or elaboration and because, at least in my experience, few historians and fewer literature scholars engage with this dynamic very deeply with or without Williams's guidance.

Yet it is also, as I say, perfectly understandable because a very great proportion of The Country and the City lends itself only very weakly to adaptation or appropriation; only the final few chapters really seem meant to inspire further work or to indicate the possibility of connection to other questions, projects, or histories. The rather foxy title belies the monograph's more hedgehoggy content. Williams's study of English literature depicting the English countryside (and, rather cursorily, the English city, meaning almost exclusively London) is resolutely single-minded; after a bit of throat-clearing about classical pastoral traditions, I count only 14 references to non-Anglo-Irish writers in the remainder of the book.¹ Over about 290 pages (excluding the chapter on classical pastorals), that's around one every 21 pages. That is certainly not very expansive or wide-ranging; there is little else besides the very particular literary history of this particular set of tropes in English literature. To do more than name-check Williams's book in any context other than the one he actually wrote about would essentially require taking the book's argumentative skeleton and graft on everything else—muscles, tendons, skin and blood. It would take a complete re-writing. It is not, in other words, a Foucault-type genealogy or archaeology of knowledge.

Which begs the question whether there have been comparable studies of the tropes of "country-and-city" in, say, the U.S. or in Canada, in India or France, Russia or Mexico, Nigeria or Brasil. I may simply have missed these wonderful books, but I think the answer is actually 'no'—at least for U.S. literature, there have been attempts to write literary histories of depictions of the city and there have been attempts to write literary histories of depictions of the country, but there is no single study which actively attempts to fuse those together and read them as not only the same history but the result of a single process or regime (capitalism), which is what Williams does. Now, that might simply amount to asking for a Marxist study of American literature with a particular attention to images and symbols of geography, but is that really so much to ask?

In a subsequent post, I'd like to outline what Williams actually does in his own study and what the tropes which he identifies are, and then I'd like to discuss how they may be adapted or supplemented to fit the U.S. case a little better, but for now I'd like merely to pose the question of why it seems to be difficult to think of the literary history of the countryside and the literary history of the city as existing together. In part, Williams's book is an analysis of the ideologies which keep those literary histories apart, why it is even popular to see the country and the city as cleanly and self-evidently separate in history and more especially in literature. One particular reason which he gives between the lines, as it were, is most interesting to me: when Williams speaks of his own life's journey, as he does very movingly, or of the three figures whom one benighted British Council critic called "our three great autodidacts"—George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence—or even with Hardy's character Jude, Williams notes the personal impact of the basic life pattern of moving from the countryside to a city or an intellectual metropole of sorts (i.e., Oxford or Cambridge). It is difficult not to take the basic autobiographical bifurcation of country and city as existing in different parts or moments of one's life and turn it into a more general historical or sociological paradigm.

¹Actually, I also did not count references from a chapter near the end which specifically treats contemporary Third-World literature and British imperialism. This is the chapter I meant as inspiring further work.

Party in the U.S.A.

2010-06-16T14:06:00.001-04:00

(picture via)

U.S.A. is the slice of a continent. U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U.S.A. is the world's greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. U.S.A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people.

Infinite Summer has made reading long books during the summer incredibly popular, so over the next (less than) three months, I'll be working my way through John Dos Passos's [insert modifier indicating scale, impressiveness] U.S.A. trilogy, and I invite you to read along. Or, if you've read it before, to comment along.

The set-up will be very simple: one book, each month (June, July, August). I'm not going to blog my progress while in the middle of a volume, so there won't be any weekly schedule or page pacing, just a post or two near the end of each month to walk through the volume and add some commentary. This leaves June a little foreshortened, but I'm finding that the first volume, The 42nd Parallel, really flies by.

From On Native Grounds, by Alfred Kazin

2010-06-12T09:54:00.000-04:00

I'm reading Alfred Kazin's study of American literature of the period 1890-1940 right now, and once I finish I will likely have some things to say about it, but for now, I just want to flag this perplexing passage:

The clue to Jack London's work is certainly to be found in his own turbulent life, and not in his Socialism. He was a Socialist by instinct, but he was also a Nietzschean and a follower of Herbert Spencer by instinct. All his life he grasped whatever straw of salvation lay nearest at hand, and if he joined Karl Marx to the Superman with a boyish glee that has shocked American Marxists ever since, it is interesting to remember that he joined Herbert Spencer to Shelley, and astrology to philosophy, with as carefree a will. The greatest story he ever wrote was the story he lived: the story of the illegitimate son of a Western adventurer and itinerant astrologer, who grew up in Oakland, was an oyster pirate at fifteen, a sailor at seventeen, a tramp and a 'work-beast,' a trudger after Coxey's Army, a prospector in Alaska, and who quickly became rich by his stories, made and spent several fortunes, and by the circle of his own confused ambitions came round to the final despair in which he took his life… (111)

I find the idea that anyone attaches themselves to any ideology "by instinct" a profound and absurdly un-self-reflective misunderstanding of how anyone comes to think the things they do, but my confusion is not over Kazin's journalistic superficiality. Rather,

what the hell is an "oyster pirate?"

From The Gatekeeper, by Terry Eagleton

2010-06-11T17:57:00.003-04:00

Terry Eagleton's memoir reads throughout as a little tossed-off, occasionally a bit repetitive both in diction (see below) and in anecdote, and generally less-focused and unpolished than his essays—it reads almost as an extemporaneous lecture. But I think even Eagleton's detractors would find it frequently pleasant, and there is a kind of effectiveness to almost informal political talk like the following:

Radical politics may not be a thankless affair, but it is an exceedingly modest proposal. Bertolt Brecht once remarked that it was capitalism, not communism, which was radical, and his colleague Walter Benjamin added wisely that revolution was not a runaway train but the application of the emergency brake. It is capitalism which is out of control, and socialism which seeks to restrain it. It is capitalism, as Marx recognized, which is revolutionary to its roots, one extravagant thrust of Faustian desire, and socialism which recalls us to our humble roots as labouring, socializing, materially limited creatures…

It is a sign of just how bad things are that even the modest proposal that everyone on the planet gets fresh water and enough to eat is fighting talk. One can imagine launching revolutions in the name of some exorbitant utopian ideal, but to disrupt people's lives in such a spectacular way simply so that everyone may be guaranteed a supply of fresh vegetables seems oddly bathetic. Only extremists could argue against it, just as only extremists could endorse a global capitalist system which in 1992 is said to have paid Michael Jordan more for advertising Nike shoes than it paid to the entire south-east Asian industry which produced them. Revolutionaries are those realist, moderate types who recognize that to put such things to rights would require a thoroughgoing transformation. Anyone who imagines otherwise is an idle utopianist, though they are more commonly known as liberals and pragmatists…

Revolutionaries, then, are neither optimists nor pessimists, but realists. Indeed, one reason why they are so thin on the ground is because realism is so extraordinarily difficult a creed to practise. It is exactly this that the street-wise pragmatists fail to appreciate. To see the situation as it really is is the basis of all effective moral or political action, but nothing could be more elusive or exacting. Since the truth, politically speaking, is usually thoroughly unpleasant, being a realist means living a vigilant, cold-eyed, soberly disenchanted sort of existence, perpetually on the qui vive for the mildest flicker of fantasy or sentimentalism. Since this is both the only way to live and no way to live at all, radical politics is bound to be a contradictory affair. Its more successful practitioners are likely to be the last people to embody the values of the society they are fighting for—one which would make ample room for fantasy and sentiment—just as nobody would join a club which was tasteless and desperate enough to recruit people like themselves. As a Brecht poem comments: 'Oh we who tried to prepare the ground for friendship Could not ourselves be friendly.'

The counter-intuitiveness of this passage (or at least the first paragraph) is rich, and it is most effective perhaps as a replacement for the kind of preaching-to-the-choir fist-pumping that Eagleton spends a good portion of the book baiting. The romanticism of revolution (as opposed to the realism of it), it turns out, just breeds people like the following:

Those who speak regularly at [leftist] conventions know just how unfathomable is the human capacity for misinterpretation. If your title is 'Why We Must Smash Fascism', and your speech one luridly impassioned invective against it, there will always be somebody in the audience who will want to know why you are so soft on fascism. The person who came in half an hour late will imperiously demand to know why you failed to make a point which you made in your second sentence, while someone else will wonder aloud why, if you're so anti-bourgeois, you wear a suit and spectacles rather than dressing in cowhide and peering at the world through home-made lenses cut from discarded Guinness bottles on an antique lathe.

Eagleton, obviously, can get a bit carried away, and, rather like a pint of Guinness, there is a large amount of foamy self-congratulation that one must somehow maneuver around to get at the real stuff, but his point seems to me not too far off. At least (and perhaps this is more a way of damning myself than praising him) I have thought similar things to myself quite often.

The Search for Order, 1877-1920, by Robert H. Wiebe

2010-06-10T18:01:00.001-04:00

There is an interesting and I think rather consequential disjunction between the style of Wiebe's classic synthesis of the Gilded Age/Progressive Era and its content: in few words, Wiebe brought an 18th-century sentence to a 19th-century fight. Wiebe's equipoise and preference for the apothegm, resembling above all a long cascade of heroic couplets, repeatedly turn his arguments about the character of these times against themselves: balancing where they should be evoking turbulence, harmonizing where they mean to demonstrate dissonance, affording closure where they intend to describe a new sense of endless process. It's like putting a gyroscope on a dirt bike.

Of course, the prose is also so, so pleasurable to read. "Too many ambitious men pictured themselves as tomorrow's kings to proscribe royalty." "Essential services became the playthings of private profit, and a busy people paid the price of danger, dirt, and disease." "Too isolated for leadership before 1917, Roosevelt and his comrades were too overwhelmed by agreement after that." Of William Jennings Bryan, "His public life was devoted to translating a complicated world of affairs he barely comprehended back into those values he never questioned." Few poets could pull off without a smirk such alliteration as that of the second sentence, and I'm tempted every once in awhile to scan these sentences for the meter; some have to be very near iambic pentameter.

Occasionally, this bent toward beauty becomes obtuse: of the 1877 railroad strikes, "Called America's first national strike, it was actually the first national holiday of the slums. The rioters, rather than self-conscious wage earners, were simply the inhabitants of center city who had taken advantage of a singular opportunity to come out and roam." That terminal intransitive verb is a gorgeous way to conclude, a perfect alighting point for the thought being expressed, but one does wonder about its content; how much of the disorder of the time is interred by the metaphor's grace?

Style also plays a role in some of the book's argumentative flaws. There is an outright indifference to geography ("The titans of Wall Street would have made the same decisions if they had operated from Denver; the same spate of holding companies would have appeared if Oregon instead of New Jersey had passed a lax incorporation law" (32)) which is enabled or encouraged by Wiebe's Olympian (or perhaps Parnassian) summations; there is little need for geographic specificity when the events are being narrated from 30,000 feet above the fray. There is almost an inadvertent joke between the work's title and its contents: if the era was a casting about for organization, Wiebe somehow finds order at the end of every (sentence's) period.

But the largest complaint I have is with what Wiebe's style does to his basic argument for what was transformed or precipitated in this period and what this transformation or precipitate came from. This argument is articulated by various means throughout the book, but mostly to the same theme, and I'll just pick two passages to exemplify it. From page 40 and 43, the background to or first stage of this transformation:

More generally, Americans emphasized the obvious. What they saw about them were more tracks and more factories and more people, bigger farms and bigger corporations and bigger buildings; and in a time of confusion they responded with a quantitative ethic that became the hallmark of their crisis in values. It seemed that the age could only be comprehended in bulk. Men defined issues by how much, how many, how far… For lack of anything that made better sense of their world, people everywhere weighed, counted, and measured it.

And on pages 147 and 154, a description of what came out of this quantitative ethic:

The meaning of data had fundamentally changed. Earlier theorists had examined society assuming an infinite number of one-to-one relationships; a cause produced an effect, a law covered an action, a reform led to a result. Now society was 'a vast tissue of reciprocal activity… all interwoven to such a degree that you see different systems according to the point of view you take… It was not that the exponents of bureaucratic thought sacrificed ends to means but that they merged what customarily had been regarded as ends and means into a single, continuous stream, then failed to provide a clear rationale for the amalgam. Endless talk of order and efficiency, endless analogies between society and well-oiled machinery, never in themselves supplied an answer. Instead of careful definitions, they offered only tendencies.

For Wiebe, these last are fairly knotted sentences, but it nevertheless approaches something like a performative (or perhaps a mimetic) contradiction; they are far more like a careful definition and an answer than like a tendency or a tissue. And Wiebe's heroic couplets fight rather than evoke this sense of continuity; so firmly stamped and discrete is the meaning of every thought, that the book seems entirely written in topic sentences—extremely well-written ones, but each one could begin a new and separate paragraph, or even a whole essay. They are far more like the "one-to-one relationships" which were supplanted by the new mentality, although Wiebe is very, very far from anything like a "quantitative ethic" (I can recall almost no instances of statistics in the book, certainly no tables). So far from the sense of what is actually being described, this again seems like a sort of mimetic contradiction.

It is, of course, not presumed that historiography must be stylistically mimetic of its subject, and if it were, it would no doubt end in disaster. (That's what we have novels for, anyway.) Yet there is something missing in Wiebe because of this disjuncture between style and content that undercuts, for me, his analysis of the era, as if the mimetic gap between what he depicts and how he depicts it actually distorts our ability to perceive it, even as he says straightforwardly what it is we are looking at: disorder, struggle, and confusion, emergence, improvisation, and an ad hoc transformation.

So when Wiebe argues that

If those who thought of the new industrial giants as diabolically perfect organisms could have peeked inside, they would have found jerry-built organization, ad hoc assumptions of responsibility, obsolete office techniques, and above all an astonishing lack of communication among its parts… Presiding over ramshackle concerns, the officers could only command and hope.

we get a barely clearer vision of what this ramshackleness really looked or felt like than the contemporary critics who didn't see it at all or ignored it. Wiebe compares at one point the new mentality of reform to "the fluidity of calculus, not the order and balance of plane geometry" (146). There is much more of the latter than the former; at its most elaborate, The Search for Order is extremely elegant trigonometry.

Much earlier in the book, Wiebe describes the basic dynamic of change and progress that he found repeated throughout the period: "Once again, a narrow attempt to impose order tended to increase the disorder around it." It is this dynamic which seems to be entirely suspended for the duration of the book, a sort of unnatural imposition of order everywhere without any increase of disorder anywhere within it. No sentence really seems to feel the pressure of obscurity, and the balance of one sentence sends no succeeding sentence off-kilter; everything is calibrated, nothing is confused.

Again, this is not to say that Wiebe's writing isn't absolutely lovely to read; it is so far from cloying even in its unruffled smoothness that I very well understand why it continues to be assigned even as its synthesis has been scavenged and challenged almost piece-by-piece ever since it was published in 1967. Jackson Lears's new synthesis of the period, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920, has been, as is readily visible from the titular span of dates, called by Richard White a "doppelgänger" of Wiebe's book.

White goes on to say of Search for Order, and I find this very interesting:

Wiebe portrayed the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a period of centralization, professionalization and nationalization. Americans found themselves adrift as an older world of autonomous, local "island" communities disintegrated; they responded by undertaking a "search for order" to organize, discipline and tame a society that was diverse, industrial, urban and increasingly corporate. Newer scholarship has undermined many of Wiebe's conclusions, such as the existence of island communities in the wake of the Civil War and the rationality of the new corporate order. Yet his book stands--a weathered but imposing monument reinforced by the powerful metaphor of its title. Metaphors matter; they can corral all kinds of restless and fractious people and events, and Wiebe settled on a good one.

It is strange to me that White (and the others to whom he alludes) takes the "rationality of the new corporate order" as one of the primary conclusions of Wiebe's study; perhaps it is merely because I am reading it after the revisionists have re-framed the period that I see instead of an emphasis on "order" an emphasis on the "search" for it, but I have to disagree with White that this achieved (as opposed to nominal or aspirational) rationality is in fact how Wiebe characterizes the new corporate order (as evidenced by the "jerry-built" quote above). There is a constant reminder of the romantic overhang (or hangover) shadowing the period, and if the trend was toward "science" and "rational management," Wiebe nevertheless gives frequent acknowledgment of the inertial forces inside that trend.

It is, instead, probably the prose which has influenced later scholars to play up the "order" part of the book rather than the "search." If White and others remember the book as a monument to a society in the process of ordering itself—instead of, as Wiebe really argues, producing more disorder by "narrow" attempts to impose order—it is almost certainly because the evenness of the book's arguments feels so little connected to the turbulent process of imposing order upon its materials that this smooth and successful stylistic calibration comes to replace in our minds the uneven and "ramshackle" process that it in fact depicts.

Edith Wharton and Gossip Girl

2010-06-09T21:33:00.001-04:00

I don't intend to apologize for liking the television show Gossip Girl,* but I also hope the following does not read like an attempt to elevate it by identifying its debts to Edith Wharton; that would be like trading on the name of one's rich but distant relatives, a move which hasn't happened yet in Gossip Girl, though it would be suited to its universe.

Naming Wharton as one of Gossip Girl's influences is not particularly original of me; in Season Two, the boys' and girls' private schools of St. Jude and Constance combine to stage a production of The Age of Innocence, and the writers of the show have fun placing their characters in roles from Wharton's novel, ultimately suggesting that these high schoolers actually do live in a Wharton plot, and not just a Whartonian milieu of old money. Minor details also connect the show to House of Mirth: Lily Bass is quite obviously a descendant (by name) of Lily Bart, and the show opens quite cleverly with the very same set-up as the novel: a beautiful young woman walks unexpectedly through Grand Central Station. More minor still (and more tendentious, I allow), is the Rose/Rosedale correspondence (Cyrus Rose, Simon Rosedale) for the only Jewish characters in either work. I believe I noticed more parallels as I was reading House of Mirth, but I can't recall them now.

But more significantly, the principal theme of the show and of the two major Wharton novels (House of Mirth and Age of Innocence) is basically the same: Wharton and the creators of Gossip Girl are fascinated by what keeps people who do, might, or could love each other apart. Gossip Girl is virtually algorithmic in its exploration of this problem: take nine major characters, mix and match. Find each combination's weak point, and relentlessly drive that pair toward it.

Wharton is of course more graceful, but not exactly more subtle; Selden and Lily, Newland and Ellen (and, come to think of it, Ethan Frome and Mattie), are similarly the objects of a ruthless authorial experiment in how two people can find something, anything to keep them apart. It is rather the opposite of the romance plot: instead of overcoming the various obstacles (personality and class or wealth are probably the main ones) which separate the hero and heroine, Wharton and Gossip Girl make the characters' affinities which naturally link the characters into the obstacles which must be surmounted to resolve the plot's tension. It's a rather striking structure, even in series.

* I know nothing about the novels; much of what I say here about the connections between Wharton and the GG show could in fact be a product of the written source material. If anyone is familiar with the novels, I'd be very interested to hear to what extent they reference—explicitly or in code—Wharton. The New Yorker reviewed them, but that's all I have to go on.

Edit 11/20/2010: The new season also has its Wharton reference: the second time we see Juliet, she is reading House of Mirth, and Juliet, like Lily, finds innovative ways of hiding her penury from her rivals. She hasn't started making hats in a millinery yet, though.

The House of Mirth and The Rise of Silas Lapham

2010-06-05T14:11:00.004-04:00

"There is a point where taste has to begin" - Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham

I like this quote in part because, even in the larger context (which you can get by clicking on the link), the expression "has to" straddles very elegantly the hortatory and the necessary: it is both an inevitable feature of taste that it does begin somewhere, at some specific point, and also that it should begin somewhere, that one who has taste must recognize a lowest rung on the social ladder below which lies nothing worth recognizing—not even money.

It would be tedious to say that "the point where taste has to begin" is a major concern of both Wharton's and Howells's novels, but it is, nevertheless, the tedious point at which I wish to begin discussing these works. For one glaring but still quite enlivening motif of both novels is the emphasis they place on the spatial nature of taste, or better said, the spatial preconditions of taste. For in both novels, it is presumed that taste ultimately eludes or transcends mere space—it is necessarily, in its highest forms, not only ineffable but also impossible to ground or physically delimit; the social ladder wisps away at its highest point into the empyrean—but this ultimately transcendental aspect of taste does not mean that there is not a moment at which it is most definitely spatial, and thus material.

One might think of it as the moment of primitive accumulation, and it is no accident that it is when the protagonists of both novels venture past this stage of capitalism and try their hands at actual financial speculation—the very ineffable realms of non-spatialized capital—that they meet their downfalls.* One barely needs to translate "taste" into the Bourdieusian term "social capital"—the exchange rate in both Wharton and Howells is so direct and the roles of social and financial capital so genuinely homologous that very little mediation is required to tell the stories of Lily Bart and Silas Lapham in social or in financial terms; one can continuously switch idioms with little meaning lost.

There are some ambiguities, of course. At times marriage is treated as a form of speculation—often, Lily's behavior toward her suitors resembles that of a very undisciplined investor, jumping off before either profit or loss can be realized, though doing so is a definitive form of loss. At others, marriage is treated more like a form of primitive accumulation or at the most a form of investment in capital goods—a marriage with the Coreys in Rise of Silas Lapham isn't considered a speculative venture (the Corey's position in society is not likely to appreciate or depreciate considerably) but would function more as a simple acquisition of social capital, with no idea of any surplus value accruing from it. Lily views a marriage to Selden as (merely) primitive accumulation—she would have more money than she now has, but with no hope of acquiring more: Selden is not an asset likely to appreciate or to generate a surplus value. (It barely needs to be said that seeing him as such is what leads her to reject him; she craves some speculative aspect to a marriage, a desire which leads her ultimately to consider Rosedale as a potential husband. He is the only character in the novel who might actually appreciate in value.)

But these are rather dull considerations; what excites me about the quote with which I started is that by spatializing taste at the moment of primitive accumulation, it fuses together a large number of different ideas or forms of taste, allowing taste to be expressed in multiple (but always spatial) modes. "Social climbing" is made less figurative. (This process of specialization differs, I think, from what Bourdieu does, because it concerns less the processes of signaling distinction or of reproducing it than of figuring out how to position oneself (literally) to begin acquiring it: where does that moment of primitive accumulation, that "point where taste has to begin," exist?)

Geography is one mode that I am always interested in, and immediately it touches off a spark in my head that we can think of the kind of geographic displacement which Lapham and his wife undertake from rural Vermont to cosmopolitan Boston as precisely this strategy, written on the face of the map. Moving from a hinterland to the metropolis is a form of primitive accumulation of social capital. In Lapham, this tactic of self-displacement is doubled, in fact (though it is, I acknowledge, absent in House of Mirth), with the proposed move from the Lapham's first house to their new home on the higher-status Back Bay.

The way that taste is spatialized in homes is of particular importance to Wharton: architecture was an abiding interest for her, and it plays a crucial role in The House of Mirth as a way of judging the nouveaux riches in New York and assimilating them into the hierarchy already in place. Location is part of it as well, but the structure of houses and their capacities for entertaining properly is critical in the accumulation of social capital and its proper investment. Howells has this too—the Lapham's drawing room is so unsuitable for entertaining that it nearly turns off the Coreys—but at a lower pitch.

Travel is a third spatialization of social capital; it again plays a larger role in Wharton, but it is certainly not absent from Howells. Going to the right places on holiday means running into the right people, which in turn means being invited by them to dinner, which means meeting other "right" people, as well as being able to reciprocate and invite any or all of these "right" people to one's own place. Of course, this social tactic is also highly convenient to the novelist who is always seeking to find ways of throwing her characters together without bending the laws of plausibility, but that takes little away from the interest of the social tactic.

***
Referring to these spatializations of social capital as "primitive accumulation" suggests a bit more than just that they precede more speculative modes of social capital accumulation, and that they differ from those modes. It also suggests—at least to anyone familiar with Marx—that there is a form of violence inherent in these tactics. There doesn't appear to be, however, anything like that attached to the tactics I have outlined—leaving the hinterland for the metropolis, building a home**, or traveling to a fashionable resort seem very little like enslavement or murderous dispossession. (Although in Lapham's case a fairly classic dispossession is in fact lurking in the background of the novel as the source of Lapham's wealth.)

Yet I think it is possible to consider deracination as the violence necessary for the tactic of self-displacement from the hinterland to the metropolis—although it is obviously a very different, more metaphorical kind of violence. Still, it is not wrong to define it as a kind of violence worked upon the self; it is a self-enclosure, and in a novel like Sister Carrie, the brutality of casting oneself into a situation where one has no choice but to become a social climber is quite overt. (It is there in Père Goriot as well, though more romanticized—still, Rastignac expropriates his family's money ruthlessly to fuel his social ascent, and though he is ruthless, it weighs on him.) Even in a novel like Winesburg, Ohio, there is a certain grim coldness to the departure of George Willard; it does, after all, require the death of his mother.

Locating the violence in travel is a little more difficult on the individual level, although as numerous scholars have been pointing out for awhile now, questions of international travel, even in this period, are "imbricated" (which seems to be the word always used) in the general structural relations of imperialism. I find this particular line rather limited at least in the context of these two novels. Although Corey plans on traveling to South America to sell Lapham's paint, that's not the kind of travel I mean here, and all the other instances of travel are domestic—to Dubuque, to a Long Island resort, to Bar Harbour, to Texas. Business in the novel is transnational (and particularly transatlantic), but the social-capital status game isn't, really (though that wasn't really true of Boston at the time—compare Henry Adams's Education).

House of Mirth is quite a bit more transatlantic in terms of its circuits of social capital. On the other hand, it shows an American aristocracy rather wowed by older British and Continental wealth and status; if we're looking to imperialism as the site of violence in this social tactic, then it seems like we'll have to make some adjustments. I honestly haven't thought this through as much as I have the bit about deracination, but it seems to me that whatever violence exists within the tactic of travel is more mediated and less direct than the violence of deracination.

*Well, it's a bit more complicated in Lily's case because her money is never actually used for speculation, but it is the encounter with and desire for speculative schemes which ruins her, as it ultimately ruins Lapham. In both cases, of course, the desire to speculate isn't primary or instinctive, but the result of previous misfortunes, and further misfortunes beyond those connected directly to speculation also befall Lily and Lapham, but the disaster of speculation is the crux or tipping point for both.

**Actually, there might be a fairly easy case to make for the "violence" (broadly construed) of this form of primitive accumulation: building a big house is certainly a type of enclosure and such an undertaking likely is bound to be exploitative of other people's labor. There's the old Brecht quote, "What is the crime of robbing a bank compared to founding one?" Well, I suppose the same goes here.

Also: Read this article from n+1 about serialization in fiction and television: it's fantastic, and also, a little tangentially, about social climbing—in this case, of a genre or form, the serial television drama. At any rate, it pulls a great quote from Balzac which is relevant to the above: "the number of relationships increases the chances of success in every sphere." That is precisely this logic of primitive accumulation I'm pointing to here.

Gilding the Lily

2010-06-03T21:51:00.002-04:00

"Nanny, the younger [Corey sister], had read a great many novels with a keen sense of their inaccuracy as representations of life, and had seen a great deal of life with a sad regret for its difference from fiction."
-from The Rise of Silas Lapham, by William Dean Howells

So, six months into 2010, the goals I had at the beginning of this year have pretty much fallen through. Not surprising, exactly, as deviation from one's resolutions is as much a part of making them as is thinking you're going to keep them. Yet I've had some genuine reasons for failing to read as much Latin American and world literature as I had hoped: the spring semester of courses entailed a lot more reading than the fall, for whatever reason, and I had projected my leisure-reading time according to what I was able to get done in the fall. This is in large part why there have been few posts, particularly over the last 3 months, though not really feeling like blogging also has something to do with it.

There are more important reasons than just lack of time, however; like all grad students, I've been undergoing a sort of persistent personal crisis of how much I have yet to read in my area to feel moderately well-informed about what it is I say I'm studying. It hasn't helped that mid-way through the spring semester, I realized that I felt much more at home and was much, much more interested in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era than in contemporary fiction or culture; not previously having had much sustained interest in the literature of the period, I have some serious gaps.

Rectifying that is the project for the summer and, obviously, the foreseeable (and unforeseeable) future as well. I no longer feel as compelled as I once did to blog about all or at least most of the things I read, but when I do blog, it will likely have some application to this period of literature and history. I hope that won't be boring to any of you who have hung on while I've let this blog languish. It is, at least as far as my experience goes, not a terribly familiar period, and many fewer books from it continue to be read than in the periods preceding it (the American Renaissance) and following it (Lost Generation/Harlem Renaissance/modernism). Dreiser and Wharton are still commonly read, I suppose, and obviously Twain, James, and Crane, but there's not quite the same cachet for the Gilded Age/Progressive Era as for those more illustrious eras on either side. I don't kid myself that I'll be correcting that distribution, but I do hope to share some of the more enjoyable and intriguing aspects of the period's literature, and some of the better criticism written about it.

I intend to interpret the starting points and ending points of the period as broadly as possible, even if that means making virtual nonsense of the terms "Gilded Age" and "Progressive Era" as they have been commonly interpreted. There simply isn't a term that is as inclusive as I wish to be, unfortunately. 1865 is as early as I can reasonably go, but there are numerous writers in the 1920s I want to pull in, and I may even venture a little bit into the 1930s at times.

This period won't be my exclusive focus on this blog, but it is something I'm very excited about, and I hope you'll find it worthwhile. Watch for a post on The House of Mirth and The Rise of Silas Lapham coming soon.

Regionalism, Homogenization, and Mobility

2010-05-29T09:56:00.000-04:00

Somehow I missed this response by Myers to some of his commenters; he clarifies in the last few paragraphs what he means by "loyalty" to the program:

Now, however, a young writer settles upon a literary career by attending a graduate writers’ workshop where she will be instructed in a curriculum that varies little from school to school, and certainly not according to the place where the school happens to be located. After graduation she will join something like a diplomatic corps, being posted from place to place, most likely without ever setting down roots in anything but the common background and common ties of her generation.

I find this idea of generational homogenization (my word, not his) extremely intriguing, although I think Myers overstates the case. Mark McGurl's book, which Myers doesn't mention, delivers a much suppler thesis about the generational impact of writing programs on American fiction writers. McGurl's chapter on the Iowa program is also actually very explicitly about the effects of regionalist aesthetics on its founding faculty and first classes. McGurl sees Iowa's aesthetic as "born in the conjunction of two regionalisms, Midwestern and Southern, with two competing emphases and two distinct characteristic historical figures." He makes a fairly convincing case, I think.

And as for this geographic shuffling, I think once again it may be interesting to add some historical perspective: to put the Program Era in conversation with another periods of increased geographic (and to some extent socioeconomic) mobility for American writers: the so-called "revolt from the village" of mostly Midwestern authors from the period 1915-1930 (so, Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Dawn Powell, Zona Gale, Floyd Dell, Scott Fitzgerald, et al.) which could also be extended backward in time to include Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser, and even William Dean Howells, and outward in geography to include Thomas Wolfe, T. S. Stribling, and H. L. Mencken (as Anthony Channell Hilfer does).