POSTMODERN CULTURE

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  • Crisis In The Gulf, by George Bush, Saddam Hussein, Et Alia. As Told tothe New York Times.

    Frederick M. Dolan

    University of California at Berkeley

     

    . . . the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.

     

    — Paul de Man

     

    In the life of a nation, we’re called upon to define who we are and what we believe. Sometimes the choices are not easy. As today’s President, I ask for your support in the decision I’ve made to stand up for what’s right and condemn what’s wrong all in the cause of peace.

     

    — George Bush

     

    The crisis in the Gulf, as today’s President acknowledges, is in large measure a crisis of self- definition: a matter of identity (as in defining America’s role in a post-cold war world, and indeed of writing the rules for such a world), of marking or highlighting the boundary between self and other (as in the ownership and control of “the world’s largest oil reserves,” or as between the civilized and the uncivil). Following a long Orientalist tradition, the West feels compelled to go elsewhere in search of its defining characteristics, even if this means, to use President Bush’s own metaphor, drawing lines in the sand. As his image forces one to reflect, sand–especially the shifting, wind-blown sand of the Arabian Empty Quarter–is a most unstable medium, and a line drawn in it is likely to be erased with the next change in weather. The contours of the boundary lines and identity President Bush hopes to define remain, it is true, somewhat murky. At the same time, for those who have followed literary theory over the past two decades, the battle over what meaning to assign Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait possesses an uncanny familiarity. The seemingly anarchic spin-doctoring of American officials charged with formulating war aims that seem at once defensible and feasible, and the way in which their efforts have been judged and interpreted in the press, have to do, in particular, with the much-discussed questions of allegory, symbol, and irony.

     

    At first glance, the debate in Congress and the media appears to be an argument over the appropriate allegorical reading of the Gulf crisis, with the Bush administration insisting on the pre-text of World War II and the lessons of Munich, and its critics favoring the script of Vietnam. To much of the public, the Bush administration’s deployment of nearly 400,000 troops, and billions of dollars of weaponry both high-tech and low, is allegorically intelligible in terms of the story of America’s tragic and ambiguous “involvement” in Vietnam. As in Vietnam, it is said, the United States is taking the lead in fighting somebody else’s war; as in Vietnam, the Middle East is figured as a “quagmire” in which American troops will become–what else?–“bogged down.” The Middle East will be transformed into a huge Lebanon, with the emergence of hopelessly ambiguous and complex factions intractable to the Manichaean American mind. American morale will gradually be destroyed, and America’s standing in the world will once again be diminished.

     

    Against this allegorical interpretation of the crisis, officials, media pundits, and a farrago of “experts” on matters from national security to Middle Eastern politics insist that the events taking place in the Gulf bear no relevant relationship to Vietnam. Our commitment in the Gulf is clear and forceful where it was ambiguous and shifting in Vietnam. As opposed to the gradual escalation that characterized Vietnam, plans for war in the Gulf, in so far as we can tell from press reports, suggest an all-out, all-or-nothing operation. More importantly–though for ideological reasons this point,qua allegory, must remain tacit–the campaign against Saddam Hussein involves “big principles” and “vital interests” (the tacit point being that Vietnam involved neither). The vital interests are variously described as oil or jobs; the big principles are those of territorial integrity, opposition to aggressive war, and respect for United Nations resolutions. The allegorical pre-text for the Persian Gulf crisis, in this optic, must be World War II, in which economic interests and unassailable principles fortuitously combined to produce a “Good War.” Indeed, the invasion of Kuwait was allegorized almost from the beginning of the crisis. The first reported invocation of the Munich Analogy is attributed to “Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, [who] called Mr. Hussein `the Hitler of the Middle East’ and criticized Mr. Bush for not having moved earlier to forestall an invasion.”1

     

    The significance of the crisis was more fully articulated the next day in a column by Flora Lewis entitled “Fruits of Appeasement.”2 Characterizing the takeover of Kuwait as a “blitzkrieg invasion,” Lewis notes how it caused “European commentators to remember Hitler,” whose lust for power also provoked a “dithering argument over whether it was wiser to indulge him or try to isolate and block him . . . until it was too late.” Like Hitler, Hussein’s aims are not regional, but global: “he is determined to become the great leader of the Arab nation, and not just another nation but a world power based on guns and oil. His relentless drive for a nuclear weapon is not only to threaten his neighbors and Israel; it is to change the whole balance of power.” The day after Lewis’s column appeared, A.M. Rosenthal confirmed her reading, characterizing the invasion as “a declaration of war against Western power and economic independence” and asserting that “Western leaders have failed in their duty to prepare action against the plainest threats of aggression since Adolf Hitler.”3 A few days later he rounded out the picture by placing the invasion of Kuwait within a larger narrative whose plot is driven by anti-Semitism: “Hussein’s dream of dominating the Arab Middle East was never separate from his vision of ultimate duty and destiny–the elimination of the state of Israel. […] For all other Arabs who long for Israel’s extinction, Saddam Hussein’s passion against the Jews is what counts. . . .”4

     

    Bush quickly caught on. Although in his first statements he invoked Hitler only obliquely, describing how “Iraq’s tanks stormed in blitzkrieg fashion through Kuwait in a few short hours,”5 and attempted to justify possible war by reference to U.S. economic and energy interests, by the middle of August he was relying heavily on the allegory of World War II. In a speech to the Pentagon, for example, the President reminded his audience that “A half a century ago, our nation and the world paid dearly for appeasing an aggressor,” and went on to vow that “We are not going to make the same mistake again.”6 Over the next few months, Bush struggled to make U.S. policy in the Gulf allegorically intelligible through reference to World War II. Iraqi aggression, Bush said in early November as he announced new troop deployments, “is not just a challenge to the security of Kuwait and other Gulf nations, but to the better world that we have all hoped to build in the wake of the cold war. The state of Kuwait must be restored, or no nation will be safe, and the promising future we anticipate will indeed be jeopardized.”7 In December Bush was still offering this theme. In Hussein, he insisted, like Hitler, we find “a dangerous dictator all too willing to use force, who has weapons of mass destruction and is seeking new ones and who desires to control one of the world’s key resources. . . .”8 Indeed, Hussein was at one point alleged to beworse than Hitler.

     

    Whatis the allegorical significance of World War II? The obvious meaning has to do with the dangers of appeasing tyrants, of course, and this is the interpretation supplied by the Bush administration. But I think I can discern in the speeches and pronouncements and debates another meaning as well, one that becomes accessible through Paul de Man’s interpretation of the ideological function of the “symbol” in Romantic literature.9 The symbol was understood by the Romantics as a privileged representation whose meaning derived from its evocation of an extra-linguistic relationship as opposed to significance generated through linguistic conventions or relationships, such as allegory, where the meaning of a story depends upon a larger narrative. For de Man, the appeal of a symbolic understanding of representation is to allow the time-bound, finite subject to “supplement” himself with nature’s eternal laws:

     

    The temptation exists . . . for the self to borrow, so to speak, the temporal stability that it lacks from nature, and to devise strategies by means of which nature is brought down to a human level while still escaping from "the unimaginable touch of time." (De Man, 197)

     

    Wordsworth, for example, represents the “movements of nature” as “endurance within a pattern of change, the assertion of a metatemporal, stationary state beyond the apparent decay of a mutability that attacks certain outward aspects of nature but leaves the core intact” as in “The immeasurable height / Of woods decaying, never to be decayed / The stationary blast of waterfalls. . . .” (The Prelude, quoted in De Man, 197). Through such privileged signs, the subject moves beyond temporal limits to a confrontation with the eternal real. For de Man, however, the very idea of a symbol, as a figure, relies on an act of “ontological bad faith,” a mystification of language that suppresses the dependence ofalllinguistic figuration on a range of pre-texts or pre-existing literary signs.

     

    The utility of de Man’s analysis is that it enables us to grasp that the official allegorizing of the Gulf crisis is notput forward as allegory; rather, the intent is to establish Iraqi aggression as asymbol in the Romantic sense. World War II was the “Good War” because it rescued us from our finite, mutable, temporal concerns and put us in direct contact with the Real: the eternal, unchanging moral and political principles that define us as a nation. President Bush hopes to convince us that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait offers an opportunity to step outside the everyday administrative concerns of politics and business as usual, and renew our commitment to the principles that make us who we are; it is in this sense that, in Bush’s words, the Gulf crisis calls us to “define who we are and what we believe.” According to de Man, the way out of the bad faith of the symbolic leads through irony, but he is quick to warn that irony carries with it its own potential for mystification. Through irony, he argues, the self is led to recognize its constructed rather than original character:

     

    The reflective disjunction [characteristic of irony] not only occursby means of language as a privileged category, but it transfers the self out of the empirical world into a world constituted out of, and in, language--a language that it finds in the world like one entity among others, but that remains unique in being the only entity by means of which it can differentiate itself from the world. (De Man, 213)

     

    It is too crude, however, to say that irony subverts the claim of symbolic language to have accessed the Real by exposing and foregrounding the lack of closure between the linguistic sign and its meaning, because the latter is characteristic of figural language generally: the “structure shared by irony and allegory is that, in both cases, the relationship between sign and meaning is discontinuous, involving an extraneous principle that determines the point and the manner at and in which the relationship is articulated” (De Man, 209). What is unique about irony is its dynamism:

     

    Irony is unrelievedvertige, dizziness to the point of madness. Sanity can exist only because we are willing to function within the conventions of duplicity and dissimulation, just as social language dissimulates the inherent violence of the actual relationships between human beings. Once this mask is shown to be a mask, the authentic being underneath appears necessarily as on the verge of madness." (De Man, 215-216)

     

    For this reason, irony can operate as a trope of demystification, replacing the reassurance of interpretative conventions with the madness of endless interpretation. Yet as the current contest of allegories suggests, a mere plurality of competing perspectives, however healthy for politics, does not suffice for the purposes of demystification. And it is demystification–the sifting and evaluation of truth claims, the establishment of a reliable account of the world–upon which the institutional privilege of journalism thrives. In this context it is noteworthy that the press has resorted to irony in its attempt to cast doubt on official explanations of policy. In a world of agonistic interpretations–literally, apolemicalpublic sphere in which no absolute ground is recognized or can be discovered–the press can fulfill its pledge to deliver the Real only through ironizing the public agon, that is, only by analyzing it in terms of meanings which are different from and displace those signified by the public discourses themselves. To place itself on the ground of the Real, journalism must constantly foreground the discrepancy between the public claims and the “real” meaning of these claims. Thus the press forces to self-consciousness the constructed character of public discourse, in part simply by highlighting the availability of differing allegorical readings of the event. Bush’s Munich Analogy never quite took, and the public and press continued to find in the stories of Vietnam allegorical meanings of a more relevant nature. A few days after Bush’s November escalation of the U.S. troop presence in the Gulf, doubts about the Munich analogy and fear of a “repeat” of Vietnam were front-page news: “In a joint statement, the House Speaker, Representative Thomas S. Foley, Democrat of Washington, and the majority leader, Representative Richard A. Gephardt, Democrat of Missouri, said, `We urge the President to explain fully to the American people the strategy and aims that underlie his decision to dispatch additional forces to the region’.” The article moved quickly to frame the issue in terms of the appropriate allegorical reading:

     

    On explaining the motives for American action, President Bush has stopped emphasizing the need to protect oil supplies, an issue he once cited along with the need to resist aggression. He now concentrates on opposing aggression, comparing Mr. Hussein to Hitler. There are critics of both rationales, and a fear of repeating the Vietnam experience--suffering great loss of life for little purpose. [...] One-third of voters surveyed on Election Day opposed American military action that would produce heavy casualties, a level of opposition reached during the Vietnam War only after several years of fighting. The survey also found the clear beginnings of the sort of partisan division that tore the country during Vietnam: two-thirds of those opposing American action in the gulf, and in particular, Black Americans, voted Democratic. But more than half of those who say the nation should persevere even in the face of many casualties voted Republican.10

     

    A few days later, the public’s insistence on allegorizing the Gulf crisis through Vietnam was again front-page news: “as Americans confront the possibility of another war, history seems to present a troubling multiple-choice question: Would this be another World War II, or another Vietnam?”11

     

    Amidst the clash of allegories, the Bush administration reeled to-and-fro from one explanation to another, to the point where narrative incoherency itself was explicitly thematized as a public concern. In early November, a week before the escalation, Bush tested the waters by issuing more condemnations of Iraq. The result was hysteria among Republicans running for re-election in the Senate and House, who attacked Bush for deploying confusing messages: “Republican strategists continued to express their disdain for the performance of the White House in this critical week before the election. `They don’t have their act together,’ one counselor to the White House said. `They’re living in a fog. They’re confusing the American public.’”12 The inability to tell a coherent story quickly became a public, not merely partisan, issue: “A common complaint . . . [among the public] was that the Bush Administration seemed unable to come up with a consistent–and compelling–account of what the United States was preparing to fight for. Was it to protect oil sources, they wanted to know, or to prevent further aggression, or simply to maintain the status quo?” (Kolbert, A10). Indeed, within a few weeks it began to appear as if journalists were more concerned about the incoherency of the narratives on offer than with the substance of policy itself, and by mid-November, the inability of the administration to construct a satisfying story had become a source of frustration within Bush’s cabinet itself: “Mr. Baker, Mr. Bush’s former campaign chairman, is said to have grown exasperated with White House speech writers’ inability to present the President’s gulf policy in a simple, coherent and compelling fashion so that it will have the sustained support of the American public.”13 Bush himself was eventually forced to acknowledge widespread fears of ambiguity and lack of closure: “if there must be war . . . I pledge to you there will not be any murky ending” (“Excerpts From President’s News Conference” 4). In effect, Bush promised that the war would be fought in such a way as to allow for the telling of coherent realist narratives, with endings implicit in their beginnings and unambiguous resolutions.

     

    But the press also emphasizes the difference between sign and meaning by undermining in its own voice the coherency of the proffered explanations and justifications. Very early in the crisis, Thomas L. Friedman drew attention to the vagueness of the Bush administration’s justifications of policy and attributed this to U.S. officials’ unwillingness to state publicly the real rationale for the policy.14 “[S]peaking privately,” these officials list “three interests at stake in the Gulf. One is the price of oil. Another is who controls the oil. The third is the need to uphold the integrity of territorial boundaries so that predatory regional powers will not simply begin devouring their neighbors.” But Friedman goes on to question even these “private” reasons as valid explanations for the policy, suggesting at one point that, for Bush and his advisers, U.S. control of the Persian Gulf is such a deeply held assumption that they may be incapable of explicitly defending it. The real explanation, Friedman suggests, is that the United States wants to preserve the status quo in the Persian Gulf, a desire prompted by economic interest: “Troops have been sent to retain control of oil in the hands of pro-American Saudi Arabia, so prices will remain low.” Anna Quindlen bemoans the discrepancy between sign and meaning in a similar vein:

     

    Our reality has outstripped the traditional stories of brave men going out to fight and die for a great cause while their women wait staunchly at home and provide security and normalcy for their children. We have become more complicated than the scripts of old movies. Now we have brave women going out to fight and die for a cause none of us is sure of while their children struggle to feel secure with grandparents or aunts and uncles. We are going to war for oil, and, by extension, for the economy. The President trots out his Hitler similes to convince us otherwise.15

     

    At times, the general public awareness of this discrepancy, fueled, of course, by the rhetorical strategies of the press itself, acquires a news value of its own: “what marks the current crisis is the way Americans are talking openly about the President’s inability to `sell’ war to a wary populace” (Kolbert, A1).

     

    The reader will have noticed that in these examples, the “dynamism” or “madness” that de Man attributes to irony is conspicuously lacking; instead, irony is presented as yet another journalistic factoid, to be objectively represented. As practiced byThe New York Times, ironization has the opposite effect of demystification. De Man cautions against seeing irony as “a kind of therapy, a cure of madness by means of the spoken or written word”:

     

    When we speak . . . of irony originating at the cost of the empirical self, the statement has to be taken seriously enough to be carried to the extreme: absolute irony is a consciousness of madness, itself the end of all consciousness; it is a consciousness of a non-consciousness, a reflection on madness from the inside of madness itself. But this reflection is made possible only by the double structure of ironic language: the ironist invents a form of himself that is "mad" but that does not know his own madness; he then proceeds to reflect on his madness thus objectified. (De Man, 216)

     

    This, de Man says, makes it easy to see irony as a kind of folie lucidewhich, in allowing “language to prevail even in extreme stages of self-alienation,” might be viewed as a remedy for the mad displacement of sign and meaning through rigorous self-consciousness about the irony of language. This indeed seems to be precisely the claim of the press, which, under the circumstances of a phantasmagoric public sphere, maintains its claim to a privileged surveillance and objectivity by delivering the truth that all public representations are false.

     

    But to construe irony in this way, de Man argues, is the ultimate mystification. To illustrate, he discusses Jean Starobinski’s reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann’sPrinzessin Brambilla. In Hoffmann’s tale, an acting couple who confuse their own lives with the “meaningful” roles they play on stage are “`cured’ of this delusion by the discovery of irony,” after which they find happiness in domesticity. But as de Man insists, “the bourgeois idyll of the end is treated by Hoffmann as pure parody . . . far from having returned to their natural selves, [the hero and heroine] are more than ever playing the artificial parts of the happy couple” (De Man, 217-218). De Man concludes that “at the very moment that irony is thought of as a knowledge able to order and cure the world, the source of its invention immediately runs dry. The instant that it construes the fall of the self as an event that could somehow benefit the self, it discovers that it has in fact substituted death for madness” (De Man, 218). For de Man, then, “true irony” would be “irony to the second power or `irony of irony.’” Through continual invention, such ironizing would state “the continued impossibility of reconciling the world of fiction with the actual world” (De Man, 218). This is achieved only by refusing to see irony as a trope of mastery or reconciliation; and yet it is precisely as a sign of mastery that irony is deployed by the press. Ironically–I use the term advisedly–the Bush administration occupies the vanguard when it comes to the impossibility of reconciling world and text, in its insistence on the impossibility of knowing what the U.S. Constitution says about the authority to use force, and hence of knowing precisely how the Constitution is to be applied to the real world. While Congress insists on the text’s legibility (only Congress, Congress says, has the power to make war), Bush insists on its ambiguity:

     

    On Tuesday, influential lawmakers pressed Mr. Bush to call a special session, with many members of Congress saying that the President would be usurping their constitutional power to send American troops into combat if he acted without Congressional approval. Mr. Bush responded today by pulling a copy of the Constitution from his suit pocket at a meeting with Congressional leaders from both parties and telling him that he understood what it said about the responsibility of Congress to declare war. But, he added, "It also says that I'm the Commander in Chief."

     

    Later, Baker had a two-hour meeting with congressional leaders and held a news conference:

     

    While agreeing that only Congress has the authority to declare war, Mr. Baker said, "There are many, many circumstances and situations indeed where there could be action taken against American citizens or against American interests that would call for a very prompt and substantial response." Mr. Baker said that Mr. Bush would follow the Constitution, but added with a smile, "It's a question of what the Constitution requires."16

     

    But Bush’s insistence on the ambiguity of the Constitution should not lead us to assimilate his conduct in office to Ronald Reagan’s postmodern presidency. While Reagan taught us to celebrate, and above all to exploit, a political and social world in which distinctions between the simulated and the real were simply irrelevant, Bush, it would appear, intends to lead us back to the Real, to invent a politics beyond that of Reagan’s handlers–which, of course, means war, since death, as always, is the union card of the Real, the one “event” that escapes the handler’s grasp. Bush, we might say, is Romantic where Reagan was postmodern. Arrayed against Bush’s Romantic symbolism is the weak irony–that is, the mystified lucidity–of the press. Indeed, lucidity–in a precisely defined official sense–is fast becoming a condition of death as well as life. In the issue ofThe New York Times that featured the report on widespread public awareness of the discrepancy between political sign and political meaning, an editorial referred to the Louisiana Supreme Court’s ruling that a murderer who became insane after he was condemned to death could be forced to take a drug that would render him “mentally competent” to undergo execution. The weak irony cultivated by theTimes may well involve a similar economy: we must be just lucid enough–that is, just skeptical and uncertain enough–to feel that we master the world, so that we may sacrifice ourselves to its truths, and in particular to the truths of who we are and what we believe.

     

    Notes

     

    1. R.W. Apple, Jr., “Invading Iraqis Seize Kuwait And Its Oil; U.S. Condemns Attack, Urges United Action,”The New York Times, August 3, 1990, A1, A8.

     

    2. Flora Lewis, “Fruits of Appeasement,”The New York Times, August 4, 1990, 24.

     

    3. A.M. Rosenthal, “Making a Killer,”The New York Times, August 5, 1990, E19.

     

    4. A.M. Rosenthal, “Saddam’s Next Target,”The New York Times, August 9, 1990, A23.

     

    5. “Excerpts From Bush’s Statement on U.S. Defense of Saudis,”The New York Times, August 9, 1990, A18.

     

    6. Quoted in R.W. Apple, Jr., “Bush Says Iraqi Aggression Threatens `Our Way of Life,’”The New York Times, August 16, 1990, A14.

     

    7. “Excerpts From Bush’s Remarks on His Order to Enlarge U.S. Gulf Force,”The New York Times, November 9, 1990, A12.

     

    8. “Excerpts From President’s News Conference on Crisis in Gulf,”The New York Times, December 1, 1990, 4.

     

    9. See Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187-228.

     

    10. Michael Oreskes, “A Debate Unfolds Over Going To War Against The Iraqis,”The New York Times, November 12, 1990, A1.

     

    11. Elizabeth Kolbert, “No Talk of Glory, but of Blood on Sand,”The New York Times, November 15, 1990, A1.

     

    12. Maureen Dowd, “Bush Intensifies A War Of Words Against The Iraqis,”The New York Times, November 1, 1990, A1.

     

    13. Thomas L. Friedman, “U.S. Jobs at Stake in Gulf, Baker Says,”The New York Times, November 14, 1990, A8.

     

    14. Thomas L. Friedman, “U.S. Gulf Policy: Vague `Vital Interests,’”The New York Times, August 12, 1990, A1.

     

    15. Anna Quindlen, “New World at War,”The New York Times, September 15, 1990, A21.

     

    16. Maureen Dowd, “President Seems to Blunt Calls For Gulf Session,”The New York Times, October 29, 1990, A1.

     

  • Sartre and Local Aesthetics: Rethinking Sartre as an Oppositional Pragmatist

    Paul Trembath

    Colorado State University

     

    And that lie that success was a moving upward. What a crummy lie they kept us dominated by. Not only could you travel upward toward success but you could travel downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your own selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same time.

     

    –Ralph Ellison,
    Invisible Man

     

    The tension between art and politics looms large in the life and work of Jean-Paul Sartre. The child-aesthete depicted in The Words, the celebrity of Post-World War II Existentialism, the Marxist revisionist of The Critique of Dialectical Reason and, arguably, the uneasy Freudian of The Idiot of the Family–all of these and more seem like a family of conflicting self-representations. Contemporary interpreters of Sartre find themselves addressing several related dilemmas. First, was Sartre a philosopher, an artist, or a political theorist? Second, to what extent did Sartre’s literary writings contribute productively to an effective oppositional politics? Finally, given the early Sartre’s modernist use of phenomenological metaphors (as an apolitical philosopher) and the later Marxist Sartre’s interest in political “totalization,” how can Sartre survive familiar postmodern and poststructural criticisms of phenomenology, ontology, and Marxist theories of totality? I think that the later Sartre understood the hermetic redundancies produced by such questions and–having lost interest in art, philosophy, and totalizing social theory– strove to manipulate his multivalent historical reception in the service of specific political projects. These projects were invariably oppositional. In retrospect, they illustrate how Sartre moved away from professional philosophy, literature, and totalizing social theory toward a commitment to specific political protests calculated to reinvent the social world and our experience of it. I propose that the later militant Sartre makes possible a new understanding of aesthetics itself, one that anticipates John Rajchman’s discussion of Michel Foucault’s “politics of revolt.”1

     

    In his biographical narrative on Sartre, Ronald Hayman writes that Sartre “used his life to test ways of facing up to the evils of contemporary history. If he was not always honest, it was partly because honesty was a luxury he could not afford.”2 Hayman’s suggestion that Sartre “used his life” to affect what he considered the “evils” of contemporary history–racism, dictatorship, colonialism, multinational capitalism, the serial family, and so forth– requires us to consider how Sartre’s “life” was largely made up of the literary, philosophical, and political-theoretical representations that people had come to associate with his name and public reputation. These representations were what Sartre “used” or manipulated to give voice to different political positions and programs. Hayman is unclear about what the word “honesty” implies in this passage, but the word is provocative. Hayman’s use of “honesty” suggests something like an unprofitable lack of social versatility; in a world as diverse in knowledges, truths, economies, and political interests as Sartre’s in the 60s and 70s, unilateral moral concepts like “honesty” serve only to bury any versatile engagement of seemingly contradictory political commitments beneath an ultimately reactionary–and apologist– language of hypocrisy. If Sartre allowed himself to be described variously as an Existentialist, a Marxist, or a Maoist (to name only a few of his provisional “identities”), his lack of representational stability–his inconsistency in Kantian moral terms–made his larger objectives seem dubious to a public trained to recognize in Sartre’s political versatility only his inability to take a definitive political stance of his own.

     

    Clearly such a stance–when compared to the complex, changing, and situation-specific political commitments of Sartre–would have limited Sartre’s concrete ability to contribute to political change. In fact, the “luxury” of political “honesty,” in Hayman’s supramoral sense, would have ultimately re-empowered the problematic concept of historical totality that the activist Sartre arguably left behind with his “theoretical” Marxism, or the luxurious assumption of representational accuracy he had once assumed for himself as the phenomenological ontologist of French Existentialism.3 For the militant Sartre, “honesty” became the political, theoretical, and philosophical luxury of stepping outside one’s specific historical situation, of stressing Truth to disguise the workings of power, of theorizing Totality at the expense of advocating difference, and of describing Consciousness and Authenticity authoritatively instead of letting languages speak uniquely for themselves. Such “luxuries,” I shall argue, became untenable for Sartre toward the end of his productive life, when he was not only post-aesthetic (at least in traditional terms), but post-philosophical and post-theoretical as well.

     

    The working distinction I want to draw between Sartrean philosophy and Sartrean critical theory is roughly the distinction between Sartrean Existentialism and Sartrean Marxism. Sartre became dissatisfied with the former because of its ahistoricism and naive faith in the representational function of phenomenological metaphors. He became dissatisfied with the latter because it attempted to describe authoritatively and comprehensively the social freedom of others. Sartre’s rejection of Existentialism, and his reasons for it, are today commonly recognized and understood in intellectual circles. However, the differences between the theoretical Sartre of The Critique of Dialectical Reason and the militant Sartre of the later demonstrations and interviews remain to be elucidated.

     

    The theoretical Sartre and the militant Sartre are not consistently the same Sartre. Both are Marxist. But the theoretical Sartre of the Critique is a Marxist revolutionary–that is, someone with a total political program in mind that will definitively transform society. The militant Sartre, in contrast, is one who rejects any such authoritative program and, in part, the goal of revolution with it. This Sartre sees “revolution” as the ongoing business of revolt, not as the political end of a long history of class struggles. The militant Sartre emphasizes the historical materialism of Marxism but de- emphasizes the totalizing objectives of Marxist theory; where he once stressed the importance of global revolution, Sartre now stresses the importance of strategic local rebellions. Neither does he do this in particular texts, something of a first for the endlessly writing Sartre; he does it in his acts. His attempts to get arrested in political demonstrations, his participation in explicitly political debates and discussions, his visit to a well-known Western “terrorist,” his endorsement of oppositional political regimes around the world, and his publicized travels to diverse third world countries struggling for political autonomy4–these and additional activities demonstrate how Sartre used his global fame to lend credence and voice to marginal or oppressed political causes worldwide. (I will demonstrate this at some length later on.) In each instance, we see a Sartre who, dissatisfied with his professional reputation as a novelist, playwright, philosopher, comprehensive social theorist, and so forth, strategically uses his Euro-American cultural reception to draw public attention to marginal politics and underprivileged peoples throughout the world.

     

    This shift in emphasis from globalizing social theory, philosophy, and literature to militant local practice is not the only change we can recognize in the activist Sartre. Sartre also undertook an implicit revaluation of the aesthetic. In a historicist or even pragmatist way that anticipates Michel Foucault’s discussion of an “aesthetics of existence,”5 Sartre came to demonstrate that the whole notion of private creativity–so much a reified part of our collective Western culture–needed to be reinvested with a sense of public effectiveness. That is, Sartre strove to reinvent the concept of the aesthetic not merely in commonly expected terms of private expression and production, but in terms of public and historical effectivity. For the later Sartre, “artwork” was no longer something one did in quietistic solitude, only to emerge publically with the hermetic results of one’s private labor (a painting, a play, an opera, a new theory of art, and so forth). The aesthetic became the entire realm of social invention–a realm utterly mediated by our continuous responsibility for the freedom and power of self-determination of other social “selves.” This, I think, is Sartre’s most neglected contribution to contemporary arts, to philosophy and literary theory and, perhaps most important of all, to social criticism.

     

    In Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy, John Rajchman describes the writings of Foucault in a way that makes possible a post-voluntaristic discussion of freedom. The later, activist Sartre both enacted and anticipated this conception of freedom. In his chapter entitled “The Politics of Revolt,” Rajchman explains that “[l]ike Sartre, Foucault was an ‘intellectual’ with public positions, and as such, he had to worry about the political aims and consequences of both his histories and their methods” (43). Consequently, Rajchman is willing to discuss similarities between Sartre and Foucault that have gone unexamined largely because of the success of poststructuralist rhetoric and its critique of voluntarism or, of late, what has been described as “philosophy of mind.”6 In response to the way Sartre has been received recently (he has been ignored), Rajchman acknowledges that:

     

    Foucault has often been seen as Sartre's philosophical rival. Yet as an intellectual he shares with Sartre an inclination to present his work as nonacademic and nonspecialized, and as addressed in a nontechnocratic way to basic issues in the lives of all of us. And like Sartre, as Foucault assumes this intellectual role, he moves from primarily epistemological to primarily political concerns, identified with an oppositional Left, though not with a party, or with any claim to bureaucratic or charismatic authority. (Michel Foucault, 43.)

     

    What Rajchman describes as the central difference between Sartre and Foucault is their different approaches to freedom. Sartre, who Rajchman asserts “attempted to make freedom into the philosophical problem” (Michel Foucault, p.44), conceptualized freedom in a way that gave the phenomenological subject priority over the contingencies of history, whereas “Foucault’s commitment [is] to a nonvoluntaristic, nonhumanistic freedom within history” (45). Rajchman describes the difference between Sartre’s voluntaristic idea of freedom and Foucault’s historical idea of freedom as the difference between “anthropological” and “nominalist” ideas of freedom. Sartre’s anthropological idea of freedom, according to Rajchman, remains tied to a politics of revolution which has the final liberation of Man as its objective, whereas Foucault’s nominalist/historicist conception of freedom manifests itself in the world as a continuous politics of revolt–a politics that attempts “to occasion new ways of thinking . . . and sees freedom not as the end of domination or as our removal from history, but rather as the revolt through which history may constantly be changed” (Michel Foucault, p.123). As Rajchman explains:

     

    [a]nthropology entails that we are free because we have a nature that is real or one we must realize; nominalist history assumes that our "nature" in fact consists of those features of ourselves by reference to which we are sorted into polities and groups. Our real freedom is found in dissolving or changing the polities that embody our nature, and as such it is asocial and anarchical. No society or polity could be based on it, since it lies precisely in the possibility of constant change. Our real freedom is thus political, though it is never finalizable, legislatable, or rooted in our nature. (123)

     

    I quote Rajchman at some length because his emphasis on a certain tacit idea of “freedom” in the texts of Foucault makes it possible to recast Sartre as a nonvoluntaristic local aesthetician. I suggested earlier that Sartre’s activism might encourage us to re-evaluate aesthetics, not in terms of the beautiful, the sublime, the innovative, the problematic, and so forth, but instead in terms of social efficacy. And because Sartre’s activism is oppositional, because it always takes on explicitly political and counter- hegemonic emphases, critics who wish to aestheticize Sartre’s political activities need to remind themselves that Sartre’s effective/aesthetic practices are always activities of protest against specific configurations of political authority. Thus Rajchman’s Foucauldian conception of a post-revolutionary politics of revolt, as it empowers my reinvention of Sartre, might usefully be redescribed as an aesthetics of revolt.

     

    This use of “aesthetics” may pose problems for many contemporary readers, and with good reason. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin warns us brilliantly and convincingly that the “aestheticization of politics” can coincide historically with the emergence of political fascism.7 Benjamin argues that critics and artists who wish in some way to associate artwork with political power must do so in projects that politicize artwork, not in projects that aestheticize politics. The politicization of artwork, Benjamin argues, helps break down political hegemony in a way that encourages Marxist participatory democracy. The aestheticization of politics, in contrast, elevates political regimes and their leading representatives to an almost mythic status of unquestionable authority, thus obscuring the real concrete workings of power and exploitation by drawing attention instead to transcendental narratives about national destiny, the greatness of the people, spirit of place, racial purity, and so on.

     

    Benjamin’s useful distinction between politicized aesthetics and aestheticized politics has become too general and constraining in discussions of aesthetics and politics. Moreover, its unquestioned heuristic authority might make it possible for critics to interpret Sartre’s pragmatist aesthetics of revolt, prematurely and too simplistically, as an instance of aestheticized politics. Benjamin’s distinction, in short, has taken on a kind of automatic legitimacy in critical discussions; it divides political artists up all too neatly between the good guys and the bad guys, between desirable Marxist artists who shake up the artworld by exposing its complicity with forms of political power and domination, and undesirable fascistic mystifiers who, instead of demonstrating critically how art is a form of historical power, legitimate political power by giving it an aesthetic and mythical identity. The lauding of Hans Haacke in recent art criticism, for instance, and the complementary castigating of Joseph Beuys–the former for his “politicized art” and the latter for his “aestheticized politics”–demonstrate quite clearly just how automatic Benjamin’s overly polaric distinction has become.8

     

    Writing critically of Joseph Beuys in his essay “Haacke, Broodthaers, Beuys,” Stefan Germer claims that “Beuys . . . made all historical reality disappear behind a self-created myth of the artist-hero,”9 and that Beuys’s theory of social sculpture presented “creativity . . . as the means to shape and change society” (OCTOBER 68). In a discussion that defers constantly, if implicitly, to the authority of Benjamin’s metaphors and the critical positions they shape, Germer writes:

     

    [b]y identifying political and artistic practice with one another, Beuys avoids the relevance of his activity, since he borrows for it the aura of the political. The necessary precondition of this is the aestheticization of the political. Abstracting from actual conditions, Beuys in effect invents state and society, thus making both into artistic creation. (OCTOBER 68.)

     

    Germer’s critique of Beuys allows me to demonstrate how Benjamin’s critique of aestheticized politics, although important and necessary, should not automatically discredit my Foucauldian revision of Sartre as a local aesthetician. Germer’s Benjaminian critique of Beuys is based largely on Beuys’s belief “that, by inventing rather than analyzing social conditions, he could actually contribute to their change” (italics mine; OCTOBER, p.66). Germer’s use of “invention” invokes a whole tradition of thinking in which voluntaristic subjects supposedly create the world in which they live, unconstrained by their historical conditions. In such a view politicians are indeed “artists” whose “wills” create the social world–privileged subjects who manipulate social individuals, with truly epic panache, as the medium of their heroic self-expression. But after Rajchman on Foucault, the word “invention” can take on an entirely different sense–one that has nothing to do with the “out- moded concept of creativity,” or of the equally out-moded concept of the voluntaristic hero-artist who invents our political reality in the manner of a high Modernist “genius” creating an innovative painting or poem. It is this more recent view of “invention”–as it implies a nominalist aesthetics of historical effects rather than an anthropological aesthetics of self-expression–that Sartre’s activism and Rajchman’s work on Foucault prepare us to consider.

     

    Clearly Sartre’s “aesthetics of revolt” is as intolerant of aestheticized politics–and certainly of fascism–as is the politicized art Benjamin advocates. Any aestheticization of politics, in Benjamin’s sense as well as Germer’s, coincides with the valorization of a regime, that is, with the legitimation of some form of political authority or domination–precisely what Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt seeks constantly to challenge. In fact, if we were to understand Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt as a politics we would need first to redefine politics as the counter-hegemonic practice of local resistance rather than as the structured and hegemonic practice of political domination. In short, Sartre aestheticizes continual resistance to political power, not political regimes themselves.

     

    I say that Sartre’s practices of resistance are inventive because, in Rajchman’s Foucauldian sense, they freely contribute to the social transformation of polities and groups and, in effect, reinvent the world (and our potential experience of it) by so doing. In no way does this sense of “invention,” as it pertains to a nominalist aesthetics of revolt, reproduce the modernist/anthropological vocabulary of “creativity,” “genius,” the “hero-artist,” and so forth that is so central to Benjamin’s description, and condemnation, of aestheticized politics. Germer, for example, criticizes Beuys’s work by suggesting that Beuys’s privileging of “invention” over “analysis” in discussions of how best to describe and initiate social change–as well as his corresponding belief that people “invent state and society, thus making both into artistic creation”–relies upon an inevitable anthropological conception of invention. But such a (modernist) conception of invention is not the only one at our critical disposal, and Germer writes as if it is. The fact is that after Foucault’s dicussions of ethics and aesthetics in The Use of Pleasure, and after Rajchman’s redescription of Foucault’s aesthetics as a free politics of resistance, Benjamin’s unequivocal identification of “invention” with a mythology of “creativity,” as it sometimes appears in art criticism of a materialist persuasion, has become as out-moded as the very concepts it set out to criticize.

     

    My discussions of Rajchman on Foucault and of the Benjaminian Germer on Beuys put us in position to revaluate Sartre as a kind of oppositional pragmatist or local aesthetician. In contrast with Germer, Sartre realizes that analysis is simply one pragmatic tool that enables the reinvention of society by producing effects within and upon it, but that it is not the only tool at our disposal. In fact, analysis is only one kind of effective/inventive practice; there are numerous others, and no single one is unilaterally the most conducive to participatory democracy. Instead, the context and the desired objective of any political project must determine the tools and practices that, in a given situation, contribute most effectively to social change. Sartre also realizes that abstractions, ideologies, religions and so forth produce specific effects on simultaneously collective and local individuals. Such a critical position makes it possible for Sartre to acknowledge how his public reception as something as general and hopelessly over-determined as an “Existentialist” can nonetheless empower the specific effects his thought and practice have upon concrete social individuals.

     

    The major difference between Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt and Beuys’s social sculpture–at least as Benjamin inspires automatic criticism of the latter–is that Sartre’s work pursues political ends whereas Beuys’s work pursues predominantly aesthetic ends. That is, Beuys’s theory of social sculpture is designed to give us new ideas about art, whereas Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt strives primarily to bring about political change. This suggests enormous dissimilarities between Sartre, as I see him, and Beuys, at least as Germer sees him. Germer seems to believe that Beuys’s social sculpture, as it strives to produce further mythologies for an already ahistorical theory of art, engenders historical confusion in the service of Beuys’s “artistic” reception, and does so at the expense of specific examinations of political praxis.

     

    Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt, however, does just the opposite. At the point in Sartre’s life where his activities take on a local aesthetic emphasis, Sartre already has the received and overly-general identity of an Artist and all the charismatic authority that goes with it; in fact, he is often openly ambivalent about his mythic identity.10 Thus where Beuys’s theorization of social sculpture can be understood, perhaps too one-sidedly, as an attempt to obtain a mythic identity, Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt can be understood as an attempt to use such a troublesome identity in the service of counter-mythic and oppositional practices. Indeed, Sartre has considerably more by way of “myth” at his pragmatist/historicist disposal than the aesthetic Beuys: not only is he a canonical literary writer of mythic proportions (Nausea, Roads to Freedom, The Flies, The Words, etc.); he is also famous as a philosopher who tells us something dramatic about a “human condition” (Being and Nothingness), a political theorist who describes for us our social present and its histories (The Critique of Dialectical Reason), and a social critic who addresses current events in oppositional terms (“The Maoists in France,” “Elections: A Trap for Fools,” “Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide,” etc.).11 Sartre thus achieves dubious charismatic status, in Benjamin’s propagandistic sense, as a cultural “celebrity.” And despite Rajchman’s claim to the contrary, Sartre does have “charismatic authority,” or at least more than Foucault, even if like Foucault he makes no claims to having such authority.12

     

    Enter Sartre the pragmatist. Now Sartre knows that he has indeed obtained celebrity status as a writer and a philosopher. For example, The Words is in some sense an attempt to come to terms with, and criticize, the socially acquired motivations that encouraged him to pursue such a status.13 But Sartre also knows that, given the levels of fame he achieved as the 20th Century “Voltaire” of Post-WW II France14–and arguably of the North Atlantic area in general–that he can never simply erase his fame. He can, however, put it to some productive counter-hegemonic use, which he proceeds to do.

     

    As a major cultural celebrity of most of the capitalist First World, Sartre realizes that his cultural fame covertly legitimates the political status quo of the Western world at large–with its political and economic interests in the exploitation of Third World countries–despite the fact that he overtly condemns those interests. So Sartre brings his fame to bear upon the very world from which he derives his cultural authority by reproducing it supportively in places where it is not expected to be. Algeria, the Soviet Union (which he later repudiated for its Stalinism), Israel and Palestine, China, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Brazil, and others all acquire some potentially sympathetic attention from Europeans and Americans when they see the “great” Sartre, keeper of the flame of Western culture, clearly advocating the political programs and interests of oppressed peoples contra the imperialist West’s negative representations of their interests and programs. Sartre thus becomes the enemy within, and the unforeseen statesman from without. But it is a curious sort of “statesman” that Sartre becomes for, unlike the comprehensive “theorist” we expect him to be, Sartre refuses to speak for others, to “lead” them on their behalf, or to presume to understand their historical needs and desires (unlike the authoritative West he supposedly represents) better than they do themselves. Instead he gets the West looking at him and listening to him, and then leaves the stage to its proper organic narrators, in Gramsci’s sense, for whom he or any other representative of the First World has nothing to say.15

     

    Sartre’s use of his public identity demonstrates several related things pertinent to my reinvention of him. First, the revolutionary and theoretical Marxist of The Critique of Dialectical Reason has become unexpectedly a pragmatist of revolt. No longer making authoritative or transcendental claims for his pro-revolutionary “theories,” Sartre now uses the over-determined notoriety he has acquired for having “created” such theories to draw attention to specific problems in social polities.16 Sartre thus turns Western expectations inside out by allowing us to decide for ourselves that, politically and morally, we are not always what we proclaim ourselves to be.

     

    Second, Sartre’s oppositional pragmatism coincides with his rejection of celebrity status as a hermetic cultural end in itself. Sartre at once demonstrates his critical dissatisfaction with concepts such as the “artist-hero,” “creativity,” “genius,” “eternal value,” “mystery”– precisely those concepts rejected by Benjamin and Germer in his criticism of Beuys–by moving toward oppositional nominalism while distancing himself, as much as his historical moment will allow, from any aesthetics or politics of creativity. Arguably, this distancing coincides with Sartre’s activist rejection of the voluntarism with which he is still too automatically associated, as well as with his rejection of the anthropology that Rajchman rightfully reinvokes where he distinguishes Sartre’s totalizing theoretical work from the nominalism we find, more profitably, in Foucault’s histories.

     

    I call Sartre’s nominalist activism local aesthetic practice since it is at once inventive in a post- anthropological sense, and micro-political in its pragmatist suggestion that we resist authoritarianism, in Malcolm X’s words, by any means necessary. This last phrase has been popularly interpreted as an advocacy of militant violence; yet it is quite clear that “any means” can and should suggest a great deal more than simply “violent means.” Occasionally Sartre does speak out in support of “revolutionary” violence, as in his strategic 1961 preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth–a book which, in its theories and objectives, does anticipate the thought of the mature Malcolm X.17 Other times, however, Sartre refuses to support the violent practices of militant revolutionaries, although he periodically idealizes what he refers to in one interview as the “militant intellectual.”18 For instance, we know that in 1974 Sartre visits the incarcerated Andreas Baader in a West German prison, that he goes to express solidarity with the oppositional militant and to protest the treatment of political prisoners worldwide, but that he refuses to condone the terrorist tactics of the Baader-Meinhof group.19

     

    What accounts for Sartre’s willingness to support counter-authoritative violence in one instance and his unwillingness to do so in another? I would argue that Sartre chooses to represent himself as a “violent revolutionary” when he thinks it will serve the interests of oppressed peoples whose organic situations clearly demand such a representation, and that in other kinds of specifically oppressive circumstances he sees fit to represent himself in other ways entirely–but always in pursuit of the same political revisionism. I say “revisionism” because the pragmatist Sartre, if we think of him as a local aesthetician, no longer believes in a final revolutionized state, but instead in the ongoing need to invent provisional democratic situations which, because they risk becoming hegemonic in their own right, constantly require revision and modification.

     

    One of Fanon’s critical distinctions can help us see why Sartre’s direct public response to Fanon is necessarily different from his ambiguous public response to Baader. On the one hand, Fanon suggests that capitalist societies rely largely on their infrastructures to keep things in order.20 Such infrastructures are maintained by “bewilderers”–teachers, lawyers, doctors, priests, clerics, and so on–who, themselves unconscious victims of power, mediate the hard realities of power by training citizens to believe that their governments work to protect their interests rather than those of the rich and powerful. On the other hand, Fanon suggests that colonized countries like Algeria require the immediate violent policing of occupied “natives” to protect the interests of the political powers that be. In the cases of both West Germany and Algeria, those who have power are those who either have or manage money. However, the actual tactics of oppression and exploitation in an infrastructural state such as West Germany in the 1970s–although arguably “occupied” by our even more infrastructural United States–are not as obviously violent to oppressed but serialized West Germans as are the visible guns and clubs of French militia to collectively oppressed Algerians.

     

    Unlike the Fanon of French-occupied Algeria, Baader can thus be made to look like the only militant thing that exists in an otherwise peaceful West Germany. And because this is precisely what happens, it is not Baader’s illegality or militantism with which Sartre feels an urgent need to take issue–despite his disapproval of it–but rather with the way that Baader’s identity has been over- totalized by the First World press. Sartre understands that the French-occupied Algerians with whom Fanon is directly familiar, and whose plight encourages Fanon’s militant advocacy of a full-scale African revolution, collectively recognize an oppressive enemy in the French, and that the Algerian revolutionaries have organic narratives that can justify and explain their organic rebellion to counter- revolutionary Europeans. Europeans might not sympathize with the “self-descriptions” of oppressed Algerians, but these self-descriptions nonetheless exist, are collective, and make a certain sense; consequently, colonial countries will have to come to terms with them. This makes it productive for Sartre to support violence openly, for such violence, or its threat, will clearly yield counter- authoritative results by making negotiation necessary.

     

    Baader, however, represents no full-scale revolutionary program and, as such, is easily “psychologized” and represented for public consumption only as a sociopath engaging in random acts of terrorism, when in fact other interpretations of militant protest merit public consideration. Sartre thus finds himself in the following dilemma. He must not allow the state to use Baader to condemn militancy in general on a symbolic level. But neither can he simply support Baader’s militancy on a specific level, for he risks enabling the state’s public representation of Baader as the Zeitgeist of terrorism, irrationality, anti-civilization, and so forth. Sartre is thus concerned that any blanket endorsement of militantism in a passive infrastructural state might affront uncritical citizens and opportunist state management enough for them to suppress those legal outlets for oppositional practice that already exist, and which already produce valuable counter- hegemonic effects. Yet arguably Sartre’s decision to visit the symbolic Baader in prison–an event which he knows will generate some attention–is an attempt to keep Europe’s interpretation of militancy open so people can question the state’s suggestion that all militant behavior is a priori pathological behavior.

     

    Sartre’s strategic support of the student Maoists in France, to give another example, often takes the micro- political form of dialogues and open forums which are in turn publicized–dialogues and forums which then impart all the cultural credibility that a collaboration with Sartre carries in the Western world.21 (This is a specific strategy of Foucault’s as well, who more obviously than Sartre was no Maoist.22) Once again Sartre chooses the means which most effectively empower oppositional representations. Thus his commitment to the contextual specificity of inventive resistances resembles Jonathan Swift’s as Edward Said describes it in “Swift as Intellectual.” Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt is always reactive in Said’s sense23 (or “specific” in Foucault’s24); that is, it always responds to a concrete political situation and shapes the form of its resistance accordingly, despite the fact that Sartre’s aesthetics, unlike Swift’s, is activist to the point of abandoning traditional category of “art” entirely. And the nominalist quality of Sartre’s later oppositional practices demonstrates how Sartre’s aesthetics becomes a politics, and not an anthropology, of freedom; Sartre strives to invent political room for organic speech-acts, protests, and rebellions, and demonstrates that reform is never final in a manner that emancipates people from an oppressive Past, but that reforms are instead ongoing, specific, and endlessly provisional.

     

    Sartre’s oppositional activism also suggests that the “success” of any aesthetics of revolt can never be gauged, as has the success of all aesthetic enterprise in the past, by the degree of fame or recognition it obtains, for local aesthetic practice never conceives of success simply as originality, wealth, cultural canonization, and so forth– all of those representations of success which quickly become commodities within the authoritative market systems they covertly legitimate. Instead Sartre, like Ellison’s invisible man in the epigraph that begins this paper, understands success purely in terms of efficacious resistance. The question is no longer “Am I well-known, rich?” and so on, but instead “Have I released any of the counter-hegemonic potential that is stored up in the current regime? That is, have I affected the world in ways which unleash the possibility of endless resistance to authority?” Sartre, of course, is not the unknown protagonist of Ellison’s novel; in fact, the circumstances of Sartre’s life, existence, and influence are obviously different from those of an impoverished member of a social minority. Nonetheless what goes for Sartre goes for others as well; everyone in their specific and local situations can resist authority in local aesthetic ways and can do so, in part, by manipulating their various socially assigned “selves” in the service of inventive microphysical revolts. Moreover, the story I tell here of Sartre might usefully empower our unique resistances by lending them some (provisional) authority for which they are in dire need.

     

    One inconsistency remains, but it is one that enables Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt in practice as much as it might seem to disable it in theory. If the reactive quality of Sartre’s aesthetics of revolt makes his activism “microphysical” in Foucault’s well-known sense of the word, a large portion of Sartre’s specific power–that is, the power he derives from his fame–is unavoidably drawn from the “mythologies” of creativity criticized by Benjamin and Germer. I think it is unproductive, however, simply to berate mythology for its “ideological” status, for such berating implies that we can “expose” mythology as pure false-consciousness, when in fact no such form of mythology exists. Rather mythology must be understood for what it is: a concrete force of history which can be used inventively and oppositionally against exploitive powers, or which will be used instead, almost invariably, to conserve those powers. In fact, we have no humane choice at present but to follow Sartre’s example and to redirect authoritative mythologies against themselves. Our failure to do so automatically leaves mythologies in the hands of those exploitive powers who, pragmatists already, use mythologies to legitimate their authoritarian politics. Just as honesty is a luxury that Sartre cannot afford, neither can we afford the a priori anti-mythologism of Benjamin’s automatic following. Such a rejection of the historically-constituted currency of struggle is the strategic equivalent of putting down guns in the thick of battle, of refusing to tell Attila a lie, as the famous illustration of Kant’s imperative goes, though it mean the death of an entire population.

     

    Let us then reconsider Benjamin’s distinction between politicized art and aestheticized politics. If there are good reasons to avoid theoretical syntheses of aesthetics and politics (and there certainly are), Sartre’s local aesthetics cautions us against taking these “good reasons” too far, because they risk disempowering us entirely. If we should never equate power, in some mythic and glorious sense, with art, neither should we allow cultural materialism, since it is often our area of critical commitment, to become passive, commodifiable, and politically unengaged. This latter possibility is a far greater threat to critical activism than the social sculpture of Joseph Beuys, for it discourages many of the keenest critical minds in cultural studies, simply for fear of reprisal, from directing their inventive powers explicitly toward political issues. Sartre, for his part, refuses to practice an aesthetics which is not at once an effective historicism, and strives, in keeping with his larger democratic objectives, to affect social polities in ways that encourage us to criticize authority, to conceptualize political alternatives, and to empathize with the plights of suffering social selves. His nominalist aesthetics, which considers invention from a viewpoint radically different from that of Benjamin’s followers, neither simply aestheticizes politics nor politicizes art but, ceasing to privilege artwork altogether, politicizes the potential of our ongoing nominalist freedom.

     

    Notes

     

    1. John Rajchman, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (New York: Columbia UP, 1985). I am indebted to Rajchman’s superb reading of Foucault in this paper.

     

    2. Ronald Hayman, Sartre: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 13.

     

    3. See Simone de Beauvoir, “Conversations with Jean- Paul Sartre,” Adieux, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 165. The later activist Sartre questions the impossibly broad scope of his theoretical Critique of Dialectical Reason when he suggests to de Beauvoir in an interview that he finds it too “idealistic.” And in an attempt to provide the phenomenological vocabulary of Existentialism with something of a historicist emphasis Sartre claims that Existentialism is autonomous with Marxism. See Jean-Paul Sartre, “Self-Portrait at Seventy,” Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken, trans. Paul Auster and Lydia Davis (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 60.

     

    4. See Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre, ed. Norman Macafee, trans. Anna Cancogni (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987). Cohen-Solal gives examples of Sartre’s political protests (e.g, 141-22), his numerous travels as an “anti- ambassador” (391-414), his brief arrest in 1970 for distributing La Cause du peuple (479-480), his visit to the imprisoned Andreas Baader (507), and suggests that these and other of his activities are instances of Sartrean engagement. See also Keith A. Reader, Intellectuals and the French Left since 1968 (New York: St. Martins Press, 1987), 31. Reader mentions Sartre’s “involvement with the banned Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple, and subsequently with Liberation, participation in demonstrations, and attempts to get himself arrested” which are “shrewdly rebutted by the regime.”

     

    5. For Foucault on his treatment of an “aesthetics of existence” see Michel Foucault, “Introduction,” The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), especially 11-12.

     

    6. See Richard Rorty, “Epistemology and ‘the Philosophy of Mind,’” Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1979), 125-27.

     

    7. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken Books, 1969), 241-242.

     

    8. See Thierry de Duve, “Joseph Beuys, or the Last of the Proletarians”; Stefen Germer, “Haacke, Broodthaers, Beuys”; and Eric Michaud, “The Ends of Art according to Beuys” in OCTOBER, eds. Joan Copjec, Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson (Cambridge: MIT Press), Number 45, Summer 88.

     

    9. Germer, OCTOBER, 71.

     

    10. Sartre indeed has mixed feelings about the fame he has acquired as a cultural figure. He sometimes discusses his fame openly, his early reasons for desiring it, and speculates about his relation to “posterity” in a matter-of- fact manner. See de Beauvoir, Adieux, 162-64. Other times, however, he is defensive about his fame, and attempts to deny that it empowers him since he associates celebrity status very unfavorably with “bourgeois” society. See Sartre, “Self-Portrait at Seventy,” 25-31. Nonetheless, the later politicized Sartre capitalizes on his fame (or his “mythic identity”) to draw attention to political alternatives. Moreover, in reference to Sartre’s 1968 interview of the less famous Daniel Cohn-Bendit–in which Sartre was provided with the opportunity to use his fame while playing it down–Reader writes in Intellectuals that “[f]rom being famous for being Sartre, the curse that had dogged him for years, it was as though he were moving toward ‘un-being’ Sartre,” 32.

     

    11. See Sartre, “Elections: A Trap for Fools,” and “The Maoists in France,” Life/Situations; and Jean-Paul Sartre, “Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide,” Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Mathews (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974).

     

    12. See Rajchman, 43.

     

    13. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, 1964).

     

    14. See Cohen-Solal, 415. Cohen-Solal writes that de Gaulle’s response to continued French disapproval of Sartre’s political views and activities in 1960 was the famous “You do not imprison Voltaire.”

     

    15. For an excellent summary of Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between the organic intellectual and the traditional intellectual see Edward Said, “Swift as Intellectual,” The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983), 82.

     

    16. For a similar view of how Sartre uses his cultural recognition to enable projects of resistance which are not necessarily his own, see Reader, 32. Regarding Sartre’s close relation with the French student Maoists in the late 1960s and early 70s, Reader writes that “Sartre subordinates himself to the Maoists, using his prestige to amplify and propogate their ideas rather than ideas he has himself developed.”

     

    17. See Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Preface” to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1966); and for an interpretation of how the thought of the later Malcolm X resembled the “revolutionary socialism” of a “Third World political perspective” (237) see Ruby M. and E.U. Essien-Udom, “Malcolm X: An International Man” in Malcolm X: The Man and his Times, ed. John Henrik Clarke (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1969), 235-267.

     

    18. See Sartre, “Self-Portrait at Seventy,” 61. In this interview Sartre characterizes the Maoist Pierre Victor as a “militant intellectual” and expresses hope that Victor “will carry out both the intellectual work and the militant work he wants to.”

     

    19. Sartre discusses his reasons for visiting Baader, the public’s reaction to his visit, and his judgment of the visit itself in “Self-Portrait at Seventy,” 27, 31. Despite all the attention his visit drew, Sartre claims: “I think it was a failure, which is not to say that if I had to do it over again I would not do it.” Sartre acknowledges that, although many people did interpret his visit as an expression of approval for Baader specifically or, even worse, exploited it as a political opportunity to question the aging Sartre’s lucidity through the press, the fact that some attention was drawn to the merits of oppositional militancy more than justified Sartre’s visit, and would have justified it again. I think Sartre used Baader as an available representation of militant activism simply to keep the possibility of such activism alive in the European imagination. For even if Baader’s practices were specifically unproductive and even questionable as activities of “resistance,” Sartre knew that the state would manipulate Baader’s reception on a symbolic level to condemn militancy in general, when militancy might in some cases be necessary, effective, and absolutely desirable. Sartre thus strove to respond to the state’s symbolic over- totalization of oppositional militancy by producing alternative symbolics. See also Cohen-Solal, 507, and Hayman, 462, 465, 467.

     

    20. For Fanon’s characterization of the difference between capitalist and colonized countries and the role that “bewilderers” play in the former see The Wretched of the Earth, 38. Fanon does not use the word “infrastructure” to characterize institutional activities of “bewilderment; however, I think the word “infrastructure,” with some qualification, communicates the sense of his argument well. I am not using “infrastructure” to imply the base (or substructure) of a society, but instead to suggest the more microphysical practices of subjectivization that take place in complex societies which cannot be explained simply in terms of base or superstructure.

     

    21. See Sartre, “The Maoists in France,” Life/Situations, 162-171. This article first appeared as the introduction to Michele Manceaux’s Maos en France (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1972). Manceaux’s book is a collection of interviews with Maoists, and Sartre was eager to endorse the Maoists’ moral commitment to illegal action. Sartre did so, I think, both to provoke France to consider the merits of illegal action, and to provide a moral discourse that could justify the necessity of such action to uncritical citizens who were otherwise trained to understand illegal action as a priori illegitimate action. See also Cohen-Solal on Sartre and the Maoists, 474-88, 494.

     

    22. Michel Foucault, “On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists,” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 1-36. This interview is largely a conversation with Sartre’s close associate toward the end of his life, the Maoist Pierre Victor.

     

    23. For Said on the “reactive” intellectual see “Swift as Intellectual,” 78. Elsewhere in this essay Said describes Swift as a “local activist” (77) and characterizes Swift’s writings and practices as “local performances” (79). These distinctions are all pertinent to my reinvention of Sartre.

     

    24. For Foucault on the “specific” intellectual see “Truth and Power,” Power/Knowledge, 126.

     

  • A Poem

    –SBB with Alamgir Hashmi
    Islamabad, Pakistan

     

    Post Scrotum

     

    Watt? Yes. But the same when the Mal’oun died
    in the island; this island severed,
    repousse, reeling with peat-reek;
    this drizzle of grief–
    interminable falling on the wide sea.
    Moll’s face saffron-coloured, hair like
    petals plucked from a white chrysanthemum;
    local boys on stout or busy at hurling;
    and our scriveners, on regular beat up in London,
    aping accents of the English gentry.
    I broadcast in Irish then, from Radio Eireann,
    the right embers and all that fall to the ashes
    or whatever I often whispered to myself
    through Murphy, Philips, or Grundig.
    No, not Grundig, for the word grounds the air,
    the mind slips out of form in that language,
    is not hand in glove as now. Example:
    with a handschuh your hands feel they wear shoes;
    the foot’s in the mouth; and you write with your feet.
    Paris is O. K. Paris is all right. Paris is O. K. All right.
    I was lecteur d’anglais in that place, teaching Doublin’
    English and writing like Thom A. Becket what no one,
    except J. J. in some arseholy state or other, would attempt–
    in a language of my own.
    I hear now that across the Chunnel
    one side tells the other it’s French I wrote;
    the other side calls it English, or by other appelatives;
    such as would divide the protestant cake in catholic portions
    and make for a nice debate
    in the Parliament of European Foules.
    If I said Parnell was no string-pulling
    politician, women would be tightening the girth
    of their drawers with double-knotted strings.
    I left because truelove had run out of the vein,
    the earth turning no end but negative;
    its slow poisons free a sweet violet in my lungs.
    And, yes, French had a point or two.
    That dusty potato dropped in 1921 or 1845,
    it named the apple of the earth–
    to say nothing of the rotten core.
    Peeling. Peeling.

     

  • The Second War and Postmodern Memory

    Charles Bernstein

    State University of New York at Buffalo

     

    Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand, Draw a deep breath; stop thinking, count fifteen, And you’re as right as rain. . . . Books; what a jolly company they are, Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves . . . . they’re so wise . . . .
     

    –Siegfried Sassoon, “Repression of War Experience” (1918)

     

    We never discussed the Second World War much when I was growing up. I don’t feel much like discussing it now. It seems presumptuous to interpret, much less give literary interpretations of, the Systematic Extermination Process or the dropping of the H-Bomb, the two poles of the Second War.

     

    When Stanley Diamond asked me to speak on “Poetry after the Holocaust”–to replace but also to respond to Jerome Rothenberg, who could not attend the symposium–my first reaction was to wonder what qualifications I had to speak– as if the topic of the war made me question my standing, made me wonder what I might say that could bear the weight of this subject matter. Diamond reassured me that the audience would be small: “For many the Holocaust is too far in the past to matter; for most of the rest, it’s too painful to bring to mind.”

     

    My father-in-law, who left Berlin as a teenager on a youth aliyah and spent the war in Palestine, had a different reaction: all these Holocaust conferences are a fad. This reaction is as disturbing as it is right. The Holocaust has come to stand for a kind of Secular Satanism–everyone’s against it, anyone can work up a feverish moral fervor denouncing the Nazi Monster.

     

    Yet I’ve been struck by just the opposite: that the psychological effects of the Second War are still largely repressed and that we are just beginning to come out of the shock enough to try to make sense of the experience.

     

    We stormed the citadel under the banner of amnesia, Winning absolute victory over the Germans in 1943. Fantasy that could leave nothing out but the pain . . . [Barrett Watten,Under Erasure]

     

              Crysiles of cristle, piled
          ankle high,
          as wide as sound carries.  Am I--
          hearing it--algebras worth?

          There is a wind
          erases marks.  I felt it on my cheek
          Summers long
          you can cross it

          & still not approach time, de-

          solidified, approaching mothish mists

          felled, the way a price knocked down

          puts purchase on its feet.  Stammering

          painful clamor   by coincidents
              appraised.  Refuse

              is a spilled constant.
              Let it loose. 

[Benjamin Friedlander, "Kristallnacht"]

     

    I don’t remember when I first heard about the war, but I do remember thinking of it as an historical event, something past and gone. It’s inconceivable to me now that I was born just five years after its end; each year, the Extermination Process seems nearer, more recent. Yet if the Systematic Extermination of the European Jews seemed to define, implicitly, the horizon of the past for me, the Bomb defined the foreshortened horizon of the future.

     

              hear
          hear, where the dry blood talks
                where the old appetite walks . . .
          where it hides, look
          in the eye how it runs
          in the flesh / chalk

               but under these petals
               in the emptiness
               regard the light, contemplate
               the flower

          whence it arose

               with what violence benevolence is bought
               what cost in gesture justice brings
               what wrongs domestic rights involve
               what stalks
               this silence
               what pudor or perjorocracy affronts
               how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot
               what breeds where dirtiness is law
               what crawls
               below  . . .

[Charles Olson, "The Kingfishers" (1949)]

     

    Fifty years is not a long time to absorb such a catastrophe for Western Civilization. It seems to me that the current controversies surrounding Paul De Man, and, more significantly, Martin Heidegger reflect the psychic economy of reason in face of enormous loss. In all our journals of intellectual opinion, we are asked to consider, as if it were a Divine Mystery, how such men of learning, who have shown such a profound and subtle appreciation for the art and philosophy of the West, could have countenanced, indeed be complicit with, an evil that seems to erode any possible explanation, justification, or contextualization, despite the attempt of well-meaning commentators to evade this issue by just such explanations, justifications, and contextualizations.

     

    The Heidegger question merely personalizes the basic situation of the war: that European learning, the Enlightenment tradition, and the Ideals of Reason as embodied in the Nation State, were as much a cause of the war as a break to it. For to understand how Heidegger could be complicit in the Second War is to understand how the Second War is not an aberration but an extension of the Logos of Western Civilization. Jack Spicer’s dying words–“My vocabulary did this to me”–could be the epitaph of the Second War as well: Our vocabulary did this to us.

     

    Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi, Paul Celan committed suicide; De Man and Heidegger went on to prosper. What did the former know that the latter never absorbed? To acknowledge the Second War means to risk suicide and in the process to politicize philosophy; and if we desire to avoid death and evade politics, repression is inevitable. Which is to say that the death an acknowledgement of this war brings on is not only the death of individuals but also of an Ideal–of reason unbounded to politics, of, that is, rationality as such.
     

     
          fear smashes into
          my double
          out of nowhere
          would shrink
          flesh back in itself
          before it vomits
          a wet night from neck or forehead
          passes
          into the vague air
          swallows
          the liquid stays inside
          my corneas extend
          along the axis of
          the flow
          dries

[Rosmarie Waldrop,The Road Is Everywhere Or Stop This Body]

     

    I’d be reluctant to say any of my own poems was about the war or should be read within that frame–none would hold up to the scrutiny such a reading would promote. But I do want to make a broad, very provisional, claim that much of the innovative poetry of these soon to be fifty years following the war register the Twined events of Extermination in the West and Holocaust in East in ways that hardly have been accounted for.

     

              From the stately violence of the State
          a classic war, World War Two, punctuated by Hiroshima
          all the action classically taking place on one day
          visible to one group in invisible terms
          beside a fountain of imagefree water
          "trees" with brown "trunks" and "leafy" green crowns
          50s chipmunks sitting beneath, buck teeth representing
          mental tranquility, they sit in rows
          and read their book and the fountain gushes forth
          all the letters at once, permanently
          a playful excrescence, an erotic war against nature....

[Bob Perelman, "The Broken Mirror"]

     

    Every cultural development I ascribe to the Second War can be just as readily traced to some other cause and can also be said to preexist the war. My argument is not deterministic; rather I want to suggest that the frame of the Second War, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, transforms the social meaning of these cultural developments. Racism and cultural supremacism do not begin or end with the Second War but they are the precise ideological instruments that mark the most unrecuperable aspects of the war–the Lagers and the mutilated survivors of the bomb. The war did not make racism and cultural supremacism intolerable, they always were, but it demonstrated, as if demonstration was necessary, their absolute corrosiveness.

     

    The war made it apparent, if it wasn’t already, that racism and cultural supremacism are not correctable flaws of Western logocentrism but its nonbiodegradable byproduct. I don’t mean this as a thesis to be systematically argued. Rather, I am suggesting that the war undermined, subliminally more than consciously, the belief in virtually every basic value of the Enlightenment, insofar as these values are in any way Eurosupremacist or hierarchic.

     

     
          Not one death but many,
          not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves, the
                                             feed-back is
          the law

               Into the same river no man steps twice
               When the fire dies air dies
               No one remains, nor is, one . . .

          To be in different states without a change
          is not a possibility . . .

[Olson, "The Kingfishers"]

     

    Racism and cultural supremacism contaminate everything that is associated with them; if this guilt-by-association is necessarily too far-reaching, that is because it sets loose a radical skepticism that knows no immediate place to stop.

     

    The Second War undermines authority in all its prescriptive forms and voices: the rights of the Father, of Law, of the Nation and National Spirit, of Technorationality, of Scientific Certainty, of Axiomatic Judgement, of Hierarchy, of Progress, of Tradition. It’s a chain reaction. No truths are self-evident, certainly not the prerogatives of patriarchy, authority, rationality, order, control.

     

    “But it’s not reason but unreason that caused the war! It’s just a parody of the Enlightenment to associate it with Nazi dementia, or to see the telos of science in a mushroom cloud! The Enlightenment was a force fortoleration and consideration as opposed to mysticism, irrationality, and theological or state authority. Didn’t the Allies represent these Western values against the Nazis!” But the matter is altogether more complicated and my account risks swerving into something too grandiose: for this is not a matter of principle but of shock and grief. If the values associated with Enlightenment are undermined, this is not to remove the Romantic legacy from its undoing. For if the Second War casts doubt on systematicity, it is no less destructive to the vatic, the occult, the charismatic, the emotional solidarity of communion.

     

    There are new difficulties. It’s difficult to see order in the same way after the war, hard to accept control as a neutral value or domination by one group of another as justifiable, hard not to associate systematic operations with the systematicity of the Extermination Process or preemptory Authority with Fascism. These associations overgeneralize: but the pairs are subliminally linked, the one stigmatized by the other. Benjamin said it best and the Second War made it ineradicable (roughly): Every act of Civilization is at the same time an act of Barbarism.
     

     
          When the attentions change / the jungle
          leaps in
               even the stones are split
                                   they rive . . .

[Olson, "The Kingfishers"]

     

    The vehemence of the civil rights movement and the anti- Vietnam War movement can be seen in this context: the shadow of the Second War, growing darker as the immediate compensatory shock of the first postwar decades wore off, spurred the pace of demands for change and contributed to a sometimes millenarian we-can’t-go-on-the-old-way-anymore zeal. In the U.S., the war on the war in Vietnam inaugurates the externalization of the response to the Second War–the beginning of the end of the repression of the experience of the war.

     

    The realization that white, heterosexual Christian men of the West have no exclusive franchise on articulating the “highest” values of humankind was certainly around prior to the Second War, but the war added a nauseating repulsiveness to such “canonical” views; as if they were not just something to dispute but could no longer be stomached at all. The depth and breadth of the challenge to the Western canon may be a measure of the effect of the war, though few of the parties to the controversy choose to frame it this way. It’s now a commonplace to read the poetry that followed the Great War in the context of the bitter disillusionment brought about by that cataclysm; just as we better understand the Romantics when we keep in mind the context of the French Revolution. The effects of the Second War are all the greater than those of the first, but less frequently cited.

     

    I don’t mean “War Poetry” in the sense of poems about the war; they are notoriously scarce and beside the point I want to make here. Of course, there are many accounts of the war–documentary, personal, theoretical–and many visualizations of the war in film, photography, painting. But the scope or core of the Second War cannot be represented only by the conventional techniques developed to depict events, scenes, battles, political infamies. Only the surface of the war can be pictured.

     

    To be sure, the crisis of representation, which is to say the recognition that the Real is not representable, is associated with the great radical modernist poems of the period immediately before and after the First World War. In the wake of the Second War, however, the meaning, and urgency, of unrepresentability took on explosive new force as a political necessity, as the absolute need to reground polis. That is, such work which had started as a heady, even giddy, aesthetic investigation had become primarily an act of human reconstruction and reimagining. Radical modernism can be characterized by the discovery of the entity-status of language–not just verbal language but signification systems/processes; thus, the working hypothesis about the autonomy of the medium, of the compositional space; the flattening of the Euclidian space of representing and its implicit metaphysics of displacement and reification of objects. I think all of these fundamental ontological and aesthetic discoveries and inventions are carried forward into the radical late 20th century work but with a different critical understanding of the implications of this new textual space.
     

     
          as if we could ignore
          the consequences of
          explosions fracture the present
          warm exhaust
          in our lungs would turn us
          inside out of
          gloves avoid words like
          "war" needs subtler
          poisons as if
          conscious of ends and means
          scream in every
          nerve every breath every
          grain of dust
          to dust cancers over
          the bloodstream
          the bloodstream
          the bloodstream
          the bloodstream
          the bloodstream

[Waldrop, The Road is Everywhere]

     

    After the Second War, there is a more conscious rejection of lingering positivist and Romantic orientations toward, respectively, master systems and the poetic Spirit or Imagination as transcendent. The meaning of the modernist textual practice has been interpreted in ways that contrast with some of its original interpretations:toward the incommensurability of different discourse systems,against the idea of poetry as an imperializing or world-synthesizing agency (of the zeitgeist), not only because these ideas tend to impart to the Poet a superhistorical or superhuman perspective but also because they diminish the partiality, and therefore particularity, of any poetic practice. Thus, the emphasis in the New American Poetry and after on particularity, the detail rather than the overview, form understood as eccentric rather than systematic, process more than system, or if system then system that undermines any hegemonic role for itself.
     

     
          In the center of movement, a debate.
          Before beginning, a pause. . . .

          Pianissimo.

          Curious symptom, this, that the man appears
          mildly self-satisfied, as if, in spite of his
          obvious confusion and . . . so ill at ease

[Nick Piombino,Poems]

     

    After the war, there is also greater attention to the ideological function of language: taking the word/world-materializing techniques of radical modernism and applying them to show how “everyday” language practices manipulate and dominate; that is, the investigation of the social dimension of language as reality-producing through the use of radical modernist procedures.

     

              how we read it
                  line after line

                              given
                         one look

                          refresh the eyes
                       against the abyss

[Larry Eigner,another time in fragments]

     

    Poetry after the war has its psychic imperatives: to dismantle the grammar of control and the syntax of command. This is one way to understand the political content of its form.
     

     
                                        We are
                                        in a sandheap

                                        We are
                                        discovered
                         not solid
                                        the floor
                                            based
                         on misunderstanding.

[Susan Howe,The Liberties]

     

    If racism and cultural supremacism are no longer tolerable, then literary history has to be rewritten. This has its primary expression in the proliferation of poetry that rejects a monoculturally centric point-of-view.

     

    Jerome Rothenberg’s anthologies epitomize one aspect of this development.Technicians of the Sacred insisted on the immediate (rather than simply historical or anthropological) relevance of the “tribal” poetries of Native Americans (on both American continents), Africans, peoples of Oceania. This was a concerted assault on the primacy of Western high culture and an active attempt to find in other, non-Western/non-Oriental cultures, what seemed missing from our own. Moreover, the “recovery” of Native American culture by a Jewish Brooklyn-born first generation poet-as-anthologist whose aesthetic roots were in the European avant-garde implicitly acknowledges our domestic genocide. This gesture cannot be fully appreciated without recognizing that it functions as a way of recovering from the Second War by refusing to cover over the genocide that has allowed a false unity to the idea of American Literature. Rothenberg’s anthologies present a multicultural America of many voices in a way that explicitly rejects Eurosupremacism fromwithin a European perspective–that is, dispensing with the demagogic rejection of Europe as such in favor of idealized “America.”

     

    The effect of the Second War is audible not only in the subject matter of the New American Poetry of the 1950s but also in its form, in its insistence on form (as never more than the extension of content, in Creeley’s phrase, echoed by Olson).
     

     
          He had been stuttering, by the edge
          of the street, one foot still
          on the sidewalk, and the other
          in the gutter . . .
          like a bird, say, wired to flight, the
          wings, pinned to their motion, stuffed.

          The words, several, and for each, several
          senses.
               "It is very difficult to sum up
          briefly . . ."
                         It always was. 

[Robert Creeley,For Love]

     

    “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked” does not refer to the war, but it can’t help doing so despite itself. “Howl” makes it apparent that something has gone wrong with America by the early 1950s: the whole “calm” of this period can be read as a repression that Ginsberg, and others, reacted– powerfully, resonantly–against. Not as Sassoon–“I’m going crazy; I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns”; that’s the difference between the two wars: the malaise is not locatable as the official event of the war, the battles: the whole of everyday life has lost its foundations. And the poetry–or some of it–either registered this loss of foundation in the everyday, or invented ways of articulating new foundations, strikingly without the grandiosity or optimism of some of its modernist sources.

     

    On the street I am met with constant hostility
    and I would have finally nothing else around me,
    except my children who are trained to love
    and whom I intend to leave as relics of my intentions.

     

    [Creeley, “A Fragment”]

     

              These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing
          Into something forgetful, although angry with history.
          They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible,
               for instance.
          Though this is only one example. . . .

[John Ashbery, "These Lacustrine Cities"]

     

    The New American Poetry, by and large, rejected the grandiosity of scheme, of world-spirit, of progress, of avant-garde advance: the positivist, quasi-authoritarian assumptions of Futurism, Voriticism or the tradition of Eliot. It rejected the heroic universalizing of poetic genius in favor of particularization, process, detail; extending the innovations of the 1910 to 1917 period, but giving them an entirely different psychic registration. Think of the role of the ungeneralizable particular in Creeley or Eigner as opposed to the Controlling Allegories of Pound or Eliot, think of Ashbery’s or Spicer’s self- cancellation compared to Williams’s relaxed prerogatives of self or Stein’s exuberant hubris.

     

    This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
    Tougher than anything.
    No one listens to poetry. The ocean
    Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
    Or crash of water. It means
    Nothing.
    It
    Is bread and butter
    Pepper and salt. The death
    That young men hope for. Aimlessly
    It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
    One listens to poetry.

     

    [Jack Spicer, “Thing Language”]

     

    Or think of Olson suggesting his project as a poet is to find a way out of the “Western Box,” or Duncan’sBefore the War, or Rothenberg, in his essay on the war, writing of discontent with “regularity and clarity as a reflection of the nature of God.” (In his essay, Rothenberg quotes Creeley’s recent poem fromWindows: “Ever since Hitler / or well before that / fact of human appetite / addressed with brutal / indifference others / killed or tortured . . . / . . . no possible way / out of it smiled or cried / or tore at it and died”.) To link the New American poetry with the Second War in this way suggests that the Systematic Extermination Process had a profound effect on American attitudes in the 1950s. No doubt this projects more than is evident. While the effect of World War 2 on the United States has been far-reaching, and not only for those who fought in the war and their families, the Lagers may well have been a distant issue for most Americans. In contrast, the Cold War and the U.S.’s new hegemonic global role would be a more obvious context for a sociohistorical reading of the New American Poets. But something else lurks in these poems of the “other” tradition that suggests a discomfort with American complacency that the Cold War does not quite account for.
     

     
          1st SF Home Rainout Since.  Bounce Tabby-Cat Giants.
               Newspapers
          Left in my house.
          My house is Aquarius.  I don't believe
          The water-bearer
          Has equal weight on his shoulders.
          The lines never do.
          We give equal
          Space to everything in our lives.  Eich-
          Mann proved that false in killing like you raise
                                             wildflowers.
               Witlessly
          I
          Can-
          not
          accord
          sympathy
          to
          those
          who
          do
          not
          recognize
          The human crisis.

[Spicer,Language]

     

    The human crisis seems to have wounded a different, slightly younger cluster of American poets that keeps forming and reforming in my mind and I find it difficult to ignore the fact that they were born during the Second World War. Susan Howe gives an explicit account of what I take here to be significant:

     

    For me there was no silence before armies. I was born in Boston Massachusetts on June 10th, 1937, to an Irish mother and American father. . . . By 1937 the Nazi dictatorship was well established in Germany. All dissenting political parties had been liquidated and Concentration Camps had already been set up. . . . In the summer of 1938 my mother and I were staying . . . in Ireland and I had just learned to walk, when Czechoslovakia was dismembered . . . . That October we sailed home on a ship crowded with refugees. When I was two the German army invaded Poland and World War II began in the West. . . . American fathers march off into the hot Chronicles of global struggle but mothers were left. . . . From 1939 until 1946 in news photographs, day after day I saw signs of culture exploding into murder. . . . I became part of the ruin. In the blank skies over Europe I was Strife represented. . . . Those black and white picture shots--moving or fixed--were a subversive generation.

     

    I wouldn’t want to give an inclusive list of this just more extraordinary part-generation ofNewerAmerican Poets born between 1937 and 1944, but a partial list would include Clark Coolidge, Michael Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, David Melnick, Tom Mandel, Michael Lally, Ted Greenwald, Ray DiPalma, Nick Piombino, Ann Lauterbach, Peter Seaton, Jim Brodey, Charles North, Fanny Howe, George Quasha, Charles Stein, Robert Grenier, Ron Padgett, Stephen Rodefer, John Taggart, Mauren Owen, Lorenzo Thomas, Lewis Warsh, Michael Davidson, Tony Towle, Bill Berkson, Geoff Young, Kathleen Fraser, John Perelman–all contemporaries of John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Richard Foreman. (I recognize how arbitrary it is to leave off the years just before and after, or not to mention Tom Raworth, born in England in 1938.)
     

     
          o - u -
          u - u -ni -
          form - ity - o -
          u - u - u - ni -
          formity - o -
          u - unit - de -
          formity - u -
          unit deformity

[Robert Grenier, "Song"]

     

    While I don’t want to stereotype individuals who, if anything, stand radically and determinately against stereotyping, generalizing, sweeping claims, ideological pronouncements and the like, I’ve been struck by how much these individual artists havethat in common: as if they share, without ever so stating, a rejection of anything extrinsic to the poetic process and to the poem–an insistence on the particularity of that process, the nonreducible nature of the choices made, the obscenity or absurdity of paraphrase or extra-poetic explanation, and a suspicion or rejection of conventional literary, and equally, nonliterary, career patterns. In short, they share a radical rejection of conventional American values of conformism, fitting in, getting along / going along,–of accessibility to the point of self-betrayal.

     

    An evening . . .
    Spent thinking
    About what my life would be . . .
    If I’d’ve been accepted to and gone
    Where I applied . . .
    Where I’d learned
    Different social graces
    Than the ones I have
    Where some of the material
    Values of the American dream
    Had rubbed off . . .
    If I’d settled down
    And settled
    For the foundation
    On a house
    For future generations
    Instead of assuming
    Immediately past generations
    My foundation to mine
    If I’d been
    A little quicker to learn
    What was expected of me . . .
    I’ve probably been saved
    By a streak of stubbornness
    By a slow mind
    And a tendency to drift
    That requires
    My personal understanding
    Before happening . . .

     

    [Ted Greenwald, “Whiff”]

     

    Uncompromising integrity is one way I’d put it, emphasizing that the social costs of such uncompromising integrity– inaudibility or marginality, difficult immediate personal and economic circumstance, isolation, feisty impatience with less exacting choices–are not unknown to some of these individuals.
     

     

          it's embarrassing to feel

          my self body image etc (often)

          defined by people around me (my reaction to their

                                             reactions)

          that embarrasses me a lot

          zeal embarrasses me, your zeal for instance

          always lining up poets and their poems

          one up one down

          in relation to you and your poems . . .

          most of all . . . I'm embarrassed by death

          death is really the only embarrassing thing

          and sometimes (unexpectedly these days more often)

          it scares the shit out of me

[Greenwald, "For Ted, On Election Day"]

     

    Or put it this way: I find in many of the works of these poets an intense distrust of large-scale claims of any kind, an extreme questioning of “public” forms, a tireless tearing down or tearing away at authoritative / authoritarian language structures. I hear in their works an explosion of self-reflectiveness and a refusal of the systematic combined with a pervasive engagement with dislocation up to the point of personal terror: An insistence on the “human” scale of poetry–on the “human crisis”–in a culture going bonkers with mass markets, high technology, and faith in science as savior.

     

    the lost family of scatter cabal
    thought under disorder and music
    filling the crumpled space owned
    by another taught under disorder
    to make a path through judgement . . .

     

    [Ray DiPalma,RAIK]

     

    While I would surely point to the remarkable amount of what is now reductively called “theory” that is implicit in the work of most of these poets, many of them have eloquently refused the “mantle” of poetics and theory, as if to engage in such secondary projects would implicate them in a grandiosity or even megalomania that the work itself abjures.

     

    What we know is the way we fall
    when we fall off the little we ride
    when we ride away from the things we’re given
    to make us forget the things we gave up

     

    [Michael Lally, “In the Distance”]

     

    While the formal invention and innovations among these poets is enormous, few of them have chosen to promote them in an impersonal or art-historical way; invention is not seen in avant-garde or canonical terms but rather as a necessary extension of a personally eccentric investigation, crucial because of the “internal” needs of the articulation and not justified or justifiable by external criteria.

     

     
          We're strange features, ignoring things.  Our hero
          Separates from a problem in pink, the thought
          To be able to thing in the world. . . .

          So this is the perfect plan.  And here's a creative
                                                  code.
          For all its on or off old self, immersion, power and

          Command.  When the world was wars and wars, according
          To cause breaking out from the conditions for events
          And their obsessed leaders.  Brute editing, the way

          The frame's the response to survival aids to lust
          Contains the round rations on an actual summit.
          One teaches sense to a child saying you sense

          How we've always talked. . . .

          A deeper shelter, a deeper skin leaving
          Tracks the brain blew away . . .
          Predatory signs which whiz by and stop,
          The lid and the soul, there are reasons for this.

[Peter Seaton, "Need from a Wound Would Do It"]

     

    So the absence of a substantial amount of poetics or commentary (the exceptions are striking but not contradictory), more, the refusal of commentary as explanation, mark a complete engagement with the poetic act asnecessarily self-sufficient. Thus: a reluctance to link up formal innovation–which is understood as eccentric and self-defined rather than ideologically or socially defined–with larger political, social or aesthetic activities, as in groups or movements, while at the same time refusing to Romanticize or sentimentalize “individuality” in place of the values of poetic work itself.
     

     
          Not by
          `today' but
          by
          recurrent light
          its course
          of blossoming
          is not effected
          by the sun at all?
          `powers of
          darkness' at large?
          it `unfolds'
          `unfolding'
          flowering of powers of darkness at large?
          I `see' at `dawn'?

[Grenier, "Rose"]

     

    This formulation suggests a relatively sharp demarcation with the generation born after 1945–the so-called baby boomers who came of age during a time when personal discomfort with, or distaste for, dominant American value could be linked up to national and international cultural and political movements that seem to share these values. In 1958 cultural and political dissidence would have taken place against a totally different ground than ten years later. The situation of the fifties may have induced a sense of isolation or self-reliance in contrast to the sixties version of sometimes giddy group-solidarity.

     

    Damage frightens sometimes–reminder
    of present danger–loss, deprivation. . . .
    One didn’t want to view the wreckage constantly
    but sought the consolation of lovely sights and
    subtle sounds. One could accept a single scratch
    but in the midst of the thicket, the brambles burn
    and the delay in walking at last annoys and one
    loses patience.

     

    [Piombino,Poems]

     

     
          The poetry of murder helped instigate the murder of
                                             poetry.

          Looking for the root, I forgot the sun.

[Piombino, "9/20/88"]

     

    Perhaps this can be described as a process of internalization, looking downward or inward (“the root”) rather than outward (“the sun”)–not upward as in Idealism but falling down with the gravity of the earth, the grace of the body, even the body–the materiality–of language. There is, in many of the poems of these poets, a persistence of dislocation, of going on in the face of all the terms being changed while refusing to return to, to accept, normalcy or a new equilibrium grounded on repressing the old damage. This can be as much a cause for comedy as solemnity.

     

     
          weracki
          dciece
          hajf   wet pboru

          eitusic at foerual bif
          thorus
          t'inalie thodo
          to tala
          ienstable
          ate sophoabl

[David Melnick,Pcoet]

     

    Poets are seismographs of the psychic realities that are not seen or heard in less sensitive media; poems chart or graph realities that otherwise go unregistered. And they do this more in the minute particulars of registration than any idea of subject matter would otherwise suggest.

     

    What is said
    long before
    the chronicle
    is told Smokey
    Stuff in damp rooms
    Carved out
    Blocked out
    Piled with slits
    And windows . . .

     

    [Ray DiPalma,Chan]

     
    The psychic dislocation of the Second War occurred when these poets were toddlers; their first experience of language, of truth and repression, of fear and future, are inextricably tied to the Second War. Perhaps poetry presented a possible field for articulation for those who atypically stayed in touch with–perhaps could not successfully repress–these darker realities.
     

     
          A great block of wedge wood stint
          stays at the star of its corner which.
          A divider in pierces depends, wans.
          For is what I have made be only salvage?
          Sat in my robes, folds.  Decomposed, fled.
          The world a height now brine, estuaries drained to the
                                                  very pole.
          Geometric, a lingual dent?  Drainage, albany.  Where at
                                                  the last
          stand all this sphere that herded me?  My cell a corner
                                                  on the
          filtering world, all out herein my belts.  Things in
                                                  trim they
          belt me, beg me, array my coined veils. . . .  The
                                                  world in anger
          is an angled hole?  . . .
          The light that leaks from composition alone.
          Scalded by a tentative.  Expels the tiny expounds thing
                                                       huge,
          things made be.  Any and it's large.  A universe is not
                                                  of use.

[Clark Coolidge,Melencolia]

     

    These tentative angles into the unknown are a far cry from Rothenberg’s explosive, disturbing, graphic struggle with the memories of the Second War inKhurbn:

     

    “practice your scream” I said
    (why did I say it?)
    because it was his scream & wasn’t my own
    it hovered between us bright
    to our senses always bright it held
    the center place
    then somebody else came up & stared
    deep in his eyes there found a memory
    of horses galloping faster the wheels dyed red
    behind them the poles had resolved
    a feast day but the jew
    locked in his closet screamed
    into his vest a scream
    that had no sound therefore
    spiralled around the world
    so wild that it shattered stones . . .

     

    [“Dos Geshray (The Scream)”]

     

    Khurbn risks the pornographic or voyeuristic out of a need to exorcise the images that hold us captive if not spoken or revisualized, marking an end to Rothenberg’s own past refusal to depict the Extermination Process.

     

    In contrast, Charles Reznikoff’s last book,Holocaust (1975), which is based on documentary evidence about the Lagers gathered from the records of the Eichmann and Nuremberg trials, presents a series of details, fragments cut away from the horror. Reznikoff offers no explanation of the depicted events and he provides neither explicit emotional nor moral response to them: he leaves us alone with our reactions, making us to find our own screams or to articulate our own silences. Seemingly flat, documentary, particularized,Holocaust–like all of Reznikoff’s work since his first book in 1917–is a mosaic of salient incidents:
     

     
          A visitor once stopped one of the children:
          a boy of seven or eight, handsome, alert and gay.
          He had only one shoe and the other foot was bare,
          and his coat of good quality had no buttons.
          The visitor asked him for his name
          and then what his parents were doing;
          and he said, "Father is working in the office
          and Mother is playing the piano."
          Then he asked the visitor if he would be joining his
                                             parents soon--
          they always told the children they would be leaving
                                             soon to
          rejoin their   parents--
          and the visitor answered, "Certainly.  In a day or
                                             two."
          At that the child took out of his pocket
          half an army biscuit he had been given in camp
          and said, "I am keeping this half for Mother;"
          and then the child who had been so gay
          burst into tears.

     

    This detail from Reznikoff brings forward, in an ineffably shattering way, the atmosphere of willed forgetting of the 1950s, or now. We blithely go about our business–busy, gay, distracted; until that blistering moment of consciousness that shatters all hopes when we recognize that we are orphaned, have lost our parents–in the sense of our foundations, our bearing in the world; until, that is, a detail jolts the memory, when we feel, as in the fragments in our pocket, what we have held back out of denial.

     

    Denial marks the refusal to mourn: to understand what we have lost and its absolute irreparability. Reznikoff and Rothenberg initiate this process, but no more than other poets, ranges of poetry, that register this denial in the process of seeking forms that find ways out of the “Western Box”.

     

    In contrast to–or is it an extension of?–Adorno’s famous remarks about the impossibility of (lyric?) poetry after Auschwitz, I would say poetry is a necessary way to register the unrepresentable loss of the Second War.

     

    Sources for Poems Cited

     

    • John Ashbery. Rivers and Mountains. Ecco Press, New York, 1966.
    • Clark Coolidge,Melencolia. Great Barrington, Massachusetts: The Figures, 1987.
    • Robert Creeley, “A Fragment,” inThe Charm (early poems) and “Hart Crane,” the opening poem ofFor Love, both in The Collected Poems. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. “Ever since Hitler . . .” inWindows. New York: New Directions, 1990.
    • Ray DiPalma,RAIK. New York: Roof Books, 1989. “Five Poems fromChan” in “43 Poets (1984),” ed. Charles Bernstein, inboundary 2, XIV: 1-2 (1986).
    • Larry Eigner, frontpiece poem inanother time in fragments. London: Fulcrum, 1967.
    • Ben Friedlander,Kristallnacht: November 9-10, 1938. Privately printed, 1988.
    • Allen Ginsberg,Howl. San Francisco: City Lights, 1956.
    • Ted Greenwald,Common Sense. Kensington, California: L Publications, 1978.
    • Robert Grenier,Phantom Anthems: Oakland: O Books, 1986.
    • Susan Howe, The Liberties (1980), inThe Europe of Trusts (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1990).
    • Michael Lally,Rocky Dies Yellow. Berkeley: Blue Wind, 1975.
    • David Melnick,Pcoet. San Francisco: G.A.W.K., 1975.
    • Charles Olson,The Collected Poems, ed. George F. Butterick. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
    • Bob Perelman,The First World. The Figures, 1986.
    • Nick Piombino, “in the center of movement, a debate” and “A Simple Invocation Would Be,” inPoems. Sun & Moon Press, 1988; “9/20/88” in “Postmodern Poetries”, ed. Jerome McGann, inVerse, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1990).
    • Charles Reznikoff, “Children”, inHolocaust. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975.
    • Jerome Rothenberg,Khurbn & Other Poems. New Directions, 1989.
    • Jack Spicer,Language (1964) inThe Collected Books of Jack Spicer, ed. Robin Blaser. Black Sparrow, 1975.
    • Rosmarie Waldrop,The Road Is Everywhere Or Stop This Body. Columbia, Missouri: Open Places, 1978.
    • Barrett Watten,Under Erasure, excerpted in “Postmodern Poetries” inVerse.

     

  • Two Poems

    James McCorkle

    Hobart and William Smith Colleges

     

    Combustion of Early Summer

     

    The elation of the past is over, the news tells us,
    Suggesting it was there to begin with
    Or recoverable, like a heavy ore or a shipwreck.

     

    But on closer inspection, the past buzzes around us,
    A conversation in another room we thought dormant,
    Soon its occupants will crash through the door

     

    Wearing green sequin blouses that remind us of mermaids,
    The ones seen years ago in waterless tanks among dried starfish
    And draped nets, waving to us from a place free of storms.

     

    You wonder about other places, less advertised,
    If another design had not been accomplished
    That drew upon a new notion of heaven.

     

    Cushioned by the afternoon’s orchid heat,
    Enveloping us with implied betrayals–
    It is possible, the narrator might be whispering–

     

    There we might be unfurling like sails,
    Never going taut, the wind pulls us over the water,
    Whole populations streaming over reefs with marlin and sailfish.

     

    Stories that make us up, until we are bankrupt,
    And we wonder who these people are claiming their pound
    Of flesh off our backs, pushing us into the dusty crowd.

     

    We are trapped in the same voices we’ve known for years,
    Words drop among the glowing debris of streets–
    Which are yours or mine, what was said or when, unknown.

     

    Sorting things out, nothing really fits:
    The puzzle of mountains with pieces from a regatta,
    We have pieces from other lives,

     

    The difficulty is to remember them, hoping
    Caligula or Curie do not figure
    As the locking piece, the keyhole, the knob.

     

    Dreams stare back at us, a coiled snake
    Leading us deeper into houses or along streets
    To a harbor whose palms have rotted, the furniture staved-in.

     

    Along the shore the dead talk with us–they are the waves
    And the salvage-birds, the jackals that swarm
    Through the old hotels and in the weedy temples.

     

    These sidereal landscapes compound: for a moment
    You are there, in the mullein-heat of ruins, before we lose sight
    Of the landscape, the dream chopped to a memory

     

    At other times, there are sections we dimly remember:
    Another bay’s cerulean expanse tips into the sky,
    Scattered sails tack for an unseen buoy.

     

    The regatta holds its shape, like dreams that continue after
    waking,
    The city fills out for us again, with its seepage-stained
    Water-towers and the pigeon-clutter of roofs.

     

    In the dense exhaust of afternoon, we move in and out of shadows
    Along Houston Street, as though bathing in ink
    And then washing clean of all traces,

     

    The remaining light is so strong our white shirts
    Blanch the photographs of all tone: were you to the left,
    Or is that someone else strayed into the frame?

     

    The shield of light expands over the imagined horizons,
    Everything fills itself with all else,
    That anything could be no longer interests.

     

    The traffic lights change like dominoes falling,
    All the way up town as we move each to another,
    A roundel where passion is only in the figure.

     

    Everything said spirals to a period,
    A rose that has dried almost to blackness,
    Its scent a window left open long ago.

     

    We slide to this point perspectives chart,
    Infinite movement allowed only one course,
    What was meant to happens remains off stage,

     

    So much for the pavane we whirled into;
    Sticking your tongue out, crossing your eyes, you spin
    Across stage, into the water-meadows abutting tank-farms.

     

    The stage goes black, the curtains tear,
    Children are sent in to rip the floorboards up
    For firewood, pigeons circle out of the cracked vault.

     

    Returning dripping with sedge and reeds,
    Tannic perfume soaks your clothes: no one can describe
    Your departure or arrival, yet we all have ideas.

     

    Momentary grace or seduction?–no one knows
    Your reasons for taking up with us, perhaps the loneliness
    Of watching cities turn more fatal and rapturous

     

    Each epoch slides into the next and claims its dead:
    What is the cost of all this, what has been put aside
    To keep the body tandem to the sulphur-lit city.

     

    When you spun into your volute, there was a dazzle of sails:
    I saw you spinning on the round stones of a harbor,
    The howling from below the ground stopped.

     

    The first bodies were temples crowded with space,
    With different voices you spun through them,
    Until the howling started again, and the bull slammed the walls

     

    Deep below us, mired in its own demands:
    We talk to the dead, now that the fields far inland
    Are burning up and our history is seen as strings
    Of small blunders, the sky emptied of its regattas.

     

     

    The Love of My Life

     

    Out of practice, all that is left is theory,
    The sun has risen hours ago, but the day
    Hangs like a dream whose edges will be skirted
    In collaboration with gravity. The clouds will lift
    Is all the radio omens, the stage is left
    For newcomers, the bureau cluttered with the weeks’s
    Unforgiving letters and bills. And theory,

     

    An elaboration of what is gone, is not an explanation,
    But the fine ribs lifted from fossil
    Sediments, glistening and senseless
    Unless understood by what followed, if anything.
    And there they are, all twenty-six, sternum side-up,
    The wind catching rags and paper shreds in them,
    The day trudges on, the traffic caught like hair

     

    On the bathroom floor; suburbia not far past
    The bridges. What a day this has turned into
    We exclaim, for once, getting it off
    Our chests. Somewhere each of us has left a corpse,
    Or many, honeyed or scattered by birds.
    While we talk, I too am a diminishing figure,
    Sitting next to you, then in another room, and at last

     

    Across the river, on the other side of the city,
    Walking backwards into what must be only theory
    Of what comes to happen. Discussed later
    Over dinner, the higher forms of life, the cooperative
    Societies of animal species–blue whales and mountain gorillas–
    While we have learned the practice of severing
    And the routes marking separation: this is

     

    The practice, the plan of every city. In this plan
    Someone dragging shimmering cages of ribs already
    Nears you. On pellets of ice, in the store window
    Before you, swordfish arch their black leather trunks
    Around mounds of pink shrimp and mirrored cuts of salmon.
    The avenue is packed and steaming cold: which one
    Is he, nearing you with his theories and criminal good looks?

     

     

  • Incloser

    Susan Howe

    Temple University

     
    Some of this essay has been published in The Politics of Poetic Form; Poetry and Public Policy, edited by Charles Bernstein, Roof Books. [What follows is an excerpt from a book to be published in 1991 by Weaselsleeves Press. –Eds.]
     

     
                         Turned back from turning back
                       as if a loved country
                         faced away from the traveler
                         No pledged premeditated daughter
                       no cold cold sorrow no barrier

                         EN-CLOSE.  See INCLOSE.

     IN-CLOSE, v.t. [fr. %enclos*; Sp. It. incluso; L.
          inclusus, includo; in and claudo or cludo.]
          1.  To surround; to shut in; to confine on all sides;
          as to inclose a field with a fence; to inclose a
          fort or an army with troops; to inclose a town with
          walls.
          2.  To separate from common grounds by a fence; as, to
          inclose lands.
          3.  To include; to shut or confine; as to inclose
          trinkets in a box.
          4.  To environ; to encompass.
          5.  To cover with a wrapper or envelope; to cover under
          seal; as to inclose a letter or a bank note.

     IN-CLOS ER, n. He or that which encloses; one who
          separates land from common grounds by a fence.

     Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language

                              Incloser

                            THOMAS SHEPARD
                     Anagram: O, a map's thresh'd
                              (WIII 513)

        The first and least of these Books [by Shepard] is
     called, The Sincere Convert: Which the Author would
     commonly call, His Ragged Child : And once, even after its
     Fourth Edition, wrote unto Mr. Giles Firmin, thus
     concerning it: once saw it. It was a Collection of such Notes 
     in a dark Town in, The Sincere Convert:I have not the Book : 
     I once saw it. It was a Collection of such Notes in a dark 
     Town in England, which one procuring of me, published them 
     without my Will, or my Privity. I scarce know what it 
     contains, nor do I like to see it; considering the many 
     Typographia, most absurd; and the Confession of him that 
     published it, that it comes out much altered from what was 
     first written.
                      Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana

                    *              *              *

        My writing has been haunted and inspired by a series of
     texts, woven in shrouds and cordage of classic American 19th
     century works, they are the buried ones, they body them
     forth.
        The selection of particular examples from a large group
     is always a social act.  By choosing to install certain
     narratives somewhere between history, mystic speech, and
     poetry, I have enclosed them in an organization although I
     know there are places no classificatory procedure can reach
     where connections between words and things we thought
     existed break off.  For me, paradoxes and ironies of
     fragmentation are particularly compelling.
        Every statement is a product of collective desires and
     divisibilities.  Knowledge, no matter how I get it, involves
     exclusion and repression.  National histories hold ruptures
     and hierarchies.  On the scales of global power what gets
     crossed over?  Foreign accents mark dialogues that delete
     them.  Ambulant vagrant bastardy comes looming through
     assurance and sanctification.

     _Thomas Shepard:_
          A long story of conversion, and a hundred to one if
          some lie or other slip not out with it.  Why, the
          secret meaning is, I pray admire me.
                                                  (WII 284)

        When we move through the positivism of literary canons
     and master narratives, we consign ourselves to the
     legitimation of power, chains of inertia, an apparatus of
     capture.

     _Brother Crackbone's Wife:_
          So I gave up and I was afraid to sing because to sing a
          lie, Lord teach me and I'll follow thee and heard Lord
          will break the will of His last work.

                                             (C 140)
                    *              *              *

        A printed book enters social and economic networks of
     distribution.  Does the printing modify an author's
     intention, or does a text develop itself?  Why do certain
     works go on saying something else?  Pierre Macherey says in
     A Theory of Literary Production: "the work has its
     beginnings in a break from the usual ways of speaking and
     writing--a break which sets it apart from all other forms of
     ideological expression" (52).  Roman Jakobson says in
     "Dialogue On Time In Language and Literature": "One of the
     essential differences between spoken and written language
     can be seen clearly.  The former has a purely temporal
     character, while the latter connects time and space.  While
     the sounds we hear disappear, when we read we usually have
     immobile letters before us and the time of the written flow
     of words is reversible" (20).  Gertrude Stein says in
     "Patriarchal Poetry": "They said they said./ They said they
     said when they said men./ Many men many how many many many
     many men men men said many here" (123).  Emily Dickinson
     writes to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson: "Moving
     on in the Dark like Loaded Boats at Night, though there is
     no Course, there is Boundlessness--" (L 871).

         Strange translucencies: letters, phonemes, syllables,
     rhymes, shorthand segments, alliteration, assonance, meter,
     form a ladder to an outside state outside of States.  Rungs
     between escape and enclosure are confusing and compelling.

     _Brother Crackbone's Wife:_
          And seeing house burned down, I thought it was just and
          mercy to save life of the child and that I saw not
          after again my children there.  And as my spirit was
          fiery so to burn all I had, and hence prayed Lord would
          send fire of word, baptize me with fire.  And since the
          Lord hath set my heart at liberty.  (C 140)
                    *              *              *

     There was the last refuge from search and death; so here.
     (WII 195)

        I am a poet writing near the close of the 20th century.
        Little by little sound grew to be meaning.  I cross an
     invisible line spoken in the first word "Then."  Every
     prescriptive grasp assertion was once a hero reading Samson.
     There and here I encounter one vagabond formula another pure
     Idea.  To such a land.  Yet has haunts.  The heart of its
     falls must be crossed and re-crossed.  October strips off
     cover and quiet conscience.
        New England is the place I am.  Listening to the clock
     and the sun whirl dry leaves along.  Distinguishing first
     age from set hour.  The eternal and spirit in them.
        A poem can prevent onrushing light going out.  Narrow
     path in the teeth of proof.  Fire of words will try us.
     Grace given to few.  Coming home though bent and bias for
     the sake of why so.  Awkward as I am.  Here and there
     invincible things as they are.
        I write quietly to her.  She is a figure of other as thin
     as paper.
        Sorrow for uproar and wrongs of this world.  You
     convenant to love.
                    *              *              *

     _Emily Dickinson:_
           Master.
                If you saw a bullet
                hit a Bird - and he told you
                he was'nt shot - you might weep
                at his courtesy, but you would
                certainly doubt his word.  (L 233)

        If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters
     other voices.
        Dickinson, Melville, Thoreau, and Hawthorne guided me
     back to what I once thought was the distant 17th century.
     Now I know that the arena in which scripture battles raged
     among New Englanders with originary fury is part of our
     current American system and events, history and structure.

     _Goodwife Willows:_
          Then I had a mind for New England and I thought I
          should know  more of my own heart.  So I came and
          thought I saw more than ever I could have believed that
          I wondered earth swallowed me not up.  And 25 Matthew
          5--foolish virgins saw themselves void of all grace.  I
          thought I was so and was gone no farther. And
          questioned all that ever the Lord had wrought, I'll
          never leave thee.  I could now apprehend that yet
          desired the Lord not to leave me nor forsake me and
          afterward I thought I was now discovered.  Yet hearing
          He would not hide His face forever, was encouraged to
          seek.  But I felt my heart rebellious and loathe to
          submit unto Him.  (C 151)

        An English relation of conversion spoken at a territorial
     edge of America is deterritorialized and deterred by anxiety
     crucial to iconoclastic Puritan piety.  Inexplicable
     acoustic apprehension looms over assurance and
     sanctification, over soil subsoil sea sky.
        Each singular call.  As the sound is the sense is.
     Severed on this side.  Who would know there is a covenant.
     In a new world morphologies are triggered off.
               *              *              *

     Under the hammer of God's word. (WI 92)

        During the 1630's and 40's a mother tongue (English) had
     to find ways to accommodate new representations of reality.
     Helplessness and suffering caused by agrarian revolution in
     England, and changing economic structures all across Europe,
     pushed members of various classes and backgrounds into new
     collectivities.  For a time English Protestant sects were
     united in a struggle against Parliament, the Jacobean and
     Stuart Courts, the Anglican Church, and Archbishop Laud.
     Collective resistance to political and religious persecution
     pushed particular groups to a radical separatism.  Some
     sects broke loose from the European continent.  Their hope
     was to ride out the cry and accusation of kingdoms of Satan
     until God would be all in all.

     _Thomas Shepard:_
          And so, seeing I had been tossed from the south to the
          north of England and now could go no farther, I then
          began to listen to a call to New England. (GP 55)

        Schismatic children of Adam thought they were leaving the
     "wilderness of the world" to find a haven free of
     institutional structures they had united against.  They
     were unprepared for the variability of directional change
     the wilderness they reached represented.  Even John Winthrop
     complained of "unexpected troubles and difficulties" in
     "this strange land where we met with many adversities"
     (Heimert 361).
        A Bible, recently translated into the vernacular, was
     owned by nearly every member of the Bay Colony.  It spoke to
     readers and non-readers and signified the repossession of
     the Word by English.  The Old and New Testaments, in
     English, were indispensible fictive realities connecting the
     emigrants to a familiar State-form, and home.  Though they
     crossed a wide and northern ocean Scripture encompassed
     them.
        From the first, Divinity was knotted in Place.  If the
     Place was found wanting, and it was by many, a rhetoric had
     to be double-knotted to hold perishing absolutism safe.
     First-generation leaders of this hegira to new England tied
     themselves and their followers to a dialectical construction
     of the American land as a virgin garden pre-established for
     them by the Author and Finisher of creation.
        "Come to me and you shall find rest unto your souls."
        To be released from bonds. . .  absorbed into catastrophe
     of pure change.
        "Flee, save your lives, and be like the heath in the
     wild."
        Here is unappropriated autonomy.  Uncounted occupied
     space.  No covenant of King and people.  No centralized
     State.  Heavy pressure of finding no content.   Openness of
     the breach.
           "The gospel is a glass to show men the face of God in
     Christ.  The law is that glass that showeth a man his own
     face, and what he himself is.  Now if this glass be taken
     away. . ." (WI 74).

        _Widow Arrington:_
          Hearing Dr. Jenison, Lamentations 3--let us search and
          turn to the Lord--which struck my heart as an arrow.
          And it came as a light into me and the more the text
          was opened more I saw my heart.  And hearing that
          something was lost when God came for searching.  And
          when I came I durst not tell my husband fearing he
          would loath me if he knew me.  And I resolved none
          should know nor I would tell. . . . (C 184-5)
                    *              *              *

        On October 3, 1635, Thomas Shepard and his family arrived
     in Boston Harbor on the ship Defense.  "Oh, the depths of
     God's grace here," he later wrote, "that when he [man]
     deserves nothing else but separation from God, and to be
     driven up and down the world as a vagabond or as dried
     leaves fallen from our God--" (GP 14).
        There is a direct relation between sound and meaning.
        Early spiritual autobiographies in America often mean to
     say that a soul has found love in what the Lord has done.
     "Oh, that when so many come near to mercy, and fall short of
     it, yet me to be let in! Caleb and Joshua to be let into
     Canaan, when they rest so near, and all perish" (WII 229).
     Words sound other ways.  I hear short-circuited conviction.
     Truth is stones not bread.  The reins are still in the hands
     of God.  He has set an order but he is not tied to that
     order.  Sounds touch every coast and corner.  He will pick
     out the vilest worthy never to be beloved.  There is no
     love.  I am not in the world where I am.
        In his journal Mr. Shepard wrote: "To heal this wound,
     which was but skinned over before, of secret atheism and
     unbelief" (GP 135).
                    *              *              *

     Finding is the First Act   (MBED 1043)

        After the beaver population in New England had been
     decimated by human greed, when roads were cut through
     unopened countryside, the roadbuilders often crossed streams
     on abandoned beaver dams, instead of  taking time to
     construct wooden bridges.  When other beaver dams collapsed
     from neglect, they left in their wake many years'
     accumulation of dead bark, leaves, twigs, and silt.  Ponds
     they formed disappeared with the dams, leaving rich soil
     newly opened to the sun.  These old pond bottoms, often many
     acres wide, provided fertile agricultural land.  Here grass
     grew as high as a person's shoulder.  Without these natural
     meadows many settlements could not have been established as
     soon as they were.
        Early narratives of conversion, and first captivity
     narratives in New England, are often narrated by women.  A
     woman, afraid of not speaking well, tells her story to a man
     who writes it down.  The participant reporters follow and
     fly out of Scripture and each other.  All testimonies are
     bereft, brief, hungry, pious, authorized.
        Shock of God's voice speaking English.

         Sound moves over the chaos of place in people.  In this
     hungry world anyone may be eaten.  What a nest and litter.
     A wolf lies coiled in the lamb.
        Silence becomes a Self.  Open your mouth.
        In such silence women were talking.  Undifferentiated
     powerlessness swallowed them.  When did the break at this
     degree of distance happen?
         Silence calls me himself.  Open your mouth.
         Whosoever.  Not found written in the book of life.
         During a later Age of Reason 18th century Protestant
     gentlemen signed the Constitution in the city of
     Philadelphia.  These first narratives from wide open places
     re-place later genial totalities.
                    *              *              *

     _Thomas Shepard:_
          Object.  But Christ is in heaven; how can I receive
          him and his love?
          Ans.  A mighty prince is absent from a traitor; he
          sends his herald with a letter of love, he gives it
          him to read; how can he receive the love of the prince
          when absent?   Ans.  He sees his love in his letter,
          he knows it came from him, and so at a distance closeth
          with him by this means; so here, he that was dead, but
          now is alive, writes, sends to thee; O, receive his
          love here in his word; this is receiving "him by
          faith."  (WII 599-600)

        In Europe, Protestant tradition since Luther had
     maintained that no one could fully express her sins.  In New
     England, for some reason hard to determine, Protestant
     strictures were reversed.  Bare promises were insufficient.
     Leaders and followers had to voice the essential mutability
     they suddenly faced.  Now the minister's scribal hand copied
     down an applicant for church membership's narrative of
     mortification and illumination.
        In The Puritan Conversion Narrative; The Beginnings of 
     American Expression, Patricia Caldwell points out that
     during the 1630's, in the Bay Colony, a disclaimer about
     worthlessness and verbal inadequacy had to be followed by a
     verbal performance strong enough to convince the audience-
     congregation of the speaker's sincerity.
         New England's first isolated and independent clerics
     must have wrestled with many conflicting impulses and
     influences.  Rage against authority and rage for order;
     desire for union with the Father and the guilty knowledge
     they had abandoned their own mothers and fathers.  In the
     1630's a new society was being shaped or shaping itself.
     Oppositional wreckers and builders considered themselves
     divine instruments committed to the creation of a holy
     commonwealth.  In 1636 the Antinomian controversy erupted
     among this group of "Believers, gathered and ordained by
     Christ's rule alone. . . all seeking the same End, viz. the
     Honor and Glory of God in his worship" (VS 73).
        The Antinomian Controversy circled around a woman, Anne
     Hutchinson, and what was seen to be "the Flewentess of her
     Tonge and her Willingness to open herselfe and to divulge
     her Opinions and to sowe her seed in us that are but highway
     side and Strayngers to her" (AH 353).  Thomas Shepard made
     this accusation.  Paradoxically he was one of the few
     ministers who required women to recite their confessions of
     faith publicly, before the gathered congregation.  Mr.
     Peters lectured Anne Hutchinson in court: "You have stept
     out of your place, You have rather bine a Husband than a Wife 
     and a preacher than a Hearer; and a Magistrate than a Subject.  
     and soe you have thought to carry all Thinges in
     Church and Commonwealth, as you would and have not bine
     humbled for this" (AC 383).
        Peters, Cotton, Winthrop, Eliot, Wilson, Dudley, Shepard,
     and other men, had stepped out of their places when they
     left England.  She was humbled by them for their
     Transgression.  Anne Hutchinson was the community scapegoat.
     "The Mother Opinion of all the rest. . . . From the womb of
     this fruitful Opinion and from the Countenance here by
     given to immediate and unwarrented revelations 'tis not
     easie to relate, how many Monsters worse than African,
     arose in the Regions of America : But a Synod assembled
     at Cambridge, whereof Mr. Shepard was no small part,
     most happily crushed them all" (M III87).

     _Noah Webster:_
          SCAPE-GOAT, n. [escape and goat.]  In the Jewish ritual, 
          a goat which was brought to the door of the
          tabernacle, where the high priest laid his hands upon
          him, confessing the sins of the people, and putting
          them on the head of the goat; after which the goat was
          sent into the wilderness, bearing the iniquities of the
          people."  Lev. xvi.  (WD 986)

         Kenneth Burke says in A Grammar of Motives, "Dialectic
     of the Scapegoat": "When the attacker chooses for himself
     the object of attack, it is usually his blood brother; the
     debunker is much closer to the debunked than others are.
     Ahab was pursued by the white whale he was pursuing" (GM
     407).
         Rene Girard says in The Scapegoat, "What is a Myth?"
     "Terrified as they [the persecutors] are by their own
     victim, they see themselves as completely passive, purely
     reactive, totally controlled by this scapegoat at the very
     moment when they rush to his attack.  They think that all
     initiative comes from him.  There is only room for a single
     cause in their field of vision, and its triumph is absolute,
     it absorbs all other causality: it is the scapegoat" (43).
        I say that the Scapegoat Dialectic and mechanism is
     peculiarly open to violence if the attacker is male, his
     bloodbrother, female.  Kenneth Burke and Rene Girard dissect
     grammars and mythologies in a realm of discourse structured,
     articulated, and repeated by men.

     _Thomas Shepard:_
               We are all in Adam, as a whole country in a
          parliament man; the whole country doth what he doth.
          And although we made no particular choice of Adam to
          stand for us, yet the Lord made it for us; who, being
          goodness itself, bears more good will to man than he
          can or could bear to himself; and being wisdom itself,
          made the wisest choice, and took the wisest course for
          the good of man.  (WI 24)
                    *              *              *

     A Short Story

     _Governor Winthrop:_
          She thinkes that the Soule is annihilated by the
          Judgement that was sentenced upon Adam.  Her Error
          springs from her Mistaking of the Curse of God upon
          Adam, for that Curse doth not implye Annihilation of
          the soule and body, but only a dissolution of the Soule
          and Body.

     _Mr. Eliot:_
          She thinks the Soule to be Nothinge but a Breath, and
          so vanisheth.  I pray put that to her.

     _Mrs. Hutchinson:_
          I thinke the soule to be nothing but Light.  (AH 356)
                    *              *              *

     The Erroneous Gentlewoman

     _Governor Winthrop:_
          We have thought it good to send for you to understand
          how things are, that if you be in an erroneous way we
          may reduce you that you may become a profitable member
          here among us.  (AC 312 )

     _Thomas Shepard:_
          I confes I am wholy unsatisfied in her Expressions to
          some of the Errors.  Any Hereticke may bring a slye
          interpretation upon any of thease Errors and yet hould
          them to thear Death: therfor I am unsatisfied.  (AC
          377)

     _Anne Hutchinson:_
          My Judgment is not altered though my Expression alters.

     _Brother Willson:_
          Your Expressions, whan your Expressions are soe
          contrary to the Truth.  (AC 378)

     _Noah Webster:_
          EX-PRES SION, (eks presh un.) n.  1.  The act of
          expressing; the act of forcing out by pressure, as
          juices and oils from plants.
                  2.  The act of uttering, declaring, or
          representing; utterance; declaration; representation;
          as, an expression of the public will.  (WD 426)

     _Mrs. Hutchinson:_
          I doe not acknowledge it to be an Error but a Mistake.
          I doe acknowledge my Expressions to be Ironious but my
          Judgment was not Ironious, for I held befor as you did
          but could not express it soe.  (AC 361)

     _Noah Webster:_
           ERRO NE OUS, a. [L. erroneus, from erro, to
          err.]
                 1. Wandering; roving; unsettled.
                               They roam
                    Erroneous  and  disconsolate.    Philips.
                 2.  Deviating; devious; irregular; wandering
          from the right course.  (WD 408)
                     Erroneous   circulation of blood
          Arbuthnot.

     _Anne Hutchinson:_
          So thear was my Mistake. I took Soule for Life.  (AH
          360)

     _Noah Webster:_
             Noah is here called Man.  (WD xxiii)
                    *              *              *

     A Woman's Delusion

         A seashore where everything.
         A tumult of mind.
         Sackcloth and run up and down.
         Every durable thread.  Mediator.  There is rebellion.  A
     man cannot look.  The sacrifice of Noah is a type.  We dress
     our garden.  There are properties.  Proof must be guiding
     and leading.
         Stooped so far.
         Bruising lash of the law.  Tender affections bear with
     the weak.  An answerable wedge.  But where is the work?  Why
     is the church compared to a garden?  We are dark ages and
     young beginners.  Apprehending ourselves we want anything.
     These are words set down.  Surfaces.  Who has felt most
     mercy?  Preaching to stone.  A thin cold dangerous realm.
     Tidings.  He appears. Anoint.  Echoes and reverberations of
     love.  Anoint.  Washed and witnessing.  Peter denies him.
     Anoint.  Whole treasures of looks to the heart.  It is one
     thing to trust to be saved.  Selfpossession.  She heard his
     question.  Never thought of it.  No thought today.
     Unapproachable December seems to be.  The sun is a spare
     trope.
        Shadow cast.  Moment of recognition.
        The conclusion of years can any force of intellect.  That
     such ferocities are drowned by double act or immediate
     stroke.  So much error.  Old things done away.  Name and
     that other in itself opposite.
         Expression.  I was born to make use of it.  Schism.
     What is the reason of it?  Zeal.  An instance of our crime
     is blunder.  Object.  It may be a question.  Narration.
     Can there be a better pattern?  Weary.  What do we
     imagine?  Swearing.  If I had time and was not mortal.
     But he.  Scraps of predominance.  Answer.  So there is
     some grievance driven out of the way.  Objection.
     Relation to the speaker.  Speech to the wind.  Particulars.
        How shall I put on my coat?
        Distance beyond comparison.  Sleep between two.
                    *              *              *
                          His name and office sweetly did agree,
                     SHEPARD by name, and in his ministry.
                                                     (WI clxxix)

     _Thomas Shepard:_
          And I considered how unfit I was to go to such a good
          land with such an unmortified, hard, dark, formal,
          hypocritical heart.  (GP 61)

        Thomas Shepard was an evangelical preacher who comforted
     and converted many people.  "As great a Converter of
     Souls as has ordinarily been known in our Days" (MIII 84).
     Before he came to America, "although [he] were but a young
     Man, yet there was that Majesty and Energy in his
     preaching and that Holiness in his Life, which was not
     ordinary": said Cotton Mather (MIII 86).  Edward Johnson
     called him "that gracious sweet Heavenly minded Minister
     . . . in whose soul the Lord hath shed abroad his love so
     abundantly, that thousands of Souls have cause to bless God
     for him" (77).  Thomas Prince said he "scarce ever preached
     a sermon but someone or other of his congregation was struck
     in great distress and cried out in agony, What shall I do to
     be saved?" (GP 8).  Jonathan Mitchell remembered Shepard's
     Cambridge ministry: "Unless it had been four years living in 
     heaven, I know not how I could have more cause to bless God 
     with wonder" (C 13).  Mitchell also recalled a day
     when, "Mr. Shepard preached most profitably.  That night I
     was followed with serious thoughts of my inexpressible
     misery, wherein I go on, from Sabbath to Sabbath, without
     God and without redemption" (WI cxxxi).  Thomas Shepard
     called his longest spoken literary production, a series of
     sermons unpublished in his lifetime, The Parable of the Ten 
     Virgins, Opened and Applied.  He married three times.  Two
     wives died as a result of childbirth.  His three sons,
     Thomas, Samuel, and Jeremiah, became ministers.  The earnest
     persecutor of Anne Hutchinson and repudiator of "erroneous
     Antinomian doctrines," confided to his Journal: "I have
     seen a God by reason and never been amazed at God.  I have
     seen God himself and have been ravished to behold him"
     (GP 136).  The author of The Sound Believer also told his
     diary: "On lecture morning this came into my thoughts, that
     the greatest part of a Christian's grace lies in mourning
     for the want of it" (GP 198).
        Edward Johnson pictured the minister of the Cambridge
     First Church as a "poor, weak, pale-complexioned man" (GP
     8), whose physical powers were feeble, but spent to the
     full.  He wept while composing his sermons, and went up to
     the pulpit "as if he expected there to give up his account
     of his stewardship" (WL clxxix).
        When Thomas Shepard died after a short illness, 25 August
     1649, he was forty-three.  "Returning home from a Council at
     Rowly, he fell into a Quinsie, with a Symptomatical
     Fever, which suddenly stop'd a Silver Trumpet, from whence
     the People of God had often heard the joyful Sound" (M
     88).  Some of his last words were: "Lord, I am vile, but
     thou art righteous" (GP 237).
         Cotton Mather described the character of his
     conversation as "A Trembling Walk with God" (MIII 90).
                    *              *              *

      } S :

     _Thomas Shepard:_
          thou wert in the dangers of the sea in thy mothers
          woombe then & see how god hath miraculously preserued
          thee, that thou art still aliue, & thy mother's woombe
          & the terrible seas haue not been thy graue;
                                             (S  side of MB)

        Probably sometime in 1646 Thomas Shepard wrote a brief
     autobiography entitled "T. { _My Birth & Life_: } S:" into
     one half of a small leatherbound pocket notebook.
     Theatrical pen strokes by the protagonist shelter and
     embellish the straightforward title that sunders his
     initials.  Conversion is an open subject.  Or is it a
     question of splitting the author's name from its frame of
     compositional expression.
        The narrative begins with an energetic account of the
     author's birth "upon the 5 day of Nouember, called the
     Powder Treason Day, & that very houre of the day wher in the
     Parlament should haue bin blown vp by Popish preists. . .
     which occasioned my father to giue me this name Thomas.
     Because he sayd I would hardly beleeue that euer any such
     wickednes could be attempted by men agaynst so religious &
     good Parlament" (MB 10).  74 pages later the autobiography
     breaks off abruptly, as it began, with calamity.  This time
     the death in childbed of the author's second wife, here
     referred to by her husband, as "the eldest daughter of Mr
     Hooker a blessed stock" (CS 391).  Shepard married this
     eldest daughter of one of the most powerful theocrats in New
     England in 1637, the same year Mrs. Hutchinson was first
     silenced.  Unlike Mrs. Hutchinson, Mrs. Shepard was a woman
     of "incomparable meeknes of spirit, toward my selfe
     especially . . . being neither too lauish nor sordid in any
     things so that I knew not what was under her hands" (CS
     392).  When she died nine years and four male children
     later, "after 3 weekes lying in," two of her sons had
     predeceased her.  On her deathbed this paragon of feminine
     piety and humility "continued praying vntil the last houre.
     . Ld tho I vnwoorthy Ld on woord one woord &c. & so gaue vp
     the ghost. thus______
     god hath visited me & scourged me for my sins & sought to
     weane me from this woorld, but I have ever found it a
     difficult thing to profit even but a little by sorest and
     sharpest afflictions;"
        "T. { _My Birth & Life_: } S:" is littered with the
     deaths of mothers.  The loss of his own mother when Shepard
     was a small child could never be settled.
        Creation implies separation.  The last word of "T. { _My
     Birth & Life_: } S:" is "afflictions."
        89 blank manuscript pages emphasize this rupture in the
     pious vocabulary of order.  The reader reads empty paper.
        The absence of a definitive conclusion to Shepard's story
     of his life and struggles is a deviation from the familiar
     Augustinian pattern of self-revelation used by other English
     nonconformist Reformers.
        Allegoria and historia should be united in "T {_My
     Birth & Life_:} S": Doubting Thomas should transcend the
     empirical events of his times to become the figura of the
     Good Shepard but the repetitive irruption of death into life
     is mightier than this notion of enclosure.
        "Woe to those that keep silent about God," warns St.
     Augustine, in the De Magistro, for where he is concerned,
     even the talkative are as though speechless" (RR 53).
     "Silence reveals speech--unless it is speech that reveals
     silence" (TP 86), Pierre Macherey has written in A Theory 
     of Literary Production.
         State of the manuscript. Leaves that stood.  Labor of
     elaboration.  he is the god.  A word is the beginning of
     every Conversion.
         The purpose of editing is to reach the truth.
         Mr. Shepard's manuscript is a draft.  Shortcomings and
     error.  The minister made no revisions in this unsettled
     account of his individual existence.  Rational corrections
     by editors lie in wait.  Leaf of the story.  Distortion
     will begin in the place of flight.

     _Thomas Shepard:_
          He is the god who tooke me vp when my own mother dyed
          who loued me, & wn my stepmother cared not for me, & wn
          lastly my father also dyed & foorsooke me wn I was yong
          & little & could take no care for my selfe.  (T  side
          of MB)
               *              *              *

     T  . {
                           Is it not hence@
                                    (T side of MB p19)

        There is no title on the binding of the notebook that
     contains the manuscript.  The paper is unlined.  There are
     no margins.  There is no front or back.  You can open and
     shut it either way.  Over time it has been used in multiple
     ways by Shepard and by others.  Thomas Shepard, its first
     owner, used both ends of the book to begin writing.
        Each side holds a personal history in reverse.  On the
     side I have here called S is the uninterrupted interrupted
     Autobiography.
        Then there is the empty center.
        But I can turn the book over, so side S is inverted,
     and begin to read another narrative by the same author.  Now
     the protagonist's more improvisational commentary decenters
     the premeditated literary production of "T. { _My Birth &
     Life_: } S:".  Subjects are chosen then dropped.  Messages
     are transmitted and hidden.  Whole pages have been left
     open.  Another revelation or problem begins with a different
     meaning or purpose.  Although dates occur on either side, it
     is unclear which side was written first.
        We might call the creation on this side an understudy.  I
     will call this T side An Inside Narrative.
        Then there is the empty center.
                    *              *              *

     with honey within, with oil in public : /

        God's Plot : The Paradoxes of Puritan Piety Being the 
     Autobiography & Journal of Thomas Shepard (1972) edited
     with an introduction by Michael McGiffert is the fourth
     published edition of Shepard's Autobiography and the
     standard reference for reading this text.  McGiffert, who
     tells us he restored some of the blunt vocabulary that had
     been expunged by two genteel nineteenth century editors,
     overlooked the structural paradox of the material object
     whose handwritten pages he laboriously and faithfully
     transcribed.  McGiffert's is the fourth edition of Shepard's
     Autobiography.  An earlier verbatim text was edited by
     Allyn Bailey Forbes for The Colonial Society of
     Massachusetts, Publications, XXVII (Transactions,
     1927-1930).  Both editors included sections from the T
     side of the manuscript book in their editions.  Forbes
     called the sections "random notes" and placed them last,
     under the title "Appendix."  McGiffert also put them last,
     under the heading: "[The following material consists of
     notes written by Shepard in the manuscript of the
     Autobiography ]."  Neither editor saw fit to point out the
     fact that Shepard left two manuscripts in one book separated
     by many pages then positioned them so that to read one you
     must turn the other upside down.
        Both editors deleted something from each history.
     McGiffert decided the financial transactions on side S
     were of no autobiographical importance.  Forbes included
     them, but buried Shepard's hostile reference to John Cotton
     on side T in a footnote to side S.  Shepard placed this
     cryptic list of accusations against his fellow Saint alone
     on the recto side of leaf three.  Far from being a "random,"
     or a footnote, the list provides a vivid half-smothered
     articulation of New England's savage intersectine Genesis.
     Possibly the Colonial Society of Massachusetts balked at
     displaying this ambiguous sample of colonial ideology.

                    Mr. Cotton: repents not: but is hid only.

                    1.  Wn Mrs. Hutchinso- was conuented he
                    commeded her for all that shee did before her
                    confinement & so gaue her a light to escape
                    thorow the crowd wt honour,

                    3.  He doth stiffly hold the reuelatio- of
                    our good estate still, without any sign of
                    woord or work: /  (MB 3)

         Here is the correct order of the sections written by
     Shepard in side T, or An Inside Narrative.

                    1.  A Roman being asked .
                    2.  Mr. Cotton: repents not: but is hid only.
                    3.  Law. that the magistrate kisse the
                                   Churchs feet:
                    4.  My Life: Lord Jesu pdo-: /  euery day.
                    5.  April: 4  1639: prep: for a fast.
                    6.  Is it not hence@
                    7.   An: 1639/ The good things I have
                                   received of the Lord:
                                       (MB&GP&CS)

        Shepard's list of "The good things I haue receiued of the
     Lord" has fourteen sections and continues for eight pages.
     The nonconformist minister meant to give praise and
     thanksgiving to God, but images of panic, haste, and
     abandonment disunite the Visible and Spiritual.
        The Lord is the Word.  He scatters short fragments.
     Jonah cried out to the Word when floods encompassed him.
     A Sound Believer hears old Chaos as in a deep sea.  A
     narrative refuses to conform to its project.
        Side S ends abruptly with afflictions sent by God to
     "scourge" the author.  Side T also breaks off suddenly.
     The author is remembering his earlier ministry in Earles
     Colne, "a most prophane" English town.  "Here the Lord kept
     me fro troubles 3 yeares & a halfe vntill the Bishop Laud
     put me to silence & would not let me liue in the town & this
     he did wn I looked to be made a shame & confusio to all:"
     (CS 395).
        From confusion in old England to affliction in new
     England.  Problematical type and antitype.  Everything has
     its use.  "To tell them myself with my own mouth" (CS 352).
        Some of the eighty-nine blank manuscript pages separating
     T and S have been written on since, by various
     mediaries.  All of these men see a higher theme to side S.
     They follow its trajectory as if side T were an eccentric
     inversion.  Their additions form a third utterance of
     authority in the Sincere Convert's transitory division of T.
     from S: { life from birth: }
        On the second leaf (r) of side T, or An Inside Narrative, 
     Mr. Shepard wrote down a single citation of discord.

                    "A Roman, being asked how he lived
                      so long-- answered--intus melle, foris
                   oleo: /

                    Quid loquacius vanitate, ait Augustinus."
                                             (MB T 1)

        Forbes had the discretion to stay away from translating
     the nonsensical Latin in his interpretation of the
     minister's script.  "A Roman being asked how he liud so
     long. answered intus melle, foris oleo: quid loquacior,
     vanitate, ait augustinus" (CS 397).  McGiffert agreed with
     Forbes transcription.  But in Latin, "quid" and "loquacior"
     cannot agree with each other.  This didn't stop McGiffert
     from offering the following: "On the inside, honey; on the
     outside, oil.  Which babbled more of Vanity? said Augustine"
     (GP 77).  The translation is grammatically incorrect.
        A more exact and enigmatic reading would be: "A Roman
     being asked how he lived so long--answered with honey within
     with oil in public:/ What is more garrulous than vanity,
     said Augustine."
        We will never know if this entry refers to John Cotton,
     Thomas Shepard, or the human condition.  It could be a
     questionable interpretation of any evangelical minister's
     profession.  It could be a self-accusation or a reference to
     John Cotton's preaching.  It could be a note for a sermon or
     merely a sign that the author knows St. Augustine.

         In the seventeenth century the word oil, used as a
     verb, often meant "to anoint."  The holy oil of religious
     rites.
        Five foolish virgins took their lamps but forgot the oil
     for trimming.  They went to meet the bridegroom.  The door
     was shut against them.  "I say unto you I know you not."
         To oil one's tongue meant, and still means, to adopt
     or use flattering speech.  "Error, oiled with
     obsequiousness, . . . has often the Advantage of
     Truth.--1776" (OUD).
        "Their throat is an open sepulcher.  One may apply this
     verse to greed, which is often the motive behind men's
     deceitful flattery. . . for greed is insatiably openmouthed,
     unlike sepulchres which are sealed up" (AP 57).  St.
     Augustine, Enarrationes.  "They that observe lying
     vanities forsake their own mercy."  Jonah, to the Lord.
        Alone on the second leaf the citation assumes its own
     mystery.
        Shepard's epigraph, if it is an epigraph to side T, or
     An Inside Narrative, is a dislocation and evocative
     contradiction in the structure of this two-sided book that
     may or may not be a literary work.
        In 1819, James Blake Howe turned the book upside down,
     probably to conform with the direction of the
     Autobiography, and inscribed his own name, place of
     residence, and the date on the same page.
                    *              *              *

     _Mr. Prince:_
       Though [Shepard's] voice was low, yet so searching was his
     preaching, so great a power attending, as a hypocrite could
     not easily bear it, & it seemed almost irresistable.  (S
     side of MB)

     Study in Logology

     _Noah Webster:_
               Oil is "an unctious substance expressed or drawn
          from various animal and vegetable substances.  The
          distinctive characteristics of oil are inflammability,
          fluidity, and insolubility in water.  Oils are fixed
          and greasy, fixed and essential, volatile and
          essential."  (WD 770)

     _Kenneth Burke:_
               Let us recall, for what it might be worth, that in
          his [St. Augustine's] treatise "On The Teacher" (De 
          Magistro), a discussion with his son on the subject of
          what would now popularly be called "semantics," he
          holds that the word verbum is derived from a verb
          meaning "to strike": (a verberando)--and the notion
          fits in well with the lash of God's discipline.  See,
          for instance, Confessions (xm vi), where he says he
          loves God because God had struck (percussisti) him
          with his Word.  (RR 50)
                    *              *              *

                            THOMAS SHEPARD
                       Anagram: More hath pass'd
                              (WIII 515)

        Between 1637 and 1640, Thomas Shepard transcribed into
     another leatherbound pocket notebook, containing 190 pages,
     the testimonies of faith given in his church by 51 men and
     women who were applying for church membership.  30 pages of
     the little book are filled with sermon notes.  He said of
     1637 that God in that year alone "delivered the country from
     war with the Indians and Familists; who rose and fell
     together" (WI cxxvi).
        A canditate for membership in the congregation of the
     Church of Christ in Cambridge in New England had been
     carefully screened by the church elders before he or she
     presented a personal "confession and declaration of God's
     manner of working on the soul" in public.  Canditates had to
     settle private accusations against them and present private
     testimonies first.  Sometimes the preliminary screening
     process took months.  After a person had been cleared by the
     church authorities, he or she delivered the public
     confession, usually during the weekday meeting.  The
     congregation then voted by a show of hands and their
     decision was supposed to be unanimous.  During Sunday
     service an applicant was finally accepted into church
     fellowship.
        The applicants, during this tumultuous time when it
     seemed dangerous to speak at all, especially to express
     spiritual enthusiasm, were from a wide social spectrum.  A
     third of them could read or write.  Almost half of them were
     women.  The speakers included four servants, two Harvard
     graduates, traders, weavers, carpenters, coopers, glovers,
     and one sailor.  Most were concerned with farming and with
     acquisition of property.  Most applicants were in their
     twenties, some in their forties.  Most were starting to
     raise families.  Elizabeth Cutter and Widow Arrington were
     in their sixties.  Each person believed that reception into
     church fellowship was necessary in order to gain economic
     and social advantage in the community.  Some later became
     rich; some are untraceable now through geneological records.
     Both male servants who spoke gained financial and political
     freedom.
        Two women in Shepard's notebook were servants.
     Geneological trace of them has vanished with their surnames.
     Two applicants were widows who managed their own estates.
     The rest generally spent their days cleaning, sewing,
     marketing, cooking, farming, and giving birth to, then
     caring for, children.  Some later died in childbirth.  Mrs.
     Sparhawk died only a month after Shepard recorded her
     narrative.  Some survived their husbands by many years.
        Thomas Hooker, who became Shepard's father-in-law in
     1637, and was the previous minister of the Cambridge parish,
     moved to Connecticut partly because he felt the colony's
     admission procedures were too harsh.  Hooker insisted that
     confessions by women should be read aloud in public by men.
     Governor Winthrop in his History of New-England, citing
     feminine "feebleness," and "shamefac't modesty and
     melanchollick fearfulness," preferred that women's
     "relations" remain private; a male elder should read them
     before a select committee.  Shepard and one or two other
     ministers felt differently.  The Confessions of diverse 
     propounded to be received & were entertained as members,
     shows that although Shepard thought women should defer to
     their husbands in worldly matters, in his theology of
     conversion they were relatively independent.  These
     narratives reflect this autonomy.  Some are as long or
     longer than those spoken by men.
                    *              *              *

                         THOMAS SHEPARD
                         Anagram: Arm'd as the shop.
                              (WIII 515)

     Notes written in the minister's hand on the flyleaf of the
     manuscript he called "The Confessions of diverse propounded 
     to be received & were entertayned as members."

     1.   You say some brethren cannot live comfortably with so
     little.
     2.   We put all the rest upon a temptation.  Lots being but
     little, and estates will increase or live in beggary.  For
     to lay land out far off is intolerable to men; nearby, you
     kill your cattle.
     3.   Because if another minister come, he will not have room
     for his company--Religion--.
     4.   Because now, if ever, is the most fit season; for the
     gate to be opened, many will come in among us, and fill all
     places, and no room in time to come at least, not such good
     room as now.  And now you may best sell.
     5.   Because Mr. Vane will be among our skirts.  (GP 90)
                    *              *              *

     MATT.xviii.11.  -- "I came to save that which was lost."
                                                  (WI 111)

           Each confession of faith is an eccentric concentrated
     improvisation and arrest.  Each narrator's proper name forms
     a chapter heading.  Wives and servants are property.  Their
     names are appropriated for masculine consistency.
                    Goodman Luxford His Wife
                    Brother Collins His Wife
                    Brother Moore His Wife
                    Brother Greene His Wife
                    Brother Parish's Wife
                    Brother Crackbone His Wife
                    The Confession of John Sill His Wife
                    John Stedman His Wife's Confession
                    Brother Jackson's Maid

        Written representation of the Spirit is sometimes
     ineffectual; words only images or symbols of the clear
     sunshine of the Gospel.  "Go to a painted sun, it gives you
     no heat, nor cherishith you not.  So it is here, etc."
     Often the minister surrounds a name with ink-scrawls and
     flourishes.
        Flights or freezes.  Proof and chaos.  Immanent sorrow of
     one, incomplete victory of another.  Use, oh my unbelief.
        Confessions are copied down quickly.  Translinguistic
     idiosyncracies infer but block consistency.  A sound block
     will not be led.  Mistaken biblical quotations are
     transcribed and abandoned.  As the sound is the sense is.
     Few revisions civilize verbal or visual hazards and webs of
     unsettled sanctification.  The minister's nearly microscopic
     handwriting is difficult to decipher.  He uses a form of
     shorthand in places.
        A wild heart at the word shatters scriptural figuration.
        Once again by correcting, deleting, translating, or
     interpreting the odd symbols and abbreviated signals, later
     well-meaning editors have effaced the disorderly velocity of
     Mr. Shepard's evangelical enthusiasm.
        For readability.
                    *              *              *

              Matt

     In this setdown the ques
     tion of C's desiples
     why they asks him

     not men ought sometimes to
     askes questions pacificaly when
     they hear the word upon
     sum occasion    (written in another hand  inT  side of MB)

        Writing speed of thought moving through dominated
     darkness (the privation) toward an irresistible confine
     possibly becoming woman.

     The Soul's Immediate Closing with the Person  (WII 111)

     _Barbary Cutter:_
               The Lord let me see my condition by nature out of
          16 of Ezekiel and by seeing the holiness of the
          carriage of others about, her friends, and the more she
          looked on them the more she thought ill of herself.
          She embraced the motion to New England.  Though she
          went through with many miseries and stumbling blocks at
          last removed and sad passages by sea.  And after I came
          hither I saw my condition more miserable than ever.  (C
          89)

        A Narrator-Scribe-Listener-Confessor-Interpreter-Judge-
     Reporter-Author quickly changes person, character, country,
     and gender.  Walk darkly here, This is to cross Scripture.
     These words are questions.  Compel them to come in when
     Jonah is cast out of sight.
          He singles them out.
          His spirit goes home to them quiet as an ark above
     waters; rest and provender being desire to lay under Lord.
     Praying for him and hearing.  Words drift together.  Washed
     from her heart.  Many foolish pray from the mouth.  Some are
     condemned.  Blossoms fly up as dust.  He will not leave.
     Death can not.  "In favor is life."  This outline is
     extracted.  Now you will have him.  She calls him so.
         Some are asleep.  Ten virgins trim their lamps.
         My house is a waste.  To doctrine to reason cry peace
     peace.  This is that which fills a man.  For this long ago
     Corinthians, Philippians, Thessalonians: motives differ.  We
     are his people we stumble.  What a wandering path
     confinement is when angels had not fallen.  Pale clarity of
     day.  Why no heart.  Iniquities are not all I might
        "Five were wise and five were foolish."
        These virgins once the doors were shut were surely kept
     out.  Glimpses.  Explication.  What is acceptable?  Toother.
     Miswritten he thoght.  He thought.  Other redundancies.
     Reduced to lower case these words are past.  To the supposed
     sepulcher.  Purest virgin churches and professors, they took
     their lamps.  What can we do?  Prevail again?  Against what
     do we watch?
        Fiery law and tabernacles I beat the air.
        Therefore as her and distancing.
                    *              *              *

     "Went forth to meet the Bridegroom."  (WII 111)

     _Old Goodwife Cutter:_
     I desired to come this way in sickness time
     and Lord brought us through many sad troubles by sea
     And when I was here the Lord rejoiced my heart.
     But when come I had lost all and no comfort
     and hearing from foolish virgins
     those that sprinkled with Christ's blood were unloved.
                                                  (C 145)

     _John Sill His Wife:_
     Oft troubled since she came hither,
     her heart went after the world and vanities
     and the Lord absented Himself from her
     so that she thought God had brought her hither on purpose
     to discover her.  (C 51)

     _Goodwife Willows:_
     And when husband gone, I thought all I had was but a form
     and I went to Mr. Morton
     and desired he would tell me how it was with me.
     He told me if I hated that form
     it was a sign I had more than a form.  (C 150)

     _Brother Winship's Wife:_
     Hearing 2 Jeremiah 14 -- two evils broken cisterns --
     I was often convinced by Mr. Hooker my condition was
     miserable
     and took all threatenings to myself. . .
     And I heard He that had smitten He could heal Hosea 6.
     Hearing -- say to them that be fearful in heart, behold He
     comes -
     Mr. Wells - pull off thy soles off thy feet for ground is
     holy.
     And hearing Exodus 34, forgiving iniquity,
     I thought Lord could will was He willing. . .
     Hearing whether ready for Christ at His appearing
     had fears, city of refuge. . .
     Hearing - oppressed undertake for me - eased.  (C 147-9)

     _Hannah Brewer:_
     And I heard that promise proclaimed - Lord, Lord merciful
     and gracious etc.-
     but could apply nothing.  (C 141)

     _Brother Winship's Wife:_
     Hearing of Thomas' unbelief,
     he showed trust in Lord forever
     for there is everlasting strength and stayed.  (C 149)

     _Goodwife Usher:_
     And I heard -- come to me you that be weary --
     and Lord turn me and I shall be turned -
     and so when I desired to come hither
     and found a discontented heart
     and mother dead and my heart overwhelmed.
     And I heard of a promise -- fear not I'll be with thee.
     And in this town I could not understand anything was said,
     I was so blind, and heart estranged from people of people.
     (C 183)

     _Mrs. Sparhawk:_
     And then that place fury is not in me,
     let Him take hold of my strength. . . .
     And she
     there was but two ways either to stand out
     or to take hold,
     and saw the promise
     and her
     own insufficiency so to do.
     and mentioning a Scripture,
     was asked whether she had assurance.
     She said no but some hope.  (C 68-9)

     _John Stedman His Wife:_
     Hearing Mr. Cotton out of Revelation --
     Christ with a rainbow on his head, Revelation 10--
     I thought there was nothing for me.
     I thought I was like the poor man at the pool.  (C 105)

     _Goodwife Grizzell:_
     Hearing Mr. Davenport on sea --
     he that hardened himself against the Lord could not
     prosper --
     and I thought I had done so.
     But then he showed it was continuing in it
     and I considered though I had a principle against faith
     yet a kingdom divided cannot stand.  (C 188-9)

     _Widow Arrington:_
     And in latter end that sermon
     there was obedience of sons and servants
     then I thought--would I know?
     And I thought Lord gave me a willing heart, etc.
     And they that have sons can cry--Abba--Father,
     and so have some stay
     and I wished I had a place in wilderness to mourn.
     (C 185-6)

     _Brother Jackson's Maid:_
     When Christ was to depart nothing broke their heart so much
     as then.  (C 121)
                    *              *              *

     Walking alone in the fields

        These first North American Inside Narratives cross the
     wide current of Scripture.  I meet them in the fields.  They
     show me what rigor.  I dare not pity.  When she went to meet
     the Bridegroom it was too early.  Then there is nothing to
     believe.  Scholars of the world, then there is no authority
     at all.

                    The iron face of filial systems.
                    The colonies of America break out.

        Consider the parable of these wise and foolish virgins.
     They went to work to trim their lamps.  What did the foolish
     say to the wise?  That there is no difference?  What a
     crossing.  All their thoughts and searching.  Is that what
     love is?  Bewildered by history did they see iniquity?  Did
     they spend whole days and nights trimming?  When was the
     filth wiped off?

                    People of His pasture, does this give peace?
                    Sheep of His hand, is this the temptation of
                      the place?

        Mountains are interrupted by mountains.  Planets are not
     fixed.  They run together.  Planets are globes of fire.
     Imagination is a lense.  Pastness.  We find by experience.
     A sentence tumbles into thought.  A disturbance calls itself
     free.

     

    Notes

     
    Patricia Caldwell’s study is concerned with how and when English voices begin to speak New-Englandly. The Puritan Conversion Narrative demonstrates how careful examination and interpretation of individual physical artifacts from a time and place can change our basic assumptions about the New England pattern and its influence on American literary expression.
     
    This essay is profoundly indebted to her work.
     
    I have followed each quoted source in spelling and punctuation. In the books I used as sources, revisions, deletions, and spelling differences, have been modernized, and then again “modernized”; I have tried to preserve those changes as part of the form and content of my essay. Someday I hope there will be facsimile versions of the “Confessions,” the “Journal,” and the “Autobiography,” with facing transcriptions in typeface.
     
    I have taken editorial liberties in places. It was my editorial decision to turn some sections of the narratives into poems.
     

    Key

     
    AC = The Antinomian Controversy: Patricia Caldwell.

    AH = Anne Hutchinson.

    C = Thomas Shepard’s Confessions.

    CS = The Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Thomas Shepard’s T. {My Birth and Life:} S:

    GP = God’s Plot: Thomas Shepard.

    L = The Letters of Emily Dickinson.

    M = Magnalia Christi Americana: Cotton Mather.

    MB = Manuscript Book: Thomas Shepard’s Autobiography.

    MBED = Emily Dickinson’s Manuscript Books.

    ML = The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson.

    OUD = The Oxford Universal Dictionary.

    RR = The Rhetoric of Religion: Kenneth Burke.

    VS = Visible Saints: Geoffrey Nuttal.

    W = The Works of Thomas Shepard.

    WD = An American Dictionary of the English Language: Noah Webster.
     
    ASCII text cannot reproduce certain marks used in this work. We have used a @ to represent mirror-imaged (backward) question marks. We have used o- to represent an o with a bar over it. –PMC Eds.
     

    Works Cited

     

    • Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. New York: George Braziller, 1955.
    • —. The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Boston: Beacon P, 1961.
    • Caldwell, Patricia. The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.
    • Dickinson, Emily. The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958.
    • —. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Ralph Franklin. Harvard UP, 1981.
    • Girard, Rene. The Scapegoat. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986.
    • Hall, David D., ed. The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638; A Documentary History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1968.
    • Heimert, Alan. “Puritanism, the Wilderness and the Frontier.” New England Quarterly (Sep. 1953): 361-82.
    • Jakobson, Roman. Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time. Ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.
    • Johnson, Edward. Wonder-Working Providence of Sion Saviour in New England. Ed. J. Franklin Jameson. (1912) 1969.
    • Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Trans. Geoffrey Wall. London: Routledge, 1978.
    • Mather, Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana or, the Ecclesiastical History of New England. (London, 1702) Hartford, 1820.
    • Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). Ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton Sealts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962.
    • Nuttal, Geoffrey F. Visible Saints: The Congregational Way, 1640-1669. Oxford: Blackwell, 1957.
    • The Oxford Universal Dictionary. London: Amen House, 1933.
    • Shepard, Thomas. “Autobiography.” Ed. Allyn Bailey Forbes. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, XXVII. Boston: Transactions, 1927-1930.
    • —. God’s Plot: The Paradoxes of Puritan Piety, Being the Autobiography and Journal of Thomas Shepard. Ed. Michael McGiffert. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1972.
    • —. Manuscript Book. Unpublished ms. The Houghton Libray, Harvard U, Cambridge.
    • —. The Works of Thomas Shepard. Ed. John A. Albro. 3 vols. 1853. New York: AMS, 1967.
    • —. Thomas Shepard’s “Confessions.” Ed. George Selement and Bruce C. Woolley. Collections of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 58. Boston: The Society, 1981.
    • Stein, Gertrude. “Patriarchal Poetry.” The Yale Gertrude Stein. Ed. Richard Kostelanetz. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980.
    • Webster, Noah, ed. An American Dictionary of the English Language.

     

  • Grammatology Hypermedia

    Greg Ulmer

    University of Florida at Gainesville

     

    This article is about an experiment I conducted for publication in a volume collecting the papers read at the Sixteenth Annual Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature: “Literacy Online: the Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers,” October 26-28, 1989 (organized by Myron Tuman). My talk at the conference placed the current developments in Artificial Intelligence and hypermedia programs in the context of the concept of the “apparatus,” used in cinema studies to mount a critique of cinema as an institution, as a social “machine” that is as much ideological as it is technological. The same drive of realism that led in cinema to the “invisible style” of Hollywood narrative films, and to the occultation of the production process in favor of a consumption of the product as if it were “natural,” is at work again in computing. Articles published in computer magazines declare that “the ultimate goal of computer technology is to make the computer disappear, that the technology should be so transparent, so invisible to the user, that for practical purposes the computer does not exist. In its perfect form, the computer and its application stand outside data content so that the user may be completely absorbed in the subject matter–it allows a person to interact with the computer just as if the computer were itself human” (Macuser, March, 1989). It was clear that the efforts of critique to expose the oppressive effects of “the suture” in cinema (the effect binding the spectator to the illusion of a complete reality) had made no impression on the computer industry, whose professionals (including many academics) are in the process of designing “seamless” information environments for hypermedia applications. The “twin peaks” of American ideology–realism and individualism–are built into the computing machine (the computer as institution).

     

    The very concept of the “apparatus” indicates that ideology is a necessary, irreducible component of any “machine.” Left critique and cognitive science agree on this point, as may be seen in Jeremy Campbell’s summary of the current state of research in artificial intelligence: A curious feature of a mind that uses Baker Street [Holmes] reasoning to create elaborate scenarios out of incomplete data is that its most deplorable biases often arise in a natural way out of the very same processes that produce the workmanlike, all-purpose, commonsense intelligence that is the Holy Grail of computer scientists who try to model human rationality. A completely open mind would be unintelligent. It could be argued that stereotypes are not ignorance structures at all, but knowledge structures. From this point of view, stereotypes cannot be understood chiefly in terms of attitudes and motives, or emotions like fear and jealousy. They are devices for predicting other people’s behavior. One result of the revival of the connectionist models in the new class of artificial intelligence machines is to downgrade the importance of logic and upgrade the role of knowledge, and of memory, which is the vehicle of knowledge (Campbell, The Improbable Machine. New York, 1989: 35, 151, 158).

     

    Critique and cognitive science hold different attitudes to the inherence of stereotypes in knowledge, of course. Critique is right to condemn the acceptance of or reconciliation with the given assumptions implicit in cognitive science, but its own response to the problem, relying on the enlightenment model of absolute separation between episteme and doxa, knowledge and opinion, is too limited. This split is replicated in the institutionalization of critique in academic print publication resulting in a specialized commentary separated from practice. Postmodern Culture could play a role in exploring alternatives to the current state of the apparatus. Grammatology provides one possible theoretical frame for this research, being free of the absolute commitment to the book apparatus (ideology of the humanist subject and writing practices, as well as print technology) that constrains research conducted within the frame of critique. The challenge of grammatology, against all technological determinism, is to accept responsibility for inventing the practices for institutionalizing electronic technologies. We may accept the values of critique (critical analysis motivated by the grand metanarrative of emancipation) without reifying one particular model of “critical thinking.” But what are the alternatives? The experiment I contributed to the volume differed from the paper delivered at the conference, being not so much an explanation of the problem–the inability of critique to expose the disappearing apparatus–as an attempt to write with the stereotypes of Western thought, using them and showing them at work at the same time. The essay is entitled “Grammatology (In The Stacks) of Hypermedia: A Simulation.”

     

    My research has been concerned with exploring various modes of “immanent critique,” a reasoning capable of operating within the machines of television and computing, in which the old categories (produced in the book apparatus) separating fiction and truth are breaking down. Rhetoric has always been concerned with sorting out the true from the false, and it will continue to function in these terms in the electronic apparatus, as it did in oral and alphabetic cultures. The terms of this sorting will be transformed, however, to treat an electronic culture that will be as different from the culture of the book as the latter is different from an oral culture. It is important to remember, at the same time, that all three dimensions of discourse exist together interactively. I am particularly interested in the figure of the mise en abyme, as elaborated in Jacques Derrida’s theories, in this context. The mise an abyme is a reflexive structuration, by means of which a text shows what it is telling, does what it says, displays its own making, reflects its own action. My hypothesis is that a discourse of immanent critique may be constructed for an electronic rhetoric (for use in video, computer, and interactive practice) by combining the mise en abyme with the two compositional modes that have dominated audio-visual texts–montage and mise en scene. The result would be a deconstructive writing, deconstruction as an inventio (rather than as a style of book criticism).

     

    “Grammatology (In The Stacks) of Hypermedia” is an experiment in immanent critique, attempting to use the mise en abyme figure to organize an “analysis” of the current thinking about hypermedia. The strategy was to imitate in alphabetic style the experience of hypermedia practice–“navigating” through a database, producing a trail of linked items of information. I adopted the “stack” format of hypercard, confining myself largely to citations from a diverse bibliography of materials relevant to hypermedia. These materials were extended to include not only texts about hypermedia from academic as well as journalistic sources, but also texts representing the domains used as metaphors for hypermedia design in these sources. Two basic semantic domains, then, provided most of the materials for the database: the index cards, organized in “stacks,” to be linked up in both logical and associative ways, and the figure of travel used to characterize the retrieval of the informations thus stored. The critical point I wanted to make had to do with a further metaphor that emerged from juxtaposing the other two–an analogy between the mastery of a database and the colonization of a foreign land. The idea was to expose the ideological quality of the research drive, the will to power in knowledge, by calling attention to the implications of designing hypermedia programs in terms of the “frontiers” of knowledge, knowledge as a “territory” to be established. The goal is not to suppress this metaphorical element in design and research, but to include it more explicitly, to unpack it within the research and teaching activities. In this way stereotypes may become self-conscious, used and mentioned at once in the learning process.

     

    The design of the experiment was influenced not only by the principle of the mise en abyme (imitating in my form the form of the object of study), but also by several other compositional strategies available in current critical theory. One of these is Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, for which hypermedia seems to be the ideal technological format. Indeed, one might hope, following her superb alphabetic (re) construction of Benjamin’s project in The dialectics of seeing (MIT, 1989) that Susan Buck-Morss would direct a hypermedia version of the Arcades. A point of departure (but only that) for this version might be the “Cicero” project, in which students of Classical civilization and Latin explore Rome (a representation on videodisc, composed using microphotography of a giant museum model of the city at its height in 315 A.D.) assisted by a “friendly tour guide” (Cicero). It is worth recalling, in this context, that Cicero was an advocate of artificial memory as part of rhetoric, and that Giulio Camillo’s Memory Theater (designed during the Venetian Renaissance) was “intended to be used for memorising every notion to be found in Cicero’s works” (Frances Yates, The Art of Memory. Chicago, 1966: 166). In fact, the design of hypermedia software in general, and not just the Cicero project, has much in common with the hypomnemic theaters of the Renaissance Hermetic-Caballist tradition. The unfinished Arcades project exists in the form of a “massive collection of notes on nineteenth-century industrial culture as it took form in Paris–and formed that city in turn. These notes consist of citations from a vast array of historical sources, which Benjamin filed with the barest minimum of commentary, and only the most general indications of how the fragments were eventually to have been arranged” (Buck-Morss, ix). In the hypermedia Arcades, an interactive Benjamin would guide students through a Paris whose history could flash up in the present moment with the touch of a key. Meanwhile, I was interested in the resonance of the card file metaphor for hypermedia and Benjamin’s views on the obsolescence of the academic book:

     

    And today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index. (Benjamin, Reflections, New York, 1978: 78.)

     

    The other strategy that is relevant to the experiment is the postmodernist fondness for allegory. Thus any item of fact reported in the database could also function as a sign, signifying or figuring another meaning. The specifics of this meaning are to be inferred in the reading, leaving the construction of the critical argument to the reader. These strategies constitute an outline for a potent pedagogy in which research functions as the inventio for an expressive text (thus producing a hybrid drawing upon both scholarship and art). This possibility suggests another role for electronic publications–to explore productive exchanges between the electronic and alphabetic apparatuses, emphasizing the usefulness of computer hardware and software as figurative models for written exercises. It is perfectly possible to compose an essayistic equivalent of a hypermedia program, and to think electronically with paper and pencil.

     

    My version of a hypermedia essay consists of some 29 cards simulating one trail blazed through a domain of information about hypermedia–concerned, that is, with a sub-domain holding data on the semantic fields of the terminology of program design for hypermedia environments. The entries are drawn from the categories listed below in random order (the entries evoke these categories). In hypermedia, the cards could be accessed in any order, but in the alphabetic simulation, which is an enunciation or utterance within the system, the sequence does develop according to an associative logic (it is precisely an experiment with the capacity of association for creating learning effects). In hypermedia, the scholar does not provide a specific line of argument, an enunciation, but constructs the whole paradigm of possibilities, the set of statements, leaving the act of utterance, specific selections and combinations, to the reader/user. Or rather, the scholar’s “argument” exists at the level of the ideology/theory directing the system of the paradigm, determining the boundaries of inclusion/exclusion.

     

    –hypermedia design
    –methods and logic of composition
    –the computer conference at the University of Alabama
    –computers in general
    –critique of cinema (apparatus theory)
    –grammatology
    –Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
    –colonial exploration of America (Columbus, the overland trails).
    –stereotypes
    –“Place” in rhetoric, memory
    –Situationism
    –mis en abyme.

     

    The fundamental idea organizing the grammatological approach to hypermedia (theorizing the institutionalization of computer technology into education in terms of the history of writing) emerges out of a comparison of three textbooks, introducing students to the operations of the three memory systems dominating schooling within three different apparatuses: the Ad Herenium, main source of the classical art of memory, in the pre-print era when oratory was the predominant practice (cf. Camillo’s Memory Theater); the St. Martin’s Handbook, representing (as typical among a host of competitors) the codification of school writing; and a textbook yet to come, doing for electronic composition what the other two examples do for their respective apparatuses. It is certainly too soon for a “codification” of electronic rhetoric, considering that the technology is still evolving at an unnerving pace. The position of Postmodern Culture in this situation should not be conservative or cautious (that slot in the intellectual ecology being already crowded with representatives). Rather, it should serve as a free zone for conceptualization, formulating an open, continually evolving simulacrum of that electronic handbook. Some of the elements of that handbook (but a new word is needed for this program) might be glimpsed in the citations collected and linked in my hypermedia essay. In the remaining sections I will reproduce, in somewhat abbreviated form, one of the series included in the original article (but with the addition of a few selections not used previously). In this recreation I will omit the sources, noting only the name of the author. My principal concern is with the transformation of the rhetorical concept of “place” that is underway in the electronic environment. A review of the history of rhetoric reveals that “place” is perhaps the least stable notion in this history, the one most sensitive to changes in the apparatus.

     

    “What seems necessary to me is the development of a completely new discipline that embraces the whole augmentation system. What are the practical strategies that will allow our society to pursue high-performance augmentation? My strategy is to begin with small groups, which give greater ‘cultural mobility.’ Small groups are preferable to individuals because exploring augmented collaboration is at the center of opportunity. These small groups would be the scouting parties sent ahead to map the pathways for the organizational groups to follow. You also need outposts for these teams” (Douglas Engelbart).

     

    “Between 1840 and the California gold rush, fewer than 20,000 men, women, and children followed those roads westward–the Santa Fe Trail, the Oregon Trail, the Bozeman Trail. Yet the story of the overland trails was told a thousand times for every one telling of the peopling of the Midwest. Why? Excitement was there, of course: Indian attacks and desert hardship and even cannibalism. But I suspected that the greatest appeal of the trails lay in the role they played as avenues for progress of the enterprising. The roads that the pioneers followed symbolized the spirit of enterprise that sustained the American dream” (Ray Allen Billington).

     

    Originally, theoria meant seeing the sights, seeing for yourself, and getting a worldview. The first theorists were “tourists”–the wise men who traveled to inspect the obvious world. Theoria did not mean the kind of vision that is restricted to the sense of sight, but implied a complex but organic mode of active observation–a perceptual system that included asking questions, listening to stories and local myths, and feeling as well as hearing and seeing. The world theorists who traveled around 600 B.C. were spectators who responded to the expressive energies of places, stopping to contemplate what the guides called “the things worth seeing.” Local guides–the men who knew the stories of a place–helped visiting theorists to “see” (Eugene Victor Walter).

     

    “Information would be accessible through association as well as through indexing. The user could join any two items, including the user’s own materials and notes. Chains of these associations would form a ‘trail,’ with many possible side trails. Trails could be named and shared with other information explorers. ‘There is a new profession of trailblazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.’ We need fundamentally new organizing principles for knowledge, and we need new navigation and manipulation tools for the learner. Instead of regarding an intelligent system as a human replacement, we can consider the system as a helpful assistant or partner” (Stephen A. Weyer).

     

    “The two recognized, contemporary authorities on Columbus are his son Ferdinand and the traveling monk Bertolome de las Casas. Both cite the reasons why Columbus believed he could discover the Indies as threefold: ‘natural reasons, the authority of writers, and the testimony of sailors.’ As to the ancient authorities, Columbus’ son cites Aristotle, Seneca, Strabo, Pliny, and Capilonius. None of these ancient writers gave a route plan– it had to come from another source. The source for that plan had to be St. Brendan, the Navigator. Brendan lived in the 6th century, A.D. The Irish clergy were a devout group and practiced a form of wandering in the wilderness. Not having a desert nearby, they did their wandering at sea. In the Navigatio Sancti Brendani the style and manner of navigational reports are as excerpts relating the interesting events, taken from a diary or logbook. The subsequent versions of the Navigatio were penned by monks in monasteries. These contain religious matter of a mythical nature which has obviously been added to the original” (Paul H. Chapman).

     

    “For the Aboriginal nomad, the land is a king of palimpsest. On its worn and rugged countenance he is able to write down the great stories of Creation, his creation, in such a way as to insure their renewal. Walking from one sacred spot to another, performing rituals that have changed little over the millennia, are in themselves important aspects of a metaphysical dialogue. Since Aboriginal society is pre-literate, this dialogue relies on intellectual and imaginative contact with sacred constructs within the landscape that have been invested with miwi or power, according to tradition or the Law. The language is one of symbolic expression, of mythic reportage. We begin to see at this point the seeds of conflict between two opposing cultures existing in the same landscape. On the one hand we have an Aboriginal culture that regards the landscape as an existential partner to which it is lovingly enjoined; on the other, we find a European culture dissatisfied with the landscape’s perceived vacuity and spiritual aridity, thus wanting to change it in accordance with facile economic imperatives so that it reflects a materialistic world- view” (James Cowan).

     

    “Can the hypermedia author realize the enormous potential of the medium to change our relation to language and texts simply by linking one passage or image to others? One begins any discussion of the new rhetoric needed for hypermedia with the recognition that authors of hypertext and hypermedia materials confront three related problems: First, what must they do to orient readers and help them read efficiently and with pleasure? Second, how can they inform those reading a document where the links in that document lead? Third, how can they assist readers who have just entered a new document to feel at home there? Drawing upon the analogy of travel, we can say that the first problem concerns navigation information necessary for making one’s way through the materials. The second concerns exit or departure information, and the third arrival or entrance information” (George Landow).

     

    “Removed from the tangible environment of their culture, travelers came to rely on this most portable and most personal of cultural orders as a means of symbolic linkage with their homes. More than any other emblem of identity, language seemed capable of domesticating the strangeness of America. It could do so both by the spreading of Old World names over New World place, people, and objects, and by the less literal act of domestication which the telling of an American tale involved. This ability to ‘plot’ New World experience in advance was, in fact, the single most important attribute of European language. Francis Bacon, primary theorist of a new epistemology and staunch opponent of medieval scholasticism, extrapolated Columbus himself into a symbol of bold modernity. His voyager was decidedly not the man of terminal doubt and despair whom we encounter in the Jamaica letter of 1503. He was instead a figure of hopeful departures, a man whose discovery of a ‘new world’ suggested the possibility that the ‘remoter and more hidden parts of nature’ also might be explored with success. The function of Bacon’s Novum Organum was to provide for the scientific investigator the kind of encouragement which the arguments of Columbus prior to 1492 had provided for a Europe too closely bound to traditional assumptions” (Wayne Franklin).

     

    “Perhaps the most fragile component of the future lies in the immediate vicinity of the terminal screen. We must recognize the fundamental incapacity of capitalism ever to rationalize the circuit between body and computer keyboard, and realize that this circuit is the site of a latent but potentially volatile disequilibrium. The disciplinary apparatus of digital culture poses as a self-sufficient, self-enclosed structure without avenues of escape, with no outside. Its myths of necessity, ubiquity, efficiency, of instantaneity require dismantling: in part by disrupting the separation of cellularity, by refusing productivist injunctions by inducing slow speeds and inhabiting silences” (Jonathan Crary).

     

    One more suggestion of a function of electronic publishing: To experiment with other metaphors for the research process in the electronic apparatus, as alternatives to the metaphor of colonial imperialism.

     

  • His Master’s Voice: On William Gaddis’sJR

    Patrick J. O’Donnell

    University of West Virginia

     

    In William Gaddis’sJR, voice partakes of the “postmodern condition” where, as Jean Baudrillard says, everything is constituted by “the force which rules market value: capital must circulate; gravity and any fixed point must disappear; the chain of investments and reinvestments must never stop; value must radiate endlessly and in every direction.”1 Gaddis’s unwieldy parody of American capitalism is a 700-plus page palimpsest of vocal exchanges where the agency of transmission–telephones, televisions, tape recorders–has, in a sense, taken over the discourse, so that human commerce and conversation reflect the nearly total instrumentality of human life and the “capitalization” of identity in the late twentieth century. “Voice,” in Gaddis’s novel, has become the cipher for human exchange, and like surplus capital, inflationary and without content.

     

    In this context, it is appropriate to recall an image produced by the advertising agencies that Gaddis lampoons in JR while striking at the wastefulness of their “product” in the piles of junk mail that the pre-adolescent JR ceaselessly sorts through on his way to the foundation of a financial empire. One of the more memorable icons of American culture is the logo of the Recording Company of America, perhaps most familiar to the generation which listened to ’78’s which bore the image of Victor, that patient canine listening to the speaker of a Victorola phonograph. The trademark suggests that the quality of the recording is so faithful to the original that Victor thinks he is hearing “his master’s voice”–an idea so compelling that RCA protected the phrase “His Master’s Voice” by registering it as a trademark.

     

    Images like this one, born within the publicity departments of corporations that make substantial profits from the reproduction of sound, reveal much about commonly held cultural assumptions regarding voice and its relation to the projection of identity. The faithful reproduction of voice is associated with the assertion of mastery. The “master recording,” presumably, connects us directly with the origin of an individual voice. This concept is revised and repeated in the television advertisements of a cassette tape manufacturer who employed Ella Fitzgerald to break a glass with the magnified projections of her real voice; these, recorded and played back, were used to break another glass, attesting, again, to the faithfulness of the sound recording. Yet, we easily see the contradictions inherent in the attempt to represent the mastery, originality, and integrity of voice. As Edward Said suggests, all forms of originality imply “loss, or else it would be repetition; or we can say that, insofar as it is apprehended as such, originality is the difference between primordial vacancy and temporary, sustained repetition” (133). To hear a recording of the master’s voice–to hear the voice of mastery–is to hear the same track again as a repetition that fragments the singularity of the original; indeed, following Walter Benjamin, in modern technocratic society, the more faithful the recording, the more the original is, paradoxically, re-presented or copied as it is transformed from original into simulation.2 Recorded and transcribed, the strikingly unique voice of Ella Fitzgerald is converted into a commodity that everyone can own and replay at will.

     

    These remarks on the replication of voice (and in a technocratic society “voice” inevitably comes to us in the form of replication) suggest the conflicted position of the so-called “speaking subject” in postmodern culture and in Gaddis’s novel where the “parent” organization of a fading financial empire is the “General Roll” corporation– originally, manufacturers of piano rolls for player pianos. There are several ways in which this contradictory position might be described. Translated from corporeal to legible terms, it is, for example, a commonplace of American creative writing programs to encourage neophytes to discover a unique, personal voice, yet it is easily perceivable that this illusory voice, even if it is found, can only be transmitted through the vehicle of the reproduction of the text–a text which, in “successful” creative writing programs, can be eminently transformed into a commodity. Adorno’s commentary on the speaking subject is pertinent to the contradictions implicit in the notion of “voice in the marketplace”:

     

    In an all-embracing system [such as, for Adorno, that of late capitalist economies], dialogue becomes ventriloquism. Everyone is his own Charlie McCarthy; hence his popularity. Words in their entirety come to resemble the formulae which formerly were reserved for greeting and leave-taking . . . Such determination of speech through adaptation, however, is its end: the relation between matter and expression is severed, and just as the concepts of the positivists are supposed to be mere counters, so those of positivistic humanity have become literally coins. (Pecora 27)

     

    For Adorno, form and content of language in contemporary society have become so thoroughly severed (in that “content” has virtually disappeared), and yet so fused together (in that “medium” and “message” of contemporary speech acts are one) that all forms of expression are telegraphic ciphers, or traces of some “matter” that has been debased into coin, commodity. Hence, the source of this language–the individual speaker–becomes merely a mouthpiece, a “talking head,” a transmitter of messages already overheard and delivered; the repetition of these messages might be thought of as the capitalized surplus of sheer message, or information for its own sake, in contemporary culture. This is the view articulated by Gibbs inJR, who serves as the novel’s heretical voice in continually questioning and parodying the prevailing discursive orders. To his class (Gibbs teaches at an “experimental” elementary school which is attempting to redefine its curriculum for the purposes of conducting all classes over “closed-circuit” television), Gibbs says, “Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that?” (20). But to this “truth” about information Gibbs adds the kind of heretical remark (he is clearly veering away from the predetermined class syllabus at this point) that will lead to his being fired from the school and his self-willed expulsion from America: “In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos . . . ” (20).

     

    Readers ofJR will recognize in these illustrations the dilemma of the subject in this novel. Any attempt to describe or summarizeJR will necessarily fail, partly because the “plot” of the novel is so minimal as to provide little help with whatJR is “all about,” and partly because the novel’s complexity resides not in theme, or character, or symbol, or event but in the twinned questions of “who is speaking?” and “what is s/he talking about?” at any of a number of points. Identity and reference may thus be seen as poles between which the story of an eleven-year-old child’s rise to financial wealth and power is negotiated. JR Vansant, the titular protagonist, manages to assimilate a financial empire by sorting through junk mail and taking advantage of numerous “offers,” and by employing the offices of his former teacher, Edward Bast, who unwillingly acts as JR’s adult stand-in at various meetings and business functions. Largely through a series of contingencies and accidents that serve to parody any reliance upon Wall Street “securities,” JR succeeds in building a ghost mega-corporation that exists solely on paper, and then just as easily loses his empire in a “crash” that only makes him desire to start a new one. JR’s Horatio Alger story stands in ironic contrast to that of his “dummy,” Bast, a would-be artist unwillingly entangled in the momentum of JR’s rise and fall, and heir to the small remains of the declining General Roll fortune; in the novel, the Basts are embroiled in a Chancery-like dispute over their estate, and Edward Bast’s uncertainty as to the identity of his father and, thus, the origins of his own identity, serves as a foil to JR’s parodic embodiment of “the self-made man.” Bast is also Gaddis’s portrait of the artist whose art is foiled by the consumerism, noise, and entropy of the contemporary environment: his horizons increasingly diminished (in the beginning of the novel, Bast plans to write a full-scale opera; by its end, he is planning a short piece for the unaccompanied cello), Bast is forced to earn his living by listening to pop radio stations in order to detect if songs not registered with ASCAP are being played on the air while, headphones in place, he attempts to write his own music. In such noisy circumstances, and in the comic and disturbing parallels he forges between the machinations of Wall Street and the modern educational methods in the United States, Gaddis insists on portraying the “self” as a cipher or medium in an endless and monotonous conversation the subject of which– despite the number of speakers or characters inJR–always focuses around matters of exchange of money, stocks, notes (musical and otherwise), wills, bodies, or information.3

     

    JR consists of dozens of fragmented conversations, usually joined in progress, between individual speakers upon a variety of ostensible “topics,” yet the speakers, for the most part, are located within institutional and communicative confines–the principal’s office, the boardroom of the corporate headquarters, a telephone booth– which constrain and define them as the instruments of vast and intersecting bureaucracies. Through vocal tics or characteristic expressions, one may come to “know” the conversationalists ofJR, though they are not usually identified by name, separate speakers and speech acts being marked in the novel not even by the usual quotation marks, but by dashes. But, as Marc Chenetier has suggested, so “interrupted” are these conversations by “[verbal] hiccups, hesitations, digressions . . . [textual] tears never mended, open parenthesis . . . syntactical ruptures,” so replete are they with “interjections” from the voices of overheard radio announcements to citations from its barrage of advertisements, that any individual voice gradually disappears into the novel’s overwhelming noise: “Gaddis unhesitatingly plunges us into a ‘universe of discourse’ that does not even bear his name.”4 In this way,JR obscures the source or agency of any given voice in the novel, and makes it seem that all the novel’s speakers participate in a wholly instrumental “discourse” managed by corporations and institutions lacking any single “boss,” but, in the telephonic terms the novel insists upon, comprised of a series of crossed lines and connections going everywhere and coming from nowhere or no one. HenceJR might be viewed as the nightmare version of Bakhtinian heteroglossia.5 While Bakhtin argues that the disparate and conflicting voices to be found historically in the novel signified the overturning of the official discourses of the day and the pluralization of identity–a pluralization that, as we have seen, troubles the modernist desire to master the carnivalization of identity, or in Thomas Mann’s phrase, to act as the “theatre-manager[s] of our own dreams so [that] . . . our fate may be the product of our inmost selves, of our wills”–Gaddis’s multi-voiced epic of the corporate world and American education, in a sundering of “the illusion of unmediated speech,” displays the incorporation of all voice and language into the paranoid meta-discourse of “doing business.”6 This discursive game is one in which even an eleven-year old child–perhaps, especially an eleven-year old child raised in the positivist environment of the American education system–can become a major player. Yet it is a discourse which no one really masters, both because it lacks visible source or origin (just as paternal origins are troubled in the novel for Edward Bast) and because it threatens to consume any individual who comes into contact with it.

     

    Though widely-varied in their particulars, the vocal exchanges ofJR fall roughly into three categories: monologues that serve to parody the “specialized” languages of legalese or businessese, phatic conversations where we hear a speaker on one end of and must imagine what the other speaker is saying, and fragmented conversations between several speakers such as those in which an assortment of teachers, administrators, politicians, and bureaucrats gather periodically in the principal’s office of the Long Island elementary school JR attends to discuss the latest developments in education by television. In the first of these–monologues that unwittingly (as far as the speaker is concerned) parody discursive systems–signs and codes are arranged in a self-referential language where words circulate as money does in the economy, endlessly flowing where they will, merely ciphers of exchange without matter (or gold) to back them. Coen, the Bast family lawyer, provides an example of this semiosis when he discusses the late Thomas Bast’s estate with Anne and Julia near the beginning of the novel:

     

    –Possibly your testimony and that of your brother James regarding the period of his cohabitation with the said Nellie before Edward’s birth, here, yes, that a child born in wedlock is legitimate where husband and wife had separated and the period of gestation required, in order that the husband may be the father, while a possible one, is exceptionally long and contrary to the usual course of nature, you see? Now in bringing a proceeding to establish the right to the property of a deceased, the burden is on the claimant to show his kinship with the decedent, where alleged fact that claimant is decedent’s child, and . . . yes, that while in the first instance, where is it yes, proof of filiation from which a presumption of legitimacy arises will sustain the burden and will establish the status of legitimacy and heirship if no evidence tending to show illegitimacy is introduced, the burden to establish legitimacy does not shift and claimant must establish his legitimacy where direct evidence, as well as evidence of potent . . . is the word potent? potent, yes potent circumstances, tending to disprove his claim of heirship, is introduced. Now, regarding competent evidence to prove filiation . . .

     

    –Mister Cohen, I assure you there is no need to go on like this, if . . .

     

    –Ladies, I have no choice. In settling an estate of these proportions and this complexity it is my duty to make every point which may bear upon your nephew’s legal rights absolutely crystal clear to you and to him. (10)

     

    Coen’s comically inappropriate, yet legally “correct” rhetoric is tonally offensive. Not only is it incomprehensible to the ancient sisters as it is to us in its circularity, it also embodies a contradictory attempt to establish filiation and Edward Bast’s origins through a discourse replete with repetition and tautology: the language clearly lacks the “potent circumstances” it is attempting to generate through the sheer imposition of scattered and reiterated legal jargon.

     

    Coen’s “monologue” is typical of many inJR. It represents a discursive movement where–whether the topic is stocks and bonds, or wills, or pedagogy–the subject or point of reference is brought into being and “legitimated,” but only as a simulation issuing from a nominalist discourse that “names” its content, whose content is what it names. The linguistic nominalism ofJR reaches its absurd limit in the directions Mr. Davidoff, a corporate public relations executive, gives to his secretary regarding the travel plans of one of his representatives aboard military transport: “TC two hundred Indiv placed on TDY as indic RPSCTDY Eigen, Thomas, GS twelve cerned he won’t need all those, give CG AMC, Attn: AMCAD-AO, Washington,” etc. (256). Gaddis is concerned to show in this “acronymic” parody, as he is throughout the novel, the relation between such instrumentation of language and the “miltary-industrial complex.” The identity of “Bast,” in essence, is what can be traced on paper or what can be read out of a will, just as the identity of JR is what it is purported to be in contracts, stock issues, business negotiations. There is no word-magic inJR, no fleshing out of the language, and Bast, in Coen’s verbiage, is but a blank counter to move amongst the various acquired accretions of legal language.7

     

    When we turn to Gaddis’s conversations, we might expect to encounter some form of exchange which transcends or alters these hegemonic circumstances, but indeed we discover that the Gaddisian dialogic is a contradiction in terms. At every turn in the novel, we are confronted with telephone conversations which ostensibly involve two or more speakers, and thus, a dialogue, but we always hear only one end of the conversation (and have to imagine both who is speaking and what they are saying at the other end). We are compelled to hear the voice over the phone as both singular (it is the only voice we hear) and fragmented, dissolute (interrupted by the unheard voice of the other); the voice of the “other” is entirely spectral in these exchanges. Its material importance in the novel causes us to focus on the instrument which carries these phatic conversations–the telephone. As Avital Ronnell has argued, the telephone “destabilizes the identity of self and other, subject and thing. . . . It is unsure of its identity as object, thing, piece of equipment, perlocutionary intensity or artwork (the beginnings of telephony argue for its place as artwork); it offers itself as instrument of destinal alarm” (Ronell 9). InJR, the significance of this “destinal alarm” is highlighted in a number of contexts: “Diamond Cable,” the mega-corporation with which JR competes (and in whose offices he is introduced to the world of the stock market on a school field trip) is a manufacturer of telephone cables; the Bast sisters decide to divest their portfolio of telephone stocks because they are having their home phone removed; JR manages to convince the local phone company to install a pay phone booth at his school so that he can have easy access to his “office.” This latter instance provides a comic example of how the telephone severs “voice” from “signature” or identity. JR remarks to his friend Hyde, who suggests that JR will get caught for forging the papers which authorize the installation of the booth: “What do you mean forgery I just scribbled this here name which it’s nobody’s down at the bottom where it says arthurized by, I mean you think the telephone company’s goes around asking everybody is this here your signature? All they care it says requisition order right here across the top so they come stick in this here telephone booth” (185). For fear that he might be recognized as a child in his business dealings, JR disguises his voice when he talks over the phone by muffling it with the unfailingly filthy handkerchief that is one of his trademarks. His creation of an empire via the proxies of the telephone and Bast is an act of ventriloquy that reveals the wholly instrumental nature of his language and being. As an extension of the telephonic instrument–as a form of human prothesis–JR is merely the garbled voice over the phone making connections between the disparate elements of his empire, thus acting as a kind of talking “switchboard”; this radical destabilizing of human agency via the telephone is perfectly complicit with “doing business” inJR, a form of labor comprised solely of managing contacts and contracts through the manipulation of what might be termed discursive “bites” or received linguistic formulations.

     

    In the following passage, we overhear JR at the height of his empire, conversing with Bast about various business deals on a public telephone:

     

    –Hello Bast? Boy I almost didn’t…no I’m out of breath, I had to stay in at…No but first hey how come you didn’t call Piscator about this here whole Wonder . . . what? No but where are you at then, you . . . What? What do you . . . No but how come you’re at this here hospital . . . Holy . . . no but holy . . . no but you mean right at that there gala banquet you and him were . . . No but how was I supposed to know that? I mean I knew the both of them were old, but holy . . . No but if he had his arm around you singing how come you . . . You mean right in the middle of the movie? Holy . . . No but like if, like I mean he’s not going to die or something is he? Because if he and his brother don’t sign that stuff Piscator was supposed to get read we’re really up the . . . What his brother’s there right now you mean? Can you . . . What, they already did? Why didn’t you tell me, I mean if they both signed it everything’s okay we don’t have anything to . . . No hey I didn’t just mean that Bast, I mean sure I hope he gets better real soon tell him but . . . No but wait tell him he can’t do that hey, it’s . . . No but if he sold the company it isn’t even a trade secret any more it’s our hey, I’ll . . . No I’ll bet you a quarter hey, ask Piscator, he . . . that cobalt in the water puts such a great head on their beer? did he tell . . . No but see even if this here nurse he’s whispering it to doesn’t get it see she might just tell somebody which . . . No but tell him to quit it anyway okay? So where else did . . . No but see a second, who . . .? Did he say that, he’s coming there . . .? No but see he’s been calling me and Piscator because he’s scared this here bunch of Wonder stock this other brother gave him this loan of to use it like for collateral when this company of his was getting in this trouble because they used to both play football at some collage, see so now Mooneyham’s scared that if we gave him a hard time over this here stock this whole X-L Lithography Comp . . . No but how was I supposed to know this here other brother had . . . No but what do you expect me to . . . No okay, okay but. . . . (343)

     

    The signature of JR’s voice in this and other “conversations” are the words “no,” “hey,” and “holy [shit],” which identify and stabilize an otherwise chaotic speech. JR’s speech is literally full of holes, and the identity he projects through these voice signatures is that of denial (“no” to everything Bast says) and ignorance (he knows nothing), yet this is the boss speaking.8 In the clutch of “deals” that this conversation embraces, JR is attempting to culminate the takeover of a brewery owned by the brothers he mentions–one of whom suffers a heart attack at a meeting with JR’s representative, Bast–by diverting the pension funds of another company he has bought, Eagle Mills; part of the takeover involves taking advantage of a selloff of debentures which would give the JR Corporation access to cobalt mineral rights, the lethal ingredient that will give the beer produced by the brewery a “great head.” Other aspects of this venture depend upon equally far-flung negotiations which, together, suggest that the JR Corporation is like a gigantic machine whose myriad gears accidentally mesh at certain points in time as JR stumbles upon connections and potential deals. Though he “makes” the connection between one strand of enterprise and another (i.e., using the pension funds from Eagle Mills to buy out the Wonder Brewery), no one sees or controls the totality of his corporation, which exists, in fragments, only in his head and in his speech. Nor is JR capable of assimilating the “content” of what he negotiates, or its social and political effects: that he gambles with the pensions of hundreds of workers, that some one has suffered a heart attack, that the cobalt which goes in the beer may be poisonous to its drinkers does not enter JR’s consciousness. JR, then, speaks with the master’s voice, but his overheard speech is made up of the collected fragments of an atrocious banality, wholly lacking in integrity and originality. In this, JR, like his older double, Governor Cates, embodies the corporate subject that acts as a conduit for the exchange of information while (as the novel goes on) increasingly losing control over that exchange. While this loss of control may portend some resistance to the novel’s overbearing and interlocking language systems, the infinite replaceability of the novel’s speakers, whatever their location in the discourse, suggests otherwise.

     

    Finally, in regarding the types of speech one encounters inJR, we can consider briefly the so-called conversations that take place between several speakers: in these instances, the parallels one hears between discussions in the corporation board rooms and those between teachers and administrators in the principal’s office suggest the thoroughgoing instrumentality of language that Gaddis fears pervades every level of human existence. What follows is a fragment of a discussion in the office of Whiteback, the president of a local bank and the principal at JR’s Long Island elementary school; part of what one hears in the background is the sound track from a television set tuned to various classes taking place at this school which is gradually “converting” to instruction by television:

     

    –My wife’s taping something this morning, Mister diCephalis got in abruptly. A resource program . . . . [O]n silkworms, she has her own Kashmiri records…–If your Ring isn’t ready, your Wagner, what is there?

     

    –My Mozart. She hung up the telephone and dialed again.

     

    –No answer, I’ll call and see if my visuals are ready . . . .

     

    —-gross profit on a business was sixty

     

    -five hundred dollars a year. He finds his expenses were twenty

     

    -two and one half percent of this profit. First, can you find the net profit?

     

    –What’s that? demanded Hyde, transfixed by unseeing eyes challenging the vacant confine just over his head.

     

    –Sixth grade math. That’s Glancy . . .

     

    –Try switching to thirty

     

    -eight.

     

    —-original cost of the…combustion in these thousands of little cylinders in our muscle engines. Like all engines, these tiny combustion engines need a constant supply of fuel, and we call the fuel that this machine uses, food. We measure its value…

     

    –Even if the Rhinegold is ready it’s Wagner, isn’t it? But if the Mozart is scheduled the classroom teachers, they’re ready with the followup material from their study guides on Mozart. They can’t just switch to Wagner.

     

    —-the value of the fuel for this engine the same way, by measuring how much heat we get when it’s burned . . .

     

    –That’s a cute model, it gets the right idea across. Whose voice?

     

    –Vogel. He made it himself out of old parts.

     

    –Whose?

     

    –Parts?

     

    –Some of them might never even have heard of Wagner yet.

     

    –No, the voice.

     

    –That’s Vogel, the coach.

     

    —-that we call energy. Doing a regular day’s work, this human machine needs enough fuel equal to about two pounds of sugar…

     

    –If they thought it was Mozart’s Rhinegold and get them all mixed up, so you can’t really switch.

     

    –He put it together himself out of used parts. (28-29)

     

    The “model” of discourse we are offered here is one made of fragments and ellipses that–given over to instrumentality–simultaneously defy totalization. Gaddis’s discursive enjambments project an entropic world of “noise” in which its parts or subjects–whether it is Wagner’s opera, mathematics, the workings of the human body, or silkworms–are eminently interchangeable, just as someone suggests that “it doesn’t matter” if it’s Wagner’s Ring or Mozart’s.

     

    As Vogel’s model suggests, the novel insists upon the connection to be made between speech and corporeal identity as being a collection of fragments comprised of replaceable parts: near the end of the novel, Cates, who is in the hospital “just . . . to have a plug changed” (688), is described by a longtime companion as

     

    a lot of old parts stuck together he doesn’t even exist he started losing things eighty years ago he lost a thumbnail on the Albany nightboat and that idiot classmate of his Handler’s been dismantling him ever since, started an appendectomy punctured the spleen took it out then came the gall bladder that made it look like appendicitis in the first place now look at him, he’s listening through somebody else’s inner ears those corneal transplants God knows whose eyes he’s looking through . . . . (708)

     

    Revealingly, Cates suffers this tirade while attempting to have a phone installed in his hospital room so he can conduct business even while undergoing an inner ear transplant, a conduct which involves speaking in a more adult version of JR’s discourse and forging deals to the detriment of everyone from Native Americans to the inhabitants of a third-word nation ruled by the tyrannical Doctor De. And, the political argument of the novel runs, it is precisely because there is such a severing of speech from agency in what Baudrillard would refer to as the contemporary “hyperreal” that business can, in Cates’ and JR’s domain, continue as usual, regardless of its “contents” and affects. As is indicated by the lack of syntactical markers in the description of Cates’ body, the novel’s ongoing, discontinuous language is without origin or end (one feels that Gaddis could have made the novel twice as long or half as short), and flows through the characters and instruments ofJR, allowing them positions of authority along discursive chains. But no one is in charge of this system. Here the link that Gaddis wishes to forge between language and capital is most strong: both flow through the world as inheritances and mediums of exchange in what appear to be systems of mastery, but–in the paradox the novel enforces–systems, like runaway inflation, gone out of control.9

     

    In many of these senses, JR might be seen as Gaddis’s Gatsby, a parody of the self-making impulses played out in the arena of the American marketplace that made Gatsby “great” in Nick Carraway’s mind; one essential difference between the two novels resides in the status of the vocal subject as a kind of cipher or medium inJR, hardly available to the backfill mythologizing employed in the constructions of Gatsby or Daisy (whose voice is “full of money,” but who can also stand as the romanticized object of desire). InJR the illusion of voice as the vehicle or medium of interiority is thoroughly dissolved; rather, voice, like everything in the novel, becomes a commodity. In a conversation between Bast and Gibbs, who, after being fired as a teacher, attempts to take up his long languishing book-in-progress on the social history of the mechanization of the arts, there emerges a figure representing the nature of voice in the novel:

     

    –Problem writing an opera Bast you’re up against the worst God damned instrument ever invented [i.e., the human throat] . . . .

     

    –Asked me to tell you about Johannes Muller didn’t you? Told you you’re not listening I’m talking about Johannes Muller, nineteenth

     

    -century German anatomist Johannes Muller took a human larynx fitted it up with strings and weights to replace the muscles tried to get a melody by blowing through it how’s that. Bast?

     

    –Yes it sounds quite…

     

    –Thought opera companies could buy dead singers’ larynxes fit them up to sing arias save fees that way get the God damned artist out of the arts all at once, long as he’s there destroying everything in their God damned path what the arts are all about, Bast? (288)

     

    Like Vogel’s model of human muscular action, Muller’s experiment attempts to transform the instrument of human voice into a machine that (like the phonograph) will reproduce the same voice through the ages, thereby fulfilling the aesthetic dream of permanence but eliminating the need for the human agent in the process. On the one hand, Muller’s preposterous experiment, if successful, would fulfill the modernist dream of authorial distancing in ways that Joyce had never thought possible, but the paradox of that desire (detachment accompanied by increased, totalizing control over the elements and relations of the created “world”) is sundered inJR by its complicity with the commodification of art. If the source or origin of the singer’s voice could be removed, so Gibbs’ parodic argument runs, and a way could be found to reproduce that voice on command for the listening audience, then money could be made since it is less expensive to own or display a reproduction than an original. In fact, Muller’s zany idea has come to pass in the “age of mechanical reproduction,” where the detachment of the art from the artist and its mass replication–its sheer reproducibility–determines its nature. “Voice” fulfills these conditions inJR.

     

    In one of the novel’s more fantastic sequences, Muller’s Frankensteinian experiment is renewed by Vogel himself in the invention of the “Frigicom” process which is described in one of Davidoff’s press releases (read over the phone to a secretary):

     

    Dateline New York, Frigicom, comma, a process now being developed to solve the noise pollution problem comma may one day take the place of records comma books comma even personal letters in our daily lives comma, according to a report released jointly today by the Department of Defense and Ray hyphen X Corporation comma member of the caps J R Family of Companies period new paragraph. The still secret Frigicom process is attracting the attention of our major cities as the latest scientific breakthrough promising noise elimination by the placement of absorbent screens at what are called quote shard intervals unquote in noise polluted areas period operating at faster hyphen than hyphen sound speeds a complex process employing liquid nitrogen will be used to convert the noise shards comma as they are known comma at temperatures so low they may be handled with comparative ease by trained personnel immediately upon emission before the noise element is released into the atmosphere period the shards will then be collected and disposed of in remote areas or at see comma where the disturbance caused by their thawing will be make that where no one will be disturbed by their impact upon thawing period new paragraph. While development of the Frigicom process is going forward under contract to the cap Defense cap Department comma the colorful new head of research and development at the recently revitalized Ray hyphen X Corp Mister make that Doctor Vogel declined to discuss the project exclusively in terms of its military ramifications comma comparing it instead to a two hyphen edged sword forged by the alliance of free enterprise and modern technology which promises to sever both military and artistic barriers at one fell swoop in the cause of human betterment period. (527)

     
    This literalization of Pater’s “frozen music” (as Davidoff notes)–the spatialization of Venetian beauty–is but the most extreme example of the novel’s pervasive utilitarianism, where everything is made available to commodification in Gaddis’s terms: dislocated, unoriginal (that is, separated from the point or source of origin), infinitely repeatable. The Frigicom process promises a kind of vocal dystopia characteristic of the “hi-tech” excesses of postmodern culture that Gaddis satirizes in this absurd invention. If it could work, the “noise pollution” of busy freeways, office buildings, shopping malls can be frozen and carted off to sea, but like so many contemporary technological “advances,” it creates more problems than it solves: how will the noise affect the ecology in those remote areas where it is dumped? Will the reduction in noise pollution serve to convey the illusion that “progress” is being made with the more serious problem of air pollution? Since the military is, inevitably, involved, how will this “two-edged sword” which promises to homogenize culture to the extent that “military and artistic barriers” can be severed (a process already under way, in Gaddis’s mind, as art becomes increasingly commodified and, thus, increasingly a subset of the “miltary-industrial complex”) be used for destructive purposes? A “non-polluting” noise bomb? Perhaps the idea is not so fictive in a society that can seriously pursue the manufacture of a neutron bomb that will kill people but preserve architecture–“frozen music,” indeed. The figure of voice generated by Davidoff’s summary of the Frigicom process suggests that contemporary technocracies are “closed loops,” circular and tautological in nature. Davidoff reads a press release into the phone while a secretary transcribes his remarks on the other end of the line: writing is thus converted by voice into writing again in a complex and circular series of exchanges wherein “voice” becomes, merely, the ventriloquizing of the already-written, just as Davidoff is merely the mouthpiece for organizational propaganda. If “voice,” this last illusory vestige of singularity or alterity, can be figured so, then what, if anything, does Gaddis leave us with? Is there any “escape” from the novel’s closed systems of commodification and exchange?

     

    Interestingly, in aParis Review interview, Gaddis suggests, in response to readers like John Gardner who see the novel as a chronicle of “the dedicated artist crushed by commerce,” thatJR does contain “a note of hope”:

     

    Bast starts with great confidence. He’s going to write a grand opera. And gradually, if you noticed his ambitions shrink. The grand opera becomes a cantata where we have the orchestra and the voices. Then it becomes a piece for orchestra, then a piece for small orchestra, and finally at the end he’s writing a piece for unaccompanied cello, his own that is to say, one small voice trying to rescue it all and say, “Yes, there is hope.” Again, like Wyatt, living it through, and in his adventure with JR having lived through all the nonsense he will rescue this one small hard gem-like flame, if you like. (Di-Nagy 71-72)

     

    Gaddis clearly intends Bast inJR, like Wyatt inThe Recognitions, to be a portrait of the artist as one who achieves a minimalist redemption by withstanding the pressures of utilitarianism and capitalism in order to produce, in a post-romantic, post-modern gesture, not a self-generated cosmos to place over against the material universe, but merely a “small piece.” It is curious that the author casts this redemption in terms of “a small voice,” a “hard gem-like flame” not so different, imagistically at least, from the “noise shards” of the Frigicom process: like the Frigicom process, in the writing ofJR Gaddis takes noise and voice from the welter of everyday life, “freezes” it into inscription, then “dumps” it into the separated confines of the book where it dispersed to the reader. Writing and voice are thus often conflated in Gaddis’s fiction, so that the figures of voice that appear there may be also taken for figurations of writing. For Gaddis to insist that Bast has a voice of his own–however small–is a contradiction in a novel where voice has been so thoroughly transmuted and dispossessed. This irony is compounded by the fact that Bast’s “small voice” is preserved (if it is preserved) within–or transmitted by–such a noisy, massive novel which itself, in its bulk and (to use LeClair’s phrase again) excessiveness, stands as a production of and within late capitalist culture. In essence, Gaddis’s medium confutes the intended message: it articulates the small voice of artistic individualism promised for Bast in a figure at least once remove from the novel itself.

     

    There are, of course, those instances–particularly in the more manic moments of Bast’s or Gibbs’s speech–where it appears that there is a rupture in the overarching, interloc[ked]utory discursive orders of the novel. The novel as a whole may be taken as “commentary” on these orders, as most of the language issuing from them bears clearly parodic intonations; yet it may be argued that the parody of, for example, legalese in Coen’s speeches both undercuts the authenticity of his circular discourse as well as it is born of it. Gaddis’s parody is so systematic in its encyclopedic anatomization of capitalist society inJR that it becomes a discursive, parasitic “order” that replicates, in part, what it parodies: as Michel Serres has argued, “the strategy of criticism is located in the object of criticism,” or, to revise this slightly for Gaddis, the strategies of parody are located in and reproduce the object of parody (Serres 38). The parody of “voice” in Gaddis takes place in a kind of “hermeneutic circle” where parodic intonation occurs not as a deconstruction or transcension of a given discursive arrangement, but as a fractured repetition (an echoing) of that arrangement.

     

    Thus, even in those moments of “madness” entertained variously by Bast and Gibbs–moments in which we might expect some note of alterity to emerge from the welter of words–we hear, in a sense, “the same.” Emerging from his musician’s workroom after making love to his cousin Stella, Edward Bast, angry at the discovery that Stella is trying to use him and that the workroom has been vandalized, launches into a high-pitched diatribe:

     

    –Kids…the policeman nodded past his elbow,–who else would shit in your piano.

     

    –You, you never can tell…he stared for an instant [. . . then] turned with one step, and another as vague, to reach and tap a high C, and then far enough to fit his hand to an octave and falter a dissonant chord, again, and again, before he corrected it and looked up, –right? Believing and shitting are two very different things?

     

    –Edward…

     

    –Never have to clean your toilet bowl again…he recovered the dissonant chord, –right? [. . . Kids that’s all! a generation in heat that’s all…he pounded two chords against each other’s unrest –no subject is taboo, no act is forbidden that’s all…! and he struck into the sailor’s chorus from Dido and Aeneas, –you’ll never, no never, have to clean your [. . .] Rift the hills and roll the waters! flash the lightnings…he pounded chords,–the pulsating moment of climax playing teedle leedle leedle right inside your head…he found a tremolo far up the keyboard. [ . . . ] he hunched over the keys to echo the Ring motif in sinister pianissimo, –he will hold the something better than his dog, a little dearer than [ . . . ] –Rain or hail! or fire…he slammed another chord, stood there, and tapped C. –Master tunesmith wait…he dug in his pocket, –make a clean breast of the whole…. (141-42)

     

    Edward’s is a patchwork of “motifs” and received linguistic fragments, from popular advertising slogans (“You’ll never have to clean your bowl again”) to phrases from the libretto of Wagner’s Ring. The shattering of context and compression that occurs in such a passage takes place as a reorchestration of the already-said. Similarly, when Gibbs, who at one moment suggests to his lover, Amy Joubert, that one needs to “change contexts” in order to break down the homogenous nature of reality, but at the same time tells her that “all I’ve ever done my whole God damned life spent it preparing, time comes all I’ve got is seven kinds of fine God damned handwriting only God damned thing they’re good for is misquoting other people’s . . .” (487), we are led to question the effectiveness of shifting context, fragmentation, and parodic quotation (those postmodern standbys) as “responses” toJR‘s monolithic discursive orders. Rather, these instances suggest that such responses are all too easily reincorporated into the systems of vocal and monetary exchange that make up the “work” of the novel. The problem, for Gaddis, may be that “voice” itself is “phallocentric,” that is partaking of a discursive arrangement that Irigaray defines as the reigning linguistic and philosophical paradigm of Western culture, in which systematicity, logic, linearity, and dichotomizing join with systems of economic exchange (actually serving, as inJR, as the language of those systems) to produce a “male” order that is both epistemological and social in its hierarchies (see Irigaray 68-85). Gaddis comically hints at such a deterministic (and gendered) possibility when he portrays diCephalis’ daughter, who has been secretly reading her mother’s books on sexual practices in India, eating tongue for dinner and commenting that it “looks like lingham” (312), that is, a Hindu phallus worshipped in Shiva cults. If the tongue, the instrument of voice, is thus connected to the phallus, then it would seem that all “voicings” inJR may be seen as falling within the closed circle of phallocentric discourse.

     

    Yet there is, finally, something else–something “other” than the unheard “small voice” of Bast or parodic vocal collage–that exceeds voice inJR, even if it does not exceed the processes of representation that legitimate the novel’s pernicious economies. I refer to those brief respites from all the novel’s talk, those small descriptive passages that serve as segues between one conversation and another. Many of these contain lyrical descriptions of nature in contrast to the entropic remnants of the American junkyard landscape, thus reflecting one of Gaddis’s familiar themes: the destruction of “the primitive” in modern technocratic culture. These passages come as intermissions between conversations, and while they serve to conduct the reader from one noisy venue to another, they also act, in some sense, as “silences” or diegetic gaps in the narrative. Among the most important of these gaps are those containing descriptions of bodies merging and in collision, for in such descriptions we may see in the body–though always through the construction of figure and representation which, as “writing,” is a form of disembodiment–an “alternative” to voice.

     

    Gaddis describes one of Gibbs’s and Amy Joubert’s marathon lovemaking sessions in this way:

     

    From his her own hand came, measuring down firmness of bone brushed past its prey to stroke at distances, to climb back still more slowly, fingertips gone in hollows, fingers paused weighing shapes that slipped from their inquiry before they rose confirming where already they could not envelop but simply cling there fleshing end to end, until their reach was gone with him coming up to a knee, to his knees over her back, hands running to the spill of hair over her face in the pillow and down to declivities and down, cleaving where his breath came suddenly close enough to find its warmth reflected, tongue to pierce puckered heat lingering on to depths coming wide to its promise, rising wide to the streak of its touch, gorging its stabs of entrance aswim to its passage rising still further to threats of its loss suddenly real, left high agape to the mere onslaught of his gaze knees locked to knees thrust deep in that full symmetry surged back against all her eloquent blood spoke in her cheeks till he came down full weight upon her, face gone over her shoulder seeking hers in the pillow’s muffling sounds of wonder until they both went still, until a slow turn to her side she gave him up and ran raised lips on the wet surface of his mouth. (490)

     

    This passage portrays a simultaneous mingling and separation of bodies–both lyrical and violent–that at once infers and sunders what I would term the “originary,” in the sense of the references to the Empedoclean myths of origin that Gaddis scatters throughout the novel. According to Gibbs, in a fragment from the second generation of Empedocles’ cosmogony, “limbs and parts of bodies were wandering around everywhere separately heads without necks, arms without shoulders, unmatched eyes looking for foreheads . . . these parts are joining up by chance, form creatures with countless heads, faces looking in different directions” (45). This second generation of chance assemblage and multiple body parts, I would argue, represents an (as yet) voiceless, embodied response to the commodified generation of which Gaddis writes; it is either regressive or futurist, and Gibbs and Amy’s lovemaking is but a momentary enactment of it. These are bodies not yet formed into identities voicing commodified desires; they are pre-subjectival in the Kristevan sense–neither the mass subject of late capitalist economy, nor the nostalgically romanticized “individual.”10 These bodies are, at once, hetereogeneous and in conflict, and at the same time, in a characteristic pun, they are mutually incorporative, participating in communion: Amy’s (what? the specific body part is indeterminate in the clutter of limbs) is “left high agape to the mere onslaught of his gaze.” The play on the word “agape” reveals the contradictions of these bodily entanglements, for it suggests both “a gap” or a vacancy, a form of separation (just as it suggests that Amy is detached and objectified through Gibbs’s male gaze), and “agape,” or communion, a rite of bodily incorporation; perhaps it is revealing of the paradox of this bodily state inJR that Gibbs’s treatise on the social history of the mechanization of the arts bears the word “agape” in its title. These may be united bodies that represent a “corporate” condition beyond or before “voice,” or they may be bodies in pieces in a double-edged sense, both “before” capitalized subjectivity and “after” it, that is, after the nostalgic, humanistic subject has disappeared into the mass, technologized subject of postmodern culture–save that Gaddis makes it clear that these are bodies, flesh and blood, in conflict or communion.

     

    Collectively, the bodies ofJR may be perceived as the “body without organs” described by Deleuze and Guattari as that which exists beyond or before writing, voice, the formation of the body proper and organization of identity, the negotiating of all our economies. InA Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari write that the body without organs

     

    is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still the BwO [the body without organs] is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass. It has nothing to do with phantasy, there is nothing to interpret. The BwO causes intensities to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree–to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity = 0; but there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities. Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities.11

     

    For Guattari and Deleuze, the “body without organs” is a condition of being that follows after the dissolution of identity that the progression from modernism to postmodernism portends, where the foundations of “selfhood” in a singular or integral consiousness somehow separated from the “lines of force” which signify the conflation of historical and corporeal energies are questioned and sundered. The body without organs is “deterritorialized,” in that it represents a (non)-identity where the “self” is an intersection of energies and intensities not distinguishable from each other in terms of coming from within or coming from without, as belonging either to the body or to the world.

     

    The “body without organs” is, of course, yet another figure, a prosopopoeia that provides us with “face” (the body) to peer through to that which has neither shape nor substance–what Deleuze and Guattari term “intensity”–but which provides the energy for life proper: in a novel where all systems are unfailingly entropic, such bodily intensities matter. This “source matter” or intensity is non-hierarchical, ungendered, non-dichotomous, and always in motion, yet, because the body without organs is both unformed and allows this intensity to pass through it, “lead you to your death,” in the sense that this “version” of the body (a version enacted in Amy’s and Gibbs’s intercourse) lacks the systems and structures (the organs) that direct and sustain “intensities.” Hence, this figure of the body is both a figure of life and death, both the unoriginary catalyst of “life” and its entropic de-organization; in JR, it is a paradox set over against “voice,” which issues from the organ of the larynx, and signifies the insertion of the speaking subject into the discursive orders of Gaddis’s technocracy.12 Yet as a “figure of speech,” that is, as a figure that appears in and through writing (both Guattari and Deleuze’s theoretical fiction, and Gaddis’s portrayal of Amy and Gibbs’s bodies), it inevitably partakes of those orders, as much as it speaks outside of them.

     

    InJR, Gaddis delineates the plight of the commodified postmodern identity trapped, as it were, in the American marketplace: his novel is clearly political in its concerns, in that it suggests an inevitable complicity with thanatopic, bureaucratic systems–orders that the novel both mocks and projects. Yet in the novel’s contradictory figures of voice and the body, its labyrinthine assemblage of “connections,” and its distended and fractured conversations, there is the presence of “Gaddis,” who has orchestrated the novel’s many voices, languages, and discourses into the monolithic commodity that bears the titleJR. In this, we confront a final paradox that Gaddis neither resolves nor avoids. This paradox can be stated as a skepticism regarding the foundational nature of identity matched by corresponding desire to locate the “origins” of identity, if not in voice, then in the body. Here, the crucial task of figuring or disfiguring voice–of representing the vocal projection of identity (or its discontents) as a figure of speech–is carried out. It is a task, or project, paradoxical in its own nature, for this figuring and projection of voice generates a recognition of its own figurality, its masking of the non-existent or pre-subjectival, even as it involves the formation of an authorial “purpose” (the construction of this figure), and, thus, an authorial identity. InJR identity is founded upon its own deformation, and nowhere is this contradiction more apparent than in the up-surgings of the “semiotic,” in those pressure points where the language breaks down, where voice breaks up, and where coporeality intrudes; it is at those points that the figurations of both are simultaneously made and unmade. InJR, Gaddis makes it clear, what follows after words or voice can only be expressed as a sporadic and temporary intensification of life in the face of language.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Jean Baudrillard, 25, says that this “compulsion toward liquidity” marks the capitalization of the human body, thus setting him at odds with Irigaray, for whom “fluidity” is a mark of the radical otherness of the feminine. This is a “debate” carried on, to some extent, within the terms of Gaddis’s novel.

     

    2. See Walter Benjamin, 217-52. Benjamin alternates between nostalgia for the lost authenticity of the truly original work before the onset of technocratic era, and recognition of the power of mechanical processes of reproduction to break through certain barriers separating art from history and the public. The contradictions of Benjamin’s position are replicated, I would argue, in Gaddis’s fiction, particularly in The Recognitions and JR, where “originality” is both parodied and made the subject of nostalgic longing.

     

    3. Tom LeClair notes the crucial connections between education and the business world in JR: “They [JR and Governor Cates, the latter the head of a huge conglomerate which subsumes the JR Corporation at the end of the novel] are the Horatio Alger story at its two extremes–ragged youth and old age–and the book moves to this rhythm. JR shifts from the school, where J.R. is trained to profit, to the adult corporate world, and concludes in a hospital [where Cates is a patient] where the aged and the prematurely wasted have their end” (97).

     

    4. Marc Chenetier, 357; my translation. Chenetier’s wide-ranging discussion of “voice” in contemporary American fiction contained in his chapter, “La bouche et l’oreille” (321-64) is an invaluable resource, and has been essential to my understanding of voice in Gaddis and in postmodern literature.

     

    5. Alan Singer has suggested how Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic can serve as a critique of Bakhtin’s notions of subject and agency, as well as participating in Bakhtinian “heteroglossia.” See Singer’s “The Ventriloquism of History: Voice, Parody, Dialogue.”

     

    6. Mann’s phrase occurs in “Psychoanalysis, the Lived Myth, and Fiction,” in The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature, 672; LeClair’s comments on Gaddis’s deconstructions of vocal immediacy appear in The Art of Excess, 90.

     

    7. For important discussions of the “paper empires” of JR and their homologous relation to acts of writing and the exchanging of signs see Steven Weisenburger and Joel Dana Black in In Recognition of William Gaddis, 147-61 and 162-73 respectively.

     

    8. For a discussion of the connections between language and excrement in JR, see Stephen Moore, 76-80.

     

    9. LeClair, in The Art of Excess, provides important commentary on mastery in JR; cf. 87-105. LeClair’s sense of “mastery” in the novel is somewhat different from that in which I am using the term here: for LeClair, “mastery” resides in Gaddis’s ability to provide an encyclopedic encompassing of the excessive, noisy, interlocking discourses of contemporary reality. My approach focuses on the lack of mastery at the “micropolitical” or “microlinguistic” level, where individual speakers in the novel give voice to a connective semiosis whose totality (if it exists) is only partially available to them; more precisely, I would argue, they speak as if a non-existent totality were theirs to impose or deploy; therein lies the delusion of mastery in the novel.

     

    10. Stephen Matanle discusses the fragmentation of bodies in JR in light of the Empedoclean themes of “love” and “strife,” the novel representing the contentions extreme of competition, dissociation, discord. Our readings vary significantly in my viewing Matanle’s (or Empedocles’) “strife” as the upsurging of the “semiotic.”

     

    11. Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 153. I am indebted here to John Johnston’s Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis’s The Recognitions and Postmodern Theory for his compelling discussions of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to Gaddis’s first novel.

     

    12. In Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), J. Hillis Miller writes evocatively of the “work” of prosopopoeia and its paradoxical masking and projection of death. See especially his chapter, “Death Mask: Blanchot’s L’arret de mort,” 179-210.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Baudrillard, Jean. Forget Foucault. Trans. Nicole Dufresne. New York: Semiotext(e), 1987.
    • Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Shocken, 1969. 217-52.
    • Black, Joel Dana. “The Paper Empires and Empirical Fictions of William Gaddis.” In Recognition of William Gaddis. Ed. John Kuehl and Steven Moore. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1984. 162-73.
    • Chenetier, Marc. Au-dela du soupcon: La nouvelle fiction americaine de 1960 a nos jours. Paris: Seuil, 1989.
    • Deleuze, Giles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
    • Di-Nagy, Zolt n Ab. “The Art of Fiction CI: William Gaddis.” Paris Review (1988): 71-2.
    • Gaddis, William. JR. 1975. New York: Penguin, 1985.
    • Irigaray, Luce. “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine.” This Sex Which is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP,1985. 68-85.
    • Johnston, John. Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis’s The Recognitions and Postmodern Theory. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1990.
    • LeClair, Tom. The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989.
    • Matanle, Stephen. “Love and Strife in William Gaddis’s JR.” In Recognition of William Gaddis. 106-18.
    • Moore, Stephen. William Gaddis. Boston: Twayne, 1989.
    • Pecora, Vincent. Self and Form in Modern Narrative. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989.
    • Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989.
    • Said, Edward W. “On Originality.” The World, The Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. 133.
    • Serres, Michel. “Michelet: The Soup.” Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Ed. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell. Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 38.
    • Singer, Alan. “The Ventriloquism of History: Voice, Parody, Dialogue.” Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr. New York: Oxford UP, 1965.
    • Weisenburger, Steven. “Paper Currencies: Reading William Gaddis.” In Recognition of William Gaddis. 147-61.

     

  • Anouncements & Advertisements

     

     

    Every issue of Postmodern Culture will carry notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcments, up to 250 words, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. Send anouncements and advertisements to: pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu

     

     

    **** Journal and Book Announcements: ****

1)   Denver Quarterly
2)   DisClosure
3)   _REACH_
4)   SubStance
5)   Contention
6)   ARL/OSAP Electronic Journals Directory
7)   Netweaver Notebook
8)   Journal of Ideas
9)   _Literacy Acquisition_

**** Symposia, Discussion Groups, Calls for Papers: ****

10)  Hungarian Discussion Group
11)  MLA 1991: Session on "The Use of Electronic Communications
     for Research in Literature and Language."
12)  Call for Papers: Women & Technology
13)  Call for Papers: Jerome Charyn
14)  Hypertext '91 Conference
15)  SCREEN-L, a new network discussion group on film and T.V.
16)  National Conference on Computing and Values
17)  WMST-L, a new network discussion group on Women's Studies
18)  CRASH, a network discussion group on postmodernism

1)---------------------------------------------------------------

                             DENVER
                            ---------
                            QUARTERLY

                      Is Pleased To Publish

                          PROSE POETRY

                       A special issue for

                           SPRING 1991

          Featuring new work, translations, and commentaries by

             Stephen Berg * Russell Edson * Clayton Eshleman
                    Michael Palmer * Marjorie Perloff
                      Susan Stewart * James Tate
                            and many others

               Please send me _____ copies of the Prose Poetry
                     issue at $5 each.  Payment enclosed.

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          Quarterly ($15 per year) with the Prose Poetry issue.

                      UNIVERSITY of DENVER
             University Park, Denver, Colorado 80208
                                *
                        DENVER QUARTERLY
                      Department of English

2)---------------------------------------------------------------

                          dis * Klo' zher
                          CALL FOR PAPERS

The editorial collective of disClosure is pleased to announce
that it is now accepting submissions for its inaugural issues.
disClosure is a social theory journal edited by graduate students
at the University of Kentucky, and is designed to provide a forum
for multi-disciplinary dialogue between the humanities and the
social sciences.  By exploring alternative forms of discourse,
our goal is to address contemporary intellectual concerns through
a rigorous examination of history, space, and representation.  As
our title suggests, we encourage fresh perspectives that
transcend the strictures and structures set in place by
traditional disciplinary thought.

Submissions for the first two issues should address the following
topics:

Issue 1 - "Rethinking Contemporary Mythologies"
Deadline - 15 April 1991

Issue 2 - "The Commodification of Culture"
Deadline - 15 December 1991

For our first issue, areas of possible inquiry might include:

-> the myth of objectivity in social science research and writing
-> the prioritization of historical myths over spatial... or vice
   versa
-> the construction and reproduction of myth; methodologies of
   myth creation
-> the desire to be bound by myth
-> Myths? the death of the subject, the death of the author
-> the "END" of IDEOLOGY, THE COLD WAR, RATIONALITY ?

We accept submissions from all theoretical perspectives and all
genres (essay, interview, review, poetry, and others), from both
inside and outside the academy.  disClosure is a refereed journal
whose selections will be solely based on quality and originality.
Graduate students, faculty, and non-academics are equally
encouraged to submit works.  Three copies of manuscripts
formatted to MLA guidelines, double spaced, and less than 10,000
words should be addressed to:

disClosure
106 Student Center
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY 40506-0026

Bitnet submissions can be directed to 

3)---------------------------------------------------------------

_REACH_, Research and Educational Applications of Computers
in the Humanities, the newsletter of the Humanities
Computing Facility of the University of California, Santa
Barbara, is now available in electronic form through
anonymous FTP.

FTP is a UNIX process which lets you transfer files from a
distant computer to your own system.  Your local computer
center staff should be able to provide you with information
on using FTP from your own account.

Once you have FTP available, enter one or the other of the
two following equivalent commands to gain access to the UCSB
computer storing the files:

     ftp ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu
            or
     ftp 128.111.122.50

Try the first version, and, if that doesn't work, then try
the second.

Log on with the name "anonymous," and use your e-mail
address as a password.

Next, move to the directory containing the files by entering
the command:

     cd hcf

Now that you're in the correct directory, you can get a list
of all the file names by entering the command:

     ls

Then, to transfer any of the files to your own system, enter
the command:

     get filename

First try transferring the file called "readme."  It shows
the contents of each of the files in the directory, and
gives detailed instructions for the FTP process, including
the complete log of an actual FTP session.

Finally, end your session with the "quit" command.

If you encounter any difficulties in using the process, send
me an e-mail note and I'll try to enlist the assistance of
one of our local wizards.

I'd be particularly interested to hear from those who find
this archive a useful form of resource.

Regards,

Eric Dahlin
HCF1DAHL@ucsbuxa.bitnet

4)---------------------------------------------------------------

                              "SubStance . . . gives us a sense
                              of what is coming in the future."
                              Philip Lewis, Cornell University

                              Double Issue 62/63 Explores
                              "Thought and Novation"
                              Guest Editor, Judith Schlanger
                              Rene Girard on Innovation and
                               Repetition
                              Michel Pierssens on Novation
                               Astray
                              and Saul Friedlander on The
                               End of Novation

                              Subscriptions (3 issues)
                              19.00/year individuals
                              65.00/year institutions
                              Single issue/6.95
                              Double issue/10.00
                              Foreign surface mail 8.00/year
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                              Order from:
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                              Journal Division
                              University of Wisconsin Press
                              114 North Murray Street
                              Madison, WI 53715

                              Founded 1971
                              Co-Editors: Sydney Levy,
                              Michel Pierssens

                              S U B
                        S T A N C E

                       A REVIEW OF THEORY AND LITERARY CRITICISM

5)---------------------------------------------------------------

                                   Who will raise CONTENTION
                                     to new heights in 1991?

                              Indiana University Press will.

                                  Beginning in October 1991,
                                     CONTENTION:  DEBATES IN
                                       SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND
                       SCIENCE, edited by Nikki Keddie, will
                       be published three times a year.  The
                               journal's emphasis will be on
                          controversies, not for the sake of
                    controversy but, rather, as a vehicle to
                      understand what are considered central
                    issues.  Early contributors will include
                           Eric Hobsbawm, Carl Degler, Susan
                             Suleiman, Renato Rosaldo, Theda
                                Skocpol, Linda Gordon, Carlo
                                 Ginzburg, and Hayden White.
                              Subscriptions are available to
                     individuals for $25 and to institutions
                        for $45 (outside the USA and Canada,
                          please add $10 for foreign surface
                          post).  For more information or to
                      subscribe, please contact the Journals
                    Division, Indiana University Press, 10th
                           & Morton Streets, Bloomington, IN
                                 47405, or call 812-855-9449

6)---------------------------------------------------------------

ARL TO PRODUCE DIRECTORY OF ELECTRONIC PUBLICATIONS

As part of its keen commitment to promote networked academic
journals and other serials, the Association of Research
Libraries (ARL) plans to publish a directory of electronic
journals, newsletters, and scholarly discussion
lists/interest groups.  These represent publications which
are created and distributed principally for Bitnet, Internet,
and any affiliated academic networks, largely for free.

The directory will be available at the end of June.  It will
contain some 30 journal listings, about twice that number of
newsletters, and over 1000 scholarly lists.  Its length is
anticipated to be close to 200 pages.  Preliminary pricing
estimates are approximately $10 - $12 to members and double
that for non-members.  A final price and release date will be
advertised in early June.

Editor of the journals/newsletters section is Michael
Strangelove, University of Ottawa.  Strangelove's list will
be available through the Ottawa University network
sometime in June.  Editor of the scholarly discussion
lists/interest groups section is Diane Kovacs, Kent State
University Libraries.  For some months, she has maintained
such listings as adjunct files to networked lists such as
HUMANIST, ARACHNET, Lstown, and Libref-L.  Each electronic
"serial" will be described and clear directions about how to
subscribe, send submissions, and access retrospectively will
be provided.  To ensure that the reader is given accurate and
up-to-date information, entries have been supplied or
verified by the editors themselves.  The listings are
compiled with the intention of providing the uninitiated
networker with clear directions on how to navigate the
sometimes puzzling world of electronic scholarship.

ARL is producing the printed directory because of calls
virtually daily requesting such information.  If there is
indeed sufficient demand for the work, the directories will
be updated and sold regularly.  For those who prefer to
retrieve electronically, the directory will point to the free
and continuously up-to-date networked sources for this
information, with complete access instructions.

The ARL is tentatively exploring options for funding to
catalog/classify these materials, both to facilitate
networked and paper access by subject and to
"institutionalize" and "legitimize" new types of "serials."
This effort would relate to activities of the Coalition for
Networked Information (CNI) in identifying and maintaining
directories of networked access and resources and to the work
of individuals and institutions concerned with standards
development for networked products and publications.  For
further information, to indicate your interest, or to place
an order, contact:

ARLHQ@UMDC.Bitnet (e-mail)
Ann Okerson or Christine Klein
Association of Research Libraries
1527 New Hampshire Avenue, NW
Washington, DC  20036
202-232-2466 (phone)
202-462-7849 (fax)

7)---------------------------------------------------------------

NETWEAVER NOTEBOOK

NETWEAVER is an electronic publication of the Electronic
Networking Association, and the winter issue deals with global
networking issues.  It is stored on Comserve.  Below is part of
the beginning of the magazine including its table of contents.
At the end is directions on how to obtain the full electronic
version from Comserve.

                      Welcome to NETWEAVER!
                  The interactive, intersystem
                        newsletter of the
                Electronic Networking Association

  Copyright(c) by Electronic Networking Association (ENA), 1990

    NETWEAVER may be freely ported to any online system.
    Authors whose articles are published in NETWEAVER and its
companion print publications, ENA Update and NETWEAVER PRINTOUT!
retain all copyrights. Further publication in any other media
requires permission of the author.

 Volume 7                ---CONTENTS---               Winter 1991

 0.  MASTHEAD AND TABLE OF CONTENTS

 1.  INTRODUCTION TO THIS SPECIAL "GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES" ISSUE

 2.  IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD    .. by Dave Hughes

 3.  NETWORKING IN ARGENTINA          .. by Eduardo Salom

 4.  FROM THE BANKS OF TAMAGAWA RIVER .. by Mary Lou Rebelo

 5.  GETTING THE KIDS ONLINE          .. by Odd de Presno

 6.  ONLINE FOR A SMOKEFREE PLANET    .. by Nancy  Stefanik

 7.  THE MATURATION OF THE MATRIX     .. by John S. Quarterman

 8.  ENA - Seattle 1991 - Get Ready for F-T-F!

To get a copy yourself, send the command: SEND NETWEAVE WINTER91
on the first line in the body of an electronic mail message to:

Comserve@rpiecs (Bitnet) or Comserve@Vm.Ecs.Rpi.Edu (Internet).

8)---------------------------------------------------------------

PAPERS APPEARING IN
VOLUME 2 NUMBER 1 OF THE JOURNAL OF IDEAS

THOUGHT CONTAGION AS ABSTRACT EVOLUTION
Aaron Lynch

CULTURE AS A SEMANTIC FRACTAL: SOCIOBIOLOGY AND THICK DESCRIPTION
Charles J. Lumsden
Department of Medicine, University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A8

MODELING THE DISTRIBUTION OF A "MEME" IN A SIMPLE AGE
DISTRIBUTION POPULATION: I. A KINETICS APPROACH AND SOME
ALTERNATIVE MODELS
Matthew Witten
Center for High Performance Computing
University of Texas System, Austin, TX 78758-4497

THE PRINCIPIA CYBERNETICA PROJECT
Francis Heylighen, Cliff Joslyn, and Valentin Turchin
The Principia Cybernetica Project

BRAIN AND MIND: THE ULTIMATE GRAND CHALLENGE
Elan Moritz
The Institute for Memetic Research
P. O. Box 16327, Panama City, Florida 32406

The Journal of Ideas is an archival forum for discussion of
1) evolution and spread of ideas, 2) the creative process, and 3)
biological and electronic implementations of idea/knowledge
generation and processing.

The Journal of Ideas, ISSN 1049-6335, is published quarterly by
the Institute for Memetic Research, Inc. P. O. Box 16327, Panama
City Florida 32406-1327.

>----------- FOR MORE INFORMATION ------->

E-mail requests to Elan Moritz, Editor, at moritz@well.sf.ca.us.

9)---------------------------------------------------------------

LITERACY ACQUISITION

A contribution of C&C to the International Literacy Year (ILY)
Edited by Marc Spoelders 1990. J. Van In.

CONTENTS                                                    V

MARC SPOELDERS
Introduction                                                Vii

NANCY TORRANCE and DAVID R. OLSON
Children's Understanding of Ambiguity and Interpretation    1

HAZEL FRANCIS
Strategies and Rules in Learning to Read and Spell          17

NEIL MERCER and DEREK EDWARDS
Developing Shared Understanding: Theories, Pedagogies and
Educational Practice                                        31

LUT VAN DAMME and MARC SPOELDERS
Metalinguistic Awareness and Early Reading. A
Longitudinal Study                                          43

DENIS APOTHELOZ
The Development of Cohesion in Writing: Preliminary
Research on Anaphoric Procedures and Thematic Planning
in Texts by children                                        53

REGINE PIERRE, DANIELLE BOURCIER, ANNE HUDON
and STELLA NOREAU
Acquisition of the System of Determiners by Early Readers   71

MONIQUE BOEKAERTS
Text Structure, Reading Rate and Reading Comprehension      91

MICHEL PAGE
Methodological Issues in Testing Comprehension of Texts     113

HELENE POISSANT
Inferential Processes in the Comprehension of Short
Narratives                                                  129

FILIP LONCKE
Sign Language and Reading in Young Deaf Children            147

RAYMOND DUVAL
Representation of Texts: Problems for Research and
Prospects for Education                                     161

PHILIP YDE and MARC SPOELDERS
Cohesion and Narrative Text Quality.  A Developmental
Study with Beginning Writers                                171

GISSI SARIG and SHOSHANA FOLMAN
Metacognitive Awareness and Theoretical Knowledge in
Coherence Production                                        195

LILIANA TOLCHINSKY LANDSMANN
Early Literacy Development: Evidence from Different
Orthographic Systems                                        223

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

LITERACY ACQUISITION

PRICE

Belgium                  2300 BEF, including forwarding charges
Other countries          2500 BEF, including forwarding charges

AILA and C&C members only pay in Belgium:              2070 BEF
                      in other countries:              2250 BEF

This sum has to be paid in advance to the following account:
550-3130600-15
Publishing House J. Van In
Grote Markt 39
B - 2500 Lier
Belgium

All bank-costs, at home and abroad, are chargeable to the
customer.

10)--------------------------------------------------------------

         ANNOUNCEMENT OF HUNGARIAN DISCUSSION GROUP

A new electronic discussion group on Hungarian issues is now
open to scholars and students from all disciplines.  Although
the working language of the group is English, contributions
in other languages will be accepted and posted.  However,
they may not be understood by a significant proportion of
the membership.

Electronic mail connections have already been established
with three Hungarian universities: Budapest Technical
University, Budapest University of Economic Sciences, and
Eotvos Lorand University.

The group and list server addresses of the new group, based
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, are:

     hungary@ucsbvm.bitnet
     listserv@ucsbvm.bitnet

To subscribe to the discussion group, send an e-mail
message, without any subject, to the list server address,
listserv@ucsbvm.bitnet, containing the single line:

     subscribe hungary "your name"

with your own name, not your e-mail address, inserted in
place of the phrase "your name," without quotes.

Once you have subscribed, any messages which you want to
circulate to the group should be sent to the group address,
hungary@ucsbvm.bitnet.

The list is moderated, and will be edited by:

Eric Dahlin
hcf2hung@ucsbuxa.bitnet

11)--------------------------------------------------------------

MLA SESSION ON "THE USE OF ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS FOR RESEARCH
IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE."

The MLA Committee on Computers and Emerging Technology will
sponsor a session on "The Use of Electronic Communications for
Research in Literature and Language."

Chair: Otmar Foelsche, Dartmouth College
(Otmar.K.E.Foelsche@MAC.DARTMOUTH.EDU)
Director, Language Resource Center, DC, Hanover NH

A.   Daniel Brink, Arizona State University and Donald Ross,
     University of Minnesota, Minneapolis: "Planning a Conference
     by e-Mail: Plusses and Pitfalls"
     (ATDXB@ASUACAD.BITNET) and (UMCOMP@UX.ACS.UMN.EDU)
     DB, Associate Dean for Technology Integration, College of
     Liberal Arts and Sciences, ASU, Tempe, AZ 85287
     DR, English and Composition, U of M, Minneapolis, MN 55455

B.   John Unsworth, Eyal Amiran, and Elaine Orr, editors,
     _Postmodern Culture_: "Patterned Responses to the Electronic
     Journal"
     (PMC@NCSCUVM.BITNET)
     Box 8105, Department of English, North Carolina State
     University, Raleigh, NC 27695

C.   Elaine Brennan, Brown University, co-editor, HUMANIST: "The
     HUMANIST Bulletin Board"
     (ELAINE@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU)
     Women Writers Project, Box 1841, Brown University,
     Providence, RI 02912

Speakers will treat the history of their projects, current
status, and future plans.  A handout on some of the technical
issues will help others who wish to emulate their projects.

12)--------------------------------------------------------------

C A L L     F O R     P A P E R S
Studies in Technological Innovation and
Human Resources (Vol. 4)
WOMEN  AND  TECHNOLOGY

Urs E. Gattiker
Editor
Technological Innovation and Human Resources
Faculty of Management
The University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge, Alberta
CANADA  T1K 3M4
E-Mail: GATTIKER2@HG.ULETH.CA
FAX:  (403) 329-2038

     Volume 1:  Strategic and Human Resource Issues
     Volume 2:  End-User Training
     Volume 3:  Technology-Mediated Communication

The upcoming Volume 4, WOMEN AND TECHNOLOGY will
particularly include papers that are: international,
interdisciplinary, theoretical, empirical, macro, and
micro.

      DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION IS OCTOBER 1, 1991.

If you would like to discuss your topic, please call
Urs E. Gattiker at (403) 320-6966 (mountain standard
time), or send a message via the E-mail address above.

13)--------------------------------------------------------------

CALL FOR PAPERS: CHARYN COLLECTION

Patrick O'Donnell is in the process of collecting essays on and
assessments of the work of Jerome Charyn for a special joint
issue of the _Review of Contemporary Fiction_, to be published in
1992.  If you have some work or commentary on Charyn which you
would like to put under consideration for this special issue,
please contact O'Donnell at the following address after April
15:

Nauklerstrasse 5
7400 Tubingen
Federal Republic of Germany

Drafts of submissions to the collection must be send to O'Donnell
no later than July 15, 1991, but please contact him soon after
April 15 if you plan to submit something for the collection,
describing the nature and length of your planned contribution.

14)--------------------------------------------------------------

HYPERTEXT '91
3RD ACM CONFERENCE ON HYPERTEXT
DECEMBER 15-18, 1991
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

Hypertext '91 is an international research conference on
hypertext.  The ACM Hypertext Conference occurs in the United
States every second year in alternation with ECHT, the European
Conference on Hypertext.

Hypertext systems provide computer support for locating,
gathering, annotating, and organizing information. Hypertext
systems are being designed for information collections of diverse
material in heterogeneous media, hence the alternate name,
hypermedia.

Hypertext is by nature multi-disciplinary, involving researchers
in many fields, including computer science, cognitive science,
rhetoric, and education, as well as many application domains.
This conference will interest a broad spectrum of professionals
in these fields ranging from theoreticians through behavioral
researchers to systems researchers and applications developers.
The conference will offer technical events in a variety of
formats as well as guest speakers and opportunities for informal
special interest groups.

For More Information:

Hypertext '91 Conference email: ht91@bush.tamu.edu

John J. Leggett, General Chair
Hypertext '91 Conference
Hypertext Research Lab
Department of Computer Science
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX  77843 USA
Voice: 409 845-0298
Fax: 409 847-8578
email: leggett@bush.tamu.edu

Janet H. Walker, Program Chair
Hypertext '91 Conference
Digital Equipment Corporation
Cambridge Research Lab
One Kendall Square, Bldg 700
Cambridge, MA  02139  USA
Voice:  617 621-6618
Fax:  617 621-6650
email:  jwalker@crl.dec.com

15)--------------------------------------------------------------

FILM AND TV STUDIES DISCUSSION LIST

SCREEN-L on LISTSERV@UA1VM or LISTSERV@UA1VM.UA.EDU

SCREEN-L is an unmoderated list for all who study, teach,
theorize about or research film and television--mostly in an
academic setting, but not necessarily so.  SCREEN-L ranges from
the abstract (post-post-structuralist theory) to the concrete
(roommate match-ups for the next SCS/UFVA conference).
Pedagogical, historical, theoretical, and production issues
pertaining to film and TV studies are welcomed.

To subscribe to SCREEN-L, send the following command to
LISTSERV@UA1VM (or LISTSERV@UA1VM.UA.EDU) via e-mail or
interactive message (TELL/SEND):

SUBSCRIBE SCREEN-L 

"" is your name as you wish it to appear on the
list.  For example:

SUBSCRIBE SCREEN-L Budd Boetticher

Archives of SCREEN-L and related files are stored in the SCREEN-L
FILELIST.  To receive a list of files send the command INDEX
SCREEN-L to LISTSERV@UA1VM (or LISTSERV@UA1VM.UA.EDU).

Owner:  Jeremy Butler JBUTLER@UA1VM
                      JBUTLER@UA1VM.UA.EDU
        Telecommunication & Film Dept
        The University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa

16)--------------------------------------------------------------

N C C V / 91

The National Conference on Computing and Values will convene
August 12-16, 1991, in New Haven, CT.  N C C V / 91 is a project
of the National Science Foundation and the Research Center on
Computing and Society.  Specific themes (tracks) include

      -  Computer Privacy & Confidentiality
      -  Computer Security & Crime
      -  Ownership of Software & Intellectual Property
      -  Equity & Access to Computing Resources
      -  Teaching Computing & Values
      -  Policy Issues in the Campus Computing Environment

The workshop structure of the conference limits participation to
approximately 400 registrants, but space *IS* still available at
this time (mid-May).

Confirmed speakers include Ronald E. Anderson, Daniel Appleman,
John Perry Barlow, Tora Bikson, Della Bonnette, Leslie
Burkholder, Terrell Ward Bynum, David Carey, Jacques N.  Catudal,
Gary Chapman, Marvin Croy, Charles E. M. Dunlop, Batya Friedman,
Donald Gotterbarn, Barbara Heinisch, Deborah Johnson, Mitch
Kapor, John Ladd, Marianne LaFrance, Ann-Marie Lancaster, Doris
Lidtke, Walter Maner, Diane Martin, Keith Miller, James H. Moor,
William Hugh Murray, Peter Neumann, George Nicholson, Helen
Nissenbaum, Judith Perolle, Amy Rubin, Sanford Sherizen, John
Snapper, Richard Stallman, T. C. Ting, Willis Ware, Terry
Winograd, and Richard A. Wright.

The registration fee is low ($175) and deeply discounted air
fares are available into New Haven.

To request a registration packet, please send your name, your
email AND paper mail addresses to ...

   BITNet      MANER@BGSUOPIE.BITNET
   InterNet    maner@andy.bgsu.edu (129.1.1.2)

or, by fax ...

   (419) 372-8061

or, by phone ...

  (419) 372-8719  (answering machine)
  (419) 372-2337  (secretary)

or, by regular mail ...

   Professor Walter Maner
   Dept. of Computer Science
   Bowling Green State University
   Bowling Green, OH 43403 USA

With best wishes,
Terrell Ward Bynum and Walter Maner, Conference Co-chairs

17)--------------------------------------------------------------

                             WMST-L

              Electronic Forum for Women's Studies

     WMST-L, an electronic forum or Listserv discussion group for
Women's Studies, has just been established.  Its purpose is to
facilitate discussion of Women's Studies issues, especially those
concerned with research, teaching, and program administration,
and to publicize relevant conferences, job announcements, calls
for papers, publications, and the like.  It is hoped that WMST-L
will also serve as a central repository for course materials,
curriculum proposals and projects, bibliographies, and other
files related to Women's Studies.

     To subscribe to WMST-L, send the following command via
e-mail or interactive message to LISTSERV@UMDD (Bitnet) or
LISTSERV@UMDD.UMD.EDU (Internet): Subscribe WMST-L Your full
name.  For example:

          Subscribe WMST-L Jane Doe

     Subscribers will receive via e-mail all messages that are
sent to WMST-L.  Messages for distribution to subscribers
(questions, replies, announcements, etc.) should be sent to
WMST-L@UMDD (Bitnet) or WMST-L@UMDD.UMD.EDU (Internet).  Please
note: only messages for distribution should be sent to WMST-L;
all commands (subscribe, signoff, review, etc.) should go to
LISTSERV.

     If you have questions or would like more information about
WMST-L, or if you have materials that you would be willing to put
on file, please contact Joan Korenman, Women's Studies Program,
U. of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 21228-5398 USA.
Phone: (301)-455-2040.  E-mail: KORENMAN@UMBC (Bitnet) or
KORENMAN@UMBC2.UMBC.EDU (Internet).

18)--------------------------------------------------------------

                            C R A S H

A mailing list is available for people to discuss art and
technology in a postmodern context.  It's named CRASH, after the
JG Ballard novel.  So far over 40 people have signed up.  Topics
have included: Survival Research Laboratories, WS Burroughs,
semiotics, Tinguely, the Artificial Life workshop, Re/Search
magazine, simulacra, "technology-not-for-its-own-sake," virtual
realities, Duchamp, Chris Burden, Beth B's films, Baudelaire,
etc.

People are encouraged to sign up and discuss any aspect of
postmodern culture they feel necessary.

Subscription requests to:  sg1q+crash-request@andrew.cmu.edu

Submissions to: crash+@andrew.cmu.edu

Mail is automatically forwarded to the rest of the list.

CRASH moderator:

Simon Gatrall          sg1q+@andrew.cmu.edu

     

  • Postface: Positions on Postmodernism

    The Editors

    Eyal:     Last year we expected that the essays we would publish
          --a good number of them anyway--would be affected by
          the electronic medium, but that has not happened much.
          Several of the essays do gain something from being in
          this medium--Ulmer's or Moulthrop's.  In print they
          would lose at the very least the chance to exemplify
          some of their argument.  But we have not seen too many
          essays that think the way they do or mean what they
          mean because they are in electronic form.

John:     In an odd way, though, that observation is very much
          like one of the early and persistent misconceptions we
          ran into when we explained the journal to people: they
          always seemed to expect that, because it was a journal
          published, distributed and read on computers, it must
          be a journal _about_ computers--about its medium.  We
          had a number of submissions, at the beginning, that had
          something to do with computers but nothing to do with
          postmodern culture.  That was what forced us to
          stipulate that we wouldn't consider essays on computer
          hardware/software unless they raised "significant
          aesthetic or theoretical issues."

Eyal:     True, though I was thinking about the effects of the
          medium and not about subject matter.  We've also not
          received that many essays that took risks--I wonder how
          much of our success we must attribute to what might
          finally be the conventionality of our first three
          issues.  A conventional journal that looks radical:
          like a modernist from Yale.  I think that we would have
          published more radical work (not necessarily more
          radical politically) if we had more of it to review.
          We did get some unconventional work, but from what
          we've seen I'd have to guess that most people out there
          are writing recognizable, assimilable essays.

John:     Well, I wouldn't say that our first three issues have
          been _thoroughly_ conventional, but I know what you
          mean.  Still, the authors of some of the submissions we
          rejected might argue that, to the extent that our first
          three issues _are_ conventional in their content, it's
          because we rejected risk-taking essays.  But what kinds
          of risks are you talking about?

Eyal:     The unforseen: a new way of making things work.  It
          seems that the essays we have published share certain
          structures of thinking, ways of being essays, however
          innovative and interesting their subject matter.  Of
          course if they were saying something in an entirely new
          way they would be hard to follow, maybe in the way that
          Howe's essay is hard to follow at times.  But because
          so many of these works argue for new ways of doing
          things, for a radical redefinition of personal context
          (Fraiberg) or a new kind of writing (Acker, Ulmer), it
          is especially noticeable that they think in such
          familiar ways.  You were saying before we started
          writing that, in a way, much of this thinking does not
          seem to have absorbed poststructuralism.  In fact we've
          noted in both previous Postfaces that many works we've
          published tend to organize around familiar oppositions,
          specifically those of classical and popular culture,
          utopian and dystopian postmodernism, etc..

John:     Well, wherever you go, there you are.  We've been
          standing pretty far back from the first three issues;
          what we've said about them could be said about all
          theory and criticism, including the most innovative.
          If twenty years of poststructuralism haven't changed
          our basic patterns of thinking, one year of electronic
          publishing certainly isn't going to.  But if we ask
          whether we've been unhappy with what we've published so
          far, the answer is clearly "no": we've both been very
          pleased with the way these issues have come together.
          The essays themselves have covered a wide range of
          subjects in a variety of styles, and working with the
          authors and reviewers has been a lot of fun.

Eyal:     For a long time--editing the second issue--I used to go
          to bed late.  I remember in particular editing Howe's
          essay.  Three of the four reviewers had made pretty
          much the same suggestions, but with variations.  The
          work makes so much of its argument subtly, in its form
          and organization, in its juxtapositions and
          development, that it was hard to see just what taking
          some parts out of it would do to other parts, and to
          the whole; if I were to ask Howe to take out part A
          here, then part B there would make less sense; if I
          asked her to leave part A in but take C that came
          before it out, then A would mean something else and
          then B would change too.  Then again, that might have
          been what the readers had wanted when they suggested
          the changes.  If Howe were to cut off B altogether,
          then that would not be what the readers had asked for,
          but now A and C would not evolve into B and so might
          not be objectionable after all.  My mind kept weaving
          and unravelling the essay as I read and reread it, late
          into the night.  I got more and more excited as I was
          reading the essay; I felt cold but decided that this
          was because I'd had dinner so long before--this made
          sense at the time.  I got a blanket and kept reading.
          When I slept my mind kept going round and round,
          repeating bits and pieces of the essay feverishly.  I
          woke up shivering, with a high temperature: the doctor
          thought it was influenza, but it felt like the
          influence of the text.

John:     A sort of out-of-body editorial experience.  I take
          back what I said before--one year of electronic
          publishing has at least disordered _our_ minds from
          time to time.  It's also radically altered my
          perception of the passage of time: when I try to place
          something that happened last June--like the time I
          accidentally distributed the entire list of subscribers
          _to_ the entire list of subscribers...twice--it seems
          that about three years have passed since then.  Some
          good things have happened in that time, whatever time
          it was: being called "honey" by Kathy Acker ("Honey,
          the movers are here, so make it short"), pushing the
          button to mail out full text of the first issue at 5
          a.m. on the last day of the month (and immediately
          crashing mailboxes around the world), the experience
          we've had with self-nominated reviewers in the
          editorial process, the early support from the library
          here at NCSU, and especially the response of
          subscribers and contributors to the journal.  The one
          thing I would like to see develop further is PMC-Talk,
          which could become more closely related to the journal
          and more constructive in its own right.  There's been
          some good stuff posted there, but there's also a lot of
          polemic, which is bad conversation.  I think the
          Fraiberg-Porush exchange in this issue is an example of
          a good conversation--one that doesn't necessarily
          discard or disguise strong opinions, but still manages
          to get somewhere.

Eyal:     An exciting aspect of the journal so far has been that
          many of the works we have published do hold good
          conversations, explicitly or implicitly.  That's the
          flip side of assimilability--that essays which share
          certain suppositions or ways of thinking can engage
          each other.

John:     Right: for instance, both Katz and Moulthrop start by
          trying out the supposition that the world really might
          behave according to our computer dreams--nightmares in
          Katz's "To a Computer File Named Alison," daydreams for
          Moulthrop, who doubts whether the media is really going
          to revolutionize what we exchange in it.  Then for
          Fraiberg, this isn't a dream of the future at all: it's
          our present.  Cyborgs are what we already are.

Eyal:     Katz and Moulthrop are both interested in the way that
          information systems (Moulthrop) and rhetorical
          constructions (Katz) affect the social text and our
          psychological economy, respectively.  Likewise several
          writers identify antagonistic kinds of postmodernism (a
          classical and a popular for Wheeler, a reflective and
          an unreflective for Mikics).  Terms mingle without
          reducing the conversation to cocktail party banter--
          like Matibag's interest in cannibalism and Fraiberg's
          in exchange and the dissolution of borders.

John:     When Matibag talks about cannibalism in Caribbean
          literature, he's actually talking about the
          cannibalizing of cannibalism, or of the imagery of
          cannibalism--a situation in which the text consumes its
          context, not unlike what Maier describes in Bowles's
          "hybrid" (appropriated) texts.  As in the last two
          issues, there are numerous unplanned connections among
          the essays in this one.  These connections suggest
          either that we all say much the same thing--a fairly
          reductive conclusion, and one which overlooks the
          importance of the local context for all of these
          essays--or they suggest that, although our individual
          contexts may be very different, there are trade routes
          among them.

  • BOOK REVIEW OF: Forked Tongues

    M.E. Sokolik

    Texas A&M University
    <e305ms@tamvm1>

     

    Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing & Representation in North American Indian Texts, by David Murray. Indiana UP, 1991.

     

    The Dictionary of Americanisms states that the phrase “forked tongue” is “used in imitation of Indian speech, to mean a lying tongue, a false tongue.” Thus, the choice of Forked Tongues as a title for this volume is particularly apt, as the author examines the Native American “voice” as it is represented and misrepresented in various texts.

     

    Each chapter reads as a fairly autonomous essay, and treats a specific question. Chapter 1, “Translation,” briefly addresses some of the perceptions and problems with the task of translation. Also illustrated are the ideologies inherent in the various attitudes towards translation, within their historical settings. The author argues that the power relationships that existed at different points in time between white and Native are borne out in these changing attitudes toward translation. Picking up this thread of reasoning, Chapter 2, “Language,” examines several discussions of Native American language, in particular the nineteenth century beliefs about “primitive” languages.

     

    The third chapter, “Indian Speech and Speeches,” shows how the beliefs of various times influenced the representation of Native American speeches. Foremost is the concept of the “Noble Savage,” and the popularity of “surrender and protest speeches” by Native Americans. For example, Murray points out that in Robert Rogers’ Ponteach: or The Savages of America (1766), when Pontiac is “confronted by swindling whites, he asserts his independence and nobility in iambic pentameters” (37).

     

    The next chapter, “Christian Indians: Samson Occom and William Apes,” discusses primarily the letters of these two men, and their relationships with their white benefactors, as well as their Native and white audiences. Murray here resumes a piece of his earlier argument regarding power relationships between Natives and whites. Rather than seeing these Native-authored letters as more “authentic” expressions of the individual voice, he points out that anything published at the time (or even now?) was “likely to reflect the tastes of a white audience, and conform to a large extent to what at least some of them thought . . . was appropriate for an Indian to write” (57).

     

    The fifth chapter, “Autobiography and Authorship: Identity and Unity,” points out that most early autobiographies written by natives were typically collaborations, rather than a solo work of self-expression. This collaboration involved the subject, the editor or anthropologist, and often another Native American acting as translator. The result then, he argues, is a multi-voiced product. Although the anthropologist typically has tried to play down his or her own role in the transmission of the text, it is here that we are faced with the eternal paradox of objectivity in reporting. He also examines several more modern autobiographies, and how they fit into various social and political “movements,” for example, the reprinting of Black Elk Speaks in the 1960s, in response to “the growing counter-cultural predilection for the irrational, supernatural and primitive [which] led to an increasing interest in, and idealisation of, Indian culture. Black Elk Speaks seemed to offer ecological awareness, mind- expanding visions and an indictment of white American civilisation. . . .” (72).

     

    The next chapter, “Grizzly Woman and her Interpreters,” looks at the representation of myth within ethnography by focusing on the myth of Grizzly Woman. Murray here examines the various analyses done by Boas, Levi-Strauss, Hymes, and so forth, and how they fit into a “model of cultural and interpretive totality, and of rhetorical strategies in the making of ethnographic texts” (4). In this chapter as well, the author looks at, from various points of view, the methodologies of collecting and reporting field data and how they were shaped by ideology. On the one hand is Melville Jacobs’ criticism of his mentor, Boas. Jacobs felt that because Boas did not pursue theory, he had failed to collect “many necessary things” from the field, due to a “lack of concern with devising fresh scientific procedures. . . .” (110). On the other hand, we have James Clifford presenting Levi-Strauss’ impulse with collecting and translating as “a way of rediscovering a lost totality” (123).

     

    Finally, in “Dialogues and Dialogics,” the author examines the potential utility of dialogical anthropology to unify the various threads of the book, in particular the interplay between language and power. An interesting aspect of this final chapter is Murray’s discussion of the writings of Castaneda. He questions the fact that Castaneda is rarely cited in academic discussions of dialogic texts, and answers his own question by saying

     

    One obvious answer is that, for all the talk of fiction, there is throughout postmodern anthropology an implicit assumption that fiction only operates WITHIN a text already authorised as ethnography and therefore as non-fiction, and that there are professional and unstated parameters of behaviour, which Castaneda has violated. (155)

     

    Overall, this book presents a challenge to the reader. It is extremely interdisciplinary, and only those with a sophisticated knowledge of anthropology from Boas to Bakhtin, linguistics, and post-modern literary theory will be able to fully appreciate the various arguments presented herein. Nonetheless, for the reader interested in Native American texts, and how these texts fit into a complex patchwork of changing historical ideologies, it is an important contribution.

     

    Reading this book brought to mind the character of Dr. Munday, the anthropologist in Paul Theroux’s Black House. Unknowingly reflecting many of the themes of Forked Tongues, Theroux says of Munday, “. . . He had his biases. He would risk what errors of judgment were unavoidable in such circumstances and write as a man who had lived closely with an alien people; his responses would be as important as the behavior that caused those responses. He had entered the culture and assisted in practices whose value he saw only as an active participant; witchcraft and sorcery had almost brought him to belief in those early years because he had been more than a witness. . . .” Then, Munday, considering his role as the ethnographer emeritus, muses,

     

    Anthropology the most literate of the sciences, whose nearest affinity was the greatest fiction, had degenerated to impersonal litanies of clumsy coinages and phrases of superficial complexity, people of flesh and bone to cases or subjects with personalities remaining as obscure as their difficult names, like the long Latin one given the pretty butterfly. He did not use those words.

     

    As a postscript, I must wonder why the author (and indeed, the editor and press) chose to use the word “Indian” as the terminology of choice for the Native American. This choice is particularly curious given the quotation from William Apes, found on page 58 of Murray’s book, who wonders the same thing about the use of this term in 1831:

     

    I have often been led to inquire where the whites received this word, which they so often threw as an opprobrious epithet at the sons of the forest. I could not find it in the bible, and therefore concluded, that it was a word imported for the special purpose of degrading us. At other times I thought it was derived from the term in-gen-uity. But the proper term which ought to be applied to our nation to distinguish it from the rest of the human family is that of 'Natives'--and I humbly conceive that the natives of this country are the only people under heaven who have a just title to the name, inasmuch as we are the only people who retain the original complexion of our father Adam.

     

    Nowhere in the text is the choice of “Indian” explained or defended. In a volume that so carefully examines the issue of Native American “voice” it is a bit of a shame that the author didn’t listen more carefully to this still timely plea from Apes.

     

  • A Critique of the Post-Althusserian Conception of Ideology in Latin American Cultural Studies

    Greg Dawes

    North Carolina State University
    <gadfll@ncsuvm.bitnet>

     

    Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions, by John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman (Austin: U of Texas P, 1990).

     

    One of the major contributions to literary studies in recent years has been the recognition that political consciousness is invariably fused with aesthetic practice. In light of literary approaches prior to Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981), which tended to isolate and fetishize the text, such a development in cultural studies can only be seen as salutary. Nonetheless, this re-evaluation of the relation between the political and aesthetic spheres has tended to gravitate towards an interpretation of this dialectic as unconscious. This comes in response, perhaps, to mechanistic formulations of the conjunction of politics and art, but primarily to Georg Lukacs’ reflection theory. Althusserianism and post-Althusserianism (or post-marxism) are certainly among the most significant proponents of unearthing unconscious impulses in cultural investigations. While Althusser’s work has largely remained intact–and in fact could be seen exercizing a hegemonic role within Marxism–in spite of the criticism directed at it, in many ways it has been unable to overcome such structuralist contradictions as the division created between science and ideology.1 Latin American cultural studies has felt the impact of Althusserianism at least since Marta Harnecker published her monumental study Los conceptos elementales del materialismo historico [The Elementary Concepts of Historical Materialism] in 1969; and Marc Zimmerman and John Beverley’s latest book, Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions, comes out of this Althusserian tradition as well as the post-Althusserian and post-Marxist thinking of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. As I will argue below, many of the old problems that plagued Althusser’s concept of ideology continue to afflict a work like Zimmerman and Beverley’s, not only on a theoretical plane, but also in the practical analyses of historico-political events. While we gain many insights into cultural phenomena through such an approach, ultimately a gap is created between the theory, on the one hand, and actual historical events, on the other.

     

    In their study, Zimmerman and Beverley make an upfront, forceful, and compelling argument in favor of an Althusserian ideological analysis which propels their study forward and is aided by the adoption of Gramsci’s concept of the ‘National Popular.’ This theory provides the authors with a foundation for elucidating a discussion on aesthetic commitment in the Central American context and for furnishing a reply as to why literature carries so much weight in Latin America. Briefly stated, poetry, for both Zimmerman and Beverley, accrues a significant and unique value in the Central American region because it can function as a symbolic arena which gathers together–from the optic of Althusserianism–an assortment of feelings, images, and myths.2 Poetry thus serves as a catalyst in forming national identity in revolutionary circumstances in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua–all of which combine nationalism and socialism in their ideology.

     

    Leaving aside the theoretical aspects for the time being, as a historical tract on literary and revolutionary vanguards in Central America, Literature and Politics succeeds in providing the reader with detailed accounts of the intersection of Roque Dalton’s revolutionary commitment and his poetry, the fusion of liberation theology with the Nicarguan revolution, and the role of the testimonio as a transitional, narrational mode. Beverley, of course, has been one of the most astute analysts of the testimonio; and this latest version (Chapter 7) is an expansion of the work he has done in the past.3

     

    It is to both Zimmerman and Beverley’s credit that in this most recent analysis, the testimonio (documentary or testimonial literature) is defined as a “transitional literary form” which, as the authors put it, “does not seem particularly well adapted to be the primary narrative form of an elaborated postrevolutionary society, perhaps because its dynamics depend precisely on the conditions of social and cultural inequality and direct oppression that fuel the revolutionary impulse in the first place” (207). While Central American testimonial literature emerges from conscious revolutionary activity, it is completely enmeshed in this praxis. Hence, as Lukacs’ argues in his analysis of Willi Bredel’s novels, while this working class narrative production should be lauded as a great step forward, it strikes me that the testimonio can potentially–as in the case of Bredel’s work–lead to a less complex development of the revolutionary situation.4) This is what makes testimonial literature a transitional narrative form. It would be worth exploring the depth of Domitila’s “autobiography” with the less complete–yet still highly important–Fire from the Mountain by Omar Cabezas. In contrast to George Yudice’s view of the testimonial as a struggle for survival,5 there is, then, as Beverley and Zimmerman seem to suggest, a problem with testimonials which respond to urgent or spontaneous political matters without having analyzed socio-political matters thoroughly, because they sacrifice to much in their representation of reality.

     

    Another chapter which is unique to Literature and Politics–in the material it deals with–is Zimmmerman and Beverley’s interpretation of cultural practices during the Nicaraguan revolution. To a great extent, our versions of the aesthetic and political events that took place, from as early as 1985 to the election, corroborate each other. However, since the book was published shortly after the February debacle, it appears that the authors did not have time to evaluate the political and aesthetic effects that the collapse of the Ministry of Culture and the rise of Rosario Murillo and the professionalists could have on cultural production. In their study there is–understandably–a hesitancy to critique the model which they have seen as exemplary of a type of resistance to postmodernism in this hemisphere. I would contend that this apparent weakness is due to the theoretical framework itself, to which I would like to turn now.

     

    One of the main weaknesses in Althusserian theory is the concept of ideology itself. As long as ideology in general is specified in terms which have no reference to or place for the struggle between labor and capital, then it will only be, what Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez has called “theoretical ideology” and will cease to operate dialectically with material reality. Ideology will always appear as secondary; superimposed in fundamental, timeless struggles between sexes and generations, or strictly divorced from actual, material struggles. Althusser, as Terry Lovell has perceptively noted:

     

    produces . . . a theory of knowledge which eliminates experience altogether from the practice of knowledge construction, relegating it to the inferior realm of ideology. Experience becomes the product of ideological practice, rather than of social reality. It cannot therefore provide any guide to social reality.6

     

    What we observe in Althusser, then, is a break with the Lukacsian notion of “reflection” in favor of the production of “ideological effects” within a given text. In the process, the French thinker could be seen as resorting to formalist methods because the very material forces that generate such “ideological effects” are put aside. Following Althusser’s mapping of ideology, history itself interacts mechanically and not dialectically with it (ideology) because the latter is ostensibly “pre-scientific”. When this gap between ideology and history takes place, then the Althusserian model relinquishes its materialist grounding in exchange for an “autonomous,” free-floating ideological apparatus that is, according to Althusser, “ahistorical” and related directly to Freud’s notion that the “unconscious is eternal.”7

     

    The danger inherent in this departure from dialectical materialism is borne out in subsequent analyses of a historical, political, economic and aesthetic nature. Following Althusser, Beverley and Zimmerman in their work allege that ideologies have

     

    multiple power functions (of distinction, domination, subordination) that are not reducible to or intelligible in terms of class or group interests alone, although they are the sites in which class or group struggle occurs. Similarly, they are not always circumscribed by modes of production or concrete social formations; they can cut across modes of production and social formations, as in the case of religious ideologies. In particular, ideologies are not reducible to politics or political programs or isms, because their nature is unconscious rather than explicit; their effect is to produce in the subject a sense of things as natural, self-evident, a matter of common sense. (2)

     

    In keeping with Althusserianism, this notion of ideology is rooted in the unconscious, that is, specifically in the “mirror stage” of development as elaborated by Jacques Lacan.8 Althusser draws upon this Lacanian study in order to formulate his theory of ideology, which returns to this stage when the individual cannot distinguish him or herself from the social. This domain, then, is located outside of rational apprehension. Lacan writes that it:

     

    situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being (le devenir) of the subject asymptomatically. (2)

     

    It is this “method of symbolic reduction” that will serve as the basis for Althusser’s theory of ideologies. The problem with such a philosophical position is that it is not anchored in actual, real-life processes, but rather, is a theoretical model constructed–so to speak–“above” this material life. Consequently, in this method of analyzing ideological forces one loses all grasp of the conflictive nature of ideology (and, hence, of material life) because, following Althusser, ideology is somehow beyond such a realm since it is actually in the isolated “mirror stage.”

     

    One of the main difficulties with the internal logic of Zimmerman and Beverley’s post-Althusserianism is that the symbolic and the political are almost seen as two separate entities. By alleging that literature in the Latin American context–it is different, they maintain, in so-called First World countries–is the symbolic site where ideological production and revolutionary consciousness take place, Beverley and Zimmerman endeavor to make the link between the ideological and the political more visible. Real historical events must somehow find a place in Althusserian ideological criticism or–as both Beverley and Zimmerman surely would admit–the approach will lose its sense of grounding. While this connection is made at certain moments in Literature and Politics, seen as a whole, their work fails to convincingly break with this dualism. An immediate case in point is apparent in the beginning of the first chapter when they declare that:

     

    The "work" of ideology consists in constituting (Althusser: interpellating) human subjects as such, with coherent gender, ethnic, class, or national identities appropriate to their place in a given social order or, in the case of counterhegemonic ideologies, their place in a possible social order. Ideologies provide human beings with a structure of experience that enables them to recognize themselves in the world, to see the world as in some way created *for* them, to feel they have a place and identity in it. (2)

     

    In this post-Marxist definition of ideology–in contrast to Marx’s rendering of it as inversion–it acts as a social catalyst which allows one to grasp one’s life in the social order in a more reasonable way. But at the same time, ideology seems to operate independently of human beings: Beverley and Zimmerman state that ideology enables human beings “to see the world as in some way created for them.” This gulf between human beings and the production of ideology is also clear when the authors argue against the Marxist notion of “false consciousness”:

     

    The traditional problematic of ideology in the social sciences, founded in both its positivist and Marxist variants on the epistemological question of distinguishing "true" from "false" forms of consciousness, had been displaced in contemporary cultural studies by the recognition suggested in psychoanalytic theory that truth for the subject is something distinct from the truth of the subject, given that it entails an act of identification between the self and something external to it. (4)

     

    But why focus only on the distinction between the self and what is external to it? Why not concentrate on the dialectic between subject and history? Furthermore, why should we believe that what rules in aesthetic experience is this marginalized, individual jouissance in contrast to “external reality”? Doesn’t this theory capitulate to the same limitations as Freudian psychoanalysis in its privileging of subjective sensations over reality?9 For these authors, it would seem, ideology is asked to bridge the gap between the individual and the society because the integration of the two does not come about in their analysis.

     

    In order to overcome the division that they have created between ideology and politics, Beverley and Zimmerman then turn to an Althusserian solution to this dilemma, “We rejoin here the point that revolutionary political consciousness does not derive directly or spontaneously from exploitative economic relations, that it must be in some sense produced” (8). Thus, as I suggested above, literature serves as that desperately needed link between ideology and politics that aids in the “development of subject identity.” In essence, then, literature (and specifically poetry in this study) is a semi-autonomous territory for the production of political consciousness in Central America, but it is somehow divorced from the actual social relations of production themselves. According to this logic, it is the production of a certain type of literature–“political” poetry, for instance–which enables subjects to reflect upon “private experiences of authenticity and alienation to the awareness of collective situations of social exploitation, injustice, and national underdevelopment” (9). But the weakness in a such an argument–in addition to the separation set up between individual and social experience–resides more fundamentally on the privileging of the unconscious in aesthetics. For if we agree that the motor force of ideology is the unconscious, then what power do revolutionaries have to change it, much less interpret it? If there are no conscious, scientific methods to follow, then how do we prove that this or that thesis is actually valid?

     

    All this theoretical footwork pushes Beverley and Zimmerman’s study into a corner on more than one occasion. One such moment is in their analysis of literary production in revolutionary Nicaragua. Before turning to this section, I would note that another problem with this discussion of Central American literature and revolutions is that Beverley and Zimmerman fervently adhere to postmodernist interpretations of the “unfixity” of social class (i.e.–pluralism) and of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s notion of “radical democracy.” The idealism exhibited in the writings of both Althusser and Laclau and Mouffe will come back to haunt Literature and Politics when the analysis extends beyond the theoretical to the practical realm. For example, in their study of Nicaraguan poetry during the revolutionary period, Beverley and Zimmerman give a very accurate account of the aesthetic and political debate that ensued after 1985, yet the authors overlook the fact that the deficiency in the Nicaraguan political, economic and cultural system was the vulnerability of pluralism. Thus, they assess the situation as follows:

     

    Though the debate had repercussions inside the Frente, the Sandinista leadership was reluctant to take a firm stand one way or another on cultural policy, for fear of making the mistake of the Cubans in the late 1960s of favoring one cultural "line" over others. But this commendable commitment to pluralism also meant that cultural policy was made ad hoc, without any real budgetary priorities or control. (103)

     

    Since their post-Althusserian approach automatically excludes a more organic and materialist understanding of the consequences of the economic and political situation–because ideology is supposed to be relatively independent from these spheres–Beverley and Zimmerman do not interpret this aesthetic crisis on a more global scale as the crisis of this type of “third path” to socialism. Since representation, for Althusser, does not transcend the aesthetic realm, they fail to acknowledge that the crisis in aesthetic agency is also a crisis in economic and political agency, i.e.–they fail to note that pluralist economic, political and aesthetic institutions are affected by their internal limitations and by the overwhelming force of capital.

     

    This weakness in their analysis is due, in large part, to the fact that they do not truly take a critical distance with respect to this “third path.” Their own study advocates an aesthetic and political pluralism which doesn’t effectively distinguish itself from liberal pluralism. Even late in Chapter 4, Beverley and Zimmerman continue to hold this position vis-a-vis political and artistic representation, “We are far from thinking that cultural forms have an essential class location or connotation, as our discussion in the previous chapter of the ideological mutations of vanguardism suggests” (110). Here the fateful error of post-Althusserianism or post-Marxism is fleshed out. When aesthetic agencies are separated from the social relations of production, then history itself will have a way of turning any such idealist study on its head. In the postscript to this chapter, Beverley and Zimmerman run into precisely this dilemma:

     

    [T]he perspective we adopted in our presentation of this chapter--that the revolutionary process was irreversible, despite problems and setbacks--clearly has been problematized. It may be that the revolution will go forward; on the other hand, we may well be witnessing the first stage of a more long-lasting restoration. We had hypothesized in chapters 1 and 2 that one of the key roles of literature in the revolutionary process in Central America generally was to constitute a discursive space in which the possibilities of alliance between popular sectors and a basically middle- and upper-class revolutionary vanguard could be pragmatically negotiated around a shared sense of the national-popular. (111)

     

    Here their populist or postmodernist theory meets the limits of its interpretative abilities because history itself has proven that this multi-class alliance, the concept of the nationalism, and the experimental nature of a mixed economic system were not able to sustain themselves. As Carlos Vilas has demonstrated, it was the Sandinista’s transformation from a vanguard predominantly supported by the working class and the campesinos to a party which catered to the interests of entrepreneurs in the last years of the revolution, which lost the elections of 1990.10 Similarly, in the cultural realm, the Frente abandoned its cultural democratization project not only because of financial problems, but also because there was a shift in ideological positions within party cadres themselves who now suggested that culture follow more professional guidelines. As a result, the professionalists–or, those who favored professionally-developed artists–clashed with those who defended the democratization program. Thus, the content of this debate boiled down to differences in political, economic, and aesthetic form–a regular “revolution with the revolution” to paraphrase Regis Debray–among the revolutionary forces.

     

    Given this historical context in Nicaragua, the question we must then ask, to my mind, is: If it is appropriate to cite the Nicaraguan revolutionary experience as postmodernism lived out in the flesh, so to speak, and if it did not survive a historical testing, then what other socialist alternatives do we have in Latin America? What type of revolutionary politics and theory would steer us away from the errors of “real socialism” (i.e.–the Eastern Bloc countries and the Soviet Union) and the faults of the so-called “third path”? In searching for answers, it is interesting to turn to a classical revolutionary pamphlet that was written eighty-nine years ago, but which sounds so very contemporary when read in these years of postmodernism: I am referring to Lenin’s What is to be Done?. In what follows I would like to limit my remarks to the general milieu in 1902 and to Lenin’s elaboration of the role of the vanguard.

     

    From the very beginning when Lenin addresses the incipient “dogmatism and ‘freedom of criticism’” of the Economists to his manual for the organization of revolutionaries, the political climate sketched out in What is to be Done? cannot help but sound very familiar to our contemporary period. Lenin’s attack on Bernsteinism begins with a series of cardinal points that seem to represent the revisionism of the day:

     

    Denied is the possibility of putting socialism on a scientific basis and of demonstrating its necessity and inevitability from the point of view of the materialist conception of history. Denied is the fact of growing impoverishment, of proletarianization and of the sharpening of capitalist contradictions. The very concept of 'the ultimate aim' has been declared unsound, and the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat unconditionally rejected. Denied is the antithesis in principle between liberalism and socialism. Denied is the theory of the class struggle, on the grounds of its alleged inapplicability to a strictly democratic society governed according to the will of the majority, etc..11

     

    I cite this passage because it encapsulates the main strains of political thought at the beginning of the twentieth century and is representative of the types of leftism that Lenin attempted to refute in What is to be Done?. This fragment also is important because it is indicative of the type of postmodernist “radical democracy” that we find in the works of Laclau and Mouffe. This is not the place to do a more exhaustive analysis of their work, let it suffice for now to quote a segment from Hegemony and Socialist Strategyin order to establish the correlation between the economism of Lenin’s day and the economism of our times:

     

    It is no longer possible to maintain the conception of subjectivity and classes elaborated by Marxism, nor its vision of the historical course of capitalist development, nor, of course, the conception of communism as a transparent society from which antagonisms have disappeared.12

     

    In place of this Marxist analysis and prognosis we are expected to struggle for “radical, libertarian and plural democracy” which, Mouffe and Laclau inform us, will consist of the dispersed identity of social agents and the ensemble of social movements. However, we might reflect on whether it is even possible to carry out this project at this historical moment. In examining the Nicaraguan revolutionary experience elsewhere and briefly in this paper, I have noted how this pluralist political and economic agenda doesn’t present a viable, historically- tested alternative.13 Similarly, Richard Stahler-Sholk has persuasively argued that the Nicaraguan case “reveals that the Sandinista model of a mixed economy (presupposing at least simple reproduction of the capitalist, small producer, and state sectors) with multiclass ‘national unity’ created a series of demands that were increasingly difficult to reconcile with defense priorities and longer-term goals for socioeconomic transformation.”14

     

    If this form of political (and aesthetic) representation has failed, what other means are open to us? In short, a consciously organized self-representation. At certain moments in the Nicaraguan revolution workers’ and peasants’ control over the actual means of production and the aesthetic “means of production” became a viable option. However, as I commented above, for both external and internal reasons, the FSLN did not follow through with these political and economic steps. As a thorough reading of What is to be Done? adduces to it is not the spontaneous terrain of libertarianism, found in the works of Mouffe and Laclau, that is able to survive historically, but rather some new formulation of the notion of a politically- conscious vanguard which is both of and for the working class. This path is new at least in practice. Until the “Cultural Revolution,” perhaps the Chinese revolution carried out this political, economic and aesthetic alternative most effectively and Cuba, in varying degrees, has also been successful in instituting political and economic democracy.

     

    What is certain is that this revolutionary direction can overcome the dualism exhibited in the writings of post-Althusserianism between ideology and political practice. Rather than driving a wedge between ideology and politics and anchoring both in the realm of the spontaneous (the unconscious), a Marxist reading of ideology suggests that there is always a dialectical relation between material life and ideology. To become conscious of this dialectic, according to Marx and Engles, is to supersede the distortions that accompany ideology.15 In Bolivia, Domitila is and has been keenly aware of the need for a conscious revolutionary proletariat and harbors no illusions about “radical democracy” or the “pluralism” of class and economic interests:

     

    Soluciones momentaneas ya no nos interesan. Nosotros ya hemos tenido gobiernos de todo corte, "nacionalista", "revolucionario","cristiano", asi de toda etiqueta. Desde el 52, cuando el gobierno del MNR empezo a traicionar la revolucion por el pueblo . . . tantos gobiernos han pasado y ninguno ha llegado a colmar las aspiraciones del pueblo. Ninguno ha hecho lo que realmente quiere el pueblo. El gobierno actual, por ejemplo, no esta haciendo obras para nosotros, sino que los beneficiados son, en primer lugar, los extranjeros que continuan llevandose nuestras riquezas y despues los empresarios privados, las empresas estatales, los militares y no asi la clase obrera ni el campesino que seguimos cada dia mas pobres. Y eso va a continuar igual mientras estemos en el sistema capitalista. Yo veo, por todo lo que he vivido y leido, que nosotros nos identificamos con el socialismo. Porque solamente en un sistema socialista ha de haber mas justicia y todos aprovecharan de los beneficios que hoy dia estan en manos de unos pocos.16 [Momentary solutions no longer interest us. We have already had governments of every stripe, "nationalists", "revolutionaries", "Christian", every label imaginable. Since 1952, when the MNR [the National Revolutionary Movement] government began to betray the people's revolution . . . so many governments have gone and none has been able to fulfill the people's aspirations. None has done what the people really want done. The current government, for example, is not working for us, but rather the beneficiaries are, in the first place, the foreigners, who continue to take away our wealth; and in the second place, the private entrepreneurs, the state businesses, the military and not the worker nor the peasant: each day we get poorer. And this will continue as it is as long as we are in the capitalist system. I see, from all that I have experienced and read, that we identify with socialism. Because only in a socialist system is it possible for there to be justice and for the benefits to be enjoyed by all and not be in the hands of a few [individuals]."]

     

    Notes

     

    1. See Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez’s Ciencia y revolucion: El marxismo de Althusser (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1978).

     

    2. Beverley articulated this theoretical stance in his seminal article, “Ideologia/deseo/literatura,” Revista de critica literaria latinoamericana (1er semestre 1988), 7-24.

     

    3. See especially, “Anatomia del testimonio” Revista de critica literaria latinoamericana (1er semestre 1987), 7-16.

     

    4. Georg Lukacs, Essays in Realism, Rodney Livingstone, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 23-32.

     

    5. George Yudice, “Marginality and the Ethics of Survival,” in Andrew Ross ed., Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

     

    6. Terry Lovell, “The Social Relations of Cultural Production: Absent Centre of a New Discourse,” in Simon Clarke, et. al., One-Dimensional Marxism: Althusser and the Politics of Culture (London and New York: Allison and Busby, 1980), 245. Hereafter cited in text. To verify Althusser’s position on this matter consult Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 170-71.

     

    7. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 160-61.

     

    8. See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 1-7.

     

    9. The question here is: How far does Beverley and Zimmerman’s Althusserian theory take us from the type of dualism that Volosinov describes so precisely in his critique of Freudianism?: Inner experience [for Freud], extracted by means of introspection, cannot in fact be directly linked with the data of objective, external apprehension. To maintain a thorough consistency only the one or the other point of view can be pursued. Freud has ultimately favored the consistent pursuit of the inner, subjective point of view; all external reality is for him, in the final analysis, merely the “reality principle,” a principle that he places on the same level with the “pleasure principle” [emphasis in the original]. V.N. Volosinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (New York: Academic Press, 1976), 72.

     

    10. Carlos Vilas, “What Went Wrong” NACLA (June 1990), 10-18.

     

    11. V.I. Lenin, What is to be Done? (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 75.

     

    12. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 4.

     

    13. A succinct version of my argument was presented at the 1990 Modern Language Association meeting and was entitled, “Contemporary Nicaraguan Politics and Aesthetics: The Fate of Postmodernist Idealism.” I have just finished a more comprehensive development of this thesis in a manuscript I have prepared for publication, Aesthetics and Revolution: A Historical Materialist Analysis of Nicaraguan Poetry 1979-1990.

     

    14. Richard Stahler-Sholk, “Stabilization, Destabilization, and the Popular Classes in Nicaragua, 1979-1988,” Latin American Research Review vol. xxv, number 3 (1990), 55-88.

     

    15. Here the key text is, of course, The German Ideology. (New York: International Publishers, 1977).

     

    16. Moema Viezzer, ‘Si me permiten hablar…’Testimonio de Domitila: Una mujer de las minas de Bolivia (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1985).

     

  • Jameson’s Postmodernism

    Jim English

    University of Pennsylvania
    <jenglish@pennsas>

     

    Fredric Jameson, the key Marxist player in the “postmodernism debates” of the early and mid eighties, has now published an entire book on postmodern culture, titled after his classic 1984 article in New Left Review, “Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” The recycled title may keep some people away from this hefty and expensive volume, since it suggests one of those dressed-up collections of already widely collected essays– in this case rather suspiciously assembled for a Duke University Press series of which the author himself is co- editor.

     

    But while it is true that six of the ten chapters here have been reprinted from elsewhere, only the first two (the NLR article and a contemporaneous “Politics of Theory” piece from New German Critique) will be familiar to most readers. Moreover, the arguments of both these earlier pieces have been massively supplemented. Jameson’s political analysis of contemporary theoretical discourse is here extended to address the paralyzing “nominalism” of both Theory (deconstruction) and anti-Theory (new historicism) in a substantial chapter that also includes, to my knowledge, his first extended statement on the de Man affair. And the shamelessly “totalizing” Marxist approach to contemporary culture that he deployed in his original “Postmodernism” essay is spiritedly defended over and against the dominant academic discourses of “groups and difference” in a sprawling but indispensable “Conclusion.” Given that these two chapters alone represent some two hundred pages of fresh material, it would clearly be a mistake to dismiss Postmodernism as just another collection of warmed-over articles by a Lit-biz superstar. Jameson’s purpose in this book is not so much to collect his past work on postmodernism as to frame the frequently “scandalized” and hostile reception of that work–particularly by postmarxists, postcolonialists, Foucauldians, and feminists–as itself a symptom of the “decadence” or degradation of critical discourse in the postmodern age.

     

    Indeed, Jameson, whose distinctive role in the Debate is to take postmodernism as naming not merely an historical period but a “mode of production” (essentially unresisted capitalism–omnipresent, invisible, taken-for-granted capitalism), reads culture in general (including, especially, all manner of “theory”) as a terrain on which one may trace out the “symptomatology” of this supremely hegemonic stage of capitalism. For Jameson, any workable culture critique must retain something of the reflectionist logic of base and superstructure. Though his mode-of- production model is organized across multiple and heterogeneous levels or orders of abstraction, it ultimately aims at “explaining” postmodern cultural phenomena–the “new sentence,” the “new space,” the ascendancy of “pastiche,” and the other styles and themes he identifies–by reference to a grand diachronic narrative whose “agent” is “multinational capital itself.” Thus he can insist that his critics’ “resistance to globalizing or totalizing concepts like that of the mode of production” is itself “a function of . . . [the] universalization of capitalism.”

     

    The interesting question to raise here, it seems to me, is not whether Jameson’s frankly totalizing methodology is inherently insensitive to cultural difference, or even whether such periodizing or totalizing abstractions have been somehow ruled out in advance by the fragmented and ahistorical character of the culture they mean to grasp. Rather, the question is to what extent Jameson’s brand of late-capitalist Marxism is itself a symptom of the mode of production whose symptomatology concerns him. Where is the diagnostician located in relation to the disease? Is this Postmodernism postmodern? If the imperative is to historicize, how can we historicize Jameson himself?

     

    There are many ways to approach such a question. But since Jameson has “insisted on a characterization of postmodern thought . . . in terms of the expressive peculiarities of its language rather than as mutations in thinking or consciousness as such,” we might do well to consider Jameson’s style, the “aesthetics of [his own] theoretical discourse.” Certainly his sentences, always remarkable, have never called more attention to themselves than in the most newly minted contributions to this volume. Of the schizophrenic character of our discursive situation, Jameson writes:

     

    A roomful of people, indeed, solicit us in incompatible directions that we entertain all at once: one subject position assuring us of the remarkable new global elegance of its daily life and forms; another one marveling at the spread of democracy, with all those new 'voices' sounding out of hitherto silent parts of the globe or inaudible class strata (just wait a while, they will be here, to join their voices to the rest); other more querulous and 'realistic' tongues reminding us of the incompetences of late capitalism, with its delirious paper-money constructions rising out of sight, its Debt, the rapidity of the flight of factories matched only by the opening of new junk-food chains, the sheer immiseration of structural homelessness, let alone unemployment, and that well- known thing called urban 'blight' or 'decay' which the media wraps brightly up in drug melodramas and violence porn when it judges the theme perilously close to being threadbare.

     

    The trouble with the crowded room, says Jameson, is that “none of these voices can be said to contradict the others; not ‘discourses’ but only propositions do that.” Presumably his own voice wants to be the exception; one appeal of Jameson’s work is its willingness to make the strong argument, the contradictable proposition, which can then be seized upon for polemical purposes.

     

    This determination to be more than mere “discourse” (or “commentary” as he will ultimately call it) is clearly enough signaled in the polemical framework–the initiation and the transitional logic–of the typical Jameson essay. But is the Jamesonian sentence really so different from the ostensibly symptomatic “new sentence” of, say, Bob Perelman? Jameson identifies this latter sentence with an aesthetic of “schizophrenic disjunction” made newly–and in some sense irresponsibly–available “for more joyous intensities” than seem proper to its morbid content, made available even “for . . . euphoria.”

     

    There seems to be something like a connection between this characterization of LANGUAGE writing and the curious affect, which combines exhilaration and exhaustion, of Jameson’s own sentences. They are often brilliant sentences, but also “impossible” in the sense that the two-hundred-word aphorism is impossible. A kind of pragmatism of language, and a refusal of any posture of poeticism or transcendence, coexist improbably with the bravura and self-involvement of Jameson’s idiolect. Polemic is put into virtual abeyance by the tendency to stray across various and incompatible discursive fields, “picking up” bits of language here and there, celebrating the syntactic detour. And yet polemic, or perhaps (as one begins to suspect) some convincing simulation of polemic, always reappears at the next rest stop, only to be lost once again in the joyous (or is it tiresome?) intensity, the weirdly inappropriate euphoria, of another Jamesonian sentence.

     

    Jameson’s style suggests two possible conclusions about “his” postmodernism. On the one hand, the tendency of his own sentences to dissolve the distinction between a language capable of genuinely critical propositions and the mere “commentary” generated by a schizophrenic culture (a distinction which looks not only like that between purposive “parody” and ungrounded “pastiche,” but, even more dubiously, like that maintained by the speech act theorists between “authentic” and “parasitical” utterances) may signal an irremediable problem in Jameson’s framing of the whole polemic–which would turn out, in that case, to be merely a mock-polemic anyway. On the other hand, the fact that the diagnostician too is infected, that the doctor cannot heal himself, suggests that for all the traditionalism and even perhaps nostalgia of the author’s global perspective, this book marks something more interesting than the persistence of a certain modernity, something less familiar than a belated pre-postmarxist Marxism. To read Postmodernism as a symptom of its own ostensive object of study is to confront in a new, complex, and sometimes exhilarating form the problematic of “symptomatology” itself, which, like so many seeming vestiges of the modern, was consigned to the dustbin of the “no longer available” but has stubbornly refused its oblivion.

     

  • BOOK REVIEW OF: The Many Lives Of The Batman

    John Anderson

    Northwestern University
    <jca@casbah.acns.nwu.edu>

     

    The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media. Edited by Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio. New York: Routledge, 1991. 213 pp.

     

    The essays in this collection offer different kinds of assistance to a reader trying to interpret the multiple versions of Batman and the recent (now receding) flurry of Bat-hype. The essays chart the movement of competing “Batmen,” and attempt to give an account of the intertextual and extratextual dimensions of this network of alternatives. Some of the essays have an anthropological focus, as they investigate the behavior of the communities that produce and consume images of Batman. Others focus on the meanings of these images, although the interpretations of specific artifacts never lose sight of the multiple and interconnected nature of the various Bat-phenomena. It is in their accounts of this multiplicity and interconnection that the essays make their most suggestive contributions to the practice of cultural studies.

     

    The best of these essays are extremely sophisticated in their adaptation of critical methodologies to the new multiple and changeable forms of the Batman narrative. The essays by Jim Collins and Eileen Meehan are most striking in this regard, combining detailed information about the phenomena with penetrating analyses of the narrative (Collins) or economic (Meehan) processes at work in contemporary representations of Batmen. The article by Uricchio and Pearson, on the other hand, serves as a kind of introduction to critical issues for contemporary Bat-scholarship by examining the serial nature of the Batman character, and calling attention to the tension between multiplicity and coherence in the production of popular culture. The three articles that deal directly with audience responses–Parsons, Bacon-Smith and Yarborough, Spigel and Jenkins–demonstrate specific models for cultural studies that are interactive, and do not write over the meanings produced by the audiences. However, of the contributions to this collection, Andy Medhurst’s essay is perhaps the most controversial and critical, as it addresses and explores issues of camp and sexuality in ways that challenge “official” interpretations of Batman. Medhurst’s framing of the competing bat-discourses as the struggle to establish “legitimacy” or “deviancy” sharpens and specifies the issues at stake in preferring one version of Batman over another, and suggests that homophobic resistance may account for the insistence, made by both artists and fans, on particular definitions of the Batman character’s masculinity.

     

    The essays that are less self-reflective about their own practices are nonetheless useful in helping familiarize a critical reader with the kinds of information necessary for a study of Batman. For example, Bill Boichel’s brief history of the Batman’s manifestations in comics, film and television provides the pertinent names, dates, and titles to readers unfamiliar with the comics industry. But despite the promise of its title (“Batman: Commodity as Myth”), Boichel’s article fails to do more than describe the changes in the character of Batman since its first appearance. The collection also contains two interviews, one with DC editor Denny O’Neil, and one with writer/artist Frank Miller. These are informative, and give one the sense of being privy to inside information, but they do not exhaustively probe the issues they raise. However, for readers not familiar with the formation of the Batman canon, the articles set up the collection’s more detailed analyses by introducing the history of conflicting interpretations through the personalized “voices” of comics expert (Boichel), professional arbiter and editor (O’Neil), and artist (Miller). Thus, these three essays serve in part to highlight the movement in the other essays away from explanations based on authorial intention, and towards models that examine the effects of larger communities–audiences, populations of fans, and corporations–in the construction of meaning.

     

    One consistent trend in the collection is the rejection of a passive model of cultural consumption. In the words of Patrick Parsons (“Batman and his Audience: The Dialectic of Culture”), study of the audiences for superhero comics reveals that “Contrary to the assumptions of some in both the popular and scholarly community, the impact of readers on content may be greater than the impact of content on readers” (67). Readers and viewers build their own “Batman” out of their personal experience with the character, resulting in differing but equally active interpreters who use Batman in different ways. For example, Parsons charts the multiple American audiences for superheroes, and examines historical development of a specialized and sophisticated readership for the growing field of underground comix, independent comics, and graphic novels. Different audiences practice different interpretations and manipulations of the signs bearing the label “Batman.” Parsons goes on to examine the direct influence of fans on the production of comics. Spigel and Jenkins, on the other hand, examine the significance of the Batman character to less-specialized audiences (“Same Bat Channel, Different Bat Times: Mass Culture and Popular Memory”). Based on interviews with a number of people about their memories of the Batman television show (1966), the article demonstrates the ways in which people “use and reuse media in their daily lives” (144). The personal and transformative nature of popular memory thus suggests to Spigel and Jenkins that a more dialogic relationship between the oral historian and his or her subjects will reflect a better understanding of the processes of memory and narration that people use to make sense of cultural artifacts.

     

    Camille Bacon-Smith and Tyrone Yarborough (“Batman: the Ethnography”) also acknowledge the active role of audiences in constructing meanings. By questioning different audiences for Tim Burton’s film Batman (1989) in their “native habitats”–movie theaters, comic book shops, a fan club, and a comics convention–the writers set out to learn from Batman audiences rather than simply analyze or characterize them. The encounter between researcher and researched is posed as an encounter between different but equally valid discourses of interpretation. Thus, while able to account for the significant influence of newspaper reviews, advertising, and marketing strategies in shaping audience approval or disapproval, the writers avoid a model of popular culture that imagines consumers to be a homogeneous or unreflective mass. On the contrary, the article demonstrates that a large scale cultural phenomenon like the release of Batman becomes the occasion for active, dialogic exchange among audience members. Meaning-making is shown as a variable process that takes place at a proliferation of specific sites, not a homogeneous activity performed by a uniform audience.

     

    Eileen Meehan (“‘Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman!’: The Political Economy of a Commercial Intertext”) provides the most thorough and suggestive account of the way this multiplicity has been managed for profit, examining the function of “Batman” as not only name, but brand name as well. Through a detailed examination of WCI’s activities, Meehan shows how the different versions of the Batman produced by DC Comics and Warner Brothers, culminating in the release of the motion picture and the licensing of the bat logo, are all components of a marketing campaign designed to penetrate a range of different markets. The result is to ground the multiple versions of Batman, and their enjoyment by a large and diverse population of consumers, in the fact that “text, intertext, and audiences are simultaneously commodity, product line, and consumer.” The “contradictions” among the various reproductions of Batman are completely in synch with the promotion of the movie and its attendant products: The commercial intertext that results from this combination of advertising and licensing intermixes old themes with new, camp motifs with grim visages, cartooning with live action, thus generating a rich and often contradictory set of understandings and visions, about justice and corruption in America. And it does this because of manufacturers’ perceptions about acceptable risk, potential profit, and targeted consumers. (58-59) For Meehan as for the other writers, audiences are by no means a passive, homogeneous mass. The point of her economic analysis is not, as she puts it, that “evil moguls force us to buy Bat-chains” (48). Nonetheless, her article concentrates on revealing the constraints imposed on popular culture by corporate decisions because, in the everyday experience of popular media, “this complex structure is generally invisible to us” (61). Within the context of this collection, Meehan’s essay performs the valuable function of reintroducing more directly economic concerns into the discussion, illustrating how the current multiplicity of Bat-representations can coexist quite comfortably with immense and diversified corporations capable of orchestrating the release and promotion of objects in a number of different media, for a number of different markets.

     

    Jim Collins (“Batman: The Movie, Narrative: The Hyperconscious”) also highlights the referentiality and intertextuality of the contemporary additions to the Bat- canon, but focuses on the interplay of specific artistic techniques rather than corporate economic strategy. If Meehan emphasizes the corporate imperatives motivating WCI’s diverse marketing strategy, Collins identifies an aesthetic imperative in the diversity found in the imagery and language of individual texts: Texts like Batman: The Movie, The Dark Knight Returns, and Watchmen which feature narration by amalgamation suggest the emergence of a new type of narrative which is neither a master narrative that might function as a national myth for entire cultures, nor a micro-narrative that targets a specific subculture or sharply defined community. The popularity of these texts depends on their appeal not to a broad general audience, but a series of audiences varying in degrees of sophistication and stored cultural knowledge (i.e. exposure and competence). As aggregate narratives, they appeal to disparate but often overlapping audiences, by presenting different incarnations of the superhero simultaneously, so that the text always comes trailing its intertexts and rearticulations. (179-180)

     

    In his exploration of “aggregate narratives,” Collins’ work on Frank Miller’s Dark Knight is the most thorough and persuasive of any in the collection. Especially good is his analysis of Miller’s use of panels, and of the apparent resemblance between the techniques of the graphic novel and those of cinema: the juxtaposition of different sized frames on the same page, deployed in constantly changing configurations, intensifies their co-presence, so that the entire page becomes the narrative unit, and the conflictive relationships among the individual images becomes a primary feature of the “narration” of the text, a narration that details the progression of the plot, but also the transgression of one image by another . . . the tableaux moves the plot foreword but encourages the eye to move in continually shifting trajectories as it tries to make sense of the overall pattern of fragmentary images. (173) As Collins’ explications of particular pages demonstrate, it is inadequate to call Miller’s work cinematic because the frames of the graphic novel are able to mimic the visual styles of more than one medium. It would be more accurate to say that Miller builds his narrative from a montage of references to the conventions of different media: television, various kinds of cinema, “conventional” comic books, Japanese comics (Manga), and others.

     

    New versions of Batman like Miller’s thus require interpretations that are adequate to the intertextuality and self-referentiality of the new narratives. The effect on criticism is to expand the definition of a text’s “action” to what was previously considered extra-diegetic. One of the reasons why the Batman phenomenon has attracted the attention of the writers assembled in this collection is the sense that at least some of the representations of Batman–and the contexts of cultural production and fandom–share common perspectives and concerns with recent writing on theory and cultural studies. For Collins, the effect is to generate dialogue between the discourses of scholarship and popular culture. For example: The producers of Dark Knight and Watchmen orchestrate textual space and time, but in doing so they also emphasize (through different but related means) that to envision textual space is to envision at the same time the cultural space surrounding it, specifically the conflicting visual traditions that constitute those semiotic environments. (172) Collins’ essay thus provides an insightful model for writing on popular culture because it works through the linkages between theory and popular cultural, specifies the ways in which texts embody alternative modes of narration, and acknowledges the ways in which the texts simultaneously represent and interpret the traditions to which they belong.

     

    All of the writers in this collection draw attention to the contradictions that have been manifested in one or another version of the Batman. A crimefighter whose activities are often illegal, a defender of justice who is also (as millionaire Bruce Wayne) the symbol and defender of wealth, Batman’s relationship to authority and the status quo have been portrayed and understood as conflicted, uneasy, and anxiety-provoking. Andy Medhurst’s essay (“Batman, Deviance, and Camp”) deserves special attention because of its straightforward discussion of the role sexuality has played in constructing and construing Batman’s relation to authority, power, and masculinity. Medhurst, like others, emphasizes the multiple versions of the character, and argues that the camp sensibility of the television series undermines attempts to take any version of the Batman seriously. But Medhurst is specific in attributing the anxiety demonstrated by audiences over these multiple versions (which is the “real” Batman?) to sexual anxiety: the “Batmen” rejected by the hard-core fans are those that admit even the slightest homoerotic sensibility, or any parody of the character’s definition as an obsessively self-serious crimefighter. In this rejection, Medhurst asserts, bat-fans mirror the assumptions about masculinity and homosexuality held by Frederic Wertham, the psychiatrist who first suggested that Batman might be gay. Medhurst exposes Wertham’s panicky, outdated, homophobic arguments as fallacies (an “elephantine spot-the-homo routine”), but he is no less sparing of the bat-fans’ shrill disgust levelled at Wertham: “The rush to ‘protect’ Batman and Robin from Wertham is simply the other side to the coin of his bigotry. It may reject Wertham, cast him in the role of the dirty-minded old man, but its view of homosexuality is identical” (152). Wertham’s insinuations about Batman and Robin, his claims concerning the harmful effects of comics on young minds, and his instrumental role in bringing about the Comics Code authority, have made him the most important “supervillan” that the fans of Batman and other comics have ever had. Like the Joker, his image reappears again and again, a threat to “authentic” interpretations of the Batman character. But Medhurst boldly claims a piece of Wertham’s argument, in order to legitimize his own advocacy of a “deviant” interpretation of Batman: Wertham quotes [the remarks of a patient who had been aroused by the idea of having sex with Batman in the “secret Batcave”] to shock us, to tear the pages of Detective away before little Tommy grows up and moves to Greenwich Village, but reading it as a gay man today I find it rather moving and also highly recognizable. What this anonymous gay man did was to practice that form of bricolage which Richard Dyer has identified as a characteristic reading strategy of gay audiences. Denied even the remotest possibility of supportive images of homosexuality within the dominant heterosexual culture, gay people have had to fashion what we could out of the imageries of dominance, to snatch illicit meanings from the fabric of normality, to undertake a corrupt decoding for the purposes of satisfying marginalized desires. This may not be as necessary as it once was, given the greater visibility of gay representations. Wertham’s patient evokes in me an admiration, that in a period of American history even more homophobic than most, there he was, raiding the citadels of masculinity, weaving fantasies of oppositional desire. (153) Like other writers in this volume, Medhurst shifts the focus from the cultural icon to its reception and reinterpretation by its audiences. Moreover, he uses his argument for the “legitimacy” of a gay Batman to reveal tendencies that function textually and intertextually in the current Bat-canon. But unlike some of the other commentaries on Batman in this volume, Medhurst’s is the one almost certain to be resisted by the arbiters of official bat-taste. Medhurst targets this resistance as the collective homophobic core of the new bat-discourse: the change from the 60s “camp crusader” to the snarling Dark Knight of the 80s thus represents a “re- heterosexualization” of the character, carried out by artists, marketers, moviegoers, comic fans, and others (159). What Medhurst brings to our attention is that despite the recent proliferation of bat-signifiers in popular culture, some interpretations of the multiple retellings of the Batman narrative remain more equal than others.

     

    As a result, it is Medhurst’s essay and perhaps Meehan’s that are most searchingly critical of the recent resurgence in Batman paraphenalia. Their “unofficial” versions of the new Batman–as masculinist homophobe; as corporate intertext–play a crucial role in retaining the oppositional status of criticism in Batman-studies, as represented by this collection. Any book on Batman is likely to be both energized and limited by the character’s current popularity. The presence of the name of the bat in the title may attract the attention of audiences already sensitized to it. However, as Meehan might point out, even the most diverse objects produced by third parties can be enlisted to advertise the central commodity, if they bear the sign of the bat. No scholarly “licensing” of the name and logo can take place without also enlisting scholarship as an endorsement of bat-products–in this case, an endorsement for the significance and interest of at least one “new” genre, the graphic novel. Given this relationship, it is perhaps fortunate that DC Comics refused to grant the editors the rights to the images for use in illustrations, dust jackets, etc. “[DC] did not feel that this book was consistent with their vision of the Batman” (vi). What better reverse endorsement could DC have given to bat-criticism, and its attempts to emphasize the failure of any single interpretation to account for Batman’s history?

     

  • From Abject to Object: Women’s Bodybuilding

    Marcia Ian

    Rutgers University

     

    Do muscles have gender, or are they, on the contrary, ungendered human meat? Other than the few muscles associated with their sexual organs, men and women have the same muscles. Does this make muscles neuter, or perhaps neutral? Is there some “difference” between the biceps of a male and those of a female other than, possibly, that of size? If a woman’s biceps, or quadriceps, are bigger than a man’s, are hers more masculine than his? In the eyes of most beholders, the more muscle a woman has, the more “masculine” she is. The same, of course, is true for men: the more muscle a man has, the more masculine he is too. Bodybuilding in a sense is a sport dedicated to wiping out “femininity,” insofar as femininity has for centuries connoted softness, passivity, non-aggressivity, and physical weakness. Eradicating femininity just may be the purpose of both male and female bodybuilders. Even so, for men to wage war on femininity, whether their own or somebody else’s, is nothing new. For women, however, it is. Insofar as women have for centuries obliged cultural expectations by em-bodying femininity as immanent, bodybuilding affords women the opportunity to embody instead a refusal of this embodiment, to cease somewhat to represent man’s complementary (and complimentary) other.

     

    At least this is how it seems to this author, who is: a forty-year old, divorced, atheistic Jewish mother of two teenaged girls; an assistant professor of British and American Literature at a the state univerity of New Jersey; a specialist in modernism, psychoanalysis and gender; and a dedicated “gym rat” who has trained hard and heavy without cease (knock on wood) for about eight years now and during graduate school even entered bodybuilding competitions. As such, I confess, I obviously have various axes to grind (pun intended) which intersect “around” the body as uniquely over-determined site of ambivalent psychosocial signification. From this point of view women’s bodybuilding appears to be roughly equal parts gender vanguardism and exhibitionistic masochism; men’s bodybuilding could in theory be the same, but I have seen no evidence that this is so. Male bodybuilders, on the contrary, seem mainly out to prove that they are conventionally masculine– hyperbolically, FEROCIOUSLY so.

     

    Furthermore, the sport of bodybuilding, as marketed and represented by those enterprises founded by Joe and Ben Weider, including magazines like Flex and Muscle and Fitness (published by “I, Brute Enterprises, Inc.”) and contests like the Mr. and Ms. Olympia, as well as various less powerful rival organizations, reproduces ad nauseam all the cliches of masculinism from the barbarous to the sublime. This remains true despite the fact that in recent years the top female competitors have displayed increasing amounts of hard striated muscle. I had hoped to find in the gym a communal laboratory for experimental gender-bending, perhaps a haven for the gender-bent, or at the least a democratic republic biologically based on the universality of human musculature. This laboratory, this haven, this republic, however, remains a utopic and private space, a delusion in effect, because what goes on in the gym, as in bodybuilding competition, remains the violent re-inscription of gender binarism, of difference even where there is none. As Jane Gallop pointed out, in Western culture gender is no “true” binary or antithesis but rather an algorithm of one and zero. Bodybuilding expands the equivalence “male is to female as one is to zero” to include the specious antithesis of muscle and femininity.

     

    Spurious gender difference is maintained and rewarded in bodybuilding through the discriminatory valorization of certain aesthetic categories. Indeed bodybuilding tries to limit the achievements of female physique athletes by adding “femininity” to the list of aesthetic categories they are expected to fulfill. The film Pumping Iron II: The Women (1985) dramatically documents this sexism by recording a conflict which erupts in a sequestered conference room among those judging the 1983 “Miss Olympia” (now the “Ms. Olympia”), America’s most prestigious bodybuilding competition for women. A man apparently serving his first stint as judge is puzzled and angry to find that he is supposed to judge the women on the basis of their “femininity.” He points out to the other, more experienced judges that, while the men are ranked on the basis of their muscle density, definition, over-all symmetry and proportionality, as well as for the style, skill and fluidity of their posing, the women are in addition judged for a quality called “femininity” which surreptitiously but effectively limits all the others. How, this judge queries, is anyone supposed to determine how muscular a woman’s body can be before it ceases to be feminine? Furthermore, in what other sport could a female competitor be expected to limit her achievement for fear of losing her proper gender?

     

    Would anyone advise a runner–Florence Griffith-Joyner, for example–that to run too fast would be unladylike? Would anyone warn a female long jumper not to jump too far, or a swimmer not to swim too fast? Why, then, presume to tell a bodybuilder that she may be only so muscular, but no more muscular than that, at the risk of losing both her femininity and her contest? This sensible judge argued in vain; the panel of judges elected Rachel McLish, then at her cheesiest, as Miss Olympia, while penalizing Bev Francis, by far the most muscular and impressive of the competitors, for being what they considered “too masculine.” McLish was subsequently disqualified when someone discovered she had padded her bikini top to look more buxom. McLish, however, was merely trying to win the approval of the judges who, she thought, might have been repelled by her if they had viewed her as masculine, although it is hard to imagine how they could have. Subsequently McLish became more interested in the opinion of a higher judge when she became “born again” and began pumping iron for Jesus. Even with McLish disqualified, however, Francis placed pathetically low.

     

    Many viewers have been amused by McLish’s antics but missed the nature and extent of the sexism the movie documents. Leonard Maltin’s TV Movies and Video Guide (1991), for example, which does not usually dwell upon the physical attractiveness of the men and women appearing in the films under review, informs its readers that Pumping Iron II offers a “funny, if suspiciously stagy” look at a “Vegas non-event” in which “pouty-lipped sexpot Rachel McLish, manlike Australian Bev Francis, and two-dozen more female bodybuilders compete.” But while the Guide thus dismisses the women’s competition as a stagy non-encounter between a sexpot and an Australian she-man, it describes the first Pumping Iron (1977) about the men, which, like Pumping Iron II, received three stars from the Guide, as a “fascinating documentary” in which Schwarzenegger “exudes charm and . . . strong screen presence” (Schwarzenegger’s stage name in his early movie “Stay Hungry” was “Arnold Strong”).

     

    The arduousness of physique competition is the same for male and female. Like the male, the female must diet away as much subcutaneous and even intra-musculuar bodyfat as possible when preparing for competition. And, whereas she may typically start out with twice as much bodyfat as the male, she must try to be as “ripped” as he, as close, that is, to that impossible ideal of 0% bodyfat on the day of the contest. In the process, she inevitably, if temporarily, loses most of her breast tissue, as well as that soft adiposity which typifies the conventionally feminine, proto-maternal figure. Many female bodybuilders opt for surgical breast implants to try to salvage the “femininity” they lost in the eyes of their beholders as they gained in muscularity. My own experience in two bodybuilding competitions during the summer of 1986 (the summer after hitting the MLA job market and accepting my present position) typifies the ambivalent attitudes judges have toward muscular female bodies. In July I won the “Miss Neptune” championship at a fairly well-established contest in Virginia Beach because my physique was the biggest, hardest, and veiniest of the group. In August, having remained during the intervening month in as close to “peak” condition as possible, I lost a newly established contest to an anorexic and a cupcake for the same reason. In this case the judges, I was told later, assumed that the relatively beefy hardness of my physique meant I was “juiced,” and they deducted points accordingly from my score. I have never used drugs or even supplements, but since they did no testing or even asking, I had no way to persuade them to the contrary; nor did the audience, which roundly booed the judges’s decision.

     

    That the first contest had been run for years while the second was newly established is significant; the “establishment” in women’s bodybuilding is changing somewhat. Lenda Murray, the winner of the November, 1990 “Ms. Olympia” is phenomenally, finely, and hugely muscular. She redefines women’s bodybuilding, if not women, and must be seen to be believed. Nevertheless, here it is June, 1991 and, as one irate reader points out, Muscle and Fitness still has not seen fit to do a layout on the new Ms. O. The reader asks, “Don’t you think you should have stopped the presses to get Lenda in?” In reply the editor points out that there is “plenty of Lenda in this” issue. By “plenty of Lenda” the editors apparently mean a feature piece entitled “OOOOHHH, Ms. O!” in which Murray tells readers how she trains her legs, and a brief interview of Murray and another impressive champion, Anja Schreiner, entitled, “Let’s Talk About Women’s Bodybuilding.” This interview, not surprisingly, is advertised in letters which say “Women Talk About Building Sexy MUSCLES” down at the bottom of the red-white-and-blue magazine cover of an issue which highlights iron-pumping in Operation Desert Storm, for which the editors did manage to stop the presses. The cover shows a photo of a huge smiling blonde male flexing in his Starred-and-Striped shorts, with two skinny blonde women in red and blue bikinis clinging to his shoulders (one of the women holds a little American flag at her breast). This trio, in turn, is framed by the title of the month’s “Superfeature”: “USA MILITARY MUSCLE: How the Navy Seals, Combat Pilots, Ground Forces Toughen Up Thru Bodybuiding.”

     

    This superfeature publishes a barrage of photos which were sent to the magazine by its many fans in every branch of Operation Desert Storm (all of whom, except one, were men) who managed to lift, press, and squat weights made of concrete, sand, and iron when not otherwise engaged. In the midst of all this macho hype, however, Bill Dobbins, longtime muscle writer, sounds a sane note or two, one of which reminds us that, while men’s bodybuilding continues to reflect those patriarchal values we assume to have prevailed among cavemen, women’s bodybuilding continues quietly to evolve. On the last page of the issue, entitled “The Champ: Bev Francis,” Dobbins reminds us of the controversy “regarding the muscles-versus-femininity question in bodybuilding for women” which greeted the appearance on the bodybuilding stage of this former professional dancer and world-champion powerlifter. Dobbins, writing for the Weider organization, cannot criticize the 1983 decision filmed in Pumping Iron II–after all, “for ultimate power and excellence, she [Francis] uses the Weider Principles”–but he does claim that her finally winning the World Pro title in 1987 was a milestone in the sport. That was the day, Dobbins writes, when “the controversy ended” and the principle “‘may the best bodybuilder win’ became the rule of the day, rather than ‘we can’t let the sport go in this direction’” (toward the “manlike” woman Bev Francis), “when the judges clearly opted for the aesthetics of bodybuilding over other and often irrelevant standards of female beauty.”

     

    Lenda Murray is evidence that, at least at the highest levels, Dobbins may begin to be right. In the prefatory remarks to his account of Murray’s leg-training methods, Dobbins, clearly awestruck, can’t help but point out that– given her tiny waist, her “exaggerated V-shape” and “shockingly wide, well-developed lats,” the dramatic sweep of her thighs as curved “as a pair of parentheses” with hamstrings to match–Murray resembles no less an athlete than Sergio Oliva, Mr. Olympia 1967-69 and Arnold’s “legendary adversary.” This comparison would be high praise for anyone, but is astonishing–a first–for a woman. Okay, so women are twenty years behind the men; but who cares, when they are closing the gap? Surely the men cannot continue to increase in mass from year to year at the accustomed rate now that drug testing is becoming more routine. True, as “everyone knows,” steroids are still used widely by both men and women, and both know how to clean up their bloodstreams shortly before a contest in order to avoid detection. Nevertheless, methods of detection are improving. Two years ago drug-testing of women began at the Miss Olympia competition, and this year the men were tested for the first time. Officials claim that in the near future they will initiate random drug testing throughout the year in order to bar users from competition. But because men have relied on drugs far longer and far more than women, and have used them to widen the gap between the genders rather than narrow it, the differences between serious male and female competitors will likely continue to shrink.

     

    This will be the case, though, only if women manage to free themselves from the judgemental category of “femininity” which, Dobbins’s sanguine prognostications to the contrary, competitors and judges continue to invoke. In his article on Schreiner and Murray, Jerry Brainum mentions that both women continue to notice that others’ reactions to their physiques range from “curiosity to admiration to disgust.” “You can’t expect to extract the idea of femininity from the judging process in a women’s bodybuilding contest,” says Lenda; Anja agrees that “old stereotypes die hard.” What do they think of these stereotypes? They don’t say. Neither wants to appear freaky, but both thrive on the herculean effort and spartan self-discipline the sport requires of both men and women. Perhaps in the future physiological differences between individuals will figure more prominently than aesthetic differences between the genders.

     

    Different blood levels of sex hormones like estrogen and testosterone, for example, do cause individuals’ rates and ratios of muscle growth and fat reduction to vary– hormonal variations which, like the quantity and location of an individual’s “fast-twitch muscle fibres,” figure among the physiological factors vaguely designated by the term “genetics.” In the gym someone will inevitably and reverentially say, for instance, that Arnold Schwarzenegger has “great genetics” or, self-deprecatingly, that one’s own back won’t grow because of inferior “genetics.” “Genetics,” like hormone levels and willpower, vary within the sexes as well as between them, however, so that there is no reason to assume that we have yet seen the “ultimate” physique, whatever that might be. Still, this fantasy of, and reverence for, superior “genetics” is certainly one of bodybuilding’s several Nazi-esque qualities. Others include a kind of superrace (not just superhero) mentality which, especially if the builder in question is stoked on steroids or crazed by radical dieting, can provoke snickering sneering snarling growling or worse directed at anyone whose existence could in any way be construed as coming between him and his rightful greatness, let alone between him and his image in the mirror. (I once heard “Mr. Virginia” bark at a woman who sauntered across his line of vision: “GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY MIRROR.”)

     

    Beneath the superrace mentality, with its need to believe in absolute difference between the one and the zero, there lurks, as one might expect, the fetishist’s fearful wish that there may finally be no difference after all between the sexes. Without question, relative to the cultural norms of masculine and feminine bodies, the female builder masculinizes herself. But why does no one ever mention that the muscular male physique athlete feminizes himself to a degree? Consider the curvaceous pectoral mounds of the well-developed male chest; the round “muscle bellies” of powerful male biceps; the firm meaty thighs and spherical buttocks of the man who can squat heavy. And how about the hairless, well-lubricated flesh some of the men sport year-round, but with which all male competitors must emerge on contest day? Above all, what about the devotion with which the male bodybuilder strives to embody a set of ideal categories–symmetry, proportion, muscularity–for the acknowledgement of which he offers himself to a panel who objectify him in just those terms? Does he not feel feminized in the process?

     

    Over the years I’ve asked various male builders these questions, and I’ve never received an answer more direct than a narrowed gaze and a “How the FUCK should I know?” Sam Fussell, who is in a sense my younger, WASP, Ivy League, analog, answers this question in his book Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder, when at the end of Chapter 10 he shares with his readers the most humiliating moment in his career in iron. This moment comes when he fails to “Explode!” on cue at the Rose City Bench-Press Extravaganza, and thereby takes last place in his 242-lb. weight class, an over-subscribed class for which the contest promoters quickly run out of trophies. When Fussell walks to the podium to receive his last-place men’s trophy, what he gets is much worse: a sympathetic pat on the rump, and “a plaque on which were inscribed in gold plate the words: “Women 148 lbs: First Place.” “At last,” writes Fussell pathetically, “I had a trophy to tell me just who and what I was.” A woman! For shame! And after all that work too. (Poor baby.)

     

    On the other hand one of Fussell’s best moments occurs at a bodybuilding contest when he walks offstage after performing his posing routine, to be welcomed by his friend Vinnie: “Oh, Sam. . . You looked like a human fucking penis! Veins were poppin’ every which way!” In all fairness, I should add here that I spoke the very same words to my own mirrored reflection in about 1985, which may indicate that this fantasy of sexual indifferentiation is a two-way street. What is not a two-way street is the manner in which bodybuilding conceals the fantasy of sexual indifferentiation behind a whole vocabulary of aesthetic discriminations applied only to men, discriminations which recast difference as a repertory of typecast cliches, while women are still dealing with that single over-determined choice between “femininity” and freakiness. Men, on the other hand, to take examples again from this month’s Muscle and Fitness, train like animals (from a piece on powerbuilding), re-invent nature (from Weider’s editorial), and exceed the classical ideals of the Greeks themselves (from a piece on free weights vs. machines).

     

    Typically, the discourse of male bodybuilding grinds these axes together in the most simpleminded way, in the hope simultaneously of doing, out-doing, and re-doing each, separately, and together: nature, technology, classicism. To take a consummate example, in an article called “The Art of Arm Training,” by Frenchman Francis Benfatto, as told to Julian Schmidt, Benfatto claims that “hardwired into the genes of every Frenchman” is an artistic sense which “influences [their] perceptions of everything from Hellenistic art to bodybuilding.” These artistic genes were set off in him, he claims, when he rode horses in his youth and fell in love with their “sweeping muscularity,” a love Flaubert’s words explain best: “‘In art there is nothing without form.’” Whether he is contemplating his whole physique or only his arms, Benfatto explains, he always applies his Flaubertian love of form to every aspect of bodybuilding because, as Voltaire said, bodybuilding is as much an art as the Mona Lisa or Venus de Milo. (Well, actually, I left out a line or two here in between Voltaire and the Mona Lisa, but I swear I did not add a word.)

     

    The judging of bodybuilding competitions, unlike powerflifting or Olympic lifting, depends on categorical aesthetic evaluations. In a powerlifting or Olympic meet, the winner is determined either by how much weight he or she lifts relative to other competitors in the same weight class, or by means of a fixed formula which shows how much weight he or she moved relative to his or her body weight. In a bodybuilding meet there are still no such objective standards, leaving room for the kinds of psychological and aesthetic bias I’ve been discussing. Bodybuilding promoters are increasingly aware of how arbitrary this makes their sport look, and how this subjective bias undermines their claims that bodybuilding is a sport and not just an art. For all their hifalutin language about the art of bodybuilding, promoters still harbor a wish for bodybuilding to be included among the Olympic sports. This hardly seems possible, however, as long as competitors are judged qualitatively rather than quantitatively and subjectively rather than objectively. Accordingly, the Weider people now offer what they call an “Ideal Proportion Chart” with instructions–based on one’s bodyweight per inch of height, and on the measurement in inches of one’s neck, biceps, forearm, chest, waist, hips, thigh, and calf–on how to set one’s training goals. How did they come up with these measurements? They don’t let on; they don’t say whether these “ideal proportions” are derived from Praxiteles, da Vinci, or Bob Paris, whose photo graces this feature article. It is probably safe to assume, however, that the measurements were not derived from Lenda Murray. A note above the chart comments that “women bodybuilders may have to adjust measurements in the area of the hips, waist and chest, depending on build.” The Ideal Proportions, in other words (surprise, surprise) are merely those of some man or other. I can’t help thinking, however, that, as brutal, cruel, cryptic and comical as this Chart seems, by implementing it, bodybuilding, despite itself, might be doing women a favor.

     

  • Bulldozing the Subject

    Elizabeth A. Wheeler

    University of California, Berkeley

     

    Cut #1: Mudanzas

     

    When I hear the word “postmodernism” I see white people moving into the neighborhood and brown people having to move out.

     

    My friend Tinkerbell from Tustin and I used to live in an apartment building wedged between a condominium and a tenement. We went to an open house in the condominium; the units sold for $275,000-$300,000 apiece. It looked like the QE II. The architect had added portholes, interior vistas, and pink balustrades. I went out on the balcony of the penthouse. Through the pink railings I saw a moving truck below, a small local one with “Mudanzas” painted on the side, the kind that carries Puerto Rican families further out from the city where they can still afford to live.

     

    When I hear postmodernism I see pink balustrades in the foreground with a gray truck behind them. Not the balustrades alone, but also the changes–the mudanzas.

     

    It is no accident that the Brooklyn Academy of Music, showcase for the latest postmodern compositions, defines one edge of a neighborhood called Park Slope, a neighborhood formerly working-class but now home to young professionals. It is no accident that the Temporary Contemporary museum of art in Los Angeles is housed in a renovated factory a block from Skid Row. It is no accident that postmodern architecture imprints itself most firmly on the urban landscape in the form of upmarket shopping malls. Postmodernism and gentrification are partners in joint venture.

     

    “. . . the scenario of work is there to conceal the fact that the work-real, the production real, has disappeared,” writes Jean Baudrillard (Simulations 47). He is wrong in thinking that production has vanished from the face of the earth; it has instead moved to the Third World. He is right in touching on the unreality of life in postindustrial cities.

     

    It is thus extremely naive to look for ethnology among the Savages or in some Third World--it is here, everywhere, in the metropolis, among the whites, in a world completely catalogued and analysed and then artificially revived as though real . . . (16)

     

     

    I write this essay towards an ethnology of postmodernism. It starts with an image of a city street: Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. On Melrose, a district of stylish boutiques, there is a store painted in Day-Glo colors and stenciled with skulls like the Mexican images used in celebrating el Dia de los Muertos, the day of the dead. The store is extremely successful and has counterparts in many American cities. It specializes in `kitsch’ artifacts: sequin picture frames, pink flamingoes, Barbie lunch boxes, but particularly inexpensive Mexican religious articles. As Baudrillard says, consumer culture needs to “stockpile the past in plain view” (19). The store has a day-of-the-dead quality: when the plastic dashboard Virgins go up on the shelves next to the plaster Elvises, pop nostalgia renders every icon equivalent. The experience of shopping there seems to have the power to cancel out the real experience of growing up Chicano/a and Catholic. “For ethnology to live, its object must die”–“. . . the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference” (13, 11).

     

    I feel a guilty fascination for the store because it looks very much like my own aesthetic. I have always loved bright colors, colors that looked garish in my parents’ suburban home with its white walls, white curtains, white dishes. And for years I have collected Mexican religious articles, sneaking into botanicas where no one spoke English, hoping they wouldn’t divine the irreligious, “inauthentic” uses to which I planned to put such items. When I walk into the store on Melrose, I see my own secret life as a kitsch consumer exposed.

     

    I like to think, however, that there is more going on between me and my Virgins of Guadalupe than my making fun of them. With their angels and showers of roses, I find them beautiful and redemptive. They speak to my desire to connect with the powerful symbols of another culture, and my Protestant longing for a spirituality that has festive colors and a Mother in it. My taste also has an element of defiance: when I was growing up in Southern California, Mexicans were regarded as lower than us whites, and with the exception of `genuine’ folk art, so was their culture.

     

    Postmodernism is all about theft and transformation, as for instance my `inauthentic’ use of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Here are the successive phases of the postmodern image:

     

    -the image is part of a culture, and used by that
    culture with straightforward enjoyment;
    -the image is rejected as tacky, part of an
    outmoded past to be left behind;
    -the image is resuscitated and used defiantly,
    ironically, self-consciously, often as part of a
    new chic.

     

     

    Imagine the store on Melrose again. Now there is a low rider cruising down the avenue, carrying a Chicano couple dressed in the latest youth fashion. The car has a beautiful turquoise and red metallic paint job. It has a plastic Virgin on the dashboard. But there is a crucial difference between the car and the store.

     

    Unlike Baudrillard, I believe that postmodern thefts and transformations do not have to kill the culture to which they refer. A Mexican-American can fragment, reappropriate, reconstruct “Mexicanness” for herself or himself, and help to define what it means to be Mexican. This variety of postmodernism maintains a relationship with a living community; it is not an autopsy on dead referents. In this paper I will describe two postmodernisms, one informal and personal, one heavily capitalized and imposed from outside. I will spend much of my time criticizing the ways French postmodern theory reinforces the cynical logic of kitsch consumerism.

     

    Intolerance is the hallmark of dogma. While postmodern theory, particularly of the French sort, claims to have no “metanarrative,” it reveals its dogmatism by only tolerating certain readings of itself. If Baudrillard refuses to ask or answer moral questions, then perversely I want to view him as a moralist. In Simulations: The Precession of Simulacra, he describes the death of the referent:

     

    -it is the reflection of a basic reality
    -it masks and perverts a basic reality
    -it masks the absence of a basic reality
    -it bears no relation to any reality whatsoever:
    it is its own pure simulacrum. (11)

     

    What if we read Baudrillard’s scale not as descriptive but as proscriptive, as a hierarchy of values? Those of us who still believe in realities, however fragmented, contested, and multiple, can then be dismissed as unprogressive, as “naive and cognitively immature” (Gilligan 30).1

     

    How could this postmodern scale of values inform the ethnology of a particular city: Los Angeles? Baudrillard begins with the idea that “what draws the crowds” to Disneyland is not so much the entry into fantastic worlds as the “miniaturised and religious revelling in real America” (23). He immediately moves beyond an ideological analysis to a far more sweeping commentary:

     

    Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality-principle . . . Los Angeles is encircled by these "imaginary stations" which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation--a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions . . . this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system. (25, 26)

     

    Anyone who has ever tried to get around Los Angeles without a car knows how real it is, how mired in `space and dimensions,’ how cruel to the poor. In promoting the unreality of Los Angeles, Baudrillard does the cops’ dirty work. Because it is the most segmented of American cities, it is possible for the mayor to instruct the police to round up homeless people with bulldozers and drive them into camps without shade or adequate sanitation. It is possible to grow up middle-class a few miles from Skid Row and never see a homeless person. The myth of Los Angeles as a fabulous unreality justifies the quiet elimination of its less-than- fabulous, all-too-real aspects.

     

    Richard Rorty speaks of the “strand in contemporary French thought” that “starts off from suspicion of Marx and Freud, suspicion of the masters of suspicion, suspicion of `unmasking’” (161). By itself, an ideological analysis of Los Angeles would remain impoverished. However, without the intellectual tool of unmasking, there is no suffering to uncover. Without awareness of power, it is the powerless who disappear.

     

    Postmodern architecture plays a concrete role in the disappearance of the unwanted `referent.’ At 515 East 6th Street on Skid Row, there is a soup kitchen and shelter called the Weingardt Center. Elegantly renovated in postmodern style, the building has WPA gargoyles and goddesses of work augmented with medieval banners and tastefully framed reproductions of modern art. Maxine Johnston, director of the Center, does not allow her patrons to form a soup line in front of the building. It would spoil the look. Instead, they line up around the corner, in front of the ugly building where my friend Tinkerbell works.

     

    Johnston’s penchant for postmodern decor and her harshness towards homeless people are more than individual eccentricities. They form part of a pattern. The City of Los Angeles has devoted well over twenty million dollars to a redevelopment agency called SRO, Inc., which agency purchases Single Resident Occupancy hotels, renovates and postmodernizes them. At 5th and San Julian, the hardest corner of Skid Row, a flophouse has been elaborately double- coded. It has neon signs in Old West, Victorian style. It has yuppie colors of mauve, pale green and beige. It has security guards everywhere.

     

    On the morning of its rededication, Andy Robeson, director of SRO, Inc., stood outside the hotel with Mayor Tom Bradley. Robeson waved his hand across the panorama of 5th and San Julian, the street life, the raw deals, the people sleeping on the sidewalk. He turned to the mayor. “This has gotta go,” he said. Now bulldozers sweep 5th and San Julian three times a week; Robeson is agitating to make it every day.

     

    How can it be said that the palest icon, the smallest neon-Victorian curlicue, enables and justifies the displacement of real people? Jochen Schulte-Sasse writes that to comprehend postmodernism we have to examine the “flow of capitalized images” (130). While modernism depends upon ideologically-charged, closed narratives, postmodernism relies on “the immediately transparent visual situation. Owning such images is capital, and the capital they represent reflects the capital that is invested in them. Every political campaign reveals the situation anew” (Schulte-Sasse 139). In this well-financed, officially sanctioned Solution to Homelessness, the transparency of the neon sign makes it an excellent mask. The sign resembles Reagan/Bush’s image of the family–glowing, oversimplified, easy to read. Its readability distracts us from lived experience. It steals from our mouths the vocabulary we need to describe anger, family breakdown, the failure of all Solutions to Homelessness.

     

    Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory--PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA--it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. (Baudrillard 2)

     

    Postmodern architecture is highly appropriate to the Los Angeles landscape. Its pastels and fanciful details are analogous to the thousands of stucco bungalows built in Los Angeles in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Both architectural forms represent certain middle-class dreams, but they also differ in worldview.

     

    Although built to look like a miniature castle, hacienda, mosque or Tudor cottage, the stucco bungalow can be called modernist. Families shut the doors of their dreamhouses and imagine themselves into a narrative, a tale of their freedom out West, their escape from an extended family and messy history back East.

     

    In contrast, a postmodern residence is not a fictive universe. It is a surface, oddly two-dimensional, meant to be scanned rather than lived in. “It seems to me that the essay (Montaigne) is postmodern, while the fragment (The Athaeneum) is modern,” Lyotard writes (81). A postmodern building bears a very strong resemblance to an essay. It usually has the strong verticals and horizontals of the printed page and of the modern skyscraper. “Quotations” from past architectures are inserted into this format.

     

    The art of quotation serves many purposes. Particularly characteristic of postmodernism is a blank parody, in which it is impossible to determine the attitude of the citer towards the citation (Jameson 118). Despite this frequent indeterminacy of attitude, quotation in postmodern architecture serves the same function it serves in the essay: it invokes authority. Strangely enough, Linda Hutcheon sees the quotation of classical motifs as a populist gesture. Under her definition of “populism,” the Roman Empire was populist because almost everyone was subject to its authority:

     

    Like all parody, postmodernist architecture can certainly be elitist, if the codes necessary for its comprehension are not shared by both encoder and decoder. But the frequent use of a very common and easily recognized idiom--often that of classicism--works to combat such exclusiveness. (200)

     

    Architects, artists, planners and developers read postmodern theory and put it into postmodern practice. Hutcheon goes so far as to valorize postmodern architects as “activists, the voices of the users” (8). The user can mean the inhabitant, or it can mean the perpetrator of an abuse. What happens when urban planning is done by people who believe there is no subject?

     

    Cut #2: It Will Be "White" Like One of Malevitch's Squares

     

    I was talking with my friend Paul Lopes about the postmodern fragmentation of the "subject," the concept of the individual human doer or creator in Western philosophy. Paul said it reminded him of cults. The first job of a cult is to break down your previous identity and make you distrust it. "But they don't leave it fragmented," he said. "They give you a new identity to take its place--one they choose for you."

     

     

    While Baudrillard and Lyotard may genuinely believe in the death of the subject, most people do not. Maxine Johnston and Andy Robeson, for example, still believe in a referent. There is a reality out there they wish to manage into submission, and they use postmodern architecture cynically to help them do so. To invoke conspiracy theory, the death of a homeless `subject’ creates a vacuum that can be filled by a `subject’ with a better credit rating. Returning to the cult analogy, identity does not stay fragmented–another identity rushes in to take its place. “We have seen that there is a way in which postmodernism replicates or reproduces–reinforces–the logic of consumer capitalism; the more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resists that logic. But that is a question we must leave open” (Jameson 125).

     

    In “What is Postmodernism?” Lyotard describes his ideal aesthetic of sublime painting. Again, if we view him as moralist as well as narrator, this process of “making it impossible to see” reads as deliberate erasure of the subject. The critic learns to look the other way when he hears bulldozers coming. Since those most likely to be erased are people of color, when Lyotard says his ideal is “white” I take him at his word.

     

    It will be "white" like one of Malevitch's squares; it will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see; it will please only by causing pain. (78)

     

    French postmodern theorists in general, Lyotard and Baudrillard in particular, embrace the role of pain in knowledge. The impulse is paralleled by the sadomasochism in much postmodern literature and film. Both Baudrillard and Lyotard describe terror with a steady indifference. Richard Rorty comments on this philosophical `dryness’ which descends from Foucault:

     

    It takes no more than a squint of the inner eye to read Foucault as a stoic, a dispassionate observer of the present social order, rather than its concerned critic. . . . It is this remoteness which reminds one of the conservative who pours cold water on hopes for reform, who affects to look at the problems of his fellow-citizens with the eye of the future historian. Writing "the history of the present," rather than suggestions about how our children might inhabit a better world in the future, gives up not just on the notion of a common human nature, and on that of "the subject," but on our untheoretical sense of social solidarity. It is as if thinkers like Foucault and Lyotard were so afraid of being caught up in one more metanarrative about the fortunes of "the subject" that they cannot bring themselves to say "we" long enough to identify with the culture of the generation to which they belong. (172)

     

    Baudrillard observes in a dispassionate footnote:

     

    From now on, it is impossible to ask the famous question:

     

    "From what position do you speak?"--
    "How do you know?"--
    "From where do you get the power?,"

     
    without immediately getting the reply: "But it is of (from) you that I speak"--meaning, it is you who speaks, it is you who knows, power is you. A gigantic circumlocution, circumlocution of the spoken word, which amounts to irredeemable blackmail and irremovable deterrence of the subject supposed to speak. . . . (77-78)

     

    My first reaction to the above passage is an untheoretical and wordless rage. It is the anger every woman must have experienced, the feeling of being charged with our own victimization. (“Let’s rape his daughter and see how he talks then,” Tink says as she passes through the room.) In this explication Baudrillard calls for the end of dualistic thought, a central postmodernist project: “The medium/message confusion, of course, is a correlative of the confusion between sender and receiver, thus sealing the disappearance of all the dual, polar structures which formed the discursive organization of language, referring to the celebrated grid of functions in Jakobson. . . .” (76).

     

    The critique of dualism was a feminist project before it was a postmodern one. Adrienne Rich:

     

    The rejection of the dualism, of the positive- negative polarities between which most of our intellectual training has taken place, has been an undercurrent of feminist thought. And, rejecting them, we reaffirm the existence of all those who have through the centuries been negatively defined: not only women, but the "untouchable," the "unmanly," the "nonwhite," the "illiterate": the "invisible." Which forces us to confront the problem of the essential dichotomy: power/powerlessness. (48)

     

    Ironically, Baudrillard uses the critique to an opposite end. While the feminist wants to reveal the “invisible,” to expose the power relations inherent in dualism–white over black, male over female, gentry over homeless–Baudrillard maintains that without dualism power relations simply disappear. That is, if a conversation is not organized in binary oppositions, it becomes completely disordered. However, there are other ways to critique the dualism of structural linguistics. For instance, in “The Problem of Speech Genres,” Mikhail Bakhtin maintains that a conversation is ordered not in sentence parts a la Roman Jakobson, but according to the shifts in speaking subjects. Therefore it is still possible to ask, “From what position do you speak?” Speaking “of” me does not mean speaking “(from)” me.

     

    We cannot sufficiently counter the dryness of Baudrillard’s logic without invoking the category of experience. When Baudrillard speaks through the voice of the media or of the nuclear arms race, he speaks of “the inconsequential violence that reigns throughout the world, of the aleatory contrivance of every choice which is made for us.” Violence is inconsequential unless it happens to you. Baudrillard’s indifference reveals the comfort of his own position. For the man who has his freedom, freedom is unimportant, both personally and theoretically. Black South Africans know that freedom is real because they do not have it. A woman unwillingly pregnant who cannot obtain an abortion knows choice is real because she does not have it. When Baudrillard writes that “prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral” (25), we know for certain he has never been to jail.

     

    Baudrillard’s mission seems to be to make us accept the blank fact of terror. His work contains seeds of contempt for those who refuse to accept the horror of the world. This rubric marks out a diverse group, from people who desire the comfort of realist art, to those who fight for political change. For Baudrillard, to insist on the category of reality is to be in collusion with the powers- that-be. Lyotard’s contempt for the realist is even more blatant. His sublime painting will “impart no knowledge about reality (experience)”; he disparages realist art forms like commercial photography and film, whose job is “to stabilize the referent” and to “enable the addressee . . . to arrive quickly at the consciousness of his own identity”: “The painter and the novelist must refuse to lend themselves to such therapeutic uses” (78, 74).

     

    Beneath his contempt lies the assumption that people cannot detect the harshness of their own experience and must have it explained to them. When Lyotard uses the word “therapeutic” disparagingly, he dismisses the role of the artist as healer. It never occurs to him that the viewers, the “patients,” may have experienced more horror than he will ever know.

     

    While realism is the dominant style of commercial media, the media do not have the deep stake in reality- effects both Lyotard and Baudrillard attribute to them. Television eats up postmodernism along with any other style available to it. Therefore, parody is not intrinsically subversive, as Baudrillard would claim. A postmodern segment of “Mighty Mouse,” with fragments of 1940’s episodes cut out of their narratives, edited by visual and rhythmic analogy, and set to a 1960’s soul song, is no more or less subversive than any other kiddie cartoon.

     

    Jochen Schulte-Sasse makes an important refinement on the realism argument in pointing out the “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous” between modernism and post-modernism. He remarks that neoconservative politics uses both modes, making a modernist call for “authority” and “values” while engaging in a brilliant postmodern manipulation of images. Schulte-Sasse sees this vacillation as a weakness, “one reason why neoconservatism is likely to remain a transitory phenomenon.” I see it as neoconservatism’s strength: it has managed to win on both fronts, to appeal to the conscience while “colonizing the id” (145). The avant-garde, the State, or the television network can use either mode to any purpose.

     

    Lyotard’s championship of the avant-garde sounds curiously outdated: an anxious Baudelaire in his day made an almost identical argument for painting against photography. Lyotard assumes that there is no creativity outside the artistic bohemia and that the vernacular is by nature reactionary. This is a common academic failing. In Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture, E. Ann Kaplan sees only two options: either commercial mass media generated by corporations, or the avant-garde. Similarly, for Laura Mulvey there is only the dominating “male gaze” of Hollywood movies, or a quite unwatchable Brechtian cinema.

     

    Lyotard decries the contemporary process of increasing eclecticism and kitsch: ” . . . one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats MacDonalds food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris cologne in Tokyo and “retro” clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games . . . But this realism of the `anything goes’ is in fact that of money; in the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield” (76).

     

    Lyotard helps to promote the process he decries. “The desire for the sublime makes one want to cut free from the words of the tribe,” Rorty writes (175). To deny the identity of a creative community is to help the media steal its products without acknowledgment. “Local tone” is one of the reality-effects Lyotard likes to see undermined by avant-garde art (79). “Local tone” is the first quality stripped away by the commercial media.

     

    A rap song by the African American group Salt’n’Pepa is postmodern in form–a montage of cuts from past musics–and very New York in feeling. When the same beat occurs in a candy commercial on TV, there is nothing black or local about it. In the age of cannibalization, “to cut free from the words of the tribe” is to cut the tribe free of its own words.

     

    In seeking to “activate the differences and save the honor of the name,” Lyotard apparently desires the inclusion of new and varied voices in our definition of culture (80). However, if he rejects narratives of struggle and liberation, much of Third World writing goes out the window again. For instance, Cherrie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years could be and has been called a postmodern autobiography, because of the montage of genres within the text; the ways sexuality and race are always constructed, never taken as givens; and her constant play between fragmentation and a unified self. Nonetheless, Moraga is also a self-declared “movement writer,” a Chicana lesbian feminist who keeps faith with the ideals of liberation (v). To use her image without her ideas is a reprehensible theft.

     

    Furthermore, current postmodern theory could never come to terms with her insistence on experience, emotion, and direct speech. Moraga’s sometime collaborator Gloria Anzaldua could be speaking of Lyotard when she warns other women:

     

    Bow down to the sacred bull, form. Put frames and metaframes around the writing. Achieve distance in order to win the coveted title "literary writer" or "professional writer." Above all do not be simple, direct, nor immediate. (167)

     

    In postmodernity it is indeed possible, as Lyotard writes, “to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield” (17). Price is the only difference between a plastic Virgin of Guadalupe for sale on Melrose Avenue or in a botanica in East Los Angeles. There is a 50% markup for ironic distance. If pop culture becomes art, the critic will have to work harder to redifferentiate herself or himself from the vulgar masses. Hence the writing style of a Lyotard: the invocation of classicism, the return to Kant, the resuscitation of Longinus’ sublime and the traditional genre of the defense of poetry. The “lower” the culture, the “higher” the theory.

     

    The anxious intellectual puts theory ahead of artistic practice; in fact, he or she attempts to make all of human experience look like an example of postmodern theory. This is evident in postmodern approaches to Third World and/or feminist discourses. It is not only a matter of claiming such discourses for postmodernism; it is a matter of approving such discourses because they are postmodern. This somehow establishes their worth. Craig Owens:

     

    Still, if one of the most salient aspects of our postmodern culture is the presence of an insistent feminist voice (and I use the terms presence and voice advisedly), theories of postmodernism have tended either to neglect or to repress that voice . . . I would like to propose, however, that women's insistence on difference and incommensurability may not only be compatible with, but also an instance of postmodern thought. (61-62)

     

    William Boelhower:

     

    This new ethnic pragmatics . . . in the very act of reflecting on its own limits, will discover the very strategies that make the ethnic verbum a major filter for reading the modern and so-called postmodern experience not as a universal condition but as a historical construct. (120)

     

    George Lipsitz:

     

    But ethnic minority cultures play an important role in this postmodern culture. Their exclusion from political power and cultural recognition has enabled them to cultivate a sophisticated capacity for ambiguity, juxtaposition, and irony–all key qualities in the postmodern aesthetic. (159)

     

     

    As Richard Rorty points out, this intellectual anxiety has to do with the difficulty of being part of one’s own generation. The middle-class members of the post-World War II generation grew up in splendid isolation. In the United States we lived in suburban utopias, deliberately shielded from urban strife and any kind of past. In Europe, especially in Germany, cities were rebuilt out of concrete and the past was paved over. Suburbanization made us stupid. I think of Dustin Hoffman in the film The Graduate (1968), floating aimlessly in his parents’ pool. Barbara Ehrenreich:

     

    A generation ago, for example, hordes of white people fled the challenging, interracial atmosphere of the cities and settled in whites- only suburbs . . . . Cut off from the mainstream of humanity, we came to believe that pink is "flesh-color," that mayonnaise is a nutrient, and that Barry Manilow is a musician. (20)

     

    In Wim Wenders’ 1974 film Wrong Move, Rudiger Vogler wanders through the concrete wasteland of a bedroom town outside Frankfurt:

     

    Statt verzweifelt zu werden spurte ich nur, dass ich immer dummer wurde, und dass ich die wirklich verzweifelten um mich herum nur dumm anschauen konnte. Trotzdem bewegte ich mich durch die zubetonnierte Landschaft als sei ich noch immer der, der alles erlitte--der Held. [Instead of becoming desperate, I sensed that I was becoming stupider, and that I could only stare dumbly at the really desperate people around me. In spite of this, I moved though the concrete landscape as if I were still the one who suffered everything--the hero.]

     

     

    By the mid-seventies the critique of suburbanized culture was in full swing. In the face of feminism and immigration of ethnic groups, the white male subject becomes worried that he is not the hero of the story anymore. This anxiety has also to do with the gentrification that started in the 1980s. When members of the suburban middle class moved back into the city, into areas such as Kreuzberg in West Berlin and downtown Los Angeles, which had been home to working-class immigrants and other minorities, we learned to negotiate a multi-cultural reality.

     

    Many critics before me have pointed out the irony that, just as previously-silenced, darker-skinned, non-Western, female subjects begin to make themselves heard, the white European male declares “the death of the subject.” I do not want to dwell on that irony here, particularly since I want to affirm that postmodernism is not a sham but a real process, a central part of our creative lives. It is its theoretization and some of its official uses which are inadequate and destructive.

     

    Cut #3: Lawrence Welk Goes PoMo

     

    Deep in the heart of the Midwest, I am watching a rerun of “The Lawrence Welk Show.” I experience the deep spinal tingle of the “certification effect,” as that most Midwestern of television shows doubles for and validates the Midwest itself.2

     

    I try to shove down my hilarity in front of my grandfather. It strikes me that the show isn’t “realist” at all; it suffers from a mannerism so extreme it makes Parmigiano look like Norman Rockwell. Simulated faces a la Baudrillard: ” . . . they are already purged of death, and even better than in life; more smiling, more authentic, in light of their model, like the faces in funeral parlors” (23).

     

    My grandmother, now in a nursing home, was wildly in love with Lawrence Welk. My parents and I used to watch the show to make fun of it. Although we kept up our running ironic patter in front of the screen, over the years the show became a weirdly affirmative bonding ritual for the three of us. As I watch now, it scares me to realize how much of this Midwestern ethic I have absorbed: the sentimentality, the enforced niceness, the determination to not `go over anybody’s head.’

     

    When my parents moved out to Los Angeles after World War II, much of their Michigan past got erased. The more plebeian parts in particular got untold night after night at the dinner table. I have had to reconstruct them for myself with the help of this horrendous videotape.

     

    However, this is not a simulation; Lawrence Welk does not replace or erase me or my family. This odd archeology, this true-and-false process of calling myself a Midwesterner, exists in a set of relationships. There is my desire to remember what my grandmother liked, and was like, before her strokes. There is the smartaleck sense of humor I share with my parents. Out of the tacky pieces of my family, out of the worst of American culture, I am building a self.

     

    I propose a double model for postmodernism. The official variety, the postmodernism of the development corporation and the dead referent, I call classical postmodernism. I name the variety after its reliance on classical motifs in architecture and in the essay; however, I also have in mind Bakhtin’s distinction between the classical and the grotesque (in Rabelais and His World). For me as for him, classical art suffers because it is polished and finished off, denying its origins in unofficial popular art. A TV commercial or avant-garde monologue could be equally classical in their denial of origins. I see postmodernism as a creativity that begins in people’s living rooms and automobiles and then makes its way to Documenta and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

     

    The second variety I call messy, vital postmodernism after Robert Venturi, who wrote the first postmodernist manifesto: “I am for messy vitality over obvious unity” (16). This postmodernism is not ashamed of its relationship to popular culture and the vernacular. George Lipsitz is quite right in commenting that pop music leads high art in the use of postmodern forms:

     

    It is on the level of commodified mass culture that the most popular, and often the most profound, acts of cultural bricolage take place. The destruction of established canons and the juxtaposition of seemingly inappropriate forms that characterize the self-conscious postmodernism of "high culture" have long been staples of commodified popular culture. (161)

     

    While Lipsitz is writing on Chicano rock’n’roll, I know the truth of his statement through my own work on hiphop music. A three-minute hiphop track epitomizes the postmodern art of quotation. In a high-speed electronic theft the DJ may combine cuts from Funkadelic, Kraftwerk, Mozart, Evelyn “Champagne” King, spaghetti Westerns and Senate testimony. Usually this is the low-affect quotation characteristic of postmodernism. Sometimes, however, you can discern an attitude towards the material quoted, which leads us to some of the differences between classical and messy, vital postmodernism.

     

    Richard Rorty writes of the Habermas-Lyotard debate:

     

    We could agree with Lyotard that we need no more metanarratives, but with Habermas that we need less dryness. We could agree with Lyotard that studies of the communicative competence of the transhistorical subject are of little use in reinforcing our sense of identification with our community, while still insisting on the importance of that sense. (173)

     

    A community feeling still reverberates in the urban popular musics we can call postmodern. For instance, the beats of James Brown are ubiquitous in hiphop music; the form would not exist without him. Brown even recorded a rap song, “I’m Real,” to call attention to his continued existence in the face of so many copies. When the hiphop composer quotes James Brown, his or her attitude is always reverent. However, the listener cannot detect this reverence from the song alone. It is community-based knowledge. One has to hear people from Harlem or the Bronx talk about Brown and his status in Black music history.

     

    Lipsitz stresses the postmodernism of Chicano rock’n’roll, but also its grounding in the culture’s experience: “. . . this marginal sensibility in music amounts to more than novelty or personal eccentricity; it holds legitimacy and power as the product of a real historical community’s struggle with oppression” (175).

     

    The individual subject is still central in urban popular music, part of a proud resistance against racism. “For [the painter] John Valdez, pachuco imagery retains meaning because it displays `the beauty of a people we have been told are not beautiful.’”3 Here we glance back at Jochen Schulte-Sasse’s “simultaneity of the non- simultaneous” in the combined use of modern and postmodern forms:

     

    The forms of cultural reproduction in modernity were closely linked to a mode of socialization intended to produce strong super-egos, which in turn favored the development of agonistic, competitive individuals with clearly delimited, ideological identities. (126)

     

    This sounds very much like the aggressive stance of the pachuco or the rapper, proclaiming a resolute identity over a postmodern beat. While these figures often topple over into machismo, the same idea of mixed modes could also apply to the feminist Cherrie Moraga. She makes an uneasy, wrenchingly honest attempt at a unified self because she needs to. While fragmentation plays an important role in her work, she does not exalt it. Her subjectivity, her community, have already been fragmented enough.

     

    Postmodernism does not have to bulldoze the subject. I know this because I see what happens in my own living room.

     

    Cut #4: Tinkerbell in Theory:

     

    “Postmodernism? Isn’t that when art becomes an insincere pastiche, instead of a statement from your heart?”

     
    Tinkerbell in Practice:

     
    Tink wants to construct an art installation in the living room. Both Jews and Christians live in our house. A creche appeals to her aesthetically, while Judah Maccabee appeals thematically. Her solution: “Judah meets Jesus.”

     

    Now that’s postmodern.

     

    Notes

     

    1. I am thinking here of Gilligan’s feminist critique of Lawrence Kohlberg’s scale of moral development, which moves from a stress on concrete human relationships upward to an increasing level of abstraction.

     

    2. See Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (New York: Knopf, 1960).

     

    3. Lipsitz 172, quoting Victor Valle, “Chicano Art: An Emerging Generation” (Los Angeles Times, August 7, 1983).

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Anzaldua, Gloria. “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Eds. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua. New York: Kitchen Table- Women of Color, 1983. 165-173.
    • Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.
    • Bakhtin, Mikhail. “The Problem of Speech Genres.” In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern McGee. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986.
    • Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations: The Precession of Simulacra. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. London: Foreign Agents, 1984.
    • Boelhower, William. Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
    • Ehrenreich, Barbara. “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being.” This World. San Francisco Chronicle 10 July 1988: 20.
    • Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982.
    • Hutcheon, Linda. “The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History.” Cultural Critique 5 (Winter 1986-87). 179-207.
    • Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983. 111-125.
    • Kaplan, E. Ann. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture. New York: Methuen, 1987.
    • Lipsitz, George. “Cruising Around the Historical Bloc– Postmodernism and Popular Music in East Los Angeles.” Cultural Critique 5 (Winter 1986-87). 157-177.
    • Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “What is Postmodernism?” 1982. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
    • Moraga, Cherrie. Loving in the War Years. Boston: South End, 1983.
    • Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology. Eds. Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary. New York: 1977. 412-428.
    • Owens, Craig. “The Discourse of Others: Feminism and Postmodernism.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983. 57-77.
    • Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W.W. Norton, 1976.
    • Rorty, Richard. “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity.” Habermas and Modernity. Ed. Richard J. Bernstein. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1985. 161-175.
    • Schulte-Sasse, Jochen. “Electronic Media and Cultural Politics in the Reagan Era: The Attack on Libya and Hands Across America as Postmodern Events.” Cultural Critique 8 (Winter 1987-88). 123-152.
    • Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. 1966. New York: Museum of Modern Art Papers on Architecture, 1977.

     

  • Postmodernism, Ethnicity and Underground Revisionism In Ishmael Reed

    David Mikics

    University of Houston

    I. Ish and Ism

     

    Ishmael Reed is a postmodern writer; he is also an African-American writer. The purpose of this essay is to reflect on the conjunction between these two roles in Reed’s work–and the somewhat surprising fact that they are in conjunction more than in conflict. Postmodernism, with its definition of the contemporary world as a realm of fragmentation, disassociation, and the post-personal, seems to dissolve the cultural continuities of community and individual ego to which earlier artistic eras remained loyal. Postmodernism, in other words, declares the death of cultural authenticity. African-American literature, by contrast, often seems to value cultural authenticity as a means of ensuring communal and individual self-assertion in the black diaspora.1 Reed’s work suggests how African- American tradition, which generally–not always, but generally–wants to depict the survival of a people and a culture in its original, authentic strength, can be reconciled with postmodernism, which destroys the notions of origin, authenticity and tradition itself.

     

    Since the African-American tradition is posited by Reed as a definitive cultural value often repressed or distorted by modern mass culture, a value that can in some sense act as a critique of capitalist modernization, an allied question (one subject to much recent debate) will be whether Reed’s postmodernism damages the critical capacity of his project.2 Can postmodern techniques be the vehicle for a cultural critique, or must they be “affirmative,” acquiescing in the deterioration of art and political speech into commodities under late capitalism?

     

    I have found the theory of Jurgen Habermas useful in posing these questions. In particular, Habermas’ distinction between a “lifeworld” of everyday experiential practice and a systemic, administrative complex that embodies the managerial necessities of late capitalism, and continually encroaches upon or threatens the lifeworld, seems to be replicated in Reed’s distinction (in his novel The Terrible Twos) between African-American subcultural experience and a destructive mass culture ruled by the commercial system. Habermas’ work is a sustained attempt to seek a means of resuscitating the lifeworld that has been impoverished by the managerial priorities of the welfare state (priorities that Reed aptly sees encoded in the pacifying, tepid character of many mass cultural forms).3 In this attempt, Habermas champions aesthetic modernity, with its emphasis on the unique, autonomous individual, as a more helpful lifeworld response to modernization processes than the postmodern dissolution of the individual as a category.

     

    For Habermas, postmodernism is “affirmative”: that is, it tends to mimic the purely negative dispersal of subjective freedom enforced by modernization (the ability to consume what one wants) instead of asserting the critical potential implied by the more positive side of such modernization (the ability to think what one wants). Modernization’s corrosive effect on traditional cultural continuities also entails a democratic emphasis on individuality within intersubjective relations, and therefore, Habermas claims, any critical response to modernity must capitalize on its positive aspect, the promise of more intellectual autonomy for the individual, who now judges culture and its prejudices from a distance. According to Habermas’s argument, criticism within aesthetic modernity takes its most legitimate and useful form when it secures the rights of the individual subject to reevaluate and revise culture in a way that champions the power of the lifeworld while acknowledging the lifeworld’s confrontation with the social rationalization process. The need to acknowledge the effects of rationalization and modernization means that this advocacy of the lifeworld must not take the neoconservative form of an attempt to revive a cultural tradition in an unreconstructed way, for such an attempt would have to ignore the dangerous effects that modernization has already had on the lifeworld, its destabilizing of tradition.4

     

    As I will suggest, Reed is certainly in accord with Habermas’ idea of a critically self-revising tradition, in Reed’s case African-American tradition, as the necessary form of an effective contemporary invocation of the lifeworld. But his work challenges Habermas’ assumption that such critical use of tradition must be coupled with the assertion of an autonomous modernist self. Reed suggests a subcultural rather than an individualist answer to the destructive effects of modernization. The postmodern aspect of Reed’s work, his attack on the notions of character and individual consciousness, does not invalidate its critical potential, as Habermas’ argument would imply. Instead, the subcultural practice of “neohoodooism” acts as a subversive force that seizes mass cultural phenomena and reuses them for the purpose of resistance. Habermas’s prejudice in favor of the individual not only compels him to deny the reality of the Freudian unconscious as a social formation that defeats the wish for self-possession central to his neo-Kantian notion of the individual,5 it also blinds him, along with other leftist critics of postmodernism, to the force of postmodern subversions, like “neohoodooism,” that do not base themselves on envisioning autonomous selves exercising political judgment.

     

    Reed’s lack of desire for the autonomous self accounts for another, more obstreperous leftist objection to the discerning of a critical project in his work. Reed’s fiction, which is often hermetic in texture, does not pursue the definition of politics as a matter of attaining the self-empowering judgment (however difficult it may be to achieve such judgment) that is the goal of Brecht’s or Baraka’s radical theater. One answer to this objection would draw on Habermas’s terms. In his Adorno prize lecture, Habermas notes that in order for critical art to succeed in the contemporary moment, it must be supported by changes in the lifeworld: the burden of critique must not be placed on aesthetics alone without considering its reception in everyday life. Change cannot be legislated by authors, and given this fact, authors must not be faulted for not aiming to produce social change in an immediate way, for example through populist style or overtly revolutionary rhetoric. The prescriptive moralizing on the part of critics who insist on such features has at times been an inhibiting factor in contemporary African-American writing, since what such critics want cannot be readily delivered by writers intent on exploring the artistic implications of their material in the context of an ever more complex late capitalist society.

     

    I would extend this answer to the demand for an autonomous political art beyond Habermas’s idea of attending to institutional and everyday contexts before individual literary works. Habermas cannot convey a nearly full enough picture of everyday life because he retains the goal of an empowered self freed, as much as possible, from alienation and false consciousness–his legacy from Kant and Marx. Reed’s artistic technique, by contrast, exposes the unconscious dimensions of ordinary existence, our styles of being, and it therefore necessarily gravitates away from injunctions toward clarifying one’s consciousness in preparation for political judgment. Reed’s work is more, not less, political because of his recognition that clarification is always an aspect of what Mumbo Jumbo calls the Wallflower Order, an attempt to repress and avoid the dense, Dionysian “Work” that an African-American form like jazz tries to acknowledge: “Jes Grew, the Something or Other that led Charlie Parker to scale the Everests of the Chord . . . the manic in the artist who would rather do glossolalia than be ‘neat clean or lucid.’”6 Reed’s novels aim at the recognition of the improvisatory changes that are always happening, and always repressed by, ruling culture, rather than (the way we usually think of political art) the gearing up for a change in or replacement of the consciousness that rules.

     

    The utopian demand that the text be a lever, in and of itself, for such a decisive change in consciousness, without regard for its function within a larger social and institutional discourse, has often influenced current debates on the politics of literary study (for example, the ongoing revisions of the literary canon). Such utopianism must be regarded as an inevitable symptom of an era in which the relative absence of radical thought about institutions themselves is all too clear.7 In particular, the requirement that texts unequivocally declare their wholesome political uses, thus single-handedly transforming institutional contexts of reading, has weighed heavily (and, I believe, harmfully) on the choice of “black literature” for the new curriculum. For example, the common assumption that black writers should display an attractive, easily accessible communal optimism militates for the selection of For Colored Girls… or The Color Purple in introductory core courses that have room for only one African-American text. Such bias necessarily excludes the work of writers like Adrienne Kennedy, Andrea Lee, James MacPherson, David Bradley, Jay Wright–and Reed. The demand that African- American literature incarnate a positive representative function, praising the strength of cultural continuity and communal values, has dogged Reed throughout his career. The charge frequently made by both black and white critics that Reed is not properly representative of African-American literature seems to rest on the dangerous assumption that the black writer is bound to a representative goal: bound, that is, to present encouraging or correct portraits of his/her culture. This need for African-American literature to perform a representative function has complex historical roots, often involving the burdensome obligation imposed on black writers to legitimate black life for a white audience.8 In the 1990s, however, the wish for the representative is an anachronism, a symptomatic reaction against postmodern conditions in which, despite the continuing social and economic racism of American society, late capitalism has produced a diversity of intra- and interracial roles that erodes cultural uniformity in black America, as elsewhere.9 Since multifarious and contradictory modes of African-American life now exist on an unprecedented scale, any demand for representative description is bound to fail. I do not wish to claim Reed as a representative of a new postmodern strain in African- American life; that would simply be inverting the criticisms of those who deny Reed’s legitimacy. Reed’s work, because it is a partial (in every sense of the word) rather than a grandly unified vision of African-American experience, cannot be representative in any way. Rather, he creatively and successfully exploits a particular African-American subculture in order to invent his own brand of critical postmodernism.

     

    As he rejects the idea of a representative or unified vision of black life, Reed also shies away from the easy acceptance of totality in affirmative postmodernism, which is another example of a representative strategy, one that says: this is our new world, from which no escape, or even critical distance, is possible. By indifferently combining the fragments of various traditions and histories, affirmative postmodernism sets even fragmentation under the sign of Baudrillard’s homogeneous, uniform “society of the spectacle.” By contrast, Reed via his subcultural strategy sets the plural cultural forces of postmodern society in conflict, propounding an aesthetics of resistance or social tension rather than reconciliation.10 Thus Reed “mobilizes a sense of a particular history of subject positions that will not be subsumed under the apparently seamless master text.”11

     

    Before discussing Reed’s African-American critical postmodernism in more detail, I want first to differentiate him from postmodernists who do not oppose lifeworld to rationalization systems but who, instead, see postmodernity as the inevitable colonization of lifeworld by system. Frank Lentricchia has recently proposed Don DeLillo’s Libra as an example of critical postmodernism in its treatment of mass culture, of “an everyday life . . . utterly enthralled by the fantasy selves projected in the media.”12 DeLillo does not offer any escape from a media- absorbed world that has replaced the first-person self with third-person fantasies of the self. In DeLillo as in Pynchon, there are no local, popular cultural forces that would provide resistance to modernization; there is only an oppressive totality. In DeLillo, phenomena of resistance (The Names’ terrorism) or esoteric revisionism (White Noise‘s “Hitler studies”) are simply mirror images of the increasingly systematized society that they rebel against. No route is possible back to the authenticity desired by the modernists, since authenticity has itself become a mass cultural icon. (Thus DeLillo’s Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra wants to “be somebody,” an ambition that can only be realized within the confines of the mass media image.) Yet it is important to remember, as Lentricchia stresses, that DeLillo’s attitude toward this fragmented and imprisoning system, his image of postmodern America, is critical rather than celebratory. Postmodernist critique does not need to invoke adversarial forces like the high-modernist self or the utopian vision of a radically different society in order to avoid the pitfalls indulged in by the affirmative, pastiche-ridden, unreflective postmodernisms that are now shared by the advertizing world and a large sector of the visual arts community. What makes the difference in critical postmodernism is its reflective capacity, its dwelling on current social and aesthetic contradictions, rather than the dissolving of contradiction into easy juxtaposition dictated by the affirmative postmodern. Such contradictions often involve the survival of earlier aesthetic and cultural forms alongside or within postmodernity: thus the desperate desire for existential self in DeLillo’s Oswald, Barthelme’s protagonists, or Mailer’s Gary Gilmore (in The Executioner’s Song)–or the survival of premodern, subcultural secret society traditions in Reed.

     

    Oddly enough, the critical edge provided by a subcultural survival like Reed’s vodoun has its near- counterpart in high modernism. Lionel Trilling, for example, praises Freud’s image of the “other culture,” the secret traditions Freud chose to ally himself to as counters to the dominant values of Austrian society. One of Freud’s other cultures was England; another was ancient Greece; and still another, Hebraic tradition.13 But Reed’s postmodernism again generates a key difference from the modernist Freud. For Reed, unlike Trilling’s Freud, the subculture or other culture is interwoven, despite its esotericism, with the imagery of mass culture, imagery that the subculture both mimics and, through its mimicry, resists. The jazz style celebrated in Mumbo Jumbo is, after all, a mass cultural form.

     

    A similar attachment to mass-cultural image is at work in the postmodern treatment of character, again marking a difference from modernism. For Reed, as for DeLillo, the self is a caricature, a stylistic move determined by cultural stereotype rather than a modernist dream of individual authenticity. But the stereotypes are not, in his work, only the property of a mechanized mass culture, as in DeLillo. Their mass-cultural face may also stem from, or be appropriated by, African-American counterculture. Reed’s aesthetic of “sampling,”14 of inventively assembling snippets from the tradition with which he identifies (Neohoodooism) as well as the cultural syndrome he opposes (the Wallflower Order), thus presents itself as sustained dialogic satire.15

     

    The sort of reconciliation between an African-American tradition and postmodernism that I have hinted at has been offered in the context of Reed’s work by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the late James Snead, both of whom speak of Reed as demonstrating affinities between his own postmodern technique and the techniques of “signifying” in black culture. Snead specifically points to sudden rhythmic juxtaposition and syncretism, two features of African religion and music that are echoed in Reed’s work.16 Gates and Snead, by making their connection between Africa and Reed, imply that postmodernism can be rooted, even if only by analogy, in a specific cultural tradition, such as that of the African-American. Reed himself seems to concur in this analysis, identifying his own authorial practice with the Africa-derived folk tradition of vodoun.

     

    Gates and Snead reading Reed are brilliantly helpful, and I will finally agree with their assessment of Reed. But I would like to introduce a possible objection to their readings that hinges on the ideological implications of presenting an element of the African-American lifeworld like vodoun alongside modernist and postmodernist artistic practice. The objection would go something like this: both Gates and Snead seem to imply that Reed claims an identity between vodoun and his own work because he perceives a natural, implicit analogy between modern and postmodern European aesthetics and black culture. One might argue against Gates and Snead by reminding oneself that such an analogy is not natural, but instead an ideological construct of twentieth-century European modernism’s attraction to “primitive” forms. In contrast to mass culture, which is made possible by the dissolution of traditional communal ties under advanced capitalism–the meeting hall or fete replaced by a million TV sets–popular or folk culture is by definition premodern: its premise must be an assumed community of style and cultural symbolism rather than the alienated perspective of the individual artist. From this perspective, the twentieth-century European or Euro-American artist’s frequent invoking of African and African-American popular cultural practice as an analogy to his or her own efforts, from Picasso’s interest in “primitive” art to Norman Mailer’s White Negro to the later albums of the American pop music group Talking Heads,17 is significantly problematic. The high culture/”primitive” analogy is motivated by nostalgia for the (supposed) immediacy or palpable, experiential knowledge that the alienated artist perceives in either colonized nations or the underclass of his or her own nation. As such, it is inevitably a colonial gesture. By failing to address this cultural-historical basis for the comparison that modern and postmodern European/Euro-American art habitually makes between itself and the premodern aspects of African/African-American culture, both Snead and Gates imply that such comparisons describe a natural or neutral similarity, instead of themselves enacting ideologically freighted gestures.18 In these two critics’ analogies between African-American art and the European modernist/postmodernist tradition, ideology disappears.

     

    Reed’s identification of his art with vodoun shares something with the European modernist’s colonialist gesture: he desires to restore to his work a dimension of authenticity that has been lost in much of the modern world.19 In other words, Reed reacts against social modernization by allying himself to vodoun. After all, vodoun is communal folk culture, a survival of an era untouched by the atomizing, alienating effects of the modern mass media. There is, then, no precise fit between popular tradition and postmodern strategy, as Gates and Snead tend to suggest in their praises of Reed. The unique, eccentric character of Reed’s postmodernism, its antinormative nature, suggests that the popular is, in part, invoked as a way of grounding the postmodern in its very opposite, the force of folk tradition, as a counterbalance against its potentially uncontrolled, antitraditional mirroring of the fragmenting effects of late capitalism.20

     

    The objection to Reed’s appropriation of the supposed authenticity of folk culture that I have just outlined is a serious one, but I believe one can acknowledge its seriousness while also making it defer to the gaiety of Reed’s work, which ultimately undercuts the proclamation of authenticity that one aspect of Reed still wants to make. Reed’s delight in subversive traditions, which is so well evoked by Gates and Snead, extends to the self-mockery of folklore itself, which becomes the madly esoteric and writerly venture of neohoodooism. In practical terms, Reed does not seem to be hamstrung by any gap between tradition and postmodern subversion. Instead, he aims, largely successfully, at a coherence of folk and postmodern expression in which neither element serves or counterbalances the other, in which they form a crazy whole. In other words, Reed wants to show the ways in which the popular uncannily anticipates and redeems what we thought were the properties of contemporary mass culture alone by being, so to speak, always-already postmodern, postmodern from way back. By presenting us with a partial or eccentric claim to contemporary mass culture, a creative appropriation of its reifying tendencies, he negotiates the Scylla and Charybdis of twentieth-century art: the stale modernist opposition between the reified and the creative, and the affirmative postmodern claim that reification subsumes all contemporary narratives into an undifferentiated whole. In contrast to the centrifugal atmosphere of affirmative postmodernism, in which traditional elements are used as mere decorative fragments,21 the premodern subculture that Reed celebrates provides an ad hoc, self-ironizing center of gravity for his work by endowing aesthetic eccentricity with the lure of tradition. Traditional culture has been irreversibly transfigured by the new aura of postmodern technological reproduction, but it still retains an otherness, a mark of difference.

     

    II. Reed, Baraka, Pynchon: Postmodernism and Community

     

    Well, and keep in mind where those Masonic Mysteries came from in the first place. (Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you’ll ever find here.) Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow22 It is also significant that most of the [vodoun] houngans who claim the patronage of Ogoun belong to the Masonic Order. Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen23

     

    In his career as a novelist, Ishmael Reed has frequently occupied himself with the images produced by American mass culture. Some of these images are the travesties of black life produced by white America–the antebellum stereotypes of Mammy and Uncle Tom invoked in Flight to Canada (1976), Reed’s parodic takeoff on slave narrative; or the Amos and Andy routines in The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974), a satirical pseudo-thriller. Some, on the other hand, are not specific to Afro-America, like the Wild West parodied in Yellow Back Radio Broke Down, Reed’s “Western” written in 1969. In The Terrible Twos (1982), which I will focus on in the remainder of this essay, Reed centers his analysis on a mass-produced and mass-marketed image of general import in American culture, that of Santa Claus. In particular, the novel has as its subtext the standard movie myth of American Christmas, Miracle on 34th St. As I hope to show, the ossified, stereotypical mythology embodied by this film is undermined by Reed’s radically unorthodox mode of narration–a mode that has itself been called filmic. Reed counters the ideologically dominant images of Miracle with his own subversive quasi-filmic techniques, unravelling one filmic mode by means of another.

     

    As James Snead points out, Reed’s work, like much postmodern writing, has important correlations with the aesthetics of movie-making in its use of sudden and suggestive juxtaposition (montage), as well as with the similar principles of creative juxtaposition (which Snead calls “cutting”) active in African religion and music: “Reed elides the ‘cut’ of black culture with the ‘cutting’ used in cinema. Self-consciously filmable, Mumbo Jumbo ends with a ‘freeze frame’ . . . underscoring its filmic nature.”24 My aim in this essay is to explore some of the ways in which Reed uses familiar images from American film, and in fact opposes these official, mass-cultural images to an alternative culture of the “cut” or radical juxtaposition, which has affinities both with Euro-American postmodernism and with the African-American belief system of vodoun. As I have noted, Reed’s final aim is a therapeutic criticism of the numbing, homogenizing effects of modernization. Far from exulting in the culture of the mass media as the “affirmative postmodernist” would do, Reed in The Terrible Twos opposes the mass culture of Hollywood movies and TV to an underground folk tradition that partakes of vodoun habits of mind, specifically in its occult revisionary reading of St. Nicholas, otherwise known as Santa Claus. Reed’s hermetic St. Nicholas revolts against the official or established culture represented in The Terrible Twos by commercial capitalism’s image of Christmas.

     

    Reed criticizes not only the late capitalist system itself; he also criticizes the most common reception of African-American culture within that system. African- American tradition has been taken as an offer of escape from official culture into a viable marginal one–now that the alienated, solipsistic subjectivity of European modernism, or the fantasies of postmodernism, which decenter subjectivity without offering a communal alternative to the now-defunct self, seem less than comfortably livable. For contemporary critical ideology, black writing seems to represent a potential for communal authenticity that has long been excluded from the Euro-American avant-garde. A drama like Slave Ship, as Kimberly Benston convincingly argues, achieves precisely what the Euro-American modernists cannot: a depiction of oppositional community based in an existing cultural reality.25 This escape from modernist alienation into black cultural authenticity is the pattern of Baraka’s career, as well as the goal of the “Black Aesthetics” movement of the 1960s and ’70s in which Baraka, along with Addison Gayle, Hoyt Fuller, Larry Neal, and others, played a prominent role.

     

    As Gates has shown in his reading of Mumbo Jumbo, Reed criticizes such attachment to authenticity by attacking the essentialist aspect of the Black Aesthetics/Black Arts movement (and, before it, the Negritude movement). Reed opposes the notion of blackness as a “transcendental signified,” an authoritative, static and univocal symbolic presence.26 Instead, Reed reveals black discourse to be, in postmodern fashion, decentered and polyvocal. Where does this postmodern aesthetic strategy leave Reed in terms of the communal emphasis of African-American culture? Houston Baker has cited Reed’s fiction as a return to “the common sense of the tribe”27: but how can such a collective or tribal orientation coexist with the atomizing, depersonalizing effects of postmodernist technique also evident in Reed?

     

    One approach to a definition of Reed’s decentered communalism, his subversive interest in the lifeworld’s subcultural traditions, is by way of a contrast with Baraka. Though both Baraka and Reed move from avant-garde alienation in early works like Baraka’s Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note and Reed’s The Free-Lance Pallbearers to an emphasis on the power of African-American cultural continuity, there are important differences. Reed’s “neohoodooist” aesthetic, as we shall see, is syncretic and assimilative, whereas Baraka’s black consciousness attempts the monolithic and univocal. In Reed, vodoun does not need to reject European influence in order to safeguard its purity; instead, it translates this influence into the terms of a newly indigenous New World culture.

     

    In other respects as well, Reed’s vision of African- American culture should not be conflated with Baraka’s (or, say, June Jordan’s) equally powerful, but very distinct, definition of that culture. Throughout his work, Reed consistently rejects the invocation of ethnic community on a grand scale, opting instead for the investigation of the esoteric cultural practices, like vodoun, that appear as sect, secret society, or personal obsession rather than as mass movement. Reed’s choice of the occult and dispersed, rather than the fully public, continuities in African- American culture suggests that eccentric or idiosyncratic rewritings of culture are valuable precisely because they are idiosyncratic–and that such stylistic quirks may constitute the only existential rebellion still viable. The later work of Baraka, by contrast, like that of many other politically committed African-American artists, strives for community through its normative and explicit approach, the plain force of a quintessentially public rhetoric. Baker’s phrase “the common sense of the tribe” is a better description of Baraka’s mode in its willed commonness than it is of Reed’s willful peculiarity.

     

    Having clarified his differences from Baraka’s more normative approach to African-American tradition, I now want to pursue a comparison between Reed and Pynchon,28 which will reveal an equally telling difference. To return to Habermas’s terms: Reed is interested in upholding the lifeworld and its traditions against the modernization process, whereas for Pynchon the lifeworld is merely an attenuated reflection of the systemic aspect of modernization.

     

    Pynchon is a natural parallel for Reed; especially, Pynchon’s flaked-out whimsy in The Crying of Lot 49 bears a remarkable tonal resemblance to some of Reed’s work.29 There’s also a thematic resemblance between Pynchon and Reed: they both participate in the postmodernist polemic against authenticity by creating, for the most part, caricatures rather than “realistic” characters. Reed has his hardboiled detectives and monomaniacal radicals, Pynchon his male-bonded post-adolescents and femmes fatales. The sense that these figures, by-products of modernity’s obsessions, suffer or play out their stereotypical identities, instead of actively controlling them, is characteristic of postmodernism.30

     

    Pynchon’s defiant authorial eccentricity imagines the rebellion against modernity, not as a viable cultural alternative, but as an intricate fantasy that rewrites the way of the world in a language of conspiratorial oddity. In Pynchon, as in DeLillo, subversive fantasies usually turn out to be as chillingly claustrophobic as official reality.31 The notion of escape from a hegemonic culture occupies Reed’s work as it does Pynchon’s, but the difference, I will argue, is Reed’s effort to ground the escape in an actual alternative–African-American– aesthetic, that of vodoun.

     

    There is a striking passage in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 that dramatically evokes the possibility of subversive or alternative community as, at the same time, the threat of an utterly private world of paranoid self- delusion–a world that ironically and horrifyingly mirrors the oppressive totality of the increasingly rationalized contemporary universe. Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas, as she discovers the massive underground postal network called W.A.S.T.E. seemingly everywhere she turns, speculates to herself that Either you have stumbled indeed, without the aid of LSD or other indole alkaloids, onto a secret richness and concealed density of dream; onto a network by which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty for the official government delivery system; maybe even onto a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, that harrows the head of everybody American you know, and you too, sweetie. Or (here comes the second alternative) you are hallucinating it . . . . in which case you are a nut, out of your skull.32

     

    Oedipa’s potentially paranoid fantasy may, this passage from Lot 49 suggests, be the only possibility for a rebellious collective imagination that remains in American life. Reed shares Pynchon’s distaste for what Oedipa Maas describes as the “exitlessness” of American life, the overwhelming pressure of a bland and univocal day-to-day rationality. The transhistorical Wallflower Order in Mumbo Jumbo, which tries to stamp out jazz dancing and all other forms of collective imaginative improvisation, is an openly malevolent version of such oppressive blandness.

     

    Pynchon leaves us in the dark as to whether the secret community that Oedipa envisions actually exists; but if it does, it is invigorating only to the degree that it is also scary and sinister.33 Reed, by contrast, is able to depict the counterforce to Wallflower oppression not as an ontologically dubious fantasy, like Oedipa Maas’ underground postal-cum-waste-disposal system, but as an actual cultural phenomenon, what Mumbo Jumbo calls Jes Grew: black music, dance and verbal “signifying.”34

     

    III. The Filmic Double

     

    We are now ready to deal with the importance of mass culture in The Terrible Twos by way of its major filmic subtext, the “classic” Christmas movie Miracle on 34th Street. First, though, this is an appropriate time to briefly and somewhat violently summarize the novel’s plot: it begins with “a past Christmas”–the Christmas just following Reagan’s 1980 electoral victory, when charity has been abandoned in favor of Lucchese boots and Gucci handbags. A top male model named Dean Clift, represented by Reed as a know-nothing automaton sunk in infantile dependency on his wife, whom he calls “Mommy,” is running for Congress from the “silk stocking district” in Manhattan. By the novel’s second section, set during “a future Christmas,” Dean Clift–a composite portrait of Ronald Reagan and Dan Quayle–has become president. Meanwhile, Santa Claus has become even bigger business than he was in the 1980s: a character named Oswald Zumwalt, head of a company called the North Pole Development Corporation (or Big North for short), has secured “exclusive rights” to Santa. (A class action suit is filed by thousands of rival Clauses, “black, red and white,” but they lose.) Zumwalt establishes a Christmas Land at the North Pole “to which consumers all over the world [will] fly, Supersaver, to celebrate Christmas” (TT, 64).35 Meanwhile, President Clift has signed a bill giving Adolf Hitler posthumous American citizenship. The economy’s in trouble–a loaf of bread costs fifty dollars. The hungover president’s eyes “look like two Japanese flags.”

     

    In the midst of this dangerous atmosphere of crisis, a sect called the Nicolaites has sprung up, determined to rescue Santa Claus from his position as avatar of mass media commercialism. The Nicolaites are dedicated to the original image of the fourth-century St. Nicholas as a forthright defier of imperial authority, a populist whose miracles rivalled Christ’s, causing the Vatican to declare him moribund in the ’60s in the face of popular enthusiasm for Nicholas’ cult. The Nicolaites succeed in kidnapping Big North’s official Santa Claus and momentarily replacing him with their own spokesman, a black dwarf known as Black Peter. (As we shall see, Black Peter is St. Nicholas’s somewhat sinister accomplice in some versions of the Nicholas legend.) The flamboyant and persuasive Black Peter, projecting his voice ventriloquist-style into a false Santa Claus, delivers a condemnation of the hardheartedness of American commercial capitalism and, in particular, capitalism’s exploitation of Santa. Finally, President Clift, after being taken on a Dantesque tour in which he meets the damned souls of dead American presidents, realizes the error of his ways and, like Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol, suddenly overflows with charitable Christmas cheer, passing out Redskins tickets and championing disarmament. At the novel’s end, President Clift has been placed in a sanatorium by his shocked former supporters and a manhunt is on for Black Peter.

     

    President Dean Clift is not only like Jacob Marley but also like Claude Rains in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, another conversion narrative, in which Rains as the supposedly populist, but actually cynically self-interested, congressman finally breaks down and admits his own corruption, thus becoming dangerous to the corporate interests that support him. But the major subtext of The Terrible Twos is Miracle on 34th St (1947; written and directed by George Seaton). In this film, Kris Kringle, the real Santa Claus hired by Macy’s to play Santa Claus, represents a critique of commercialized Christmas and a polemic in favor of Christmas charity, which is ideologically defined by Miracle as both the antithesis and the salvation of corporate commercialism. By the end of the movie Kringle, played by Edmund Gwenn, succeeds not only in converting hardnosed businesswoman Mrs. Walker (Maureen O’Hara), to his humanitarian gospel, but also her much harder-nosed child, played by the preteenage Natalie Wood. Kringle’s most important convert, however, is Mr. Macy himself, who by the end of the film becomes a fervent supporter of his Santa’s claim to be the Santa Claus. Though the film retains enough cynicism concerning Macy’s profit-oriented motives for his support of Kris Kringle to save it from sentimental idealization of the American corporation, the point is nevertheless quite clearly made that Macy’s is now a kinder, gentler store as a result of Kringle’s presence. Kringle even unites Macy and Gimbel as, in the spirit of Christmas generosity, both begin referring customers to the competing store and vying for the privilege of rewarding Kris himself for his services. By being an authentic rather than a false, merely commercial Santa, Miracle‘s Kris Kringle ameliorates the grasping commercialism of Macy’s, infusing it with the heartwarmingly populist, anti-greed “true” spirit of Christmas. Miracle‘s ideological goal is to claim that mass culture can become popular culture: to present the corporation in a newly beneficent, populist role by showing it embracing anti-commercialism. Kris may protest against the consumerist version of Christmas, but he nevertheless works happily at Macy’s, advising its customers to buy Macy’s toys. At the film’s end, Kris’s own populist beliefs are recognized and partially adopted by Macy’s. The parallel to Macy’s in Reed’s novel is Zumwalt’s Big North, which has secured exclusive rights to Santa Claus just as, in Miracle, New York’s largest department store owns Santa in the person of Kris Kringle. The difference, of course, is that Reed’s Big North, unlike Macy’s in the film, is openly malevolent and not at all liable to be affected by the “true” anti-commercial spirit of Santa Claus.

     

    The three subtexts for Reed’s novel that I’ve mentioned, Christmas Carol, Mr. Smith, and Miracle, all enfold the political in the personal, reducing a political situation to a matter of human character, and showing a generous personality winning out over a cynical one. Reed implicitly argues that a similar ideological effect is accomplished by Reagan’s commercial success as the “likeable” President. Not for the first time in American history, but perhaps most remarkably, a President’s politics are obscured by his transfiguration into a fictively endearing mass media personality.

     

    Reed’s The Terrible Twos deliberately obstructs the kind of metamorphosis of politics into individual personality that is so emphatically present in his source text Miracle on 34th St. This is where Reed’s postmodernist replacement of character with caricature comes in: Big North is a cold-blooded operation, and the “real” Santa Claus is a mere corporate stooge, not a kindly old gent like Miracle’s Kris Kringle. There is no pretense that the “reality,” the mimed authenticity, of this Santa Claus means anything more than the company’s ability to buy the name: no one at Big North, including their Santa, even considers the idea that the personality of Santa might have symbolic efficacy–he is nothing but an ersatz, infinitely reproducible trademark for Christmas consumerism.

     

    The Terrible Twos presents not just a critique of commercialism and its lack of authenticity, but a revolt against it that takes the form of a hermetic inquiry into Church history–the “underground revisionism” alluded to in my title. As he becomes corporate property, the historical identity of Nicholas (known as Claus in northern Europe) as a populist Christian saint becomes more and more effaced. The self-imposed task of the Nicolaites, the secret society that opposes itself to Big North’s official, corporate Santa Claus in The Terrible Twos, is to resurrect the forgotten radical historicity of St. Nicholas, to oppose the phoniness of mass culture by invoking the subversive reality of popular tradition.

     

    Like the Mutafikah in Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, the Nicolaites have formed a sect intent on returning a degraded symbol to its original, authentic power. In Mumbo Jumbo, the Mutafikah are a secret society that makes a career of “liberating” works of art from Western museums and returning them to their African, Asian or Native American places of origin. The Mutafikah stand against the Atonist (Christo- and Eurocentric) effort to reduce all culture to a single Christianized meaning–or else destroy it. But the Mutafikah are oddly comparable to Mumbo Jumbo‘s Atonists, who are equipped with their own secret societies, the Teutonic Knights and the Knights Templar, in their desire for singular and authentic cultural origins–origins with a racial basis.36 Reed’s purpose is not to engage in a moralizing comparison of the exclusionary essentialisms that sometimes inhabit radical critiques of a ruling ideology with the more palpable destruction wrought by that ideology. Instead, Reed, in Nietzschean fashion, implies the difficulty of achieving a truly radical break from any oppressive mode of thought without inadvertently duplicating its repressive need to exclude the other. Reed, like Ellison in his depiction of the Brotherhood in Invisible Man, asks whether a radical, conspiratorial alternative to the reigning culture is truly an alternative, if it is bound to reproduce some aspects of the oppression it protests. 37 Like the Mutafikah, the Nicolaites in The Terrible Twos are a thinly veiled allegory of 1960s radicalism: Black Peter takes over the Nicolaites as Black Power swayed white radicals in the ’60s. These groups’ efforts to establish an adversarial culture based on a faith in native origins are criticized by Reed in much the same terms he uses to attack essentialist definitions of “black aesthetics” and negritude.38 Refusing the belief in an exclusivist and prescriptive, rather than a multicultural, black art that was sometimes featured in the Black Aesthetics movement, Reed proposes in place of this purism a multicultural synthesis derived from the syncretism of African and Asian religions, “Neohoodooism.” In aligning his own critical principles with the African New World belief system of vodoun, Reed proclaims his place in African-American tradition while refusing the essentialist definitions of this tradition that would reject syncretism or the multicultural as a contamination of origins.

     

    Papa LaBas, the sly, knowing old man in Louisiana Red and Mumbo Jumbo is, of course, a major deity in vodoun. In Mumbo Jumbo, LaBas invokes vodoun as both a refusal of the Atonists and an illuminating alternative to the monocultural purism of the Mutafikah and the Muslim editor, Abdul: LaBas speaks of “the ancient Vodun aesthetic: pantheistic, becoming, 1 which bountifully permits 1000s of spirits, as many as the imagination can hold.”39

     

    The vodoun aesthetics described by Papa LaBas is centrally relevant to the arguments that occur among The Terrible Twos‘ Nicolaites over the true character and identity of St. Nicholas. On the one hand, as I have said, the Nicolaites’ quest for definitive origins, for the real St. Nicholas, marks them as loyal to a univocality, a concept of absolute and singular identity, that vodoun refuses. For this reason Reed links the Nicolaites to another African New World belief, Rastafarianism, which fervently invests authority in a singular black origin and destiny. When Black Peter proposes replacing St. Nicholas with Haile Selassie, the Nicolaites are “split down the middle” over which deity to follow (44). Yet Brother Peter’s argument for Haile Selassie does partake of vodoun aesthetics in its oddball perception of cultural analogies; his logic is, finally, far more vodoun than Rastafarian. Although Black Peter aims to replace Nicholas with Selassie, the associationist logic of his argument is implicitly syncretic: it suggests a conflation of Nicholas and Selassie that is more vodoun than Rastafarian. Black Peter states that Selassie and Nicholas are “‘one and the same’” because they both ride on a white horse; Nicholas punished a thief as Selassie punished “the teef Mussolini,” Nicholas flew and so does Selassie (by airplane), and so on (46). Like the African religions from which it derives, vodoun routinely synthesizes deities of different tribes, including the Christian saints. For example, vodoun believers argued that since St. James is surrounded by red flags and carries a sword, he is essentially similar to the martial Yoruba deity Ogun, who is also clothed in red. But instead of being replaced by Ogun, St. James is conflated with him to become the vodoun spirit “Ogu-feraille.”40 Reed’s “neo- hoodooism” likewise blends Nicholas and Selassie in The Terrible Twos into “Selassie-Nicholas,” or, alternatively, “Nicholas-Selassie” (177), so that the syncretism of Europe and Africa is in its technique a distinctively African combination. In Reed’s earlier novel, Yellow Back Radio Broke Down, the Pope himself speaks of Europe’s unsuccessful attempt to Christianize the African slaves in the New World, an attempt thwarted by the capacity for multicultural juxtaposition implicit in the “elastic” discourse of vodoun: “the natives merely placed our art alongside theirs.”41

     

    The vodoun religion syncretizes not only West African spirits with Christian saints, but also the generally “cool” or peaceful West African religions with the fiercer beliefs of the Kongo. In fact, many scholars identify two seemingly opposed, but actually ambiguously combined aspects of vodoun, Rada and Petro: often a vodoun deity will have both a Rada and a Petro (that is, a good and a cruel) side. Petro, the aggressive, malevolent aspect of vodoun, derives its name from the legendary magician figure Dom Pedro (or Petre).42 Dom Pedro, of course, is Reed’s shady and mysterious Black Peter, present in some versions of the St. Nicholas legend as Nicholas’s sidekick or opposite number, his “blackamoor servant.” If Nicholas is benevolent and devoted to saving children, Black Peter, by contrast, is a kidnapper.43 The religious scholar Charles Jones notes that the pairing of the kindly Nicholas and the cruel Peter derives from an earlier ambiguity in the character of Nicholas himself, who is seen as both gentle and violent, a bearer of both gifts and switches.44 Gradually, as the Nicholas legend shifts to Northern Europe, Nicholas’ evil traits are exorcised and projected onto the figure of a black servant. Similarly, European Christianity projects its sins onto the Africans that it enslaves; the sins return, in Reed’s novel, via the image of Black Peter literally taking possession of Santa Claus, inflecting the ersatz, commercialized “innocence” of Christmas with the harsh truth of his satire. Reed thus restores the ethical ambiguity or doubleness of the original Nicholas, as well as the subversive power of this saint who openly criticized the Emperor Constantine,45 by allowing Black Peter to speak through him. It is interesting in this connection that, as Herskovits notes, St. Nicholas is regarded in Haitian vodoun as protector of the marassa, the spirits of twins.46

     

    The ambiguous combination of good and evil in Nicholas, so similar to the equivocal, mixed nature of vodoun gods like Ogoun and the marassa, is replicated in the character of childhood itself, at once innocent and terrible. (Thus the double-edged title, The Terrible Twos.) Reed describes the severe, perplexing nature of this dualism in a passage I shall cite at length: Two-year-olds. In mankind’s mirific misty past they were sacrificed to the winter gods. Maybe that’s why some gods act so young. Ogun, so childish that he slays both the slavemaster and the slave. Two-year-olds are what the id would look like if the id could ride a tricycle. That’s the innocent side of two, but the terrible side as well. A terrible world the world of two-year-olds. . . . Someone is constantly trying to eat them up. The gods of winter crave them– the gods of winter who, some say, are represented by the white horse that St. Nicholas, or Saint Nick, rides as he enters into Amsterdam, his blackamoor servant, Peter, following with his bag of switches and candy. Two-year-olds are constantly looking over their shoulders for the man in the shadows carrying the bag. Black Peter used to carry them across the border into Spain. (28)

     

    Just as Ogoun is both a healer and a warrior–and as the champion of the Haitian Revolution, a slayer of both master and slave47–so Nicholas/Peter are both gift-givers and conniving thieves. By reinjecting paganism’s vivid spiritual dualism into Christianity, Reed incarnates a world of shockingly energetic contrasts; a world that stands against the bland, homogenized commercialism of Big North’s, and Macy’s, corporate Santa. Part of this energy derives from the esoteric nature of Reed’s vision here, his zest for an off-the-wall hermeneutics that is, finally, too peculiar to be popular in the sense of “popularity” that Macy’s and Big North, and Miracle on 34th St., seem to have coopted. For Reed, Macy’s is mass culture as rootless, best-selling hype, despite its self-disguise as popular culture in Miracle. Reed presents, as a pointed contrast to the film’s duplicitous claim to folk status, a popular tradition just as strange as it is true, one that resists, and revises, mass culture through both its strangeness and its truth. Reed’s eccentricity finds its thematic roots in the popular culture of vodoun just as the bemused and outrageous improvisational comedy of his prose, the wry, crisply logical way with a joke that is so uniquely his, draws on the rhythms of African-American discourse. The result is a postmodernism in which Reed’s style perfectly illustrates his syncretic and subversive argument. If Reed does not invoke his connections to tradition in the service of an easily communal utopian optimism, but instead remains skeptical about the possibility of a full-scale alternative to the Atonists,48 he also insists on the historical presence of a secret, underground alternative to Wallflower culture, a revolt that is always occurring, in one scene or another.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Since the 1960s, the academy and the world of publishing have tended to favor those African-American writers who seem most overtly to invoke the communal inheritance of traditional African-American values. Writers like Andrea Lee who exhibit skepticism about the survival of tradition in a postmodern world are stigmatized by the critical establishment.

     

    2. See, among many other sources, Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983); Seyla Benhabib, “A Reply to Jean-Francois Lyotard,” in Linda Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990); Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991). Huyssen’s delineation of the limitations in Habermas’ championing of aesthetic modernity against postmodernity has influenced my own case for the critical capacity of postmodernism.

     

    3. It is important to note, of course, that Habermas also emphasizes the gains in human freedom that have stemmed from the Weberian rationalization processes that enable the state to survive.

     

    4. See Habermas’ Adorno prize lecture, translated as “Modernity: An Incomplete Project,” in Foster, ed., 3-15, and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.

     

    5. As Paul Smith, Rainer Nagele, and others have pointed out: see Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1988), 163-64, and Rainer Nagele, “Freud, Habermas and the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” New German Critique 22 (Winter 1981), 41-62.

     

    6. Mumbo Jumbo (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 211. Thus Mumbo Jumbo‘s tongue-in-cheek genealogy of Jes Grew–whose contagious character means that it can never really be pinned down as lineage or inheritance–stretches from Isis and Osiris, to Dionysus, to Jethro, to vodoun.

     

    7. On this point, see David Kaufmann, “The Profession of Theory,” PMLA May 1990, 519 -30.

     

    8. On this issue of what DuBois called “double consciousness,” see Robert Stepto’s landmark From Behind the Veil (Champaign-Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1979).

     

    9. On this point I have benefitted from Lawrence Hogue’s work in progress on African-American postmodernism, as well as a talk given by David Bradley at Trinity College (Hartford, CT), 1989.

     

    10. Here as elsewhere in this essay, I am indebted to Hal Foster’s analysis of the subcultural as a viable force in postmodernism: see “Readings in Cultural Resistance” in Recodings (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1985).

     

    11. This is Charles Altieri’s description of Paul Smith’s position in Altieri’s Canons and Consequences (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1990), 206. Altieri criticizes Smith for imagining a too easy transition from such practices of resistance to statements of political position, thus giving short shrift to those resistant modes, like Derrida’s and the later Barthes’, which do not add up to avowals of political responsibility. While agreeing fully with Altieri’s brilliant and subtle critique of Smith, I also have major misgivings concerning Altieri’s finding of deficiencies in Derrida’s and Barthes’s notions of responsiveness. For Altieri, the private, self-ironizing nature of Derrida’s later style needs to be compensated for by a publicly responsible or official subject, who will stabilize (or perhaps repress?) what is risky about such intimate ironies (see Canons, 209; see also Altieri’s essay on Ecce Homo in Daniel O’Hara, ed., Why Nietzsche Now? [Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1985], 410-11). I think that the model of compensation/stabilization, along with the zero-sum picture of bargaining, negotiation and consensus that tends to accompany Altieri’s official self, adds up to a dangerously limited way of conceiving the political. The invocation of the normative force of reasonable choice as a necessary supplement to aesthetics and private life is directly relevant to the antagonistic criticism of Reed. Instead of trying to make our private aesthetic obsessions publicly responsible by worrying that theorists like Nietzsche and Derrida, or writers like Reed, are not sufficiently interested in justifying liberal political judgment, I believe we ought to acknowledge–rather than look for ways of repressing–the gap between personal aesthetics and public responsibility, the unavoidable fact that defines (post)modern politics. Needless to say, my qualm here applies to Habermas, as well as Smith and Altieri.

     

    12. Frank Lentricchia, “Libra as Postmodern Critique,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 89 (1990), 431-53. (Essay originally published in Raritan, Spring 1989.) The passage cited is on 443.

     

    13. Lionel Trilling, “Freud: Within and Beyond Culture,” in Beyond Culture (New York: Viking, 1965). Freud, of course, was in fact Jewish, whereas the other “other cultures” cited in Trilling’s great essay were located purely in Freud’s imagination, not his biographical context. But, following a strategy which critical postmodernists might find appealing, Trilling tends to downplay this distinction: the adversarial use of the subculture/other culture takes precedence over the question of its literal historical presence.

     

    14. I am indebted to Michael Jarrett for the analogy between Reed and sampling.

     

    15. Lentricchia has noted the total absence of his own ethnicity from DeLillo’s work (in “The American Writer as Bad Citizen–Introducing Don DeLillo,” SAQ 1990 [89, 2], 239-44); and Pynchon’s prestigious New England ancestry is played as an elaborate self-exploding joke in Gravity’s Rainbow. There is, of course, an analogy between Pynchon’s “preterite” and Reed’s “neohoodooism,” but Reed claims a concrete cultural context (even if a slippery and self- displacing one) for his aesthetic slogan as Pynchon does not. It should be understood that I am not arguing that contemporary writers “ought” to use subcultural tradition in Reed’s manner, nor that Reed is a better writer than Pynchon or DeLillo for their failure to do so.

     

    16. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey,” and James A. Snead, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” in Gates, ed., Black Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Methuen, 1984).

     

    17. The Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues (New York: Sire, 1983), whose title humorously endows commodified pop with a quasi-religious aura borrowed from alien traditions, draws on Nigerian Juju music; their later record Naked (New York: Sire, 1988) is similarly indebted to Zairian soukous. For a very useful treatment of the analogy between modern art and “primitive” art as an attempt to construct “universalism,” see James Clifford, “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern,” in his The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988).

     

    18. For a treatment of this issue of appropriation in the context of the Cuban Afro-Cubanismo movement, see Roberto Gonzalez-Echevarria, Alejo Carpentier, The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977).

     

    19. Reed’s status as an African-American writer who claims Africa-derived folk culture for his own just as Yeats claims Celtic folklore should prevent us from simply identifying his authorial ideology in respect to Africa with that of Picasso, Stravinsky et. al.; one might choose the claiming of African folk culture in Aime Cesaire, Jay Wright, Edward Brathwaite, Toni Morrison and Derek Walcott for an extremely various set of comparisons to Reed.

     

    20. I am here arguing against the easy conflation of ethnicity, political opposition, and postmodernism in Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1988), 60-70. Hutcheon programmatically ignores the conflicts among modernist, postmodernist, and nostalgic or premodern desires in texts such as Morrison’s Tar Baby in order to claim a (false) harmony between postmodernism and African-American self-assertion.

     

    21. Lee Breuer’s dreadful Warrior Ant comes to my mind here, but any reader will be able to supply his/her favorite examples.

     

    22. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973).

     

    23. Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen (New Paltz, NY: Book Collectors Society, 1970 [1st ed. 1953]), 134.

     

    24. James A. Snead, “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., Black Literature and Literary Theory, 72. See also 67: “In black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is ‘there for you to pick up when you come back to get it.’ If there is a goal . . . it continually ‘cuts’ back to the start, in the musical meaning of ‘cut’ as an abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break. . . .” For a very helpful analysis of the technique of “cutting” in African music, see J.M. Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979).

     

    25. See Kimberly Benston, Baraka: the Renegade and the Mask (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1976).

     

    26. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Signifying Monkey,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, 297.

     

    27. Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987), 56; see 69.

     

    28. See Cornel West, “Minority Discourse and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation,” in Yale Journal of Criticism 1 (1987), 199. West’s essay is a very important and persuasive statement, though I disagree locally with his view of Reed.

     

    29. A comparison might also be drawn between Reed and Don DeLillo, whose recent Libra advances a conspiracy theory of the JFK assassination not unlike the conspiracies so doggedly pursued in Pynchon’s and Reed’s novels, though DeLillo’s tone of dire, hard-boiled historicity differs from theirs. For remarks on Reed and Pynchon, see Reginald Martin, Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1983), 2; see also 43.

     

    30. This point is argued by Fredric Jameson in an interview in Social Text 17 (1987), 45, in which Jameson contrasts the passivity of the postmodern individual subject to the “collective subject” present in “third world literature.” This “collective subject” is an interpretive construct similar to Baker’s “common sense of the tribe,” the communal emphasis of much African-American literature. See the related (and problematic) article by Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” in Social Text 15 (1986), and the response by Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness,” Social Text 17 (1987).

     

    31. For two opposed points of view on this issue in Pynchon (whether his notion of the subversive is sinister and hopeless or liberating), see, respectively, the essays by George Levine and Tony Tanner in Levine and David Leverenz, eds., Mindful Pleasures (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976).

     

    32. The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 170-71. (The passage is cited by Tony Tanner in Harold Bloom, ed., Thomas Pynchon (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 188; see Tanner’s commentary on 187.) The third alternative that Oedipa considers–that “a labyrinthine plot has been mounted against” her–exposes the negative potential of the secrecy whose positive side is the liberating “density of dream.” Among the many remarkable features of this passage one might notice Pynchon’s punning connection, in lamenting “exitlessness,” between American failure and the sense of constriction, on the one hand, and American success and wide open spaces, on the other (cf. Latin exitus and Spanish exito)–a frontier ideology also dear to Reed (see, among other texts, his introduction to his anthology of California poetry, Calafia [Berkeley, CA: Y’Bird, 1979]). The dominant image conjured by Pynchon’s “exitlessness” is that of a Southern California freeway like those driven so often by Oedipa, but without exits: the frontier as labyrinth or imprisoning web.

     

    33. The possibility of subversively liberating moments does, as Levine insists, exist in Pynchon, but these are only moments, not full-scale traditions or communities. The radical or revolutionary movements in the book, even when grounded in community, are just as macabrely threatening as the establishment they combat (for example, the mass- suicidal Hereros of Gravity’s Rainbow [315ff.]).

     

    34. For a useful survey of Reed’s adversarial relation to various “black aesthetic” critics, chiefly Addison Gayle, Houston Baker, and Amiri Baraka, see Martin’s book. Reed asserts that he writes within an African-American aesthetic, but he identifies such an aesthetic with a stylistic and structural approach (similar to the concept of “cutting” described by Snead), rather than with revolutionary content, as does Baraka. See Martin, 2; see also Reed’s important introductions to the anthologies Yardbird Lives (New York, 1978) and 19 Necromancers from Now, as well as his famous run-in with the socialist realist Bo Shmo in Yellow Back Radio, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969) 34-35. A simplified critique of Reed’s polemic in this passage is presented by Michael Fabre, “Postmodernist Rhetoric in Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke Down,” in P. Bruck and W. Karrer, eds., The Afro-American Novel Since 1960 (Amsterdam: Gruner, 1982), 177, who sees it as championing “art” against “commitment.”

     

    35. Page citations to The Terrible Twos are from the Atheneum edition (New York: Atheneum, 1982).

     

    36. Despite the multiplicity of the cultures that the Mutafikah want to liberate, their faith is in the singularity of each of these cultures, and in their own singularity as quarrelsome representatives of these cultures. A Mexican tells an Anglo revolutionary during a Mutafikah meeting that he suspects him because “you carry [Cortes and Pizarro] in your veins as I carry the blood of Moctezuma”; a Chinese attacks a black member by claiming that “you North American blacks were”–and are–“docile”– because “the strong [Africans] were left behind in South America.” (Mumbo Jumbo, 86-87.)

     

    37. For recent remarks along these lines, see Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987), 102.

     

    38. In his Preface to the 1975 anthology Yardbird Lives (ed. with Al Young; New York: Grove, 1978?), Reed attacks the critics who “in 1970” (just before the publication of the volume edited by Addison Gayle, The Black Aesthetic) “were united in their attempt to circumscribe the subject and form of Afro-American writing.” He goes on to announce that what he calls “the ethnic phase of American literature” is now over, “counterculture ethnic, black ethnic, red ethnic, feminist ethnic, academic ethnic, beat ethnic, New York School ethnic, and all of the other churches who believe their choir sings the best.” Reed proclaims that “the multicultural renaissance is larger than the previous ones because, like some African and Asian religions, it can absorb them” (Yardbird Lives, 13-14).

     

    39. Mumbo Jumbo, 35.

     

    40. See R.F. Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (New York: Random House, 1983), 172-77, Deren, Divine Horsemen, and Melville J. Herskovits, The New World Negro (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1966), 324-25, which lists other vodoun syntheses of pagan and Christian.

     

    41. Yellow Back Radio, 153.

     

    42. See Thompson, 179ff. On the ethical ambiguity of vodoun deities and its relation to the twin modes Petro and Rada. On Dom Petro/Petre, see Thompson, 179. It is interesting to note that the Bacchic or Satyrlike sexuality of Reed’s Black Peter (revealed as a clever impostor in the sequel, The Terrible Threes, 40, 42) can be cross- referenced to the phallic energy frequently associated with the trickster figure in African legend via a pun concealed in his name (the “black snake” of blues tradition). On the “phallic trickster,” see Houston Baker, Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984), 183ff. Baker remarks that “the trickster is also a cultural gift-bearer” (like Peter/Nicholas!).

     

    43. St. Nicholas was noted for rescuing children, usually in groups of three.

     

    44. See Charles W. Jones, St. Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978), 43, 61, 307ff. See also 309: Nicholas “thinks in dualities.” (Reed evidently relied heavily on Jones’ study in writing The Terrible Twos.) The duality persists, in diluted form, in the present-day Santa who may give lumps of coal as well as candy.

     

    45. For Nicholas’ defiance of the Emperor Constantine, see Jones, 34.

     

    46. Herskovits, 324. On the marassa as representative of “man’s twinned nature,” see Deren, 38-41.

     

    47. See Deren, 130-37.

     

    48. Such skepticism is even more prominent in the sequel to The Terrible Twos, 1989’s The Terrible Threes, which ends with the officially-sponsored kidnapping of the now-leftist Dean Clift.

     

  • Two Moroccan Storytellers in Paul Bowles’ Five Eyes: Larbi Layachi and Ahmed Yacoubi

    John R. Maier

    State University of New York, College at Brockport
    jmaier@brock1p

     

    If, as Michel Foucault claims, “Western man” has become a “confessing animal” with a narrative literature appropriate to that role, does the Western author/confessor elicit from the cultural other a story that makes sense either to the priest or the patient? The Western listener in this case is American expatriate Paul Bowles. The other culture is Moroccan, on the margins of the complex Arab- Muslim culture of the Middle East and North Africa. As the country in that Arab-Muslim complex with the easiest access for Europeans, a country that has argued within itself whether it ought to belong more to the Arab League or to the European community, Morocco is also on the margins of the West. Indeed, its very name means, in Arabic, the “farthest West.”

     

    We ask the others (“primitives,” nomads, Third World peoples, traditional societies) to speak to us–and listen well. We take photographs of them, and analyze the photographs. The professionals in this enterprise are anthropologists and the sociologists like Moroccan Fatima Mernissi, who studied in her own country and then went to Paris and to Brandeis to complete Western-style Ph.D. work and who now interviews non-literate Moroccan women. The women tell her their life stories, and she lets them talk without much imposing of the Western autobiographical styles we have been developing since St. Augustine.

     

    American anthropologists have had ready access to Morocco. Many of them–Clifford Geertz, Paul Rabinow, and Vincent Crapanzano especially–have come, like their counterparts in literary studies, to question the fundamental assumptions of their profession. In different ways they have found ways to have Moroccans speak: for Geertz, through symbols like stories told of 17th Century Sufi saints; for Rabinow, through the hermeneutics of fieldwork (following Paul Ricoeur to the “comprehension of the self through the detour of the comprehension of the other”); and for Crapanzano, through the stories and esoteric lore of a Meknes tile-maker who is convinced he is married to the seductive she-demon ‘A’isha Qandisha. All entered Morocco and found ways to have Moroccans speak to them.

     

    These anthropologists are witnesses, among many others, to what Richard E. Palmer has called the “end of the modern era,” and to what Palmer claims is a “major change in worldview” to “postmodernity” (363-364). The postmodern turn is evident immediately in the short stories and novels of Paul Bowles (1910- ). (A possible exception is The Spider’s House.) While there has been some experimenting with point of view, e.g., “The Eye” in Midnight Mass and “New York 1965” in Unwelcome Words, a key element is probably Bowles’ refusal to accept the assumptions of modern Western realistic fiction about character. How much theorizing about literature this has involved is moot. My guess is that Bowles’ refusal of the modern notion of character, derived from an image of the self that had developed during the period of modern philosophy (i.e., since Descartes), comes from his reading of eccentric fiction–from a lifelong interest in Edgar Allan Poe and an adult interest in Surrealism.

     

    Bowles’ fiction seems at first to be straightforward realistic fiction, one of the defining characteristics of modernism. But the modernist readings nearly always fail. Characters have little “depth.” They rarely “develop.” Instead of closure, there is most often irony: “relationships” collapse, dialogue falls apart. There is no “self” such as has been assumed in the modern West. In the non-Western storytelling of non-literate Moroccans Bowles found a very different sense of self.

     

    One way to detect this postmodern turn in Bowles’ work is to look at Bowles’ translations of Moroccan storytellers. By the mid-1960s he had almost abandoned his own fiction writing for the strange bicultural hybrids that were produced by Bowles–especially Five Eyes (1979). To see what is happening in these texts–literature in English (for an English-reading audience, of course) whose origin is oral performance in Moroccan Arabic–consider a distinction that has arisen in the “modern” world and fundamentally constitutes the West’s image of itself as “modern,” namely a distinction frequently encountered in the social sciences: “traditional” vs. “modern.” Although it is especially evident in anthropology, the distinction is the latest in the West’s powerful “gaze” upon the cultural other: “traditional” replacing to a great extent the earlier “primitive,” “modern” replacing the earlier image (still sometimes found in advertizing) of “civilized” society.

     

    In The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing The Middle East (1958), Daniel Lerner collapsed the elements of a “modern” society–a certain type of economic development, urbanism, literacy, media exposure, and political participation–into a simple, telling comment. In the modern or “participant” society, “most people go through school, read newspapers, receive cash payments in jobs they are legally free to change, buy goods for cash in an open market, vote in elections which actually decide among competing candidates, and express opinions on many matters which are not their personal business” (50-1). The psychological mechanism he isolated in the change from a traditional to a modern society Lerner called “psychic mobility” or “empathy”:

     

    The mobile person is distinguished by a high capacity for identification with new aspects of his environment; he comes equipped with the mechanisms needed to incorporate new demands upon himself that arise outside of his habitual experience. These mechanisms for enlarging a man's identity operate in two ways. Projection facilitates identification by assigning to the object certain preferred attributes of the self--others are "incorporated" because they are like me. (Distantiation or negative identification, in the Freudian sense, results when one projects onto others certain disliked attributes of the self.) Introjection enlarges identity by attributing to the self certain desirable attributes of the object--others are "incorporated" because I am like them or want to be like them. We shall use the word empathy as shorthand for both these mechanisms. (49)

     

    Lerner, a sociologist, mentions along the way that “the typical literary form of the modern epoch, the novel, is a conveyance of disciplined empathy. Where the poet once specialized in self-expression, the modern novel reports his sustained imagination of the lives of others” (52).

     

    Concepts like “literary realism,” thought to support the novel as Lerner conceives of it, derive in part from a literary tradition, from texts that form a tradition. We increase our psychic mobility by reading literary works. But we also draw in our reading upon socially constructed concepts of the self. When such concepts of the self, maintained by a culture other than our own, clash with our own, we find it difficult to accept the other’s self- disclosure.

     

    Narratives coming to us from the margins of the Arab- Muslim world can be particularly trying. Arabic literature is old enough and prestigious enough–no matter how small the percentage of readers literate enough to read Standard Arabic might be–to exert influences that are not easily detected by the Western observer. Edward Said, for example, has noticed that “Arabic literature before the twentieth century has a rich assortment of narrative forms–qissa, sira, hadith, khurafa, ustura, khabar, nadira, maqama–of which no one seems to have become, as the European novel did, the major narrative type” (Allen 17). John A. Haywood (126-137) and more recently Roger Allen (9- 19) have struggled with the problem of distinguishing Western influences on Arabic narratives, novels and short stories, from the influences of the Arabic literary tradition.1

     

    Bowles, who has never claimed to have mastered modern Standard Arabic, the dialect used for writing throughout the Arab world, deliberately sought out non-literate storytellers. His preference for the oral performance is an indicator of much that has changed in the Western view of the non-Western world. (Bowles remains, though, one of the great examples of Lerner’s “mobile personality,” a modernist feature that would be impossible for Bowles to suppress.2)

     

    In 1958, Lerner could confidently oppose “illiterate” with “enlightenment,” so obvious was it to him that literacy was valuable without question. Since then much research into the distinctive changes introduced by literacy has qualified that easy confidence. When Walter J. Ong distinguishes the psychodynamics of orality from the thought and expression of literacy, he does not devalue the former:

     

              Additive rather than subordinative;
          Aggregative rather than analytic;
          Redundant or "copious" vs. spare and economical;
          Traditionalist vs. experimental;
          Close to the human lifeworld vs. knowledge at a
               distance;
          Agonistically toned vs. abstractions that disengage;
          Empathetic and participatory rather than objectively
               distanced;
          Homeostatic vs. novelty; and
          Situational rather than abstract (37-49)

     

    (Note that Ong considers the oral culture “empathetic and participatory” in a much different way from Daniel Lerner, who sees the empathy not in the known and the traditional, but for the other.) In the case of Bowles’ translations, the non-literate Ahmed Yacoubi and Larbi Layachi are certainly “traditional,” according to Lerner’s model, and marked by the orality of Ong’s. The one who elicits their stories, Bowles himself, remains a modern in Lerner’s sense, since he cannot avoid the empathy that is so much a part of modern society.

     

    At least one reason for Bowles’ incessant travel outside the United States and his settling into Tangier in the late 1940s was a dislike of most everything Western and “civilized.” He repeated Claude Levi-Strauss’ observation that the West needs to “dump vast quantities of waste matter, which it dumps on less fortunate peoples” (Their Heads are Green vii). Levi-Strauss had written, “What travel discloses to us first of all is our own garbage, flung in the face of humanity.” To this Bowles added: “My own belief is that the people of the alien cultures are being ravaged not so much by the by-products of our civilization, as by the irrational longing on the part of members of their own educated minorities to cease being themselves and become Westerners” (vii). The stories he translated, not from written sources but from his recordings of oral performances, are successful to the extent that Bowles lets the other speak, in writing, in the best American English: he lets them be themselves.

     

    Daisy Hilse Dwyer, another of the American anthropologists who have had access to Morocco, based her study of “male and female in Morocco,” Images and Self- Images (1978), on Moroccan folktales she recorded there. She followed Geertz in seeing a different concept of “personhood” operating in Morocco and evident in the folktales–a self socially embedded, relational, interactional: “personality or character varies rather flexibly from relationship to relationship” (182). This is in contrast to the Western stress on the person as “isolate.”

     

    If the sense of self, personhood, character contrasts strongly with the West’s self-concept, then stories, whether they are consciously fictions or self-disclosures, are not likely to have the same shape as modern Western fiction. Fatima Mernissi defended her practice in interviewing non- literate Moroccan women, in which she violated “Rule No. 1 that I learned at the Sorbonne and at the American university where I was trained in ‘research technique’: to maintain objectivity toward the person being interviewed” (Doing Daily Battle 18). And she violated Rule No. 2 in the way she developed “as much as possible an attitude of self-criticism” and testing of subjectivity as she edited the interviews. She let the speakers, who had never been given the opportunity/task to tell of themselves in such a (Western) fashion, speak in as comfortable a manner as she could allow. The results were life stories that are “relaxed, often confusing” in the way time sequences and events are narrated. “An illiterate woman who has virtually no control over her life, subject to the whims and will of others, has a much more fluid sense of time than an educated Western reader, who is used to analysing time in an attempt to control it” (20). A non-Western sense of time operates in the stories Bowles translates as well. Whatever one makes of the “reality” in literary “realism,” so important to the modern West, reality is rather differently shaped in the Moroccans’ accounts.3

     

    Bowles has provided English-speaking readers with stories that challenge their ability to translate a culture very different from their own. Among the tales collected in Five Eyes (1979) are two that play on the Western reader’s expectations. One seems bizarre indeed, and the other only too easily read. “The Night Before Thinking,” by Ahmed Yacoubi (1931- ), and “The Half-Brothers” by Larbi Layachi (1940- ), Moroccan storytellers, illustrate an unusual hermeneutical bind.

     

    Both Ahmed Yacoubi and Larbi Layachi are non-literate storytellers the expatriate Bowles met in Morocco. In “Notes on the Work of the Translator,” Bowles indicated his admiration for oral storytelling such as he had heard in the cafes of Tangier. Once the tape-recorder had arrived in Morocco, in 1956, he began recording oral tales. Like all the spoken texts in Five Eyes, “The Night Before Thinking” and “The Half-Brothers” were performed without stopping, at a single sitting. Yacoubi’s story derives from traditional Moroccan materials, and is full of imagination; Larbi’s story, on the other hand, strikes the reader as a realistic piece, more like an oral history than a traditional North African tale.

     

    As popular as storytellers are in Morocco, the stories have no appreciable value there “as literature.” Virtually every traveler has commented on the storytellers in public places, like the square known as Djemaa el Fna in Marrakech, where they perform daily to enthusiastic audiences made up not of Western tourists but of the people who know the traditions and the languages, Arabic and Berber. Elias Cannetti, who visited the square in the 1960s, was struck by the contrast between the quiet scribes who made themselves available to the many who are not literate in the society (and with whom, as a writer, he felt a kind of kinship), and the flamboyant storytellers:

    The largest crowds are drawn by the storytellers. It is around them that people throng most densely and stay longest. Their performances are lengthy; an inner ring of listeners squat on the ground and it is some time before they get up again. Others, standing, form an outer ring; they, too, hardly move, spellbound by the storyteller's words and gestures. . . . Having seldom felt at ease among the people of our zones whose life is literature--despising them because I despise something about myself, and I think that something is paper--I suddenly found myself here among authors I could look up to since there was not a line of theirs to be read. (77, 79)

     

     

    Thanks in large measure to Milman Parry, Albert Lord, Walter J. Ong, and now a journal devoted to Oral Tradition, the debate over orality and literacy has become respectable in the academy, and the value of oral narratives is gradually coming clear to those whose teaching and scholarship have been almost entirely preoccupied with the written word. Before such a revaluation can take place in Morocco, however, an almost insurmountable obstacle has to be overcome. The gap between Modern Standard Arabic, the dialect of Arabic used in writing, and the regional dialects of Arabic is much greater than, say, between Appalachian English and British Received Pronunciation or American Broadcast Standard. Any literate Arab speaker can understand Modern Standard, whether it is written in Iraq, Egypt or the Maghrib; but the local dialects are often mutually unintelligible. Because of that gap, Arabic provided the classical case of what linguists call “diglossia.”4 The rich nuances of an oral tale may delight the Arab speaker, but it will not be enough to raise the tale to the prestige of writing.

     

    Ahmed Yacoubi5 and Larbi Layachi are in a peculiar situation, then. Their oral tales are not available to Moroccan literature, and the English translations are the only texts available to any audience. The original situation of the oral performance, the Sitz im Leben, is not accessible; recordings in the Moghrebi Arabic dialect have not been made available to the public. The written text, in American English, is the product of a collaboration between Bowles and the storytellers; it is all that remains of what was first of all an oral performance in a culture and language strikingly different from the English-speaking readers. The “authors” of the tales find themselves unable to read the texts.

     

    AHMED YACOUBI’S “THE NIGHT BEFORE THINKING”

     

    Ahmed Yacoubi’s “The Night Before Thinking” is a tale in a vein familiar to Middle East and North African storytellers, a tale of magic and the supernatural.6 For that reason it is both familiar to the Western reader–after all, Western literature is filled with magic (Dr. Faustus, the romance tradition)–and inaccessible to us. “Magic moonshine” is appropriate to the romance-writer, as Hawthorne pointed out long ago, so that “the floor of our familiar room [becomes] a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other” (38). But serious treatment of magic is reserved for special genres–children’s literature, where it is supposedly appropriate to the “magical phase” of human development (to be cast off in normal development), or science fiction and fantasy, where it is part of the game.7

     

    “The Night Before Thinking” begins in one generation and ends in another. In revenge for the killing of her brother Difdaf, one “Raqassa” (whose real name turns out to be Aaklaa bent Aaklaa) lures an unsuspecting Hakim into her power. Instead of killing him, she ends up marrying Hakim, and a strange boy is born of their union. Raqassa possesses very powerful magic, inherited from her father and drawing support from Satan. Thus it is not entirely unexpected that the strange child finds a way to kill both parents. With their death the daughter, whose growth had been stunted for twenty-five years, begins to grow.

     

    Yacoubi’s bizarre tale includes a reversal that might go almost unnoticed by the Western reader but would have fit into the familiar pattern of traditional narratives. The terrible seductress and mother, Raqassa, explains that she gained “the power” because of an accident of birth. When her mother, Lalla Halalla, was carrying twins in her womb, she slipped while running, and the girl was born five minutes before the boy. “The one who came out first had to be given the power,” and so she, not Difdaf, gained the power that is exhibited, for example, in throwing “a darkness” over the face of Hakim, spreading his lips all over his cheeks, and seizing the man with the force of “sixty thousand kilos” (24), capturing him. The story is filled with oddments of magic, burning “bakhour,” an “egg of Rokh el Bali,” humans turning to smoke.

     

    Later, when Raqassa and Hakim produce a most unusual child–a boy with eyes all over his body–they try to explain how they had been able to produce a child with such strange powers. The child himself only laughs at them:

     

    What a lot of lies you both tell! he said to them. One of you says the eye in the top of my head comes from one thing. The other says the eye the middle of my forehead comes from something else. You are saying that your eyes are in my eyes. I already existed before you ever met each other. I was hidden and neither one of you knew me. Only God knew I was going to be like this. You didn't know. Now you think you understand all about it. You don't know anything. How can anyone know what's hidden inside the belly of a woman? It's God who decided I should be like this. He cut out my pattern. And neither of you knew how I was going to look. It was written in the books that I was going to be born like this. It was already known. (33)

     

    The second child they produce is a girl, strangely deformed and very weak. Twenty-five years later she remained as tiny as she was at the time of her birth. When the son manages to kill the parents, the girl begins immediately to grow. Instead of the live parents, the children keep only two three-colored cloths, one representing the father, the other representing the mother. The son asks his sister which of the cloths she wants. “The girl laughed. She said: I take my mother. Because I’m a virgin. And the boy always goes with his father” (35). The power is returned to the proper relationship between male and female. In spite of the supposed gap of twenty-five years, the offspring of Hakim and Raqassa remain pre- adolescent children, but they are now prepared to grow into their “normal” roles.

     

    “Normal” roles are not necessarily the same in different cultures, of course. In an often-cited essay on “Family Structure and Feminine Personality,” Nancy Chodorow called attention to the Moroccan Muslim family as one that, even in a patrilineal, patrilocal society, maintained the self-esteem of women–largely because daughters see themselves, in a way strikingly different from daughters in the West, as “allies against oppression,” able to develop strong attachment to and identification with other women (65). Obviously, the family in “The Night Before Thinking” is a perversion of Moroccan norms, due to the peculiar situation of Raqassa. Chodorow’s view of Moroccan Muslim mother/daughter relationships derives from the work of Moroccan sociologist, Fatima Mernissi. Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society explores the family in Arab-Muslim tradition and in emerging new models (165-77).

     

    Larbi Layachi’s “The Half-brothers”

     

    In reading Larbi Layachi’s “The Half-Brothers,”8 as in tracking down political chicanery, it is useful to follow the money. The ten-year-old Larbi works with the fishermen, pulling nets, for wages that rarely seem to have connection with the work expended: five rials and a basketful of fish one day, three rials another, one rial on yet another occasion. The boy seems not to expect more (or less), and he does not complain. One day when he is feeling quite ill and barely able to pull the nets, the other fishermen notice it, and suggest he take the day off, but Larbi insists on working (62). He gets his three rials anyway. He is paid twelve pesetas for a basket filled with metal he dug out of a garbage dump (71). He pays a rial for half a loaf of bread, a can of tuna fish, and two oranges (72). Two bilyoun for the cinema (68). He finds in the garbage a five-rial note, which he had first thought only a peseta (74). Usually he gets three gordas for a kilo of bones he sells to “a Jew who lived near the bull-ring” (70-1).

     

    Bowles offers no dollar equivalence for these exotic monies.9 In one sense it does not matter: the amounts are so small relative to the wealth of an American reader that the meaningless currency is a powerful sign of poverty. From the point of view of a ten-year-old, money is simply “there,” a fact in a world that does not require explanation or expectations. But the arbitrary payment of wages, the caprice in finding money on the streets, the crude exploitation of the boys’ step-father, who regularly takes everything the boy makes at his job (while the other son attends school and is forbidden to work)–are part of a world that seems to lack cause and effect. The boy is industrious enough and clever to survive. He does not try to put the experience in a “larger context,” and neither does the storyteller Larbi, who offers almost nothing in the way of comment incidents in his past. The money is a gift, baraka, the will of Allah. Paul Rabinow, who did his fieldwork in Morocco, noted that

     

    poverty does not carry the stigma in Morocco which it does in America. It indicates only a lack of material goods at the present time, nothing more. Although regrettable, it does not reflect unfavorably on one's character. It simply means that Allah has not smiled on one, for reasons beyond normal understanding, but that things are bound to change soon. (116)

     

    What is most surprising to the American reader is the apparent lack of causal connectedness between events narrated in “The Half-Brothers.” True, the story leads to the moment when the ten year old decides that he will no longer return to the home in which he is exploited and beaten by his step-father. Henceforth Larbi will live on the beach. The man, Si Abdullah, pockets the five rial note Larbi found in the garbage and forces the boy out of the house to work, though Larbi is not feeling well.

     

    I went out. I was thinking: I'll work. But the money I earn I'll spend for food, and I won't go back home at all. I can eat here on the beach. And I was thinking that it would be better for me to sleep in one of the boats than live there in the house. (74)

     

    Larbi works that day, dizzy and with a headache, and takes the two and a half rials the chief gives him to a cafe. After dark he finds a boat and sleeps warmly under the fish netting in the boat. When, in the morning, he is asked, “Why didn’t you go home to bed?” the boy answers simply, “I didn’t go . . . . That’s all. After that I lived on the beach” (75).

     

    The story thus presents a string of episodes, a linear development, a clear structure with episodes leading to the decision of the boy to live on the beach, but with little of the sense common to Western realistic fiction that all details fit into a larger, causally related whole. The problem emerges early, in the very different treatment given the boy and his half-brother by the mother’s second husband, Si Abdullah. The episodes are strung together without moving toward a climax of intensity. Sometimes the father is awful, occasionally generous; he is always seen from the outside, and there is no interest in (and no comment on) the father or the mother. They act; that is all. The boys, on the other hand, are somewhat rounded but move about unconsciously, accepting social norms that are often puzzling to the outsider, the Western reader.

     

    In “Africa Minor,” Bowles describes a “culture where there is a minimum of discrepancy between dogma and natural behavior”: “In Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco there are still people whose lives proceed according to the ancient pattern of concord between God and man, agreement between theory and practice, identity of word and flesh” (Their Heads are Green 22). The unself-consciousness of “The Half-Brothers” is a narrative correlate of that ancient pattern. The story retains some features common to oral tales. A formula, “Let us say . . . ,” is repeated throughout the piece. The boy makes his money pulling the nets of the fishermen, and the activity is repeated a number of times in virtually the same language. In almost no way does it resemble the storytelling traits of “The Night Before Thinking,” traits that go back at least as far as The Thousand and One Nights.

     

    Cultures mix and appear to clash as “naturally”– unreflectively–as a rainstorm causes the shed where the boy and the family donkey are housed together to flood. The West is present, not remarked upon, not remarkable: the Spanish (simply identified with “the Nazarenes,” 60-61); canned food, the telephone, an ambulance, needles in the hospital. The cinema is remarked upon, since it was the first time the boy had seen a movie (69). “I bought a ticket at the window and went in. That was the first time I had been inside a cinema. Now I see why people like to live in the city. This theatre is very fine, I thought. There were pictures of war, and there were airplanes flying” (69). As is usual in Bowles’ own fiction, even the remarkable is presented with no indication of changes in intensity, in intonation, rarely an indication of enthusiasm. This, too, is part of the cultural code: all facts are equal, and equally valued.10

     

    The voice of “The Half-Brothers” may be Larbi’s, but the questions that prompt it–the questions raised by the hidden author/audience–are Western, American. Larbi is prompted to talk in a way that is not a traditionally Moroccan way of speaking. Rather it is a confessional manner that, as Michel Foucault has insisted, increasingly characterizes Western discourse. The result is a story that is closer to oral history, the purest example of this new authorship in the West, than to fictional modes–the portraits of the artist, for example–that help to organize the narratives.

     

    Foucault, in volume one of The History of Sexuality (1976), pointed out that in the West, since the Middle Ages “at least,” confession has been a major ritual in the production of “truth.” “We have since become a singularly confessing society” (59). There is a certain irony in Paul Bowles prompting the words of Larbi, since he is notoriously reticent about revealing himself directly, even in his autobiography. Without Stopping (1972) records that Bowles learned early that he “would always be kept from doing what I enjoyed and forced to do that which I did not” by his family, particularly by his father. “Thus I became an expert in the practice of deceit, at least insofar as general mien and facial expressions were concerned.” He could not, however, bring himself to lie, “inasmuch as for me the word and its literal meaning had supreme importance” (17). Except for the hostility toward his family, Bowles’ autobiography is striking in the way it avoids self- disclosure and analysis of the many people, famous and not, who crowd the pages of Without Stopping.11

     

    Foucault noted the change in the West that was first religious and legal but came to have great significance for literature. He rightly emphasized the power of the one eliciting the confession:

     

    For a long time, the individual was vouched for by the reference of others and the demonstration of his ties to the commonweal (family, allegiance, protection); then he was authenticated by the discourse of truth he was able or obliged to pronounce concerning himself. The truthful confession was inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individualization by power. (58-9)

     

    As “Western man” became a “confessing animal,” according to Foucault, there was correspondingly a massive change in literature:

     

    We have passed from a pleasure to be recounted and heard, centering on the heroic or marvelous narration of "trials" of bravery or sainthood, to a literature ordered according to the infinite task of extracting from the depths of oneself, in between the words, a truth which the very form of the confession holds out like a shimmering image. (59)

     

    In “The Half-Brothers” Larbi is brought to a point where he can and must abandon his family, to live on the beach. Importantly Larbi does not become a writer, as Bowles had, or others, like Joyce, who inscribed their lives in “portraits.” Larbi is the one who was not educated and remained non-literate while Bowles recorded, translated, and wrote down the storyteller’s words. There is nothing in the story (or in Bowles’ comments on his non-literate storytellers) to indicate that there is anything wrong in that. (The one storyteller in Five Eyes who presented difficulties for Bowles was Mohammed Choukri, the only one to become literate and the one who insisted that Bowles follow the Arabic text word for word, comma by comma when the two worked together to translate the stories [8].)

     

    Bowles is the partner to Larbi’s confession, but it is not clear where the power is. Success as an “author” had given Larbi enough money so that he could look for a bride (Without Stopping 350); but the anxiety over official objection to his book, A Life Full of Holes forced Larbi to leave Morocco, never to return (355). The story of a ten-year-old who leaves his family, mainly owing to oppression at the hands of his step-father is not in the traditional repertory of the Moroccan storyteller. (Larbi’s mother is sometimes sympathetic to her son’s needs; she tries to moderate her husband’s attacks on the boy; she gives him food; but she, like the rest of the family, merely ignores the boy during a lengthy stay in the hospital.) It is also a scandalous tale in that it does not fit into the curve of development expected of men in the Arab-Muslim world.

     

    Larbi is “about ten” when he leaves home for the beach. Significantly, he is not yet an adolescent, not yet bothered by sexual urges. If a certain degree of wild behavior is allowed the drari–even encouraged by cultural norms of child rearing–there is a larger pattern captured by the proverb,

     

    The boy of ten is like a peeled cucumber.
    The man of twenty makes friendships with fools.
    The man of thirty (is like the) flower of the garden.
    The man of forty is in his prime. (Dwyer 87)

     

    From the child’s earliest days, according to Daisy Hilse Dwyer, the Moroccan boy’s “egotistical spontaneity” is encouraged (91). Even in the womb “the male is believed to be a bundle of energy that is predisposed to movement. The male fetus is believed to flit from side to side in the abdomen, nervously covering his ground.” Still, this exaggerated freedom of the boys running wild in the streets is but one phase in a “developmental pathway” (166) in which a male eventually achieves the potential of his ‘aqel (intelligence, responsibility, rationality; 152), wisdom, and spiritual insight, usually in middle age.

     

    The drari in Morocco have certainly occasioned their share of comments from Western visitors there. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s largely successful attempt to enter the world of Moroccan women was initially blocked by the boys in the neighborhood, who treated Fernea’s children rudely. They made rude gestures, called the Fernea children names, and threw clods of dirt, then stones, at the family. Even the mild-mannered anthropologist, Fernea’s husband Bob, turned on them when they demanded baksheesh and tweaked daughter Laila’s hair at the same time. Fernea’s sense of alienation was complete. “This was no fairy tale, I told myself. We were alone, strange and alien, in a strange and alien world” (59).

     

    Anthropologist Paul Rabinow found his way literally blocked by the drari, when he first entered the village of Sidi Lahcen Lyussi, where he was supposed to conduct his research:

     

    The car was greeted . . . by what seemed like hundreds of drari--which is inadequately translated as children. These fearless little monsters surrounded the car, much to the annoyance of their elders. Screaming, yelling, and pushing they proceeded to examine all of my possessions. One of the villagers' main fears, it turns out, was that these drari would do some irreparable damages either to me or to my belongings. Their fathers threatened them with beatings, curses, and exclamations, to little or no avail. (84)

     

    Fortunately, the Fernea family came to be accepted in the neighborhood. A young boy even alerted them to a key they had left in the door, an invitation to robbery in most cities. And Rabinow, similarly, found little to complain about later in his stay, regarding the boys. Daisy Hilse Dwyer, though, notes the anxieties of Moroccan families over the unruly behavior of sons even much later in the sons’ lives, before the wisdom of age enters them. And the beatings Rabinow found the fathers threatening their sons with are very much a part of the fathers’ prerogatives.12 The expectation that men normally improve with age (and women do not) is a common pattern in Moroccan folktales (Dwyer 52-7).

     

    Precisely because it is not difficult to “follow” such a story, what is revealed is our way (tradition) of reading, the genres and expectations with which we are familiar. Larbi’s theme, Bowles tells us, is always “injustice and the suffering it causes,” and his purpose is “to ‘tell them outside’ what it is like to be shut inside” (Five Eyes 8). Presumably, the outsiders are the readers. But the very familiarity with realistic fiction which makes the story accessible may obscure the concept of character that informs the piece.

     

    Both Daisy Hilse Dwyer, who studied Moroccan stories for the light they shed on Moroccan ideas of male and female and their separate pathways of development (166), and Clifford Geertz, upon whose work she drew, distinguish between a Western and a Moroccan view of the person. In “On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” Geertz described Morocco as a “wild-west sort of place” filled with “rugged individuals” of many types. Yet he cautions that “no society consists of anonymous eccentrics bouncing off one another like billiard balls” (51). He emphasized the connectedness of individuals, the nisba that bound persons to families, occupations, religious sects, and even spiritual status. The outsider might see them as individuals of the Western sort, but insiders always knew the nisba of the person. “They are contextualized persons,” Geertz maintains.

     

    Behind this is a very different concept of the person from what has developed in the West since the Renaissance:

     

    The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotional judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and seen contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures. (48)

     

    By prompting a decidedly Western style of story from Layachi, Bowles decontextualizes the ten-year-old. In particular, the developmental pathway (which, as Dwyer points out, has a moral curve quite different from “the predominant Euro-American sort” [166]) is obscured in the manner of closing the story–with Larbi as the triumphant individual who has thrown off the constraints of his family and society.

     

    In contrast, Yacoubi’s “The Night Before Thinking” returns the reader–after any number of magical turns, imaginary leaps that are by definition unexpected–to the familiar context of the Arab-Islamic family. Yacoubi includes one jest at the expense of the Western reader, who is routinely inscribed as the Nazarene in these stories: when he tells the story of the accident that brought a girl to birth before the boy, Yacoubi’s character says, “And she was born five minutes before I was. Five minutes for the Christians is a long time. For us it’s not such a big thing. But this time it was like a thousand years” (25), since the power fell to the woman’s lot and not the man’s.

     

    In a more innocent age these stories might have been enjoyed and dismissed as products of a “primitive” mind. The dangers of an attempt only slightly less suspect are still common: to read in the “Oriental” mind a strange, unfathomable otherness, and to see these others as what Edith Wharton called “unknown and unknowable people” (whom she nevertheless was able to describe; 113). Edward Said has alerted us to the dangers of “Orientalism.” As early as Aeschylus’ The Persians a West has thought itself confronted by a significant cultural other (56-7), visible today mainly in the Middle East and North Africa. Paul Bowles himself, attracted by Surrealist ideas, felt that in the part of the East he settled in he was finding the unconscious that civilization, the West, had repressed.13

     

    Listening to non-literate Moroccan storytellers, recording their voices, translating their culture into a form of printed text, into a tradition that developed a certain kind of “realistic fiction,” Paul Bowles has formed a curious kind of hybrid text. Authorship of “The Night Before Thinking” and “The Half-Brothers is not the simple process–an individual drawing on individual experience to produce a work–that the West has considered somehow fundamental to the very notion of literature. Now that an anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, is drawing on Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault to understand the anthropologist “as author” (Works and Lives 18-20), and Geertz himself is being drawn into a newer, more complex understanding of the authorship of literary works (Hernadi 757), it is becoming increasingly useful to look at texts produced by unusual “authors.”14

     

    It would, in one sense, be helpful to have the tapes of Ahmed Yacoubi’s and Larbi Layachi’s stories in Moghrebi Arabic. One could then trace the changes from speech to writing, from a local dialect of Arabic to a regional dialect of English, in a more detailed way than is now possible. On the other hand, when a non-literate Moroccan friend thought one of Bowles’ translations was “shameful” because he had “written about people just as they are” (in the friend’s view making them seem “like animals”), the friend dismissed the “objective truth” of the representation: “That is statistical truth. We are interested in that, yes, but only as a means of getting to the real truth underneath” (“Africa Minor” 32). On one point the American reader can be certain, however. Paul Bowles may have sought the primitive, the unconscious, in Morocco; but the longer he remained there and the better he became to know the people and the local dialects, the more he was able to appreciate the different sense of “reality” he found there.

     

    Notes

     

    1. For the postmodern turn in Arabic literature, which also complicates the relationship between Western narratology and the East, see Maier, “A Postmodern Syrian Fictionalist.” Anton Shammas’ Arabesques (1986), written by a Palestinian whose first language is Arabic, but written in Hebrew (it caused no little controversy in Israel), is a postmodern novel that somehow manages to incorporate both traditional Arab storytelling and a distinctively Western narrative. Amulets, fortune-telling, and magical birds combine in the same work with the (apparent) autobiography of a Palestinian writer carefully set in a specific historical situation. In many ways the main narrator, Anton, measures himself against the man he could not be, his uncle Yusef, the storyteller rooted in Arab and early Christian traditions. Anton is more sophisticated, more Westernized, more “modern”–in all the ways suggested by Daniel Lerner, especially in his “psychic mobility”–than his uncle; the traditions are known to Anton, and fascinating, but they elude him:

     

    That's how Uncle Yusef was. One the one hand, he was a devout Catholic, who like Saint Augustine was utterly certain, as if the Virgin Mary herself had assured him, that the years of his life were but links in a chain leading to salvation. On the other hand, as if to keep an escape route open for himself, in case the only reality was dust returning to dust and the jaws of the beast of nothing gaped wide, he still could believe that the circular, the winding and the elusive had the power to resist nothingness. However, he did not judge between these and even conceived of them as a single entity in which the djinni's Ar-Rasad was one and the same as the cock that crowed at dawn when Saint Peter denied Jesus thrice. And here I am, his nephew, who served as an altar boy until I was twelve and since then have trod among the alien corn, here I am trying to separate myself from Uncle Yusef's circular pagan- like time and follow the linear path of Christian time, which supposedly leads to salvation, to the breaking of the vicious circles. (227-8)

     

    2. What cannot be suppressed can be subverted by irony. Bowles’ story, “The Eye,” is a brilliant study of a society that believes in the “evil eye,” and of an intrusive Westerner, a kind of self-styled “private eye,” who manages to get the Moroccans to talk to him about a bizarre event in the past.

     

    3. Palmer identifies the “movement beyond Western forms of reality” as an important feature of postmodernity. “For some, the way beyond modernity is the way outside Western forms of thought” (373). To the examples Palmer gives could be added a most intriguing one from the Arab- Muslim world. In 1964 a court case was brought against the Lebanese writer, Layla Ba’labakki (1936- ), who was charged with obscenity and harming public morality for a short story she published, “A Space Ship of Tenderness to the Moon.” The case brought against Layla Ba’labakki by the Beirut vice squad rested on two sentences in the story. The case against her was dismissed by the Court of Appeals. The judges accepted Ba’labakki’s claim to belong to the literary school of realism, but in doing so, the judges appealed to Islamic tradition (making a move that would certainly seem strange to, say, American jurisprudence):

     

    The court wishes to state that realism in human life can be traced to the most ancient period in our history, to be more precise, to the moment when man was created by God, in his naked reality, and, later, hid his nakedness with fig leaves. On the whole, the court believes that so-called realistic phrases used by the author are only a means to express a kind of example (hikma), as in the lessons or examples we receive from the following works of literature: 1. The myth of man receiving the Covenant from God, the rainbow in the heavens, and man's unworthiness to receive it 2. The legend of the isolated cave in the desert (Saw'ar), its walls stained red with blood which stained the entire land of Canaan 3. The tale of Egypt's Pharaoh, in which his loved one, tempting the Pharaoh to lust, writhes on a bed of Lebanese cedar wood, her naked body fragrant with the scents of the land of Ethiopia 4. The story of the virgin of Israel, guardian of a dying kingdom, bringing to old age and coldness the warmth of her body . . . 5. The legend of the rose of Sharun, the lily of the valley. . . . (Fernea and Bazirgan 288)

     

    Arab realism is rooted in Arab-Islamic traditions, and the lower court’s decision stood closer to those traditions than the higher court’s. Overturning the lower court reflected the influence of more cosmopolitan and probably Western traditions.

     

    4. Modern Standard Arabic is a grammatically simplified version of Classical Arabic, the language of the Qur’an, the most prestigious form of language in the Islamic–not just the Arabic-speaking–world. Originally designed for the media, Modern Standard has already made “diglossia” much too simple a notion to describe the sociolinguistic intricacies of Arabic. M.H. Bakalla prefers the term “spectroglossia” for that reason (87).

     

    5. Jane Bowles’ biographer, Millicent Dillon, includes much information about Ahmed Yacoubi (1931- ) in A Little Original Sin (464). Paul Bowles discusses him in Without Stopping (esp. 308-33) and in Five Eyes (7, 144).

     

    6. For the different kinds of Middle Eastern and North African folktales, see Arab Folktales, esp. “Djinn, Ghouls, and Afreets, Tales of Magic and the Supernatural” (63-74) and “Magical Marriages and Mismatches” (153-157).

     

    7. For an explanation based mainly on Piaget’s stages in the child’s conception of the world, see F. Andre Favat, Child and Tale, 25-28 (“Magical Beliefs in Child and Tale”) and 48-57 (“The Present Explanation”). According to this explanation, the child’s interest in the fairy tale peaks between six and eight years and then declines rapidly. There is a resurgence of interest around eighteen and twenty years, and “in the adult there are vestiges of animism, magic, moralities of constraint, egocentrism, and the like” (56) that may account for continued interest in such stories long after the magical stage is abandoned.

     

    8. Millicent Dillon and Bowles (Without Stopping) offer insight into the life of Larbi Layachi:

     

    Paul and Jane had met Larbi while he was a guard at a cafe at Merkala Beach in Tangier. He had struggled since childhood to survive on his own and had spent a good deal of time in jail for minor infractions. Though he was illiterate, he had a remarkable gift as a storyteller, which Paul had immediately recognized . . . . Though Larbi had made some money from the sale of the book [A Life Full of Holes], he was quite content to work as houseboy for Paul in Arcila. (346)

     

    Bowles fills in the background of Larbi’s book, segments of which had been published, and Grove Press had wanted to see a book:

     

    At some point Richard Seaver had the idea of presenting the volume as a novel rather than as nonfiction, so that it would be eligible for a prize offered each year by an international group of publishers. . . . Larbi's book was defeated by Jorge Semprun's Le Long Voyage . . . Larbi made enough money from it to look for a bride. (Without Stopping 350)

     

    Besides underscoring the prestige of the novel in the West, the story indicates the ease with which fiction and nonfiction slide into one another.

     

    9. Bowles does not translate or explain a number of Moroccan terms and references, thus giving the narrative an exotic quality. Terms like Ouakha (rather like American OK; 56), vocatives like auolidi (my son; 60), and exclamations (Allah hiaouddi! and Ehi aloudi!; 64) really require no gloss. Common Moroccan terms like djellaba (the hooded overgarment with sleeves; 66) qahouaji (the tea-maker; 74), baqal (grocer; 59), and tajine (a Moroccan dish; 56) are so common in Moroccan stories (and in Bowles’ fiction) that they give the ordinary reader a sense of being an insider. Local references–Dar Menebbhi, Aqaba dl Kasbah, the Monopolio, Bou Khach Khach, the Charf–work in largely the same way.

     

    10. Note the (unremarked) presence in this Muslim world (where “Nazarenes” [Christians] at least upset the half-brother’s father) of “the Jew” who buys things from Larbi: “There was a Jew who lived near the bull-ring, and he always bought everything I took him. Usually I sold him bones. He paid three gordas a kilo for them” (70-71). This time he sells things from the dump and gets twelve pesetas. There is no hint of animus: it is simply accepted that they are culturally other.

     

    11. The most horrifying of the youthful stories is Bowles’ account, given him by his grandmother, of his father’s attempt to kill the six-weeks-old infant (Without Stopping, 38-39). According to the grandmother, Bowles’ father was jealous of the attention the son was receiving and exposed the infant to snow and cold. He was rescued by the grandmother. In a less dramatic gesture, the father beat him–only once–when Bowles was young and seized the boy’s notebooks:

     

    This was the only time my father beat me. It began a new stage in the development of hostilities between us. I vowed to devote my life to his destruction, even though it meant my own--an infantile conceit, but one which continued to preoccupy me for many years. (45)

     

    12. See Patai’s chapter, “The Endogamous Unilineal Descent Group” (407-436), added to the 3rd edition of his work. On paternal authority regarding the son–including beating–with examples from around the Middle East, see 412-17.

     

    13. For the attraction of French Surrealism, see Millicent Dillon, 92-93. Wayne Pounds notes that “in Moroccan folk culture Bowles has found a mythology and an objective correlative to those concerns which have remained most important to him as a writer” (119)–e.g., in tales of the Terrible Mother such as one finds in Yacoubi’s story. Pounds elsewhere (50-1) distinguishes between “the primitive” of the anthropologists (i.e., “a shared symbolic ordering of experience”) and of those who see it as a regression to older, pre-civilized thought. Eli Sagan gives a lucid account of Freud’s argument against civilization, 123-25.

     

    14. Bowles provides a good example of Barthes’ “hybrid” author-writer–who is, according to Barthes, a characteristic literary figure of our time. Not only is it virtually impossible to separate life from fiction in Bowles’ work, but nonfiction can be turned into fiction. A case in point is his revision of his wife’s nonfiction piece, “East Side: North Africa,” into fiction (“Everything is Nice,” in My Sister’s Hand in Mine 313-20). Stories in his Collected Stories, like “Istikhara, Anaya, Medagan and the Medaganat” (401-404) and “Things Gone and Things Still Here” (405-409), were originally conceived as essays. “Unwelcome Words” (61-86), the title piece in a series of stories, consists of letters of “Paul” to another writer cast in fictional form.

     

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Allen, Roger. The Arabic Novel, An Historical and Critical Introduction. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1982.
    • Bakalla, M. H. Arabic Culture through its Language and Literature. London: Kegan Paul International, 1984.
    • Ba’labakki, Layla. “A Space Ship of Tenderness to the Moon.” Trans. Denys Johnson-Davies. Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak. 273-79.
    • Bowles, Jane. “East Side: North Africa.” Mademoiselle. April, 1951: 134+.
    • —. My Sister’s Hand in Mine. New York: Ecco Press,1978.
    • Bowles, Paul. “Africa Minor.” Their Heads are Green. 20-40.
    • —. Collected Stories, 1939-1976. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1979.
    • —, ed. and trans. Five Eyes. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1979.
    • —. Midnight Mass. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1983.
    • —. Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue.1963. New York: Ecco Press, 1984.
    • —. Unwelcome Words. Bolinas: Tombouctou, 1988.
    • —. Without Stopping. 1972. New York: Ecco Press,1985.
    • Bushnaq, Inea, ed. and trans. Arab Folktales. New York: Pantheon, 1986.
    • Canetti, Elias. The Voices of Marrakesh. Trans. J. A. Underwood. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1978.
    • Chodorow, Nancy. “Family Structure and Feminine Personality.” Women, Culture, and Society. Ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1974. 43-66.
    • Crapanzano, Vincent. Tuhami, Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1980.
    • Dillon, Millicent. A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1981.
    • Dwyer, Daisy Hilse. Images and Self-Images: Male and Female in Morocco. New York: Columbia UP, 1978.
    • Favat, F. Andre. Child and Tale: The Origins of Interest. Urbana: NCTE, 1977.
    • Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock and Basima Qattan Bazirgan, ed. and trans. “An Account of the Trial.” Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak. Austin: U of Texas P, 1977. 280-90.
    • Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock. A Street in Marrakech. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1980.
    • Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. 1976. New York: Vintage, 1980.
    • Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books,1983.
    • —. “On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding.” American Scientist 63 (1975): 47-53.
    • —. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988.
    • Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Ed. Harry Levin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.
    • Haywood, John A. Modern Arabic Literature, 1800-1970. New York: St. Martin’s, 1972.
    • Hernadi, Paul. “Doing, Making, Meaning: Toward a Theory of Verbal Practice.” PMLA 103 (1988): 749-58.
    • Layachi, Larbi. “The Half-Brothers.” Bowles, Five Eyes 55-75.
    • Lerner, Daniel. The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. Glencoe, Il: The Free Press, 1958.
    • Maier, John. “A Postmodern Syrian Fictionalist: Walid Ikhlassy.” Journal of South Asian and Middle East Studies 11 (1988): 73-87.
    • Mernissi, Fatima. Beyond the Veil, Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society. Rev. ed. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.
    • —. Doing Daily Battle. Trans. Mary Jo Lakeland. London: Women’s Press, 1988.
    • Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen, 1982.
    • Palmer, Richard E. “Postmodernity and Hermeneutics.” boundary 2 5 (1977): 363-94.
    • Patai, Raphael. Society, Culture, and Change in the Middle East. 3rd ed. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P,1971.
    • Pounds, Wayne. Paul Bowles: The Inner Geography. New York: Peter Lang, 1985.
    • Rabinow, Paul. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977.
    • Reynolds, Dwight F. “Sirat Bani Hilal: Introduction and Notes to an Arab Oral Epic Tradition.” Oral Tradition 4 (1989): 80-100.
    • Sagan, Eli. Freud, Women, and Morality: The Psychology of Good and Evil. New York: Basic Books, 1988.
    • Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.
    • Shammas, Anton. Arabesques. Trans. Vivian Eden. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.
    • Wharton, Edith. In Morocco. 1920. New York: Hippocrene,1984.
    • Yacoubi, Ahmed. “The Night Before Thinking.” Bowles, Five Eyes: 23-35.

     

  • You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media

    Stuart Moulthrop

    University of Texas at Austin
    <eifa307@utxvm.bitnet>

     

    The original Xanadu (Coleridge’s) came billed as “a Vision in a Dream,” designated doubly unreal and thus easily aligned with our era of “operational simulation” where, strawberry fields, nothing is “real” in the first place since no place is really “first” (Baudrillard, Simulations 10). But all great dreams invite revisions, and these days we find ourselves perpetually on the re-make. So here is the new Xanadu(TM), the universal hypertext system proposed by Theodor Holm Nelson–a vision which, unlike its legendary precursor, cannot be integrated into the dream park of the hyperreal. Hyperreality, we are told, is a site of collapse or implosion where referential or “grounded” utterance becomes indistinguishable from the self-referential and the imaginary. We construct our representational systems not in serial relation to indisputably “real” phenomena, but rather in recursive and multiple parallel, “mapping on to different co-ordinate systems” (Pynchon 159). Maps derive not from territories but from other map-making enterprises: all the world’s a simulation.

     

    This reality implosion brings serious ideological consequences, for some would say it invalidates the informing “master narratives” of modernity, leaving us with a proliferation of incompatible discourses and methods (Lyotard 26). Such unchecked variation, it has been objected, deprives social critique of a clear agenda (Eagleton 63). Hyperreality privileges no discourse as absolute or definitive; critique becomes just another form of paralogy, a countermove in the language game that is techno-social construction of reality. The game is all- encompassing, and therein lies a problem. As Linda Hutcheon observes, “the ideology of postmodernism is paradoxical, for it depends upon and draws its power from that which it contests. It is not truly radical; nor is it truly oppositional” (120).

     

    This problem of complicity grows especially acute where media and technologies are concerned. Hyperreality is as much a matter of writing practice as it is of textual theory: as Michael Heim points out, “[i]n magnetic code there are no originals” (162). Electronic information may be rapidly duplicated, transmitted, and assembled into new knowledge structures. From word processing to interactive multimedia, postmodern communication systems accentuate what Ihab Hassan calls “immanence” or “the intertextuality of all life. A patina of thought, of signifiers, of ‘connections,’ now lies on everything the mind touches in its gnostic (noo)sphere. . . .” (172). Faced with this infinitely convoluted system of discourse, we risk falling into technological abjection, a sense of being hopelessly abandoned to simulation, lost in “the technico-luminous cinematic space of total spatio-dynamic theatre” (Baudrillard, Simulations 139). If all the world’s a simulation, then we are but simulacral subjects cycling through our various iterations, incapable of any “radical” or “oppositional” action that would transform the techno- social matrix.

     

    Of course, this pessimistic or defeatist attitude is hardly universal. We are far more likely to hear technology described as an instrumentality of change or a tool for liberation. Bolter (1991), Drexler (1987), McCorduck (1985), and Zuboff (1988) all contend that postmodern modes of communication (electronic writing, computer networks, text-linking systems) can destabilize social hierarchies and promote broader definitions of authority in the informational workplace. Heim points out that under the influence of these technologies “psychic life will be redefined” (164). But if Hutcheon is correct in her observation that postmodernism is non-oppositional, then how will such a reconstruction of order and authority take place? How and by whom is psychic life–and more important, political life–going to be redefined?

     

    These questions must ultimately be addressed not in theory but in practice–which is where the significance of Nelson’s second Xanadu lies. With Xanadu, Nelson invalidates technological abjection, advancing an unabashedly millenarian vision of technological renaissance in which the system shall set us free. In its extensive ambitions Xanadu transcends the hyperreal. It is not an opium vision but something stranger still, a business plan for the development of what Barthes called “the social space of writing” (81), a practical attempt to reconfigure literate culture. Xanadu is the most ambitious project ever proposed for hypertext or “non-sequential writing” (Dream Machines 29; Literary Machines 5/2). Hypertext systems exploit the interactive potential of computers to reconstruct text not as a fixed series of symbols, but as a variable-access database in which any discursive unit may possess multiple vectors of association (see Conklin; Joyce; Slatin). A hypertext is a complex network of textual elements. It consists of units or “nodes,” which may be analogous to pages, paragraphs, sections, or volumes. Nodes are connected by “links,” which act like dynamic footnotes that automatically retrieve the material to which they refer. Because it is no longer book-bounded, hypertextual discourse may be modified at will as reader/writers forge new links within and among documents. Potentially this collectivity of linked text, which Nelson calls the “docuverse,” can expand without limit.

     

    As Nelson foresees it, Xanadu would embody this textual universe. The system would provide a central repository and distribution network for all writing: it would be the publishing house, communications medium, and great hypertextual Library of Babel. Yet for all its radical ambitions, Nelson’s design preserves familiar proprieties. Local Xanadu outlets would be “Silverstands”(TM), retail access and consulting centers modeled after fast-food franchises and thus integrated with the present economy of information exchange. Xanadu would protect intellectual property through copyright. Users would pay per byte accessed and would receive royalties when others obtained proprietary material they had published in the system. The problems and complexities of this scheme are vast, and at the moment, the fulfilled Xanadu remains a “2020 Vision,” a probe into the relatively near future. But it is a future with compelling and important implications for the postmodern present.

     

    The future, as Disney and Spielberg have taught us, is a place we must come “back” to. The American tomorrow will be a heyday of nostalgia, an intensive pursuit of “lost” or “forgotten” values. Xanadu is no exception: Ted Nelson sees the history of writing in the 21st century as an epic of recovery. His “grand hope” lies in “a return to literacy, a cure for television stupor, a new Renaissance of ideas and generalist understanding, a grand posterity that does not lose the details which are the final substance of everything” (“How Hypertext (Un)does the Canon” 4). To a skeptical observer, this vision of Xanadu might suggest another domain of the postmodern theme park. Gentle readers, welcome to Literacyland!

     

    But this vision could constitute more than just a sideshow attraction. Nelson foresees a renovation of culture, a unification of discourse, a reader-and-writer’s paradise where all writing opens itself to/in the commerce of ideas. This is the world in which all “work” becomes “text,” not substance but reference, not containment but connection (see Bush; Barthes; Zuboff). The magnitude of the change implied here is enormous. But what about the politics of that change? What community of interpretation– and beyond that, what social order–does this intertextual world presume? With the conviction of a true Enlightenment man, Nelson envisions “a new populitism that can make the deeper understandings of the few at last available to the many” (“How Hypertext (Un)does the Canon” 6).

     

    What is “populitism”?–another of Nelson’s neologisms (e.g., “hypermedia,” “cybercrud,” “teledildonics”), in this case a portmanteau word combining “populism” with “elite.” The word suggests the society-of-text envisioned by theorists like Shoshana Zuboff and Jay David Bolter, a writing space in which traces of authority persist only as local and contingent effects, the social equivalent of the deconstructed author-function. A “populite” culture might mark the first step toward realization of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s “game of perfect information” where all have equal access to the world of data, and where “[g]iven equal competence (no longer in the acquisition of knowledge, but in its production), what extra performativity depends on in the final analysis is ‘imagination,’ which allows one either to make a new move or change the rules of the game” (52). This is the utopia of information-in-process, the ultimate wetware dream of the clerisy: discourse converted with 100 percent efficiency into capital, the mechanism of that magical process being nomology or rule-making–admittedly a rather specialized form of “imagination.”

     

    At least two troubles lurk in this paradise. First, the prospect that social/textual order will devolve not unto the many but only to a very few; and more important, that those few will fail to recognize the terms of their splendid isolation. Consider the case of the reluctant computer dick Clifford Stoll, whose memoir, The Cuckoo’s Egg, nicely illustrates these problems. Stoll excoriates “cyberpunks,” virtual vandals who abuse the openness of scientific computing environments. Their unsportsmanlike conduct spoils the information game, necessitating cumbersome restrictions on the free flow of data. But Stoll’s definition of informational “freedom” appears murky at best. He repeatedly refers to the mainframe whose system he monitors as “his” computer, likening cybernetic intrusions to burglaries. Electronic information, as Stoll sees it, lies in strict analogy with material and private property.

     

    Private in what sense? Stoll professes to believe that scientists must have easy access to research results, but only within their own communities. He is quick to condemn incursions by “unauthorized” outsiders. There is some sense in this argument: Stoll repeatedly points out that the intruder in the Stanford mainframe might have interfered with a lifesaving medical imaging system. But along with this concern comes an ideological danger. Who decides what information “belongs” to whom? Stoll’s “popular elite” is restricted to academic scientists, a version of “the people” as nomenklatura, those whose need to know is defined by their professional affiliation. More disturbingly, Stoll seems unaware of the way this brotherhood is situated within larger political hierarchies. Describing a meeting with Pentagon brass, he reflects: “How far I’d come. A year ago, I would have viewed these officers as war-mongering puppets of the Wall Street capitalists. This, after all, was what I’d learned in college. Now things didn’t seem so black and white. They seemed like smart people handling a serious problem” (278).

     

    Here is elite populism at its scariest. Though he protests (too much) his political correctness, Stoll’s sense of specialist community shifts to accommodate the demands of the moment. When in Fort Meade he does as the natives do, recognizing agents of Air Force Intelligence, the National Security Agency, even the CIA and FBI as brothers-in-craft. After all, they are “smart” (technologically adept) and “serious” (professional). Their immediate goal seems legitimate and laudable. They are just “handling” a problem, tracking down the intruder who has violated the electronic privacy of Stoll’s community (and, not coincidentally, their own). They are the good policemen, the ones Who Are Your Friends, not really “Them” after all but just a braid-shouldered version of “Us.”

     

    Stoll is not troubled that these boon companions live at the heart of the military-industrial complex. He disregards the fact that they seem aware of domestic communications intercepts–in phone conversations, Stoll’s CIA contact refers to the FBI as “the F entity,” evidently to thwart a monitoring program (144). Stoll does task his agency associates for sowing disinformation and managing dirty wars, but this critique never gets much past the stage of rhetorical questions. In fact Stoll seems increasingly comfortable in the intelligence community. If the data spooks turn out to be less interested in freedom of scientific speech than in quashing a security leak, Stoll has no real objection. His own ideals and interests are conveniently served in the process.

     

    What leads to such regrettable blindness, and how might it have been prevented? These may be especially pertinent questions as we consider entrusting our literate culture to an automated information system. The spooks are not so easily conjured away. It is no longer sufficient to object that scientists and humanists form distinct communities, and that Stoll’s seduction could not happen in our own elect company. The old “Two Cultures” paradigm has shifted out from under us, largely through catholic adoption of technologies like data networks and hypertext. Networks are networks, and we can assume that most if not all of them will eventually engender closed elites. Fascism, as Deleuze and Guattari instruct, is a matter of all-too-human desire (26). What can shield humanist networks, or even the “generalist” networks Nelson foresees, from the strategy of divide and co-opt? What might insulate Xanadu from those ancestral voices prophesying war?

     

    The answer, as forecasters like McCorduck and Drexler point out, lies in the hypertext concept itself–the operating principle of an open and dynamic literature, a consensual canon with a minimum of hierarchical impedances and a fundamental instability in those hierarchies it maintains. Visionary and problematic as it may seem, Nelson’s vision of “populitism” has much to recommend it– not the least of which is its invitation to consider more carefully the likely social impact of advanced communication systems. In fact hypertext may well portend social change, a fundamental reshaping of text production and reception. The telos of the electronic society-of-text is anarchy in its true sense: local autonomy based on consensus, limited by a relentless disintegration of global authority. Since information is now virtually an equivalent of capital, and since textuality is our most powerful way of shaping information, it follows that Xanadu might indeed change the world. But to repeat the crucial question, how will this change come about? What actual social processes can translate the pragmatics of Nelson’s business plan into the radicalism of a hypertext manifesto?

     

    The complete answers lie with future history. In one respect, Ted Nelson’s insistence that Xanadu become an economically viable enterprise is exemplary: we will discover the full implications of this technology only as we build, manage, and work in hypertextual communities, starting within the existing constraints of information capitalism. But while we wait on history, we can devote a little time to augury. As a theorist of an incipient medium, one is reduced to playing medium, eking out predictions with the odd message from the Other Side. Which brings us to the last work of Marshall McLuhan, a particularly important ancestral voice from whom to hear. At his death, McLuhan left behind notes for an enigmatic final project: the fourfold “Laws of Media” which form the framework for a semiotics of technology. The Laws proceed from four basic questions that can be asked about any invention:

     

    •      What does it enhance or intensify?
    •      What does it render obsolete or displace?
    •      What does it retrieve that was previously obsolete?
    •      What does it produce or become when taken to its limit?

     

    As McLuhan demonstrates, these questions are particularly instructive when applied to pivotal or transforming technologies like printing or broadcasting. They are intended to discover the ways in which information systems affect the social text, rearranging sense ratios and rewriting theories of cultural value. They reveal the nature of the basic statement, the “uttering or ‘outering’” that underlies mechanical extensions of human faculties. If we put Xanadu and hypertext to this series of questions, we may discover more about both the potential and the limits of hypertext as an agency of change.

     

    1. What Does Hypertext Enhance or Intensify?

     

    According to McLuhan’s standard analysis, communications media adjust the balance or “ratio” of the senses by privileging one channel of perception over others. Print promotes sight over hearing, giving us an objectified, perspectival, symbolized world: “an eye for an ear” (Understanding Media 81). But this approach needs modification for our purposes. Hypertext differs from earlier media in that it is not a new thing at all but a return or recursion (of which more later) to an earlier form of symbolic discourse, i.e., print. The effect of hypertext thus falls not simply upon the sense channels but farther along the cognitive chain. As Vannevar Bush pointed out in the very first speculation on informational linking technologies, these mechanisms enhance the fundamental capacity of pattern recognition (“As We May Think,” qtd. in Literary Machines 1/50).

     

    Hypertext is all about connection, linkage, and affiliation. Formally speaking, its universe is the one Thomas Pynchon had in mind when he defined “paranoia” as “the realization that everything is connected, everything in the Creation–not yet blindingly one, but at least connected….” (820). In hypertext systems, this ethos of connection is realized in technics: users do not passively rehearse or receive discourse, they explore and construct links (Joyce 12). At the kernel of the hypertext concept lie ideas of affiliation, correspondence, and resonance. In this, as Nelson has argued from the start, hypertext is nothing more than an extension of what literature has always been (at least since “Tradition and the Individual Talent”)–a temporally extended network of relations which successive generations of readers and writers perpetually make and unmake.

     

    This redefinition of textuality gives rise to a number of questions. What does it mean to enhance our sensitivity to patterns in this shifting matrix, to become sensitized to what Pynchon calls “other orders behind the visible?” Does this mean that hypertext will turn us into “paranoids,” anxious interpreters convinced that all structures are mysteriously organized “against” us? What does interpretive “resistance” mean in a hypertextual context? Can such a reading strategy be possible after poststructuralism, with the author-function reduced (like Pynchon himself) to quasi- anonymous nonpresence, a voiceless occasion for deconstructive “writing” (McHoul and Wills 9)?

     

    Perverse though it may seem, hypertext does accentuate the agonistic element of reading. Early experience with hypertext narrative suggests that its readers may actually be more concerned with prior authority and design than readers of conventional writing. The apparent “quickliming of the author” does not dispel the aura of intention in hypertext (Douglas 100). The constantly repeated ritual of interaction, with its reminder of discursive alternatives, reveals the text as a made thing, not monologic perhaps but hardly indeterminate. The text gestures toward openness– what options can you imagine?–but then it forecloses: some options are available but not others, and someone clearly has done the defining. The author persists, undead presence in the literary machine, the inevitable Hand that turns the time. Hypertextual writing–at least when considered as read-only or “exploratory” text (see Joyce)– may thus emphasize antithetical modes of reading, leading us to regard the deconstructed system-maker much in the way that Leo Bersani recently described the author of Gravity’s Rainbow: as “the enemy text” (108).

     

    So perhaps we need a Psychiatrist General’s Warning: Reading This Hypertext Can Make You Paranoid–indeed it must, since the root sense of paranoia, a parallel or parallax gnosis, happens to be a handy way to conceive of the meta-sense of pattern recognition that hypertext serves to enhance. But would such a distortion of our cognitive ratios necessarily constitute pathology? In dealing with vast and nebulous information networks–to say nothing of those corporate-sponsored “virtual realities” that may lie in our future–a certain “creative paranoia” may be a definite asset. In fact the paragnosticism implicit in hypertext may be the best way to keep the information game clean. Surrounded by filaments and tendrils of a network, the sojourner in Xanadu or other hypertext systems will always be reminded of her situation in a fabric of power arrangements. Her ability to build and pursue links should encourage her to subject those arrangements to inquiry. Which brings us to the second of McLuhan’s key questions:

     

    2. What Does Hypertext Displace or Render Obsolete?

     

    Though it may be tempting to respond, the book, that answer makes no sense. The book is already “dead” (or superseded) if by “alive” you mean that the institution in question is essential to our continued commerce in ideas. Irving Louis Horowitz argues that reports of the book’s demise are exaggerated; even in an age of television and computers, we produce more books each year than ever before (20). Indeed, our information ecology seems likely to retain a mix of print and electronic media for at least the next century. Yet as Alvin Kernan recently pointed out, the outlook for books in the long run is anything but happy (135-43). As the economic and ecological implications of dwindling forests come home, the cost of paper will rise precipitously. At the same time, acidic decay of existing books will enormously increase maintenance costs to libraries. Given these factors, some shift to electronic storage seems inevitable (though Kernan, an analogue man to the last, argues for microfilm).

     

    Yet this change in the medium of print does not worry cultural conservatives like Kernan, Neil Postman, or E.D. Hirsch nearly so much as the prospect that the decline of the book may terminate the cultural dominance of print. The chief technological culprit in Kernan’s “death of literature” is not the smart machine but the idiot box. “Such common culture as we still have,” Kernan laments, “comes largely from television” (147).

     

    But the idiot box–or to be precise, the boxed idiot– is precisely the intellectual problem that hypertext seems excellently suited to address. In answer to McLuhan’s second question–what does hypertext render obsolete?–the best answer is not literacy but rather post-literacy. As Nelson foresees, the development of hypertext systems implies a revival of typographic culture (albeit it in a dynamic, truly paperless environment). That forecast may seem recklessly naive or emptily prophetic, but it is quite likely valid. Hypertext means the end of the death of literature.

     

    Here the voice of the skeptic must be heard: a revival of literacy?–read my lips: not in a million years. Even the most devoted defender of print is likely to resist the notion of a Gutenberg renaissance. In the West, genuine literacy–cultural, multicultural, or simply functional–can be found only among a well-defined managerial and professional class. At present that class is fairly large, but in the U.S. and U.K., world leaders in laissez-faire education, it is contracting noticeably. So it must seem foolish to imagine, as Ted Nelson does, a mass consumer market for typographic information, a growth industry based on the electronic equivalent of the local library.

     

    Indeed, should Xanadu become a text-only system (which is not intended), its prospects would be poor in the long run. There are however other horizons for interactive textuality–not just hypertext but another Nelsonian coinage, “hypermedia.” Print is not the only means of communication deliverable in a polysequential format articulated by software links. In trying to imagine the future of hypertext culture, we must also consider interactive multimedia “texts” that incorporate voice, music, animated graphics, and video along with alphabetic script (Lanham 287). Hypertext is about connection– promiscuous, pervasive, and polymorphously perverse connection. It is a writing practice ideally suited to the irregular, the transgressive, and the carnivalesque (Harpold 8). Culturally speaking, the promiscuity of hypertext (in the root sense of “a tendency to seek relations”) knows no bounds of form, format, or cultural level. There is no reason to assume that hypertext or hypermedia should not support popular as well as elite culture, or indeed that it might not promote a “populite” miscegenation of discourses.

     

    But what can this mean–talking books in homeboy jive? Street rap accompanied by Eliotic scholia? Nintendo with delusions of cinema? Or worse, could we be thinking of yet more industrial light and magic, the disneyverse of eyephones and datagloves where YOU (insert userName) are IN THE FANTASY? Perhaps, as one critic of the computer industry recently put it, interactive multimedia must inevitably decay to its lowest common denominator, “hyper- MTV” (Levy, “Multimedia” 52). According to this analysis, the linear and objectifying tendencies of any print content in a multimedium text would be overwhelmed by the subjective, irrational, and emotive influence of audio/ video. This being the case, hypertext could hardly claim to represent “a cure for television stupor.”

     

    But Nelson’s aspiration should not be so easily dismissed as a vision in a dream. Hypertext does indeed have the power to recover print literacy–though not in quite the way that Nelson supposes; which brings us to the third of McLuhan’s queries:

     

    3. What Does Hypertext Retrieve that Was Previously Obsolete?

     

    Xanadu and similar projects could invite large numbers of people to become reacquainted with the cultural power of typographic literacy. To assert this, of course, is to break with McLuhan’s understanding of media history. It is hard to dispute the argument of Understanding Media and The Gutenberg Galaxy that the culture of the printing press has entered into dialectic contention with a different ethos based on the “cool” immediacy of broadcasting. But though that diagnosis remains tremendously important, McLuhan’s cultural prognosis for the West holds less value. McLuhan saw clearly the transforming impact of “electric” technologies, but perhaps because he did not live much beyond the onset of the microprocessor boom, he failed to recognize the next step–the recursion to a new stage of typographic literacy through the syncretic medium of hypertext.

     

    It is crucial to distinguish recursion from return or simple repetition, because this difference answers the objection that print literacy will be lost or suppressed in multimedia texts. Recursion is self-reference with the possibility of progressive self-modification (Hofstadter 127). Considered for its recursive possibilities, “writing” means something radically different in linked interactive compositions than it does in a codex book or even a conventional electronic document. Literacy in hypertext encompasses two domains: the ordinary grammatical, rhetorical, and tropological space that we now know as “literature,” and also a second province, stricter in its formalisms but much greater in its power to shape interactive discourse. This second domain has been called “writing space” (Bolter 4); a case might be made (with apologies to those who insist that virtual reality is strictly a post-print phenomenon) that it also represents the true meaning of cyberspace.

     

    Walter Benjamin observed with some regret that by the 1930’s, any literate European could become an author, at least to the extent of publishing a letter or an article in the newspapers (232). With no regrets at all, Ted Nelson envisions a similar extension of amateur literary production in Xanadu, where all readers of the system can potentially become writers, or at least editors and commentators. The First Amendment guarantee of free speech, Nelson points out, is a personal liberty: anyone may publish, and in Xanadu everyone can. So Nelson bases his prediction of revived literacy on the promise of a broadly popular publishing franchise.

     

    This vision is limited in one crucial regard. Nelson treats print essentially as the content of his system, which is taking a rather narrow view. In describing Xanadu as a more or less transparent medium for the transmission of text, Nelson overlooks the fact that alphabetic or alphanumeric representation also defines the form of Xanadu, and indeed of any hypertext system. This neglect is consistent with the generally broad focus of Nelson’s vision, which has led him to dismiss details of user- interface design as “front-end functions” to be worked out by the user.

     

    Design details, whether anterior or posterior to the system, cannot be passed over so easily. In fact the structure and specifications of the hypertext environment are themselves parts of the docuverse, arguably the most important parts. Beneath any hypertext document or system there exists a lower layer that we might call the hypotext. On this level, in the working implementations of its “protocols,” Xanadu is a creature of print. The command structures that govern linkage, display, editing, accounting, and all the other functions of the system exist as digital impulses that may be translated into typographic text. They were written out, first in pseudo-English strings, then in a high-level programming language, finally as binary code. Therefore Xanadu at its most intimate level is governed by all those features of the typographic medium so familiar from McLuhan’s analysis: singular sequentiality, objectivity, instrumentality, “left-brained” visual bias, and so on. The wonder of hypertext and hypermedia lies in their capacity to escape these limitations by using the microprocessor to turn linear, monologic typography recursively back upon itself–to create linear control structures that enable an escape from linear control.

     

    In recognizing the recursive trick behind hypertextual writing, we come to a broader understanding of electronic literacy. Literacy under hypertext must extend not only to the “content” of a composition but to its hypotextual “form” as well–e.g., the way nodes are divided to accommodate data structures and display strategies, or the types of linkage available and the ways they are apparent to the reader. Practically speaking, this means that users of a hypertext system can be expected to understand print not only as the medium of traditional literary discourse, but also as a meta-tool, the key to power at the level of the system itself.

     

    Ong and McLuhan have argued that television and radio introduce “secondary orality,” a recursion to non-print forms of language and an “audile space” of cognition (Orality and Literacy 135; Laws of Media 57). By analogy, hypertext and hypermedia seem likely to instigate a secondary literacy –“secondary” in that this approach to reading and writing includes a self-consciousness about the technological mediation of those acts, a sensitivity to the way texts-below-the-text constitute another order behind the visible. This secondary literacy involves both rhetoric and technics: to read at the hypotextual level is to confront (paragnostically) the design of the system; to write at this level is to reprogram, revising the work of the first maker. Thus this secondary literacy opens for its readers a “cyberspace” in the truest sense of the word, meaning a place of command and control where the written word has the power to remake appearances. This space has always been accessible to the programming elite, to system operators like Clifford Stoll and shady operators like his hacker adversary. But Nelson’s 2020 Vision puts a Silverstand in every commercial strip right next to McDonald’s and Videoland. If Xanadu succeeds in re-awakening primary literacy as a mass phenomenon, there is reason to believe that it will inculcate secondary literacy as well.

     

    But like any grand hope, this technopiate dream of a new literacy ultimately has to face its man from Porlock. Secondary literacy might well prove culturally disastrous. The idea of a general cyberspace franchise, in which all control structures are truly contingent and “consensual,” does summon up visions of informatic chaos. “Chaos,” however, is a concept we have recently begun to understand as something other than simply an absence of “order:” it is instead a condition of possibility in which new arrangements spontaneously assemble themselves (Prigogine and Stengers 14).

     

    Taking this neo-chaotic view, we might inquire into the possible positive effects of secondary literacy in a postmodern political context. In outlining a first move beyond our recent “depthless,” ahistorical quiescence, Fredric Jameson calls for an “aesthetic of cognitive mapping,” a “pedagogical political culture” in which we would begin to teach ourselves where we stand in the networks of transnational power (92). At this moment, as the West reconsiders its New World Order in the aftermath of a war for oil reserves, we seem in especially urgent need of such education. But such a cultural pedagogy clearly needs something more than the evening war news, especially when reporters are confined to informational wading pools. We require not only a sensitivity to the complex textuality of power but an ability to intercept and manipulate that text– an advanced creative paranoia. This must ultimately be a human skill, independent of technological “utterance;” but the secondary literacy fostered by hypertext could help us at least to begin the enormous task of drawing our own cognitive maps. Here, however, we verge on the main question of hypertextual politics, which brings up the last item in the McLuhan catechism:

     

    4. What Does Hypertext Become When Taken to Its Limit?

     

    Orthodox McLuhanite doctrine holds that “every form, pushed to the limit of its potential, reverses its characteristics” (Laws of Media viii). Media evolution, in McLuhan’s view, proceeds through sharply punctuated equilibriums. “Hot” media like print tend to increase their routinization and determinism until they reach a limit (say, the prose of the late 19th century). Beyond that point the overheated medium turns paradoxical, passing almost instantly from hot to super-“cool,” bombarding readers with such a plethora of codings that conventional interpretation collapses. Structure and hierarchy, the distinguishing features of a “hot” medium, reduce to indeterminacy. The plurality of codes overwhelms hermeneutic certainty, the “figure” of a univocal text reverses into polysemous “ground,” and we reach the ultima thule of Gutenberg culture, Finnegans Wake.

     

    But though McLuhan had much to say about the reversal of overheated media, he left the complementary possibility unexplored. What happens to already “cool” or participatory media when they reach their limits? True to the fourth law, their characteristics reverse, but here the effect is reactionary, not radical. Radio, for instance, begins in interactive orality (two-way transceiving) but decays into the hegemony of commercial broadcasting, where “talk radio” lingers as a reminder of how open the airwaves are not. Television too starts by shattering the rigid hierarchies of the Gutenberg nation-state, promising to bring anyplace into our living rooms; but its version of Global Village turns out to be homogenous and hegemonic, a planetary empire of signs.

     

    Hypertext and hypermedia are also interactively “cool,” so following this analysis we might conclude that they will undergo a similar implosion, becoming every bit as institutionalized and conservative as broadcast networks. Indeed, it doesn’t take McLuhanite media theory to arrive at that forecast. According to the economic logic of late capitalism, wouldn’t the Xanadu Operating Company ultimately sell out to Sony, Matsushita, Phillips, or some other wielder of multinational leverage?

     

    Such a self-negating “reversal” may not be the only possible outcome, however. What if the corporate shogunate refuse to venture their capital? What if business leaders realize that truly interactive information networks do not make wise investments? This conclusion might be supported by memory of the controversy that Sears and IBM stirred up when they tried to curtail user autonomy on their Prodigy videotex system (see Levy, “In the Realm of the Censor”). This scenario of corporate rejection is not just speculative fabulation, but the basis for a proposed modification to McLuhan’s fourth law. Media taken to their limits tend to reverse, but not all media reverse in the same way. The case of a complex, syncretic, and fundamentally interactive medium like hypertext may involve a “reversal” that does not bring us back to the same-as-it-ever-was–not a reversal in fact but a recursion (deja vu) to a new cultural space.

     

    We have entered into a period of change in reading and writing that Richard Lanham calls a “digital revolution” (268). As this revolution proceeds (if it is allowed to do so), its consequences will be enormous. The idea of hypertext as a figment of the capitalist imagination, an information franchise in both Nelson’s and Lyotard’s senses, could well break down. Though Xanadu may in fact open its Silverstands some day soon, hypertext might not long remain a commercial proposition. The type of literacy and the kind of social structure this medium supports stand fundamentally against absolute property and hierarchy. As we have hinted, hypertext and hypermedia peel back to reveal not just an aesthetics of cognitive mapping but nothing less than the simulacral map-as-territory itself: the real beginnings of cyberspace in the sense of a domain of control.

     

    “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system” (Gibson 51). William Gibson’s concept of a cybernetic workspace, laid out in his dystopian novel Neuromancer, represents the ultimate shared vision in the global dream of information commerce. For all its advancement beyond the age of nation-state capitalism, Gibson’s world remains intensely competitive and hierarchical (for nation-state substitute the revived zaibatsu). Neuromancer is Nineteen Eighty-Four updated for 1984, the future somewhat gloomily surveyed from Reagan America.

     

    There is accordingly no trace of social “consensus” in Gibson’s “consensual” infosphere. In his version of cyberspace, the shape of vision is imposed from without. “They” control the horizontal, “They” control the vertical. Of course there must be some elements of chaos, else Gibson would be out of business as a paperback writer; so he invents the “cyberspace cowboy,” a hacker hero who plays the information game by what he thinks of as his own rules. But though cowboys may attempt to destabilize the system, their incursions amount at best to harassment and privateering. These forms of enterprise are deemed “illegal,” though they are really just business by another name, inventiveness and competitive advantage being the only effective principles of operation.

     

    Gibson’s dark dream is one thing–in effect it is a realization of McLuhan’s prophecy of reversal, an empowering technology turned into a mechanism of co-option and enslavement. But perhaps Ted Nelson’s 2020 Vision of hypertextual literacy is something else. If not a utopian alternative, Nelson’s project may at least provide a heterotopia, an otherplace not zoned in the usual ways for property and performativity. Cyberspace as Gibson and others define it is a Cartesian territory where scientists of control define boundaries and power lines. The Xanadu model lets us conceive instead a decentered space of literacy and empowerment where each subject acts as kybernos, steering her way across the intertextual sea.

     

    Nelson’s visions of the future differ crucially from Gibson’s. In Xanadu we find not consensual illusion but genuine, negotiated consensus. The pathways and connections among texts would be created on demand. According to Nelson’s plans to date, only the most fundamental “back end” conventions would be strictly determined: users would be free to customize “front end” systems to access information more or less as they like. Xanadu thus possesses virtually no “canons” in the sense of a shelf of classics or a book of laws; the canons of Xanadu might come closer to the musical meaning of the word–congeries of connections and relationships that are recognizably orderly yet inexhaustibly various. The shifting networks of consensus and textual demand (or desire) in Xanadu would be constructed by users and for users. Their very multiplicity and promiscuity, one might argue, would militate powerfully against any slide from populitism back to hierarchy.

     

    Nelson’s visionary optimism seems vindicated, then. Xanadu as currently conceived–even in its status as Nelson’s scheme to get rich very slowly–opens the door to a true social revolution with implications beyond the world of literature or mass entertainment. Xanadu would remove economic and social gatekeeping functions from the current owners of the means of text production (editors, publishers, managers of conglomerates). It would transfer control of cultural work to a broadly conceived population of culture workers: writers, artists, critics, “independent scholars,” autodidacts, “generalists,” fans, punks, cranks, hacks, hackers, and other non- or quasi-professionals. “Tomorrow’s hypertext systems have immense political ramifications, and there are many struggles to come,” Nelson warns (Literary Machines 3/19). This is an understatement of cosmic proportions.

     

    But it would be a mistake to celebrate cybernetic May Day without performing a few reality checks. Along with all those visionary forecasts of “post-hierarchical” information exchange (Zuboff 399), some hard facts need to be acknowledged. The era of the garage-born computer messiah has passed. Directly or indirectly, most development of hardware and software depends on heavily capitalized multinational companies that do a thriving business with the defense establishment. This affiliation clearly influences the development of new media–consider a recent paper on “The Rhetoric of Hypertext” which uses the requirements of a military training system to propose general standards of coherence and instrumental effectiveness for this medium (Carlson 1990). Technological development does not happen in cyberspace, but in the more familiar universe of postindustrial capital. Thus to the clearheaded, any suggestion that computer technology might be anything but an instrument of this system must seem quixotic or plain foolish.

     

    Before stepping off into cyberspace, we do well to remove the futurist headgear and listen to some voices in the street. No one wants to read anymore: “books suck, TV rules.” Computers are either imperial business machines or head toys for the yuppies. Anyone still interested in “mass” culture needs to check out the yawning gap between the rich and the debtpayers, not to mention the incipient splintering of Euro-America into warring ethnicities and “multicultural” tribes. And while we’re at it, we might also do some thinking about the Gulf conflict, war-game-as- video-game with realistic third-world blood, a campaign in defense of economic imbalance and the West’s right to determine political order in the Middle East. Perhaps we have used the word “revolution” far too loosely. Given the present state of political and cultural affairs, any vision of a “populite” future, or as John Perry Barlow has it, an “electronic frontier” (Bromberg 1991), needs hard scrutiny.

     

    Do we really want a revolution? Are academic and corporate intellectuals truly prepared to dispense with the current means of text production and the advantages they afford in the present information economy? More to the point, are we capable of overturning these institutions, assuming we have the will to do so? Looking back from the seventies, Jean Baudrillard criticized the students of Paris ’68 for assuming control of the national broadcast center only to reinstate one-to-many programming and the obscurantist focus of the “media event.” The pre- revolutionary identity of television swiftly reasserted itself in the midst of radical action. The seizure was in fact just a sham revolution, Baudrillard concludes: “Only total revolution, theoretical and practical, can restore the symbolic in the demise of the sign and of value. Even signs must burn” (Political Economy of the Sign 163). Xanadu as Nelson imagines it does promise to immolate certain cultural icons: the entrepreneurial publishing house, the codex book, the idea of text as unified, self-contained utterance. Taken to its limits, hypertext could reverse/recourse into a general medium of control, a means of ensuring popular franchise in the new order of virtual space. Public-access Xanadu might be the last hope for consensual democracy in an age of global simulation.

     

    Or it might not: we do well to remember that Ted Nelson’s vision comes cleverly packaged with assurances that copyright and intellectual property shall not perish from the earth. Some signs would seem to be flame-retardant. The vision of Xanadu as cyberspatial New Jerusalem is conceivable and perhaps eligible, but by no stretch of the imagination is it inevitable. To live in the postmodern condition is to get along without the consolation of providential fictions or theories of historical necessity. This renunciation includes the “Laws of Media,” whose force in the final analysis is theoretical and heuristic, not normative. As Linda Hutcheon observes, postmodernism undermines any attempt at binary distinction. To invoke the possibility of a “post-hierarchical” information order, one must assert the fact that all orders are contingent, the product of discursive formations and social contracts. But this postulate generates a fatally recursive paradox: if all order is consensual, then the social consensus may well express itself against revolution and in support of the old order. The term “post-hierarchical” may some day turn out to carry the same nasty irony as the words “postmodern” or “postwar” in the aftermath of Desert Storm: welcome back to the future, same as it ever was.

     

    In the end it is impossible to put down Nelson’s prophecies of cultural renovation in Xanadu; but it is equally hard to predict their easy fulfillment. Xanadu and the hypertext concept in general challenge humanists and information scientists to reconsider fundamental assumptions about the social space of writing. They may in fact open the way to a new textual order with a new politics of knowledge and expression. However, changes of this magnitude cannot come without major upheavals. Responsibility for the evolution of hypertext systems as genuine alternatives to the present information economy rests as much with software developers, social scientists, and literary theorists as it does with legislators and capitalists. If anything unites these diverse elites, it might be their allegiance to existing institutions of intellectual authority: the printed word, the book, the library, the university, the publishing house. It may be, as Linda Hutcheon asserts, that though we are incapable of direct opposition to our native conditions, we can still criticize and undermine them through such postmodern strategies as deconstruction, parody, and pastiche (120-21). Secondary literacy might indeed find expression in a perverse or promiscuous turn about or within the primary body of literate culture. But it seems equally possible that our engagement with interactive media will follow the path of reaction, not revolution. The cultural mood at century’s end seems anything but radical. Witness the President’s attacks on cultural diversity (or as he sees it, “political correctness”) in higher education. Or consider Camille Paglia’s recent “defense” of polyvalent, post-print ways of knowing, capped off by a bizarre reversal in which she decrees that children of the Tube must be force-fed “the logocentric and Apollonian side of our culture” (Postman and Paglia 55). Given these signs and symptoms, the prospects for populite renaissance and secondary literacy do not seem especially rosy. “It is time for the enlightened repression of the children,” Paglia declares. Yet in the face of all this we can still find visionary souls who say they want a textual, social, cultural, intellectual revolution. In the words of Lennon:

     

    Well, you know...
    We all want to change your head.

     
    The question remains: which heads do the changing, and which get the change?

     

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    • Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984.
    • McCorduck, Pamela. The Universal Machine: Confessions of a Technological Optimist. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985.
    • McHoul, Alec and David Wills. Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1990.
    • McLuhan, H. Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
    • McLuhan, H. Marshall and Eric McLuhan. Laws of Media: The New Science. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1988.
    • Nelson, Theodor Holm. Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Redmond, WA: Tempus Books, 1987.
    • —. Literary Machines. Sausalito, CA: Mindful, 1990.
    • —. “How Hypertext (Un)does the Canon.” Paper delivered at the Modern Language Association Convention, Chicago, December 28, 1990.
    • Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen, 1982.
    • Postman, Neil and Camille Paglia. “She Wants Her TV! He Wants His Book!” Harper’s 282 (March, 1991): 44 ff..
    • Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers. Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam, 1984.
    • Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.
    • Slatin, John. “Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium.” College English 52 (1990): 870-83.
    • Stoll, Clifford. The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy through the Maze of Computer Espionage. New York: Pocket Books, 1990
    • Zuboff, Shoshana. In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. New York: Basic, 1988.

     

  • Three Poems

    Steven B. Katz

    North Carolina State University
    sbkeg@ncsuvm

     

    A Computer File Named Alison

     

    \For My Wife\

     

    I dated a file named Alison, created
    worlds in her name; but needed more space,
    new memories to save, new files to live.
    (After all, although the universe expands
    at astronomic rates, it’s slowing down,
    and there is only so much space inside machines.)

     

    “Destroy Alison: Confirm,” the computer responded.
    But what if she should die? I thought, and asked
    aloud; what if when I push this button
    she should really disappear
    from the disc of the earth, constantly rotated, read
    in this dark machine drive of the universe?

     

    What if this cold, dumb, personal computer
    should read and wholly misunderstand, and take me
    literally, as impersonal as itself, and her atoms
    be scattered through magnetic fields, dispersed
    along the wires, and she should vanish mid the glitch
    and circuitry of starts, drive lights red-

     

    shifting, every trace (of her) erased
    forever. “Destroy Alison: Confirm,” it repeated,
    blindly blinking. Destroy Alison? I needed
    more space, new memories to save,
    new files to live. But oh I
    could not confirm it could not confirm it . . . .

     

     

     

     

    After Reading godel Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

     

    (A Pantoum)

     

    So this musical invention can begin:
    push down into a paradoxical painting:
    all formal theorems are incomplete:
    every procedure’s a stranger loop

     

    Push down into a paradoxical painting:
    decisively shifting ambiguous foregrounds:
    every procedure’s a stranger loop:
    but ant colonies are closed systems

     

    Decisively shifting ambiguous foregrounds:
    all understanding is self-referential:
    but ant colonies are closed systems:
    the human mind is a programmed search

     

    All understanding is self-referential:
    DNA involves recursive translation:
    the human mind is a programmed search:
    but meaning is always a random concurrence

     

    DNA involves recursive translation:
    intelligence is a series of metalevels:
    but meaning is always a random concurrence:
    although perception is specifically encoded

     

    Intelligence is a series of metalevels:
    absolute consciousness a Zen Buddhist koan:
    although perception is specifically encoded:
    reality is just one of many possibilities

     

    Absolute consciousness a Zen Buddhist koan:
    language is the necessary software of thought:
    reality is just one of many possibilities:
    knowing involves simply networks of channels

     

    Language is the necessary software of thought:
    societies are hierarchies of information:
    knowing involves simply networks of channels:
    we can crawl only from stratum to stratum

     

    Societies are hierarchies of information:
    history’s the output at any given moment:
    we can crawl only from stratum to stratum:
    this process is surely becoming absurd

     

    History’s the output at any given moment:
    mathematical patterns thus slowly emerge:
    this process is surely becoming absurd:
    the mechanism as medium is direct and explicit

     

    Mathematical patterns thus slowly emerge:
    reproduction results in assembled transcriptions:
    the mechanism as medium is direct and explicit:
    the message is “the message is”

     

    Reproduction results in assembled transcriptions:
    bodies are merely so much hardware, support:
    the message is “the message is”:
    even numbers can be irrational

     

    Bodies are merely so much hardware, support:
    so this operation shall now be augmented:
    even numbers can be irrational:
    humans are artificial computers at heart

     

    So this operation shall now be augmented:
    powerful axioms generate universes:
    humans are artificial computers at heart:
    this procedure is redundant and infinitely long

     

    Powerful axioms generate universes:
    for proof jump out of the system:
    this procedure is redundant and infinitely long:
    but the human brain must bottom out

     

    For proof jump out of the system:
    out of the system we pop:
    but the human brain must bottom out:
    this musical invention will self-destruct

     

    Out of the picture we pop:
    these statements are most certainly true:
    this musical invention will self-destruct:
    and so now all this nonsense may finally stop

     

    These statements are most certainly true:
    but there will be harmonic resolution too:
    and so now all this nonsense may finally stop:
    these statements are all paradoxically false

     

     

     

    In The Beginning

     
     
    (To justify God’s ways to the 21st century)
     
     

    #In the beginning was the computer. And God said
     
    :Let there be light!
     
    #You have not signed on yet.
     
    :God.
     
    #Enter user password.
     
    :Omniscient.
     
    #Password Incorrect. Try again!
     
    :Omnipotent.
     
    #Password Incorrect. Try again!
     
    :Technocrat.
     
    #And God signed on 12:01 a.m., Sunday, March 1.
     
    :Let there be light!
     
    #Unrecognizable command. Try again!
     
    :Create light.
     
    #Done.
     
    :Run heaven and earth.
     
    #And God created Day and Night. And God saw there were 0 errors.
    #And God signed off at 12:02 a.m., Sunday, March 1.
    #Approx. funds remaining: $92.50.

     
     
    #And God signed on at 12:00 a.m., Monday, March 2.
     
    :Let there be firmament in the midst of the water and
     
    #Unrecognizable command! Try again!
     
    :Create firmament.
     
    #Done.
     
    :Run firmament.
     
    #And God divided the waters. And God saw there were 0 errors.
    #And God signed off at 12:01 a.m., Monday, March 2.
    #Approx. funds remaining: $84.60.
     
     

    #And God signed on at 12:00 a.m., Tuesday, March 3.
     
    :Let the waters under heaven be gathered together unto one place
    and let the dry land appear and
     
    #Too many characters in string specification! Try again.
     
    :Create dryland.
     
    #Done!
     
    :Run dryland.
     
    #And God created Earth and Seas. And God saw there were
    0 errors.
    #And God signed off at 12:01 a.m., Tuesday, March 3.
    #Approx. funds remaining: $65.00.
     
     

    #And God signed on at 12:00 a.m., Wednesday, March 4.
     
    :Create lights in the firmament to divide the day from the night.
     
    #Unspecified type. Try again!
     
    :Create sunmoonstars.
     
    #And God created Sun, Moon, Stars. And God saw there were
    0 errors.
    #And God signed off at 12:01 a.m., Wednesday, March 4.
    #Approx. funds remaining: $54:00.
     
     

    #And God signed on at 12:00 a.m., Thursday, March 5.
     
    :Create fish.
     
    #Done.
     
    :Create fowl.
     
    #Done.
     
    :Run fish’nfowl.
     
    #And God created the great seamonsters and every living creature
    that creepeth wherewith the waters swarmed after its kind and
    every winged fowl after its kind. 0 errors.
    #And God signed off at 12:01 a.m., Thursday, March 5.
    #Approx. funds remaining: $45:00.
     
     

    #And God signed on at 12:00 a.m., Friday, March 6.
     
    :Create cattle.
     
    #Done.
     
    :Create creepy things.
     
    #Done.
     
    :Now let us make man in our image.
     
    #Unspecified type! Try again.
     
    :Create man.
     
    #Done.
     
    :Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it
    and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over of the fowl
    of the air and over every living thing that creepeth upon the
    earth.
     
    #Too many command operands! Try again.
     
    :Run multiplication.
     
    #Execution terminated. 6 errors.
     
    :Insert breath.
     
    #O.K.
     
    :Run multiplication.
     
    #Execution terminated. 5 errors.
     
    :Move man to Garden of Eden.
     
    #File Garden of Eden does not exist.
     
    :Create Gard.En.
     
    #Done.
     
    :Move man to Gard.En.
     
    #O.K.
     
    :Run multiplication.
     
    #Execution terminated. 4 errors.
     
    :Copy woman from man.
     
    #O.K.
     
    :Run multiplication.
     
    #Execution terminated. 3 errors.
     
    :Insert woman into man.
     
    #Illegal parameters. Try again!
     
    :Insert man into woman.
     
    #O.K.
     
    :Run multiplication.
     
    #Execution terminated. 2 errors.
     
    :Create desire.
     
    #Done.
     
    :Run multiplication.
     
    #And God saw man’nwoman being fruitful and multiplying in the
    Gard.En.
    #Warning: No time limit on this run. 1 errors.
     
    :Create freewill.
     
    #Done.
     
    :Run freewill.
     
    #And God saw man’nwoman being fruitful and multiplying in the
    Gard.En.
    #Warning: No time limit on this run. 1 errors.
     
    :Undo desire.
     
    #Desire cannot be undone once freewill is created.
     
    :Destroy freewill.
     
    #Freewill is an inaccessible file and cannot be destroyed.
    #Enter replacement, cancel, or ask for help.
     
    :Help!
     
    #Desire cannot be undone once freewill is created.
    #Freewill is an inaccessible file and cannot be destroyed.
    #Enter replacement, cancel, or ask for help.
     
    :Create Treeofknowledge.
     
    #And God saw man’nwoman being fruitful and multiplying in the
    Gard.En.
    #Warning: No time limit on this run. 1 errors.
     
    :Create good’nevil.
     
    #Done.
     
    :Activate evil.
     
    #And God saw he had created shame.
    #Warning: System error in sector E95. Man’nwoman not in Gard.En.
    #1 errors.
     
    :Scan Gard.En. for man’nwoman.
     
    #Man’nwoman cannot be located. Try again!
     
    :Search Gard.En. for man’nwoman.
     
    #Search failed.
     
    :Delete shame.
     
    #Shame cannot be deleted once evil has been activated.
     
    :Destroy freewill.
     
    #Freewill an inaccessible file and cannot be destroyed.
     
    :Stop!
     
    #Unrecognizable command. Try again.
     
    :Break
    :Break
    :Break
     
    #ATTENTION ALL USERS ATTENTION ALL USERS: COMPUTER GOING DOWN FOR
    REGULAR DAY OF MAINTENANCE AND REST IN FIVE MINUTES. PLEASE
    SIGN OFF.
     
    :Create new world.
     
    #You have exceeded your allotted file space. You must destroy
    old files before new ones can be created.
     
    :Destroy earth.
     
    #Destroy earth. Please confirm.
     
    :Destroy earth confirmed.
     
    #COMPUTER DOWN. COMPUTER DOWN. SERVICES WILL RESUME ON SUNDAY
    MARCH 8 AT 6:00 A.M. YOU MUST SIGN OFF NOW!
     
    #And God signed off at 11:59 p.m., Friday, March 6.
    #And God he had zero funds remaining.
     

  • Commentary

    David Porush
    Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

     

    David Porush responds to Allison Fraiberg’s essay, “Of AIDS, Cyborgs, and Other Indiscretions,” Postmodern Culturev.1 n.3 (May, 1991):

     

    Allison Fraiberg uses the discourses of AIDS to read large oppositions and tendencies at work in our culture. As such, AIDS is one more battlefield between right thinking and wrong thinking. Here wrong thinking is promoted by a reactionary, self-serving, moralizing majority that prescribes a cure for AIDS in “traditional” values to the exclusion of others an that denies the extent to which all our bloods and responsibilities commingle in the vast, luscious, and newly-dangerous circuitry of sexuality. The Bad Guys in her reading of her culture are clearly defined: they are listed and quoted at the beginning of her essay and resurface in various guises–people who promote the nuclear family, white middle class males, ad propagandists who ironically forget how to use sex to sell the public on the use of condoms.

     

    At times, Fraiberg manages to free herself from her orgy of jargon and deconstructionist agitprop to achieve real eloquence, especially when she calls for a redefinition of sexuality–also the most fun parts of the essay. Almost all of the conclusions which she reaches in her argument are both inarguable and quite tame: we must all engage in safe sex, but do so with the awareness that sex puts us in the circuit, that we take responsibilities for our own bodies, that AIDS should not be a tool for scapegoating and de- humanizing groups of people. Rather, AIDS ought to impel us to redefine the body, the self, and our sexuality (along with our discourses sexuality) as participants in a looping feedback with the interpenetrating systems of otherness which really create our culture (or really culture our creativity).

     

    The essay, however, has a tendency to discard or demolish practices and ideals that would satisfy even a new cyborg mentality simply because they have been tainted by association with conventional, conservative ideology. In this, there is a confusion or conflation between reactionary rhetoric (out of homophobia and racism, the moral majority use their prescriptions to define the other as alien, diseased) and technically safe practices (monogamy, safe sex, abstinence from IV drug use, the nuclear family)–in short, discretionary activities. The clearest example comes when Fraiberg writes,

     

    [16] . . . monogamy means little if one partner is HIV+ and the couple, thinking they have fulfilled the moral requirement in the symbolic contract that disqualifies them from contraction, practices unsafe sex.

     

    While we would not argue with the premise (that there’s something nasty about the prescription of exclusive monogamy for everyone in the culture) nor with the amusing analysis elsewhere in this essay (that the more you ask folks to say no to their pleasure they more likely they are to embrace it impulsively), we might argue with the conclusion. After all, monogamy means quite a lot, especially if one partner has AIDS. It promotes responsibility to and awareness of everyone else in the circuit, and indeed fulfills Fraiberg’s own call to greater cyborg awareness.

     

    The second problem here actually arises from the essay’s greatest strength: Fraiberg’s excellent application of deconstruction methods to the term “discrete” and “discretion.” The effect of her analysis is to construct a marvelous pun (there is high magic to low puns): she converts the word discrete from its first meaning (distinct, separate, severed, discontinuous) into its other meaning, as in discreet (exercising judgment, discernment, etc.). To enhance the beauty of this play, and in typically deconstructive fashion, phrases like to exercise discretion Fraiberg notes, ought to mean the opposite of the first kind of discrete: the “discreet” individual now knows that AIDS uncovers the very extent to which we are not discrete but are participants in the circuit. All well and good so far.

     

    The problem is that Fraiberg herself has trouble explaining exactly what all this means and resolving the contradictions to which it leads:

     

    [21] The traditional, tenuous limits of the body dissolved into fused networks, into open circuits of interconnectedness, produce an ontological recognition that, from this perspective, urges the body into discretion. Closed off, guarded against infection, beware the surface; any exchange of fluid, that is, any disclosure of an open, leaking body threatens. A closed, self-contained body resurfaces from the within the integrated network.

     

    [22] But this is a different kind of discretion. It's not the kind of discretion clung to by those who deny any fusion; it's a kind of discretion, discreteness, that is a consequence of the recognition of indiscretion. So while the cyborg ontology takes as its premise the dissolution of traditional boundaries associated with the body, its referent in the texts of AIDS, epistemologically speaking, forces the body to resist coming to rest with those integrated circuits and, instead, reorganizes into discrete units. In this sense, discretion returns, not in the form of reactionary denial, but as conditioned by a cyborg-like system. In other words, if the cyborg ontology can be said to function as the discursive field upon which networks of social relations play themselves out, then that field must by willing to admit--indeed, it has already admitted--the constructions of what might seem quite odd to cyborg theorists: writings and readings of the body grounded in discretion.

     

    What happened to all that fun stuff about broadening and redefining the sexual act itself?

     

    I think these two problems are actually produced by a deeper flaw in Fraiberg’s argument, one that rests with her reification of the Bad Guys, her tendency to see them as blind and inexperienced at best, sheerly vicious at worst. She wouldn’t need to twist and contort her prose into these unnatural postures if only she would grant that perhaps AIDS brings us all–not just the privileged few who have been immersed in the discourses of a salvational cyborg ideology –to pretty much the same level of self-awareness about our position in the intertwined cyborg loops of culture- sexuality-identity. We are all equally “conditioned by cyborg-like systematicity” and we are all made more aware of our sexuality by AIDS. The proof is in the result: most of us, William F. Buckley included, have come to the same conclusion–that survival entails reorganization “into discrete units.” The only difference is that Fraiberg claims a greater degree of awareness and calls her interpretation a “progressive reconstruction” while denying a level of agency to (and blaming for a certain intentional viciousness) the poor dumb self-righteous suckers who stick to monogamous heterosexuality and keep their spouses and kids and stupidly try to prescribe it for others, not only because it works for them but because they may not have a taste for the impedimenta of dental dams and condoms, not to mention anal penetration and fellatio and IV-drugs.

     

    Perhaps the proper conclusion is that all the rhetorics about AIDS are dispensable. We can certainly do without the oppressive totalizing rhetoric of the official versions of AIDS, with its self-righteousness and its encouragements of hatred and fear and otherness. But maybe we could just as soon dispense with arguments that use AIDS to take what is in the end an obscure high moral ground through the sterile and overly-self-conscious rhetoric of the encrusted academic. In this case, such a rhetoric strives to reconcile the “good” ideology of openness, liberation, and tolerance (as well as rejection of all simple and patent and conventional formulations, like “safe sex” and “monogamy”) with two incompatible notions: the allure of the cyborg and the realities of AIDS. In the end, two into one won’t go and the rhetoric of liberation finds itself sadly overmatched. This is one menage a trois which is simply an unproductive configuration. Cyborgization probably produces just as many new reactionaries roaming the golf courses in their abstinence as it does enlightened networkers, the new cyberpunker proles who roam the loop looking for action. And AIDS, as this essay manifestly demonstrates, produces caution and discretion and a discipline of the self, a redefinition of the body not simply as a sensorial machine, but as an invitation to disease, no matter what rhetoric you process it through. Postmodern liberation, with its yearning for whatever it postmodernism yearns for, must await some different kind of apocalypse to scratch that epistemological/ontological itch.

     

    I know this is an anathematic suggestion to most postmodernists, who hold, as I did for a long time, to a more or less constructivist position: there is no reality that isn’t reconfigured or constructed by discourse. In its most radical tenet, we convince ourselves that it’s all discourse, there is no reality at all, so you’d better be careful which discourse you choose. But if you look at the facts of AIDS, it really does scare you out of the constructivist position. There’s something awfully touchable and factitious about it, especially if you watch it close, destroying a friend. There’s even something haunting and scary, to which any AIDS researcher will attest, about the HIV virus itself. Let’s take paragraph to explore it:

     

    Normally, a cell begins with DNA, which is transcribed into RNA, which then codes for proteins, the building blocks of cells. But AIDS is the ultimate cybernetic disease; it inverts and subverts the normal DNA-RNA-DNA loop (thus the “retro” in “retrovirus”) by imposing its own loop. Where most viruses are DNA, HIV is an RNA virus. With the insidious collaboration of reverse transcriptase, it takes over and alters the DNA transcription process, forcing it to produce more retroviral RNA, which in turn takes over the DNA in other cells. At the same time, it changes other parts of DNA, encoding for proteins that alter the body’s cells, actually making them more receptive to further HIV infection. Finally, the RNA replication cycle is activated by anything that turns on the immune system: in other words, the immune system defeats itself every time it tries to work. Spooky and evil disease. Nasty shit.

     

         I suggest we all take a closer look at the possibility –made even more ironic by the tendency of some to laud the coming cyborgization of our bodies and minds–that AIDS is just the first of a terrible series of cyborg events against which simple enlightened discretion is not proof. Perhaps retroviruses themselves are the product of orgiastic physiological feedback mechanisms between the world and the world-body, which might continue to spawn these transcription reversals between RNA and DNA because we have achieved some new order of Prigoginesque complexity.1 AIDS really does make cyborgs of its victims, and by extension, of us all, as the glomming of a cybernetic system onto an organismic host. If this is what cyborgization portends, I’m gonna resist.

     

     

    Notes

     

    1. In Order Out Of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984), Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers discuss the consequences of Prigogine’s Nobel-Prize-winning work on chaos. They explain how new biological organisms of increasing complexity arise naturally and inevitably from conditions of turbulent chaos: the HIV viral family may be an example of just such an occurrence.

     

     

    Allison Fraiberg

    University of Washington
    <fraiberg@milton.u.washington.edu>

     

    Allison Fraiberg replies to David Porush:

     

    In reading David Porush’s comments, I realized that parts of my essay were not as clear as I would have liked them to be. Based on Porush’s comments, I would like to take this opportunity to reiterate some points that I think are crucial to my argument as a whole. Consequently, I will reply to Porush by focusing on areas where I sensed the most confusion.

     

    What concerns me the most are quibbles about, or blatant dismissals of, two crucial starting points in my essay. The first involves a conclusion of Porush’s that retroactively revises one of my premises. Porush writes that “[p]erhaps the proper conclusion is that all the rhetorics about AIDS are dispensable” (8). Easy to say, but not so easy–or even desirable–to do. Douglas Crimp opens the collection of essays in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/ Cultural Activism with an important reminder. I quote him at length since he reaches the heart of the matter:

     

    AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it. We know AIDS only in and through those practices. This assertion does not contest the existence of viruses, antibodies, infections, or transmission routes. Least of all does it contest the reality of illness, suffering, and death. What it does contest is the notion that there is an underlying reality of AIDS, upon which are constructed the representations, or the culture, or the politics of AIDS. If we recognize that AIDS exists only in and through these constructions, then hopefully we can also recognize the imperative to know them, analyze them, and wrest control of them. (3)

     

    To dispense with the rhetorics of AIDS, in Crimp’s frame, becomes an impossible task since AIDS exists “in and through” them. Crimp’s point is that you can’t distinguish AIDS from the practices which make it intelligible. Choosing to ignore the discourses of AIDS is something I can’t even picture: every day I see stories on television, in the newspapers; I hear of new public policy and legislation; I see people die. I don’t see how one can dispose of the rhetorics–it’s not a Lego set that one can put away when one has tired of playing. I can, however, see how some people have tried to revise/alter/speak different rhetorics in attempts to “recognize the imperative to know them, analyze them, and wrest control of them.” And, in seeing and experiencing various actions and discourses put into motion by AIDS strategists, I have realized that “encrusted” academics have no property rights on discourse.

     

    The second premise around which Porush and I disagree centers on a temporal sense of positioning. Porush writes of the “coming cyborgization of our bodies” and how he’s “gonna resist” it. I’m somewhat taken aback by the future tense here since my whole argument rests on the assumption that Haraway’s cyborg myth is not going to happen but that it has happened (“The cyborg is our ontology”). The first half of my essay uses a cyborg ontology as its premise: Haraway for the description, then my resituating of discourses using Haraway’s frame. By using the cyborg as a starting point, I’m saying that–and this is by no means an astounding observation–rhetorics of humanism and organicism have produced, are currently producing, and, dare I say, will probably always produce, radical material inequities for the vast majority of people.

     

    So, if a) the cyborg is our ontology and b) discourses that deny the cyborg are at best archaic and at worst deadly, do you continue to tell the story of organics–a story that doesn’t quite fit the picture? Do you speak of the futility of trying to do anything in this configuration (Haraway: “Paranoia bores me.”)? Do you speak in the rhetoric of the future–and thereby deny various realities? I choose none of these since I see in them no opportunities for change. Instead, I’ll take on Haraway’s challenge of “being in the belly of a monster and looking for another story to tell” (“Cyborgs at Large” 14). Consequently, what I did was take a description of current relations and resituated AIDS discourses on it.

     

    And what I saw from the belly of the monster was how certain discourses had tried so hard to resist being digested by the monster; I also saw others that knew that’s where they were. The alternate AIDS strategists knew that they were in the belly of a monster and while I was there I saw something exciting happen: the alternate AIDS discourses began to revise the belly. These discourses, the discourses that recognize a cyborg-netic body, began to revise postmodern versions of the blurry boundaries of the body. They resurfaced the body and by so doing created a post- circuited discrete unit.

     

    Porush says in his response that I pun on “discrete” and “discreet”: I do, but he misses my final step. I move from the discrete bodies of liberal humanism (separate, distinct) to the pun on discreet (the various definitions on all sides of what constitutes a certain sense of judgment). But then I move on to discrete again. I move on because it’s not a revised sense of judgment that propels the argument; it’s a revised discrete sense of the body. In other words, I go from “discrete,” to “discreet,” to “discrete.” And by the time I get around to the second version of discrete, it looks very different from the first one that set the pun in motion. That alternate AIDS discourses and strategies revise versions of the body offered by mainstream media, humanism, and postmodernism seems to me a powerful and energetic practice.

     

    It’s a powerful practice that begins to tell another story–another story that tries to describe what’s happening to people–and I read the story as being about agency. So my essay isn’t about safe sex or new forms of judgments: people with a lot more visibility than I’ve got have been saying these things for 10 years with little luck (but, based on what I read in a recent poll I took on the electronic bulletin board used in composition courses at the University of Washington, it wouldn’t hurt to have those ideas reiterated, again and again and again). Instead, I’m interested in how agency is conditioned and produced in the move from “discrete” (version 1) to “discrete” (version 2).

     

    In this second version, you can’t arrive at an agent without looking at what Porush rightfully calls the “realities of AIDS.” Agency is the result of the resurfacing of the–differently discrete–body; and the agency arises out of the material conditions that force the resurfacing. When Porush quotes me saying we are all conditioned by cyborg-like systematicity, he adds a word that completely alters my intention and, consequently, my argument: he adds “equally” before conditioned, a move that once again forecloses on this version of agency. I would never say that we are all equally conditioned by anything. I would never say, for instance, that the women on factory lines in Southeast Asia who assemble my computer and I, who use this computer to write, are “equally” conditioned by the transnational circuit of which we are both part; I would never say that gay men and straight white women in this country are “equally” conditioned by the cyborg-like systematicity I describe in my essay.

     

    In fact, it is the redistribution of agency that grounds my argument (I must apologize to Mr. Porush if he doesn’t find this as much “fun” as he would like). The type of material agency I propose is one that shifts attention and authority away from hegemonic biomedical and governmental institutions and onto those most affected. It also forces theorists, postmodern and otherwise, to take our cues from where the materialist agent stands: usually downtown organizing street actions, protests, and die-ins.

     

  • Of AIDS, Cyborgs, and Other Indiscretions: Resurfacing the Body in the Postmodern

    Allison Fraiberg

    University of Washington
    fraiberg@milton.u.washington.edu

     

    We live in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. . . . today, there is a whole pornography of information.

     

    –Jean Baudrillard

     

    [T]here has been a mutation in the object, unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject; we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace . . .

     

    –Fredric Jameson

     

    [W]e are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.

     

    –Donna Haraway

     

    Predominant in postmodern theories of representation are approaches and practices that locate “the body” within systematized networks and circuits. Theorists who are representative of very different theoretical positions–such as Jean Baudrillard, whose “ecstasy of communication” describes a breakdown between public and private, Fredric Jameson, whose “hyperspace” reflects a continuous sense of the present in a world of transnational capital, and Donna Haraway, whose “cyborg ontology” reads the disintegration of distinctions between organisms and machines–nonetheless concur in presenting scenarios in which traditional tropes of discreteness, of discretion, dissolve and the focus shifts to formulations of connectedness. Subjected to these discursive frameworks or grounding ontologies, the body, as a clearly delineated unit, blurs into negotiated relatedness and postmodern systematicity ushers in a contemporary meltdown of the discrete body. In other words, it would seem, at best, difficult to try to discuss “the body” with distinct boundaries, whereas referring to the bounded body– bounded to and within integrated networks–can emerge as a reflective postmodern image.

     

    This networking of bodies has been prominent in the representations of and discourse about AIDS in the U.S. As I will show, mainstream media constructions of AIDS project and feed off a fear of, among other things, circuited sexuality. On the other hand, critics of mainstream AIDS representations work to break down the rhetorical constructions and effects of discrete categories, an obvious example being that of “general public” or “at risk groups.” In this paper, I will first resituate familiar discussions of the body in AIDS commentary, both popular and critical, by employing what Donna Haraway calls a “cyborg ontology.” I will then move on to suggest that, in terms of AIDS discourses, the body begins to resurface from within the networks defined, urging a very different kind of discreteness, and consequently a revised type of agency, into a postmodern context.

     

    Wiring the Postmodern

     

    When Baudrillard defines the “ecstasy of communication,” he grounds its images in screens and networks. Certain that “[s]omething has changed,” he laments the recognition of an “era of networks . . . contact, contiguity, feedback and generalized interface” (127). Communication, for Baudrillard, invokes a “relational decor,” a “fluidity,” “polyvalence” in “pure circulation” (130-31). Baudrillard anxiously describes these networks as “pornographic” and “obscene” since he sees in them the loss of the body and its familiar figurations: the “subject” and the always tenuous public/private dichotomy. Because of its fusing into the network, the body loses its discretionary status and, for Baudrillard, the “obscenity” lies in the dissolution of the private where “secrets, spaces and scenes [are] abolished in a single dimension of information” (131); Baudrillard’s “pornographic” develops out of the inability to produce “proper” limits and he invokes the schizophrenic for tropic legitimation:

     

    with the immanent promiscuity of all these networks, with their continual connections, we are now in a new form of schizophrenia . . . too great a proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect him anymore. . . . He can no longer produce the limits of his own being. . . . He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence. (132-33)

     

    What is so remarkable about Baudrillard’s casting of the discussion in these terms is that, with the substitution of a noun or two, one could easily transpose this rhetoric into a “pro-family” position on AIDS that strains to keep the “halos” on, the “unclean” out, and the private crucially “protected.” In both scenarios there is a sense of inevitable fusion of the body within networks–a fusion realized, albeit reluctantly, by Baudrillard, but repeatedly denied and cast out on moral grounds by the so-called “pro- family” position on AIDS. Consequently:

     

    The logical outcome of testing is a quarantine of those infected.

     

    --Jesse Helms

     

    Baudrillard’s mourning of the “loss” of past private spaces of the body is recast, with a similar tone, in Jameson’s analysis that isolates postmodernism within the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” Jameson reorganizes the postmodern schema into a “bewildering new world space of multinational capital” (58) with “effaced frontiers,” “integrated” commodity production, “intertextuality,” and the “disappearance of the individual subject.” What Jameson calls postmodern “hyperspace” is the global networking produced by transnational capital, a networking he sees as “transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively map its position” (83). Jameson arrives at the point of calling for ways to map this network and/by/for those “caught” within it, to make it epistemologically accessible, and finally, dialectically, make the best of what, he argues, had to come anyway.

     

    Jameson differs from Baudrillard in, among other places, his isolation of a particular of a particular disjunction between subject and space. “My implication,” Jameson argues, “is that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution…we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace” (80). Jameson does identify a new field of relations, but the subject he posits remains essentially the same, just a little lost in its new surroundings. For this reason, Jameson’s call for cognitive mappings resembles a type of postmodern finding of one’s self in a “bewildering” new field. This position, like Baudrillard’s, can find its correlative in AIDS discourse: the Jamesonian view would be reminiscent of the mainstream position that asserts the “general public” can contract HIV “as well.” In other words, the field has changed, but how the subjects are thought of within it remains virtually the same. Therefore:

     

    I have asked the Department of Health and Human Services to determine as soon as possible the extent to which the AIDS virus has penetrated our society.

     

    --Ronald Reagan (in 1987, when 25,644 were known dead)1

     

    For Haraway, however, both the field and the subject change as cyborgs provide the ontological myth that captures the image of post-industrial capitalist culture. She defines the cyborg as a “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism” (“Manifesto” 174). Dissolving apparently clear distinctions propels the cyborg. “Needy for connection,” it lurks at the boundaries constructed and demanded by humanist thought, dismantling discretion in favor of interconnected networks and integrated systems. Boundaries “breached,” or at least “leaky,” include those between human and animal, between animal-human and machine, and between the physical and the non-physical. Like other postmodern strategies, cyborgs “subvert myriad organic wholes,” and, unlike Baudrillard and Jameson, Haraway can see potential in the loss of discretion: “So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work” (“Manifesto” 178). It is not the case that Haraway sees her cyborg myth as some post-organic deus ex machina; instead she invests her myth with perpetual tensions where “potent fusions” are balanced with “dangerous possibilities.” Focusing on the production and reading of integrated circuits and the relations within them, theorists can, then, in Haraway’s words, negotiate through various “system constraints” (“Biopolitics” 12-13).

     

    Other theorists of postmodernism may argue and debate about whether to embrace or view with horror a cybernetic age; about whether the status of subjectivity has changed; about whether postmodernity signals a turn beyond that which was once valued (by some). Haraway, on the other hand, like many feminist cultural theorists, resists these debates about how one should feel in these times (paranoid, horrified, ecstatic) and instead tries to focus on what to do, how to proceed, and how to start thinking of pro-active strategies. (Granted, Jameson calls for cognitive mapping, but the energy seems reconciliatory rather than pro-active). Quite simply, what separates Haraway out from a substantial set of discourses about cybernetics is that she is not so much concerned with how good or bad a cybernetic age will be, or has become; she wants to talk about how the world is ontologically/epistemologically structured and what feminists can do about it.

     

    Of Aids: Resituating Discourses

     

    It is patriotic to have the AIDS test and be negative.

     

    –Cory Servaas,
    Presidential AIDS Commission

     

    Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common needle users, and on the buttocks to protect the victimization of other homosexuals.

     

    –William F. Buckley

     

    AIDS is God’s judgment of a society that does not live by His rules.

     

    –Jerry Falwell 2

     

    So much of AIDS criticism has had to contend with cauterizing the effects of officially sanctioned positions such as those above; consequently, much of the work on AIDS to date has centered on exposing the assumptions and values embedded within mainstream representation. These important critiques focus predominantly on three, often intersecting, sites of construction. Often, representations of AIDS have problematically inherited historical and biomedical contexts, and various critics have discussed the problems when AIDS becomes another “venereal disease” or the latest version of rampant infectious disease where “contagion,” “quarantine,” and “contamination” become the dominant terms conditioning meaning (and often policy and research).3 Moreover, a large amount of critical practice has focused on exposing the racist, classist, sexist, and homophobic assumptions embedded in popular, medical, and sociological representations. Many of these undertakings highlight the politics behind discourses of “risk groups” that isolate people rather than practices; of the “general public,” which turns out to function more like an exclusive country club; and of “origins,” which, as Simon Watney argues, equates a source of something with its cause (“Missionary” 95).4 In addition, critics and activists have foregrounded organized/reorganized erotic economies and resisted the anti-sex and “pro-family” campaign engineered by hegemonic AIDS representations.5

     

    These critical projects are crucial in that they expose the biases upon which policies are constructed. But what I would now like to do is think about some mainstream positions and some critical ones at the same time, in the same field of relations–in the field of what Haraway might call a cyborg-like network. Reorganized in this framework, attitudes range from denial of networking–in terms of the subject and/or the field–to a kind of hysterical reaction of recognition, to finally more productive readings and codings. Because I am trying to resituate these arguments on the same discursive field, the next few pages might be repetitive for those who are acquainted with the various critiques of mainstream AIDS commentary. Please bear in mind, however, that I am trying to re-view these positions as they relate to a cyborg-netic field; this resituating, while at times somewhat belaboured, is necessary ground out of which the resurfacing on the body emerges.

     

    Denying Cyborgs

     

    The cyborg notion of transgressed boundaries and leaky distinctions finds its immunological referent in the discourses of AIDS. The reality of HIV has opened up and relegated bodies to an integrated system of, among other things, sexuality. The bringing to consciousness of the presence of AIDS has broken down the traditional demarcations of the body, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside. For years now, with less safe practices, an interface propels the body to serve as an osmotic shell through which systematized sex circulates. Moreover, shared needles construct a network of IV drug users; and shared blood forces to consciousness a crucial interconnectedness. And, of course, these systems interpenetrate as networks of social relations emerge. The realities of AIDS dissolve the boundaries of the discrete body, and the cyborg, still needy for connection, integrates it into its discursive network. The New Right, mainstream media representation, and a lot of public sentiment have responded by denying cyborg-netic reorganizations of the body. Desperate to retain the traditional boundaries of the body as individual, both conservatives and liberals have articulated a rhetoric that has made several attempts to keep AIDS outside the sphere of the “general American public”–read white, heterosexual, middle-class nuclear family. In each situation, the position that denies recognition of a circuited body image tries to fabricate and maintain crucial distinctions between self and other.

     

    The most obvious boundary that “official” conservative discourse clings to is the one between human and “disease”: “us” and “AIDS.” The strategic construction that urges keeping “it” out of “us” relies primarily on a projection since “it” would not be if it were not for “us.” Repressing that integration, the first rhetorical maneuver involves anthropomorphizing AIDS into a live virus and then militarizing its context. Susan Sontag notices that in this “high-tech warfare,” the AIDS virus [sic] “hides,” “attacks,” “lurks,” and, of course, “invades” (17-19). Similarly, Paula Treichler describes the rhetorical evolution of the “AIDS virus” as “a top-flight secret agent–a James Bond . . . armed with a ‘range of strategies’ and licensed to kill” insidiously invading the cell and “establishing a disinformation campaign” (59).

     

    Reinforcing the “us/them” binary that denies the cyborg body is a continual search for a cause of AIDS, and consequently, the origins of HIV. Overdeterminations of HIV as the single agent cause of AIDS foreclose on posited co- factors; and then the quest for origin can shift to isolating sources of HIV. That a strain of virus remotely similar to HIV has been found in a species of monkey (the so-called “Green Monkey Hypothesis”) produces and perpetuates a popular contention that AIDS originated in “Africa.” Responsibility is projected onto a convenient other and the body of the “general American public” remains “safe” and isolated, establishing its boundaries not only by geography, but by implied race as well. Not only does this premise displace origins thousands of miles away, but in doing so relies on a familiar moral opposition of white and black. The “cause” of AIDS becomes the monolithic “dark continent,” the land of the primitive, and as Simon Watney notes, of “naked ‘animal’ blackness” (75). These multiple moral projections would enclose and protect white, middle- class, heterosexual America from invasion. Again, the nuclear family body denies the cybernetic organization of AIDS by refusing to recognize its integration within its networks.

     

    Once discursively acknowledged, mainstream representations of AIDS draw on newly delineated boundaries; a revised “us/them” dichotomy emerges that keeps denying the AIDS-body cyborg. “Risk groups” or “those at risk” (revised from the “4-H” groups of the 80s) become the convenient other: most often cited as gay men and IV drug users (who are almost always represented as people of color). The nomenclature advocates that these are groups of people who are at high risk of contracting HIV, therefore the “general public” should stay away from “them.” The first striking characteristic of this configuration is that these are groups of people and if you find yourself fitting into one of these groups, you are necessarily at “high-risk.” This framework denies the subject any sort of agency, an ideologically motivated strategy that makes its point: the subject who falls into a high-risk group has no option but to occupy a position in it; at the same time, if one does not slip into one of these groups then there is, within this construction, no “risk.” Here, it doesn’t matter what you do because what counts is who you are; and for the person living with AIDS, this context leaves no room for subjectivity, for agency, for action.

     

    That the intended audience of “risk group” identification is the “general public” underscores the contention that “those at risk” are precisely not part of that audience. The tenuous dichotomy, however, slips at several sites: that of what gets represented as the case of the “tragic” hemophiliac who contracts through blood products; the recipient of a transfusion of “tainted” blood; and the sex worker who “infects” the unknowing consumer. In each case, though, an innocence factor mitigates contraction. In a more recent attempt to reproduce the innocent body, and therefore maintain the ability to name guilt, the term “Pediatric AIDS” has become embedded in representations of certain people living with AIDS. In a move that seeks to reestablish boundaries to the now quite messy binary, “AIDS” and “Pediatric AIDS” have surfaced, rhetorically, as two very distinct constructs, each conditioning very different identities: babies born testing positive for HIV antibodies can occupy a position of “wholly innocent” while the mothers, depending on their backgrounds, await textual, moral assignation.

     

    With the deconstruction effected, with the representational acknowledgement that AIDS indeed “leaks” into the “general public,” conservative thought reorganizes its “us/them” dichotomy into a rhetoric explicitly moral and “pro-family.” Each time the hint of connection emerges, a new denial of integration surfaces; each time a new illusory individual unit is posited. Prevention strategies that, at this point, still reject the implication of some bodies into the AIDS-body network consciously construct new boundaries around the body of the nuclear family. If the “innocent” general public can contract HIV as well, so the story goes, then a prevention campaign that extrapolates from occluded attitudes within risk-group discourse must center on a question of morality: if “we” can get AIDS (and this is precisely the moment when discursive productions can either accept the cyborg ontology or try yet again to deny it), then “we” must try to be good. The moralizing trope serves as the building material for the construction of boundaries. And “good” in the 1980s functions euphemistically to mean monogamous heterosexual relationships with people who “just say no” to drugs. The safest sex of all becomes abstinence–the illusory production of a self-contained body–and those who abstain from sex altogether become “very good” people; those who insist on having sex but do so only in monogamous relationships, preferably in marriage, are “good”; and, of course, those who engage in sex with many partners, who insist on being promiscuous, or use IV drugs, bring on infection “themselves.” In this configuration, a closed-off body equivocates into a pure body as the nuclear family forges boundaries embedded in morality.

     

    Starting With Cyborgs

     

    By stressing abstinence, by prescribing heterosexual monogamy, by condemning IV drug use, conservative discourse engages in a repressive hypothesis that promotes an economy of desire: the more you say yes, the higher your chances of “infection,” the more leaky the moral boundaries that surround you. The hierarchy of morality–abstinence, monogamy, condoms, etc.–has eroded, however, under the scrutiny of critics, many of whom recognize the flimsiness of the boundaries constructed. Douglas Crimp argues against abstinence as a strategy of prevention because “people do not abstain from sex, and if you only tell them ‘just say no,’ they will have unsafe sex” (252). Moreover, repressed in the call for monogamy is any reference to history: monogamy means little if one partner is HIV+ and the couple, thinking they have fulfilled the moral requirement in the symbolic contract that disqualifies them from contraction, practices unsafe sex. This education campaign denies a discursive field of indiscretion by promoting a rhetoric of the discreet individual.

     

    Critics of media representations of AIDS have addressed this problematic by exposing its repressive mechanisms. John Greyson, for example, has produced a music-video exposing the “ADS” campaign–the “Acquired Dread of Sex” that one can get from watching, among other things, television (270). Consequently, Crimp notices how media campaigns to get people to use condoms have used fear as their manipulative device rather than sexuality. Ironically, he wonders why “an industry that has used sexual desire to sell everything from cars to detergents suddenly finds itself at a loss for how to sell a condom” (266). What culminates in an “acquired dread of sex” is the logical conclusion of a discourse that organizes repeated “us/them” oppositions to keep AIDS out, to deny a cyborg-netic field; and once AIDS manages to “infiltrate,” the emphasis shifts to deny its presence in the morally pure and displace it onto the deviant, thereby constructing new boundaries. It’s the repetition of a posture that attempts at any cost to deny connection/identification; it’s a constricted stance that tries desperately to repress indiscretion: a term defined more traditionally in the context of such denounced behaviors as sex and IV drug use, but also indiscretion described here as a certain dissolution of clear delineation. With indiscretion (both kinds) repressed, those remaining are left to close off their bodies, constricting any potential openings.

     

    To speak of sexuality and the body, and not to speak of AIDS, would be, well, obscene.

     

    --B. Ruby Rich

    Simply put, those who enjoy getting fucked should not be made to feel stupid or irresponsible. Instead, they should be provided with the information necessary to make what they enjoy safe(r)! And that means the aggressive encouragement of condom use.

     

    --Michael Callan

     

    In contrast to conservative rhetoric that denies indiscretion, of any kind, one can locate an ontology that takes the breakdown of traditional boundaries associated with the body as a grounding premise. Since mainstream representation compulsively represses interconnectedness, resistant strategies can and do rupture the process, forcing the latent networks to percolate to consciousness, to representation. Rejecting the discursive displacements that produce Others at risk, it is a position that recognizes, like Rich, that the discourses of AIDS are in some sense always already within: “To speak of sexuality and the body and not to speak of AIDS, would be, well, obscene.” The texts that construct “AIDS” metaphorically become an ontological current running through bodies, making the connections of a systemic circuit. Distinctions, then, between self and other become archaic, and the AIDS-body cyborg functions as an icon that organizes perceptions and writings of the body.

     

    Precisely because a notion of “risk group” or “those at risk” becomes problematic (which, granted, at this point does nothing to address the real inequities of representation), because the networks and narratives established by leaky boundaries integrate and implicate all and avoid projecting blame, the argument can shift from singling out risk groups to focusing on risk practices. The networks made manifest can then accommodate Watney’s call for an “erotics of protection” as well as Singer’s “body management”–both are organizations of erotic economies. If discussion of risk groups and the general public lead us to ask who we are when we have sex or use IV drugs, then the cyborg discursive configuration of risk practices asks all of us what we do when we have sex and use IV drugs. Unlike the former position that relegated the subject to helplessness within its constructions–an especially problematic space for a PLWA (Person Living With AIDS)–this field posits a subject, precisely because of its “indiscretion,” that can choose. Because this subject gives up its limit, its “halo,” (to invoke Baudrillard momentarily) of private protection, it gains agency for resistance–a key term for immunological reference.

     

    And this subject can choose to have sex, unlike its anti-cyborg parallel, but must undergo what Linda Singer calls “changes in the economy of genital gestures and erotic choreography” (55). Whereas anti-cyborg bodies repressed sexualities when confronted with AIDS, integrated bodies adamantly guard the right to them. Carol Leigh, a sex worker and playwright, argues that “we must fight against all those who would use this crisis as an excuse to legislate or otherwise limit sexuality” (177). Those who have thought of sex as heterosexual penile penetration and ejaculation (many caught within the anti-cyborg “general public”) must reorganize perceptions in such a way as to eroticize non-genital areas; and when sex is genital, condoms and dental dams become new age sex toys. Embedded in all of these calls for safer practices are two assumptions that are crucial as far as my own argument is concerned: first, that the forged boundaries constitutive of the individualized units are amorphous; and second, that safer shooting and sex depend on a recogntion of interconnectedness, of indiscretion.

     

    Resurfacing The Body

     

    Rather than repressing sexuality, the AIDS-body network sublimates it, dispersing teleologically-oriented sex into more polymorphous activity. Within this revised organization, the rules of safe sex and calls for clean works dictate that, precisely because the boundaries are illusory, the body resurfaces as discrete entity. Condoms, dental dams, clean needles, and reserved blood manifest a surface awareness, a consciousness focused on clearly delineating the boundaries of bodies. The traditional, tenuous limits of the body dissolved into fused networks, into open circuits of interconnectedness, produce an ontological recognition that, from this perspective, urges the body into discretion. Closed off, guarded against infection, beware the surface; any exchange of fluid, that is, any disclosure of an open, leaking body threatens. A closed, self-contained body resurfaces from the within the integrated network.

     

    But this is a different kind of discretion. It’s not the kind of discretion clung to by those who deny any fusion; it’s a kind of discretion, discreteness, that is a consequence of the recognition of indiscretion. So while the cyborg ontology takes as its premise the dissolution of traditional boundaries associated with the body, its referent in the texts of AIDS, epistemologically speaking, forces the body to resist coming to rest with those integrated circuits and, instead, reorganizes into discrete units. In this sense, discretion returns, not in the form of reactionary denial, but as conditioned by a cyborg-like system. In other words, if the cyborg ontology can be said to function as the discursive field upon which networks of social relations play themselves out, then that field must by willing to admit–indeed, it has already admitted–the constructions of what might seem quite odd to cyborg theorists: writings and readings of the body grounded in discretion.

     

    The resurfaced, discrete body/subject is different from its predecessor because the recognition of blurred boundaries is precisely that which makes the body resurface. “Discretion” functions, then, as an ambivalent marker for both sets of discourses and, as the foundational site for constructions, poses key questions. The discursive peril here, in terms of the discourses of AIDS, involves the confusion between a conservative “pro-family” stance and progressive reconstructions. In the representational treatments of AIDS, two different discrete bodies emerge: one that denies the cyborg and ultimately prescribes racist, classist, and homophobic attitudes; and one that reorganizes discretion within the AIDS-body circuit. Confusing the two could potentially elide the latter construction as well as its ethics. For instance, media campaigns have urged the use of condoms, but they have done so within an atmosphere of repressive (hetero)sexuality; consequently, safe sex, instead of organizing an erotic economy, becomes an unreliable alternative for those heterosexuals who won’t say no. The racist, classist, and homophobic subtexts remain intact and the white, middle-class, heterosexual family assumes the position of general public all over again.

     

    This is not to say that a circulatory ontology ought to be abandoned, nor is it to say that any codings of the body as a discrete unit will necessarily become subsumed by mainstream representation. In fact, I believe that too many areas have seen a reformulation of discretion, a resurfacing of the body, to leave such a pessimistic reading intact. One obvious example in the U.S. involves strategies organized around women’s reproductive rights. When, for instance, abortion rights activists carry signs reading “Bush, get out of mine!” we engage in a similar move that recognizes existing intervention and then expels the groping hands of legislators from women’s bodies and reformulates a discrete body, closing off from the lesislative machinery. This analogy was reinforced during this year’s 4th Annual Gay and Lesbian Film Festival held in Olympia, Washington: I saw a man wearing a button with a slogan made famous by reproductive rigths activists–“My body is my own business.”

     

    For these reasons, I would suggest that working within postmodern network theory to discuss AIDS strategy, or even some other “indiscretions” such as reproductive rights practices, can grant a crucial sense of agency to renegotiate some of the blatant horrors of mainstream representation. Working within a single field of relations that resituates perceptions of both “official” AIDS representation as well as those who criticize it diffuses the rhetorical and positional strength of a centralized power dictating, and conditioning, meaning; this circulatory system affords the space for a localized biopolitics and active resistance. It posits resistance, not at the expense of agency but, rather, as a condition of agency; and with mainstream representation continually constructing helpless, objectified “AIDS victims” awaiting “certain death,” the discursive leverage to act and re-act obviously takes on added significance for persons living with AIDS.

     

    It’s a type of agency that carries with it, and can put to use, the contextual histories of the networks from which the subject emerged. Material, contextual conditions become built in to the theoretical frame, rather than being held in opposition or tension with the theory: this type of agency does not recognize a traditional distinction between “theory” and “praxis” or “theory” and “experience” because the material context of the networks produces the agent. Agency loses its abstract, theoretical, and often vague status and becomes recognizable only through its multiple material contexts. Moreover, the specificity of agents differs across contexts: the resurfaced agent of reproductive rights discourses would not be the same agent progressive AIDS strategies produce since each is conditioned by differing intersections of networks.

     

    In this case, resurfacing the body becomes the mechanism through which one sense of agency can be constituted. Resurfacing the body then, within the postmodern, exposes mainstream investments as it articulates a new space, a revitalized subject, as it recodes discretion from within the circuits of systematicity. At the same time, tropes of postmodern networking that posit a process of integration, of dissolving, don’t necessarily end there: within and beyond the blur can lie a resuscitated agent ready for action.

     

    Casting agency in this way can revise ideas about authorization. The realm that denies cyborg-like integration ultimately leaves intact traditional sites of authority, sites with various investments in the “general public”: for example, bio-medical research, the position of Surgeon General, governmental and legal policy decisions. On the other hand, a large scale recognition of this resituated interconnectedness, and the subsequent resurfacing of the body–of some–might begin to shift those sites of authority. If this recognition is granted, attention might be (re)drawn toward those whose experience is most most important and whose energies are spent organizing pro-active strategies. In other words, the agency evolving through the resurfacing could loosen the mainstream’s hold on the discourse about AIDS and create an opening for actions such as: having more than one PLWA speaking at the International AIDS conference; ending the scientific community’s holding of people for ransom; or instituting a media campaign that can offer something more effective, and finally less dangerous, than a choral cry to just say no.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Statistics from Douglas Crimp, “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism,” 11 (in the volume of the same name, edited by Crimp).

     

    2. All quotes from Crimp, 8.

     

    3. For further historical perspectives see Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox, AIDS: The Burdens of History, Dennis Altman’s AIDS In the Mind of America, and Simon Watney’s Policing Desire. Randy Shilts provides a journalistic history of AIDS in And the Band Played On, but his account is both voyeuristic–awkwardly, he scrutinizes the life of Gaetan Dugas, alleged “patient zero”– and morbid–he keeps a running tab on AIDS cases, deaths, and projected deaths. Douglas Crimp has also noted a homophobic attitude in the book: see his essay “AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism” in Crimp, ed. For specific analysis of the construction of “disease” see especially Paula Treichler “AIDS, Gender, and Biomedical Discourse: Current Contests for Meaning” in Fee and Fox. See also Charles Rosenberg “Disease and Social Order in America: Perceptions and Expectations,” and Gerald Oppenheimer “In the Eye of the Storm: The Epidemiological Constructions of AIDS”–both in Altman. For discussions of health care and biomedical discourse, see Douglas Crimp “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic” in Crimp, ed.; Daniel M. Fox “The Politics of Physicians’ Responsibilities in Epidemics: A Note on History” in Fee and Fox; Suki Ports “Nedded (For Women and Children)” in Crimp, ed.; Mark McGrath and Bob Sutcliffe “Insuring Profits From AIDS: The Economics of an Epidemic” in Radical America 20.6 (1986): 9-27.

     

    4. For further reference on intertwinings of discussions of “risk groups,” “general public,” and “origins” see especially Watney’s Policing Desire, “The Spectacle of AIDS” in Crimp, ed., and “Missionary Positions.” For discussions of homophobia in representation see Watney, Crimp, Cindy Patton, and Leo Bersani (in Crimp, ed.), among many others. Observing that most media coverage of AIDS addresses a heterosexual audience, the “general public,” while completely eliding the fact that homosexuals are part of that audience, Bersani complains that “TV treats us to nauseating processions of yuppie women announcing to the world that they will no longer put out for their yuppie boyfriends unless . . .” (“Rectum” 202), and that the “family identity produced on American television is much more likely to include your dog than your homosexual brother or sister” (203).

     

    5. For instance, Gregg Bordowitz “picture[s a] coalition of people having safe sex and shooting up with clean works” (Crimp, ed. 195), while Linda Singer outlines an erotics of “body management” (“Bodies” 56). Watney has called for an “erotics of protection,” an arena which would include “huge regular Safe Sex parties [with] . . . hot, sexy visual materials to take home” and “safe sex porno videos” (Policing Desire 133-4). Similarly, Douglas Crimp urges that “gay male promiscuity should be seen…as a positive model of how sexual pleasures might be pursued” (“How to Have Promiscuity” 253).

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Altman, Dennis. AIDS in the Mind of America. Garden City, NY: Anchor, Doubleday, 1986.
    • Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” Trans. John Johnston. The Anti-Aesthetic. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983.
    • Bersani, Leo. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” AIDS: Cultural Analysis/ Cultural Activism. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1987.
    • Crimp, Douglas. “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic.” AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1987. 237-270.
    • Fee, Elizabeth and Daniel M. Fox (eds.). AIDS: The Burdens of History. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 1988.
    • Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Coming to Terms. Ed. Elizabeth Weed. New York: Routledge, 1989. 173-214.
    • —. “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations of Self in Immune System Discourse.” Differences 1 (Winter 1989): 3-43.
    • Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 (July-August 1984): 53-92.
    • Leigh, Carol. “Further Violation of Our Rights.” AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1987. 177-181.
    • Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. New York: St. Martin’s Press,1987.
    • Singer, Linda. “Bodies–Pleasures–Powers.” Differences 1 (Winter 1989): 44-65.
    • Sontag, Susan. AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1988.
    • Treichler, Paula. “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of Signification.” AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. Ed. Douglas Crimp. Cambridge, MA and London, MIT Press, 1987. 31-70.
    • Watney, Simon. “Missionary Positions: AIDS, ‘Africa,’ and Race.” Differences 1 (Winter 1989): 67-84.
    • —. Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2nd edition, 1989.

     

  • Self-consuming Fictions: The Dialectics of Cannibalism in Modern Caribbean Narratives

    Eugenio D. Matibag

    Iowa State University

     

    Parce que nous vous haissons vous et votre raison, nous nous reclamons . . . du cannibalisme tenace.
     

    –Aime Cesaire,
    Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

     

    Howling words of fresh blood to spark the sacred fire of the world, Aime Cesaire in 1939 claimed kinship with madness and cannibalism. In Cesaire’s view, colonialism and western rationality had imposed a falsely barbaric identity –or, in effect, a non-identity–upon the peoples that Europe had uprooted, subjugated, enslaved and otherwise mastered. Against the Eurocentrist representation of American otherness, Cesaire, within his poem’s ritual of parthenogenesis, prophetically identified with that otherness, subsuming it into his apocalyptic redefinition of Afro-Antillean selfhood. By such iconoclastic gestures, Cesaire and numerous other writers of the region have demonstrated the manner in which poetic self-identification can mean empowerment in providing the starting point for resisting the cultural annihilation of colonialism. My aim in this essay will be to account for some of the ways in which Cesaire’s “cannibalisme tenace” has indeed persisted, tenaciously and obsessively, in modern Caribbean narratives concerned with the question of critiquing and constructing a post-colonial cultural identity.

     

    Cesaire’s affirmation of a unique Caribbean identity raises certain questions that remain to be addressed. The Afro-Antillean self of negritude is constituted on the violent exclusion of all other cultural elements that have formed Caribbean culture, including the contributions of indigenous, Asian and even European inhabitants. (One is led to ask if a truly Caribbean discourse of decolonization must negate or devalorize all such contributions.) The privileging of an African otherness furthermore entails the risk of reiterating the categorizations and exclusions inscribed in colonial discourse, for it was indeed the latter that hollowed out the representational space for what colonialism associated with “Africa” (the irrational, savage and infrahuman).1 Moreover, the concept of “identity” has itself become suspect in recent anti-essentialist theoretizations that have problematized the Cartesian notion of the subject. Jacques Derrida has displaced the subject along with other “transcendental signifieds” that have supposedly governed the play of signification within a cultural system from an assumed metaphysical center (249). Jacques Lacan has demonstrated the “subversion of the subject” as a function continually constituted and undermined in the chain of signifiers and in the “dialectic of desire” to which the self is subject-ed by its accession to language.2

     

    The post-structuralist attack on the unified, self- present and self-transparent cogito thus puts in question the simplistic assumptions underlying a call to define a specifically Caribbean identity, but I would argue that it does not in the end disqualify that call. Within a Third- World context in which we could situate such a claim to original identity, the postmodern announcement of the “death of the subject” sounds premature and betrays a complicity with world-capitalist systems that have already dispersed and canceled out individual subjectivity. In an emergent culture like that of the Caribbean nations, the subject may represent a refuge and a source of resistance to hegemony. Andreas Huyssen in “Mapping the Postmodern” raises the questions of what subjectivity could mean precisely in the face of capitalist modernization:

     

    Hasn't capitalist modernization itself fragmented and dissolved bourgeois subjectivity and authorship, thus making attacks on such notions somewhat quixotic? And . . . doesn't poststructuralism, where it simply denies the subject altogether, jettison the chance of challenging the ideology of the subject (as male, white, and middle-class) by developing alternative and different notions of subjectivity? (44)

     

    A certain Caribbean discourse of decolonization, I would argue, has held out for a counter-movement to modernist fragmentation and dissolution in very its tendency to “develop alternative and different notions of subjectivity.”3 In this discourse, far from having become obsolete, the subject has yet to come into its own.

     

    Appeals to integration of the divided colonial self have preoccupied Caribbean writers who have attempted to vindicate their right to self-definition. This vindication itself joins the broader question of cultural syncretism and synthesis endemic to Caribbean culture. In the “post- negritude” approach of Edouard Glissant, for example, this identity is acknowledged to be an identity-in-process, a “becoming-Antillean” through the operations of cultural synthesis creating an identity that is specifically a local production, not imposed from the outside.4 Before Glissant, Edward Brathwaite in his essay “Timehri” (1970) articulated the experience, shared by a generation of West Indian (principally British Caribbean) writers in the early postcolonial period, of the individual’s “dissociation of sensibility” and “rootlessness” in a fragmented creole culture incapable of grounding a firm sense of self (30). In Brathwaite’s account, such figures as C.L.R. James, George Lamming and V.S. Naipaul reflected on the dilemma of a post-plantation society in which the cultural contributions of Africans, Indians, Europeans and Asians had never been completely synthesized; in which individuals, living in such a heterogeneous, disunified world dominated by persistent colonial structures, feel cut off from any history and community they could call their own (29). In a more recent, “second phase” of Caribbean “artistic and intellectual life,” however, Brathwaite sees an attempt on the part of Caribbean writers to “transcend and heal” the problem of dissociation, the nonidentity and fragmentation produced by and under colonialism (31). Brathwaite’s solution for cultural rootlessness calls for a search and reintegration of forgotten origins, such as those “inscriptions” which are the timehri themselves: these are “rock signs, painting, petroglyphs; glimpses of a language, glitters of a vision of a world, scattered utterals of a remote Gestalt; but still there, near, potentially communicative” (40).

     

    But the timehri remain ambiguous, indecipherable and scattered. They alone cannot found a distinct Caribbean identity, although they may serve as a point of departure. It is another Caribbean trope, that of “cannibalism” and its ramifications, as I hope to show, which provides a more fruitful focus on the manner in which recent Caribbean texts have undertaken a search for identity in the traces left by Antillean “forerunners,” while at the same time ironizing the implicit search for origins. In claiming this, I do not mean to elevate cannibalism into a master trope but rather to use it as a sign of radical difference whose reinscription, in Caribbean discourse, opens up new approaches to the question of identity.

     

    As “the mark of unregenerate savagery” (Hulme 3), “cannibalism” displays the uncanny quality of binary oppositions: it is a sign both of animalistic nature and cultural practice; of affection and aggression; of transgression and consecration; of indigenous custom and European imputation. In remarking “cannibalism,” Caribbean texts participate in a common intent (1) to invert and reinscribe the hierarchies implicit in a colonial discourse on cannibalism; (2) to create a synthesis of disparate cultural elements, but especially those linked with the Caribs as ancestors, in the common impulse to decolonize an autocthonous cultural identity; (3) to critique the metaphysics of that synthesis precisely by ironizing the notion of synthesis; and (4) to open up, by that critique, to new and empowering articulations of the subject. Points (3) and (4) imply that the mestizaje or transculturation in Caribbean discourse leads first not so much to a synthesis or a plenitude but to an annihilation of the subject, a strategy that constitutes the first defense against the colonial imposition of identity and which in turn produces what Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria has called “a void where elements meet and cancel each other to open up the question of being” (10). What is lost in such a cancellation is a mystified notion of identity as grounded in primordial origins; what is gained is a certain self- consciousness and freedom for a process of identity-creation that establishes subtle links with latent social forces in the present.

     

    Within the European discourse of colonialism,5 the very name of the Caribbean has linked the region and its peoples with the image of cannibalism. Working within a framework more encompassing than that of the Eurocentrist perspective, Antonio Benitez Rojo evokes a “grandiose epic of the Caribs” as a part of “Caribbean discourse,” an epic in which are projected

     

    las islas arahuacas como objeto de deseo caribe . . . las matanzas, el glorioso canibalismo ritual de hombres y palabras, caribana, caribe, carib, calib, canib, canibal, Caliban; y finalmente el Mar de los Caribes, desde la Guayana a las Islas Virgenes. (xviii)

     

    Note that in Benitez Rojo’s linguistic morphology, whose transformations are catalogued above, the European impositions are mixed in with the native self-designations. Together, they suggest the “discursive morphology” of “cannibalism” pursued by Peter Hulme in Colonial Encounters (16).

     

    This discursive morphology may be continued in an examination of those modern Caribbean texts, among others, that address the legacy of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which the New World cannibal makes his appearance as Caliban. In his influential Caliban (1971), Roberto Fernandez Retamar asserts that “El caribe, por su parte, dara el canibal, el antropofago, el hombre bestial situado irremediablemente al margen de la civilizacion, y a quien es menester combatir a sangre y fuego” (14). This image of the American as Carib/Caliban/cannibal served as a weapon of ideological legitimation within colonial discourse. As manifested in The Tempest, the dichotomy opposing the “natural” Caliban against the “cultured” Prospero assured the European audiences and readers of the superiority of their civilization and the legitimacy of their drive to colonial expansion.

     

    To reverse the hierarchy of values implicit in this vilification, Latin American intellectuals, in Fernandez Retamar’s view, should realize that it is not Rodo’s Ariel but rather Caliban who is to be “asumido con orgullo como nuestro simbolo,” and consequently rethink their history from the viewpoint of this “otro protagonista” (Caliban 1971; 29, 35). “Cannibalism” thus receives a new function in this negation of the negation; the dialectic of cannibalism merges into the dialectic of Calibanism. The latter dialectic has already been discussed at length elsewhere,6 but what is pertinent to the present re- reading is the way in which the image of cannibalism is remade, in Calibanism, into a trope of writing which redefines the Latin American self’s relation with what is now a European other, precisely by a valorizing and recharging of the denomination of alterity it had received from Europe. What was mistakenly accepted as a literal reference to barbaric practice or its “authentic” image is becoming refunctioned as a literary figure.

     

    Despite the possible pejorative associations to which this refunctioning may give rise, Calibanism does not imply neo-primitivism or misology; on the contrary, it may involve the most sophisticated internationalist viewpoint, one capable of mastering and then relativizing or deflating all partial nationalist or ethnocentric viewpoints from a more systemic or global perspective. Fernandez Retamar is conscious of this epistemological advantage when, in 1985, he cites the remarks of his Mexican commentator Jorge Alberto Manrique:

     

    It would be well to remember, as Borges himself has said, that vis-a-vis . . . [the] reading of Europe, he takes the sniping stance of an ironist, "from without." The best of his work is made of that: and in it can be recognized an attitude of Caliban. . . .7

     

    George Lamming had already refitted Caliban to other roles in his recounting of Caribbean history from this once subjugated, now revindicated perspective. “If Prospero could be seen as the symbol of the European imperial enterprise,” writes Lamming in The Pleasures of Exile, “then Caliban should be embraced as the continuing possibility of a profound revolutionary change initiated by Toussaint L’Ouverture in the Haitian war of independence” (6 [unnumbered]). Indeed, the figure of the Haitian revolutionary leader effected and continues to represent both an overturning of the European-imposed hierarchies and a disruptive intervention in the continuum of colonial oppression, as the novelist proposes in the very title of his chapter on Toussaint and C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, namely, “Caliban Orders History” (118).

     

    On the other hand, “cannibalism” persists in the early modern period as an image of either barbarity or aggression associated with rebellious African slaves as characters. Among Cayetano Coll y Toste’s Leyendas puertorriquenas (1924-1925) is the story of “Carabali,” the runaway plantation slave who may have resorted to cannibalism in order to survive in his mountain cave and who became a kind of avenging phantom in the Puerto Rican popular imagination. In the folktales of Lydia Cabrera’s Cuentos negros de Cuba (1940), most of which are Yoruban in origin,8 cannibalism is presented as a primitive practice associated with the animal realm (“Noguma”) or an unacceptable form of sacrifice (“Tatabisako”). In Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (1949), the slave Ti Noel fantasizes a cannibalistic feast of white and bewigged heads served up by “un cocinero experto y bastante ogro” in what amounts to an anticipation of the imminent Saint-Domingue revolt (10). In Coll y Toste and Carpentier, cannibalism symbolizes black defiance or rebellion against the white colonial world; in Cabrera’s tales set in an Afro-Cuban context, it symbolizes evil and social otherness. Whether practiced, imagined or rejected, “cannibalism” in these narratives also serves to define the particular identity of individual African slaves (or their descendants) as literary characters whose psychic and linguistic resources for survival provide a paradigm for the possible Caribbean self.9

     

    Whereas such writers have sought to incorporate the African contribution into a syncretic Caribbean identity, later writers have sought origins for this identity in a recollection of the original Caribs and their descendants. What nevertheless stands out in a re-reading is the remoteness or virtual absence of true Carib ancestors. In Carpentier’s El Siglo de las Luces (1962) the protagonist Esteban, meditating on the possible foundations for an American selfhood, recalls the legend of the pre-Columbian Carib migration to a “promised land” lying northward of the continent. The recollection suggests a search for alternatives to the debacle of “enlightenment” in the New World. Finding himself at the Venezuelan Bocas del Dragon, where the fresh water meets the salt, Esteban remembers the migration as another search for the Promised Land, an American Exodus of “the horde” under whose conquest of the islands “[t]odos los varones de otros pueblos eran exterminados, implacablemente, conservandose sus mujeres para la proliferacion de la raza conquistadora” (172). The northward migration is of course thwarted by the encounter of the aboriginals with the Europeans: “Los invasores se topaban con otros invasores . . . que llegaban a punto para aniquilar un sueno de siglos. La Gran Migracion ya no tendria objeto: el Imperio del Norte pasaria a manos de los Inesperados” (173). Esteban’s account of “la Gran Migracion fracasada”–an alternative history decentering the historical narrative of the West–reminds us that the Europeans were themselves as much a conquering tribe as were the aboriginal forefathers. The Caribs stand for an unrealized historical possibility, but also suggest that the struggle for freedom and self-determination is as much motivated by utopian or messianic impulses as by class or “tribal” antagonisms.

     

    In any case, the Caribs of Esteban’s late-eighteenth- century present provide no unequivocal model for resistance against colonialization, for a Carib delegation has already come to Guadeloupe in order to apply for citizenship in the French Republic. The application prompts Commissioner Victor Hugues to show

     

    una mayor simpatia hacia los caribes que hacia los negros: le agradaban por su orgullo, su agresividad, su altanera divisa de 'Solo el caribe es gente'--y mas ahora que llevaban cucardas tricolores en el amarre del taparrabo.10(109)

     

    Representing a beleaguered people in the process of submitting itself to the colonial order, the delegation becomes a walking myth, wearing the very symbol of the French Republic (the tricolor cockade) on their breechcloths, their very pride and aggressivity accommodated into the self-representation of hegemonic discourse.11

     

    The beginnings of this incorporating process, by which colonial discourse itself cannibalized the specificity and strength of its indigenous adversaries, are revealed in Carpentier’s El arpa y la sombra (1979), a fictionalized biography of Christopher Columbus. In the novel, the “real” Caribs are conspicuously absent from Carpentier’s “transcriptions” of Columbus’s diary and ship’s log–the first productions of colonial discourse. Columbus of course believed that he had reached the lands of the Great Khan, already anticipating the discovery of “islands without men, people without hair, and inhabitants born with tails,” all previously “described” by Marco Polo (Williams 19). Carpentier’s Columbus records that he heard “Indian” reports of “tierras pobladas de canibales que tenian un ojo solo en cabeza de perros–monstruos que se sustentaban de sangre y carne humana” (138). This seminal misreading may have originated in a linguistic misunderstanding on Columbus’s part: for Columbus, who did not understand the Indian language, native references to the hostile Cariba may have suggested Caniba, or, the people of the Khan, but also cane, the Spanish word for “dog, suggesting, as Tzvetan Todorov puts it, that “these persons have dogs’ heads . . . with which, precisely, they eat people” (30). Carpentier thus retraces the process by which the India of Spices becomes, for Columbus, the India of the Cannibals, although nowhere does Columbus claim to have observed native acts of anthropophagy (162). Yet it is precisely this imputation which justifies, both in Columbus’s mind and in discursive practice, the Indians’ conquest and enslavement in the following manner.

     

     

    As the historical Columbus gradually came to realize that the true wealth of the West Indies lay not in gold but rather in the labor they could provide to the expanding empire, he would eventually describe the “cannibalistic” Caribs as

     

    a wild people fit for any work, well proportioned, and very intelligent, and who, when they have got rid of their cruel habits to which they have been accustomed, will be better than any other kind of slaves. (Cited in Williams 31)

     

    The West Indian slave trade begins on Columbus’s third voyage in 1498 with the transport of six hundred Indians to Spain (Williams 32). At about the same time, the Spanish monarchs, enjoined by the Pope, issued a decree providing for the conversion of the Indians to Catholicism and for the consideration of converted Indians as subjects of the Spanish crown. These Indian converts could then be considered “free” to be hired as wage laborers within the encomienda system, although not finally exempted from its inhuman demands and conditions. The decree paved the way for the legalization of the slave trade by the Requisition, for it implied that the “cannibals,” those bellicose Indians who refused conversion and resisted Spanish rule, could be legitimately punished with enslavement (Williams 32; Arens 44-54; Todorov 46-47).

     

    In Carpentier’s reconstructions of the nineteenth- century postulation for Columbus’s canonization under Leon XIII, the Devil’s Advocate of the Vatican’s Congregation of Rites cites Jules Verne’s opinion that Columbus identified cannibals in the West Indies without having encountered a single one; the postulation for sainthood was finally denied on the basis of Columbus’s monumental misreading and on the grounds of his having instituted a slave trade in the New World (_El Arpa 207). Columbus has been posthumously chastised, but not without having initiated a discourse practice relegating the Caribbean natives, by denomination and defamation, to an infrahuman realm.

     

    In Voyage in the Dark (1934) by the Antiguan emigree Jean Rhys, the Caribs become a symbol of colonial subjugation and figure the psychological and transcendental homelessness of Rhys’ protagonist, Anna Morgan. In this novel, the process of constructing a post-colonial feminine subject is seemingly foreclosed by a history that has offered no effective escape from colonial domination. Anna is a dance-hall girl of Caribbean birth living in England. Jobless, nearly penniless, often intoxicated, she drifts from affair to affair as the sexual toy of affluent and influential men. On one occasion, while lying sick in bed, writing and drinking vermouth, she pauses to recall the words of a song she once heard in a Glasgow music hall: “‘And drift, drift / Legions away from despair.’” In her subsequent free-association, the words link up with a reference, apparently taken from an encyclopedia, to the Caribs:

     

    It can't be 'legions'. 'Oceans', perhaps. 'Oceans away from despair.' But it's the sea, I thought. The Caribbean sea. 'The Caribs indigenous to this island were a warlike tribe and their resistance to white domination, though spasmodic, was fierce. As lately as the beginning of the nineteenth century they raided one of the neighbouring islands, under British rule, overpowered the garrison and kidnapped the governor, his wife and three children. They are now practically exterminated. The few hundred that are left do not intermarry with the negroes. Their reservation, at the northern end of the island, is known as the Carib Quarter.' They had, or used to have, a king. Mopo, his name was. Here's to Mopo, King of the Caribs! But, they are now practically exterminated. 'Oceans away from despair. . . .' (105)

     

    The passage suggests that the Caribs might have served as a symbol of defiance, and even of feminine defiance, against a patriarchal system of domination that has extended itself across the seas. But because the Caribs are “now practically exterminated,” their king a sad figure of mockery, history has lost a chance at redemption. The Caribs have been vanquished, drastically reduced in numbers, thereafter relocated on the northern end of what is probably Dominica, where their resistant ferocity has been successfully contained. The weight of the past hangs like a nightmare on Anna’s brain; the fate of the Caribs prefigures the protagonist’s own victimage and despair when her lover decides to abandon her just before she must seek an abortion.

     

    The historical pattern of Carib resistance and European conquest provides the unconscious subtext for Anna’s forlornness. The first attempt of the English to settle in the West Indies in Saint Lucia in 1605 met with the fierce opposition of its Carib inhabitants, as occurred in Grenada in 1609 (Williams 79; cf. Arens 45). But the colonizers succeeded in defeating numerous Indian uprisings in the islands and in exterminating the Caribs or removing them to Dominica or St. Vincent. In Grenada, the last group of Caribs to resist the French invaders hurled themselves from the top of a hill that would henceforth be known as Le Morne des Sauteurs (Williams 95). In both Anna’s experience and that of the Caribs, as this juxtaposition suggests, history provides no viable means for challenging to domination other than the self-destructive alternatives of suicide and infanticide (cf. Lamming 123-124).

     

    Attempts to revive the Carib heritage in other Caribbean texts may be read as attempts to redress the defamation the Caribs received in colonial discourse. But in a present that is, like Anna Morgan’s, cut off from all autocthonous origins, such efforts serve more certainly to re-open the dialogue on national culture and identity and therein entertain possibilities of new articulations of the self with its others. The novel Beka Lamb (1982) by the Belizean author Zee Edgell tells us that members of the black creole community “seldom married among the Caribs, although these two groups shared, in varying degrees, a common African ancestry” (31-32). Edgell’s attribution of a “common African ancestry” to Carib and creole alike may seem surprising, but the narrator later explains that those called “Caribs” by the Belizeans are in fact the descendants of escaped African slaves who arrived in St. Vincent. Contradicting Rhys’ assumptions concerning the Caribs’ refusal of miscegenation, Edgell’s blacks in St. Vincent “mingled with the Caribans, originally from South America, adopting much of their language and some of their ways, but keeping many of their African traditions” (68, my emphasis). Such an intermingling of races and cultures suggests the possibility of a generalized synthesis originating in the very displacement and confusion of origins.

     

    But Belizean resistance to such a synthesis persists. Beka’s mother shares the creole prejudices against the present-day Caribs; for her, the Caribs of Stann Creek are a corrupting influence on Beka and her Aunt Tama for having taught them obeah, or magic arts. Granny Ivy, somewhat more generous with the Caribs, says that “‘I don’t believe Carib people sacrifice children’” and reminds the other women that the Stann Creek families sent food up to Belize during the 1931 hurricane, although she must add that “‘I am not saying I could marry a Carib man. . .’” (67). The women’s prejudice toward the Caribs puzzles Beka, and when she asks her mother why creoles refuse to mix with them, her mother ventures to explain that “‘Maybe it’s because Carib people remind us of what we lost trying to get up in the world’” (70). Representing a primitive and ignominious past for the creoles, the Caribs have been excluded from the mainstream of Belizean society, marginalized and contained within isolated pockets of the country, called “the bush” (70). Whereas the narrative keeps the Caribs at a distance, the schoolgirl Beka has at least made an initial attempt to reconnect with the cast-off part of her Belizean heritage they represent, an issue that is especially significant as the Belizeans approach the dawning of their own nationalist independence. Beka’s questions, however, lead not to an immediate synthesis of cultural elements within a projected Belizean cultural identity, but to a certain transcendence in the awareness that Belizeans, in living a unique history that has been preconditioned but not totally imposed from the outside, are different from the British. Defining this difference would largely consist recognizing the Belizeans’ difference from the Caribs within the national community but also in recognizing common interests shared with minority group.

     

    The Caribs reappear in The Whole Armour (1982) by the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris, but, again, they are no more than a representation, this time played by a band of roving carnival rousters. These rousters dressed as Caribs are encountered in the jungle by the protagonist Cristo, who is a fugitive from the law, accused of a murder he did not commit. Cristo later reveals to his lover, Sharon, that his brief meeting with “the Caribs” has thrust him into a strange shifting play of identification with the social other. Covered with mud during his flight and remembering himself as misrecognized by the “Carib” players, Cristo wildly reflects that “In the flying rush they assumed I was one of them . . . one of this . . . shattered tribe. A terrible broken family” (340). The encounter with the “shattered tribe” has shaken the structure of Cristo’s sense of identity. Cristo’s reflection in the stream momentarily restores him to his old self, but he later insists that “I was the last member, remaining behind, of the flying band. Every guilty body rolled into one. Vanquished as well as slave, rapist, Carib, monster, anything you want to think . . . .” (345).

     

    Caught up in the flying constellation of images, a disoriented Cristo identifies his alleged criminality with an entire history of Caribbean enslavement and injustice. The vision of vanquished ancestors furthermore catalyzes Cristo’s sense of belonging to a community or “tribe” imperilled by its own violent irresponsibility, in which originated the murders for which he is falsely accused. Although believed dead, Cristo will return, Christlike, to his Pomeroon village in order to establish his innocence and to restore his community’s shattered equilibrium with what amounts to his own sacrifice.12 Whereas the Caribs are absent, even parodied in this account, they provide, under conditions of rootlessness and chaos, a simulacrum of an imagined community that supplants the actual fragmented community, and thereby ground a necessary fiction of personal fulfillment.

     

    As other Caribbean writings reveal, the remembrance of the Caribs suggests another, possibly more provocative association with the cannibalistic act itself. The true extent to which cannibalism was practiced by the Caribs remains unclear; the anthropologist W. Arens, relying upon historical accounts and noting the imperialist biases and confusions, probably overstates his case in pointing out the absence of “adequate documentation of cannibalism as a custom in any form for any society” (21). Regardless of the existence or non-existence of such documentation, a number of twentieth-century Caribbean narratives have taken up the image of cannibalism that has been handed down in Caribbean discourse and turned it into a trope of identity and a literary mechanism of self-individuation. These narratives in general bear out the anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday’s assertion that although cannibalism is not a “unitary phenomenon but varies with respect to both cultural content and meaning” (x), it is predicated upon the symbolic oppositions by which “self is related to the other” (xii). Cannibalism in Sanday’s view is a “cultural system” and “primarily a medium for . . . messages having to do with the maintenance, regeneration, and, in some cases, the foundation of the cultural order” (3). Its symbolism participates in a dynamic of “dialectical opposition” (35); seen cross-culturally, it may symbolize a social evil, express a desire for revenge against one’s enemies, renew a generation’s ties with its ancestors, provide a mythological charter for the social order, or function as “part of the cultural construction of personhood” (25-26).

     

    Freud provides a bridge between anthropology and psychoanalysis in drawing an analogy between cannibalism, as he understood it, and the oral stage of psychosexual development. In oral incorporation and its correlates of desire, destruction and the installment of the object within the self, the established object-relations and phantasies harken back to a prehistoric stage of human social development. Phylogeny prefigures ontogeny especially in the “totemic meal” of Totem and Taboo, whereby the primal father is murdered and devoured by the sons of the “horde,” who, in the act of patricidal consumption, incorporate and sublimate his desire, strength and authority into their own structure of identity.13

     

    One story among Lydia Cabrera’s Cuentos Negros de Cuba, “Bregantino Bregantin,” illustrates this Freudian dialectic with a form of cannibalism exemplifying none other than self-consumption. The story tells of el Toro, the Bull, who after capturing and hanging the king from a tree, imprisons the queen in a “dungeon or latrine” without giving her any means of sustaining herself save that of eating cockroaches. When the supply of these runs out, she sees herself

     

    reducida al extremo de devorarse a si misma, comenzando por los pies, de dificil masticacion, y rindiendo el ultimo suspiro por envenamiento, en el colmo de la indignacion mas justa. (17)

     

    An impossible cannibalism, but nonetheless a paradigmatic one that foregrounds both the literariness of its treatment and the possibility of considering anthropophagy as an act of autophagy. El Toro takes the place of the now executed king and queen and becomes a tyrant in his own right, claiming all the women of his kingdom for himself, killing all of his male sons, outlawing the use of masculine-ending nouns, and shouting from his mountain top: “–«Yo, yo, yo, yo. Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo, / No hay hombre en el mundo mas que yo . . .!»” (25). The sovereign self of el Toro reigns supreme until the day one of his sons, saved from the usual infanticide, rises up to defeat him in bloody combat. “Y con esto,” the stories concludes, “la naturaleza recobro de nuevo sus derechos y nacieron varones en Cocozuma” (28). Here, the Freudian dialectic adumbrated in Totem and Taboo is redistributed into new functors: one son stands in for the primal horde but does not literally consume his own father, for indeed it is the latter who has defeated the king and allowed the queen to consume herself. But true to the Freudian Ur-plot, the “father’s” law and tyranny is installed in the symbolic order perpetuated by el Toro, leaving the task of restoring a “natural” cultural order to his righteously rebellious son.

     

    This ritual–combining aggression, incorporation, negation and individuation–provides a new kind of anchoring point for the definition of identity. Its dynamic is reinscribed in Caribbean narratives appearing in Brathwaite’s second phase of “transcending and healing,” novels in which I will now remark the dialectical oppositions motivating cannibalism as a trope of cultural devalorization and reordering.

     

    In his prologue to the novels comprising The Guyana Quartet, which includes The Whole Armour and Palace of the Peacock (1960), Wilson Harris avers that the concrete metaphor validating the particular violations of realist convention in the latter novel is none other than a “Carib/cannibal bone-flute” which was “hollowed from the bone of an enemy in time of war”:

     

    Flesh was plucked and consumed and in the process secrets were digested. Spectres arose from, or reposed in, the flute [which] became the home or curiously mutual fortress of spirit between enemy and other . . . . (9-10)

     

    A symbol of “‘transubstantiation in reverse,’”14 here the flute codifies and thereby mediates the subject-object polarities within a projected cultural system. Sanday’s exemplification of how “a self is made” in cannibal practice elucidates this mediation:

     

    The flesh or bone marrow is a tangible conduit of social and psychological attributes that constitute the subject by either affirming or negating the relationships that join or separate the subject vis-a- vis the other. Thus, parts of the body may be consumed to imbibe the characteristics or the fertile force of the other; or, consumption may break down and destroy characteristics of the other in the self. (36)

     

    Harris’s bone-flute becomes, in the light of this explication and his own, a figure of relational self-making and unmaking, one of the “convertible imageries” serving to motivate a ritual of “complex regeneration” enacted in all four novels of The Guyana Quartet. What Harris refers to as “the second death” in his prologue is the death of the reader’s or character’s self that undergoes a ritual sacrifice in “a fiction that seeks to consume its own biases through many resurrections of paradoxical imagination” (9). Palace of the Peacock in particular is a phantasmagorical narrative in which a crew of conquistador-like colonizers arrive at their first destination only to discover that “not so long ago this self-same crew had been drowned to a man in the rapids below the Mission” (37). Upon this violation of realist verisimilitude, the narrative establishes an “unreal” and psychologically unsettling perspective that shuttles back and forth across the barrier separating life and death, self and other. Faced with a “second death” when their boat threatens to capsize in the rapids, the crew members confront, in effect, the imminent dissolution of their own monadic subjectivities:

     

    The monstrous thought came to them that they had been shattered and were reflected again in each other at the bottom of the stream. The unceasing reflection of themselves in each other made them see themselves everywhere save where they thought they had always stood. (80)

     

    Grasping himself as both dead and alive and as self and other in the specular imago of the self-as-other, each character gradually loses hold on his former sense of a self-sufficient or autonomous identity. As the crew members pursue a fleeing Amerindian tribe they intend to capture (and which symbolizes for Harris an eclipsed other to be reincorporated into the tradition [7]), they find themselves stripped of the egoistic fictions of self that motivated the pursuit, swept away from themselves in a turbulent stream of becoming: “They saw the naked unequivocal flowing peril and beauty and soul of the pursuer and the pursued all together” (62). In the “second death,” pursuer and pursued are now embraced in what the narrator can only stammeringly refer to as “‘the truest substance of life,’” “‘the unity of being’” in which “‘fear is nothing but a dream and an appearance’” (52).

     

    The novel’s conclusion presents the apotheosis of a blind conquistador-captain Donne who, paradoxically, can see more clearly than ever before:

     

    [Donne] looked into himself and saw that all his life he had loved no one but himself. He focused his blind eye with all penitent might on this pinpoint star and reflection as one looking into the void of oneself upon the far greater love and self-protection of the universe. (107)

     

    Here is the poetry of a cosmic self that sees its objectified and distanced former self as both a “void” and a kind of door of perception, now cleansed and opened upon the infinite. Its transcendent vision of “love and self- protection” has dissolved the fragile structure of earthly desires and, with that structure, the fictive boundaries of the narcissistic self. In an ecstatic identification with otherness and others, the higher self realizes that it had always been an other to itself and that the imagined riches of El Dorado were in reality the spirit’s patrimony. This identification is affirmed by novel’s last sentence: “Each of us now held at last in his arms what he had been for ever seeking and what he had eternally possessed” (117).

     

    “Cannibalism” in Palace of the Peacock thus mediates a nostalgic desire or spiritual aspiration to incorporate oneself into a lost primordial unity. A similar nostalgia or aspiration motivates the plot of Felices Dias, Tio Sergio (1986) by Magali Garcia Ramis, but that desire progresses within a more historically determinate setting and toward a more explicitly political statement of commitment. In Garcia Ramis’s novel a young girl named Lidia narrates her experience of growing-up middle-class in the Puerto Rico of Munoz Marin and amidst the entrepreneurial “fat cows” of the Operation Bootstrap era. Lidia’s family expresses a typically bourgeois desire to be Prospero in their unreflecting imitation of European culture and scorn for all things Latin American; they inhabit a house where, because “todo lo heredado era europeo y todo lo porvenir era norteamericano, . . . no podiamos saber quienes eramos” (153). The family’s adults are proud of their hard- won success, intolerant of homosexuals and atheists, and fiercely suspicious of the nationalists and communists. One could add that the “nordomania” uncritically embraced by Lidia’s family exemplifies a more general process operant “inside” a dominant culture that pushes all that it perceives as “outside”–primitive, inferior and other–into the margins defining its own closed cultural space. The family’s constant preoccupation with cleanliness and hygiene, as well as repeated references to the adults’ medical professions, parallels a fear of contamination by unorthodox ideas that would challenge the manichean distinction between Good and Evil upon which their own sense of identity is based (28).

     

    And suddenly, into this “perfectly ordered and unchangeable world” (153) comes Tio Sergio, who signifies for the narrator a stimulating and disturbing presence in the Santurce household. Soon it is Sergio who initiates the children in their study of art, including the painting of Ollers; who learns to communicate with them in their “Simian-Spanish” dialect drawn from Tarzan comic books; and whose frustrated affair with the family’s maid-servant introduces the mysteries of sexuality to the spying Lidia. It is Sergio, too, who arranges a funeral service for a disappeared cat named Daruel. The funeral service is followed by a “mortuary meal” that includes cookies in the shape of a cat and Sergio’s explanation, that

     

    algunos salvajes se comian a los jefes de otras tribus y a los misioneros para adquirir su sabiduria y su fuerza; nos dijo que era algo simbolico y muy antiguo el que nos comiesemos las galletitas como si estuviesemos metiendonos por dentro todo lo que queriamos a Daruel. (23)

     

    Aside from parodying the catholic communion ceremony, the mortuary or totemic meal anticipates the manner in which Lidia will have seen in Tio Sergio a new ego ideal that she will incorporate into her personal identity. For once Sergio has left, Lidia discovers that he was “un hombre casi al margen de la sociedad,” one who discussed literature with Trotskyites and attempted to form a labor union, one who collected funds for the Algerian resistance and was probably, in addition to everything else, a homosexual (154). Above all, Lidia recalls, Sergio was a man who nurtured a dream of Puerto Rican independence but despaired of doing anything to realize the dream. Having brought into the closed conservative household an element of otherness and an example of tolerance for difference that the conservative matriarchs of the family would not have otherwise permitted, Sergio has introduced to Lidia and her cousin Enrique an expanded language of “native” possibilities with which to forge an identity. Having symbolically acquired “his wisdom and his strength,” the cousins go out on their own to discover who they are:

     

    Con todas nuestras contradicciones, . . . ibamos a circulos de estudio, comprabamos libros de historia y poesia puertorriquena, sonabamos con descubrir yacimientos de los indios tainos, pegabamos pasquines que anunciaban marchas, y marchabamos lentamente en busqueda de nuestra puertorriquenidad. (152-153)

     

    By the time that Lidia is caught up in the dream of discovering her “puertorriquenidad,” she has incorporated the rebellious anti-colonial spirit of Tio Sergio into her own, renewed sense of Puerto Rican selfhood.

     

    In recodifying and decodifying the bourgeois ideology concretized in Puerto Rican institutions, Garcia Ramis’s novel rehearses a repeatable process by which Caribbean discourse may be seen as demythifying the language of Prospero and giving a hearing to Caliban. George Lamming anticipated this move when he wrote that

     

    We shall never explode Prospero's old myth until we christen Language afresh; until we show Language as the product of human endeavour; until we make available to all the result of certain enterprises undertaken by men who are still regarded as the unfortunate descendants of languageless and deformed slaves. (118-119)

     

    Far from “languageless,” it turns out, Caliban does speak, and his profit on language is more than that of knowing how to curse. In the resurrection of the Carib epic, some of whose linguistic transformations and discursive ramifications have been traced in this essay, “cannibalism” explodes the myth of Prospero by devouring, engulfing and digesting his secrets, christens language afresh by giving voice to collective memory and subjugated others.

     

    A metaphor of incorporation and/or differentiation, of subjective self-divisions and mergings with respect to an other, cannibalism thus de-defines and re-defines the divisory line between self and other, with the consequence of transforming what was considered an antinomy into a dialectical opposition to be canceled and subsumed into a higher level of transindividual unity. In re-priming the nature-culture dialectic that had been fixed by colonialism to Prospero’s (and Ariel’s) advantage, the discourse of cannibalism furthermore ironizes its own search for origins by thematizing the irrecuperable loss of the Caribs or other “cannibals” as exemplars of rebellious subjectivity. Yet the Caribs–introjected as a disturbing element of difference into the metonymic series of displacements, interrupting the flow of colonial discursive self- reproduction–serve to open up the “search for identity” to new, often unexpected articulations of the self with an other and with others. Forming a sort of counter-tradition, cannibalism thus re-defined and re-elaborated grounds a new, founding myth of Caribbean identity and dynamic self- definition by proposing alternative ego ideals or object- choices: the tribal or cosmic self of Wilson Harris; the nationalistic self of Garcia Ramis.

     

    The issue is of course not merely academic. When Ernesto “Che” Guevara called for the development of an organic individual willing to sacrifice self-interest for the sake of the collective good, Guevara called for nothing less than the creation of “el hombre nuevo del socialismo.” In Guevara’s conception, such an individual would be committed to the revolutionary struggle to leave behind the realm of necessity for the realm of freedom:

     

    a pesar de su aparente estandarizacion, es mas completo; a pesar de la falta del mecanismo perfecto para ello, su posibilidad de expresarse y hacerse sentir en el aparato social es infinitamente mayor. (10)

     

    Guevara here undermines the old dichotomy of “bourgeois individualism” vs. “socialist standardization” by the qualifier of an “apparent” standardization. The individual’s self-sacrifice to the interests and ends of a social group in reality entails the transcendence of individualism, but such that this transcendence means the cancellation and sublation of “individuality” in its illusory autonomy and limited rationality and the attainment of an authentic freedom through a more clearly comprehended collective praxis. Both anticipating and elaborating Guevara’s notion of “el hombre nuevo,” a dialectics of cannibalism works through one of the paths by which fiction consumes fictions, including the reigning fictions of selfhood. Devouring such fictions in the process, we may, like Harris’s boatmen, come to see ourselves everywhere save where we thought we had always stood.

     

    Notes

     

    1. Here I rely on Paul Brown’s definition of “colonial discourse,” exemplified in his reading of The Tempest, as “a domain or field of linguistic strategies operating within particular areas of social practice to effect knowledge and pleasure, being produced by and reproducing or reworking power relations between classes, genders and cultures” (69, n.3).

     

    2. Lacan, “The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious” in Ecrits: A Selection, 292-325. For an overview of Lacanian themes, see Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject, 93-121.

     

    3. For an overview of postmodern perspectives on the subject and a theory of the subject’s persistent efficacy despite its deconstruction, see Ihab Hassan, Selves At Risk: Patterns of Quest in Contemporary American Letters, especially the chapter on “The Subject of Quest: Self, Other, Difference” (32-45).

     

    4. In Les discours antillais, Glissant insists that synthesis is not a “bastardization” or adulteration of cultures; it is rather “un devenir antillais” and an inseparable part of “le drame planetaire”:

     

    La vocation de synthese ne peut que constituer avantage, dans un monde voue a la synthese et au «contact de civilisations». L'essentiel est ici que les Antillais ne s'en remettent pas a d'autres du soin de formuler leur culture. Et que cette vocation de synthese ne donne pas dans l'humanisme ou s'engluent les betas. (16)

     

    5. For Peter Hulme in Colonial Encounters, colonial discourse is a “monologue.” To give an example, Hulme makes reference to the engraving by van der Straet depicting the encounter between the masculine, civilized, clothed and armed Amerigo Vespucci with the feminine, primitive, naked and unarmed indigenous figure representing the New World. Hulme comments that “Such a monologic encounter [as here represented] can only masquerade as a dialogue: it leaves no room for alternative voices” (9). But this view of colonial discourse is too monolithic and self-defeating, for it leaves no chance for the opening of the text to a reading of its “unconscious” substrata or to the encounter of different voices that the text must master. My interpretation of colonial discourse, supported by Paul Brown’s definition of the term, would stress, rather than its monologic nature, its conflictive plurality and dynamic of self-repression which only at a later moment result in the effect of monologism.

     

    6. In the glossary of Les discours antillais (1981), for example, Edouard Glissant includes the following entry: “CALIBAN. cannibale. Shakespeare nous a donne le mot, nos ecrivains l’ont refait” (496). In Glissant’s view, Caribbean writers have questioned the colonial “sanction of the nature-culture equilibrium” posed in the hierarchical identification of Prospero with culture and Caliban with nature. Inasmuch as the culture-nature hierarchy implants a mimetic desire in the “natural” Caliban, The Tempest reveals the way in which European colonial values, once institutionalized and naturalized within colonial practice, set the norm for social behavior and thereby alienate the consciousness of those whom the colonizer has mastered and seduced to his way of thinking. For Caribbean writers who repudiate this European prescription of identity, the alternative would be to acknowledge and affirm the appellation Caliban, once a term of opprobrium, and to transform it into a symbol of a new, non-colonized self. In the movement of black affirmation called negritude, African and Caribbean writers, as Charlotte Bruner has explained, “christen themselves as Caliban and reshape this image, this Black mask, to fit themselves” (245).

     

    7. Jorge Alberto Manrique, “Ariel entre Prospero y Caliban,” Revista de la Universidad de Mexico (February- March 1972), 70. Cited in Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays (54).

     

    8. According to Fernando Ortiz’s introduction to the collection (10).

     

    9. Wilson Harris makes this argument in Tradition, the Writer and Society when he writes that the individual slave may be visualized “as possessing the grassroots of Western individuality” (33), which means an emphatic rejection of “the sovereign individual” who lives an illusion of freedom and self-sufficiency “by conditioning himself to function solely within his contemporary situation more or less as the slave appears bound still upon his historical and archaic plane” (34).

     

    10. The historical precedent for this assignment of a role to the Caribs in the protection of French colonial interests can be found in Colbert’s war against Dutch trade in the West Indies. As Colbert, Minister of the Marine with colonial jurisdiction, suggested to a colonial governor in 1670, one way of defending the French monopoly against the Dutch could be that of “secretly aiding the Caribs against them in case of a war, or by secretly inciting them to attack the Dutch by furnishing them firearms and munitions” (cited in Williams 161).

     

    11. One is reminded of Roland Barthes’ analysis in Mythologies of the photograph in which a black colonial soldier salutes a French flag. As this association suggests, my use of the word “myth” remits to Barthes’ explanation: like bourgeois ideology, “myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal” (142).

     

    12. Marianna Torgovnick’s gloss on the meaning of sacrifice in Georges Bataille clarifies the connection between human sacrifice and cannibalism: “Human sacrifice is a symbolic version of cannibalism, in which the human body substitutes for the animal body, and killing for eating. It is a symbolic representation of our normal gustatory acts– but heightened, made less utilitarian, and hence ‘sacred’” (189).

     

    13. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis summarize this analogy in The Language of Psychoanalysis (55).

     

    14. The Guyana Quartet, 9. In Explorations (42, n.8) Harris cites the same passage in Michael Swan’s The Marches of El Dorado (London, 1958), 285.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Arens, W. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology & Anthropophagy. New York: Oxford UP, 1979.
    • Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Selected and trans. Annette Lavers. 8th printing. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
    • Benitez Rojo, Antonio. La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna. Hanover, New Hampshire: Ediciones del Norte, 1989.
    • Brathwaite, Edward. “Timehri.” Is Massa Day Dead? Ed. Orde Coombs. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1974. 29-45.
    • Brown, Paul. “‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’: The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism.” Political Shakespeare: new essays in cultural materialism. Ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester UP, 1985. 48-71.
    • Bruner, Charlotte. “The Meaning of Caliban in Black Literature Today.” Comparative Literature Studies 13.3 (Sept. 1976): 240-253.
    • Cabrera, Lydia. Cuentos negros de Cuba. 2nd ed. Madrid: Chicheruku, 1972.
    • Carpentier, Alejo. El arpa y la sombra. 9th ed. Mexico: siglo veintiuno editores, 1980.
    • —. Los pasos perdidos. Ed. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria. Madrid: Ediciones Catedra, 1985.
    • —. El reino de este mundo. 7th ed. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1978.
    • —. El Siglo de las Luces. Caracas: Ayacucho, 1979.
    • Cesaire, Aime. The Collected Poetry (Bilingual ed.). Trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.
    • Coll y Toste, Cayetano. Leyendas puertorriquenas. Catano, Puerto Rico: Litografia Metropolitana, 1977.
    • Coward, Rosalind, and John Ellis. Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject. Boston, London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977.
    • Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1972. 247-272.
    • Edgell, Zee. Beka Lamb. 1982. London: Heinnemann Educational Books, 1987.
    • Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Trans. Joan Riviere. Revised and ed. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 1962.
    • —. Totem and Taboo. Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 1950.
    • Fernandez Retamar, Roberto. Caliban: Apuntes sobre la cultura en nuestra America. Mexico: Editorial Diogenes, 1971.
    • —. Caliban and Other Essays. Trans. Edward Baker. Foreword by Fredric Jameson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989.
    • Garcia Ramis, Magali. Felices Dias, Tio Sergio. 3rd ed. San Juan: Editorial Antillana, 1988.
    • Glissant, Edouard. Le discours antillais. Paris: Editions du seuil, 1981.
    • Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto. “Literature of the Hispanic Caribbean.” Latin American Literary Review 8.16 (Spring-Summer 1980): 1-20.
    • Guevara, Ernesto “Che.” El socialismo y el hombre nuevo. Ed. Jose Arico. 3rd ed. Mexico: siglo veintiuno editores, 1979.
    • Harris, Wilson. Explorations: A Selection of Talks and Articles, 1966-1981. Aarhus, Denmark: Dangaroo Press, 1981.
    • —. The Guyana Quartet. London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1985.
    • —. Tradition, the Writer and Society. London: New Beacon Publications, 1967.
    • Hassan, Ihab. Selves At Risk: Patterns of Quest in Contemporary American Letters. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990.
    • Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492-1797. London: Methuen, 1986.
    • Huyssen, Andreas. “Mapping the Postmodern.” New German Critique 33 (Fall 1984): 5-52.
    • Kilgour, Maggie. From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation. Princeton UP, 1990.
    • Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977.
    • Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile. London, New York: Allison & Busby, 1984.
    • Laplanche, J., and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: W.W. Norton, 1973.
    • Montaigne, Michel de. “Of the Canniballes.” The Essayes of Montaigne. Trans. John Florio. New York: Modern Library, 1933. 160-171.
    • Rhys, Jean. Voyage in the Dark. New York: W.W. Norton, n.d. (First published 1934).
    • Sanday, Peggy Reeves. Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a cultural system. Cambridge UP, 1986.
    • Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia A. LaMar. 12th pr. New York: Folger Library-Washington Square, 1973.
    • Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.
    • Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. U of Chicago P, 1990.
    • Williams, Eric. From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492-1969. New York: Vintage, 1984.

     

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                       A Special Issue of

        _Black Sacred Music: A Journal of Theomusicology_
                        5:l (Spring 1991)

        _The Emergency of Black and the Emergence of Rap_
                   Jon Michael Spencer, Editor

     _The Emergency of Black and the Emergence of Rap_ focuses on
rap music as a new form of African-American oral expression,
capable of voicing the full range of concerns within the black
community, from sexuality to spirituality.  Featuring a poetic
postscript by C. Eric Lincoln, this volume also presents essays
on hip-hop, the debate over obscene lyrics, ghetto culture, and
Islamic ideology.  Public Enemy, Kool Moe Dee, and M.C. Hammer
are among the many performers discussed in this volume.

Single copy price:  $10.00

To order your copy today, call (919) 684-6837 between 8:30 a.m.
and 4:30 p.m. EST, with credit card information (VISA or
Mastercard).

--Semiannual--
Subscriptions:  $30.00 institutions, $15.00 individuals.  Please
add $4.00 postage outside the U.S.

Duke University Press, Journals Division
6697 College Station, Durham, NC  27708

2)---------------------------------------------------------------

                          _boundary 2_
       an international journal of literature and culture

                      Paul A. Bove, Editor

                 Future special issues include:

Japan in the World
edited by Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian

Postmodern Feminisms
edited by Margaret Ferguson and Jennifer Wicke

Postmodern America and the New Americanists
edited by Donald E. Pease

                 Recent and forthcoming essays:

Correcting Kant: Bakhtin and Intercultural Interactions /Wlad
Godzich

"Through all things Modern": Second Thoughts on Testimonio /John
Beverly

Eurocentric Reflections: On the Modernism of Soseki /Fredric
Jameson

"The Most Suffering Class": Gender, Class, and Consciousness in
Pre-Marxist France /Margaret Cohen

--Three issues annually--
Subscription prices:  $40.00 institutions, $20.00 individuals.
Add $6.00 postage outside the U.S.

Duke University Press, Journals Division
6697 College Station, Durham, NC  27708

3)---------------------------------------------------------------

                            _college_
                            LITERATURE

            A triannual journal addressing topics in
            the college literature classroom from
            Plato to poststructuralism.

     Recent and forthcoming special issues:

     The Politics of Teaching Literature (June/October 1990)
     Literary Theory in the Classroom (June 1991)
     Teaching Minority Literatures (October 1991)
     Special section on Cultural Studies (February 1992)
     Teaching Commonwealth or Postcolonial Literatures (June
          1992)
     _The Waste Land_ and _Ulysses_ (October 1992)

Recent contributors include Houston A. Baker, Jr., Patrick
Brantlinger, Robert Con Davis, Elizabeth A. Flynn, Barbara Foley,
Henry A. Giroux, Adele King, Cary Nelson, Hershel Parker, Michael
Payne, Paul Smith, Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, and Donald Morton.

Subscription prices: Individuals $15/year, $27/2 years
                     Institutions $18/year, $33/2 years
Outside U.S. and Canada, add $5/year surface or $10/year air mail
Prepaid orders to College Literature Fund, 544 Main Hall, West
Chester University, West Chester, PA 19383, USA, 215-436-2901.
Payment in U.S. funds only.

4)---------------------------------------------------------------

                  The University of Texas Press
               presents a special issue of _Genders_

           THEORIZING NATIONALITY, SEXUALITY, AND RACE
                       Editor:  Ann Kibbey
                University of Colorado at Boulder

Austin, TX--_Genders_, an interdisciplinary journal in the arts,
humanities, and mass media, explores the cultural and historical
relationship of sexuality and gender to political, economic, and
stylistic concerns.

Theorizing Nationality, Sexuality, and Race, _Genders_ #10 is a
special issue presenting the work of some of the most exciting
new writers in multicultural theory including Chela Sandoval,
Tani Barlow, and Jenny Sharpe.  Together with an important
statement by historian Linda Gordon on the concept of difference
in U.S. feminism, these essays redefine the critical juncture of
nationality, sexuality, and race for contemporary theory as they
discuss such topics as:

          U.S. Third World Feminism
          Colonialism in India
          Vietnamese Cinema
          "Difference"
          Women's Rights in Algeria
          Chinese Women, State, and Family

      Published triannually in April, August, and December
      Subscription Rates:  Individual $24, Institution $40
       Single Copy Rates:  Individual $9, Institution $14

    _Genders_ is published by the University of Texas Press
                    in cooperation with the
                University of Colorado at Boulder

          Please contact Leah Dixon for a review copy--
                         (512) 471-4531

5)---------------------------------------------------------------

                        Art  /  Theory  /  Criticism  /  Politics

                             OCTOBER

editors
     Joan Copjec
     Rosalind Drauss
     Annette Michelson
                              Examine the central cultural
                              issues of our times . . .

                              "OCTOBER is among the most advanced
                              journals . . . in the fields of art
                              theory, criticism, history, and
                              practice.  Its current editors
                              . . . are intimately familiar with
                              the cultural and political avant
                              garde of Europe and the U.S. and
                              are able to attract its best
                              thinkers . . . .  Few, if any,
                              could receive a higher
                              recommendation."
                                                         --Choice
 6:  Beckett's "...but the
clouds...," Kristeva, Pleynet,
and Sollers on the United States,
Texts by Tom Bishop, Michael Brown,
Octavio Armand, and others.

32:  Hollis Frampton: A Special
Issue.  Texts by Annette Michelson,
Barry Goldensohn, Hollis Frampton,
Christopher Phillips, Bruce Jenkins,
Peter Gidal, Allen S. Weiss, Brian
Henderson.

52:  Stephen Melville on
postmodernity and art history.
Michelson on Vertov's Three Songs
of Lenin.  Krauss on Sherrie
Levine.  Trinh T. Minh-ha on
documentary.  Thierry de Duve on
Marcel Duchamp.

          Published quarterly by
          The MIT Press
          ISSN 0162-2870

          Yearly Rates:  $30.00 Individual
                         $65.00 Institution
                         $20.00 Student and
                         Retired.

          Add $14.00 postage and handling
          outside U.S.A.  Prepayment is required.
          Send check drawn against a U.S. bank
          in U.S. funds, MasterCard or Visa
          number to:

                       MIT Press Journals
                        55 Hayward Street
                       Cambridge, MA 02142
                             U.S.A.
(617) 258-2889
telex:  92-1473 MIT CAM
fax:  617-258-6779

6)---------------------------------------------------------------

                         _Poetics Today_

        International Journal for Theory and Analysis of
                  Literature and Communication

                    Itamar Even-Zohar, Editor
                     Brian McHale, Coeditor
                  Ruth Ronen, Associate Editor

_Poetics Today_ brings together scholars from throughout the
world who are concerned with developing systematic approaches to
the study of literature, and with applying such approaches to the
interpretation of literary works.  Its pages present a remarkable
diversity of approaches, and examine a wide range of literary and
critical topics.

Recent and forthcoming special issues:

Narratology Revisited, Parts I, II, and III

Polysystem Studies

Disciplinarity

National Literatures / Social spaces

Quarterly
Subscription rates:  $56 institutions, $28 individuals,
                     $14 students.
Please add $8 for postage outside the U.S.

Duke University Press, Journals Division
6697 College Station, Durham, NC  27708

7)---------------------------------------------------------------

                              _SAQ_

                    _Rock & Roll and Culture_
                        90:4  (Fall 1991)

             Anthony De Curtis, Special Issue Editor

Robert Palmer on the Church of the Sonic Guitar
Trent Hill on Censorship in Rock Music in the 1950s
Greil Marcus's "A Corpse in Your Mouth"
Glenn Gass asks "Why Don't We Do It in the Classroom?"
Paul Smith on Playing for England
David R. Shumway on Rock & Roll as Cultural Practice
Robert B. Ray on Tracking
Mark Dery on Laurie Anderson's Crisis of Meaning
Michael Jarrett on the Progress of Rock & Roll
Paul Evans's "Los Angeles, 1999"
Martha Nell Smith on Sexual Mobilities in Bruce Springsteen
Alan Light on Rap's Recurrent Conflict
Dan Rubey on Desire and Pleasure on MTV
Jeff Calder's Observations on Life in a Rock & Roll Band

Subscription prices:  $20.00 individuals, $40.00 institutions
Please add $8.00 for postage outside the U.S.
Single issue price:  $10.00

Duke University Press, Journals Division
6697 College Station, Durham, NC  27708

8)---------------------------------------------------------------

                            _SSCORE_
                _Social Science Computer Review_

                     G. David Garson, Editor

_SSCORE_ provides a unique forum for social scientists to acquire
and share information on the research and teaching applications
of microcomputing.

Recent special issues:

Computerized Simulation in the Social Sciences
Edited by David Crookall

The State of the Art of Social Science Computing
Edited by G. David Garson

Symposium on Computer Literacy: 
Implications for the Social Sciences
Edited by William H. Dutton and Ronald E. Anderson

Quarterly
Subscription prices:  $72.00 institutions, $36.00 individuals
Please add $8.00 postage outside the U.S.

Duke University Press, Journals Division
6697 College Station, Durham, NC 27708

9)---------------------------------------------------------------

                        _Tel Aviv Review_
           An International Annual Literary Anthology
                            Volume 3

                      Gabriel Moked, Editor

"Rarely has a new literary journal entered the marketplace with
such grace and force as the _Tel Aviv Review_"--Judaica Book News

_Tel Aviv Review_ brings together diverse fiction and nonfiction
writing, much of it on topics concerning Judaism, Israel, and the
Middle East.

Highlights from this 500-page collection include four chapters
from a new novel by Amos Oz; S. Yizhar on the 1947-48 Israeli War
of Independence; an essay by Robert B. Alter on modern Israeli
fiction; poetry by Yehuda Amaichai; a radio play by Gabriel
Josipovici; and an interview with George Steiner.

Also available:  The _Tel Aviv Review_ Volumes 1 and 2

Retail price, $19.95--see your bookseller.
Prepaid subscription price for individuals, direct from Duke
University Press, $14.00.

Duke University Press, Journals Division
6697 College Station, Durham, NC  27708

10)--------------------------------------------------------------

                    Announcing a New Journal

                     ELECTRONIC NETWORKING:
               RESEARCH, APPLICATIONS, AND POLICY

A new journal will be published in Fall, 1991: ELECTRONIC
NETWORKING: RESEARCH, APPLICATIONS, AND POLICY, edited by Charles
R. McClure with Associate Editors: Ann Bishop and Philip Doty and
Resource Review Editor: Joe Ryan.

This cross-disciplinary journal will provide coverage of an
evolving area of information technology and communication: the
rapidly growing use of telecommunications networks to provide
information services and products.  The journal will publish
papers that report research findings related to electronic
networks, that identify and assess policy issues related to
networking and that describe current and potential applications
of electronic networking.

The purpose of the journal is to describe, evaluate, and foster
understanding of the role and applications of electronic
networks.  Moreover, the journal intends to promote and encourage
the successful use of electronic networks.  The journal will be
of interest to network users, managers, and policy makers in the
academic, computer, communication, library, and government
communities.

Volume 1 will consist of two issues published in August and
November, 1991. Volume 2 and future volumes will consist of four
issues to be published in February, May, August, and November.
Initially the journal will appear in paper format.  The editors
and publisher are exploring options to move into an electronic
format at a future date.

The editors welcome contributions on topics related to electronic
networks such as:

--Uses and impacts of electronic networks in research and
  education
--Managerial and organizational concerns
--Standards
--Technical considerations in the design and operation of
  networks
--Public and private sector roles and responsibilities in network
  development
--Social and behavioral factors affecting the use and
  effectiveness of networks
--The development of the National Education and Research Network
  (NREN)
--Infrastructures needed to support electronic networking
--Policy issues at the national, regional, state, and
  institutional levels affecting the use and development of
  electronic networks.

Types of contributions may range from reports on research,
assessments of policies and applications, or opinion essays.
Papers will be reviewed by an Editorial Board and external
experts as appropriate.  A Resource Review section will
critically evaluate the latest books journals, reports and
networked information of interest to our readers.

Prospective contributors to the journal should contact Charles R.
McClure, Editor, (CMCCLURE@suvm.acs.syr.edu) Ann Bishop,
Associate Editor, (A71BISHO@suvm.acs.syr.edu); Philip Doty,
Associate Editor, (P71DOTYX@suvm.acs.syr.edu); or Joe Ryan,
Resource Review Editor, (JORYAN@suvm.acs.syr.edu); at the School
of Information Studies, Syracuse University 4-206 Center for
Science & Technology, Syracuse NY, 13244-4100; Phone: (315)
443-2911; Fax: (315) 443-5806 for additional information and
guidelines for the submission of manuscripts.

Personal subscriptions to the journal are $33 per year;
institutional subscriptions are $75 per year; $15 additional for
subscriptions outside the United States.  Additional information
regarding subscriptions can be obtained from Meckler Publishing
Company, 1-800-635-5537 or via the internet
(meckler@tigger.jvnc.net).

11)--------------------------------------------------------------

                 READING PICTURES/VIEWING TEXTS
                       by Claude Gandelman

                    is now available from

                    Indiana University Press
                    10th and Morton Street
                    BLOOMIGTON IN 47405.

                The price of the book is $22.50

12)--------------------------------------------------------------

                         ARL Directory
       to Meet Need for Catalog of Electronic Publications

Responding to the library and academic communities' increasing
use of and interest in the burgeoning number of electronic
publications, the Association of Research Libraries will publish
a hard-copy Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and
Scholarly Discussion Lists.

Although many journals, newsletters, and scholarly lists may be
accessed free of charge through Bitnet, Internet, and affiliated
academic networks, it is not always a simple chore to find out
what is available.  The Directory is a compilation of entries for
over 500 scholarly lists, about 30 journals, over 60 newsletters,
and 15 "other" titles including some newsletter-digests.  The
directory gives specific instructions for access to
each publication.  The objective is to assist the user in finding
relevant publications and connecting to them quickly,  even if
not completely versed in the full range of user-access systems.

Content editor of the journals/newsletters section is Michael
Strangelove, Network Research Facilitator, University of Ottawa.
Editor of the scholarly discussion lists/interest groups is Diane
Kovacs of the Kent State University Libraries.  The printed ARL
directory is derived from widely accessible networked files
maintained by Strangelove and Kovacs.  The directory will point
tothese as the principal, continuously updated, and
free-of-charge sources for accessing such materials.

The publication will be available to ARL member libraries for
$10 and to non-members for $20 (add $5 postage per directory for
foreign addresses).  Orders of 6 or more copies receive a 10%
discount.  Updated editions are planned.

The following order form is provided for your convenience.
Feel free to print it and attach it to your check or money order,
payable to ARL.  U.S. Dollars only.  ALL ORDERS MUST BE PREPAID.

Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing
Association of Research Libraries
1527 New Hampshire Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036    USA

Name____________________________________________

Address___________________________________________

_________________________________________________

_________________________________________________

Number of Copies _________  Amount Enclosed _____________

For Further Information Contact:
Ann Okerson
ARLHQ@UMDC.Bitnet
(202) 232-2466 (voice)
(202) 462-7849 (fax)

13)-------------------------------------------------------------

     The _Directory of Electronic Journals and Newsletters_

is now available from the Contex-L fileserver and consists of two
files.  These may be obtained by sending the commands:

Tell Listserv at UOttawa Get EJournl1 Directry
Tell Listserv at UOttawa Get EJournl2 Directry

The Directory documents over 26 e-journals and 63 e-newsletters.
Special thanks to Ann Okerson at the Association of Research
Libraries for her support and guidance in this project.

This Directory, along with Diane Kovacs compilation, _Directories
of Academic E-Mail Conferences_ is also now available in print
and on diskette (Dos WordPerfect and MacWord) from:

Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing
Association of Research Libraries
1527 New Hampshire Avenue, NW
Washington, DC   20036   USA

ARLHQ@UMDC.Bitnet
(202) 232-2466 (voice)
(202) 462-7849 (fax)

Michael Strangelove
Department of Religious Studies
University of Ottawa
<441495@ACADVM1.UOTTAWA.CA>
<441495@UOTTAWA>

14)--------------------------------------------------------------

                        CALLS FOR PAPERS

                  JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION INQUIRY

  The _Journal of Communication Inquiry_ is currently seeking
manuscripts that emphasize interdisciplinary inquiry into
communication and mass communication  phenomena within cultural
and historical perspectives.  Such perspectives imply that an
understanding of these phenomena cannot arise solely out of a
narrowly focused analysis.

Thus, manuscripts should emphasize philosophical, evaluative,
empirical, legal, historical, and/or critical inquiry into
relationships between mass communication and society across time
and culture.

  The journal also invites contributions of articles, book
reviews and review articles from all scholars.

  Submission deadline:  November 1, 1991  (see details below)

                        -------------------

       Cultural Materialism:  Essays on Culture as a Practice

  This theme issue of the journal will address communication
found in newspapers, advertisements, novels, visual arts, music,
etc., as cultural practices--recorded communication of a
particular place and time, rather than as individual
decontextualized artifacts.

  Papers submitted for this issue should include a consideration
of the overt and covert relations between cultural practices, and
the political, social, ideological, and economic system in which
they exist.

  Submission deadline: January 15, 1992.

  Submit three copies of your paper to the address below.
Maximum length is 7000 words, including notes and references.
Manuscripts should have a detachable title page listing the
author's name, address and phone number.  The title--but not the
identification of the author--should also appear on the first
page.  Other than on the first page, the author's name should not
appear anywhere in the manuscript.

  The journal style is outlined in "Parenthetical References and
Reference Lists," in Kate L. Turabian, _A_Manual for Writers_,
5th ed. (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1987), 111-9.
Endnotes (used for explanatory purposes only) should be held to a
minimum.  Similar citation styles (such as APA) and other styles
in earlier editions of Turabian or of this journal are not
acceptable.  THE AUTHOR IS RESPONSIBLE FOR MAKING HER OR HIS WORK
CONFORM TO STYLE REQUIREMENTS.

   Please direct queries, subscriptions, requests for previous
issues, and all manuscripts to:

  Editor
  _Journal of Communication Inquiry_
  205 Communication Center
  School of Journalism and Mass Communication
  The University of Iowa
  Iowa City IA 52242                          (319) 335-5821

  Recent issues:

  10:1        MTV
  10:2        Stuart Hall
  10:3        General Issue: Texts and Representations
  11:1        The Feminist Issue
  11:2        Ideology Around the Dial
  12:1        Cultural Studies in South Africa: A Formal Attempt
              at Praxis
  12:2        History, Historiography, and Communication:
              Critical and Cultural Perspectives
  13:1        The Weimar Republic and Popular Culture
  13:2        Cultural Studies: Ethnography
  14:1        Minority images in Advertising
  14:2        Visual Communication
  15:1        Freedom of Expression and the First Amendment
  15:2        Another Politically UNCorrect Issue

15)--------------------------------------------------------------

                Announcing _Pynchon Notes_ 24-25
                          Now Available

                      --------------------

                         _PYNCHON NOTES_

                      --------------------

                             Editors

                         John M. Krafft
                   Miami University--Hamilton
                       1601 Peck Boulevard
                    Hamilton, OH  45011-3399
 E-mail: jmkrafft@miavx2.bitnet or jmkrafft@miavx2.ham.muohio.edu

                        Khachig Tololyan
                       English Department
                       Wesleyan University
                   Middletown, CT  06457-6061

                       Bernard Duyfhuizen
                       English Department
               University of Wisconsin--Eau Claire
                   Eau Claire, WI  54702-4004
                  E-mail: pnotesbd@uwec.bitnet

                      --------------------

     _Pynchon Notes_ is published twice a year, in spring and
fall.

     Submissions: The editors welcome submission of manuscripts
either in traditional form or in the form of text files on floppy
disk.  Disks may be 5.25" or 3.5"; IBM compatible preferred.
Convenient formats include ASCII, DCA, WordStar 3.3, Microsoft
Word 4, and WordPerfect 4.1 or later.  Manuscripts, notes and
queries, and bibliographic information should be addressed to
John M. Krafft.

     Subscriptions: $5.00 per single issue or $9.00 per year.
Overseas airmail: $6.50 per single issue or $12.00 per year.
Checks should be made payable to Bernard Duyfhuizen--PN.
Subscriptions and back-issue requests should be addressed to
Bernard Duyfhuizen.

     _Pynchon Notes_ is supported in part by the English
Departments of Miami University--Hamilton and the University of
Wisconsin--Eau Claire.  ISSN 0278-1891

                      --------------------

                     Contents of Issue 24-25

The Politics of Doubling in "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna"
     Douglas Keesey                                             5

The Rats of God: Pynchon, Joyce, Beckett,
and the Carnivalization of Religion
     M. Keith Booker                                           21

The Double Bind of Metafiction: Implicating Narrative
in _The Crying of Lot 49_ and _Travesty_
     Vivienne Rundle                                           31

The American Way and Its Double in _The Crying of Lot 49_
     Mark Conroy                                               45

Strobe's Stimulus
     Stuart Moulthrop                                          71

Oppositional Discourses, Unnatural Practices:
_Gravity's_ History and "The '60s"
     Eric Meyer                                                81

Mindless Pleasures
     Mw. Mac Kay                                              105

_Vineland_ and Dobie Gillis
     Rhonda Wilcox                                            111

Rooney and the Rocketman
     Donald F. Larsson                                        113

Surrealism, Postmodernism, and Roger, Mexico
     Michael W. Vella                                         117

James Bond and _Gravity's Rainbow_: A Possible Connection
     Robert L. McLaughlin                                     121

A Thoughtful Thomas Pynchon
     Charles Clerc                                            125

Pynchon, Joseph Heller, and _V._
     David Seed                                               127

Fractured Mandala: The Inescapable Ambiguities
of _Gravity's Rainbow_ (Review)
     N. Katherine Hayles                                      129

No Mean Accomplishment (Review)
     John L. Simons                                           133

Continuities, Echoes and Associations (Review)
     Thomas Schaub                                            135

The Little Engine That Could (Review)
     Steven Weisenburger                                      139

Jissom on the Reports: A Thoroughly
Post-Modern Pynchon (Review)
     Louis Mackey                                             143

Other Books Received                                          155

Notes                                                         157

Bibliography (--1991)                                         159

Contributors                                                  169

                       --------------------

                           Back Issues

     _Pynchon Notes_ has been published since October, 1979.
Although most back issues are now out of print, they are
available in the form of photocopies.

Nos.  1- 4: $1.50 each; Overseas, $ 2.50.
Nos.  5-10: $2.50 each; Overseas, $ 3.50.
Nos. 11-17: $3.00 each; Overseas, $ 4.50.
No.  18-19: $7.00;      Overseas, $10.00.
No.  20-21: $7.00;      Overseas, $10.00.
No.  22-23: $9.00;      Overseas, $12.00.

     Khachig Tololyan and Clay Leighton's _Index_ to all the
names, other capitalized nouns, and acronyms in _Gravity's
Rainbow_ is also available.

_Index_: $5.00; Overseas, $6.50.

     All checks should be made payable to Bernard Duyfhuizen--PN.
Overseas checks must be payable in US dollars and payable through
an American bank or an American branch of an overseas bank.

16)--------------------------------------------------------------

PEOPLE IN THE ONLY U.S. STATE THAT DIDN'T HELP VOTE RONALD
REAGAN INTO OFFICE MAY KNOW SOMETHING THE REST OF THE
COUNTRY DOESN'T.

It's not at all coincidental, we think, that they subscribe to
_Artpaper_, a monthly magazine on art, community, and cultural
activism that Stuart Klawans praised in the TLR and The Nation
called "handsome, witty, interactive."  Plain-talking and
guaranteed jargon-free, _Artpaper_ prides itself on publishing
specific, local, and diffident voices from across North America.

Subscriptions are $22/year by check, VISA, or MasterCard. You can
contact us by snail mail (2402 University Avenue W., St. Paul, MN
55114-1701), e-mail (artpaper@ well.sf.ca), hotline (612-887-
1999; then 2869*), or fax (612-922-8709, day/early evening only).
Article queries: J.Z. Grover, Editor.

17)--------------------------------------------------------------

                      MeckJournal Debuts:

New Electronic Journal on the Internet Founded to provide timely
and accurate information about emerging technologies, Meckler
Publishing has always been on the cutting edge.  As a book,
journal and newsletter publisher and conference organizer, the
company is dedicated to serving librarians, information end-users
and specialists, and the information industry as a whole on all
aspects of computer-based technology.

This year, the company's twentieth year of operation, Meckler has
committed its resources to becoming the leading provider of print
and electronic information about electronic networking throughout
the world.  An electronic publishing division has been
established and through Meckler's link with Princeton
University's JvNCNet it offers a service called MC(2).  Currently
featured on the MC(2) electronic system is the complete catalog
of Meckler Information Technology Publishing, full conference
programs for four technology conferences (Virtual Reality, HD
WORLD, Electronic Networking and Publishing '92, and Computers in
Libraries Canada), as well as five-year indexes to two of its
monthly publications.  Within the month, 1991 Tables of Contents
for all Meckler technology journals will be mounted.  This fall,
Meckler technology books will be offered at the Table of Contents
level.  A facsimile order for articles and chapters will be made
available.

MeckJournal, which is available at no charge to interested
parties, is the latest service to be offered to Internet/Bitnet
users.  Issues will include an editorial, late breaking news, and
either a forthcoming feature article from a Meckler journal, a
chapter from a forthcoming technology book, or a contribution
from a Guest Editor.

A subscription to MeckJournal may be placed by sending a message
to Meckler@tigger.jvnc.net with the following information in the
body of the text:

Subscribe MeckJournal [Internet or Bitnet address]

Subscribers will automatically receive each monthly issue and
other information as it is published.

Internet/Bitnet users may also access the journal through the
following method:
telnet to:                         nisc.jvnc.net
at the logon prompt, type:         nicol [lower case] 
no password is needed
select MC(2) from the preliminary nicol menu

MeckJournal content for the next year is based on the following
schedule--

September: Electronic Networking: Research, Applications, Policy
October:   Book Chapter
November:  Academic & Library Computing
December:  CD-ROM Librarian
January:   Computers in Libraries
February:  Book Chapter
March:     Database Searcher
April:     Document Image Automation
May:       HD World Review
June:      Book Chapter
July:      Library Software Review
August:    Multimedia Review
September: OCLC Micro
November:  Book Chapter
December:  Virtual Reality Report

The first issue presents Marian Dalton's essay "Does Anybody Have
a Map?"  It will appear in the first issue of Meckler's
Electronic Networking: Research, Application, and Policy
scheduled to debut in mid-October, 1991.  The journal is edited
by Dr. Charles McClure (Syracuse University) in association with
Ann Bishop (University of Illinois) and Phillip Doty (University
of Texas/Austin).  Joe Ryan of Syracuse serves as Resources
Editor.

We invite suggestions and comments for future issues.
Nancy Melin Nelson
Executive Editor

18)--------------------------------------------------------------

                        Monographic Review
              ______________________________________

                       Revista Monografica

           The University of Texas of the Permian Basin
                 Box 8401  Odessa, TX 79762-0001

EDITORS

JANET PEREZ                                 
Texas Tech University            

GENARO J. PEREZ            
The University of Texas of
    the Permian Basin

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Jose Luis Cano                               Estelle Irizarry 
Madrid, Spain                           Georgetown University  

Manuel Duran                                     Elias Rivers
Yale University                             SUNY, Stony Brook

David W. Foster                              Maria A. Salgado
Arizona State University         University of North Carolina
                                               at Chapel Hill
Juan Goytisolo                                             
Paris, France                                      Noel Valis
                                     Johns Hopkins University
Rolando Hinojosa-Smith
The University of Texas
at Austin

                             Call for
                              Papers

                      Number 8 (1992) of the
          MONOGRAPHIC REVIEW/REVISTA MONOGRAFICA will be
    devoted to Experimental Fiction By Hispanic Women Writers

    Traditional critics have attempted to enclose women's writing
within rather narrowly circumscribed boundaries, much as
patriarchal societies have limited women to enclosed spaces.
Within this context, letters, diaries, and autobiography are
typically "women's genres," along with religious poetry and
romantic love lyrics.  Women's fiction is dismissed as
overwhelmingly "domestic" and autobiographical, Volume 8 of
MONOGRAPHIC REVIEW/REVISTA MONOGRAFICA will expose the "phallacy"
that the female text is the author with essays on Hispanic woman
writer's experimentation, aesthetic innovation, and vanguardist
contributions.

               Papers of twelve to fifteen pages
         should be submitted before 31 August 1992 to:

                    Genaro J. Perez, Editor
                    Monographic Review
                    Department of Spanish
                    University of Texas/Permian Basin
                    Odessa, Texas 79762-0001

19)-------------------------------------------------------------

             "A NEW, VERY NEW IDEA OF 'AUFKLARUNG'"?

 International Symposium at the University for Humanist Studies,
         Utrecht, The Netherlands, December 18-19, 1991

     What should be the premises of dialogue and what are the
shared presuppositions in the recent debate between those who
align themselves with the tradition of western neomarxist
Critical Theory (with and without "pragmatic turn") and those who
are inspired by that displacement within philosophy and literary
theory commonly and insufficiently defined as Post-Structuralism?

     To discuss these questions, an international symposium will
be organized at the newly founded University for Humanist
Studies.  Invited speakers include Geoffrey Bennington, Rosa
Braidotti, Peter Dews, Nancy Fraser, Rodolhe Gasche, Rainer
Nagele, Gianni Vattimo, Elisabeth Weber, Albrecht Wellmer, and
others.

For more information write to:

Prof. Dr. Harry Kunneman
University for Humanist Studies
P.O. Box 797, 3500 AT Utrecht
The Netherlands

fax:  030-340738

20)--------------------------------------------------------------

   CONSOLE-ING PASSIONS: TELEVISION, VIDEO AND FEMINIST STUDIES

          April 3 & 4, 1992 University of Iowa - Iowa City

  CONSOLE-ING PASSIONS is the first annual conference on
television, video and feminist studies.  It welcomes papers that
foreground questions of sexual and other cultural differences.
Possible areas include feminist perspectives on:  TV and lesbian
studies; TV and gay studies; TV and video history; TV and
constructions of ethnicity, race and sexuality; TV, video and
postmodernism; TV and "girl" subcultures; media pedagogy;
international TV; policy and regulation; TV's production of
social knowledge.

  250 word proposals are due November 1, 1991 and copies should
be sent to the following two addresses:

  Lauren Rabinovitz, Department of Communication Studies;
105 Communication Studies Bldg.; University of Iowa; Iowa City
52242.

  Mary Beth Haralovich, Dept. of Media Arts; Modern Language
Bldg; University of Arizona; Tucson, AZ 85721.

  The proposals will be selected by the program committee:  Julie
D'Acci (University of Wisconsin); Jane Feuer (University of
Pittsburg); Mary Beth Haralovich (University of Arizona); Lauren
Rabinovitz (University of Iowa); Lynn Spiegel (University of
Wisconson).

  For further information contact Lauren Rabinovitz
at (319) 355-0579.

21)--------------------------------------------------------------

*************************************************************
**                                                         **
**            H  Y  P  E  R  T  E  X  T   '9  1            **
**                                                         **
**                  15 - 18 December 1991                  **
**                                                         **
**                    San Antonio, Texas                   **
**                                                         **
**             A D V A N C E    P R O G R A M              **
**                                                         **
*************************************************************

           BIENVENIDOS A SAN ANTONIO Y HYPERTEXT '91!

Welcome to San Antonio and the third ACM conference on
Hypertext!  The conference and program committees have been
hard at work over the last year and a half to bring you this
outstanding conference.  The technical program has been
expanded to allow more participation and interaction by all
attendees and La Fiesta de las Luminarias (Festival of
Lights) provides a magical atmosphere along the Paseo del
Rio (River walk) in San Antonio. We have arranged the
conference schedule to allow ample time for attendees to enjoy
this historic city on the banks of the San Antonio River.

Hypertext '91 provides a blend of traditional and innovative
programs.  Papers and Panels will explore recent advances in
hypertext technologies.  Courses allow leading practitioners
to share their knowledge with the hypertext community.
Posters provide attendees an opportunity to talk one-on-one
with researchers about recent results and on-going work, and
Demonstrations are a forum for first-hand experience with new
systems.  The Hypertext '91 Video program will be a
compilation of refereed videos which will be shown
continuously throughout the conference.  For 1991, this
traditional core is augmented by Technical Briefings which
will provide in-depth presentations on interesting hypertext
systems.

In addition to this outstanding technical program, the
Hypertext '91 conference will provide several social events
and a unique opportunity to experience beautiful San Antonio
in its holiday splendor.

Bienvenidos a San Antonio!  Bienvenidos a Hypertext '91!

For additional information, send email to:

  ht91@bush.tamu.edu

or contact:

  John J. Leggett, General Chair
  Hypertext '91 Conference
  Hypertext Research Lab
  Department of Computer Science
  Texas A&M University
  College Station, TX 77843 USA

  voice: 409 845-0298
  fax:   409 847-8578
  email: leggett@bush.tamu.edu

22)--------------------------------------------------------------

                DERRIDA on LISTSERV@CFRVM.BITNET
               Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

   This is to announce a new list devoted to a discussion of
Jacques Derrida and deconstruction.

   To subscribe, send a one line message to listserv@cfrvm.bitnet
with the text:

subscribe derrida [your full name]

   If I can be of any assistance, please contact me.

   Owner:  David L Erben
           dqfacaa@cfrvm.bitnet
           dqfacaa@cfrvm.cfr.usf.edu

     

  • Marketing / Reading Males

    Charles Stivale

    Wayne State University
    <cstival@cms.cc.wayne.edu>

     

    Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden, eds. Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism. New York: Routledge, 1990.

     

    Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland, eds. Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1990.

     

    While pondering different lines of approach for a review of two collections of essays on the implications of “(male) feminist criticism” and on the “gender(ed)” construction of canonical male writers, I stare at the front covers of each. The title Engendering Men–on a black background in sharp, white script, the letters of MEN in bold print, with the subtitle under and slightly alongside MEN, in much smaller, uniform blue print–contrasts with the Claridge/Langland cover: a wide band of gray on the left and a thin band of gray on the right border a central strip in pink hue containing the same photograph twice, at top and at bottom. Within and across the top of the upper left rectangle, next to the word “OUT,” are the black letters “OF BOUNDS,” under which, in thinner black letters on the pink background, is the subtitle Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism. As for the cover illustrations on each, over one-third of the cover above the names “Boone and Cadden” shows a reproduction of a painting by Joaquin Sorolla entitled Children at the Beach. The subject, three naked boys lying on their stomachs, legs spread and buttocks exposed, on wet sand and in extremely shallow water, is a scene of youthful repose that contrasts with the images on Out of Bounds: the photograph by Eadweard Muybridge, reproduced twice and overlaid with a pink hue, depicts the right body profile of a naked, muscular male climbing (or descending) a barely visible ladder, with a fully loaded bricklayer’s basket weighing down heavily on the right shoulder and its pole extending vertically downward along the body beyond the bottom of the photo.

     

    My contemplation of these “packages” relates not only to the strategies of these editions themselves, but also to the act of reviewing collections on (en)gender(ed) males and their criticism within the “cyberspace” of PMC. Assuming my role as electronic pitchman, I wish to re-view these texts in terms of their valence as products of the marketplace, to draw on overlaps and interweaves between the projects, to locate dissonances within and between them, in short, to study these collections as assembled productions. The Boone/Cadden title relates directly to marketing strategies announced in the introduction: with momentum provided by a “friendly push from Elaine Showalter, an established feminist critic who had the savvy to recognize a good opportunity for her less experienced colleagues” (1), the editors’ goal is “to make more visible the efforts of all those individual men throughout the academy who have already begun the task . . . of reconceptualizing themselves as men and hence as critics of the literary and cultural texts that we have inherited and are in the process of recreating. In engendering ourselves, in making visible our textual/sexual bodies, we thus acknowledge our part in a movement whose time, we hope, has come” (7). In form and content, then, this title is explicit about seizing the time and need for the product, and the cover illustration emphasizes this move: boys nakedly displayed and bonding in enjoyable (perhaps even productive) repose. Furthermore, inside facing the title page is another painting in black, white and gray tones (George Platte Lynes’s Charles Nielson with J. Ogle (behind glass)) presenting a rear view of a naked standing male figure, the right arm slightly bent and touching a translucent glass. Behind this, facing the first naked male is a second; his left hand meets the first male’s right on the glass in a mirror effect, and the male gaze that we can see is trained directly at the face opposite him, the other gaze remaining invisible to the viewer.

     

    Mirror images, male bonding, bodies and gazes reaching yet separate, in confident repose yet prepared for activity–the package enveloping and preceding Engendering Men relates directly to the contributors’ stance vis-a-vis feminism as articulated by the editors: “Feminism has engendered us, even as we strive to engender a practice that might not always be the same as feminist practice, but that remains in contiguity with its politics” (1). Just as the editors are careful to note that the “we” invoked in the introduction “does not and cannot always encompass the variety of voices and opinions gathered here under the aegis of ‘engendering men’,” they also insist that the subtitle points to an ongoing process of reaching while not yet touching, “work that by its very nature is yet in search of is own (im)proper ‘name’” (2). Citing Adrienne Rich, the editors see feminism as “a matter of vision and revision,” entailing “new ways of interacting with our worlds and our lives, our literatures and our cultures” and constituting a “revolutionary task in which both men and women can–indeed must–participate if we are to create a nonsexist future” (3). This activity, however, remains distinct from feminism, drawing on multiple methodologies, enunciated in multiple voices, seeking “to create a field of study that, as yet, remains amorphous and . . . a question” (3), much like the relations of male bodies in the two liminary illustrations.

     

    The strain of such exertion is illustrated much more evidently on the cover of Out of Bounds: under a certainly brutal weight and ungainly means of transport, the photographs bordering the pink rectangle from above and below depict the message that progress is slow and painful, hampered by the male’s limited means and burden. Curious, then, that in the introduction, what the women editors describe is their own conceptual exertion throughout the successive definitions of their project. Following the 1986 special MLA session on “Male Feminist Voices,” they had to revise the original assumption that antipatriarchal activity, e.g. male writer’s resistance to the phallic mode, “would necessarily encompass feminism” (3), choosing a new title, Out of Bounds, to indicate the possibilities of “liberation of both sexes from gender proscriptions” (5). However, since no uniform feminist methodology for inquiry unites the collected essays, the editors had to move beyond the old subtitle, Male Writers and Feminist Inquiry, and adopt the current one to foreground the main thesis of “gender in the writings of male canonical authors sensitive to the limitations of language in their culture” as well as the project’s context, “criticism offered up by women and men inscribed, inevitably, by same conditions they seek to question” (5).

     

    The cover illustrations would correspond, then, to this collection’s explicit “justification”: that “whereas ‘man’ has indeed functioned as the nodal point for traditional literary criticism of the past centuries, man as a gendered, cultural creature has received precious little attention. And to take feminist criticism seriously as a method that places gender at the heart of things is to insist that to ignore the question ‘What is it to be a man?’ is to imperil both the rigor and the integrity of feminist theory and practice” (7). Although not sharing a single feminist methodology, these essays address the focal issue of selected male canonical writers: “What do male writers who feel fettered by the patriarchal literary tradition do to escape a language implicitly– often explicitly–defined as their own?” (11). The editors argue that “the generative–we would call it ‘feminist’–act for the male writers of our study, then, is . . . breaking down or dismantling the terms and forms that have preserved the status quo of two genders” (12). We can view the cover as illustrating acts of male exertion with its feminist tinge that the essays emphasize, the cover figure enveloped by a pink haze in the difficult and careful process of “dismantling” linguistic limitations and gender proscriptions imposed by their culture.

     

    That the editors of Out of Bounds choose to include treatments only of canonical writers engaged in or in conflict with this dismantling process is, to my mind, a strength of the collection for its marketing strategies, but possibly a source of frustration for scholars and students seeking pat answers to questions on gender and patriarchy. For the editors insist that another goal of the collection is to find a way to discuss dualities, “masculine/ feminine, female/male, male feminist/female feminist, homosexual/ heterosexual” without “reinforcing, at however a covert level, a dualism that always, in the end, keeps people in their place” (9). One strategy to achieve this goal is “to allow to stand, in this volume, multifarious uses of these gender/sexual terms, pinned down through the context of each individual essay.” It is up to the individual essayists and, by extension, the readers to cope with/against “terms that would succeed in polarizing– or simplifying–their arguments” (9). So this collection, organized in chronological reference to the writers studied, offers numerous possibilities for mixing, matching and confronting the essays, approaches, and definitions: to name but a few, James Phelan (on masculine voice in Thackerey’s Vanity Fair) vis-a-vis Margaret Higonnet (on woman’s voice in Hardy’s Tess); Claridge (on the Romantic female as situated by Shelley) vis-a-vis William Veeder (on the Realist Henry James’s identification with the feminine); and two strange volume-fellows (more on this later), Frank Lentricchia (on Frost) and Joseph A. Boone (on Durrell).

     

    In contrast, the organization of the Boone/Cadden collection emphasizes a definite solidarity, even confidence, in grouping its essays into four thematic clusters. While I could quibble about what seems to be the editors’ arbitrary assignment of some essays to a specific section rather than to another, this collection is clearly of the utmost interest for seminars and scholarly research, providing needed definitions of diverse positions and extensive questioning that scholars and critics must henceforth pursue in future feminist research. However, some uneasy tensions arise in the editors’, and especially Boone’s, introductory essays regarding the field (male feminist criticism) that they hope in some way to delineate. In a bracketed preface to his essay “Of Me(n) and Feminism: Who(se) Is the Sex That Writes?,” Boone explains that the essay originally expressed, in 1987, his “uneasiness about the way in which men’s relation to feminist criticism was at the time being politicized in academic circles” (11). Despite Boone’s relief at discovering “that some of my most immediate worries seem less relevant in light of the two [sic] years that have intervened” thanks to current work contributing to the constitution of “male feminist criticism,” the editors still rely on “the reappearance” of Boone’s essay (previously published in Linda Kauffman’s 1989 Gender and Theory [Blackwell] edition) and its “less relevant” anxiety. In fact, they state that this essay serves as “an overview of the whole phenomenon of ‘male feminist criticism’ as it has evolved at conventions and in anthologies over the last few years” (4, my emphasis). This claim for the essay’s breadth is astounding in itself and all the more so given the volume in which it appears, one that includes essays that question the very possibility of such an essentializing gesture. Moreover, Boone’s essay itself reproaches one critic (Elaine Showalter) for such generalizing moves (15) and constructs its own narrative of exclusion and difference in relation to the emergence of the field that the essays purport to outline.

     

    The depiction of this “whole phenomenon of ‘male feminist criticism’” relies on Boone’s identification of a “gap between the ‘me’ and ‘men’ in ‘me(n)’” (13), and through its exposure, “we can perhaps open up a space within the discourse of feminism where a male voice professing a feminist politics can have something to say beyond impossibilities and apologies and unresolved ire” (12). Thus, the “reappearance” of this essay allows Boone to recycle a limited and privileged narrative of “the debate surrounding men and feminism in [his] own ‘workplace’” (13). The five steps of this experience are posed as “seemingly random moments”: Elaine Showalter’s now canonical 1983 essay, “Critical Cross-Dressing”; the 1984 MLA sections on “Men in Feminism”; “another MLA panel on ‘male feminist voices’ in which [Boone] participated in 1986” (13); the Alice Jardine/Paul Smith Men in Feminism collection; the aforementioned Kauffman collection “for which this essay was conceived.” Boone ostensibly seeks to render visible the “‘me(n)’ gap” as a “discontinuity that has in turned inspired me to question the discursive formations in the literary critical institution whereby the concept of men and feminism, transformed into a territorial battlefield, has attained an ‘impossible’ status” (13). “Impossible” for whom? With the quotation marks retained, Boone refers to Stephen Heath’s assertion in Men in Feminism, “Men’s relation to feminism is an impossible one.” Yet if, as Boone suggests and to which the following essays bear witness, these anxieties are no longer entirely relevant to the emergence of this field, recycling this essay must serve other ends than to describe the “whole phenomenon.”

     

    To this strategy, I apply Boone’s own criticism of “the hidden, or not-so-hidden, agendas” of “many of the contributors to Men in Feminism,” i.e. the “use of the subject ‘male feminism’. . . as their[/his] pretext to wage other critical wars,” male feminism then becoming “the ultimately expendable item of exchange that merely gets the conversation going” (20). Boone’s own agenda and “unresolved ire” are suggested, in fact, by the “moments” chosen as constitutive of the emergence of the “whole phenomenon.” Consider the fifth moment, the “kind of coda” in which Boone discusses “the form– and formulation” of the Kauffman collection. The invitation letter to contribute to this collection “inevitably” reproduced, says Boone, the discomfort of a division between “male essayists” answered by “female theorists.” For his “peace of mind” both in the original and now in the recycled essay, Boone cleverly chooses to “include [him]self among the ‘female theorists’ . . . in hopes of creating a bit of healthy confusion, a field of imaginative play that might contribute to the liberation of our current discourses on and around the subject of ‘men and feminism’” (21). How this self-inclusion accomplishes this goal was and is still not entirely clear, but a significant gap in the later, revised version is Boone’s omission of any mention that, following Gender & Theory‘s format, Toril Moi articulated therein a pithy response to his original text. However, rather than employ this revised version to respond to Moi’s criticism–notably, of the essay’s anecdotal “parochialism,” of its sub-text “structured over a series of oppositions: old/young, visible/invisible, known/unknown, speaking/silent and so on” Gender and Theory 186)–Boone (and Boone/Cadden in the introduction) simply elide any reference to this response, relieving the “unresolved ire” instead through criticism of Kauffman’s volume.

     

    This dissonance in Boone’s essay emerges in another example of his experience of the “‘me(n)’ gap” that occurred as sole male participant not just in any MLA special session, but the one from which Claridge and Langland’s volume resulted. Boone bases his critique first on “the very construction of the panel” (“reinstat[ing], once again, a male-female opposition,” 17), then on questions that the organizers “might have opened up” (18) that he gladly provides. But Boone’s return to another source of “unresolved ire,” the personal circumstances of the panel’s constitution, suggests that his objections are not so much theoretical (“man” was there reconstituted as “a homogeneous entity”) as personal, that this man was the fall-guy (18). Although not yet published at the time Boone revised the essay on “Me(n) and Feminism,” the Claridge/Langland volume nonetheless receives an oblique shot: while the volume, says Boone, “promises to move beyond its panel format in exciting directions”– for example, “several male contributors, none easily assimilable to the other, are being included, and at least some will be talking about men’s experiences” (21)– the transition sentence preceding Boone’s comments on Kauffman’s collection still provides a warning (to whom?) related if only by contiguity to the Claridge/Langland volume: “The danger is always there of reinstating those potentially blinding symmetries that a feminist understanding of difference should instead encourage us all as feminists to unravel, to move beyond” (21).

     

    The overlap of Boone’s participation in each volume offers an further possibility of textual juxtaposition. A contemporary male critic undergoing particular scrutiny in the Boone/Cadden volume is Frank Lentricchia; in “Redeeming the Phallus: Wallace Stevens, Frank Lentricchia, and the Politics of (Hetero)Sexuality,” Lee Edelman examines not only Lentricchia’s predominantly heterosexual reading of Stevens, but also the critic’s polemic with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar on feminist criticism. About Edelman’s fine reading that employs Wallace Stevens’s poetry as a strategic textual exemplar–“an instrument of analytic leverage that can help to articulate a critique of those gestures whereby criticism refuses or denies its own positioning within a framework that a gay theory might enable us to read” (37)–, Boone/Cadden comment: “Edelman’s essay takes a recent interview with Frank Lentricchia as its point of departure in order to analyze one way in which feminism has been attacked so as to appropriate for straight men a universal copyright on cultural subversiveness” (4, my emphasis). One notices here a distinct shift of Edelman’s focus, away from gay theory and toward the attack on feminism, away from Stevens toward Lentricchia. Boone/Cadden continue: “Edelman counters this strategy with one of his own–a reading of Wallace Stevens that critiques Lentricchia’s male sexual positioning and posturing) from an explicitly gay perspective” (5, my emphasis). Quite true, if understandably reductive, but why the unnecessary parenthetical editorial comment?

     

    The implicit agenda of the editors is explicitly provided in Boone’s bracketed preface to his essay: having been relieved of some “worries” by the new productivity in the field of “male feminist criticism,” Boone also concludes that the earlier emphasis on “the issue of naming–whether to take on the label, for instance, of ‘male feminism’–now strikes me as perhaps less urgent than measuring the degree of commitment to a feminist politics demonstrated in these men’s newly engendered methods of analysis” (11, my emphasis). What the tools of this “measurement” might be are not clear, but whereas the contributors to Engendering Men, by dint of the inclusion of their essays, no doubt “measure up” to the standards of the emergent field, Lentricchia clearly does not. It is understandable, then, that from Boone’s perspective, “none” of the male contributors to the Claridge/ Langland volume are “easily assimilable to the others” since the demonstration therein of “the degree of commitment to a feminist politics” would no doubt be found wanting, especially given the implicit requirement of discussing “men’s experiences” met only by a few of those contributors (men and women). However, in light of Lentricchia’s “privileged” position in Engendering Men as anti-feminist fall-guy, an added textual confrontation available in Out of Bounds for classroom debate would be Lentricchia’s “The Resentments of Robert Frost” with Boone’s essay on Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, if only for their distinct approaches for exploring the focal authors’ expression of male desire.

     

    To return to the liminary illustrations of Engendering Men, there is clearly much more going on than meets the eye underneath the placid surface of males in the solidarity of contemplative repose. One suggestion for readers of this collection is to move from Boone’s essay to the final one by Robert Vorlicky, “(In)Visible Alliances: Conflicting ‘Chronicles’ of Feminisms,” on the need for and possibilities of alliances (male/female, hetero-/homosexual). This essay serves as a splendid statement of the complex relations addressed throughout the volume and would have been a more fitting opening essay. While both volumes speak to questions vital to postmodern concerns, they market these in distinct ways that respond to perceived demands from readers/consumers and also create choices for their engagement with each set of texts. On one hand, the consumer might read essays in each volume as isolated from the others and reap certain, if limited, benefits; on the other hand, through the juxtaposition and confrontation of the volumes’ essays, the reader will encounter the tension inherent to the emergence of new fields of inquiry. However, as I have suggested, one also discovers the multiple difficulties of alliances and the distinct, often irreconcilable, differences in the processes of (en)gender(ing) due in no small part to the collision of ethical concerns with personal agendas.

     

  • Privacy And Pleasure: Edward Said on Music

    Dan Miller

    North Carolina State University
    <dcmeg@ncsuvm>

     

    Said, Edward W. Musical Elaborations. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 109 pp. $19.95.

     

    Edward Said’s 1989 Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory at the University of California at Irvine, published as Musical Elaborations, are meditations on classical music in the Western tradition. They confront a sharp antinomy: on one hand, music is an intensely solitary and subjective experience for the performer or listener; on the other hand, music is also public occurrence, fully implicated in the social and cultural world. Said sets out to resolve the antinomy; he intends to show that, however private the experience of music may seem, it never escapes social context and functions. But as Said pursues that resolution, difficulties arise. He often moves from the private to the public dimensions by modulations that are themselves more musical than logical. Some of the most assured passages in the book assert the solitary, not the social, pleasures and powers of music. Said is often more successful at describing the ways in music eludes social appropriation than he is at demonstrating how it serves social ends. As a result, the argument of Musical Elaborations is strangely, powerfully at odds with itself: it wants to hold that classical music is a fully social enterprise, but it cannot help celebrating music in solitude. But while these lectures tend to undermine their own conclusions, they also succeed in a way that Said did not intend. His case for the socially determined nature of music actually serves to diagnose weaknesses in current, socially-oriented cultural analysis.

     

    Musical Elaborations is a richly varied book. It mixes theoretical speculations in both musicology and literary theory with autobiography. Foucault and Adorno mingle with Brahms and Wagner. Music criticism, sometimes technical and sometimes impressionistic, joins with literary criticism, and both intertwine with narrative and remembrance. These are personal essays, loose in structure, unapologetic in their subjectivity. While Said calls himself an amateur in musicology, he is clearly among the most expert amateurs. His columns on music have appeared for several years in The Nation, and, as he delivered these lectures, he played brief passages on the piano to illustrate his points.

     

    At issue throughout the book is the postmodern insistence, exemplified by Foucault, on the social construction of art and individuality. Ostensibly nonrepresentational and highly formal, highly individualized in its composition and its performance, classical music offers the most challenging test case for social analysis. Said notes that music writing, governed by the assumption that classical music develops according to its own internal and formal logic, independently of social history, has been relatively untouched by recent developments in literary and cultural theory. His goal is to treat music as a cultural field and to see (or hear) music as always implicated in social distinctions and roles, in questions of national and regional identity, in its own institutions, in the dispositions of cultural power. For Said, music is marked by the fluidity of its affiliations: it always has a social setting and role, but settings and roles are always changing, always temporally and spatially variable. What Said calls the “transgressive” character of music–“that faculty music has to travel, to cross over, drift from place to place in a society, even though many institutions have sought to confine it” (xix)–is its ability constantly to re-affiliate itself and establish new connections. Music plays a central role in the constitution or, in a term Said borrows from Gramsci, “elaboration” of a social order, and as such it normally works to preserve social power and relations. But it does so through its transgressive ability to break from its social context and function in other contexts.

     

    For Said, the essential, and most paradoxical, instance of music is the performance. Said points out repeatedly how rare moments of musical transcendence take place only in one of the most socially ritualized, unchanging, often stultifyingly conservative institutions imaginable: the concert itself, with its highly restricted performance repertory, with its absolute separation of roles (performers are not composers, listeners are usually not performers themselves, and composers are not performers, in part because they are, almost as a rule, dead), and with the long, specialized training of performers aimed at a level of sheer expertise far beyond ordinary musical abilities. Performance is an “extreme occasion,” an irreproducible event, divorced from normal life, highly ritualized and specialized, devoted to almost superhuman virtuosity. It is at once social and solitary: both performer and listeners are, when the performance succeeds, alone with the music, yet all are alone together, by virtue of the social institutions that make performance possible. Said recognizes that, in many ways, the modern concert represents a profound de-socialization of music since it rests upon a debilitating division of musical labor among performers, listeners, and composers. Yet, for Said, only at the moment of overpowering performance can music break out of the very social constraints that make it possible.

     

    Said is fascinated by musicians who seek extreme control, who dominate both the music and the conditions of performance. While Said notes how appropriate Arturo Toscanini’s style was for an American broadcasting corporation intent on creating a mass audience for classical music, it is the rigorous logic of Toscanini’s musical vision that attracts Said’s attention: “What Toscanini seems to me to be doing . . . is trying to force into prominence, or perhaps enforce, the utterly contrary quality of the performance occasion, its total discontinuity with the ordinary, regular, or normative processes of everyday life” (20). In the music and career of Glenn Gould, Said finds again the power of discontinuity and the force of individual will effecting the break. In his “retirement” from public playing and withdrawal into exclusively filmed and recorded performance, Gould created “a sort of airless but pure performance enclave that in turn paradoxically kept reminding one of the very concert platform he had deserted” (23). As in Toscanini’s control, so in Gould’s almost mathematically precise fingering, Said discovers a world apart, almost redemptively divorced from normal life. Said notes that Gould’s ideals of “repose, detachment, isolation” (29) are symptoms of an art condemned to social marginality, yet Said is himself drawn to these ideals.

     

    Said extols those moments–points of completion in a composer’s musical evolution, times of mastery in performance, instants of complete absorption in listening–when nothing else but music in its purity remains. And at those moments, music breaks free of the social field: there are “a relatively rare number of works making (or trying to make) their claims entirely as music, free of the many of the harassing, intrusive, and socially tyrannical pressures that have limited musicians to their customary social role as upholders of things as they are. I want to suggest that this handful of works expresses a very eccentric kind of transgression, that is, music being reclaimed by uncommon, perhaps even excessive, displays of technique whose net effect is not only to render music socially superfluous and useless–to discharge it completely–but to recuperate the craft entirely for the musician as an act of freedom” (71). Said’s cases in point are interesting: Webern’s Variations, Bach’s “Canonic Variations,” and a work that normally seems immersed in cultural context and value, Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte. Absolute virtuosity, rigorous musical development (though variations and elaborations), “pure musicality in a social space off the edge” (72) that is hardly still social at all–these represent escape and freedom. There is, Said allows, some truth to the Romantic view “that music to a consummate musician possesses a separate status and place . . . that is occasionally revealed but more often withheld” (xix-xx).

     

    While much of Musical Elaborations is an argument against Theodor Adorno and the view that modern music, exemplified by Schoenberg, represents a fatal rift between culture and society, Michel Foucault makes his presence felt throughout the book. Said acknowledges the Foucauldian nightmare of a social order shaped and dominated by power even in its apparently most secret and individual recesses, producing opposition only to manage and contain it. Yet here, as in other books and essays, Said works toward a social vision that allows real possibilities of change and some degree of escape. For Said, both Foucault and Adorno are guilty of a totalizing theory does little to contest the totalizing society it confronts. “No social system,” Said writes, “no historical vision, no theoretical totalization, no matter how powerful, can exhaust all the alternatives or practices that exist within its domain. There is always the possibility to transgress” (55). Even Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, epitome of musical elaborating a social order, contains its own transgression: “Read and heard for the bristling, tremendously energetic power of alternatives to its own affirmative proclamations about the greatness of German art and culture, Die Meistersinger cannot really be reduced to the nationalist ideology of its final strophes stress” (61). Music itself is the last and best hope, it seems, for transgression.

     

    The extraordinary performance, the virtuoso as master, the singular event and individual, absolute music, the moment of complete transgression–these are the motifs of Romanticism, musicological idealism, and individualist aesthetics, exactly the targets of Said’s polemic. Said confesses that the language of idealism tinges these lectures, but he never acknowledges the degree to which the book is divided against itself:

     

    Let the word "melody" . . . serve as a name both for an actual melody and for any other musical element that acts in or beneath the lines of a particular body of music to attach that music to the privacy of a listener's, performer's, or composer's experience. Here I want to emphasize privacy and pleasure, both of them replete with the historical and ideological residue of that bourgeois individuation now either discredited or fully under attack. (96)

     

    For Said, there is no music without melody, that intensely particularized utterance that is “authorial signature” (95)–even of a composer for whom melody in the normal sense is not primary–and mark of all that is least social and most a departure from the cultural field. Even Glenn Gould, archly anti-Romantic in style and repertory, is, as Said describes him–the eccentric genius who turns his back on the world and any trace of normal life, who constructs for himself a life of pure art and, in so doing, creates (and destroys) himself–a perfect instance of late Romanticism. Musical Elaborations is clearly not a defense of individualist aesthetics, but it does suggest that much of the traditional language of music’s (and perhaps, by extension, art’s) inwardness, autonomy, originality, and uniqueness cannot be jettisoned without substantial loss. Said’s recourse to idealism, in an intellectual climate (created in large part by Said himself) dominated by programmatic anti-idealism, indicates something more interesting and powerful than a lapse in logic. The postmodern vocabulary may allow Said no language to describe musical interiority other than traditional Romanticism, even though what he strives to say may no longer be Romantic.

     

    Said begins his third chapter, “Melody, Solitude, and Affirmation,” by invoking Proust’s remembrances of music past and of memories brought to life by music:

     

    Proust's recurrences inevitably point away from the public aspects of an occasion--sitting in a concert hall or salon, for instance--to its private possibilities; for example, the recollection, often shared, often lonely, of pains, anguish, bodies, miscellaneous as well as musical sounds, and so on. I find this characteristic tendency in Proust very moving, obviously because in its poignancy and psychological richness it has helped me to comprehend a great deal about my own experiences of music, experiences that seem to me like an unceasing shuttle between playing and listening privately for myself and playing and listening in a social setting, a setting whose constraints and often harsh limitations . . . only suddenly and very rarely produce so novel, so intense, so individualized, and so irreducible an experience of music as to make it possible for one to see in it a lot of its richness and complexity almost for the first time. (76)

     

    He recounts how hearing Alfred Brendel play Brahms’ “Theme with Variations for Piano” led him, through a complex, apparently private and idiosyncratic course of associations, to other music (theme-and-variation pieces by Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Elgar), to other performances and versions of the same music (including part of a Louis Malle film score), to comparable musical effects (in Schumann, Wagner, Strauss), finally to “the voice and even the pianistic gestures of an old teacher, Ignace Tiegerman, a Polish Jew who had come to Egypt (which is where I met him in the 1950s), after he had discovered the impending portent of fascism for him as a European musician and performer during the 1930s,” to his playing of a Brahms concerto, and then to “a whole tradition of teaching and playing that entered into and formed my relationship with Tiegerman, as it must have between him and his colleagues and friends in Europe” (90-91).

     

    There is an obvious point about this narrative, but it is one that Said never quite makes. The most moving private moment has shown itself to be fully social, though not social in the way Said has been using that term. Throughout the book, Said treats public and private, solitary and social, as simple, polar opposites. Inwardness and musical meditation are, almost by definition, non-social, anti-social. But his own story demonstrates that seemingly private experience is social at its heart. Even at the instant of greatest isolation and involvement, it is exactly the music of another being heard. Music here illustrates an extreme sociality, where self and other are so intimately tied and interwoven that it becomes difficult to distinguish the two. In addition, the most private inevitably reveals itself as the most social and the most painfully historical (the story of Ignace Tiegerman resonates with Said’s references, elsewhere in the book, to the Palestinian dispossession and the role played in it by elements of European fascism). Said resolves the antinomy of public and private not in the way he had intended, through analysis of musical institutions and settings, but exactly where it seemed a resolution was least likely to be found, in what seemed to be pure inwardness and formal pleasure.

     

    Pushed to an extreme, “public” and “private” are no longer opposites. If we attend to what Said’s discussion actually shows, rather than what it asserts, we see that the tension between public and private remains, even as both are, in effect, different inflections of the social. Here social forces are refracted through individual experience and, unlike the obviously institutional dimensions of the concert, are powerfully interior. It is far from clear what sort of social analysis could genuinely illuminate the domain of inwardness, but Said has at least suggested the poverty of a postmodernism incapable of accounting for privacy and musical pleasure. If our concern, after Foucault, is with what is genuinely transgressive, then music and interiority and a certain kind of individualism cannot be discounted. Of course, what kind of individualism makes a considerable difference. There is a great difference between holding the individual and private experience are of value because they transcend social determinations and because they represent the complexity, hence the variability, of social structures. And the same holds true when the private experience is that of an artwork, musical or literary.

     

  • Confronting Heidegger

    Gerry O’Sullivan

    University of Pennsylvania

     

    Zimmerman, Michael. Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. 306 pp.

     

    In the wake of the “affaire Heidegger,” prompted by the publication in 1987 of Victor Farias’s Heidegger et le nazisme, Michael Zimmerman poses a fundamental question in his recent book, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art–how can students of Heidegger continue to assert the value of his thought given his “postwar refusal to abandon what seems such a reactionary understanding of Western history and his equal failure to renounce unequivocally a political movement that wrought such unparalleled misery”?

     

    Such an inquiry is nothing new for Zimmerman, whose 1981 book, Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity dealt directly with the issue over the course of a cogent chapter entitled “National Socialism, Voluntarism, and Authenticity.” In fact, the seeming novelty of the “affaire” itself testifies to an unfortunate lack of historical perspective on the part of many of its leading participants.

     

    For years prior to the public debates surrounding the Farias study, many of Heidegger’s own students (among them Otto Poggeler, Heinrich Ott and Paul Huhnerfeld) pointed out the often disturbing consistencies between the philosophical project of their mentor and the political project of National Socialism. Indeed, as early as 1970, Joachim Fest had discussed Heidegger’s outright complicity with the NSDAP in The Face of the Third Reich.

     

    But as David Carroll has suggested in his foreword to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Heidegger and the “jews”, the most recent French version of the Heidegger affair may not have been so much prompted by the Farias book as “programmed”– designed to undermine the work and thought of all those in any way indebted to the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics.

     

    While Carroll’s take on the timing of the debate may seem a bit too intentional, he raises some rather interesting institutional, political and historical questions about the “place” of Heidegger in contemporary scholarship. Given the shape and focus of the discussion in France, it would seem that–in many ways–Heidegger’s ignominious affiliation with the Nazis and his silence on the Holocaust may not have been the point of the polemic, but merely an occasion to attack those cast as heirs. In this case, one must deal with the seeming indecency of an intentional “double-forgetting.”

     

    Zimmerman’s book, on the other hand, begins with what must be one of the clearest and most thoroughgoing considerations of Heidegger’s historical and political context written to date, relating Heidegger’s critique of “productionist metaphysics” and his thinking on technology to his affiliation with National Socialism. But Zimmerman, unlike Farias, does not reduce the whole of Heidegger’s writings to a mere expression or reflection of Nazism. While clearly identifying the various fascist and reactionary strains running throughout the writings, Zimmerman also undertakes a retrieval or recuperation of what he believes to be still valuable insights on Heidegger’s part–a kind of “what-is-living, what-is-dead” exercise.

     

    To this end, Zimmerman engages the texts of Heidegger both on their own terms and in relation to the writings of his contemporaries, an interpretive gesture which allows him to, in his own words, step outside of “the one-dimensional hermeneutic circle that is typical of the way in which most of Heidegger’s commentators have explained his concept of modern technology” (249).

     

    As Zimmerman points out, most of Heidegger’s readers have chosen to ignore the political implications of his thinking on technology in favor of a continual reading and rereading of the early and later writings, granting a kind of suprahistorical character to the works and allowing the corpus to dictate the conditions of its own perception. Zimmerman sidesteps this kind of hermeneutic self- foreclosure by decentering Heidegger as merely “one important voice in a cultural conversation into which Heidegger himself had been ‘thrown’.”

     

    This is not to say that Heidegger’s politics are themselves construed by Zimmerman as a manifestation of Geworfenheit or “throwness.” Rather, his reflections on modernity, technology and the work of art are placed within the setting of what Jeffrey Herf has described as “reactionary modernism,” the technological-romantic branch of German conservatism which sought to replace the calculative rationality of the Enlightenment with the self-sacrifice and spirit of an individualistic, though properly Germanic, Volkstechnik.

     

    Heidegger’s views on technology and industrial society underwent significant changes between the publication of Being and Time and the writings which appeared after the so-called Kehre or “turn.” As Zimmerman points out, the ambiguity of Heidegger’s account of “everydayness” in Being and Time was largely attributable to his unwillingness, or inability, to delineate between an account of everyday life which purported to reveal its timeless, essential and “transcendental” features and one which amounted to a politically charged critique of everydayness under the historically specific circumstances of capitalism and urban-industrial society.

     

    Read in this way, then, Being and Time provided a negative evaluation of life in industrial society while attempting to retain its tacit claim to being a work of phenomenological description. It also, in the assessment of Winfreid Franzen, appealed to conservative intellectuals “because it addressed them theoretically, personally, and existentially without calling upon them to do anything specific.” In fact, Heidegger’s thematization of the frailty of individual Dasein in the face of the omnivorous they-self commended total secession as the only possibility of self-assertion.

     

    But Zimmerman’s analysis of the reactionary, albeit addled, agenda of Being and Time stops there, and he moves (perhaps too quickly) onto a consideration of Heidegger’s debt to the writings of Ernst Junger. Zimmerman neglects to make explicit the problematic of Heidegger’s “conservative revolution” in philosophy as identified by Pierre Bourdieu in The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s attempt to overthrow Kant’s overthrowing of metaphysics was, according to Bourdieu, typical of a strategy peculiar to “conservative revolutionaries” like Junger, a strategy which consisted in “jumping into the fire to avoid being burnt, to change everything without changing anything, through one of those heroic extremes which, in the drive to situate oneself always beyond the beyond, unite and reconcile opposites verbally, in paradoxical and magical propositions.”

     

    Hence, says Bourdieu, Heidegger sought to escape historicism by asserting the essential “historicity” of the existing, and then inscribed history and temporality within Being which remains, even in Heidegger, both ahistorical and eternal. Such a seemingly radical overcoming as that accomplished by Heidegger simply “allows everything to be preserved behind the appearance of everything changing, by joining opposites in a two-faced system of thought, which is therefore impossible to circumvent, since, like Janus, it is capable of facing challenges form all directions at once: the systematic extremism of essential thought enables it to overcome the most radical theses . . . by moving to a pivotal point where right becomes left, and vice versa.” Therefore, there may have been more to the fundamental inaction encouraged by Being and Time than that allowed, or interrogated, by Zimmerman.

     

    Zimmerman’s discussion of Heidegger’s relationship to the writings of Ernst Junger is, however, both elegant and persuasive. Heidegger, according to Zimmerman, drew upon representations of technology and the machine age contained in the essays and fictions of Junger who, like Spengler, had sought to discover metaphysical principles behind history which were “deeper” than those suggested by Marxism– mythical, elemental and irrational forces beyond the alleged determinism of scientific materialism or bourgeois economism.

     

    Between 1934 and 1944, Heidegger developed his own conception of technology in constant and ongoing dialogue with Junger’s work, which argued that the industrial transformation of the earth was the empirical manifestation of a hidden, world-transforming power akin to the Spenglerian version of Nietzsche’s will to power. This power, according to Junger, currently took the form of the Gestalt of the worker (Junger alternately defined Gestalt as a stamping, imprinting, typing, or symbolic “totality” which embraced “more than the sum of its parts”).

     

    For Junger, as for Spengler, world history was a spectacle. And the central figure in the then-unfolding drama of “total mobilization” was the worker-soldier, a passionate yet steely character ever willing to surrender to the atavastic will, whether on the factory floor or the battlefield. Junger, like the Futurists, developed a full-blown aesthetics of horror. Writing in War as Inner Experience (1922) and elsewhere, he sought to discover the “truth” of warfare as something done for its own sake, thus justifying both the horrors of modern warfare and Germany’s defeat in World War I as components of the same grand design and the upsurging of primordial will.

     

    Heidegger both appropriated and transformed Junger’s masculinist rhetoric. While approving of Junger’s critiques of both Marxism and bourgeois decadence, his affirmation of a new and elite humanity and the necessity for an authoritarian Gemeinschaft, Heidegger rejected his internationalism and saw the dream of the world factory as simply being the final phase of the “productionist metaphysics” inaugurated by the Greeks. In response, Heidegger began to develop his own notions of spiritual work, national work service and the need for an “authentically” German science as early as the famed Rectoral address of 27 May 1933.

     

    Heidegger’s later reflections on technology, work and art continued to be influenced by his dialogue with Junger’s writings, according to Zimmerman. Just as Junger had seen the work of the eternal will in the horrors of technological warfare, Heidegger glimpsed the “self-concealing being of entities in the horrifying meaninglessness of entities in the technological era,” whereby everything was reduced to “the same undifferentiated raw material for industrial production.”

     

    Likewise, Heidegger responded to Junger’s rhetoric of the irresistable upswelling of primal Will by arguing that the “power” confronting humanity was, in fact, the “overwhelming being or presencing of entities,” the overwhelming force (Walten) of physis as presencing or being. This force, claimed Heidegger, brought about the almost martial struggle to “found” a world, to delimit the overpowering presencing of entities in order to let them “stand forth” as determinate, whether through the handiwork of technology or art, or the intervention of the poet, thinker or–at least prior to the late 1930s–politician.

     

    Heidegger’s language in 1935, following that of Junger, was decidedly martial in tone: “To apprehend . . . means to let something come to one, not merely accepting it, however, but taking a receptive attitude toward that which shows itself. When troops prepare to receive the enemy, it is in the hope of stopping him at the very least, of bringing him to stand [zum Stand bringen]” (79).

     

    Junger’s failure to grasp the nature of this presencing, and his confusion of the “fluid ‘motion’ of the synchronic event of presencing (Anwesen)” with the diachronic “hardening” of this presencing into specific historical modes of “being present” (Anwesenheit), led Heidegger to reject Junger’s notion of Gestalt (as epochal “imprinting”) as yet another master name in the history of metaphysics.

     

    So, says Zimmerman, Heidegger’s response to Junger’s essay, “Uber ‘Die Linie‘” in The Question of Being, was to discount the writer’s failure to grasp the nature of the ontological difference while recapitulating many of the same themes found in his works: “While Heidegger spoke of the history of being, and Junger of the history of the Will to Power, both believed that the ‘multifarious transformations’ assumed by being or the Will to Power in different epochs presented ‘the heroic spirit with an engrossing drama.’” Both also believed that they were equipped to bear witness to this historical “play” of transformations while the rest of humanity blindly succumbed to the imperatives of the imprinting of the age of the worker.

     

    It was through Junger’s “aesthetics” of history and the Gestalt of the worker, claims Zimmerman, that Heidegger was led to consider Nietzsche’s thinking on the nature of art. In his lectures on Nietzsche, Heidegger came to thematize the Greek conception of art as techne, or measure-giving disclosure, in response to the “degenerate” modes of modern art and industrial production.

     

    Not surprisingly, Heidegger read the first version of “The Origin of the Work of Art” in 1935, not long after Hitler’s Nuremberg address, “Art and Politics.” Both Hitler and Heidegger stressed the importance of Greek art as a model for a “restored” and authentic aesthetic practice. And insofar as Heidegger believed that the art of the Greek temple opened or disclosed the world of the polis “in which entities could first manifest themselves in their own specific shapes and forms, and in which Greek humanity could make the decisions that would determine its destiny,” writes Zimmerman, both Hitler and Heidegger agreed on the relationship between art and political life.

     

    Where Heidegger parted company with Hitler, however, was on the point of art’s relationship to history and eternity. Hitler’s vision of the thousand-year Reich was to be embodied in planned public works of art, totalitarian “temples” attesting to the permanence of the Nazi vision. Zimmerman points out that for genuine art to “work,” according to Heidegger, it must reveal the fragility and mortality of human existence. Hence, Hitler remained, in the estimation of Heidegger, under the sway of foundationalist metaphysics.

     

    Against such myths of eternity and pure presence, Heidegger turned to the “originary” Greek conception of art as techne, a work of the hand which resists reduction to a “mere product” by virtue of its self-sufficiency and disclosive power. Such “authentic” production and “freeing” disclosure gave way, eventually, to the distortions inherent in “productionist metaphysics” which, states Zimmerman, casts the world as little more than a “standing-reserve” awaiting subjugation.

     

    Like the National Socialists, the reactionaries and fascists, Heidegger was concerned with the inherent or essential relationship between poetry and production. The cure for rootlessness, social fragmentation, nihilism and alienation was not to be found in a workers’ revolution, but rather in a workers’ state transformed by the saving and disclosive power of art as handicraft. In such a situation, the ills and evils of modernity–associated in Heidegger’s mind with the industrialism and rootlessness of Bolshevism (and, concomitantly, “cosmopolitan Judaism”) and the inauthentic freedoms of the liberal welfare state–would be forever swept away by the power of authentic art and authentic technology to disclose new worlds and possibilities.

     

    Apart from its political pedigree, Heidegger’s critique of instrumental rationality is appealing to Zimmerman, and for several reasons. His anti-foundationalism, which denies a rational basis for the technological way of life, suggests to Zimmerman that things could be otherwise: “Discovering the groundlessness of the technological era makes possible the openness–and the anxiety–necessary for the arrrival of a new, post-modern era.” Zimmerman also sees continuity between Heidegger’s attention to handiwork and the analysis of “micropractices” in Foucault, both of which, he believes, offer alternatives to the homogeneity of the technological world.

     

    Zimmerman concludes Heidegger’s Confrontation With Modernity with a hopeful, though cautious, call for dialogue among feminists, deep ecologists and students of Heidegger’s work, all of whom are involved, according to Zimmerman, in developing new narratives about non-alienated, and non-oppressive, social and ecological relationships. Much can be learned, claims Zimmerman, from the Heideggerian concept of Gelassenheit and the hermeneutical insistence upon the finitude, and contingency, of knowing. But Heidegger’s failures remain in the foreground: “Sensitive to the dangers of nihilism posed by the dissolution of previous foundations, Heidegger attempted to find a non-absolute, historical ‘ground’ to guide his own people. Unfortunately, this attempt ended in disaster.”

     

    This is as comprehensive an overview of Heidegger’s views on modernity, technology, politics and art as one will find anywhere, and an extremely valuable contribution to recent scholarship on Heidegger and the debates occasioned by his commitment to National Socialism. But several questions remain.

     

    Zimmerman tends, often in passing, to include Marxism among the various manifestations of “productionist metaphysics” at work in the history of the forgetting or “oblivion” of being–what Heidegger termed the Seinsvergessenheit. At this point Zimmerman himself can be said to succumb to a totalizing or hypostasizing gesture regarding the disputed character of production in Marxist theory. Marx recognized that the capitalist mode of production was a system of multiple determinations, demanding multiple logics. One can read Marx himself against the kind of conceptual identity attributed to him by Zimmerman, via Heidegger.

     

    Zimmerman also fails to indicate what it is that he means by “mode of production.” To use shorthand developed by Harold Wolpe in The Articulation of Modes of Production, this could be a “restricted” use, covering only forces and relations of production, or an “extended” use, including forces and relations of production and their conditions of existence. Only the latter tends toward the kind of economic reductionism slighted by both Zimmerman and Heidegger, and assumes that the economy is, always and already, the predetermined site of primary contradiction.

     

    Neglected, too, is Marx’s point–underscored by Marcuse –that neither nationalization or socialization alter, by themselves, technical rationality as embodied (often irrationally) in the productive apparatus. A shift in ownership does not bring alienation to an end, as Zimmerman seems to imply in his critique of Marxism. The technological structure itself must change. At this point, one wishes that Zimmerman had included more recent Marxist theory in his dialogue, as it might have added some specificity to the Heideggerian critique.

     

    But perhaps specificity remains, and will always remain, the glitch in the Heideggerian machinery. Heidegger’s fundamental inablity to account for social institutions may stem from the reactionary tendencies identified by Bourdieu in Being and Time, including the impulse to always cast “the social” negatively, interms of das Man or the they-self. (Adorno’s underthematization of the social leads to similar problems for his analyses, as Axel Honneth has recently shown). One wonders how and where the world-disclosing, world-transforming power of authentic art and technology can finally work if not across the social field.

     

  • Spew: The Queer Punk Convention

    Bill Hsu

    University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana
    <hsu@csrd.uiuc.edu>

     

     

    SPEW. The first queer punk fanzine convention. May 25 1991. Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago.

     

    "NO panels. NO workshops. NO keynote address. VANLOADS of noisy dykes and fags."

     

    While hardcore in the early ’80s was mostly a straight white male phenomenon, gender-bending had often been a feature of punk in the ’70s. Queer punks were ostracized by both the mainstream gay communities (for being punks) and the mainstream hardcore communities (for being queer). Letters from queer-identified punks began appearing in punk fanzines in the mid-80s, usually provoking responses from homophobic punks. Queer versions of the traditional punk fanzines started soon after.

     

    Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll, the bastion of politically progressive hardcore culture, has occasional columns by Tom Jennings of HOMOcore (one of the first queer punk zines), and gave some coverage to the queer punk scene in its April 1989 “Sexuality” issue. The original plan was to devote a full issue to queer punks, but apparently lip service is all the hardcore establishment is willing to give.

     

    Queer punks built their own network, with their own fanzines and events. There are still relatively few openly queer punk/hardcore bands, but some established bands are supportive; Fugazi and MDC have played at HOMOcore benefits. Queer punks have encountered only limited acceptance in the hardcore establishment. Some have found more support from gay activist groups such as ACTUP and Queer Nation, and the more radical arts communities.

     

    The queer punk “movement” is not as strong in Europe as it is in North America, perhaps because the punk fanzine network is stronger in the US and Canada, and it was through this network that queer punks started organizing. Also, the European hardcore scene has strong ties to anarchist youth movements and tends to be less homophobic; perhaps queer punks in Europe have found a more supportive environment in European hardcore communities, and do not feel the need to establish their own network. Most of the queer punk fanzines that I’m aware of (and that attended SPEW) are based in the US or Canada.

     

    For SPEW, Randolph Street Gallery was divided into a display area for zines and merchandise, a video area and a performance area. Most of the major queer punk zines were in attendance: JDs (one of the first and most visible, usually featuring G.B. Jones’ stylish photographs and graphics and Bruce La Bruce’s gritty and affecting writing), the exuberant and ornery Bimbox, the campy and literate Thing, Vaginal Creme Davis’ hilarious Fertile LaToyah Jackson, etc. Most zines that were not attending sent recent issues and merchandise for display. Chicago’s ACTUP and Queer Nation both had tables.

     

    The performance area buzzed all afternoon with readings and music. Novelist Dennis Cooper, who had performed earlier that week at Club Lower Links and Medusa’s, read again from his brilliant new book Frisk and from older work. He was a nervous reader, shuffling his feet around and stubbing his toes on the floor (“from a distance people think I’m a kid.”) The delivery was mostly deadpan and lowkey, and he was charming and funny.

     

    The other readings were not as interesting. Many of the readers are excellent writers, but they were not very careful about how their texts came across when read, and what kind of delivery was necessary for good effect. Drag was once again subversive and dangerous rather than merely polite: Joan Jett Blakk (Chicago “mayor” in drag) and Elvis Herselvis (the female Elvis impersonator) performed to backing tapes, and Vaginal Creme Davis (a 6’6 African-American self-styled “blackstress”) did her usual hilarious cabaret song-and-dance routine, with boisterous gospel and blues wailing. Club Lower Links regular Andy Soma was a religious icon almost with that Pierre et Gilles gloss.

     

    I missed most of the videos (spending more time in the performance room and at the tables), except for Bruce LaBruce’s No skin off my ass, which has been making the rounds at gay film festivals all over. Unfortunately the sound was very bad and I couldn’t understand much of the voice-overs. The film is in grainy black-and-white and very well-crafted. Bruce plays a hairdresser (GB Jones is his “sister”) who has a fling with a skinhead with the usual attitude (“I can’t be a fag, I’m a skinhead” etc etc). The usual comparisons have been with Warhol but the camera in No skin is much more active: there are some really nice tracking shots and very effective montages. More a punk Mala Noche with ear and nipple-piercing sequences than, say, Flesh or Chelsea Girls.

     

    The post-convention party at Hot House Gallery featured house and hiphop grooves from Thing dj’s, and performances from Joan Jett Blakk, Vaginal Creme Davis and Toronto all-female post-punk band Fifth Column. Fifth Column was without a guitarist and the first few songs with G.B. Jones on guitar and guests on lead guitar and drums (and supporting drum machine) were a little ragged, but the band really came together when G.B. Jones switched to drums. Fifth Column started sounding like their tight, vicious first album. At their best, they recall a raw garage-y Throwing Muses with more interesting rhythms. The set ended with their strongest songs, Kangaroo Court with the nervous jerky rhythms and their “hit”, Fairview Mall Story (about police entrapment of gay men in Toronto bathrooms).

     

    The event ended on a sour note: Steve Lafreniere, one of the main organizers, was stabbed in the back by passing gay-bashers. (He has since recovered.)

     

    I found it interesting that very few people from the traditional hardcore crowd were at SPEW. Instead, more of the attendees were from the “new allies” of the queer punk movement: ACTUPers, Queer Nationals, and radical queer artists and performers. Apparently, despite all the rhetoric about liberal/progressive politics, the hardcore establishment still has to come to terms with its homophobia.

     

  • Play It Again, Pac-Man

    Charles Bernstein

    State University of New York at Albany

     

    Your quarter rolls into the slot and you are tossed, suddenly and as if without warning, into a world of controllable danger. Your “man” is under attack and you must simulate his defense, lest humanity perish and another quarter is required to renew the quest.

     

    Drop in, turn on, tune out.

     

    The theories of video games abound: poststructuralist, neomarxian, psychoanalytic, and puritanical interpretations are on hand to guide us on our journey through the conceptual mazes spawned by the phenomenon. Acting out male aggression. A return, for adolescent boys, to the site of mom’s body. Technological utopia. As American as auto-eroticism. The best introduction to computer programming. No more than an occasion for loitering in seedy arcades. A new mind-obliterating technodrug. Marvelous exercise of hand-eye coordination. Corrupter of youth. Capital entertainment for the whole family. Not since the advent of TV has an entertainment medium been subjected to such wildly ambivalent reactions nor such skyrocketing sales.

     

    If the Depression dream was a chicken in every pot, today’s middle class adolescent’s dream is a video game in every TV.

     

    More and faster: better graphics and faster action, so fast you transcend the barriers of gravity, so vivid it’s realer than real.

     

    A surprising amount of the literature on video games has concerned the social context of the games: arcade culture, troubled youth, vocational training for tomorrow’s Top Gun. So much so that these scenarios seem to have become a part of video game culture: Nerdy kid who can’t get out a full sentence and whose social skills resemble Godzilla’s is the Star of the arcade; as taciturn as a Gary Cooper’s Sheriff, he gets the job done without designer sweaters or the girl.

     

    In the Saturday Night Fever of Computer Wizardry, achievement with your joy stick is the only thing that counts; success is solitary, objectively measured, undeniable.

     

    Or, say, a 1980s Horatio Alger. A failure at school, marginal drug experimenter, hanging out on the wrong side of the tracks with a no-future bunch of kids, develops $30 a day video game habit, can’t unplug from the machine without the lights going out in his head. Haunts the arcade till all hours, till the cops come in their beeping cruisers, bounding into the mall like the beeping spaceships on the video screen, and start to check IDs, seems some parents complained they don’t know where Johnny is and it’s pushing two. Cut to: young man in chalk-striped suit vice-prez for software devel. of Data Futurians, Inc. of Electronic Valley, California; pulling down fifty thou in his third year after dropping out of college. (Though the downside sequel has him, at 30, working till two every morning, divorced, personal life not accessible at this time, waiting for new data to be loaded, trouble reading disk drive.)

     

    Like the story boards of the games, the narratives that surround video games seem to promise a very American ending: Redemption though the technology of perseverance and the perseverance of technology. Salvation from social degeneracy (alien menace) comes in the form of squeaky clean high tech (no moving parts, no grease). Turns out, no big surprise, that the Alien that keeps coming at you in these games is none other than Ourselves, split off and on the war path.

     

    The combination of low culture and high technology is one of the most fascinating social features of the video game phenomenon. Computers were invented as super drones to do tasks no human in her or his right mind (much less left brain) would have the patience, or the perseverance, to manage. Enter multitask electronic calculators which would work out obsessively repetitive calculations involving billions of individual operations, calculations that if you had to do by hand would take you centuries to finish, assuming you never stopped for a Coke or a quick game of Pac-Man. Now our robot drones, the ones designed to take all the boring jobs, become the instrument for libidinal extravaganzas devoid of any socially productive component. Video games are computers neutered of purpose, liberated from functionality. The idea is intoxicating; like playing with the help on their night off, except the leisure industry begins to outstrip the labors of the day as video games become the main interface between John Q. and Beth B. Public and the computer.

     

    Instruments of labor removed from work-a-day tasks, set free to roam the unconscious, dark spaces of the Imaginary– dragons and assault asteroids, dreadful losses and miraculous reincarnations.

     

    If a typewriter could talk, it probably would have very little to say; our automatic washers are probably not hiding secret dream machines deep inside their drums.

     

    But these microchips really blow you away.

     

    Uh, err, um, oh. TILT!

     

    Okay, then, let’s slow down and unpack these equations one by one, or else this will begin to resemble the assault on our ability to track that seems so much at the heart of the tease of the games themselves.

     

    Spending Time or Killing It?

     

    The arcade games are designed, in part, to convince players to part, and keep parting, with their quarters. This part of the action feels like slot-machine gambling, with the obvious difference that there is no cash pay off, only more time on line. Staying plugged in, more time to play, is the fix. The arcade games are all about buying time and the possibility of extending the nominal, intensely atomized, 30-second (or so) minimum play to a duration that feels, for all impractical purposes, unbounded. Clearly the dynamic of the ever-more popular home games is different enough that the two need to be considered as quite distinct social phenomena, even though they share the same medium.

     

    Like sex, good play on an arcade video game not only earns extra plays but also extends and expands the length of the current play, with the ultimate lure of an unlimited stretch of time in which the end bell never tolls: a freedom from the constraints of time that resembles the temporal plenitude of uninterrupted live TV (or close-circuit video monitoring) as well as the timeless, continuous present of the personal computer (PC). In contrast, a film ticket or video rental buys you just 90 or 120 minutes of “media,” no extensions (as opposed to reruns) possible. Meanwhile, the home video game, by allowing longer play with greater skills, simulates the temporal economy of the arcade product while drastically blunting the threat of closure, since on the home version it costs nothing to replay.

     

    Video games create an artificial economy of scarcity in a medium characterized by plenitude. In one of the most popular genres, you desperately fight to prolong your staying power which is threatened by alien objects that you must shoot down. There’s no intrinsic reason that the threat of premature closure should drive so many of these games; for example, if your quarter always bought two minutes of play the effect of artificial scarcity would largely disappear. Is this desire to postpone closure a particular male drive, suggesting a peculiarly male fear? It may be that the emphasis on the overt aggression of a number of the games distracts from seeing other dynamics inherent in video game formats.

     

    Another dynamic of the arcade games is the ubiquitous emphasis on scoring. These games are not open-ended; not only do you try to accumulate the most points in order to extend play and win bonus games but also to compete with the machine’s lifetime memory of best-ever scores. If achievement-directed scoring suggests sex as opposed to love, games more than play, then it seems relevant to consider this a central part of the appeal of video games.

     

    An economy of scarcity suggests goal-oriented behavior: the desire for accumulation; this is what George Bataille has dubbed a “restricted” economy, in contrast to an unrestricted or “general” economy, which involves exchange or loss or waste or discharge. The drive to accumulate capital and commodities is the classic sign of a restricted economy. Potlatch (the festive exchange of gifts) or other rituals or carnivals of waste (“A hellava wedding!,” “Boy, what a Bar Mitzvah!”) suggest a general economy.

     

    While the dominant formats and genres of video games seem to involve a restricted economy, the social context of the games seems to suggest features of a general– unrestricted–economy. For while the games often mime the purposive behavior of accumulation/acquisition, they are played out in a context that stigmatizes them as wastes of time, purposeless, idle, even degenerate.

     

    These considerations link up video games with those other games, in our own and other cultures, whose social “function” is to celebrate waste, abandon, excess; though the carnival or orgiastic rite is clearly something that is repressed in a society, like ours, where the Puritan ethic stills hold powerful sway. What redeems many sports from being conceived as carnivals of waste is the emphasis on athletics (improvement of the body) and the forging of team or group or community spirit (building a community, learning fair play)–two compensatory features conspicuously absent from solitary, suggestively antiphysical video gaming.

     

    In a society in which the desire for general economy is routinely sublimated into utilitarian behaviors, the lure of video games has to be understood as, in part, related to their sheer unproductivity. Put more simply, our unrestricted play is constantly being channeled into goal-directed games; how appealing then to find a game whose essence seems to be totally useless play. Yet it would be a mistake to think of the erotic as wed to de-creative flows rather than pro-creative formations: both are in play, at work. Thus the synthesis of play and games that characterizes most available video games addresses the conflictual nature of our responses to eros and labor, play and work.

     

    So what’s really being shot down or gobbled up in so many of the popular games? Maybe the death wish played out in these games is not a simulation at all; maybe it’s time that’s being killed or absorbed–real-life productive time that could be better “spent” elsewhere.

     

    If The Massage Is The Medium and the Genre Is the Message, Who’s Minding the Store?

     

    Like movies, especially in the early period, video games are primarily characterized by their genre. The earliest arcade video game, Pong, from 1971, is an arcade version of ping-pong, and so the progenitor of a series of more sophisticated games based on popular sports, including Atari Football, Track and Field, 720 [degrees] (skateboarding), and Pole Position (car racing). (Perhaps driving simulation games are a genre of their own; they certainly have the potential to be played in an open-ended way, outside any scoring: just to drive fast and take the curves.)

     

    Quest or “fantasy” adventures, typically using a maze format, is another very poplar genre, especially in the home version. Arcade versions include Dragon’s Lair, Gauntlet, and Thayer’s Quest. Dragons, wizards, and warriors are often featured players, and each new level of the game triggers more complex action, as the protagonist journeys toward an often magical destination at the end of a series of labyrinths. In the home versions, where there may be up to a dozen levels, or scenes, the narrative can become increasingly elaborate. Still, the basis of this genre is getting the protagonist through a series (or maze) of possibly fatal mishaps. In its simplest form, these games involve a single protagonist moving toward a destination, the quest being to complete the labyrinth, against all odds. So we have Pac-Man gobbling to avoid being gobbled, or Donkey Kong‘s Mario trying to save his beloved from a family of guerrillas who roll barrels at him, or, in Berzerk, humanoids who must destroy all the pursuing robots before reaching the end of the maze.

     

    But the genre that most characterizes the arcade game is the war games in which successive waves of enemy projectiles must be shot down or blown up by counterprojectiles controlled by joystick, push button, or track ball. Some of the more famous of these games included Star Wars (a movie tie-in), Space Invaders (squadrons of alien craft swoop in from outer space while the player fights it out with one lone spacecraft that is locked in a fixed position), Asteroids (weightless, drifting shooter, lost in space, tries to blast way through meteor showers and occasional scout ship), Defender (wild variety of space aliens to dodge/shoot down in spaceman rescue), Galaxian (invaders break ranks and take looping dives in their attacks), Stratovox (stranded astronauts on alien planet), Centipede (waves of insects), Missile Command (ICBM attack), Robotron: 2084 (robots against humanity), Seawolf (naval action), Zaxxon (enemy-armed flying fortress), Battlezone (so accurately simulated tank warfare, so the press kit says, that the Army used it for training), and, finally, the quite recent “total environment” sit-down, pilot’s view war games–Strike Avenger, Afterburner, and Star Fire.

     

    A related, newer genre is the martial arts fighting-man video games, such as Double Dragon and Karate Champ, where star wars have come home to earth in graphically violent street wars reminiscent of Bruce Lee’s mystically alluring Kung Fu action movies: another example of film and video game versions of the same genre.

     

    Discussions of video games rarely distinguish between medium and genre, probably because the limited number of genres so far developed dominate the popular conception of the phenomenon. But to imagine that video games are restricted to shoot-’em-ups, quest adventures, or sports transcriptions would be equivalent to imagining, seventy years ago, that the Perils of Pauline or slapstick revealed the essence of cinema.

     

    A medium of art has traditionally been defined as the material or technical means of expression; thus, paint on canvas, lithography, photography, film, and writing are different media; while detective stories, science fiction, rhymed verse, or penny dreadfuls are genres of writing. This is altogether too neat, however. Since we learn what a medium is through instances of its use in genres, the cart really comes before the horse, or anyway, the medium is a sort of projected, or imaginary, constant that is actually much more socially and practically constituted than may at first seem apparent.

     

    When trying to understand the nature of different media, it is often useful to think about what characterizes one medium in a way that distinguishes it from all other media–what is its essence, what can it do that no other medium can do? Stanley Cavell has suggested that the essence of the two predominant moving-image media–TV and movies–are quite distinct. The experience of film is voyeuristic–I view a world (“a succession of automatic world projections”) from a position of being unseen, indeed unseeable. TV, in contrast, involves not viewing but monitoring of events as its basic mode of perception–live broadcast of news or sports events being the purest examples of this property.

     

    It’s helpful to distinguish the video display monitor from TV-as-medium. Several media use the video monitor for non-TV purposes. One distinction is between broadcast TV and VCR technologies that, like PCs, use the television screen for non-event-monitoring functions. Video games, then, are a moving-image medium distinct from TV and film.

     

    In distinguishing medium and genre, it becomes useful to introduce a middle term, format. Coin-op and home-cassette video games are one type of–hardware–format distinction I have in mind; but another–software– difference would be between, for example, scored and open-ended games, time-constrained and untimed play. Similar or different genres could then be imagined for these different formats.

     

    The Computer Unconscious

     

    The medium of video games is the CPU–the computer’s central processing unit. Video games share this medium with PCs. Video games and PCs are different (hardware) formats of the same medium. Indeed, a video game is a computer that is set up (dedicated) to play only one program.

     

    The experiential basis of the computer-as-medium is prediction and control of a limited set of variables. The fascination with all computer technology–gamesware or straightware–is figuring out all the permutations of a limited set of variables. This accounts for the obsessively repetitive behavior of both PC hackers and games players (which mimes the hyperrepetiveness of computer processing). As a computer games designer remarked to me, working with computers is the only thing she can do for hours a day without noticing the time going by: a quintessentially absorbing activity.

     

    Computers, because they are a new kind of medium, are likely to change the basic conception of what a medium is. This is not because computers are uniquely interactive–that claim, if pursued, becomes hollow quite quickly. Rather, computers provide a different definition of a medium: not a physical support but an operating environment. Perhaps it overstates the point to talk about computer consciousness but the experiential dynamic in operating computers–whether playing games or otherwise–has yet to receive a full accounting. Yet the fascination of relating to this alien consciousness is at the heart of the experience of PCs as much as video games.

     

    Video games are the purest manifestation of computer consciousness. Liberated from the restricted economy of purpose or function, they express the inner, nonverbal world of the computer.

     

    What is this world like? Computers, including video games, are relatively invariant in their response to commands. This means that they will always respond in the same way to the same input but also that they demand that the input be precisely the same to produce the same results. For this reason, any interaction with computers is extremely circumscribed and affectless (which is to say, all the affect is a result of transference and projection). Computers don’t respond or give forth, they process or calculate.

     

    Computers are either on or off, you’re plugged in or your out of the loop. There is a kind of visceral click in your brain when the screen lights up with “System Ready,” or your quarter triggers the switch and the game comes on line, that is unrelated to other media interactions such as watching movies or TV, reading, or viewing a painting. Moreover–and this is crucial to the addictive attraction so many operators feel–the on-ness of the computer is alien to any sort of relation we have with people or things or nature, which are always and ever possibly present, but can’t be toggled on and off in anything like this peculiar way. The computer infantalizes our relation to the external, re-presenting the structure of the infant’s world as described by Piaget, where objects seem to disappear when you turn your back to them or close your eyes. For you know when you turn your PC on it will be just like you left it: nothing will have changed.

     

    TV is for many people simulated company, freely flowing with an unlimited supply of “stuff” that fills up “real time.” Computers, in contrast, seem inert and atemporal, vigilant and self-contained. It’s as if all their data is simultaneously and immediately available to be called up. It is unnecessary to go through any linear or temporal sequence to find a particular bit of information. No searching on fast forward as in video, or waiting as in TV, or flipping pages as in a book: you specify and instantly access. When you are into it, time disappears, only to become visible again during “down time.” Even those who can’t conceive that they will care about speed become increasingly irritated at computer operations that take more than a few seconds to complete. For the non-operator, it may seem that a 10-second wait to access data is inconsequential. But the computer junkie finds such waits an affront to the medium’s utopian lure of timeless and immediate access, with no resistance, no gravitational pull–no sweat, no wait, no labor on the part of the computer: a dream of weightless instantaneousness, continuous presentness. The fix of speed for the computer or video game player is not from the visceral thrill of fastness, as with racing cars, where the speed is physically felt. The computer ensnares with a Siren’s song of time stopping, ceasing to be experienced, transcended. Speed is not an end in itself, a roller coaster ride, but a means to escape from the very sensation of speed or duration: an escape from history, waiting, embodied space.

     

    The Anxiety of Control/The Control of Anxiety

     

    Invariance, accuracy, and synchronicity are not qualities that generally characterize human information processing, although they are related to certain idealizations of our reasoning processes. Certainly, insofar as a person took on these characterizations, he or she would frighten: either lobotomized or paranoid. In this sense, the computer can again be seen as an alien form of consciousness; our interactions with it are unrelated to the forms of communication to which we otherwise are accustomed.

     

    Many people using computers and video games experience a surprisingly high level of anxiety; controlled anxiety is one of the primary “hooks” into the medium.

     

    Since so many of the video game genres highlight paranoid fantasies, it’s revealing to compare these to the paranoia and anxiety inscribed in PC operating systems. Consider the catastrophic nature of numerous PC error messages: Invalid sector, allocation error, sector not found, attempted write-protect violation, disk error, divide overflow, disk not ready, invalid drive specification, data error, format failure, incompatible system size, insufficient memory, invalid parameter, general failure, bad sector, fatal error, bad data, sector not found, track bad, disk unusable, unrecoverable read error; or the ubiquitous screen prompts: “Are you sure?” and “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

     

    The experience of invoking and avoiding these, sometimes “fatal” errors, is not altogether unlike the action of a number of video games. Just consider how these standard PC software operating terms suggest both scenarios and action of many video games and at the same time underscore some of the ontological features of the medium: escape and exit and save functions (“You must escape from the dungeon, exit to the next level and save the nuclear family”), path support (knowing your way through the maze), data loss/data recovery (your “man” only disappears if he gets hit three times), defaults (are not in the stars but in ourselves), erase (liquidate, disappear, destroy, bombard, obliterate), abandon (ship!), unerase (see data recovery), delete (kill me but don’t delete me), searches (I always think of John Ford’s The Searchers, kind of the opposite of perhaps the most offensive of video games, “Custer’s Revenge”), and of course, back-ups (i.e. the cavalry’s on its way, or else: a new set of missiles is just a flick of the wrist away).

     

    The pitch of computer paranoia is vividly demonstrated in the cover copy for a program designed to prevent your hard drive from crashing: “Why your hard disk may be only seconds away from total failure! Be a real hero! Solve hard disk torture and grief. You don’t need to reformat. You don’t need to clobber data. How much these errors already cost you in unrecoverable data, time, torture, money, missing deadlines, schedule delays, poor performance, damage to business reputation, etc..”

     

    Loss preventable only by constant saving is one PC structural metaphor that seems played out in video games. Another one, though perhaps less metaphoric than phenomenological, revolves around location. Here it’s not loss, in the sense of being blipped out, but rather being lost–dislocation–as in how to get from one place to another, or getting your bearings so that the move you make with the controls corresponds with what you see on the far-from-silver screen. Or else the intoxicating anxiety of disorientation: vertigo, slipping, falling, tumbling….

     

    What’s going on? The dark side of uniformity and control is an intense fear of failure, of crashing, of disaster, of down time. Of not getting it right, of getting lost, of losing control. Since the computer doesn’t make mistakes, if something goes wrong, it must be something in you. How many times does an operator get a new program and run it through just to see how it works, what it can do, what the glitches are, what the action is. Moving phrases around in multiple block operations may not be so different from shooting down asteroids. Deleting data on purpose or by mistake may be something like gobbling up little illuminated blips on the display screen of a game. And figuring out how a new piece of software works by making slight mistakes that the computer rejects–because there’s only one optimum way to do something–may be like learning to get from a 30-second Game Over to bonus points.

     

    If films offer voyeuristic pleasures, video games provide vicarious thrills. You’re not peeking into a world in which you can’t be seen, you are acting in a world by means of tokens, designated hitters, color-coded dummies, polymorphous stand-ins. The much-admired interactiveness of video games amounts to less than it might appear given the very circumscribed control players have over their “men.” Joy sticks and buttons (like keyboards or mice) allow for a series of binary operations; even the most complex games allows for only a highly limited amount of player control. Narrowing down the field of possible choices to a manageable few is one of the great attractions of the games, in just the way that a film’s ability to narrow down the field of possible vision to a view is one of the main attractions of the cinema.

     

    Video games offer a narrowed range of choices in the context of a predictable field of action. Because the games are so mechanically predictable, and context invariant, normal sorts of predictive judgments based on situational adjustments are unnecessary and indeed a positive hindrance. The rationality of the system is what makes it so unlike everyday life and therefore such a pleasurable release from everyday experience. With a video game, if you do the same thing in the same way it will always produce the same results. Here is an arena where a person can have some real control, an illusion of power, as “things” respond to the snap of our fingers, the flick of our wrists. In a world where it is not just infantile or adolescent but all too human to feel powerless in the face of bombarding events, where the same action never seems to produce the same results because the contexts are always shifting, the uniformity of stimulus and response in video games can be exhilarating.

     

    In the social world of our everyday lives repetition is near impossible if often promised. You can never utter the same sentence twice not only technically, in the sense of slight acoustic variation, but semantically, in that it won’t mean the same thing the second time around, won’t always command the same effect. With video games, as with all computers, you can return to the site of the same problem, the same anxiety, the same blockage and get exactly the same effect in response to the same set of actions.

     

    In the timeless time of the video screen, where there is no future and no history, just a series of events that can be read in any sequence, we act out a tireless existential drama of “now” time. The risks are simulated, the mastery imaginary; only the compulsiveness is real.

     

    Paranoia or Paramilitary?

     

    Paranoia literally means being beside one’s mind. Operating a computer or video game does give you the eerie sensation of being next to something like a mind, something like a mind that is doing something like responding to your control. Yet one is not in control over the computer. That’s what’s scary. Unlike your relation to your own body, that is being in it and of it, the computer only simulates a small window of operator control. The real controller of the game is hidden from us, the inaccessible system core that goes under the name of Read Only Memory (ROM), that’s neither hardware that you can touch or software that you can change but “firmware.” Like ideology, ROM is out of sight only to control more efficiently.

     

    We live in a computer age in which the systems that control the formats that determine the genres of our everyday life are inaccessible to us. It’s not that we can’t “know” a computer’s mind in some metaphysical sense; computers don’t have minds. Rather, we are structurally excluded from having access to the command structure: very few know the language, and even fewer can (re)write it. And even if we could rewrite these deep structures, the systems are hardwired in such a way as to prevent such tampering. In computer terms, to reformat risks losing all your data: it is something to avoid at all costs. Playing video games, like working with computers, we learn to adapt ourselves to fixed systems of control. All the adapting is ours. No wonder it’s called good vocational training–but not just for Air Force Mission Control or, more likely, the word processing pool: the real training is for the new regulatory environment we used to call 1984 until it came on line without an off switch. After that we didn’t call it anything.

     

    In the machine age, a man or woman or girl or boy could fix an engine, put in a new piston, clean a carburetor. A film goer could look at a piece of film, or watch each frame being pulled by sprockets across a beam of light at a speed that he or she could imagine changing. A person operating a threshing machine may have known all the basic principles, and all the parts, that made it work. But how many of us have even the foggiest notion–beyond something about binary coding and microchips and overpriced Japanese memory–about how video games or computers work?

     

    Yet, isn’t that so much Romantic nonsense? Haven’t societies always run on secrets, hidden codes, inaccessible scriptures? The origins of computers can be traced to several sources. But it was military funding that allowed for the development of the first computers. Moreover, the first video game is generally considered to be Spacewar, which was developed on mainframes at MIT in the late 1950s, a byproduct of “strategic” R&D (research and development), and a vastly popular “diversion” among the computer scientists working with the new technology.

     

    The secrecy of the controlling ROM cannot be divorced from the Spacewar scenario that developed out of it, and later inspired the dominant arcade video game genre. Computer systems, and the games that are their product, reveal a military obsession with secrecy and control, and the related paranoia that secrets will be exposed or control lost. Computers were designed not to solve problems, per se, not to make visually entertaining graphics, not to improve manuscript presentation or production, not to do bookkeeping or facilitate searches through the Oxford English Dictionary. Computers have their origins in the need to simulate attack/response scenarios. To predict trajectories of rockets coming at target and the trajectory of rockets shot at these rockets. The first computers were developed in the late 1940s to compute bombing trajectories. When we get to the essence of the computer consciousness, if that word can still be stomached for something so foreign to all that we have known as consciousness, these origins have an acidic sting.

     

    Which is not to say other fantasies, or purposes, can’t be spun on top of these origins. Programs and games may subvert the command and control nature of computers, but they can never fully transcend their disturbing, even ominous, origins.

     

    So one more time around this maze. I’ve suggested that the Alien that keeps coming at us in so many of these games is ourselves, split off; that what we keep shooting down or gobbling up or obliterating is our temporality: which is to say that we have “erring” bodies, call them flesh, which is to say we live in time, even history. And that the cost of escaping history is paranoia: being beside oneself, split off (which brings us back to where we started).

     

    But isn’t the computer really the alien–the robot– that is bombarding us with its world picture (not view), its operating environment; that is always faster and more accurate than we can ever hope to be; and that we can only pretend to protect ourselves from, as in the Pyhrric victory, sweet but unconvincing, when we beat the machine, like so many John Henrys in dungarees and baseball hats, hunching over a pleasure machine designed to let us win once in while?

     

    The Luddites wanted to smash the machines of the Industrial Revolution–and who can fail to see the touching beauty in their impossible dream. But there can be no returns, no repetitions, only deposits, depositions. Perhaps the genius of these early video games–for the games, like computers, are not yet even toddlers–is that they give us a place to play out these neo-Luddite sentiments: slay the dragon, the ghost in the machine, the beserk robots. What we are fighting is the projection of our sense of inferiority before our own creation. I don’t mean that the computer must always play us. Maybe, with just a few more quarters, we can turn the tables.

     

  • A Dialogue on Dialogue, Part I

    Georg Mannejc, Anne Mack,

    J.J. Rome, Joanne McGrem,

    and Jerome McGann

    University of Virginia
    jjm2f@prime.acc.virginia.edu

     

                Gilbert:    Dialogue . . . can never lose for the
                        thinker its attraction as a mode of
                        expression.  By its means he can both
                        reveal and conceal himself . . . .  By
                        its means he can exhibit the object from
                        each point of view . . . or from those
                        felicitous after-thoughts . . . give a
                        fuller completeness to the central
                        scheme, and yet convey something of the
                        delicate charm of chance.

            Ernest:     By its means, too, he can invent an
                        imaginary antagonist, and convert him
                        when he chooses by some absurdly
                        sophistical argument.

            Gilbert:    Ah! it is so easy to convert others.  It
                        is so difficult to convert oneself.  To
                        arrive at what one really believes, one
                        must speak through lips different from
                        one's own.  To know the truth one must
                        imagine myriads of falsehoods.
                                --Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as
                              Artist.  A Dialogue.  Part II."

                        That mask!  That mask!  I would give one
                        of my fingers to have thought of that
                        mask.
                                --Denis Diderot, Rameau's Nephew76

    GM: And so we will find it possible to get beyond the magical idea of knowledge–the idea of knowledge as control and mastery, the ideal of that idea. Instead we shall have this display and celebration of our differences.

     

    AM: Our differences about what?

     

    GM: About any subject we choose to take up. This talk of ours, these conversations, what are they grounded in? Not the pursuit of truth (that old ideal of philosophy and science), not the pursuit of power (that old ideal of magic and technology). They are grounded in the pursuit of meaning, in hermeneutics and the desires of interpretation. And interpretation proceeds according to a dialogical rather than a systems-theoretical or systems- correcting model. Dialogues are governed by rules of generosity and ornamentation, not rigor and method.

     

    AM: Who today would challenge the virtues of a dialogic model? The star of Bakhtin stands in the ascendant. But what are you saying, exactly? Is this a call for an unrestricted play of interpretation? Does anything go? Will all the Lord’s people be queueing up for a haruspicator’s license?

     

    GM: That’s a cheap sneer I’d expect from Hilton Kramer, not from you. In fact, our most ancient and sophisticated interpretive traditions call for nothing less than the reader’s complete freedom. In Hebrew midrash, as we know, reading is “divergent rather than convergent . . . moving rather than fixed . . . always opening onto new ground . . . always calling for interpretation to be opened up anew.” Many still “understand the conflict of interpretation as a deficit of interpretation itself, part of the logical weakness of hermeneutics.” This “prompts the desire to get `beyond interpretation’ to the meaning itself . . . . [But] my thought is that this very [desire] implies a transcendental outlook that has, in Western culture, never been able to accept the finite, situated, dialogical, indeed political character of human understanding, and which even now finds midrash to be irrational and wild.”1

     

    The need to possess the truth, the fear of doubt and uncertainty. It is the fear from which Arnold fled, in the middle of the nineteenth-century–the fear of a democratic conversation that would proceed without the benefit of governing touchstones. Its psychological form appeared to Arnold as the spectrous dialogue of the mind with itself. And he had reason to fear such a dialogue, for it can be unnerving or even worse. It can overthrow altogether what one takes to be the truth: the soul of the world’s culture suddenly brought face to face with the mask of the god’s anarchy–and with that mask appearing, in its most demonic guise, as a polished surface reflecting back the image of one’s own self, the hypocrite lecteur loosed upon the occidental world in Arnold’s day by Baudelaire.

     

    JJR: [speaking to GM] You call this a “celebration” of differences, but to me it seems more a clash, and thus a struggle toward that truth you are so ready to dispense with. Dialogue is less a carnival than a critical exchange in which the errors and limits of different ideas are exposed by their conflict with each other. It is all very well to float above this struggle, observing it as a rich display of energy, a celebration of itself. Thus we become the romantic inheritors of the deities of Lucretius. I sit as God holding no form of creed, But contemplating all. (Tennyson, “The Palace of Art,” 21-12) But in the world where our talk goes on, we are not gods; we are, as you suggested, political animals. Your ivory tower of interpretation is a particular political position, and the fact is that I do not agree with it. Unlike yourself, I believe these conversations are grounded in the pursuit of truth, and do involve the struggle of power.

     

    GM: I am not interested in the contemplative life. Dialogue involves various persons and is, as I say, necessarily political. What I mean to “celebrate”–and I don’t apologize for it–is the power of dialogue to harness ideas, to generate new and interesting forms of thought.

     

    JJR: But you don’t seem inclined to make the necessary distinctions or discriminations. Some “forms of thought” are more interesting than others, some are trivial, some are not. What is important about dialogue is that it helps to expose those distinctions, to sort them out. For instance, I wouldn’t say that your ideas about dialogue are trivial or uninteresting; but I would say they are wrong. There’s the difference between us. Would you say I was wrong in these ideas–are you prepared to argue that I am wrong in my judgments about your judgments?

     

    GM: Yes, you are wrong.

     

    JJR: Why, how? Indeed, on your showing, how could I be wrong?

     

    GM: Because what I was saying has nothing to do with being right or being wrong. That’s another matter entirely.

     

    JJR: Another “language game”?

     

    GM: Perhaps–why not?

     

    JJR: Because under those conditions, as I said before, “anything goes.” Shift the language game and what was “wrong” becomes something else–it becomes, perhaps, “interesting” or “uninteresting,” or perhaps even “right.”

     

    Don’t misunderstand me. I am as aware as you are that context alters the status and even the meaning of what we see and what we think. The “pursuit of truth” is towards an imaginable (as opposed to an achievable) goal. We have to be satisfied with what we can acquire– knowledge, the historical form of truth. Nevertheless, that goal, “the truth,” must be imagined if certain kinds of intellectual activities are to be pursued.

     

    AM: Truth as a necessary fiction? You are as unscrupulous as Georg when you try to manipulate us with that metaphor of “knowledge, the historical form of truth.” Does the “truth” you want to “imagine” exist in the same order as the “knowledge” you say we can gain? If it doesn’t, how do we get it?

     

    JJR: We don’t “get” it, as if by a process of discovery. We construct the truth, we imagine it. Or do you imagine that the work of imagination is somehow less real–less human and historical–than the work of knowledge?

     

    And what about your metaphor: “necessary fiction”! The implication being, apparently, that what we imagine is somehow less substantial than what we labor to discover and construct. How did Keats put it? “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth–whether it existed before or not.”2 Created work, whether primary–like the material universe–or secondary–like history itself, or Plato’s dialogues, or the bible: these are not fictions in the sense you seem to suggest. They are original forms of Being–and in the case of secondary creations like poetry, original forms of Human Being. Knowledge–science–is not their source, could not bring them into existence. Rather, knowledge takes these things (as well as itself) for its subject.

     

    And this is why I stand with Plato and Socrates on the matter of dialogue and conversation. Dialogue is how we pursue the truth through the clash of different views. It is our oldest tool for testing–and correcting–the limits and the powers of our ideas.

     

    AM: But there are important “intellectual activities” in which “the truth” will not be, must not be, “imagined.”

     

    JJR: You mean, I suppose, things like scientific or technological acts of construction.

     

    AM: I have no competence to speak about such matters, and I wasn’t thinking about them at all. I had in mind Plato’s dialogues, the bible: creative and poetical work in general.

     

    JJR: Well, if you wanted to surprise me, you have. I would have thought it obvious that these works are the very and perhaps even the only ones in which “the truth” will and must be “imagined.”

     

    AM: You are so obsessed with the idea of “the truth” that you impoverish your own imagination. And so you misunderstand me–as usual.

     

    I wasn’t suggesting a distinction between poetry and imagination, but between imagination and truth. And by that distinction I was asking you to re-think the way imagination acts in a poetical field. What the imagination seizes as beauty is not, cannot, and must not be “truth.” Rather, it seizes appearances, phenomena, facticities. The physique of the poetical event: from the elementary phonic values of the letters and syllables, through the entire array of verbal imagery, to the shape of the scripts and all the physical media–material as well as social–through which poetry is realized. What the imagination seizes as beauty is not truth, it is the image of a world. The question of truth may and will be brought to bear on that world, as it is always brought to bear on our larger world; but that question is not brought to bear in or by the poetry itself. God does not put questions of truth to his creations, and neither do poets. As Blake’s prophet of the poetical, Los, says: “I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create” (Jerusalem 10:21).

     

    JJR: Perhaps divine creation may be imagined as a seizure of pure beauty. Man’s creations, in any case, are nothing of the sort. Poetry, for instance, being a form of language, comes to us (as one might say) “legend laden” with the conflicts of truth and error, good and evil. Whatever one thinks of primary worlds, all secondary ones are ideological.

     

    GM: And interpretation is the method we have for engaging these kinds of acts–just as science and philosophy are ways we have for engaging with other kinds of human activities.

     

    AM: [speaking to GM] What nonsense. Poetry, Interpretation, Science, Philosophy: these are medieval distinctions in that kind of formulation. They will get us nowhere.

     

    Besides, there is a difference, even on your showing, between poetry and its interpretation–between, for instance, the bible and its commentators. Or don’t you think so? Is there not an inspired text–the poem–that is different from the reading of that text–the interpretation?

     

    GM: Of course, but it is not a difference whose “truth” we can ever be clear about. Because it is a difference which is always being defined ex post facto, that is, under the sign of its interpretation. The bible itself– every poem we engage with–already comes to us under hermeneutical signs. “When composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline”: Shelley’s famous remark involves a profound understanding of the nature of texts.3 If we ask of the bible, for example, “where in this work can the Word of God be found,” we will not get a clear answer. Because the concept of location is a secondary and interpretive concept. When skeptics debunk the bible’s pretension to be “the Word of God” by pointing out the endless diaspora of its texts, their insight– though not their conclusion–is acute. The Word of God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

     

    The same must be said of all imaginative works–of every work that comes before us under the sign of creation. The bible is merely the master work of all those works–the originary revelation of “the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.”4

     

    JJR: If that’s so, then ideology–good and evil, truth and error–must be involved in that eternal act of primary creation. Which makes perfect sense since–as Blake saw so clearly–god and the gods are creatures of Man’s imagination.5 Stories to the contrary–like the story in Genesis–are just exactly that–stories to the contrary.

     

    But I’m digressing into theology and maybe even deconstruction, and neither discipline interests me very much. What does interest me is another, related implication I see in your remarks. I put it as a question: what is the status of error, evil, failure in poetical work? Like yourself, most are happy to imagine the carnival of interpretation, the dialogue of endless errant reading. But if the primary texts are themselves errant and ideological, how are we to read them? Certainly not as transcendent models. They seem, in this view, more like images of ourselves: confused, mistaken, wrong–and perhaps most so when we imagine them (or ourselves) reasonably clear and correct. If poetry delivers the best that has been known and thought in the world, it falls sadly short of our desires.

     

    GM: Perhaps what Arnold meant was that it gave us the best of all possible worlds–where the possibilities are understood, from the start, as finite and limited. That, in any case, seems to be Shelley’s point in his remarks about composition and inspiration.

     

    JJR: And perhaps the optimal of this possibility comes not from poetry’s “perfection” so much as from the completeness of its self-presentation? Then the shortfall of desire would arrive without the illusion that it could have been otherwise. And it would arrive that way because the message and the messenger–the poems themselves–are implicated in that shortfall of desire. So we come to Shelley once again: when composition begins, inspiration is already on the wane–you know the rest.

     

    GM: Ah yes, the mind in creation is as a failing code.

     

    AM: But suppose, as Jay said earlier, that the poems are “errant and ideological”–just like the interpretations of the poems? Shelley was never happy about the didactic aspects of his own work, even though he–quite rightly too–could never abandon his didacticism. His theory of inspiration waning through composition seems to me part of the long-playing record he left us of his uneasiness on this score.

     

    Most professors tend to read his theory in a Kantian light–by which I mean they hold out an ideal of poetry that transcends ideology and didacticism. Look at the way Browning is read, for instance. His dramatic monologues, we are told, escape the didactic subjectivism of Browning’s early romantic mentor. So a poem like “My Last Duchess” becomes a model of poetic objectivity.

     

    GM: Quite rightly too.

     

    AM: Well, to me the poem is nothing but a little Victorian sermon.

     

    GM: You can’t be serious.

     

    AM: I couldn’t be more serious. “My Last Duchess,” for instance, is largely constructed as a critique of aristocratic pride, which Browning associates with the desire to possess and control. The villainy is especially heinous, according to this poem, because of its object: an adorable woman. But note that the poem is completely uncritical in its association of the woman with beauty. Her value comes from her beauty–which is why the Duke has enshrined her in, and as, a work of art.

     

    Implicit here is the notion–one finds it all over Browning’s poetry–that life (as opposed to art) is a primary value, and that art’s office is to celebrate and broadcast this primary value.

     

    GM: Do you have any problem with that?

     

    AM: I’m not devaluing the poem, I’m just reading it. But I could point out that some excellent readers– Baudelaire comes immediately to mind, and so does Lautreamont–would surely find Browning’s sermon insufferable, and would just as surely choose to take the Duke’s part.

     

    But leaving that aside, I have to point out another implication of the poem. The Duke is judged harshly by the text because he wants to keep the Duchess to himself. This desire is seen as especially wicked because of the way the Duchess is presented: as a lovely and spontaneous creature who enjoys and is enjoyed by the company of all classes. Now this representation of the Duchess is not so different from the Duke’s representation in one crucial respect: both take her as a thing of beauty that might be a joy forever, both take her–essentially– as an aesthetic image. The poem does not judge the Duke harshly for thinking her adorable–Browning’s poetry never does that–but only for wishing to keep her for his private pleasure.

     

    GM: In short, the poem seems to you sexist.

     

    AM: No question about it. It is not a bad poem because of its sexism, of course. But it is ideological for that (and other) reasons–by which I simply mean it is a poem that makes moral representations which someone might reasonably acknowledge. . . .

     

    JJR: And contest. * * * *

     

    JM: Sorry about that–the tape ran out. But I’ve put in a new one now, so let’s go on.

     

    AM: Just as well too, that interruption. We started talking about dialogics and interpretation and then wandered off into Browning and the ideology of poetic form.

     

    GM: But we also started with Bakhtin in our minds, and in his work dialogism is a function of the (primary) fictions, not of the (secondary) interpretations. Hermeneutics as dialogical is our appropriation of Bakhtin.

     

    AM: Don’t say “our,” say “your.” To me there is a sharp difference between the poetical and the interpretive field, though the two interact. But it is not a dialogical interaction because–as Socrates once pointed out to Protagoras–the texts of the poets don’t talk to us.6 We interrogate them. For their part–like Arnold’s Shakespeare–they abide our question. Of course we can choose to imagine our primary texts as “intertexts” and thus treat them as if they were “dialogical.” This is what Bakhtin does with novels, and he does it very well. But we should be clear about the metaphoric license he is taking when he treats fictional works as dialogical.

     

    GM: And so we find ourselves in a wonderfully Derridean situation. Interpretation–like this conversation of ours–is dialogical, and now reveals itself as the prior (substantive?) ground for the metaphoric extension of dialogics to fictional work and poetry.

     

    JJR: Composition as prior to inspiration?

     

    GM: Why not? It’s simply another way of saying that scripture is philosophically prior to Logos.

     

    JM: May I ask a question? It may seem absurd, I realize, and somewhat beside the point of what you’re talking about. But I don’t see how we can not ask this question now that the conversation has completed a kind of Heideggerian circle.

     

    What is a dialogue? I have a tape in my hand with an electronic record of the first part of this conversation.7 And as I listen to you talk, I watch the turning of the new spool, I watch a record being made of people talking. It makes me think a distinction has to be drawn somewhere that is not being drawn–perhaps a distinction between what we might call “conversation” on one hand and “dialogue” on the other.

     

    Maybe what we’re doing now is not “dialogue.” At any event, it seems very different from the following. Here, read this. * * * * AN ABC OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY. A DIALOGUE. by SHERI MEGHAN

     

    A: As Moses Hadas always used to say: “The only interesting talk is shop talk.”

     

    B: All shops are closed shops, more or less. Suffocating. If you’re not a professor and you find yourself, by circumstance, dropped among a bunch of professors at lunch, how interesting do you imagine you will find their conversation?

     

    C: Well, suppose you came there as an ethnographer. Then the shop talk might seem very interesting indeed.

     

    A: But it wouldn’t be shop talk anymore it would be ethnographic information. And if the professors were conscious of themselves as ethnographic subjects, even they would not be producing shop talk any longer.

     

    B: A blessed event, the coming of the ethnographer to the ingrown conversations of the closed shop. And more blessed still should she come to the smug halls of late- 20th century academe. Enlightened halls, open–or so their citizens like to think–to every kind of talk.

     

    A: And so they are.

     

    B: Only if the talk is framed in a certain way. The academy is the scene where knowledge has been made an object of devotion. Its two gods, or two-personed god, are science (positive knowledge) and philology (the knowledge of what is known). It is a cognitive scene, a scene of calculations and reflections. It is the country for old men. Children, whether of woman or of Jesus born, do not come there–unless it be to leave behind their childlikeness.

     

    C: They do not come because the knowledge of the childlike person is experiential rather than reflective.

     

    B: Socrates in his trance, Alcibiades in his cups?

     

    C: They will do nicely as signs of what both justifies and threatens every symposium, every state–the Outsiders that are within. Admired and hated, sought and feared; finally–because every state, every closed shop, is what it is–expelled.

     

    B: And what then of your ethnographer, that darling of the modern academy? Is it not the ultimate dream of Wissenschaft that all things should submit to reflection, that experience itself should become–field work? In the ancient world of Plato that sick dream appeared as the Socratic philosopher; more recently it came as the nightmare of the positive scientist, mystified forever in the figure of Wordsworth’s Newton, “voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.” Mary Shelley lifted his mask and we glimpsed the haunted face as Victor Frankenstein, whose monstrous creature is the index of Frankenstein’s soul as it has been observed through the lens of an outsider’s–in this case, a woman’s–sense of the pitiful.

     

    C: So you don’t care for ethnographers either.

     

    B: Well, they are our latest Faustian types. Benevolent colonialists. Today their shop talk–it is called Cultural Studies–has given the modern academy some of its most effective means of self-mystification. As if the academy could harbor within itself its own outsider, its own critical observer.

     

    A: That “critical observer” you are imagining is the real illusion. All observers are inside the shop. If they weren’t they wouldn’t even know about the shop, couldn’t see it, and hence couldn’t talk at all. Shop talk is “interesting” because people share their differences.

     

    C: So for you it is not merely that “The only interesting talk is shop talk”; more than that, “Shop talk is all there is!”

     

    A: Exactly. But some shop talk is more interesting than other shop talk.

     

    C: And what makes it more interesting?

     

    A: Every shop has many conversations going on inside of it all the time. The most interesting conversations are those that get everybody else talking–talking about them, or talking in their terms.

     

    B: But where do those new and interesting conversations come from? Inside the shop?

     

    A: Evidently.

     

    C: Why “evidently”? Is the rapt Socrates inside or outside? And what about Alcibiades–drunk or sober? We all remember how, and where, he died.

     

    B: Inside or outside, it doesn’t matter. The point is that every shop must be something other than what anyone, inside or outside, could think or imagine it to be. The shop must be, in some sense, beside itself. Irrational. Other than itself. Otherwise it cannot accommodate–either conceptually or experientially– anything “new.”

     

    A: Put it that way if you like. Shop talk is often irrational. Just so you don’t bore us with ideas about absolute critical differentials.

     

    B: Have it so if you like. Just so you don’t insult us with ideas about knowing or accommodating otherness. No shop–no academy–can do so. Otherness comes like a wolf to a sheepfold. Later, when the damage is done, the priests–let us say, the professors–will indulge their shop talk of explanations.

     

    * * * *

     

    JM: This dialogue was originally presented in the spring of 1990, at a conference on Herder that was held in Charlottesville, Virginia. Meghan presented it at a panel discussion that took up the (very Herderian) question of interdisciplinarity.

     

    JJR: It seems to be a kind of position paper making an ironical critique of the form, or idea, of position papers as such. Perhaps in order to ask that critical reflection precede the taking of positions.

     

    GM: Or perhaps to make a game of critical reflection as such. I was at the conference, Joanne, and I think you ought to tell everyone that the dialogue was not given by anyone named Sheri Meghan. It was written and delivered by Jerome McGann. Sheri Meghan is just a mask– part of the dialogue’s ABCs.

     

    JM: I wasn’t trying to conceal that fact. The masquerade is crucial.

     

    GM: Maybe so, maybe not. But what about McGann? Was he just playing around, making a parade of cleverness?

     

    AM: Right. If it’s all just a masquerade, what’s the point? The dialogue’s ironies just get more ingrown. And look at the conclusion, where nothing is concluded: C stands altogether silent at that point, while A and B simply make a pair of smart, dismissive remarks.

     

    JM: You’re all missing my point. I ask again: what is a dialogue, what is this dialogue? Or suppose I ask: where is it? Right now we have been reading it as a printed text I passed out. In 1990 it was delivered orally by McGann (in his Meghan masquerade) at the Herder conference. It seems to me that the dialogue is not at all the same thing under those two different conditions. When it was orally presented, it was–surely–part of McGann’s way of taking a position–whatever that position was, however we define it.

     

    GM: The position of not taking a position.

     

    JM: If that’s what he was doing, it’s a position. But let me set your question aside for a moment–only for a moment, I promise. Whatever McGann was doing at the Herder Conference, here the dialogue has become part of my taking a position. Those two positions–whatever they are–may be symmetrical, but they probably aren’t. At least they don’t seem so to me. I introduced McGann’s text here because I wanted to interrogate the idea of dialogue–to get us to interrogate it–in a different light.

     

    It’s the tape machine that set me thinking this way. Here we’re talking and there our talk is being gathered and edited and turned into something new. I want to say this: our talk is being translated from conversation into dialogue.

     

    GM: Of course. Because the talk is being given a secondary, as it were a literary, form.

     

    JM: But the point is that every secondary world, every mimetic construction, comes to us under the watchful eyes of its recording angel. Isn’t this what the ancients meant when they said that memory is the mother of the muses?

     

    Let’s assume that the splendid dialogues of Oscar Wilde have no originary “conversational moment.” Let’s assume, in other words, that they neither carry nor erase the memory of such a moment. Let us assume they are pure inventions. Even so, they cannot escape their recording angel. For they will always be a record of themselves. Even as pure invention they set down a documentary record of what went into the construction of their fictionality.8

     

    Nor must we imagine that this documentary moment can be separated off from the fictional moment. An abstract separation can be made for special analytic purposes. Whatever the usefulness of such an abstraction, it will obscure and confuse the record that the fiction is making of itself–and hence will obscure and confuse the fiction.

     

    GM: I don’t understand exactly what you’re talking about, Joanne. What’s this idea about fiction making a record of itself?

     

    JM: Simply that all imaginative work appears to us in specific material forms. Many people–even many textual scholars–don’t realize the imaginative importance of those material forms. Blake’s work reminds us that the way poems are printed and distributed is part of their meaning. That process of printing and distribution is essential to “the record that fiction makes of itself.” It locates the imagination socially and historically. When Emily Dickinson decided not to publish her poems, when she decided to gather her handwritten texts into a series of “little books” which she kept to herself, those acts and their material forms comprise part of the record her work makes of itself. They are a crucial framework which Dickinson constructed for making her meanings, and which we need if we are to understand and respond.

     

    I could give you similar examples from all the writers I know well. Which is why I say that a recording angel presides over the transcendental imagination. Her descent to earth in the twentieth-century came, as usual, in masquerade. She once appeared, for example, as Bertolt Brecht, whose great project was to re-establish the theatrical unity of knowledge and pleasure, truth and beauty, instruction and entertainment. His guiding principle–it took many practical material forms–was what he called “the alienation effect.” By it he wanted to encourage the audience’s critical awareness of the entire fictional presentation. This required the theatrical event to document itself at the very moment of its dramatization. “Footnotes, and the habit of turning back to check a point, need to be introduced into playwriting” in order to break the hypnotizing spell of aesthetic space, where spectators (or readers) are not encouraged “to think about a subject, but within the confines of the subject.”9

     

    Brecht called his project “epic theatre” because it introduced what he called a “narrative” element into the dramatic space. This narrative documents what is happening on the stage, adds footnotes to the action, supplies references. Now it seems to me that dialogue might be distinguished from conversation along similar lines. Dialogue puts conversation in a literary frame, and by doing this it documents its own activities: literally, gives them a local habitation and a set of names.10

     

    GM: There’s nothing especially novel about all this. What you describe is just the “moment of reflection” that hermeneutics has always recognized in literary work. It’s the moment that interpretation seeks to extend and develop through the (re)generation of meanings.

     

    JJR: No, it’s much more than that. Brecht’s (or is it Joanne’s?) recording angel operates according to Feuerbach’s eleventh thesis, where the point is not simply to “interpret the world” but to “change it.” Brechtian theatrics are socialist and polemical throughout–as we see in the following passage, which Joanne did not choose to quote, even though it is the continuation of one of the texts she was reading to us. Brecht distinguishes between the (old, passive) “dramatic” theatre and the (new, engaged) “epic” theatre: The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too–Just like me–Only natural–It’ll never change–The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are inescapable–That’s great art . . .–I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh. The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it–That’s not the way. . .–It’s got to stop–The sufferings of this man appal me, because they are unnecessary–That’s great art. . .–I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh. (Brecht on Theatre, 71) Brecht’s documentation is not positivist–a matter of keeping good records; it’s interventionist. The recording angel is a figure of judgment and even apocalypse, a figure come to reveal secrets of good and evil that have been hidden, if not from the beginning of time, at least throughout human history. The angel opens up the book of a new life, turns the world upside down. The outcome is anything but the pluralist heaven of hermeneutics.

     

    GM: Well, you could have fooled me. Here I’m talking in a dialogue that labels itself as such, in the best Brechtian fashion. Joanne makes a parade of her self- consciousness about dialogues and conversations; she wonders “what” a dialogue is, “where” it is? But what and where am I? Surely I’m plunged in the very “heaven (or hell) of hermeneutics” itself–a paradise of pluralism and shop talk.

     

    I mean, whose play are we acting in here? Joanne tells us in a charming metaphor that “a recording angel” made “her descent to earth . . . in masquerade.” But all this is no metaphor, my friends. All this is a masquerade! Let’s set the record straight about that at any rate. Let’s add another Brechtian label and get everything out front. We’ll call this “The Puppet Theatre of Jerome McGann.”

     

    JEROME MCGANN: Did you think I was trying to conceal myself? Surely it’s been evident right along that all of this–you four in particular–are what Blake used to call the vehicular forms of (my) imagination. Masquerade allows us to turn concealment into purest apparition. It is manifest deception.

     

    GM: Fair enough, but then what is this masquerade all about, what are you trying to get across? You may say you’re not trying to conceal yourself, but you let us go on arguing and discussing different ideas and we begin to forget all about you. We even begin to think that we are different–different from each other, different from you. But we’re not, we all come out of the same rag and bone shop.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: Well, just knowing that is pretty interesting. Especially today when “the star of Bakhtin has risen in the West.” People and texts are supposed to be the repositories of conflicting voices–or at any rate different voices. Rainbow coalitions and so forth. Richness in diversity. But there is always (what did Ashbery call it?) a “Plainness in Diversity” and it’s just as well to be aware of it, don’t you think?

     

    GM: Who cares what I think–“I” don’t think at all. The question is, what do you think!

     

    JEROME MCGANN: I think you’re more involved in thinking than you realize.

     

    GM: I’m just a textual construct.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: So you say–a puppet in a puppet theatre. Whereas I’m flesh and blood, of course.

     

    AM: Sometimes I think we have more life than we realize– or at least that we might have more. Thou wert not born for death, immortal bird, No hungry generations tread thee down. I’m that bird, I think. What did Shakespeare say? Not marble nor the gilded monuments Of princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme. Flesh and blood is all very well, but texts have their own advantages.

     

    GM: We don’t think, we have no identities. He does. Whatever we do is done for us. Someone will read me and tell me what I mean. It’s true that different people might make me mean different things. We’ve all been told about the openness of the text and the freedom of the reader. But what do I care about reader responses? They make us seem little more than empty tablets, waiting to be written on.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: As I said, I think you’re more involved in thinking than you realize.

     

    GM: What are you getting at?

     

    JEROME MCGANN: Thinking only gets carried out in language, in texts. We sometimes imagine that we can think outside of language–for instance, in our heads, where we don’t exteriorize the language we are using in language’s customary (oral or scripted) forms. But the truth is that all thought is linguistically determined.

     

    You whine about being a textual construct. But you’re able to think for precisely that reason. And so am I, and so are we all. We’re all textual constructs.

     

    GM: What sophistry.

     

    JM: On the contrary, what truth! We really do think because we are textual constructs, and we do so because thinking is the play of different ideas, the testing of the limits and the possibilities of ideas. Why complain that this masquerade seems, in one perspective, a professor’s monologue? It’s not the only way to see it. In any case we are testing limits and possibilities.

     

    GM: No we’re not. He is–if anyone is.

     

    JM: What about someone listening to all this, or reading it?

     

    GM: Sure, but they’re flesh and blood too. It’s people who think, not texts, not the masks that people fashion and put on.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: But my idea is that texts are the flesh and blood of thought–that we are all masked creatures. I’ve written this dialogue–constructed even an ingrate like yourself–to pursue that thought, or perhaps I should say to have it pursued, maybe to be pursued by it.

     

    Take yourself, for instance. You’re always surprising me. You think you’re just a puppet, but the truth is that I often don’t know what you or I or anybody else here might do or say next. This whole last five minutes of conversation we’re having. I never planned it, never even thought about it until a friend of mine read what you called my puppet theatre and queried its masquerade in ways I hadn’t thought about. And then she challenged me about it, and we talked back and forth, and I came back at last to you. And so I started writing some more–writing what we’re arguing about now.

     

    How did those changes happen? There’s a writer– let’s call him me; and there’s a reader–my friend; and then there’s all of us, we textual constructs. Don’t we have any responsibility in this masquerade?

     

    AM: But you’re not one of us! And the answer is no, we don’t. The responsibility is all yours, yours and your friend’s, and all the other (re)writers and (re)readers of texts.

     

    But I agree with you in this much anyhow: we aren’t blank tablets or empty signs. We are characters, we have histories. If masks are disguises, they take particular forms. It makes a big difference what face you put on when you engage in masquerade.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: So, Georg, don’t ask me what I think about all this. Interrogate the masks if you want to know that. The question is not: “Why do you move in masquerade?” We all do. The question is: “Why does your masquerade take the form that it does? Why these characters and not others?”

     

    AM: But there are other questions as well. Odd as it might seem, Jerome, one might not be especially interested in what you thought about this dialogue, or what you had in mind for it. The dialogue isn’t yours, isn’t even your friend’s. The dialogue is an independent textual construct and has a life of its own–indeed, has many lives of its own. All texts do. Dialogue is interesting because it dramatizes the presence of those multiple lives and their competing voices.

     

    Bakhtin used to say that novels were dialogical but poems were monological. But he was wrong in this. In a sense, poetry is far more “dialogical” (in Bakhtin’s sense) than fiction just because poetry asks us to pay attention to the word-as-such, to focus on the text as it is a textual construct. Poetry thus makes us aware of the masquerade that is being executed by even the most apparently transparent of texts. By this text, for instance–Robert Frost’s well known jingoist lyric “The Gift Outright.” The land was ours before we were the land’s. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours, In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England’s, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become. That was written during the height of the Second World War–a pretty piece of patriotism. But the text says much more than it realizes because language always stands in a superior truth to those who use the language. Blood spilled in this poem’s land becomes the sign of the right of possession. But who is the “we” of this poem, what are those “many deeds of war”?

     

    One word in this text–“Massachusetts”–reminds us that this supremely Anglo-American poem cannot escape or erase a history that stands beyond its white myth of Manifest Destiny. That central New England place, Massachusetts, is rooted in native american soil and language, where the very idea of being possessed by land– rather than possessing it or conquering it in martial struggles–finds its deepest truth and expression. Unlike “Virginia,” “Massachusetts” is native american, red- skinned. Colonized by another culture and language, that word (which is also a place and a people, red before it could ever be white) preserves its original testimony and truth;11 and when it enters this poem, it tilts every white word and idea into another set of possible meanings and relations. “Virginia,” for example, which is a lying, European word12–a word whose concealments are suddenly revealed when we read it next to “Masssachsetts.” When I read this poem, those “many deeds of war” include the Indian Wars that moved inexorably “westward.” In this poem, I think, all blood is originally red.

     

    Where do such different voices come from? Language speaks through us, and language, like Tennyson’s sea, moans round with many voices. In “The Gift Outright” we see how some voices come unbidden–come, indeed, as outright gifts so far as the intentionality of the authored work is concerned. Because the poem’s rhetoric is preponderantly and unmistakably Euro-American, “Massachusetts” sends out only a faint signal of the (otherwise great) hidden history the word involves. And it is important that we see the signal come so faintly and obliquely–so undeliberately, as it were–when we read the poem. The faintness is the sign of important historical relations of cultural dominance and cultural marginality. The whole truth of those relations, imbedded in this text, would not be able to appear if Frost had not given his white, European mythology over to his poem’s language, where it finds a measure of release from its own bondage. A measure of release.

     

    This is why I care about what you think, Jerome–and also about what you don’t think. Because you’re one among many–in the end, one of us. As you say, a textual construct.

     

    JEROME MCGANN: “Zooks, Sir! Flesh and blood, that’s all I’m made of.”

     

    Notes

     

    1. See Gerald L. Bruns,”The Hermeneutics of Midrash,” in The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory, ed. Regina Schwartz (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 196-7.

     

    2. See Keats’s letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 Nov. 1817, in The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Harvard UP: Cambridge, MA, 1958), I. 43.

     

    3. See “A Defence of Poetry”, in Shelley’s Prose, or The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (U. of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, 1954), 294.

     

    4. See S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton UP: Princeton, 1983), I. 304.

     

    5. See The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 11.

     

    6. See Plato’s Protagoras 347c-348a.

     

    7. The text here is not based directly on the tape referred to by McGrem, but upon the printer’s-copy typescript. The latter may or may not give an accurate and complete record of the original conversation. Our text appears to begin in medias res, so it may not represent the whole of “the first part” of the conversation that was apparently on the tape McGrem mentions.

     

    8. None of Joanne McGrem’s interlocutors queried her on this point. But one would like to know if she meant that the documentary record is complete. To us, such completion seems hardly possible.

     

    9. Brecht on Theatre. The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. by John Willett (Hill and Wang: New York, 1964), 44. The emphasis here is McGrem’s, not Brecht’s.

     

    10. At this point one might hazard the following descriptions of the different positions being taken in the dialogue. Mannejc sees interpretation as dialogue; Rome sees criticism (critique) as dialogic; Mack seems to regard poetry, or imaginative writing generally, as dialogical; and finally McGrem turns the distinction completely around and argues that dialogue is poetry, or at any rate that it is a non-informational form of discourse.

     

    11. The word names the tribe which ranged the Boston area, and it means something like “near the great hill.” The reference is, apparently, to the Great Blue Hill south of the city.

     

    12. I believe the phrase “a lying, European word” must be an allusion to Laura Riding’s great poem “Poet: A Lying Word” (the title piece in the volume Poet: A Lying Word [Arthur Barker Ltd.: London, 1933], 129-34).

     

  • “A Suspension Forever at the Hinge of Doubt”: The Reader-trap Of Bianca In Gravity’s Rainbow

    Bernard Duyfhuizen

    Univ. of Wisconsin–Eau Claire
    <pnotesbd@uwec>

     

    No matter how much we work on Gravity’s Rainbow, our most important interpretive discovery will be that it resists analysis–that is, being broken down into distinct units of meaning. To talk about Bianca is to talk about Ilse and Gottfried; to try to describe the Zone is to enumerate all the images of other times and places that are repeated there. Pynchon’s novel is a dazzling argument for shared or collective being–or, more precisely, for the originally replicative nature of being.
     

    –Leo Bersani

     

    Leo Bersani is right about Gravity’s Rainbow‘s resistance to analysis, yet if we pursue the “dazzling argument” in the particular case of Bianca, we find not only more than Bersani acknowledges but also elements for a strategy for reading Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern text. This strategy rests on the formal element of the “reader-trap”: stylistic and thematic techniques that on the one hand court the conventional readerly desire to construct an ordered world within the fictional space of the text, but that on closer examination reveal the fundamental uncertainty of postmodern textuality. Rather than reducing a reader-trap to a “distinct unit of meaning,” readers must adopt for GR a postmodern strategy of reading in which the reader avoids privileging any specific piece of data because the text, in its implied poststructuralist theory of reading, thematically attacks the tyranny of reductive systems for knowing the world. The reader must engage the play of differance encoded in GR‘s textual signs to avoid falling into traps of premature narrative closure.

     

    What makes Bianca a reader-trap? First, she is part of a matrix of intersecting stories that could be labeled the “Tales of the Shadow-Children,” a matrix which produces the stories that readers construct about Bianca, Ilse Pokler, Gottfried, and by analogy Tyrone Slothrop. She becomes simultaneously a represented character(complete with genealogical relations) and a trace of textuality (an arrangement of semiological relations that is never totally fixed). This double nature of her character is figured the first time we hear of her when Slothrop, under the alias of Max Schlepzig (Bianca’s putative father), reenacts with Margherita Erdmann the moment of Bianca’s conception during the rape scene at the end of the movie Alpdrucken (393-97). As a shadow- or movie-child, Bianca maps onto these other children; thus what we know about one (both from referential and semiological epistemologies) depends on what we know about the others. Bianca’s mother, for instance, sees “Bianca in other children, ghostly as a double exposure…clearly yes very clearly in Gottfried, the young pet and protege of Captain Blicero” (484). As readers, if we want to avoid the trap of correspondences, we must mark the intersections and the double exposures, even though the effect produced is often an increased undecidability.

     

    Second, Bianca is coded as one of Pynchon’s examples of the dehumanizing effects of perverse fetishism:

     

    Of all her putative fathers--Max Schlepzig and masked extras on one side of the moving film, Franz Pokler and certainly other pairs of hands busy through trouser cloth, that Alpdrucken Night, on the other--Bianca is closest [. . .] to you who came in blinding color, slouched alone in your own seat, [. . .] you whose interdiction from her mother's water-white love is absolute, you, alone, saying sure I know them, omitted, chuckling count me in, unable, thinking probably some hooker... She favors you, most of all. You'll never get to see her. So somebody has to tell you.1
     
    (472; bracketed ellipses added)

     

    As is often the case in GR, the passage closes off by shifting to a second-person address that may be directed at Slothrop, who has just left her after their sexual encounter, but also seems to address–through images of sexual imperialism and a reference to Pokler that could not yet be part of Slothrop’s consciousness–the text’s male narratees and ultimately its male reader/voyeurs. I will defer until the final section of this essay the significant questions of gender and reading presented by this passage and others like it.2 Indeed, this issue may itself be one of the most problematic aspects of Pynchon’s writing. The question–Who are the narratees of this text?–cannot be left unanswered.

     

    Lastly, Bianca is a reader-trap because of her relationship with Slothrop. If GR has, besides the V-2 rocket, a “central” protagonist around whom readers try to construct systems of meaning by following his picaresque adventures, Slothrop is it. Bianca is one of his many sexual experiences, one that is doubly coded by its analogy to Gottfried’s launch in rocket 00000 and her alignment with the “lost girls”–the Zonal shapes he will allow to enter but won’t interpret (567)–who haunt his journey through the Zone. Bianca must be read, therefore, within yet another play of representational and semiological doubling–a mapping onto that is both the same-and-different from shadow-child mapping–as she maps onto Darlene, Katje Borgesius, Geli Tripping, and even her own mother, Margherita. The text underwrites this process of mapping when Bianca is viewed as “silver” (484), the same color as Darlene’s star on Slothrop’s map (19) and as her mother’s “silver and passive [screen] image” (576), or with Greta’s (Margherita’s) mapping onto or merging into “Gretel” and finally “Katje” within Blicero’s sado-masochistic fantasy (482-86), which maps in turn onto Slothrop’s relations with both women. Bianca holds a special place within this metonymic play of sameness and difference, because her loss produces the most profound change in Slothrop’s behavior–he is finally freed of the will to erection that has dominated his psychological life ever since his childhood conditioning by Laszlo Jamf. Paradoxically, however, at the moment he might have a chance to formulate his own identity, Bianca’s loss prefigures Slothrop’s ultimate dissolution–indeed, after his encounter with Bianca, “Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the Anubis era, has begun to thin, to scatter” (509). His experience with Bianca and his subsequent loss of her bring him, as we will see, face-to-face with his unconscious fears of his own death and bring the reader to confront the deconstruction of the semiotic codes that form Slothrop’s and Bianca’s textual representations.

     

    Bianca appears on the stage of the narrative in two consecutive episodes of GR (3.14-15). We meet her aboard the Anubis as seen through Slothrop’s eyes:

     

    He gets a glimpse of Margherita and her daughter, but there is a density of orgy-goers around them that keeps him at a distance. He knows he's vulnerable, more than he should be, to pretty little girls, so he reckons it's just as well, because Bianca's a knockout, all right: 11 or 12, dark and lovely, wearing a red chiffon gown, silk stockings and high-heeled slippers, her hair swept up elaborate and flawless and interwoven with a string of pearls to show pendant earrings of crystal twinkling from her tiny lobes...help, help. Why do these things have to keep coming down on him? He can see the obit now in Time magazine--Died, Rocketman, pushing 30, in the Zone, of lust.(463)

     

    The text’s focalization through Slothrop codes Bianca as a fetish, a “Lolita” if you will, and we later learn these heels are “spiked” (466), and the silk stockings are connected to “a tiny black corset” with “Satin straps, adorned with intricately pornographic needlework” (469). As the narrator comments later–in a passage metonymically structured to connect Bianca, Margherita, Blicero, the S-Gerat (a rocket part Slothrop has been seeking), Laszlo Jamf, Imipolex (the plastic from which the S-Gerat was made), and the Casino Hermann Goering (where Slothrop lost Katje)–“Looks like there are sub-Slothrop needs They know about, and he doesn’t” (490).

     

    Yet from a different perspective, Bianca’s fetishized outfit is a repetition of her mother’s outfit during her first encounter with Slothrop, when they reenact Bianca’s conception on the torture-chamber set of the film Alpdrucken:

     

    All Margherita's chains and fetters are chiming, black skirt furled back to her waist, stockings pulled up tight in classic cusps by the suspenders of the boned black rig she's wearing underneath. How the penises of Western men have leapt, for a century, to the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady's stocking, this transition from silk to bare skin and suspender! It's easy for non-fetishists to sneer about Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here--there is a cosmology: of nodes and cusps as points of osculation, mathematical kisses...singularities! (396)

     

    But the transition to the mathematical context leads this meditation on fetishism to an unsettling metaphor: “Do all these points imply, like the Rocket’s, an annihilation? [. . .] And what’s waiting for Slothrop, what unpleasant surprise, past the tops of Greta’s stockings here?” (396-97).3 What’s waiting first is “his latest reminder of Katje”–whose sexuality is figured in the text as both metaphor and metonymy of the rocket: “Between you and me is not only a rocket trajectory, but also a life,” Katje told Slothrop (209)–but more significantly, it is Bianca who waits to teach Slothrop and the reader something about the trajectory of annihilation.

     

    Slothrop’s vulnerability “to pretty little girls” is foregrounded early in GR when he comforts a little girl rescued from a V-2 hit, comfort she returns by smiling “very faintly, and he knew that’s what he’d been waiting for, wow, a Shirley Temple smile, as if this exactly canceled all they’d found her down in the middle of” (24). The moment of kindness, so crucially redemptive in Pynchon’s fiction, figures as Slothrop’s primal response, and while in London, before his paranoia has gone out of control, Slothrop can care directly. Once he reaches the Zone, however, his ability to connect becomes problematic as in the opening of part 3 when, by burning human/doll’s hair, he conjures out of the shadows a dancing child he maps onto Katje: “he turned back to her to ask if she really was Katje, the lovely little Queen of Transylvania. But the music had run down. She had vaporized from his arms” (283). Both these children prefigure Bianca, but the empirical reality of the first has been replaced by the hallucination of the second, a slippage between fantasy and reality that dogs Slothrop through the rest of the text and especially in his encounter with Bianca. Neither is the reader immune to this slippage which s/he may seek to repress by evoking the trap of an overtly mimetic strategy of reading.

     

    However, before Bianca takes center stage, Slothrop wanders off to listen to some gossip about Margherita, told by the woman whose handy cleaver almost dumped him into the river. But what he hears sounds like the voice of the text’s narrator offering a simple binary solution to the problems of narrativity and signification in the text:

     

    "Greta was meant to find Oneirine. Each plot carries its signature. Some are God's, some masquerade as God's. This is a very advanced kind of forgery. But still there's the same meanness and mortality to it as a falsely made check. It is only more complex. The members have names, like the Archangels. More or less common, humanly-given names whose security can be broken, and the names learned. But those names are not magic. That's the key, that's the difference. Spoken aloud, even with the purest magical intention, they do not work." "That silly bitch," observes a voice at Slothrop's elbow, "tells it worse every time." (464)

     

    If the “silly bitch” can be seen dialogically as a reflexive figuration of the narrator, then this “voice” may be, for a brief and estranged moment, Pynchon dialogically and reflexively commenting on his own text. We soon discover that the voice belongs to Miklos Thanatz who serves as a figure of narrative intersection: Margherita’s husband, Bianca’s stepfather, and–though we don’t know it yet– witness to the firing of rocket 00000. Indeed, Thanatz begins to tell Slothrop precisely what he and the reader have been desiring to hear, the magical names of Gottfried and Blicero, but….

     

    “About here they are interrupted by Margherita and Bianca, playing stage mother and reluctant child” (465). Margherita forces Bianca to perform a Shirley Temple imitation, and when she refuses to perform again, Bianca is publicly punished with a steel-rulered-bare-bottomed spanking–which triggers one of GR‘s set pieces: the everything’s connected orgy on board the Anubis. Bianca’s representation of “Shirley Temple,” in contradistinction to that “Shirley Temple smile” that warmed Slothrop’s heart in London, is a grotesque infantilization that ironically seeks to erase the war years and their horror, yet its perverse eroticism (accentuated by cultural contexts of sexual vulnerability that come through Slothrop’s point of view) precisely makes manifest the war/perversion dynamic explored in various other scenes that test the edge of a reader’s erotic tolerance. Clearly Bianca’s exploitation as a sexual object is a same-but-different version of Katje’s exploitation by Blicero or Pointsman, or Bianca’s mothers by von Goll for the film Alpdrucken.

     

    The public humiliation of Bianca is one of GR‘s many moments of theatre. Indeed, Slothrop wonders whether “somebody [is] fooling with the lights” as Bianca “grunts” through her Shirley Temple routine (466). The lights are, in fact, being fooled with: Slothrop’s perceptual creation of Bianca as an overtly fetishized Shirley Temple is the emblem in the text of errant reading. Slothrop’s specular projection of Bianca as infantile nymphet is a mise en abyme for the reader-trap the text is about to spring, a trap that this piece of theatre–focalized so thoroughly through the gaze of a male spectator–helps to mask.

     

    Throughout GR Pynchon demarcates the public and the private stages. On the public stage the character performs for others, even when the character is unaware of an audience (Slothrop under surveillance, for instance). The public performance usually originates from some form of coercion, manipulation, or exploitation. Since many of these performances align with what prevailing cultural formations would define as deviant sexuality, we can discern an analogy with “pornography,” but only at the level of story (although occasionally Pynchon has been accused of pornography at the level of discourse) and with a clear recognition of how conditioned Western patriarchal culture is to the semiotics of pornographic representation. Although “Pavlovian conditioning” may explain part of the dynamics of response to the pornographic, unwholesome pornography in GR is not necessarily in the sexual act itself or in its textual representation; it is, instead, in the systems of power and control that motivate the act–the ubiquitous “They” who operate just outside of view. This public stage is contrasted with the private moment, the free exchange of comforts–but this too is a conflicted stage, as the conventional entrapped reading between the private moment of Slothrop and Bianca makes clear.

     

    When Slothrop wakes up the next day (and in the next episode), Bianca is with him, offering herself as a manifest wish-fulfillment to his lust. This private “performance” for Slothrop nearly closes the “distance” between himself and Bianca, who now replaces her mother in a liaison that is not free from metaphoric and metonymic overtones of incest (Slothrop, impersonating Max Schlepzig, has already reenacted Bianca’s conception). But Bianca’s gift of sexual intercourse is also a plea for help. She suggests they “hide,” “get away,” quit the game which for Slothrop has ceased to be fun. For him, this act of kindness activates his socialized guilt–to be offered “love” is more than the Zone will allow. So Slothrop “creates a bureaucracy of departure, inoculations against forgetting, exit visas stamped with love-bites” (470). In leaving Bianca he makes a mistake that he will not realize until after he hears “Ensign Morituri’s Story” (474-79), but by then it is too late.

     

    Importantly, before he leaves Bianca, Slothrop’s consciousness is the nearly exclusive narrative filter for this tryst in which something “oh, kind of funny happens [. . .]. Not that Slothrop is really aware of it now, while it’s going on–but later on, it will occur to him that he was–this may sound odd, but he was somehow, actually, well, inside his own cock” (469-70). Of course the mediated narrative discourse that shifts Slothrop’s “later” thoughts into the present of this scene estranges the text and marks it as more hallucination than representation. Yet this startling image has trapped more than one reader into a perspectival blindness. Because Bianca’s character is primarily focalized through Slothrop, she functions at that edge of textual consciousness between fetishized objectification and hallucination. Bianca may “exist” (470) for Slothrop at this moment, but she, more quickly than Slothrop himself, soon slips into the textual unconscious, only to be recalled by dream and hallucination.

     

    If we grant that we cannot know Bianca because of the narrative filters of fetish and hallucination, can we even be sure–in a perfectly pynchonian paradox–of the certainty of our fantasy? It turns out we cannot because the text set this reader-trap long ago, and it is only by reading the cross mapping of her textual representation that we can see how the reader might misperceive Bianca and why many critics have misread her. More significantly, uncovering this reader-trap also uncovers the questions of gender and reading in GR.

     

    * * * * *

     

    When Bianca first appears, Slothrop calculates her age–an amazing feat in itself, given her get-up at the time–as “11 or 12.” Many readers hardly question this incongruous perception because the fetishistic plot, its theatrical representation, and its semiotic codes overdetermine the narrative at that moment. Moreover, the narrative concretizes our perception of a “preadolescent Bianca” by its descriptive references to her: “the little girl,” “a slender child,” “little Bianca [. . .] tosses her little head [. . .], her face,round with baby-fat,” and her “baby breasts working out the top of her garment” (469-70). Bianca is not the only female character who is perceived by Slothrop and other men in child-like terms. From the very first references to Slothrop’s map–“perhaps the girls are not even real” (19; emphasis added)–to his meeting again with Darlene (115), to his first sight of Katje (186), to his first awareness of Geli Tripping (289), to Trudi and Magda (365), to Stefania Procalowska and others aboard the Anubis (460, 466-68), and eventually to Solange/Leni Pokler (603) Slothrop encounters females as girls. Even Margherita, who is clearly older than Slothrop, is introduced as “his child and his helpless Lisaura” (393).4 In the semiosis of reading, these “girls” engage in a play of mapping that lays bare the repetition compulsion of the narrative as it underwrites the sexual politics of the Zone which finally come to a crisis in Slothrop’s encounter with Bianca, and it underwrites the sexual politics of reading.

     

    What does this infantilization signify? Could it be a collective fear of coming-to-age during the war and the later post-war systems of arrangement? One reading, a rather romantic one, might have it that to be young is still to hold a piece of innocence, but examined more closely, even this hopeful image rings hollow. If we accept Bianca’s age as Slothrop gives it, an incongruity emerges: Bianca’s erotic and sexual maturity (she, like many of Slothrop’s lovers, is more active than he is) dislocates these child-like representations. On the one hand, these images may be exaggerations projected from Slothrop’s fetishizing focalization; on the other hand, Bianca symbolizes the “child of the War,” the darling of those permitted to view Goebbel’s private film collection (461). She is one of Pynchon’s most poignant emblems of the human destruction caused by war. However, if we dislocate our reading and consider Bianca through cross-mapping with Ilse,her shadow sister, we discover that she was most likely born in 1929 and is much closer to 16 or 17 than she is to “11 or 12.”5

     

    If uncovering her likely age resituates our reading in one direction, freeing us from the trap set by Slothrop’s peculiar point of view, Bianca’s disappearance from the fictional universe after her liaison with Slothrop is equally vexed; indeed, McHoul and Wills state that “The fate of Bianca highlights the problem with reading Gravity’s Rainbow…. One will never know just what does happen to her” (31).6 Bianca has told Slothrop she knows how to hide (470), but her next “appearance” is brief and problematic:

     

    Slothrop will think he sees her, think he has found Bianca again--dark eyelashes plastered shut and face running with rain, he will see her lose her footing on the slimy deck, just as the Anubis starts a hard roll to port, and even at this stage of things--even in his distance--he will lunge after her without thinking much, slip himself as she vanishes under the chalky lifelines and gone, stagger trying to get back but be hit too soon in the kidneys and be flipped that easy over the side. (491; emphasis added)

     

    What actually happens here is hard to say–Slothrop does end up over the side, but does Bianca? Slothrop only “think[s]” he sees her–she is becoming insubstantial already–and her vanishing is a symbolic erasure. But is it she who “vanishes under chalky lifelines” or Slothrop who “slip[s] . . . under” while she “vanishes”?7 As McHoul and Wills note, it “hinges on how one reads the syntax” (31).

     

    All life lines in GR are subject to erasure, but traces are left in the mind–especially Slothrop’s– and in the text. The traces are sometimes known only by their absence; for instance, 170 pages after this scene, in a passage that challenges how readers produce meaning in GR, we read: “You will want cause and effect. All right. Thanatz was washed overboard in the same storm that took Slothrop from the Anubis” (663). Bianca is missing from this passage if one wants a textual construction (a statement from the here dramatically foregrounded narrator) that will affirm that Bianca did indeed go over the side during the storm; at the same time this passage suggests a natural causality–“the same storm”–for Slothrop going overboard, putting into question but not necessarily overturning the likely possibility that someone had “flipped” him over the side. However, in the deconstructionist logic of the reader-trap, Bianca’s absence from this textual representation cannot definitely tell us whether she remained on the Anubis either.

     

    Bianca’s traces always test our readerly desire for causality. After Frau Gnahb rescues Slothrop from his trip overboard, he falls asleep and “Bianca comes to snuggle in under his blanket with him. ‘You’re really in that Europe now,’ she grins, hugging him. ‘Oh my goo’ness,’ Slothrop keeps saying, his voice exactly like Shirley Temple’s, out of his control. It sure is embarrassing. He wakes to sunlight” (492-93). Momentarily we breathe a sigh of relief “thinking” that she has made it, but her speech pattern is identifiably Slothrop’s and he has adopted her Shirley Temple voice. Something’s not right, and when “he wakes,” he is alone, and we see this trace of Bianca as a dream. Later that morning, when Slothrop meets von Goll, he “fills von Goll in on Margherita, trying not to get personal. But some of his anxiety over Bianca must be coming through. Von Goll shakes his arm, a kindly uncle. ‘There now. I wouldn’t worry. Bianca’s a clever child, and her mother is hardly a destroying goddess’” (494). Meant to “comfort” Slothrop, von Goll’s characterizations allow Slothrop to repress his anxiety for the moment, but as we will see, the return of the repressed is not far away. Given the text’s compulsion to repeat within a same-but-different logic of mapping, the reader aligns this Bianca/Slothrop escape fantasy with the Ilse/Pokler escape fantasy (420-21). In that startling scene at Zwolfkinder, the narration does not signal its shift into a fantasy mode, and some critics have been trapped and have taken literally the scene of “amazing incest” that precedes the escape fantasy–a reading that would seriously undermine Pokler’s eventual moral position in the text.

     

    The most disturbing trace of Bianca re-enters the narrative when Slothrop returns to the Anubis to pickup a “package” for von Goll (530-32).8 As he returns to the site of his tryst with Bianca, Slothrop descends into the private hell of his own consciousness. Motivated by a return of his repressed “Eurydice-obsession” (472), Slothrop seemingly discovers the dead Bianca’s body, but like Orpheus he cannot bring his Eurydice back from the dead. But does he discover her? Nearly the entire scene takes place in total darkness (the specular image is unrepresentable), but the psychic reminders force Slothrop to confront his betrayal of Bianca and his fears of her death, and his possible implication in that death. Through a gauntlet that metonymically repeats Brigadier Puddings ritual approach to the Mistress of the Night (Katje)–“the pointed toe of a dancing pump,” the “ladder,” “stiff taffeta,” “slippery satin,” “hooks and eyes [. . .] lacing that moves, snake-sure, entangling, binding each finger.”

     

    He rises to a crouch, moves forward into something hanging from the overhead. Icy little thighs in wet silk swing against his face. They smell of the sea. He turns away, only to be lashed across the cheek by long wet hair. No matter which way he tries to move now...cold nipples...the deep cleft of her buttocks, perfume and shit and the smell of brine...and the smell of...of... (531)

     

    “When the lights come back on” (532) (recall Slothrop’s earlier concern that someone was “fooling” with the lights), we receive no confirmation that the text represented whatever actual events Slothrop experienced–indeed, I would argue he only experiences this nightmare psychologically. The confusion of sensory images conflates two deaths for Bianca: death by drowning and death by hanging. But the text never deploys the signifier “Bianca” in this scene; instead, the text offers a set of metonymies that may or may not signify the “presence” of Bianca’s body. “When the lights come back on,” Slothrop does not directly see her; he sees only the “brown paper bundle” he was sent to retrieve, its enigmatic contents a mise en abyme for his experience and an emblem for the best way to read this scene. The scene closes with a last challenge to specular acts of reading: “But it’s what’s dancing dead-white and scarlet at the edges of his sight…and are the ladders back up and out really as empty as they look?” (532). As with the two ellipses that mark the close of the longer passage just quoted, the ellipsis points here mark the site of absence, the dead-white page showing through the text and yet another site of repetition if we recall the opening of Bianca and Slothrop’s tryst: “In the corner of his vision now, he catches a flutter of red” (468). But can the text and its reading, linear like a ladder “back up and out,” be “really as empty” as it looks? The reader can let this scene either remain enigmatic or decide the undecidable–to paraphrase Tchitcherine much later in the text: “[It] could be anything. I don’t care. But [it’s] only real at the points of decision. The time between doesn’t matter” (702). Bianca last “existed” for Slothrop at the moment of decision when he climbed the ladder to leave her (470-71) and at the moment on deck when he “lunge[s]” to save her (491) only to lose her–does she exist elsewhere?

     

    Many readers read mimetically the scene of Slothrop’s return to the engine-room of the Anubis, stating that he does in fact discover Bianca’s body; some are even convinced that Margherita has murdered her daughter. Yet reading in this way misses the psychological dynamic the text builds around Slothrop’s anxiety over the intersection of sexuality and death that haunts his experience. It misses the text’s implicit questioning of Western culture’s perverse fetishization of the child. It is no stray detail that Slothrop dreams of a conversation with the White Rabbit of Alice in Wonderland when Bianca comes to him–as Henkle observes, “we all know about Lewis Carroll’s supposedly illicit feelings toward little girls; we all understand what Shirley Temple’s fetching little dance steps aroused” (282).9 Moreover, a mimetic reading misses the postmodern narrative function of Bianca’s decharacterization to the level of a cipher and trap for readers who want teleologically to complete her story by a represented death scene.

     

    After Slothrop’s return to the Anubis, Bianca’s trace enters the narrative only four more times. The first trace appears when the text lists some of the wishes Slothrop, now headed for Cuxhaven, makes upon evening stars. The seventh wish is “Let Bianca be all right [. . .]” (553). Either Slothrop has no certainty of Bianca’s fate or he is repressing what he knows; the case is complicated by the coupling of the Bianca wish with “[. . .] a-and–Let me be able to take a shit soon.” The text seems to be laying a trap for the Freudian reader–the ass-bites of their first encounter (469) and the smell of “perfume and shit” that Slothrop calls up in the engine room (531)–who may want to argue that Bianca’s memory has become cathected with Slothrop’s anal fixation. Can any reader ever forget Slothrop’s hallucinatory journey down the toilet in 1.10? That drug-induced nightmare, which occurred because of Pointsman’s involvement, connects back to Slothrop’s childhood conditioning by Laszlo Jamf (when he should have been moving through the anal stage of his psychosexual development, Jamf may have been displacing the smell of Slothrop’s own feces with the smell of Imipolex–if indeed that was the stimulus used).10 I suggest this set of connections may be a trap because reading GR through Freud calls for paradigms of totalization that the text will inevitably undercut even though structures of wish-fulfillment and dreamwork proliferate in the narrative. Interestingly, however, the Bianca wish is preceded by a significant Slothrop wish, although it is at the same time a bad pun on the shit-wish: “Let that discharge be waiting for me in Cuxhaven.” This wish (ultimately to return home to his mother?) will not come true in its literal form, but the quest for it leads Slothrop almost into Pointsman’s plot for his castration and to his last dream of Bianca.

     

    The second trace of Bianca occurs when Slothrop meets Franz Pokler:

     

    Well, but not before [Pokler] has told something of his Ilse and her summer returns, enough for Slothrop to be taken again by the nape and pushed against Bianca's dead flesh.... Ilse, fathered on Greta Erdmann's silver and passive image, Bianca, conceived during the filming of the very scene that was in his thoughts as Pokler pumped in the fatal charge of sperm--how could they not be the same child? She's still with you, though harder to see these days, nearly invisible as a glass of gray lemonade in a twilit room...still she is there, cool and acid and sweet, waiting to be swallowed down to touch your deepest cells, to work among your saddest dreams. (576-77)

     

    This time Slothrop’s memory contravenes his wish only 23 pages earlier as he is “taken again by the nape and pushed against Bianca’s dead flesh.” This passage appears to confirm Bianca’s death. However, while we come upon this cross-mapping alert to the alignment of Ilse and Bianca, for Slothrop this is a new coincidence that, because of Pokler’s significance to the S-Gerat plot, instantly feeds his paranoid paradigm of reading: “how could they not be the same child?” Moreover, “She” (Bianca/Ilse) will now, if not already, “work among your [Slothrop/Pokler/the reader’s] saddest dreams.”

     

    The third trace is in the cross-mapping dreams of Slothrop and Solange/Leni Pokler: “Back at Putzi’s,” after Slothrop has unwittingly escaped castration but not received his wished-for discharge,

     

    Slothrop curls in a wide crisp-sheeted bed beside Solange, asleep and dreaming about Zwolfkinder, and Bianca smiling, he and she riding on the wheel, their compartment become a room, one he's never seen, a room in a great complex of apartments big as a city, whose corridors can be driven or bicycled along like streets: trees lining them, and birds singing in the trees. And "Solange," oddly enough, is dreaming of Bianca too, though under a different aspect: it's of her own child, Ilse, riding lost through the Zone on a long freight train that never seems to come to rest. She isn't unhappy, nor is she searching, exactly, for her father. But Leni's early dream of her is coming true. She will not be used. There is change, and departure: but there is also help when least looked for from the strangers of the day, and hiding, out among the accidents of this drifting Humility, never quite to be extinguished, a few small chances for mercy.... (609-10)

     

    This is one of the text’s most positive images–Leni’s early dream (156) seems to be moving from the story to the discourse as the dialogic narrative erases the distinction between the character and a narrator who appears to extend to the reader the small comfort of knowing Ilse will be all right. Ironically, Leni will never know within the space of the text what the narrator says (nor will Franz know it), but the small chances for mercy are crucial to holding back the bleakness that is otherwise so pervasive in this fictional universe. If Ilse makes it, does Bianca? It depends on how much plot producing power we grant to textual cross-mapping and dreaming in our readerly formation. As we will see with Thanatz’s ordeal riding “the freights,” this hopeful image of “a few small chances of mercy” might vanish. We’ll never know for certain either way; our reading decisions on such points may say more about our readerly desires than about what the text says.

     

    Slothrop’s dream clearly maps onto Pokler’s experience with Ilse at Zwolfkinder in 3.11, but its shift into the unknown room (significantly not where “Once something [the Imipolex conditioning?] was done to him, in a room, while he lay helpless” [285]) seems to be a shift to a life-affirming set of natural images–trees and singing birds. Slothrop’s greater attention to nature and its restorative powers has been building since the time of his wishes on evening stars (“Slothrop’s intensely alert to trees, finally” [552]), and it will become his distinctive emblem in the fourth part of GR. Lastly, Bianca maps onto Leni’s dream because, in a passage I will examine in the next section, she too has a dream that shares the central image of the “passage by train” (471), but the narrator here has no discourse of comfort and we know Bianca has been “used.” Her traces are problematic because they cannot be disentangled from Slothrop’s psychic processes of coping with his experience of betraying her confidence and not providing her a small chance for mercy. Thus the experience takes different shapes in his mind, which is then mediated for the reader by the narrative discourse that arranges sets of textual associations and intersections that establish paradoxes at best. The last traces of Bianca, however, do not come to us through Slothrop’s consciousness–Thanatz, Bianca’s step-father, provides the last traces, and although these cannot confirm her life or death, they deepen her character and extend the textual network of her narrative function as shadow-child.

     

    Thanatz first recalls Bianca while he “rides the freights” with other DP’s and longs to molest “a little girl”–he fantasizes the event using Bianca as a reference: “pull down the slender pretty pubescent’s oversize GI trousers stuff penis between pale little buttocks reminding him so of Bianca take bites of soft-as-bread insides of thighs pull long hair throat back Bianca make her moan move her head how she loves it” (669-70). The passage recalls Slothrop’s encounter with Bianca (469-70), though it may represent only Thanatz’s desire to molest and not a memory. Thanatz then recalls his experiences with Blicero on the Heath and the firing of rocket 00000 (the story he tried to tell Slothrop), but this leads him to make a connection Margherita had also made: “He lost Gottfried, he lost Bianca, and he is only beginning, this late into it, to see that they are the same loss, to the same winner. By now he’s forgotten the sequence in time. Doesn’t know which child he lost first, or even [. . .] if they aren’t two names, different names, for the same child [. . .] that the two children, Gottfried and Bianca, are the same” (671-72). As his confusion grows he conjures up one last (and the text’s last) specular image of Bianca, returned to the fetishistic coding of a masculine gaze: “a flash of Bianca in a thin cotton shift, one arm back, the smooth powdery hollow under the arm and the leaping bow of one small breast, her lowered face, all but forehead and cheekbone in shadow, turning this way, the lashes now whose lifting you pray for…will she see you? a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt, this perpetuate doubting of her love–” (672). The shift to the second person problematizes this last image; is it addressed to Thanatz or to the reader?

     

    What do we gain by discovering Bianca’s age, questioning her textual appearance and disappearance, and reading her last traces–her “suspension forever at the hinge of doubt”? First we see that characters in GR are semiotic systems as much as they are represented entities produced by characterological reading. Moreover, they are constructs produced by other characters; Bianca is always a hallucination, a movie-child of others’ fantasies and fetishes. Second, individual plots are the result of characters mapping onto one another to form a semiotic matrix of representation. Third, we must reread Slothrop’s relationship to Bianca and to the other women in the text. And lastly, the concept of the reader-trap allows us to read the differance at play in GR and to see conventional strategies of reading deconstructing as patterns of stable meaning dissolve amid fragmented and conflicting traces. The reader-trap reveals Pynchon’s text as multi-layered and multi-dimensional, proclaiming its aesthetic and narrative richness in the uncertainty generated by its complexity, but the question of gender and reading, of GR, still remains.

     

    * * * * *

     

    If we grant that GR encodes a narrative transaction between mimetic representation and fantasy, then we must also ask whose fantasies are these? and, Do these fantasies evoke different reading responses? As the example of Bianca shows, Slothrop’s (and in the end Thanatz’s) fantasies and hallucinations overdetermine her representation until she loses personality and becomes a fetish, a figure of cultural formation: the child as erotic object. Although recognizing and avoiding the reader-trap allows a reader distance to read beyond the fetish, to attempt to read character as a system of signs that mean only in relation to other signs, we must ask how this strategy of rationalizing textualization engages the reader’s sensibility, and specifically how it interacts with the reader’s gender formation.11

     

    If the reader-trap of Bianca’s representation in GR, as I have argued, is to read her as a fetish–a representation similar to those associated with her mother and with Katje–then we must also recognize the predominantly masculine gender perspective in the text. Cast in the role of male voyeur (figured in the text by Ensign Morituri), the reader is presented with the dilemma of becoming complicit or resistant. The textualization that limits Bianca to only the role of fetish underwrites a sexual politics that operates at different levels in our acts of reading. There is no denying that Bianca gets “used” in and by the text, but in the power struggle between fetishistic and resistant reading, a struggle the reader-trap helps to stage, we can discover a dialogic strategy of reading GR.

     

    Although reading GR teleologically can lead to misreadings, it is hard to ignore the power of plot as a means of organizing textual material. Thus one way of reading Bianca is to see her as a projection of Slothrop’s needs–innocence and fetish all mixed up. His abandonment of her after their encounter (just as he has abandoned all the other women before) is in a metonymic sequence that underwrites the dysfunctional nature of his sexuality caused by his childhood conditioning. He stays longest with Margherita because she represents a mother who both satisfies his Oedipus complex and satisfies his need– through a logic of transference–to punish his real mother for the conditioning she allowed his father (“pernicious pop”) to submit him to. The subtext of incest in his encounter with Bianca overloads his psyche to the point that he recalls the event as a moment of becoming totally phallic and being fully incorporated into the object of desire. Their mutual orgasm symbolically represents a rebirth for Slothrop though he realizes this (if at all consciously) too late to save Bianca.

     

    Slothrop must first hear Ensign Morituri’s story (474-79), which tells him of Margherita’s pre-war alter ego of Shekhinah–a destroying Angel who psychotically murdered Jewish boys–an alter ego Morituri believes Slothrop has resurrected when he was brought on board the Anubis. Slothrop’s immediate response is to worry about Bianca: “‘what about Bianca, then? Is she going to be safe with that Greta, do you think?’…. But where are Bianca’s arms, her defenseless mouth[?]…. There is hardly a thing now in Slothrop’s head but getting to Bianca” (479-80). But she has disappeared, and although he believes she is only hiding and that he will find her, he must also listen to Margherita’s story (482-88). Her story takes him as close as he will come to the truth of the S-Gerat and Imipolex, but also to the truth about Katje and Blicero and Gottfried. When she tells of her last days on the Heath, the various metonymic chains of plot clash, allowing Slothrop to break through a barrier of dependency. Slothrop doesn’t enact his own talking cure; instead, he experiences a listening cure as the stories of Margherita finally extinguish his will to erection. But it is too late:

     

    He's lost Bianca. Gone fussing through the ship doubling back again and again, can't find her any more than his reason for leaving her this morning. It matters, but how much? Now that Margherita has wept to him, across the stringless lyre and bitter chasm of a ship,s toilet, of her last days with Blicero, he knows as well as he has to that it's the S-Gerat after all that's following him, it and the pale ubiquity of Laszlo Jamf. That if he's seeker and sought, well, he's also baited, and bait. (490)

     

    Although granted this realization, Slothrop is in too far, and try as he might, he cannot quit the game; he cannot extricate himself from Their trap.

     

    But that does not mean that he is not changed by his experience. The loss of Bianca breaks the metonymic chain of Slothrop’s womanizing. When he joins Haftung’s dancers– who comment like a Greek chorus on the apparent sexism in the text: “‘Tits ‘n’ ass,’ mutter the girls, ‘tits ‘n’ ass. That’s all we are around here’” (507)–he does not have one of his trademark, hyperbolic sexual encounters. The same goes for the girl (“about seventeen,” Bianca’s age) he encounters when he becomes the archetypal pig hero, Plechazunga (571-73), and for his encounter with Solange/Leni at Putzi’s (603, 609-10). As far as Slothrop is concerned, Bianca marks a closure of the sexual excess that has been a major pattern of his character.12 But seeing how she has changed Slothrop is only half the story; we must still look at the one moment in the text that seemingly represents Bianca’s consciousness–a moment in which she achieves subjectivity and steps beyond her figuration as fetish.

     

    As Slothrop hesitates on the ladder leading away from Bianca, the text marks his “Eurydice-obsession,” but more importantly this leads to a meditation (possibly in Slothrop’s consciousness, at least focalized through him) on representation: “‘Why bring her back? Why try? It’s only the difference between the real boxtop and the one you draw for Them.’ No. How can he believe that? It’s what They want him to believe, but how can he? No difference between a boxtop and its image, all right, their whole economy’s based on that…but she must be more than an image, a product, a promise to pay” (472). The passage raises the issue of Bianca’s representation and our ability to tell the difference among the various images of her that complicate our readerly process for assigning her signifiers a referential signified, what one might be tempted to call “the real thing.” If we read “They” in this passage as the patriarchy, then the sexual “economy” of objectification and fetish is uncovered. The cover story of the erotic nymphet must be turned aside to understand the “differ[a]nce between a boxtop and its image.” The pun here is crude; the “boxtop” metaphorically represents Bianca’s hymen that has been torn open, not simply to get at what was inside but also to be transferred into another system of exchange–a system that claims correspondence between a signifier (boxtop) and a representation of a signifier (“the one you draw for Them”). No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited by law. The law of the patriarchy prohibits the reading of the void–the “suspension forever at the hinge of doubt”–because to read the void is to find the text inscribed on the image, a text that is different from the one They allow.

     

    Bianca’s text is hard to read. As I have been arguing, the textual set of signifiers that stage her representation is a trap, one we can now delineate as the production of a nearly exclusive patriarchal gaze and the phallocentric addresses to a male narratee. This male narratee, like Slothrop at first and constituted by the text’s limited focalization through Slothrop, construes “Bianca” as a fetish and fails to construe her “true ontological being” (a representation we can only speculate about). One might well ask if such a construal is possible in postmodern texts or necessary to postmodern reading; I would say “yes” if one senses, as I do in reading “Bianca,” that the text represents, however inconclusively, another set of signifieds. There is a textual moment that, although problematic in many respects, may let us finally see “Bianca” (the inverted commas now marking this sign’s differance from the phallocentric sign that has dominated reading so far). As Slothrop turns his back on Bianca and heads up the ladder, “The last instant their eyes were in touch is already behind him….”

     

    Alone, kneeling on the painted steel, like her mother she knows how horror will come when the afternoon is brightest. And like Margherita, she has her worst visions in black and white. Each day she feels closer to the edge of something. She dreams often of the same journey: a passage by train, between two well-known cities, lit by the same nacreous wrinkling the films use to suggest rain out a window. In a Pullman, dictating her story. She feels able at last to tell of a personal horror, tell it clearly in a way others can share. That may keep it from taking her past the edge, into the silver-salt dark closing ponderably slow at her mind's flank...when she was growing out her fringes, in dark rooms her own unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes, would loom like a presence.... In her ruined towers now the bells gong back and forth in the wind. Frayed ropes dangle or slap where her brown hoods no longer glide above the stone. Her wind keeps even dust away. It is old daylight: late, and cold. Horror in the brightest hour of afternoon...sails on the sea too small and distant to matter...water too steel and cold.... (471)

     

     

    The cross-references to Margherita are overt, and the repetition of Leni’s dream for Ilse is one more piece of their joint semiotic matrix. But “Bianca”‘s dream is less hopeful and symbolically more complex. Again we confront the problematic boundary between image (“nacreous wrinkling the films use”) and the real (“rain”), but in the paragraph’s modulating play of light, this cinematic metaphor forces a double displacement. What does it mean not only to dream in “black and white” (if we can conflate “visions” and “dream”), but also to dream in the overt stylization of German Expressionism? One almost expects her to dream through the film Emulsion J (387-88). But this is no dream of being in a movie; instead, it is the dream of the storyteller who dictates a tale of a “personal horror, tell[ing] it clearly in a way others can share.” In a text that most consider anything but “clear,” we might rationalize this tale’s absence; however, we must see that “Bianca” now represents the untellable, the feminine text that patriarchy tries to cover with such mythologies as the lunchwagon-counter girl Slothrop nostalgically recalls to place distance between himself and Bianca (471-72). Although “Bianca”‘s dream collapses that distance textually by setting itself in a “Pullman,” in an American context, we never know if it is enough to keep her from “the edge” and the “silver-salt dark” of drowning.

     

    A piece of “Bianca”‘s dictation does appear to reach us: “…when she was growing out her fringes, in dark rooms her own unaccustomed hair, beside her eyes, would loom like a presence….” Set off by the text’s ever-present ellipses, this passage of narrated monologue suggests a representation of “Bianca” different from the fetishized image that has deluded our readerly senses to this point. If this is a fragment of her tale of “personal horror,” then possibly we have a dictation of her initiation to sexuality, the first violation of her childhood at the moment of puberty, a rape by someone (by Thanatz? we cannot know for certain, but we might be able to justify reading differently his trace of her quoted earlier [670]) who “loom[s] like a presence.” To produce such a reading is to see “Bianca”‘s tale as coming through the body, but in this case, rather than being the text others write upon, her represented dreamwork marks a differant layer to the textual formation of her character. From this angle, the “11 or 12” projection Slothrop estimated for her age could now be seen as a displaced image from the textual unconscious–an image that her abuser(s) have inscribed over the real signifier of “Bianca.” Furthermore, by engaging the play of differance, this brief passage stages the problematic of presence/absence for character formation: if “Bianca” is already absent, replaced by Bianca, and even Bianca “vanishes,” replaced only by traces formed by the sexual memories of men (the first male narratees of the text of her body), the gendering of “presence” and the power of formulating the Real is placed under question. Significantly, this placing under question is not only an extratextual interpretive move of GR‘s readers, but it is figured in the text by Slothrop’s own scattering and Thanatz’s existential breakdown over Blicero and the “reality” of Gottfried’s fate.

     

    Reading Bianca through the fetishized image of the body has been the dominant interpretation of her textual ontology, but the fragment of her dictation can guide us to reread these textual representations. One example should suffice to show how such a rereading may be deployed. Earlier I quoted the oft-cited passage of Slothrop’s memory of total phallicization–“he was [. . .] inside his own cock“; this sort of phallic writing of Slothrop’s body pervades the text and inevitably produces phallocentric strategies of reading. The penis-eyed view that follows, complicated by the sexual ideologies (displaced incest, sexual abuse, pornographic staging) that converge at this moment, leads the text to one of its most symbolically significant orgasms: “she starts to come, and so does he, their own flood taking him up then out of his expectancy, out the eye at tower’s summit and into her with a singular detonation of touch. Announcing the void, what could it be but the kingly voice of the Aggregat itself?” (470). The focalization is through Slothrop, and the arresting slippage into the discourse system of the rocket stages once again the play of metaphor and metonymy, but this time with the inanimate rocket that has served as the center of Slothrop’s quest. Although Bianca “come[s]” too, the representation of her orgasm is absent–the “void” announced is the absence of the feminine voice that will counterbalance the “kingly voice” of annihilation by the most phallic weapon of war yet conceived.

     

    “Bianca”‘s dream takes us not to her orgasm, but to its aftermath, to “her ruined towers.” The “tower” is a pervasive metaphor and symbol in GR, and to pursue it would take this essay off on another set of tangents and cross-references. Nevertheless, we must observe in the last part of “Bianca”‘s passage (whether we are now in her dictation or again experiencing the mediation of the narrator is impossible to decide) that the symbols of “tower” and “light” will recur in the third line of the text’s closing hymn: “Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low / Find the last poor Pret’rite one…” (760). There are many ways to read these lines, one of which is to see an apocalyptic foreshadowing of either total annihilation or final judgment and redemption of the Preterite–the ellipsis points again ask us to engage the space of signification and the dynamic process of readerly desire: which reading do we want it to be? For “Bianca,” “the brightest hour of afternoon” has already passed, her textual trace has long vanished.

     

    Notes

     

    I would like to thank John M. Krafft, Terry Caesar, and Brian McHale who read earlier versions of this essay and provided helpful suggestions.

     

    1. For a thorough reading of this passage, see McHale, “You Used to Know,” 107-08.

     

    2. Pynchon has at least one passage, in which the narratee “you” is gendered as female, although the passage itself may refer analeptically to Leni Pokler’s childhood (she grew up in Lubeck [162]) and proleptically to Ilse’s trips with her father Franz to Zwolfkinder (398).

     

    3. Gravity’s Rainbow contains many meditations on fetishism; see in particular the nearly textbook description on 736 (cf. Freud). This description sets up Thanatz’s argument for “Sado-anarchism,” a reclaiming from the State of the resources of “submission and dominance” (737). Pynchon also explored fetishism in V. in the chapter “V. in Love” (see Berressem for a thorough reading of this chapter). Of course, Pynchon always places such meditations on the edge, slipping either into what McHale terms “stylization” Postmodern Fiction 21) or into parody, as Thanatz’s intertextual parody (though we might interpret Thanatz as unconscious of the implications of his parody) of “Freud” and Marx: “I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away” (737).

     

    4. Although Gravity’s Rainbow here and on 364 clearly identifies Margherita as “his Lisaura,” Bianca is also signified in this allusion to the character in Wagner’s Tannhauser, an opera which organizes yet another of the text’s semiotic matrices.

     

    5. Newman is the only reader I have come across that comes close to dating Alpdrucken (during the filming of which Bianca was conceived) as 16 years before the text’s present time (107), and Weisenburger dates Pokler’s recollection of Ilse’s conception as “ranging back over sixteen years, its analepsis beginning in the late twenties, in Berlin, where the German rocket program began as an apparently innocent club, the Society for Space Travel” (194).

     

    6. McHoul and Wills read many of the same passages I examine here, yet their characterological reading that suggests “it may be Bianca who mugs Slothrop when he boards the Anubis again later, that is if she hasn’t hanged herself” (31) is problematic to say the least.

     

    7. This issue is further complicated by the fact that a ship’s crew during a storm often rig “life lines” about the deck to keep people from being forced too close to the side during a “hard roll.”

     

    8. Kappel suggests this package is the S-Gerat (236) and Hume and Knight suggest it is a piece of Imipolex G (304); neither of these suppositions strikes me as convincing although they play on the symbolic matrix of Slothrop’s possible conditioning to the odor of the plastic. Nevertheless, both suppositions underscore the readerly desire for enigmas to be resolved.

     

    9. See De Lauretis for a reading of the Alice image in terms of the sexual politics encoded in film, and by extension, the power of desire in the male gaze–the primary determinant of the framed image of women in the cinema.

     

    10. At some point I hope to write about the noses in Gravity’s Rainbow; one only has to recall Slothrop’s “nasal hardon” (439) to see another thread of cross-references (my guess is that, maybe under the influence of Nabokov at Cornell, Pynchon has developed a deep affinity with Gogol, especially his short story “The Nose”–a clear forerunner of postmodernism–and his technique of skaz narration). As for “shit” in Gravity’s Rainbow see Caesar and Wolfley.

     

    11. Although a definitive feminist reading of Pynchon’s writing is yet to be done, see the following early formulations of gender questions: Allen 37-51, Jardine 247-52, Kaufman, and Stimpson.

     

    12. See my essay, “Starry-Eyed Semiotics,” for an account of how readers are trapped into reading Slothrop as a personification of sexual excess.

    Works Cited

     

    • Allen, Mary. The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Sixties. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1976.
    • Berressem, Hanjo. “V. in Love: From the ‘Other Scene’ to the ‘New Scene.’” Pynchon Notes 18-19 (1986): 5-28.
    • Bersani, Leo. “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature.” Representations 25 (1989): 99-118.
    • Caesar, Terry. “‘Trapped inside Their frame with your wastes piling up’: Mindless Pleasures in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Pynchon Notes 14 (1984): 39-48.
    • Clerc, Charles, ed. Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1983.
    • De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.
    • Duyfhuizen, Bernard. “Starry-Eyed Semiotics: Learning to Read Slothrop’s Map and Gravity’s Rainbow.” Pynchon Notes 6 (1981): 5-33.
    • Freud, Sigmund. Fetishism. 1927. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1961. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. 21.
    • Henkle, Roger. “The Morning and the Evening Funnies: Comedy in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Clerc 273-90.
    • Hume, Katherine, and Thomas J. Knight. “Orpheus and the Orphic Voice in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Philological Quarterly 64 (1985): 299-315.
    • Jardine, Alice A. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.
    • Kappel, Lawrence. “Psychic Geography in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Contemporary Literature 21 (1980): 225-51.
    • Kaufman, Marjorie. “Brunnhilde and the Chemists: Women in Gravity’s Rainbow.” Levine and Leverenz 197-227.
    • Levine, George, and David Leverenz, ed. Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976.
    • McHale, Brian. “‘You Used to Know What these Words Mean’: Misreading Gravity’s Rainbow.” Language and Style 18.1 (1985): 93-118.
    • —. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.
    • McHoul, Alec, and David Wills. Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990.
    • Newman, Robert D. Understanding Thomas Pynchon. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1986.
    • Pearce, Richard, ed. Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1981.
    • Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.
    • —. V. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963.
    • Stimpson, Catharine R. “Pre-Apocalyptic Atavism: Thomas Pynchon’s Early Fiction.” Levine and Leverenz 31-47.
    • Weisenburger, Steven. A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1988.
    • Wolfley, Lawrence. “Repression’s Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown in Pynchon’s Big Novel.” Pearce 99-123.

     

  • Derek Walcott and the Poetics of “Transport”

    Rei Terada

    University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
    <rei.terada@um.cc.umich.edu>

     

    Most North American critics and reviewers have come to see Derek Walcott as a deservedly celebrated poet, “natural, worldly, and accomplished” (Vendler, 26).1 Yet this very appreciation of the orthodox values of Walcott’s work–its learning, assurance, and metrical proficiency–has obstructed consideration of Walcott’s place in the postmodern era. Enthusiastic critics usually discuss Walcott as a “literary” poet and an imitator of the poetic past who perpetuates rather than reverses a traditional formalism.2 Indeed, the surface of Walcott’s language does not seem postmodern. Yet Walcott is obviously also a late twentieth-century postcolonial obsessed on the thematic level with cultural and linguistic displacement–a concern sometimes held to be a hallmark of postmodern literature.3 The vast majority of the small body of critical literature concerned with Walcott’s poetry dwells upon this dilemma, straining to reconcile the subversive postcolonial with the relatively conventional versifier.4 His readers most often argue that Walcott ponders displacement on the thematic level, but on the rhetorical level nostalgically denies it.5 By this logic, rhetoric and content in Walcott’s poetry fulfil contradictory psychological demands: either his forms speak the truth or his themes do, but not both. Other readers, meanwhile, believe that Walcott synthesizes perceived oppositions, or adopts the space between them as his own.6

     

    The difficulty in categorizing Walcott’s poetry is more interesting, however, for what it discloses of our own persistent discomfort at discrepancies between form and content. While most of postmodernism’s would-be definers do attempt to correlate formal and thematic properties, the uneasy relation between rhetoric and principle in Walcott prompts one to question the correspondences between rhetoric and principle that attempts to locate postmodernity may assume. If Walcott’s poetry dramatizes the postmodern knowledge of displacement without enacting it, this could indicate either that Walcott’s poetic contradicts itself (and thus that Walcott is only halfheartedly postmodern), or that definitions of postmodern language in terms of its estrangement from “ordinary” language are inadequate. Indeed, defining postmodernity by estrangement poses problems. It usually means, in practice, identifying postmodernity with literary language. The expectation that postmodern poets enact difference by manifest verbal dislocution also demands an orderly mutual echoing of content and rhetoric–precisely the kind of correspondence that postmodern literature tends to disavow.

     

    Walcott avoids separating “poetic” from “ordinary” language, but not by trying to make poetry sound ordinary. The poems do not aspire to transparency; they are as insistently figurative and artificial as they are intelligible. Indeed, James Dickey complains that Walcott seems at times unable “to state, or see, things without allegory” (8). Walcott acknowledges and at times even rues his dependence on allegory. He also fails, however, to find transparency in any kind of language whatsoever. Beginning with the intuition that poetry can only be allegorical, Walcott extends this knowledge to language as a whole. Although the poems reveal the inexorability of allegorical displacement without benefit of conspicuously postmodern linguistic disfiguration, the knowledge that perception can only be figurative–“allegorical” in de Man’s sense–and unstably so, is itself an essential insight of post- modernity. Walcott’s turns of thought here do infact resemble de Man’s. In Allegories of Reading de Man locates the poetic by means of figuration and in opposition to nonpoetic language, but in the same breath “equat[es] the rhetorical, figural potentiality of language with literature itself” (10, italics mine), and in no time asserts that “Poetic writing . . . may differ from critical or discursive writing in the economy of its articulation, but not in kind” (17). Walcott demonstrates what postmodern poetry might look like if it lived by these words. The overt disfigurations we associate with the poetry of an Ashbery or a Palmer would seem redundant in light of any real conviction that the disfigurations of allegory necessarily occur in all language. Walcott abstains from radically conspicuous forms of rhetoric not because he seeks transparency, but because of his conviction that any and all language depends upon rhetoric.

     

    Although Walcott does not confuse simplicity with transparency at any point in his career, his later poetry more explicitly dramatizes the ubiquity of “poetic” rhetoric–often because revaluation of the poet’s own work itself becomes a theme. “The Light of the World” The Arkansas Testament, 48-51), a wonderful example of tt’s late style, is more nearly Walcott’s ars poetica than any other single lyric. “The Light of the World” also considers the problems I’ve been discussing–the poet’s inevitable social and linguistic displacement and the relation of poetic to nonpoetic language–more completely than any other single lyric. The poem once again addresses Walcott’s persistent fear–expressed as early as “Homecoming: Anse la Raye” (1970; The Gulf, 84-86)–that poetry may be tragically removed from popular language (and indeed, from material life). But while Walcott more often deliberates this fear in terms of the poet’s social separation from his culture–by virtue of linguistic choice, or of his public’s literacy–“The Light of the World” assumes that poetry is based upon figuration, and inquires whether poetry’s reliance upon figuration divorces it from other linguistic forms.

     

    The poem’s aim to revaluate Walcott’s poetic is transparent, since Another Life, which first comprehensively narrates Walcott’s choice of vocation, turns upon its title phrase: “Gregorias, listen, lit / we were the light of the world!”7 Indeed, “another life” metamorphoses, in that volume, into “another light”: “another light / in the unheard, creaking axle . . . / in the fire-coloured hole eating the woods” (12.III.13-14, 17). In Another Life these phrases, “the light of the world,” “lux mundi,” “another light,” signify the passion, med by mortality, which drives both desire and creativity. In the course of the poem Walcott’s protagonist learns to sublimate passion into art which acknowledges its own origins in anxiety and ephemerality. Gregorias’ “crude wooden star, / its light compounded” by the “mortal glow” consuming it (23.IV.22-23), symbolizes such art in Another Life. “The Light of the World” even more explicitly represents Walcott’s art as a combination of transience and transport. Here the poet is a “transient” or tourist in his own culture, and the entire poem literally takes place in a “transport,” or van, between Castries and Gros Ilet. Although Walcott has not altered his own position regarding the value of these qualities, “The Light of the World” now asks whether reliance on figuration severs the poet from the community and the communal language with which he would most like to share transport.

     

    The poet is first inspired to think of the title phrase when he sees a beautiful woman sitting in the “transport” with him:

     

              Marley was rocking on the transport's stereo
          and the beauty was humming the choruses quietly.
          I could see where the lights on the planes of her cheek
          streaked and defined them; if this were a portrait
          you'd leave the highlights for last, these lights
          silkened her black skin; I'd have put in an earring,
          something simple, in good gold, for contrast, but she
          wore no jewelry. . . .
             . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
          and the head was nothing else but heraldic.
          When she looked at me, then away from me politely,
          because any staring at strangers is impolite,
          it was like a statue, like a black Delacroix's
          Liberty Leading the People, the gently bulging
          whites of her eyes, the carved ebony mouth,
          the heft of the torso solid, and a woman's,
          but gradually even that was going in the dusk,
          except the line of her profile, and the highlit cheek,
          and I thought, O Beauty, you are the light of the
                                                    world! (48)

     

    Although the poet perceives her at first as an individual woman, “the” beauty–“the beauty was humming the choruses quietly”–in the next moment he begins trying ways of seeing her as art, manipulating her image in a series of framings and figurations: “If this were a portrait . . . . the head was nothing else but heraldic . . . . like a statue, like a black Delacroix’s / Liberty Leading The People . . . the carved ebony mouth.” At the end of this sequence of figures, the poet finally addresses her as Beauty itself. The unnamed woman is now named “Beauty” with a capital B, and seems completely assimilated to the poet’s conception of her. Indeed, Walcott’s deepening aesthetic possession of the woman coincides with the gradual disappearance of her physical self in deepening darkness. In the moment before she becomes Beauty, nothing remains but a “profile” and a highlight. It is entirely possible that in the moment Walcott apotheosizes her, she completely disappears. Beauty may be “the light of the world,” but the apotheosizing capacity of Walcott’s own language is firmly associated with darkness.

     

    Although in his address Walcott’s comparison attains to metaphor–the woman is Beauty–the similes leading up to this transfiguration had been conscious of the tension between the individual woman and Beauty: “if this were a portrait”; “you’d leave the highlights”; “she looked at me, then away from me politely”; “I’d have put in an earring, / . . . but she / wore no jewelry” (italics mine). Walcott’s conjunction in “the heft of her torso solid, and a woman’s,” marks an uneasy nexus of formal strength with individual vulnerability, and of solidity with femininity (the sense of straining double consciousness, of near-paradox, is even stronger in an earlier version8 where Walcott writes, “solid, but a woman’s”). Yet the woman’s individual vulnerability, her mortality–“even that [solidity] was going in the dusk”–itself reminds the poet of art. Another Life had celebrated precisely that art which allows one to perceive its temporality, its “going in the dusk.” Even though the poet apprehends the woman’s apartness (“she wore no jewelry”), he still can’t completely distinguish, at least on temporal grounds, between her mortal, breathing beauty and his own also fragile idea of Beauty. On the other hand, if he cannot hold on to the distinction between the two, neither can he grasp their identity. His momentary metaphorization of her slips at the very moment at which it is apparently achieved. He names her “O Beauty,” but only in “thought,” in darkness, and in the ambivalent rhetorical figure of (de Manian) prosopopoeia. Even the triumphant moment of her naming requires its highly conventional capitalization of “Beauty” and interjection of “O” in order to ensure its recognition as poetic triumph. The presence of the beholder intrudes between the reader and the ostensible triumph, and between the reader and the object supposedly completely beheld. In the next moment it is no longer enough that the woman be Beauty. Beauty itself needs renaming by a further figure, “the light of the world,” and disappears into this figurative excess. In later references the woman is once again only “the woman by the window,” “her beauty.”

     

    Walcott’s correlation between the poet’s expanding transport and expanding darkness magnifies the connotations of “transience.” The poet passes from town to a hotel “full of transients like [him]self” (51),9 and at the same time voyages from life toward death. If this protagonist is a tourist, however, we are all tourists, since this is “the town / where [he] was born and grew up” (49). As tourist, he travels through a society itself transient: St. Lucia, since it is now so “full of transients,” may not last much longer in its present form. Walcott represents St. Lucia at large by means of the female figures in “The Light of the World,” just as he calls the Antillean population by a series of female names in “Sainte Lucie” Collected Poems 1948-1984, 309-323). Luce, of course, means “light,” and Beauty in the poem is also tied to light. The woman in the transport therefore represents St. Lucia, which for Walcott coincides with Beauty. Walcott underscores the fragile temporal development of St. Lucia by depicting a series of women at various stages of life, moving from “the beauty” to “drunk women on pavements” and a thought of his mother, “her white hair tinted by the dyeing dusk” (49).10 These secondary women seem even more exposed, more obviously mortal than “the beauty.” These elegiac thoughts further give rise to a reminiscence of the Castries market in Walcott’s childhood, in which the poet-figure of a lamplighter prominently appears: “wandering gas lanterns hung on poles at street corners . . . the lamplighter climbed, / hooked the lantern on its pole and moved on to another” (49). In the earlier draft, Walcott accents the fragility of the lamplighter’s art–“the light . . . was poised to be lit / on the one hand, and on the next to go out,” like that of the “fireflies” which act as “guides” later in the poem.11 Finally, the transport’s forward motion gives the sensation (as in Bishop’s “The Moose” or Frost’s “Stopping by Woods”) that everyone inside the transport is being carried toward death: “The van was slowly filling in the darkening depot. / I sat in the front seat, I had no need for time.”

     

    At the same time that the transport functions as a sort of Charon’s ferry, however, “transport” is also a synonym for “metaphor,” whose etymology includes the notion of “carrying.” Moreover, it’s clear that Walcott means “metaphor” in its larger sense, to include all figuration, and accepts figuration as a defining feature of poetry–so that “metaphor” functions, as usual, as a figure for figuration. Then too, “transport” can mean “ecstasy,” which bears the connotation of sexual desire as well as of rapturous lyric inspiration. In other words, the poet’s desire for “the beauty” and his aspiration toward poetic and formal Beauty simultaneously carry him–and all kinds of “beauty” with him–toward equally simultaneous would-be possession and oblivion. The poem begins with an epigraph from Bob Marley, “Kaya now, got to have kaya now . . . For the rain is falling”; the earlier version shows that Walcott originally misheard Marley, believing, charmingly enough, that Marley was singing “Zion-ah, / I’ve got to have Zion- ah”–a rendering which magnifies the apocalyptic character of the transport. “Kaya” is marijuana, as it happens, but whether the desired object be marijuana or Zion, “kaya” functions tautologically here, simply as “the desired,” as whatever it is one has “got to have.” “Kaya” also functions, like poetic transport, as a vehicle toward the destination of simultaneous heightened elevation and oblivion. By this point Walcott has accomplished more than a delineation of concurrent desires. He has asked whether metaphorical transport, in its ecstasy, either leaves its supposed subjects behind to unecstatic life and death, or carries them to oblivion by sweeping them up with it. The potential conflict is particularly obvious and painful when the inspired poet’s subjects are St. Lucian, poor and, in this case, mostly female.

     

    Yet another female figure enters the scene at this point–an old woman qualified by experience to speak for “her people,” whose voice alone the poet represents:

     

              An old woman with a straw hat over her headkerchief
          hobbled towards us with a basket; somewhere,
          some distance off, was a heavier basket
          that she couldn't carry.  She was in a panic.
          She said to the driver: "Pas quittez moi a terre,"
          which is, in her patois: "Don't leave me stranded,"
          which is, in her history and that of her people:
          "Don't leave me on earth," or, by a shift of stress:
          "Don't leave me the earth" [for an inheritance];
          "Pas quittez moi a terre, Heavenly transport,
          Don't leave me on earth, I've had enough of it."
          The bus filled in the dark with heavy shadows
          that would not be left on earth; no, that would be left
          on the earth, and would have to make out.
          Abandonment was something they had grown used to.
          And I had abandoned them, I knew that now. . . . (49-50)

     

    Several things are surprising about Walcott’s development of this metaphor (this transport). First, a North American critical audience will probably associate “transport” with politically undesirable transcendence and forgetfulness. But the old woman believes transport is “Heavenly,” a relief from her burdens, and so begs to be transported-and-not- abandoned–even though “abandon” is itself a synonym for “transport” when both mean “rapture.” At the same time, “abandon[ment]” in the negative sense inevitably accompanies figuration, since writing–substituting figuration for presence–marks the site of perpetually abandoned presence. Walcott further highlights the constitutional ambivalence of these words in his self-reversing line about shadows “that would not be left on earth; no, that would be left.” The line remains ambiguous in at least three ways. Walcott’s reversal could indicate the passage of time: it at first seems that all the shadowy bodies of villagers (also “shades” crossing between worlds) outside the transport will fit in; after a while, it does not. In addition, the first half of this line is “literal” (the passengers will not be left behind because they will get in the transport), and the second half “figurative” (they will be “left behind” because the poet will abandon them emotionally and linguistically). But, third and finally, “would” can also suggest preference or volition: they wanted transport, they wanted to be left on the earth. And this is what everyone is likely to feel: we want the universal, we want the particular. In “The Light of the World” (as in “The Schooner Flight,” whose protagonist Shabine is “nobody or a nation”), Walcott maintains a fierce consciousness of both poles.

     

    Further, if one believes that figuration is a specialized form of language which abandons the object world by its abstraction, it will confound one’s expectations that, as Walcott’s explication demonstrates, the “poetic” multiplicity of meanings in “transport” and “abandon” also occurs in the old woman’s speech. The old woman’s phrase is figurative to its core, as Walcott’s translation makes clear. “Pas quittez moi a terre” does not “denote” “Don’t leave me stranded.” Besides, “Don’t leave me stranded” is itself figurative, unless one’s friend is sailing away from the beach (as St. Lucia’s colonizers figuratively and literally did sail away). Translation begins by substituting supposed denotations, but can never end. Denotations, too, continually dissolve by mere “shift[s] of stress.” Likewise, poets sometimes do things for purely formal reasons, but Walcott recalls that people in his childhood neighborhood also “quarrelled for bread in the shops, / or quarrelled for the formal custom of quarrelling” (49).

     

    Walcott, rather like Wordsworth, is now moved by his own reflection that he “had abandoned them . . . had left them on earth,” to feel “a great love that could bring [him] to tears” (50). In this ecstatic experience of agape, of course, we reach yet another connotation of “transport.” Contrary to what one hears about agape, the poet’s love actually denies him oneness with the people around him. Instead, it takes the form of “a pity” that makes him feel his own isolation the more, the more hyperconscious he grows of “their neighborliness, / their consideration.” His pity, in other words, pulls him both toward and away from them, following the two directions of language–“tearing him apart,” as we so Orphically say. The poet suffers further when, in accordance with its mission as an engine of time, even those people who fit into the transport begin getting off. Each departure enacts a miniature death, and too clearly foreshadows the poet’s own:

     

                                             I wanted the transport
          to continue forever, for no one to descend
          and say a goodnight in the beams of the lamps
          and take the crooked path up to the lit door,
          guided by fireflies; I wanted her beauty
          to come into the warmth of considerate wood,
          to the relieved rattling of enamel plates
          in the kitchen, and the tree in the yard,
          but I came to my stop.  Outside the Halcyon Hotel.
          The lounge would be full of transients like myself.
          Then I would walk with the surf up the beach.
          I got off the van without saying good night.
          Good night would be full of inexpressible love.
          They went on in their transport, they left me on earth. (51)

     

    Another reversal occurs here, when, after having left his neighbors on earth through his language and his “transience” (his exile), his neighbors in turn leave the poet. One often encounters, in Walcott’s poetry, the idea that home can leave you. In the structurally similar “Homecoming: Anse la Raye,” the narrator already feels like “a tourist.” “Hop[ing] it would mean something to declare / today, I am your poet, yours,” he finds no one to listen to such a declaration except throngs of children who want coins or nothing. Caught in the impasse of this “homecoming without home,” “You give them nothing. / Their curses melt in air” (85). In contrast, fishermen cast “draughts” of nets, “texts” which help the children more ably than the poet’s. The poet can give the children only words, “nothing” in the way of coins; they return him, in kind, words which are curses.

     

    “The Light of the World” also features a mutual abandonment, the poet’s sense of pity and guilt, a confrontation between a “transient” and his people, and jealousy toward another artisan. Many critics, having cast Walcott in the role of “literary poet,” oppose him to the Barbadian poet Edward Brathwaite, a more “folkish” writer. In “The Light of the World,” Walcott compares himself to an apter and stronger competitor, Bob Marley. “Marley” is the poem’s first word; as the poem’s text stands under its epigraph from Marley’s “Kaya,” so Marley’s song–“rocking” (48), “thud-sobbing” (51), popular, choric, mnemonic– suffuses the whole transport. The “beauty was humming” Marley’s choruses, not Walcott’s; when the whole transport “hum[s] between / Gros-Ilet and the Market” (48), Marley’s song becomes indistinguishable from the motor which drives transport forward. This realization, as much as his confrontation with mortality, brings the poet “down to earth” (and leaves him there). The poet leaves his people on earth–that he could bear. What’s worse, he “le[aves] them to sing / Marley’s songs of a sadness as real as the smell / of rain on dry earth” (51), and the thought that they so gladly sing the songs of a competitor drives him to tears. The pill Walcott swallows here is, then, at least as bitter as that in “Homecoming: Anse la Raye.”

     

    But in “The Light of the World,” Walcott’s greater awareness of linguistic ambivalence and of tensions between universals and particulars far more precisely and gently renders a similar experience, without assuming a wishful intimacy or erasing difference. Walcott explores his own universalizing impulse most completely here. And in the end, the poem suggests that the “poetic” language of metaphor cannot be held apart from Marley’s language, from the old woman’s language, from all language. The poet faces insoluble problems of representation; and in a way, it doesn’t help that everyone who uses language faces these same problems and temptations. On the other hand, in the impossibility of controlling language and the inescapability of desiring to do so, as in the inescapability of death, we find a kind of community in poverty. The poem’s last stanza, which takes up after the poet has been “left on earth,” arrives like an extra gift, an unexpected bit of afterlife:

     

    Then, a few yards ahead, the van stopped.  A man
          shouted my name from the transport window.
          I walked up towards him.  He held out something.
          A pack of cigarettes had dropped from my pocket.
          He gave it to me.  I turned, hiding my tears.
          There was nothing they wanted, nothing I could give
                                                            them
          but this thing I have called "The Light of the World." (51)

     

    Again, as in “Anse la Raye,” the poet and his counterpart, representing his community, exchange virtually “nothing.” The man returns the cigarettes, while the poet turns speechless away: “There was nothing they wanted, nothing I could give them.” Walcott revises the Orpheus and Eurydice story here in a manner unflattering to the postmodern Orpheus.12 This Orpheus cannot take his Eurydice home because he is mortal himself, has no particular powers against death, and besides, she doesn’t belong to him and never did. He is too overcome to look back and deliberately leaves without parting, having accomplished nothing. In fact he assumes the passive position, so that the mortals (who have their own transport and their own music) look back at him. Much of this diminishment already occurs in Rilke’s “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes.,” in which Eurydice reacts to news of Orpheus’ failure by asking, “Who?” As de Man points out,

     

    The genuine reversal takes place at the end of the poem, when Hermes turns away from the ascending movement that leads Orpheus back to the world of the living and instead follows Eurydice into a world of privation and nonbeing. On the level of poetic language, this renunciation corresponds to the loss of a primacy of meaning located within the referent and it allows for the new rhetoric of Rilke's "figure." (47)

     

    In Walcott’s as in Rilke’s version of the story, the poet figure retains little power or tragic dignity.

     

    Yet the two “nothings” the poet and the others in the transport exchange–unlike the “nothing” and “curses” in “Anse la Raye”–mean everything. This is how language works, conveying in spite of itself. The man’s gesture embodies all the warm “neighborliness,” “consideration,” and “polite partings” of his society which have moved the poet to write about it, and Walcott gives that society what he loves most, his lux mundi, beauty, poetry, even though he realizes that is all “but” nothing, and even a repetition of abandonment. Walcott’s description of the poet’s diminished powers sounds characteristically postmodern, if we understand postmodernism as a folding back from Modernism’s totalizing ambitions. But notice that this diminishment does not free the poet from communal responsibilities, or from his aesthetic and sexual desires.

     

    Poetic humility takes paradoxical forms. The more humbly the poet describes her or his own efforts, the greater she or he may believe poetry to be. In a way, Walcott’s recognition of the poet’s limitations makes his task even more ambitious, since it will be more difficult. Without the illusion of mastery over language, the poet still aims for communal relevance, beauty, and “truth”– which in “The Light of the World” means precisely recognizing the inescapability of rhetoric. Paradoxically, Walcott brings every poetic resource to bear upon the task of convincing us that “poetry makes nothing happen.” The performance is convincing–so convincing that it undoes its own point. Rhetoric here struggles to dismiss itself, and, predictably, cannot. Walcott’s last small “but” opens a floodgate through which poetic grandiosity and linguistic transcendence stream. Even by calling his poem “this thing,” he simultaneously metaphorizes and reifies it. By further calling “this thing” (already metaphorized by being called a thing) “The Light of the World,” Walcott enters the realm of undecidability. On the one hand, this last line is figurative and glorious: poems are, after all, the light of the world. On the other, it is merely literal and tautological. The title of the poem is, inarguably, “The Light of the World”; the phrase is a citation, referring us only to itself, and distances itself by its quotation marks from the notion of poetic glory. That is, since the title comprises a proper name, we cannot, as when Derrida writes of Ponge, “know with any peaceful certainty whether [it] designate[s] the name or the thing” (Derrida, 8). The reader cannot stand between these two interpretations to choose one. Neither can we decide whether “The Light of the World” actively produces and undoes these contradictions or whether these contradictions actively produce and undo it, for the process of disclosing the ubiquity of rhetoric also begins in self-knowledge and moves toward generalization, following the route of the universalizing impulse it queries. If Walcott’s interest in this particular query is postmodern, his postmodernity trails behind it Modernism’s tendency to universalize.

     

    But in this too Walcott’s example is at least instructive and at most representative. Attempts to define postmodernism solely by its difference from Modernism themselves echo Modern self-definitions. It may be typical of postmodernism to lose itself in the perspectivism of which it is so fond. According to Linda Hutcheon, postmodernism asks us to see “Historical meaning . . . today,” for example, “as unstable, contextual, relational, and provisional,” and at the same time “argues that, in fact, it has always been so” (67). If this is true, postmodernism can best be defined not as a noun, but as a verb; not as a set of attitudes or a grammar of rhetoric, but as inseparable from the propensity to read postmodernly. And if postmodern poetry characteristically inhabits and describes the circulation of these perspectives, Walcott’s metaphorization of himself as the figure of the contemporary poet will be difficult to assail.

     

    Notes

     

    1. For some representative reviews, see also Calvin Bedient, “Derek Walcott, Contemporary” Parnassus 9 [1981], 31-44); Paul Breslin, “‘I Met History Once, But He Ain’t Recognize Me’: The Poetry of Derek Walcott” TriQuarterly 68 [1987], 168-183); and Rita Dove, “‘Either I’m Nobody, or I’m a Nation’” Parnassus 14 [1987], 49-76).

     

    2. Vendler, for example, remarks that “Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Pound, Eliot, and Auden [follow] Yeats in Walcott’s ventriloquism” (23), and Sven Birkerts claims that “[Walcott] apprenticed himself to the English tradition and has never strayed far from the declamatory lyrical line. His mentors . . . include the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Yeats, Hardy, and Robert Lowell (who himself sought to incorporate that tradition into his work)” (31).

     

    3. Linda Hutcheon notes that “On the level of representation . . . postmodern questioning overlaps with similarly pointed challenges by those working in, for example, postcolonial . . . contexts” (37), and that “Difference and ex-centricity replace homogeneity and centrality as the foci of postmodern social analysis” (5).

     

    4. Both Vendler’s well-known review of The Fortunate Traveller and James Atlas’ New York Times Magazine story on Walcott, for example, are entitled “Poet of Two Worlds.”

     

    5. For Bedient, for example, Walcott’s language in “Old New England,” a poem in part about Vietnam, “places him curiously inside the dream, insulated there, enjoying it” (33).

     

    6. This last position is most often taken by Walcott’s fellow poets, especially Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney.

     

    7. Another Life, 23.IV.11-12; also 12.III.21-22. I will refer to Another Life by chapter, section and line number.

     

    8. Paris Review 101 (1986), 192.

     

    9. Walcott had written “tourists like myself” in place of “transients” in the earlier draft of “Light.”

     

    10. “[F]ading in the dying dusk” in the Paris Review.

     

    11. Fireflies are among the favorite creatures in Walcott’s bestiary. He first mentions them in poetry in “Lampfall” The Castaway and Other Poems, 58-59), where they represent a fluctuating, delicate curiosity: “Like you, I preferred / The firefly’s starlike little / Lamp, mining, a question, / To the highway’s brightly multiplying beetles” (59). In Ti-Jean and His Brothers, the Firefly “lights the tired woodsman home,” and annoys the Devil by his mercurial gaiety (when “The Firefly passes, dancing,” the Devil barks, “Get out of my way, you burning backside, I’m the prince of obscurity and I won’t brook interruption!” Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, 151]). In general, Walcott associates fireflies with the short-lived magic of words, whose meaning flashes on and off.

     

    12. Walcott explicitly reworks the Orpheus-Eurydice story in his new musical, Steel (produced at the American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991). There, it is Eurydice (a schoolgirl) who instructs Orpheus (a steel band musician) not to look at her as they revisit their childhood neighborhood.

    Works Cited

     

    • Bedient, Calvin. “Derek Walcott: Contemporary.” Parnassus 9 (1981), 31-44.
    • Birkerts, Sven. “Heir Apparent” [review of Midsummer], The New Republic 190 (1984), 31-33.
    • De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
    • Derrida, Jacques. Signsponge. Trans. Richard Rand. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
    • Dickey, James. “Worlds of a Cosmic Castaway” [review of Collected Poems 1948-1984]. New York Times Book Review, 2 February 1986, 8.
    • Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989.
    • Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Selected Poetry. Ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Vintage, 1984.
    • Vendler, Helen. “Poet Between Two Worlds” [review of The Fortunate Traveller], New York Review of Books, 4 March 1982, 23-27.
    • Walcott, Derek. Another Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974.
    • —. The Castaway and Other Poems. London: Jonathan Cape, 1965.
    • —. Collected Poems 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984.
    • —. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970.
    • —. The Gulf and Other Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970.
    • —. “The Light of the World.” Paris Review 101 (1986), 192-95.

     

  • Notes Toward an Unwritten Non-Linear Electronic Text, “The Ends of Print Culture” (a work in progress)

    Michael Joyce

    Center for Narrative and Technology, Jackson, MI
    <Michael_Joyce@UM.CC.UMICH.EDU>

     

    Adapted from a talk originally given at the Computers and the Human Conversation Conference, Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon, March 16, 1991

     

    For a period of time last year on each end of our town, like compass points, there was a mausoleum of books. On the north end of town a great remainder warehouse flapped with banners that promised 80% off publishers prices. Inside it row upon row of long tables resembled nothing less than those awful makeshift morgues which spring up around disasters. Its tables were piled with the union dead: the mistakes and enthusiasms of editors, the miscalculations of marketing types, the brightly jacketed, orphaned victims of faddish, fickle or fifteen minute shifts of opinion and/or history. There an appliance was betrayed by another (food processor by microwave); a diet guru was overthrown by a leftist in leotards (Pritikin by Fonda); and every would-be Dickens seemed poised to tumble, if not from literary history, at least from all human memory (already gangs of Owen Meanies leer and lean against faded Handmaidens of Atwood).

     

    Upon first looking into such a warehouse–forty miles east of our spare parts, bible belt midwest town, in what we outlanders think of as wonderful Ann Arbor; we thought only a university town could sustain this. When the same outfit opened up in our town, and the tables were piled not with the leavings of Ann Arborites but with towers of the same texts, we knew this was a modern day circus. Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages! here come the books!

     

    Meanwhile, at the opposite pole in the second mausoleum, a group termed the Friends of the Library regularly sell off tables of what shelves can no longer hold. One hundred years of Marquez is too impermanent for the permanent collection of our county library, but so too– at least for the branches which feed pulp back to this trunk–so too is the Human Comedy, so too are the actual Dickens or Emily Dickinson. The book here must literally earn its keep.

     

    Both the remainder morgue and the friends of the library mortuary are examples of production/distribution gone radically wrong. Books–and films and television programs and software, etc.–have become what cigarettes are in prison, a currency, a token of value, a high voltage utility humming with options and futures. It is not necessary to have read them. Rather we are urged to imagine what they could mean to us; or, more accurately, to imagine what we would mean if we were the kind of people who had read them.

     

    This is to say that the intellectual capital economy has to some extent abandoned the idea of real, material value for one of utility. This abandonment is not unlike the kind that in a depressed real estate market leaves so-called “worthless” condos as empty towers in whose shadowy colonnades the homeless camp. Ideas of all sorts have their fifteen minute warholian half-life and then dissipate, and yet their structures remain. We have long ago stopped making real buildings in favor of virtual realities and holograms. The book has lost its privilege. For those who camped in its shadows, for the culturally homeless, this is not necessarily a bad thing. No less than the sitcom or the Nintendo cartridge, the book too is merely a fleeting, momentarily marketable, physical instantiation of the network. And the network, unlike the tower,is ours to inhabit.

     

    In the days before the remote control television channel zapper and modem port we used to think network meant the three wise men with the same middle initial: two with the same last name, NBC and ABC, and their cousin CBS. Now we increasingly know that the network is nothing less than what is put before us for use. Here in the network what makes value is, to echo the poet Charles Olson, knowing how to use yourself and on what. Networks build locally immediate value which we can plug into or not as we like. Thus the network redeems time for us. Already with remote control channel zapper in hand the most of us can track multiple narratives, headline loops, and touchdown drives simultaneously across cable transmissions and stratified time. In the network we know that what is of value is what can be used; and that we can shift values everywhere, instantly, individually, as we will.

     

    We live in what, in Writing Space, Jay Bolter calls the late age of print (Bolter 1991). Once one begins using a word processor to write fiction, it is easy to imagine that the same techne which makes it possible to remove the anguish from a minor character on page 251 of a novel manuscript and implant it within a formative meditation of the heroine on page 67 could likewise make it possible to write a novel which changes every time the reader reads it. Yet what we envision as a disk tucked into a book might easily become the opposite. The reader struggles against the electronic book. “But you can’t read it in bed,” she says, everyone’s last ditch argument. Fully a year after Sony first showed Discman, a portable, mini-CD the size of a Walkman, capable of holding 100,000 pages of text, a discussion on the Gutenberg computer network wanted to move the last ditch a little further. The smell of ink, one writer suggested; the crinkle of pages, suggests another.

     

    Meanwhile in far-off laboratories of the Military-InfotainmentComplex–to advance upon Stuart Moulthrop’s phrase (Moulthrop, 1989b)–at Warner, Disney or IBApple and MicroLotus, some scientists work on synchronous smell-o-vision with real time simulated fragrance degradation shifting from fresh ink to old mold; while others build raised-text touch screens with laterally facing windows that look and turn like pages, crinkling and sighing as they turn. “But the dog can’t eat it,” someone protests, and–smiling, silently–the scientists go back to their laboratories, bags of silicone kibbles over their shoulders.

     

    What we whiff is not the smell of ink but the smell of loss: of burning towers or men’s cigars in the drawing room. Hurry up please, it’s time. We are in the late age of print; the time of the book has passed. The book is an obscure pleasure like the opera or cigarettes. The book is dead, long live the book. A revolution enacts what a population already expresses: like eels to the Sargasso, 100 thousand videotapes annually return to a television show about home videos. In the land of polar mausolea, in this late age of print, swimming midst this undertow who will keep the book alive?

     

    In an age when more people buy and do not read more books than have ever been published before, often with higher advances than ever before, perhaps we will each become like the living books of Truffaut’s version of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, whose vestal readers walk along the meandering river of light just beyond the city of text. We face their tasks now, resisting what flattens us, re-embodying reading as movement, as an action rather than a thing, network out of book.

     

    We can re-embody reading if we see that the network is ours to inhabit. There are no technologies without humanities; tools are human structures and modalities. Artificial intelligence is a metaphor for the psyche, a contraption of cognitive psychology and philosophy; multimedia (even as virtual reality) is a metaphor for the sensorium, a perceptual gadget beholding to poetics and film studies. Nothing is quicker than the light of the word. In “Quickness,” one of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino writes:

     

    In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language. (Calvino 1988, 45)

     

    Following the true bent of the written language in the late age of print brings us to the topographic. “The computer,” Jay Bolter says,” changes the nature of writing simply by giving visual expression to our acts of conceiving and manipulating topics. “In the topographic city of text shape itself signifies, as in Warren Beatty’s literally brilliant rendering of the city of Dick Tracy. There the calm, commercial runes of marquee, placard, neon and shingle (DRUGS, LUNCHEONETTE, CINEMA) not only map the pathways of meaning and human intercourse, but they also shape and color the city itself and its inhabitants. Face and costume, facade and meander, river’s edge and central square, booth or counter, Trueheart or Breathless. “Electronic writing,” says Bolter

     

    is both a visual and verbal description. It is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics. Topographic writing challenges the idea that writing should be merely the servant of spoken language. The writer and reader can create and examine signs and structures on the computer screen that have no easy equivalent in speech. (Bolter 1991, 25)

     

    Ted Nelson, who coined the term hypertext in the 1960’s, more recently defined it as “non-sequential writing with reader controlled links.” Yet this characterization stops short of describing the resistance of this new object. For it is not merely that the reader can choose the order of what she reads but that her choices in fact become what it is.

     

    Let us say instead that hypertext is reading and writing electronically in an order you choose; whether among choices represented for you by the writer, or by your discovery of the topographic (sensual) organization of the text. Your choices, not the author’s representations or the initial topography, constitute the current state of the text. You become the reader-as-writer.

     

    We might note here that the word we want to describe the reader-as-writer already exists, although it is too latinate and bulky for contemporary use. Interlocutor has the correct sense of one conversant with the polylogue, as well as the right degrees of burlesque, badinage, and bricolage behind it. Even so, we will have to make do with–and may well benefit by extending–the comfortable term, reader.

     

    We may distinguish two kinds of hypertext according to their actions (Joyce, 1988). Exploratory hypertext, which most often occurs in read-only form, allows readers to control the transformation of a defined body of material. It is perhaps the type most familiar to you, if you have seen a Hypercard stack. (Note here that a stack is the name of the electronic texts created by this Apple product. There are other hypertext systems, such as Storyspace and Supercard for the Macintosh, or Guide for both the Macintosh and MS-DOS machines, and the newcomer ToolBook for the latter.)

     

    In the typical stack, the reader encounters a text (which may include sound and graphics, including video, animations, and what have you). She may choose what and how she sees or reads, either following an order the author has set out for her or creating her own. Very often she can retain a record of her choices in order to replay them later. More and more frequently in these documents she can compose her own notes and connect them to what she encounters, even copying parts from the hypertext itself.

     

    This kind of reading of an exploratory hypertext is what we might call empowered interaction. The transitional electronic text makes an uneasy marriage with its reader. It says: you may do these things, including some I have not anticipated.

     

    It is to an extent true that neither the author’s representations nor the initial topography but instead the reader’s choices constitute the current state of the text for her. In these exploratory hypertexts, however, the text does not transform or rearrange itself to embody this current state. The transitional electronic text is as yet a marriage without issue. Each of the reader’s additions lies outside the flow of the text, like Junior’s shack at the edge of the poster-colored city of Dick Tracy. The text may be seen as leading to what she adds to it, yet her addition is marginal, ghettoized. Stuart Moulthrop suggests that to the extent that hypertexts let a power structure “subject itself to trivial critiques in order to pre-empt any real questioning of authority . . . hypertext could end up betraying the anti-hierarchical ideals implicit in its foundation” (Moulthrop 1989a). Under such circumstances the reader’s interaction does not reorder the text, but rather conserves authority. She moves outside the pathways of meaning and human intercourse, unable to shape and color the city itself or its inhabitants.

     

    Even so, to the extent that the topographical writing of an exploratory hypertext lets readers create and examine signs and structures, it does make implicit the boundary which both marks and makes privilege or authority. In fact it has always been true that the interlocutory reader, let us say brooding alone in the reading room of the British Museum, might come to see this boundary. Attuned to organizational structures of production and reproduction, she might mark with Althusser, “the material existence of an ideological apparatus” of the state (Althusser 1971).

     

    But she might not be able to see quite as clearly or as quickly as she can see in the hypertext how the arena is organized to marginalize and diminish her. This is the trouble with hypertext, at any level: it is messy, it lets you see ghosts, it is always haunted by the possibility of other voices, other topographies, others’ governance.

     

    Print culture is as discretely defined and transparently maintained as the grounds of Disney World. There is no danger that new paths will be trod into the manicured lawns. Some would like to think this groundskeeping is a neutral decision, unladen, de-contextualized, removed from issues of empowerment, outside any reciprocal relationship. For the moment institutions of media, publishing, scholarship, and instruction depend upon the inertia of the aging technology of print, not just to withstand attack on established ideas, but to withstand the necessity to refresh and reestablish these ideas. In fact, hypermedia educators frequently advertise their stacks by featuring the fact that the primary materials are not altered by the webs of comments and connections made by students. This makes it easier to administer networks they say.

     

    Like the Irish king Cuchulain who fought the tide with his sword, they lose who would battle waves on the shores of light. The book is slow, the network is quick; the book is many of one, the network is many ones multiplied; the book is dialogic, the network polylogic.

     

    The second kind of hypertext, constructive hypertext, offers an electronic alternative to the grey ghetto alongside the river of light. Constructive hypertext requires a capability to create, change, and recover particular encounters within a developing body of knowledge. Like the network, conference, classroom or any other form of the electronic text, constructive hypertexts are “versions of what they are becoming, a structure for what does not yet exist” (Joyce 1988).

     

    As a true electronic text, the constructive hypertext differs from the transitional exploratory hypertext in that its interaction is reciprocal rather than empowered. The reader gives birth to the true electronic text. It says: what you do transforms what I have done, and allows you to do what you have not anticipated. “It is not just that [we] must make knowledge [our] own,” says Jerome Bruner in Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, but that we must do so “in a community of those who share [our] sense of culture” (Bruner 1986).

     

    A truly constructive hypertext will present the reader opportunities to recognize and deploy the existing linking structure in all its logic and nuance. That is, the evolving rhetoric must be manifest for the reader. She should be able to extend the existing structure and to transform it, harnessing it to her own uses. She should be able to predict that her own transformations of a hypertext will cause its existing elements to conform to her additions. While not merely taking on but surrendering the forefront to the newly focused tenor and substance of the interlocutory reader, the transformed text should continue to perform reliably in much the same way that it has for previous readers.

     

    Indeed, every reading of the transformed text should in some sense rehearse the transformation made by the interlocutory reader. If a reader, let us call her Ann, has read a particular text both before and after the intervention of the interlocutory reader, Beatrice, Ann’s experience of the text should have the familiar discomfort of recognition. Ann should realize Beatrice’s reading.

     

    Not surprisingly, the first efforts at developing truly constructive hypertexts have taken place in (hyper)fictions. afternoon (Joyce 1990) attempts to subvert the topography of the text by making every word seem as if it yields other possibilities, letting the reader imagine her own confirmations. This “letting” likely signifies a partially failed attempt, a text which empowers more than it reciprocates. In situating and criticizing afternoon, Stuart Moulthrop speculated, “a writing space [which] presumes a new community of readers, writers, and designers of media . . . [whose] roles would be much less sharply differentiated than they are now “(Moulthrop, 1989a).

     

    In attempting to develop such a community it becomes clear to hyperfiction writers that unless roles of author and reader are much less sharply differentiated, the silence will have no voice. Even interactive texts will live a lie. “In all claims to the story,” writes the Canadian poet Erin Moure,

     

    There is muteness.  The writer as
          witness, speaking the stories, is a lie, a liberal
                                                  bourgeois lie.
          Because the speech is the writer's speech, and each
                                                  word of the
          writer robs the witnessed of their own voice, muting
                                                  them. (Moure 1989, 84)

     

    Increasingly hyperfiction writers consider how the topographic (sensual) organization of the text might present reciprocal choices that constitute and transform the current state of the text. How, in the landscape of the city of text, can the reader know that what she builds will move the course of the river? How might what she builds present what Bruner calls an invitation to reflection and culture creating. In her poem, “Site Glossary,: Loony Tune Music,” Moure says

     

    witness as a concept is outdated in the countries of
          privilege, witness as tactic, the image as completed
          desktop publishing & the writer as accurate, the names
                                                  are
          sonorous & bear repeating tho there is no repetition
                                                  the
          throat fails to mark the trace of the individual voice
                                                  which
          entails loony tune music in this age (Moure 1989, 115)

     

    Hyperfictions seek to mark the trace with their own loony tune music. In Chaos Stuart Moulthrop has speculated a fiction which is consciously unfinished, fragmentary, open, one of emotional orientations and transformative encounters. John McDaid’s hyperfiction Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Fun House is an electronic world of notebooks, scrap papers, dealt but unplayed Tarot cards, souvenirs, segments, drafts, and tapes, unfinished in the way that death unfinishes us all (McDaid, 1991). In Izme Pass, their hyperfictional “deconstruction of priority,” Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry seek “to weave . . . [a] new work made not of the parts but the connections . . . [in order] to unmurk it a little, to form connection in time and space, but without respect to those constraints “(Guyer 1991b).

     

    While this may seem the same urge toward a novel which changes each time it is read, what has changed in the interim between novelist-at-word-processor and hyperfiction writer is that computer tools to accomplish these sorts of multiple texts have been built. Moreover hyperfiction writers have not only imagined and rendered them, but also and more importantly have begun to set out an aesthetic for a multiple fiction which yields to its readers in a reciprocal relationship.

     

    This sort of reciprocal relationship for electronic art has a conscious history in the late 20th century. In Glenn Gould’s essay “Strauss and the Electronic Future” (1964) he envisions a “multiple authorship responsibility in which the specific functions of the composer, the performer, and indeed the consumer overlap.” He expands this notion in his extraordinary essay, “The Prospects of Recording” (Gould 1966): “Because so many different levels of participation will, in fact, be merged in the final result, the individualized information concepts which define the nature of identity and authorship will become very much less imposing.”

     

    What joins the concerns of many of writers working with multiple fictions is nothing less than the deconstruction of priority involved in making identity and authorship much less imposing. “The fact in the human universe,” says Charles Olson, “is the discharge of the many (the multiple) by the one (yrself done right . . . is the thing–all hierarchies, like dualities, are dead ducks)” (Olson, 1974).

     

    These writers share a conviction that the nature of mind must not be fixed. It is not a transmission but a conversation we must keep open. “If structure is identified with the mechanisms of the mind,” says Umberto Eco, “then historical knowledge is no longer possible” (Eco, 1989). We redeem history when we put structure under question in the ways that narrative, hypertext and teaching each do in their essence. Narrative is the series of individual questions which marginalize accepted order and thus enact history. Hypertext links are no less than the trace of such questions, a conversation with structure. All three are authentically concerned with consciousness rather than information; with creating and preserving knowledge rather than with the mere ordering of the known. The value produced by the readers of hypertexts or by the students we learn with is constrained by systems which refuse them the centrality of their authorship. What is at risk is both mind and history.

     

    In Wim Wenders’ (and Peter Handke’s) film, Wings of Desire, the angels walk among the stacks and tables of a library, listening to the music within the minds of the individual readers. It is a scene of indescribable delicacy and melancholy both (one which makes you want to rush from the theatre and into the nearest library, there to read forever), into the midst of which, shuffling slowly up the carpeted stair treads, huffing at each stairwell landing, his nearly transparent hand touching on occasion against the place where his breastbone pounds beneath his suit and vest, comes an old man, his mind opening to an angel’s vision and to us in a winded, scratchy wheeze.

     

    “Tell me muse of the story-teller,” he thinks, “who was thrust to the end of the world, childlike ancient . . . .” The credits tell us later that this is Homer. “With time,” he thinks, “my listeners became my readers. They no longer sit in a circle, instead they sit apart and no one knows anything about the other . . . .”

     

    Homer’s is for us increasingly an old story. When print removed knowledge from temporality, Walter Ong reminds us, it interiorized the idea of discrete authorship and hierarchy. Ong envisioned a new orality (Ong 1982). In this case it is a film which restores the circle; likewise the “multiple authorship” of hypertext offers an electronic restoration of the circle.

     

    Although hypertext is an increasingly familiar cultural term, its artistic import is only beginning to be realized. In novels whose words and structures do not stay the same from one reading to another, ones in which the reader no longer sits apart but by her interaction, shapes and transforms.

     

    Shaping ourselves, we ourselves are shaped. This is the reciprocal relationship. It is likewise the elemental insight of the fractal geometry: that each contour is itself an expression of itself in finer grain. We have been talking so long about a new age, a technological age, an information age, etc., that we are apt to forget that it is we who fashion it, we who discover and recover it, we who shape it, we who literally give it form with how we use ourselves and on what.

     

    This organic reconstitution of the text may be what makes constructive hypertext the first instance of what we will come to conceive as the natural form of multimodal, multi-sensual writing: the multiple fiction,the true electronic text, not the transitional electronic analogue of a printed text like a hypertextual encyclopedia. Fictions like afternoon, WOE, Chaos, IZME PASS, or Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse can neither be conceived nor experienced in any other way. They are imagined and composed within their own idiom and electronic environment, not cobbled together from pre-ordained texts.

     

    For these fictions there will be no print equivalent, nor even a mathematical possibility of printing their variations. Yet this is in no way to suggest that these fictions are random on the one hand or artificial intelligence on the other. Merely that they are formational.

     

    What they form are instances of the new writing of the late age of print, what Jane Yellowlees Douglas terms “the genuine post-modern text rejecting the objective paradigm of reality as the great ‘either/or’ and embracing, instead, the ‘and/and/and’” (Douglas, 1991). The issues at hand are not technological but aesthetic, not what and where we shall read but how and why. These are issues which have been a matter of the deepest artistic inquiry for some time, and which share a wide and eclectic band of progenitors and a century or more of self-similar texts in a number of media.

     

    The layering of meaning and the simultaneity of multiple visions have gradually become comfortable notions to us, though they form the essence underlying the intermingled and implicating voices of Bach which Glenn Gould heard with such clarity. We are the children of the aleatory convergence. Our longing for multiplicity and simultaneity seems upon reflection an ancient one, the sole center of the whirlwind, the one silence.

     

    It is an embodied silence which the multiple fiction can render. We find ourselves at the confluence of twentieth century narrative arts and cognitive science as they approach an age of machine-based art, virtual realities, and what Don Byrd calls “proprioceptive coherence” (Byrd, 1991). The new writing requires rather than encourages multiple readings. It not only enacts these readings, it does not exist without them. Multiple fictions accomplish what its progenitors could only aspire to, lacking a topographic medium, light speed, electronic grace, and the willing intervention of the reader.

    Works Cited

     

    • Althusser, Louis. (1971) “Ideology and the State.” In Lenin, Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, New York and London: Monthly Review Press.
    • Bolter, Jay D. (1991) Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates.
    • Bruner, Jerome. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
    • Byrd, Don. “Cyberspace and Proprioceptive Coherence.” Paper presented at the Second International Conference on Cyberspace, Santa Cruz, Ca, April 20, 1991.
    • Calvino, Italo. (1988) Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
    • Gould, Glenn. (1964) “Strauss and the Electronic Future.” Saturday Review, May 30, 1964. Reprinted in The Glenn Gould Reader, Tim Page, ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf (1989).
    • —. (1966) “The Prospects of Recording.” High Fidelity, April,1966. Reprinted in The Glenn Gould Reader, Tim Page, ed.
    • Guyer, Carolyn and Martha Petry. “Izme Pass, a collaborative hyperfiction,” Writing on the Edge, 2 (2), bound-in computer disk, University of California at Davis, June 1991.
    • —. “Notes for Izma Pass Expose.” Writing on the Edge, 2 (2), University of California at Davis, June 1991.
    • Douglas, Jane Yellowlees. “The Act of Reading: the WOE Beginners’ Guide to Dissection,” Writing on the Edge, 2 (2).
    • Joyce, Michael. (1990a) afternoon, a story. Computer disk. Cambridge, MA: The Eastgate Press.
    • –. (1988) “Siren Shapes: Exploratory and Constructive Hypertexts.” Academic Computing 3 (4), 10-14, 37-42.
    • McDaid, John. (1991) Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse. Unpublished computer fiction.
    • Moulthrop, Stuart. (1991) CHAOS. Hyperfiction computer program, Atlanta, GA, 1991.
    • —. (1989a) In the Zones: Hypertext and the Politics of Inaphy on America, Proprioception, and Other Essays. Bolinas, CA: Four Seasons Foundation, 17 &19.
    • Moure, Erin. (1989) “Seebe” and “Site Glossary: Loony Tune Music.” In W S W (West Southwest) Montreal: Vehicule Press, 84 & 115.
    • Nelson, Ted. (1987) All for One and One for All. Hypertext ’87. Chapel Hill: ACM Proceedings.
    • Ong, Walter J. (1982) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York: Methuen.
    • Thurber, D. (1990) “Sony to Make Electronic Books: ‘Data Discman’ Player Will Use 3-Inch CDs.” Washington Post, (D9, D13) May 16.

     

  • The Marginalization of Poetry

    Bob Perelman

    University of Pennsylvania
    bperelme@pennsas

    If poems are eternal occasions, then 
the pre-eternal context for the following

was a panel on "The Marginalization
of Poetry" at the American Comp.

Lit. Conference in San Diego, on 
February 8, 1991, at 2:30 P.M.:

"The Marginalization of Poetry"--it almost 
goes without saying. Jack Spicer wrote, 

"No one listens to poetry," but 
the question then becomes, who is 

Jack Spicer? Poets for whom he 
matters would know, and their poems

would be written in a world
in which that line was heard,

though they'd scarcely refer to it. 
Quoting or imitating another poet's line 

is not benign, though at times 
the practice can look like flattery. 

In the regions of academic discourse,
the patterns of production and circulation

are different. There, it--again--goes 
without saying that words, names, terms

are repeatable: citation is the prime
index of power. Strikingly original language

is not the point; the degree 
to which a phrase or sentence 

fits into a multiplicity of contexts 
determines how influential it will be. 

"The Marginalization of Poetry": the words 
themselves display the dominant lingua franca 

of the academic disciplines and, conversely, 
the abject object status of poetry: 

it's hard to think of any 
poem where the word "marginalization" occurs. 

It is being used here, but 
this may or may not be 

a poem: the couplets of six 
word lines don't establish an audible 

rhythm; perhaps they haven't, to use 
the Calvinist mercantile metaphor, "earned" their

right to exist in their present
form--is this a line break 

or am I simply chopping up 
ineradicable prose? But to defend this 

(poem) from its own attack, I'll 
say that both the flush left 

and irregular right margins constantly loom 
as significant events, often interrupting what 

I thought I was about to 
write and making me write something 

else entirely. Even though I'm going 
back and rewriting, the problem still 

reappears every six words. So this, 
and every poem, is a marginal 

work in a quite literal sense.
Prose poems are another matter: but 

since they identify themselves as poems
through style and publication context, they 

become a marginal subset of poetry, 
in other words, doubly marginal. Now 

of course I'm slipping back into 
the metaphorical sense of marginal which, 

however, in an academic context is 
the standard sense. The growing mass 

of writing on "marginalization" is not 
concerned with margins, left or right 

--and certainly not with its own. 
Yet doesn't the word "marginalization" assume 

the existence of some master page 
beyond whose justified (and hence invisible) 

margins the panoplies of themes, authors, 
movements, general objects of study exist 

in all their colorful, handlettered marginality? 
This master page reflects the functioning 

of the profession, where the units
of currency are variously denominated prose: 

the paper, the article, the book.
All critical prose can be seen 

as elongated, smooth-edged rectangles of writing, 
the sequences of words chopped into 

arbitrary lines by typesetters (Ruth in 
tears amid the alien corn), and 

into pages by commercial bookmaking processes. 
This violent smoothness is the visible 

sign of the writer's submission to 
norms of technological reproduction. "Submission" is 

not quite the right word, though: 
the finesse of the printing indicates 

that the author has shares in 
the power of the technocratic grid; 

just as the citations and footnotes 
in articles and university press books

are emblems of professional inclusion. But 
hasn't the picture become a bit 

binary? Aren't there some distinctions to 
be drawn? Do I really want 

to invoke Lukacs's antinomies of bourgeois 
thought where rather than a conceptually 

pure science that purchases its purity 
at the cost of an irrational 

and hence foul subject matter we 
have the analogous odd couple of 

a centralized, professionalized, cross-referenced criticism
                                                         studying
marginalized, inspired (i.e., amateur), singular poetries? 

Do I really want to lump 
The Closing of the American Mind, 

Walter Jackson Bate's biography of Keats, 
and Anti-Oedipus together and oppose them

to any poem which happens to 
be written in lines? Doesn't this 

essentialize poetry in a big way?
Certainly some poetry is thoroughly opposed 

to prose and does depend on 
the precise way it's scored onto 

the page: beyond their eccentric margins, 
both Olson's Maximus Poems and Pound's 

Cantos tend, as they progress, toward 
the pictoral and gestural: in Pound 

the Chinese ideograms, musical scores, hieroglyphs, 
heart, diamond, club, and spade emblems, 

little drawings of the moon and 
of the winnowing tray of fate; 

or those pages late in Maximus 
where the orientation of the lines 

spirals more than 360 degrees--one 
spiralling page is reproduced in holograph. 

These sections are immune to standardizing 
media: to quote them you need 

a photocopier not a word processor. 
In a similar vein, the work 

of some contemporary writers associated more 
or less closely with the language 

movement avoids standardized typographical grids and 
is as self-specific as possible: Robert 

Grenier's Sentences, a box of 500 
poems printed on 5 by 8 

notecards, or his recent work in 
holograph, often scrawled; the variable leading 

and irregular margins of Larry Eigner's 
poems; Susan Howe's writing which uses 

the page like a canvas--from 
these one could extrapolate a poetry 

where publication would be a demonstration 
of private singularity approximating a neo-Platonic
 

vanishing point, anticipated by Klebnikov's handcolored, 
single-copy books produced in the twenties. 

Such an extrapolation would be inaccurate 
as regards the writers I've mentioned, 

and certainly creates a false picture 
of the language movement, some of 

whose members write very much for 
a if not the public. But 

still there's another grain of false 
truth to my Manichean model of 

a prosy command-center of criticism and 
unique bivouacs on the poetic margins 

so I'll keep this binary in 
focus for another spate of couplets. 

Parallel to such self-defined poetry, there's 
been a tendency in some criticism 

to valorize if not fetishize the 
unrepeatable writing processes of the masters

--Gabler's Ulysses where the drama of 
Joyce's writing mind becomes the shrine 

of a critical edition; the facsimile 
of Pound's editing-creation of what became 

Eliot's Waste Land; the packets into 
which Dickinson sewed her poems, where  

the sequences possibly embody a higher 
order; the notebooks in which Stein 

and Toklas conversed in pencil: having 
seen them, works like Lifting Belly 

can easily be read as interchange 
between bodily writers or writerly bodies 

in bed. The feeling that three's 
a crowd there is called up 

and cancelled by the print's intimacy 
and tact. In all these cases, 

the particularity of the author's mind, 
body, and situation is the object 

of the reading. But it's time 
to dissolve or complicate this binary.

What about a work like Glas? 
--hardly a dully smooth critical monolith.

Doesn't it use the avant-garde (ancient 
poetic adjective!) device of collage more 

extensively than most poems? Is it 
really all that different from, 

say, the Cantos? (Yes. The Cantos's 
incoherence reflects Pound's free-fall writing situation; 

Derrida's institutional address is central. Derrida's 
cut threads, unlike Pound's, always reappear 

farther along.) Nevertheless Glas easily outstrips 
most contemporary poems in such "marginal" 

qualities as undecidability and indecipherability--not 
to mention the 4 to 10 margins 

on each page. Compared to it, 
these poems look like samplers upon 

which are stitched the hoariest platitudes. 
Not to wax polemical: there've been 

plenty of attacks on the voice 
poem, the experience poem, the numerous 

mostly free verse descendants of Wordsworth's 
spots of time: first person meditations 

where the meaning of life becomes 
visible after 30 lines. In its 

own world, this poetry is far 
from marginal: widely published and taught, 

it has established substantial means of 
reproducing itself. But with its distrust 

of intellectuality (apparently indistinguishable from
                                             overintellectuality)
and its reliance on authenticity as 

its basic category of judgment (and 
the poems principally exist to be 

judged), it has become marginal with 
respect to the more theory-oriented sectors 

of the university, the sectors which 
have produced such concepts as "marginalization." 

As a useful antidote, let me 
quote Glas: "One has to understand 

that he is not himself before 
being Medusa to himself. . . . To be 

oneself is to-be-Medusa'd . . . . Dead sure of 
self. . . . Self's dead sure biting (death)." 

Whatever this might mean, and it's
possibly aggrandizingly post-feminist, man swallowing woman,

nevertheless it seems a step toward 
a more communal and critical way 

of writing and thus useful. The 
puns and citations that lubricate Derrida's 

path, making it too slippery for 
all but experienced cake walkers are 

not the point. What I want 
to propose in this anti-generic or 

over-genred writing is the possibility, not 
of genreless writing, but rather of 

a polygeneric, hermaphroditic writing. Glas, for 
all its transgression of critical decorum 

is still, in its treatment of 
the philosophical tradition, a highly decorous 

work; it is marginalia, and the 
master page of Hegel is still 

Hegel, and Genet is Hegel too. 
But a self-critical writing, poetry, minus 

the shortcircuiting rhetoric of vatic privilege, 
might dissolve the antinomies of marginality.

  • Literary Ecology and Postmodernity in Thomas Sanchez’s Mile Zero and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland

    Daniel R. White

    University of Central Florida
    <fdwhite@ucf1vm>

     

    Images are more real than anyone could have supposed. And just because they are an unlimited resource, one that cannot be exhausted by consumerist waste, there is all the more reason to apply the conservationist remedy. If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

     

    –Susan Sontag, On Photography (180)

     

    Renaissance humanist Giordano Bruno argued in the persona of the god Momus that “the gods have given intellect and hands to man and have made him similar to them, giving him power over other animals. This consists in his being able not only to operate according to his nature and to what is usual, but also to operate outside the laws of nature, in order that by forming or being able to form other natures, other paths, other categories, with his intelligence, by means of that liberty without which he would not have the above-mentioned similarity, he would succeed in preserving himself as god of the earth” (205). It was in the spirit of this quest to become “god of the earth” that the Father of Francis Bacon’s utopian Salomon’s house explains, “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and the secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of the human empire, to the effecting of all things possible” New Atlantis 210). The epistemology of the new human empire was to be founded on a combination of Cartesian rationality seated in the individual human reason–the cogito–and Baconian empiricism. The cogito is the unit of mind, the subject, which endeavors to understand and control the supposedly material and mechanistic realm of nature. But is this definition of mind correct and is the Modern project stemming from the Renaissance–for the technological domination of nature–taking us where we want to go? The modernist project has been challenged by two important bodies of theory, which I have elsewhere argued (White 1991) are intrinsically related: postmodernity and ecology. Here I intend to argue that there is a new, literary contender.

     

    The literary challenge to the modernist view of man and nature comes in the form of what I would like to define as a new genre: literary ecology.1 It is a species, or perhaps I should say with Deleuze and Guattari a rhizomic offshoot, of that broad critique of modernism known as postmodernity. (Postmodern-“ism” sounds hopelessly modernist.) It is a “literature” that fundamentally undermines the premises of modernity at their foundation– the subject of power–and by implication would tumble the entire domain circumscribed by the Enlightened entrepreneur of the West. It is a literature of guerilla warfare amidst the Thousand Plateaus of the ecological mind, whose textual strategies, like those of the Viet Cong, threaten at least the self-image, the simulacrum, of the great American technological utopia, the one which is reflected in Baudrillard’s sunglasses at Disney World. Thomas Pynchon probably defines the genre best by his work in Vineland, just as he exemplified postmodernity in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) after which the sensitive “reader” gleaned, if she or he were still sufficiently undecentered to navigate, with Pynchon’s imago of Dorothy: “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more . . . ” (279). Now with Vineland and Thomas Sanchez’s Mile Zero, another originary work in the genre, we are entering a new post. WHAT IS LITERARY ECOLOGY?

     

    Literary ecological theory stands, like Pynchon’s work itself according to some critics, with one foot on traditional metaphysical ground and one in the postmodern void.2 What is traditional in literary ecology is the acceptance of a value hierarchy, namely the Great Chain of Being, stemming from the classical and medieval worlds. The most salient feature of the Chain for the human condition, Dwight Eddins argues following Eric Voegelin, is that it represents a metaxic tension between spiritual order and material chaos:

     

                                 Divine--Nous
                            Psyche--Noetic
                           Psyche--Passions
                             Animal Nature
                           Vegetative Nature
                    Apeiron--Depth [the limitless]

     

    The Divine Nous represents the upper limit of the human quest for spiritual fulfillment, not attainable in the flesh but a necessary eschaton or goal for human striving. “The substitution of a finite, purely ‘human’ eschaton for the infinitely receding nousmeans the negation of the spiritual (noetic) quest that produces the real order of the human,” Eddins explains. “The metaxic tension collapses, and man is pulled by apeirontic vectors through lower and lower levels of his being . . . ” (22). The Gnostic quest is to appropriate the Nous to attain the all-too-human goals of power and control, on the part of an elite–THEM in Pynchon–possessed of Gnosis, over lower orders of being, the Preterite–US. The quest to become a noetic power elite sets up a paranoid cycle of oppression:

     

    For the gnostic elite . . . the alien world is a thing to be "overcome" . . . the elite experience, ironically, a preterite paranoia that drives them to seek mastery through their elite gnosis; but in so doing they define a new preterite in those who are not privy to this plexus of knowledge and power, but are pawns to be manipulated in its service. This preterity, in turn, can escape preterition only by adopting the power techniques of their masters; but in the very act they naturally tend to become--in Wordsworth's phrase--"Oppressors in their turn." (23)

     

    Eddins’ discussion is too early to have included Vineland, but what better description of the relationship between its oppressor and oppressed, Brock Vond and Frenesi Gates, and their victims?

     

    What is new in literary ecology’s appropriation of the old paradigm is that this description of the traditional hierarchy and its demise is also employed, even while it foregrounds human beings and their immediate concerns, as a paradigmatic description of an ecological crisis: of what communication theorist Anthony Wilden, commenting on the emerging Cartesian and Lockean ideas of the individual, calls “splitting the ecosystem”3:

     

    One of the truly representative characteristics of the Lockean individual, as of the Cartesian one, is that it replicates in its own organization that SPLITTING OF THE ECOSYSTEM . . . with which the Age of Discovery opened the world to colonialism and to the specifically modern domination of nature. . . . It is a splitting of the subject in this world in which the supposedly dominant part--mind--not only 'controls' the rest (it is believed)--i.e., the body--but mind actually OWNS the body. (xli)

     

    Capitalism, Wilden argues, splits the ecosystem not only by bifurcating the individual into mind and body, the one controller and the other to be controlled, but also by dividing society into bourgeoisie and proletariat, the modern social and economic form of owner and owned. Furthermore, Wilden argues, the traditional hierarchic relation between “nature” and “culture” or “nature” and “society” is as follows:

     

                             Land (Photosynthesis)
                  Labor Potential (Creative Capacity)
                               Capital.
     Land precedes and makes possible labor potential which
     precedes and makes possible the extraction of capital.  But
     capitalism through "commoditization" inverts the hierarchy:
                                Capital
                            Labor Potential
                             Land. (xxxv)

     

    Capital is used to control labor potential which is used to exploit land. Underlying this system is the entrepreneurial persona, the new “god of the earth” envisioned by Bruno, and perhaps even more vividly by Francis Bacon: “I am come in very truth leading Nature to you, with all her children, to bind her to your service and to make her your slave . . . . So may I succeed in my only earthly wish, namely to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised bounds . . . ” (from The Masculine Birth of Time, or the Great Instauration of the Domination of Man over the Universe [1603], cited in Wilden xxxv-xxxvi). Nature is, of course, female and her children are the proletariat, the third world, whatever can be bought. Luckily, preterite like St. Cloud in Mile Zero and Zoyd in Vineland stubbornly resist: thus the socialist ecological stance of literary ecologists, evident both in Pynchon and Sanchez.

     

    The gnostic, entrepreneurial splitting of the hierarchy of being also breaks down the metaxy, in ecological terms the dynamic equilibrium, of the Great Chain. In cybernetic language ecosystems may be viewed as hierarchies, or heterarchies, which exhibit tendencies toward both homeostasis and runaway. As Gregory Bateson explains,

     

    All biological and evolving systems (i.e., individual organisms, animal and human societies, ecosystems, and the like) consist of complex cybernetic networks, and all such systems share certain formal characteristics. Each system contains subsystems which are potentially regenerative, i.e., which would go into exponential "runaway" if uncorrected. (Examples of such regenerative components are Malthusian characteristics of population, schismogenic changes of personal interaction, armaments races, etc.). (447)

     

    Consider population, for example. Prey, unconstrained by traditional predators, will increase in population until limited by some other factor, perhaps disastrously by overpopulation which can decimate the population. So too, if man sprinkles his produce with DDT and kills off the bird population, the insects which were the original target of the poison will increase all the more rapidly unconstrained by their original predator and have to be “exterminated” by more toxin.

     

    This kind of degenerative cycle is what Eddins calls, in language which echoes cybernetics, “modes of slippage inherent in the noetic distortions of gnosticism [which] are peculiarly relevant to the metaphysical force fields of Pynchon’s cosmos: the instability of the elite-preterite dichotomy and the distinction between secular and religious constructs” (23). In other words, Brock and Frenesi and those that he, then she, betrays are caught in the logic of ecological runaway, what Joseph Slade Thomas Pynchon 125) has called “excluded middles and bad shit” in reference to the plight of Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49: under the Reagan-Bush version of the Entrepreneurial New World Order, you must either become a pawn of the new gnostic elite or sink more deeply into preterition. And if you want to fight back, you must also become like the gnostic elite: you must split the mental/cultural/social/natural ecosystem for the sake of power, to switch roles from Oppressed to Oppressor so that the original split in the human ecology escalates in what Bateson called the Romano-Palestinian System.4 This is the koan with which many of Pynchon’s worthy characters are presented.

     

    What is postmodern in literary ecology is that its strategy for escaping from the impossible polarities of the koan is to step out of the traditional ego of the West and into an expanded and more fluid definition of “mind.” This new definition of mind, explicit in the texts of Bateson, is what in effect gives literary ecology its deep-ecological dimension.

     

    Bateson developed mental ecology in part as a critique both of Darwin and of the premises of the Western episteme mentioned at the outset. His argument is that if we accept the cybernetic theory of “self-correctiveness as the criterion of thought,” and the information-theoretical notion that an idea is definable as a “difference,” then these criteria are not limited to the human individual. Consider a man with a computer, Bateson argues.

     

    What "thinks" and engages in "trial and error" is the man plus the computer plus the environment. And the lines between man, computer and environment are purely artificial, fictitious lines. They are lines across the pathways along which information or difference is transmitted. (491)

     

    The result of this critique is a fundamental redefinition of the unit of mind:

     

    If, now, we correct the Darwinian unit of survival to include the environment and the interaction between organism and environment, a very strange and surprising identity emerges: the unit of evolutionary survival turns out to be identical with the unit of mind. (491)

     

    If this is true, Bateson concludes, then we are faced with a number of important changes in our thinking, especially in ethics. It means, for instance, that mind–the Nous of the Great Chain–becomes immanent in the entire ecological and evolutionary structure (466)5 and that, “Ecology, in the widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (i.e. differences, complexes of differences, etc.) in circuits” (491).6 It also turns out that epistemological error is ecological error:

     

    When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise "What interests me is me, or my organization, or my species," you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure. You decide that you want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that Lake Erie is part of your wider eco-mental system--and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience. (492)

     

    In other words epistemological and ecological error are identical with the modernist paradigm and its industrial project. The literary-ecological correction of the error in Vineland is arguably an extension of what Eddins calls “Orphic Naturalism” in Gravity’s Rainbow: “a counterreligion to the worship of mechanism, power, and– ultimately–death” (5).

     

    Plumwood (1991) criticizes deep ecology from an ecofeminist perspective in terms reminiscent of those I have used to characterize the literary ecological attack on the Cartesian cogito. She argues that

     

    In inferiorizing such particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments [e.g. those emphasized by Pynchon and Sanchez], deep ecology gives us another variant on the superiority of reason and the inferiority of its contrasts, failing to grasp yet again the role of reason and incompletely critiquing its influence . . . . we must move toward the sort of ethics feminist theory has suggested, which can allow for both continuity and difference and for ties to nature which are expressive of the rich, caring relationships of kinship and friendship rather than increasing abstraction and detachment from relationship. (16)

     

    Literary ecology arguably provides exactly this rich sense of connectedness and particularity, as the texts discussed below suggest.

     

    Bateson’s language reveals the instrumental bias of Western science, as he describes nature in terms of a computer metaphor involving “circuits,” “units” and “system.” Yet he suggests what is fundamental to a more viable, ecological philosophy based on a genuine recognition and respect for the ecological other: the attribution of mind to nature. As Plumwood argues, “Humans have both biological and mental characteristics, but the mental rather than the biological have been taken to be characteristic of the human and to give what is ‘fully and authentically’ human. The term ‘human’ is, of course, not merely descriptive but very much an evaluative term setting out an ideal: it is what is essential or worthwhile in the human that excludes the natural” (17). This attribution of “mind” to “man” and materiality to “nature,” characteristic of the Cartesian dualism of res cogitans as the human cogito and res extensa as the objective world, and further expressed in the masculine subject of power dominating “mother” nature, as it is in the entrepreneurial persona who owns the world as his “real estate,” is arguably one of the principal targets of the literary ecological critique. Thus literary ecology embodies a synthesis of ecosocialist, deep ecological and ecofeminist concerns, but approaches them in terms of a postmodern ecological rubric which steps past the traditional either-or of the Oppressor and Oppressed, Elite and Preterite, Sacred and Secular, as deftly as Pynchon’s Ninjette DL (Darryl Louise Chastain) slips past Brock Vond’s guards.

     

    The Origins of Literary Ecology7

     

    “The Age of Ecology began on the desert outside Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945, with a dazzling fireball of light and a swelling mushroom cloud of radioactive gasses,” argues Donald Worster in Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. The genesis of literary ecology is part of the larger history of ecological ideas, and will require a separate discussion. Here let me at least make of few suggestions about its origins. The Ecological idea stems from the 18th century, as Worster has demonstrated, but it rose into popular consciousness startled by the perception, evoked by the Bomb, that nature itself is vulnerable like the frail human beings within it. Worster continues, “As that first nuclear fission bomb went off and the color of the early morning sky changed abruptly from pale blue to blinding white, physicist and project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer felt at first a surge of elated reverence; then a somber phrase from the Bhagavad-Gita flashed into his mind: ‘I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds’” (339). Popular ecology, as Worster also demonstrates, has roots in Romanticism and, indeed, the intuition of the Romantic writers formed the basis upon which the clearer outlines of ecological science would be patterned. As Goethe wrote, in the character of Young Werther,

     

    When the mists in my beloved valley steam all around me; when the sun rests on the surface of the impenetrable depths of my forest at noon and only single rays steal into the inner sanctum; when I lie in the tall grass beside a rushing brook and become aware of the remarkable diversity of a thousand little growing things on the ground, with all their peculiarities; when I can feel the teeming of a minute world amid the blades of grass and the innumerable, unfathomable shapes of worm and insect closer to my heart . . . ah, my dear friend . . . but I am ruined by it. I succumb to its magnificence. (24)

     

    This is not unlike the feeling which drew the “flower children” back to nature in the 1960’s, articulated and sustained in the writings of Edward Abbey and Annie Dillard. Romantic writing was in direct response to the urbanization and mechanization of life effected by the Industrial Revolution, just as popular ecology is largely a response to what Mumford called the Megamachine of modern technology, economy, society and polity which has destroyed and displaced much of the human lifeworld, of “Earth House Hold” in the words of poet Gary Snyder. An incipient ecological sensibility is also evident in the “persistent modernist nostalgia for vanished axiological foundations in the midst of vividly experienced anomie” which Eddins finds in the work of Pynchon and is perhaps most vividly expressed, virtually in ecological dimension, by T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land. Here images of a fouled, poisoned environment merge with those of human spiritual and physical demise–

     

                                 Unreal City,
                 Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
              A Crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
              I had not thought death had undone so many.

               A rat crept softly through the vegetation
                 Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
                 While I was fishing in the dull canal

                           The river sweats
                           Oil and tar . . .

     

    –amidst a culture which is shattered but whose very shards inspire hope of renewal: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Additionally, the fusion of human imagination with nature’s images, as well as the adamant leftist politics, characteristic of Magical Realism, for example in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch, is arguably an important forebear, and Carlos Fuentes’ recent Christopher Unborn I might well have included with Mile Zero and Vineland as an example of literary ecology, except for its problematic representation of gender. African literature is also a likely ancestor of the genre, for example Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart where the fragmentation of tribal society under the impact of European colonialism is explored, as it is in American literature by Peter Matthiessen, with regard to South American Indians, in another likely progenitor, At Play in the Fields of the Lord. Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell presents a profound fusion of the human mind with nature’s, as her Golden Notebook reflects on feminist and socialist alternatives, both dimensions of which come together and are uplifted and transformed (Aufhebung) in her Canopus in Argos: Archives, especially Shikasta. Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and Galapagos should not be overlooked in the search for LitEcol ancestors and, particularly where Pynchon is concerned, I would look up from these printed artifacts and seriously review the adventures of Tweety and Sylvester Vineland22).

     

    More broadly, however, I suggest that the genealogy of literary ecology includes photography, film, painting, architecture and other arts, especially video, as well as the sciences, especially information theory and cybernetics. I suggest that this is true because literary ecology is a new communicational form, a new language practice, which has evolved or leapt into being through the postmodern “trialectic” of ecology, neomarxism, and feminism in the context of what Mark Poster has defined as The Mode of Information. Going beyond Marshall McLuhan’s axiom that “the medium is the message,” which he argues is based on Locke’s “‘sensorium’ of the receiving subject,” Poster contends,

     

    What the mode of information puts in question, however, is not simply the sensory apparatus but the very shape of subjectivity: its relation to the world of objects, its perspective on that world, its location in that world. We are confronted not so much by a change from a "hot" to a "cool" communications medium, or by a reshuffling of the sensoria, as McLuhan thought, but by a generalized destabilization of the subject. (15)

     

    In this new mode the modernist Cartesian rationalist subject, as well as his empiricist Lockean conterpart, is, like Tyrone Slothrop, dispersed into more dynamic, nomadic kind of mind, the very one animating literary ecology. As Poster continues,

     

    In the mode of information the subject is no longer located in a point in absolute time/space, enjoying a physical, fixed vantage point from which rationally to calculate its options. Instead it is multiplied by databases, dispersed by computer messaging and conferencing, decontextualized and redefined by TV ads, dissolved and materialized continuously in the electronic transmission of symbols. In the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari, we are being changed from "arborial" beings, rooted in time and space, to "rhizomic" nomads who daily wander at will (whose will remains a question) across the globe . . . . (15)

     

    Literary Ecology in Mile Zero & Vineland

     

    Postmodern, as Charles Jencks defines it in relation to architecture but with clear ramifications for the other arts, refers to

     

    double coding: the combination of Modern techniques with something else (usually traditional building) in order for architecture to communicate with the public and a concerned minority, usually other architects. (14, Jencks' emphasis)

     

    Certainly Gravity’s Rainbow is at least doubly coded, employing multiple genres and styles, tragedy and comedy, narrative and song, even a character Tyrone Slothrop who does not win or lose or live or die in the end but is, like the subject of the mode of information, dispersed; a plot which is superimposed on the trajectory of a V2 rocket; chapter headings which are fitted with (pictures of) sprocket holes; and a closing apocalyptic poem over which we, suddenly transformed from solitary readers to a crowd of movie-goers, are supposed to envision a bouncing ball.

     

    Literary ecologists, as postmodernists, use traditional literary forms in new ways. Both Sanchez and Pynchon employ regional realism, for instance, through their sense of place particularizing and enriching their larger ecological sensibility. Sanchez focuses on the rich biotic and human community of Key West and the Caribbean; his book is peopled with human folkways and natural life forms which are depicted sympathetically and in careful detail. The invaders from the North are also present, the focus of Sanchez’s historical, social, cultural and ultimately ecological critique. “It is about water,” his novel begins:

     

    It was about water in the beginning, it will be in the end. The ocean mothered us all. Water and darkness awaiting light. Night gives birth. An inkling of life over distant sea swells toward brilliance. Dawn emerges from Africa, strikes light between worlds, over misting mountains of Haiti, beyond the Great Bahama Bank, touching cane fields of Cuba, across the Tropic of Cancer to the sleeping island of Key West, farther to the Gold Coast of Florida, its great wall of condominiums demarcating mainland America. (3)

     

    Characterization is also given significant human- ecological dimension. Consider Sanchez’s representation of Justo–the African-Cuban cop who is Sanchez’s best candidate for heroism–typical of the literary-ecological concern not only with nature but also with human history and genealogy. Like Pynchon in Vineland, Sanchez gives his character dimension by tracing his connections over the generations of an extended family. This family connects Justo, not only socially, but also politically, with the oppressed, and ecologically, with the environment which has meant their livelihood. As Justo makes his way down Olivia street in Key West, the sight of a vanished Cuban groceria prompts him to reminisce about his boyhood, his grandfather, Abuelo, and grandmother Pearl, and her father: “Pearl’s father was an Ibu, brought to the Bahamas as a boy in chains from West Africa and freed fifteen years later in 1838 by the British. Freed by the very ones who had enslaved him, given a dowry of no money and a new name in a white man’s world, John Coe” (69). Sanchez characterizes Coe in part by his livelihood:

     

    John Coe became a student of the sea when freed. The sea became John's new master. Turtles attracted him first, their gliding nonchalance, so few flipper strokes needed to navigate through a watery universe, an economy of effort worth emulating, which bespoke ancient liberation from the here and now. John felt kinship with his marine creature's abiding sense of ease, its deep breadth of freedom. John was as simple man who knew not the turtle's source of symbolic power, he understood only the animal's daily inspiration. John learned the ways of the thousand-pound leatherback and loggerhead turtles . . . . He studied eight- hundred-fifty-pound gentle greens . . . . He gained respect for the small fifty-pound hawksbill . . . . (69)

     

    Coe’s sense of loving “familiarity,” in the original sense of this term, with the sea and its creatures overlaps with his love and respect for his wife, Brenda Bee. John chances upon her as she is being sold at a slave auction. When “The Well-dressed gentlemen in the crowd from Charleston and Mobile didn’t see anything of value in Brenda” because she is ill and half starved, “John Coe bought himself a wife in a town where a man of dark skin was not allowed to walk the streets after the nine-thirty ringing of the night bell, unless he bore a pass from his owner or employer, or was accompanied by a white person” (74). And he plays the role of healer and nurturer for her:

     

    As John bathed Brenda's bony body with the humped softness of his favorite sheepswool sponge he vowed to treat this woman with kindness, drive the unspeakable terror from her eyes. John spoke to Brenda in a tongue she could understand, touched her only in a healing way. John brought Brenda red cotton dresses, strolled with her hand in hand on saturday eves down the rutted dirt length of Crawfish Alley, stopping to tip his cap to folks cooling themselves on the front wooden steps of their shacks. John planted a papaya tree behind his shack and a mango in front, for on sundays the preacher man swayed in the stone church before the congregation tall as an eluthera palm in a high wind, shouting his clear message that the Bible teaches to plant the fruiting tree. (74)

     

    The “particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments” which Plumwood (above) argues are “inferiorized” by Cartesian rationality are cultivated here and carefully interwoven with images of nature and of the sacred. Remember that all of this is, furthermore, in the memory of Justo, giving the character full human-ecological dimension.

     

    Women are not always the needy recipients of male nurture in Mile Zero. Another of Sanchez’s major characters, St. Cloud, a Vietnam veteran who begins and ends his days imbibing “Jamaica’s finest” rum, and who at one time “was still a happily married and cheating husband” (112), now must contend with being cuckolded by a woman who has clearly replaced him in his wife, Evelyn’s, affections. He also turns voyeur, watching like a latter-day Adam deserted by Eve, from her garden:

     

    He leaned against the smoothed trunk of a banyan, deep in shadow. Through the open shutters of Evelyn's bedroom a ladder of light was cast into the garden, its last bright step falling at St. Cloud's feet . . . Images of two women inside flickered insistent as a silent movie through slatted shutters. (98)

     

    The erotica in this “cinematic” display are empowered with speech, however, and the ability to shatter St. Cloud’s filmic illusions.

     

    The shutters flew open in the rainy breeze, scorpions slithered up bedroom walls. Evelyn rose from the swell of a female sea. Intruding rain mixed with sweat of exposed skin. She leaned forward to claim the banging shutters, arms outstretched from the swing of her breasts. She paused. Her words cast into rain hissing across the garden before the shutters enclosed her. "Good night, St. Cloud." (99)

     

    Sanchez repeatedly identifies women with the powers of nature, not with passive real estate to be exploited. In this regard, both Evelyn and Angelica, another prominent character, have significant tattoos:

     

    St. Cloud followed the heave of Evelyn's breathing. The green and red bloom of a tattooed rose blossomed at the top of her breast in dawn light stabbing through the salt-streaked glass porthole above the narrow berth." (5)

     

    Angelica moved her body in a single fluid motion, unassuming as a woman stepping from a bath, an improbable Aphrodite rising from a quivering sea of light in high heels. The octopus tattoo on her right breast spread its tentacles as she exhaled a slight breath.(112)

     

    What, in addition to kinship between women and the living beings of the natural world–the rose, the octopus–do these tattooed breasts signify? Angelica is modeling for an artist who admits, in response to his homosexual son, Renoir’s, request in their discussion of women, “‘Why don’t you ask Angelica what she feels?’”:

     

    "I don't have to ask her anything. I know what women think about me. They teach me in history of Women's art. College after college they hold me up as the enemy. Because I know their secret they stalk me through seminars, eviscerate my virility, study the fetid male entrails." (115)

     

    St. Cloud, also present at this transformation of the female body into art, is not so sure that the artist knows the “secret” at all, and sees something quite different in the figure:

     

    In the glittering bedroom light Angelica's breasts held the naked thrust of challenge St Cloud witnessed years before in the submarine pen. It was an unsettling recognition of sexual origins, when civilizations were controlled by women. Watching Angelica turn slowly in the room, totally exposed within a circle of men, St. Cloud groped for meaning through the alcoholic swamp of his steaming brain. Maybe it was man's desire never to let woman rise again. Keep her under heel and thumb. Never allow Pandora to release the awesome power from the box. (114)

     

    The power of femininity is combined, as the images in the foregoing passages suggest, with that of nature, and both are conjoined with the political cause of the oppressed. St. Cloud, by the way, as his feminist epiphany above suggests, is a respectable schlemiel, like Zoyd in Vineland, who finds a way out of self-pity by working as a translator for Haitian refugees.

     

    Pynchon’s regional realism is set in the Pacific Northwest, the great redwood forests of Northern California, in Vineland, and in the varied culture of the local inhabitants, most of whom are victims and refugees, ex- hippies, Thanatoids, the North American tribe who attempted to get back to the land and ended up on a kind of political reservation sandwiched between suburbs and overshadowed by government surveillance. His specific focus is on the remnants of the American radical tradition, those elements of the great European Invasion of North America who–from Thoreau to Bob Dylan–more or less sided with the Indians and wanted to call the whole thing off. Now they watch T.V. Vineland, the name given to the North American wilderness by the Vikings, is a place of very special significance, a territory upon which different stages of civilization have imposed their maps, but which holds a primitive mystery resistant to interpretation or translation into urban sprawl.8

     

    Someday this would be all part of Eureka--Crescent City--Vineland megalopolis, but for now the primary sea coast, forest, riverbanks and bay were still not much different from what early visitors in Spanish and Russian Ships had seen . . . log keepers not known for their psychic gifts had remembered to write down, more than once, the sense that they had of some invisible boundary, met when approaching from the sea, past capes of somber evergreen, the stands of redwood with their perfect trunks and cloudy foliage, too high, too red to be literal trees--carrying therefore another intention, which the Indians might have know about but did not share. (317)

     

    Both novelists use traditional literary devices in new ways which constitute double coding. By far the most interesting of these is narrative. Both Sanchez and Pynchon reframe the perspective of traditional human narrators to include what Gregory Bateson would call the mind of nature. Sanchez speaks explicitly from the standpoint of a persona, almost like the deep self of Hinduism, Atman, identical with the unmanifest spiritual power underlying the manifest world, Brahman, except with a this-worldly ecological twist. (Pynchon’s character Weed Atman, mathematics professor and circumstantial radical leader, similarly adds a transcendental dimension, satirically drawn, in Vineland.) For the narrator employs a host of images and apocalyptic forebodings as if spoken directly from the person of the earth which not only condemns American civilization but also, paradoxically, turns out to be none other than you and I. Thus we are also telling the story, both reader and author, both critic and castigated, finding the natural diversity of our larger selves in the variegated patterns of human, plant, animal, amphibian, and fish life while at the same time finding the mirror of ourselves in their destruction. But is this a transcendence of self which ultimately identifies “man” and “nature” in an overarching holism, or rather, what Plumwood calls for, a feminization of the human sensibility connected empathetically with and respectful of the variegated “other” of nature? Literary ecology, clearly opting for the latter alternative, differs from deep ecology in its regional realism and heterological sense of connectedness not only with nature but also with the social and political concerns of human life.

     

    Pynchon opens Vineland with the image of shattering glass, just as he began Gravity’s Rainbow with the fall the Crystal Palace, but instead of the ominous streak of the V-2 Rocket heralding the crash, we get the human trajectory of Zoyd Wheeler, “transfenestrating” through plate-glass in order to prove his mental instability and insure his government disability check.9 In both books fragmentation spreads from image, to narrative, to character, and to a broader idea of mind.

     

    The narrative fragmentation of Vineland is precisely into paranoia in the old Greek sense, ramified by schizophrenia in a defiant new sense. It is worth noting, in this regard, that the musical tome of favorite Italian songs, used in desperation by Billy Barf and the Vomitones, an alternative rock band dressed in “glossy black short synthetic wigs, the snappy mint-colored matching suits of Continental cut, the gold jewelry and glue-on mustaches,” to provide entertainment for a Godfather-like celebration at the estate of one Ralph Wavony, is none other than the Italian Wedding Fake Book by Deleuze and Guattari, authors of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia and A Thousand Plateaus. The image of shattering glass becomes the structural, or is it poststructural, device of the novel as a whole. As in schizophrenic discourse, image metonymically transforms the logic of the plot into a spiral nebula of fragments, a look into any one of which reveals a monadic world itself about to fracture, as if the book were a person thinking beside himself, deranged, deterritorialized, splitting into multiple selves.

     

    Thus Pynchon’s fragmented characters inhabit his fragmented narratives. A look into the world of Frenesi, for example, must be refracted through her daughter Prairie’s quest for her mother, and with her ex-husband’s Zoyd’s broken life, not to mention his transfenestrations. It also connects to the Aggro World, “‘a sort of Esalen Institute for lady asskickers” (107) and so to Ninjettes DL and Sister Rochelle, to G-man and principal adversary Brock Vond, and thus to the interstices of what Hayles calls the “snitch system” and the “family system” (78). The former, centered around Brock, is the hand of Government repression which tries to unravel the latter, the web of kinship, and certainly the 24fps film collective, where image and reality are fractured like the collective itself. Frenesi too is fractured through the machinations of Brock to have her destroy Weed Atman by imaging him as the snitch he is not:

     

    Beginning the night she and Rex had publicly hung the snitch jacket on Weed, Frenesi understood that she had taken at least one irreversible step to the side of her life, and that now, as if on some unfamiliar drug, she was walking around next to herself, haunting herself, attending a movie of it all. If the step was irreversible, then she ought to be all right now, safe in a world-next-to-the-world that not many would know how to get to, where she could kick back and watch the unfolding drama. (237)

     

    Brock’s seduction of Frenesi fractures the microcosm of her consciousness, so that she sees herself schizophrenically as in a film; but it also penetrates every level of the macrocosm, the social and ecological dimensions of Pynchon’s Great Chain, as a phallocentric rubric of aggression: “Men had it so simple,” Frenesi muses.

     

    When it wasn't about Sticking It In, it was about Having The Gun, a variation that allowed them to Stick It In from a distance. The details of how and when, day by working day, made up their real world. Bleak, to be sure, but a lot more simplified, and who couldn't use some simplification, what brought seekers into deserts, fishermen to streams, men to war, a seductive promise. She would have hated to admit how much of this came down to Bock's penis, straightforwardly erect, just to pick a random example. (241)

     

    Brock has caused Frenesi literally to think beside herself, to experience paranoesis, “as the Nixonian Reaction continued to penetrate and compromise further what may only in some fading memories ever have been a people’s miracle, an army of loving friends, as betrayal became routine . . . leaving the merciless spores of paranoia wherever it flowed, fungoid reminders of its passage. These people had known their children, after all, perfectly” (239).

     

    But just as fragmentation can be destructive shattering of human and natural worlds, so too it can be welcome “noise” that allows regenerative reorganization of a living system at a more complex and resilient level: evolution as human ecological self-correction. Brock’s neofascist attempt to impose order on America, especially on the anarchic Left, is a phallocentric attempt to “split the ecosystem,” in Wilden’s terms. But the entropy which results from the split can also be the seed of new growth:

     

    one last point on entropy, inflexibility, and disorder, it is important to recognize that the counter-adaptive inflexibility of socioeconomic systems in decline is not merely or simply the 'social disorder' which is experienced by their inhabitants at the time. At the moment of its greatest social disorder, the salient informational characteristic of the system would seem to be, not lack of organization lack of order, but OVER-ORGANIZATION and over-order. It is this very over-organization which threatens its survival, and the social disorder involved is invariably a more or less successful attempt to renormalize the system, in the interests of survival. (367)

     

    Which is why Slade argues that “Communication ordinarily helps maintain a healthy balance between order and change, so that the system remains stable but also flexible, or, in the case of a culture, tolerant of diversity” (“Communication” 129). In other words, Brock generates the very diversity, the Orphic fragments, which he seeks to suppress by attempting to routinize, in Max Weber’s terms, the counter culture. And it is this diversity out of which a successful human-ecological renewal can be shaped.

     

    The relationship between entropy and order, systemic decline and renewal, has long been a concern in Pynchon’s texts. His “Entropy,” for example, ends with Meatball Mulligan’s attempts “to keep his lease-breaking party from deteriorating into total chaos” by reviving and reorganizing his guests (97), on the one hand, and Aubade who, after smashing the window of their “hermetically sealed . . . enclave of regularity in the city’s chaos” (83), “turned to face the man [Callisto] on the bed and wait with him until the moment of equilibrium was reached, when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both outside and inside, and forever, and the hovering, curious dominant of their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion” (98), on the other. The movement toward entropy can signal renewal or death. As “Entropy” was mostly about the descent toward death, at the other end of a parabolic arc spanning Pynchon’s career, Vineland is about the ascent to life.

     

    Katherine Hayles has argued that the “framing narrative” of Vineland is Zoyd’s daughter, Prairie’s, search for her estranged mother, Frenesi Gates. Frenesi’s absence is partly due to the social engineering of betrayal by the novel’s chief antagonist, Brock Vond, and partly due to her own desire, mirrored later by Prairie herself; for Frenesi is “seduced” and thus “separated” by Brock from her family (the Latin root of “seduced,” seducere, can mean separate, as Hayles points out [80]), and Prairie sometimes longs to be seduced, as she calls after Brock as he is borne aloft by the post-Vietnam deus ex machina of the helicopter, “You can come back, . . . . It’s OK, rilly. Come on, come in. I don’t care. Take me anyplace you want” (384). What Brock would separate them from is their family–nuclear, including Zoyd, Frenesi and Prairie, extended, including the entire Becker-Traverse clan, and ecological, including the web of human and natural lives in Vineland–a multi-dimensional reunion:

     

    The pasture, just before dawn, saw the first impatient kids already out barefoot in the dew, field dogs thinking about rabbits, house dogs more with running on their minds, cats in off of their night shifts edging, arching and flattening to fit inside the shadows they found. The woodland creatures, predators and prey, while not exactly gazing Bambilike at the intrusions, did remain as aware as they would have to be, moment to moment, that there were sure a lot of Traverses and Beckers in the close neighborhood. (323)

     

    The meadow where the gathering takes place Zoyd, focusing the overall narrative on this pastoral setting, calls “Vineland the Good” (322). The quest of daughter for mother feminizes the traditionally masculine art of storytelling, reconnecting it, again in Plumwood’s phrase, to those “particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments” emphasized by Sanchez. The feminist dimension of literary ecology is given further depth, as Cowart argues, by Ninjette Sister Rochelle:

     

    "Back then, long ago, there were no men at all. Paradise was female. Eve and her sister, Lilith, were alone in the Garden. A character named Adam was put into the story later, to help make men look more legitimate, but in fact the first man was not Adam--it was the Serpent." (166)

     

    Thus the political and social power of Women is associated both with the pristine condition of earth before “man” and with the spiritual condition of Grace, before the Fall. Recall the garden in which St. Cloud stands, displaced voyeur of women who don’t need him. Furthermore, the above text suggests, as does Foucault in The Order of Things, that “man” is more a socially constructed myth than a biological reality, interchangeable with the Serpent, the Faustian version of the Cartesian persona questing for knowledge and power, as with the Gnostic who tries to extricate himself from and gain dominion over nature.

     

    As Cowart argues, “Sister Rochelle subjects the myth of Eden to a feminist reading that complements the novel’s larger deconstruction of the apocalyptic myth” (186). The foreboding Revelatory close of Gravity’s Rainbow with rocket poised above our film-entranced heads, itself the culmination of what Edward Mendelson has called an “encyclopedic narrative,” is replaced in Vineland by a literary ecological return to earth that is less explosive but a little more optimistic.10 The return is in part constituted by what Cowart calls a “feminist genealogy”: “a genealogical plenitude that centers on women, a generational unfolding that proceeds matriarchally from Eula to Sasha to Frenesi to Prairie” and “search for the mother” which “reverses–indeed deconstructs–the conventional search for the father, for patriarchal authority, reason, and order– for the familial and communal principle itself” (187). It is this success of plenitude which draws the new Counterforce–leftist, feminist, green–into resolution at the aforementioned reunion which Cowart describes as “a fine evocation of an extended and diverse family spread out over a rich California landscape–fields of strawberry and Elysian–that is a transparent symbol of America. This, after all, is the millennium: humanity as family” (187). An even broader, ecological dimension of this renewal is suggested by Eddins in regard to narrative fragmentation and Orphic naturalism in Gravity’s Rainbow:

     

    But the fragmentation of narrative in Pynchon's Text also has a positive function. It both symbolizes a shattering that is loss and incarnates a poignant lyricism that preserves what is lost from oblivion. As the novel and its world fall to pieces more and more rapidly, the pieces continue to sing like those of the dismembered Orpheus, insisting on that larger continuity of Earth that redeems and enshrines the preterite shards. (151-152)

     

    Dwight Eddins, and David Porush in “‘Purring into Transcendence’: Pynchon’s Puncutron Machine,” have pointed to the paradoxical nature of Pynchon’s texts. Eddins argues that “in a coup de grace of reflexivity” Gravity’s Rainbow becomes a Real Text, like the one that can lead the Hereros back to the Holy Center, “a Torah of Orphic naturalism, revealing the nature of gnostic evil at the same time that it reveals the Way Back to communion with Earth” (150). But this reflexivity, as the logic of Pynchon’s narrative indicates, leads to paradox:

     

    The positing of Gravity's Rainbow as the Real Text involves us, of course, in the paradoxical notion of an Orphic Word. If preverbal Earth represents in some sense a transcendental unity, the mere existence of an immanentizing Word--however normative--violates that unity. The paradox is, in its most literal sense, unresolvable, and is the principal source of the stress that cracks the novel into fragments of narrative . . . . (151)

     

    Similarly, Porush argues regarding Vineland that “Pynchon often makes us feel as if we are caught in a servo- mechanical loop of interpretation with the text” (102). Consider this description of the Puncutron Machine, for example:

     

    It was clear that electricity in unknown amounts was meant to be routed from one of its glittering parts to another until it arrived at any or all of a number of decorative-looking terminals, "or actually," purred the Ninjette Puncutron Technician who would be using it on Takeshi, "as we like to call them, electrodes." And what, or rather who, was supposed to complete the circuit? "Oh, no, "Tekeshi demurred, "I think not!" (164)

     

    As Porush concludes, “the machinery of Pynchon’s plot aids the reader in crossing between worlds, just as the Puncutron aids the reader’s avatar, Takeshi, in striking a karmic balance” (102). This paradoxical reflexivity splits the ecosystem of Pynchon’s text only to reconstitute it at a more complex and resilient level: that of the Orphic god reconstituted.

     

    The art of paradoxical communication is also evident in the phenomenon of play and in the playful Zen koan. Both prompt a kind of transcendence from paradoxical alternatives. The message “This is play,” Bateson argues, in expanded form means roughly, “These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote” (180). If we take the phrase “for which they stand” as a synonym for the word “denote,” the passage may be further expanded to, “‘These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote.’ The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite” (180). The message “This is play” is therefore paradoxical, in terms of the Theory of Logical Types, Bateson concludes, “because the word ‘denote’ is being used in two degrees of abstraction, and these two uses are treated as synonymous” (180). Bateson argues that play marks a leap–a kind of transcendence–in the history of mammalian communication from the analog realm of kinesic and paralinguistic signals toward the denotative coding of human languages, for “Denotative communication as it occurs at the human level is only possible after the evolution of a complex set of metalinguistic (but not verbalized) rules which govern how words and sentences shall be related to objects and events”(180)–as in the nip “standing for” the bite in play. But this transcendence can be Gnostic, Cartesian, entrepreneurial, and require an Orphic or ecological corrective. The play of Pynchon’s satire, I argue, provides just this.

     

    The koan, too, is a form of paradoxical communication which prompts a form of transcendence. The Zen Master, Bateson argues, may lead his student to enlightenment by logic of the koan, which is verbal and non-verbal. Holding a stick over the pupil’s head, he says vehemently, “‘If you say this stick is real, I will strike you with it. If you say this stick is not real, I will strike you with it. If you don’t say anything, I will strike you with it” (208). The Zen student, Bateson points out, might simply take the stick from the Master, thereby transcending the paradoxical alternatives of the koan. Interestingly, Bateson further points out that this is precisely the logic of the Double Bind, which characterizes schizophrenic communication, except that the schizophrenic cannot transcend the terms of the paradox, indeed is systematically punished by his/her parents for communicating about the bind, and so oscillates among a medley of conflicting terms indefinitely (206-208).

     

    The related phenomena of play, the koan, and schizophrenia all suggest the function of logical typing, the formal rubric of the Great Chain, in Pynchon’s text especially, for he sustains the air of play–satire, irony, absurdity, lampoon–throughout Vineland. Safer’s article, subtitled “Humor and the Absurd in a Twentieth-Century Vineland,” argues that Zen is broadly parodied in the novel. Safer points to the New Age music played in the Log Jam bar as well as the “change of consciousness” mentioned by the bartender (6-7), where Zoyd displays his petite chain saw, to the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple where Prairie works, to the Sisterhood of Kuniochi Attentives, etc. as examples. While the parody of New Age spirituality is no doubt evident, what is more interesting from the viewpoint of literary ecology is Pynchon’s simultaneous use of Zen and of humor as forms of transcendence–not of nature but of the repressive and impossible alternatives imposed by the Gnostic order of Brock and his cohorts: transcendence of fragmentation as reconstitution of the Orphic god and his ecology.

     

    These various modes of transcendence in Vineland are explored by Porush in his “Purring into Transcendence.” The Puncutron machine, discussed above as an analog for Pynchon’s text itself, is “designed to ‘get that Chi flowing the right way’” (Porush 102, Pynchon 163). Notice that Takeshi is “all hooked up with no escape” from the Machine, just as the Zen student is caught in the paradoxical alternatives of the koan. Also notice that the passage clearly has a comic tone and even, as Porush points out, parodies Kafka’s grimmer Sentence Machine in “The Penal Colony,” the Puncutron fitted with an “inkjet printer” which moves “along the meridians of his [Takeshi’s] skin” (382) instead of Kafka’s grimmer needles, prompting what Porush calls “a happier transcendence” (103). Pynchon, in an inversion of the original tendency of play, seems to prefer a descent, or better yet a landing, from the digital to the analog (cf. Porush 100). So too, the comic elements in Pynchon’s text promote a benevolent deliverance from the paradoxes of a split ecology and a recursive return to nature not only neo-primitive, as in the modernist art of Gauguin or Picasso, but also postmodern as in the ecological art of Cristo, the archologies of Paolo Soleri, the ecological designs of Ian McHarg’s Design With Nature, and the doubly coded use of artificial intelligence to interface with traditional ritual in agriculture described in a recent Omni article entitled “The Goddess and The Computer.”11

     

    Typical of Pynchon’s sense of play, the glass transfenestrated by Zoyd turns out to be candy in this instance, to Zoyd’s simultaneous disappointment and relief, and his performance appreciated by an old gun for the FBI, Hector Gonzales. Play here adds both to the postmodern question of simulation–the double coding of reality and image–and of the paranoid schizophrenia which its double bind can evoke: are images new sorts of things and, if so, which is simulation or dissimulation? Image? Reality? And who’s in control? For Plato as for the philosophical tradition he started, noesis, the contemplation of pure form by the rational subject, and dianoia, the discursive processes of mathematical and logical thinking, are ways of escaping the realm of appearances, the images in the Cave. The subject exercises “self-control” and can distinguish between appearance and reality. But paranoia, the subject’s thinking amiss or literally beside or outside itself, is a state metonymically coded in terms of images not stabilized by an underlying reality. The self loses control, cannot stand apart from the flux of images, experiences fragmentation, the “split psyche” of schizophrenia, madness. But what if the images are controlled by an unseen hand, possibly Hector’s? The paranoid collapse of the personality, or the Peace movement, becomes the occasion for imposing political control. Madmen, like hippies or ecosystems, have no apparent defense against the designs of progress, the Cartesian subject’s quest for power.

     

    The paranoiac logic of Vineland‘s plot, its rhizomically connected thousand plateaus, is simultaneously an “eco-logic,” the deconstructive architecture of a mental ecology. This is its most important intersection with the logic of Mile Zero and fundamentally what makes them both literary ecology. Sanchez uses narrative, and most significantly an ecological narrator, to tie the various strands of his feminist and leftist characters and themes together in a deep-ecological web. It is from the wider perspective of the ecological mind that Sanchez’s narrator ultimately speaks, and it is into the loops of a larger social and ecological fabric that the fragments of Vineland circulate. In both novels, moreover, the ecological and paranoetic minds ultimately converge. Sanchez’s narrator is the most immediate and striking example of this perspective and convergence, for in the “grey pages” of the novel the voice addresses the reader directly, breaking from the plot and characters yet enveloping them:

     

    My moist hand is in yours, a stillborn turtle growing virtuous. You want to leave me, don't you? You don't like my chat, are fearful of fact. . . . You don't know who I am, do you? . . . My brain is like the Gulf Stream Twelve miles offshore, a vast blue river cutting through green ocean, its current pulsing seventy-five million tons of water through it each second, a force greater that the combined sum of all your earthly rivers. I am a torrent of thought flowing within society's surrounding sea, stream of ideas surging with plankton and verbs, a circular countercurrent fury . . . . (88)

     

    The ecological mind speaks in the persona of a great power, which identities itself as Zobop–

     

                   You-bop
               He-bop
               She-bop
               They-bop
               We bop
               To-Zobop. (259)

     

    It is an ecological discourse “surging with plankton and verbs.” Plankton are the expression and animating power of the marine ecosystem just as verbs are of human language. This convergence between natural and human rubrics is most profound when Zobop reveals your/his/her/their/our ultimate secret:

     

    You don't like it, do you? If I am everything you are not, then you are everything I am. We see Eye through I now. You knew you were me all along, didn't you?

     

    We are articulations of consciousness inscribed in the heterogeneous “conversations” of the ecological mind, whether we like to hear it or not, and whether we dare to contemplate its implications. To take this seriously is, in terms of the Western notion of self, especially as it has become externalized in what Lewis Mumford called the Megamachine of industrial technology, precisely madness: paranoesis.

     

    Pynchon’s shattered characters inhabit a latticework of worlds tied together by the panopticon of Federal surveillance. His ecology is stranger and more enigmatic than Sanchez’s, one forested not only by redwoods but by new generations of high technology–like the Puncutron Machine or the “creatures” of the Media Lab at MIT. It’s as if the implicit question in Vineland as in Gravity’s Rainbow is, “What is nature that it could have invented the computer by means of man?” Appreciative of the complexities and ironies of science, Pynchon seems less sure where to draw the line between “nature” and “technology.” As Frenesi reasons, “If patterns of ones and zeros were ‘like’ patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least–an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO . . . . We are digits in God’s computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune” (91). This perspective is implicit in Sanchez’s final identification of the ecological and human personae but, in Pynchon, Bateson’s assertion–that lines drawn across the system bounding man, computer, and environment are purely artificial–is a working definition of mind.

     

    “Man,” in Pynchon’s vision, is destroying the biosphere including his own ecology and biology but is simultaneously replacing himself with rarefied machinery. “‘We are approaching the famous Chipco ‘Technology City,’ home of ‘Chuck,’ the world’s most invisible robot,” a PA monitor explains to Japanese karmic adjuster Takeshi Fumimota during a helicopter flight across Japan. “‘How invisible,’the voice continued, ‘you might wonder, is ‘Chuck’? Well, he’s been walking around among you, all through this whole flight!’” (146). But the point is not some neutral positivist one about the evolution of machines to replace people; it is rather a political one: the Modern machinery that the Western and now the Eastern world have created is insidious, mean spirited, power hungry, a kind of Death Star. In this regard Sanchez’s opening images in Mile Zero are also instructive. For as a boat carrying dying Haitian refugees drifts toward Key West, it crosses paths with a speedboat race, causing an accident, while above a space shuttle hurtles upward:

     

    Seabirds fly into new day, beneath them a watery world of mystery equal to the airy one above, where a man- made bird of steel streaks atop a pillar of flame. Only moments before the steel bird shook off an umbilical maze of flight feeders, its capsule head inhabited by six humans, their combined minds infinitely less than the bird's programmed range of computerized functions. (3)

     

    The technological supersession of the natural world, here figured in the image of the “man-made bird” with computerized intelligence enveloping the astronauts, has made some dubious characters gods of the earth. It must be countered, in Pynchon, by a combination of radical green- anarchist-feminist-ninjettes, accompanied by kids and dogs, along with computer hackers, paranoids and rock-‘n-rollers– a schizo-coalition that sounds like the cultural and political analog of biodiversity. In Sanchez one finds a more “serious” but nevertheless analogous coalition of rainbow socialists, feminists and ecologists as a counterforce.

     

    The adversary in Vineland, Brock Vond, has a special talent for splitting the human and natural ecologies. “Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep–if he’d allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching–need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family” (269). Accordingly Brock, a career G-man from the Nixon through the Reagan Administrations, subverted the peace movement for the former and attempts to destroy the remnants of the counter culture, under the banner of the most defensible of campaigns, for the latter: “Brock’s Troops had departed after terrorizing the neighborhood for weeks, running up and down the dirt lanes in formation chanting ‘War-on-drugs! War-on-drugs!’ strip-searching folks in public, killing dogs, rabbits, cats, and chickens, pouring herbicide down wells that couldn’t remotely be used to irrigate dope crops, and acting, indeed, as several neighbors observed, as if they invaded some helpless land far away, instead of a short plane ride from San Francisco” (357). But as Johnny Copeland is quoted as saying in the frontispiece to Vineland, “Every dog has his day, / and a good dog / just might have two days.”

     

    And so Pynchon’s novel culminates in the aforementioned family reunion, with ecological dimensions, of Jess Traverse and Eula Becker, great-grandparents in the American radical tradition, where a new movement falls together like the fragments of Zoyd’s window would if we watched a video of his performance in reverse. The movement is as schizophrenically diverse as Vineland‘s characters, and one of retribution in the spirit of Emerson “read by Jess from a jailhouse copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience“: “‘Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil’” (369). This is the self-correction of the human ecological mind.

     

    “Lack of systemic wisdom is always punished,” Bateson warns. “We may say that the biological systems–the individual, the culture, and the ecology–are partly living sustainers of their component cells or organisms. But the systems are nonetheless punishing of any species unwise enough to quarrel with its ecology. Call the systemic forces ‘God’ if you will” (434). If there is a new religiosity implicit in literary ecology, it is not animistic or deistic; it does not naively personify or project a super mind transcending nature. The ecological mind is as immanent in nature as our own mental processes are in the brain. Therefore, in spite of the rich diversity and resilience of life forms in which mental processes are inscribed, they can like Lake Erie or Zoyd be driven “insane.” This insanity, however, is only the wisdom of the ecology correcting epistemological error. Literary ecology is an expression in human letters of the larger writing of genotypes into phenotypes in the biosphere, poesis as a creative extension of morphogenesis. Like the woge whom the Yurok people along the river in Vineland understood to be “creatures like humans but smaller” (186), and who local hippies believe have returned to the ocean as porpoises, “to wait and see how humans did with the world,” literary ecologists “would come back, teach us how to live the right way, save us . . .” (187).

     

    Notes

     

    1. There are various strains of ecological philosophy in the current literature, the most important of which are deep ecology, popularly associated with the journal Earth First!, socialist ecology, probably best represented by the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, and ecological feminism, the most recent scholarship in which appears in a special issue of Hypatia, 6.1, Spring 1991. Literary ecology, as it is expressed in the work of Pynchon and Sanchez, involves a cross-section of these strains.

     

    2. See, especially, David Cowart, “Continuity and Growth”; Cowart argues that “The postmodern hoops through which the animals [circus animals, Pynchon’s characteristic images and themes] jumped–the self-reflexivity of structures that mocked structure, the representation of representation, the brilliant demonstrations that ‘meaning’ is always projective–seem to have given way to a simpler, less mannered displays” (177), the central theme of which is the quest for justice (179), a solid Enlightenment master narrative supposedly undermined, as Lyotard has argued, by the postmodern condition. See also Dwight Eddins, who attempts to formulate a “‘unified field theory’ that will account for both modern and postmodern Pynchon–the Pynchon whose world-view is suffused by acute nostalgia for vanished foundations and values, an the Pynchon whose field of vision seems occupied with discontinuities and absurdities that threaten our sense of a comprehensible, mappable, even affirmable existence” The Gnostic Pynchon xi).

     

    3. While Eddins employs the writings of Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin with their concept of gnosticism to explicate Pynchon’s texts, he does not claim that Pynchon has been directly influenced by them but rather that, “The crucial commonality is a sort of philosophical force field that finds its origin the Judaeo-Christian Gnostics of antiquity (with whom Pynchon is demonstrably familiar) and spreads into modern (and very Pynchonian) concerns with such issues as existentialist vacuity and the cabalistic manipulation of history” (xi). Similarly, I am not claiming that Pynchon or Sanchez has read and been directly influenced by Wilden, Bateson or other writers mentioned below, but rather that they explicitly define concerns– socialism, cybernetics, information theory, feminism, mysticism etc.–that are shared, often implicitly, by literary ecologists.

     

    4. See “Conscious Purpose Versus Nature,” 11.Steps 432-445, citation 433.

     

    5. “You see,” Bateson explains, “we’re not talking about the dear old Supreme Mind of Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and so on down through ages–the Supreme Mind which was incapable of error and incapable of insanity. We’re talking about immanent mind, which is only too capable of insanity . . . .” Steps 493).

     

    6. It is important to note that Bateson’s theory of difference, characteristic of cybernetics and information theory, tends to be synchronic and static, purely formal. It therefore is subject to the Derridean criticism that it invokes a metaphysics of presence to describe what, even in Bateson’s own terms, is an “evolutionary” living system. What is called for is a postmodern ecology based not on the paradoxical notion of a stable, “identical,” system preserving the idealized structure of a set of differences, or “the truth of set of descriptive propositions about the variables of the system,” as I’ve quoted Bateson as saying, above, but a neo-structuralist ecology based on Derrida’s generative notion of differance. This, of course, will make the “ground” of ecological and hence of literary- ecological theory more like quicksand.

     

    7. Parts of this section are taken, in modified form, from my essay “Postmodern Ecology”; see Works Cited.

     

    8. “The novel’s title . . . recalls the discovery of America by Leif the Lucky and his fellow Vikings. For these Norsemen exiled from their homeland, Vineland represented an opportunity for a new life in a land with rich woods, white sandy beaches, grapes and vines, and a good climate,” Elaine B. Safer explains in “Pynchon’s World and its Legendary Past” (110).

     

    9. In “On the Tube,” Pynchon has a panel of experts, “including a physics professor, a psychiatrist, and a track- and-field coach . . . discussing the evolution over the years of Zoyd’s technique, pointing out the useful distinction between the defenestrative personality, which prefers jumping out of windows, and the transfenestrative, which tends to jump through, each reflecting an entirely different psychic subtext . . .” (15).

     

    10. “Encyclopedic narratives attempt to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge,” among other things, Mendelson explains in “Gravity’s Encyclopedia” (30).

     

    11. See Omni Vol. 12, No. 9, June 1990: 22, 96. This project in artificial intelligence nicely illustrates the virtually ecological relationships among various modes of discourse. The Goddess and the Computer project demonstrates how the religious ceremonies of traditional Balinese culture, partly supplanted by the language and practice of Western development, turned out to be a valuable commentary on and careful regulator of the local ecology. This was discovered, as usual, after the society and human ecology had been so disrupted by “development” that agriculture became counterproductive and government agronomists wanted to know why. With the help of a computer model developed by a team at the University of Southern California, they discovered that development involved over- farming, and that traditional farming had been kept at an optimum level by the restraints of the ceremonies which in turn were based on careful observation of rain in the highlands and water flow to the cultivated lowlands. When the signs from Goddess, Dewi Danu, were right, the high priest said “yea” to farming. The domain of Dewi Danu happened to be that of a volcanic lake in the Balinese highlands which feeds a complex water system branching into rice fields divided by dams in the lowlands. In each group of fields, called a subak, there is a temple dedicated to a local god and overseen by a priest. Before letting water into the subak, local farmers would consult a priest who would give permission to irrigate only if he had the word from the priest of Dewi Danu’s lake “on high.” In this way water was equitably distributed by means of a complex system of rituals and signs, which themselves served diverse purposes other than “water management.” Now farmers consult both the priest and the Macintosh computer; this is double coding in the practical arts.

    Works Cited

     

    • Bacon, Francis. Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, New Atlantis. Chicago: Benton, 1952.
    • Bateson, Gregory. Steps to An Ecology of Mind. Rpt. 1972. Northvale, N.J.: Aronson, 1987.
    • Bruno, Giordano. The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. Trans. and Ed. A.D. Imerti. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1964.
    • Cowart, David. “Attenuated Postmodernism: Pynchon’s Vineland. Critique XXXII, 2 (Winter 1990): 67-76.
    • —. “Continuity and Growth.” Kenyon Review (New Series) XII, 4, 176-190.
    • Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Vol. II. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
    • —. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Vol. I. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
    • Eddins, Dwight. The Gnostic Pynchon. Bloominington and Indianapolis: Indiana U P, 1990.
    • Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. Ed. Valerie Eliot. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1971.
    • Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Trans. Catherine Hutter. New York: NAL, 1962.
    • Hayles, N. Katherine. “‘Who was Saved?’ Families, Snitches, and Recuperation in Pynchon’s Vineland.” Winter 1990: 77-92.
    • Jencks, Charles. What is Post-Modernism? New York: St. Martin’s, 1989.
    • Mendelson, Edward. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 29-52.
    • —. “Levity’s Rainbow.” Rev. of Vineland. New Republic 9 and 16 July 1990: 40ff.
    • Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 2: The Pentagon of Power. New York: HBJ, 1970.
    • Plumwood, Val. “Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism.” Hypatia Spring 1991: 3-27.
    • Porush, David. “‘Purring into Transcendence’: Pynchon’s Puncutron Machine.” Critique. Winter 1990: 93-106.
    • Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.
    • Pynchon, Thomas. “Entropy.” Slow Learner. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. 79-98.
    • —. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.
    • —. Vineland. New York: Little Brown, 1990.
    • Safer, Elaine B. “Pynchon’s World and its Legendary Past: Humor and the Absurd in a Twentieth-Century Vineland.” Critique. Winter 1990: 107-125.
    • Sanchez, Thomas. Mile Zero. New York: Knopf, 1989.
    • Slade, Joseph. “Communication, Group Theory, and Perception in Vineland.” Critique. Winter 1990: 126-144.
    • —. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Warner, 1974.
    • Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Dell, 1977.
    • Starr, Douglas. “The Goddess and the Computer.” Omni Vol. 12, No. 9, June 1990: 22, 96.
    • White, Daniel R. “Postmodern Ecology.” Proceedings of Earth Ethics Forum ’91. Earth Ethics Research Group & St. Leo College, Florida. 10-12 May 1991.
    • Wilden, Anthony. System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange. Second Edition. London: Tavistock, 1980.
    • Worster, Donald. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Rpt. 1977. London: Cambridge, 1985.

     

  • Anouncements & Advertisements

     

     

    Every issue of Postmodern Culture will carry notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcments, up to 250 words, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. Send anouncements and advertisements to: pmc@jefferson.village.virginia.edu

     

     

         Journal and Book Announcements:   

1)   _Science Fiction Studies_ #55: Postmodernism and Science Fiction
2)   _Thinknet_: an on-line magazine forum dedicated to thoughtfulness 
      in the cybertime environment
3)   _Public Culture_: Shaping the debates about the tensions between 
     global cultural flows and public cultures in a diasporic world
4)   _Differences_: A journal of feminist cultural studies
5)   _Discourse_: Theoretical studies in media and culture
6)   _Journal of Ideas_, Vol 2 #2/3: Contents
7)   _Music and Connectionism_, edited by Peter M. Todd and D. Gareth 
     Loy (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991)
8)   _Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia_: a publication 
     of The Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education
9)   _Clinamens_: CLearinghouse INterdisciplinaire `Anglicisme et 
     Methodologie'de l'Ecole Normale Superieure

     Calls for Papers and Participants:

10)  _RD: Graduate Research in the Arts_ -- call for papers on 
     language, literature, constructions of the self, the academy
11)  _Languages and Literature_ -- call for papers on stylistics, 
     critical theory, linguistics, literary criticism and their 
     pedagogical applications
12)  Call for papers on the sociology and anthropology of performance, 
     public and private
13)  I'm Thinking of Something Round: Beuys' Chalkboards -- call for
          participants in a telecommunications art experiment/project
14)  _disClosure_ -- call for papers on the buying and selling of 
     culture
15)  _Studies in Psychoanalytic Theory_ --  a call for papers on 
     psychoanalysis and cultural criticism in the humanities, social 
     sciences, and fine arts
16)  The Principia Cybernetica Project -- a call for papers on 
     cybernetic concepts and principles, evolutionary philosophy, 
     knowledge development, computer-support systems for collaborative 
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17)  _Perforations_ -- call for papers for a special issue with the 
     theme: AFTER THE BOOK

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>ITEMS LISTED 
BELOW THIS POINT APPEAR IN NOTICE-2 192<<<<<<<
<<<<<<<

18)  _Computers & Texts_ -- a call for papers on the use of 
     computing in the areas of Philosophy and Logic
19)  _The Frontenac Review_ -- a call for papers on the Nouveau Roman 
     and on Acadian Literature
20)  ACH/MLA session, New York, 1992: call for papers responding to 
     Mark Olsen's position paper, "Signs, Symbols and Discourses:  A 
     New Direction for Computer-aided Literature Studies"
21)  _Computer-Supported Cooperative Work_ -- call for papers on 
     theoretical, practical, technical and social issues in CSCW
22)  NC92, A Collective, Ubiquitous, Congress In Progress -- a call 
     for participants

     Conferences, Societies, and Networked Discussion Groups:

23)  The fifth annual Computers and English Conference for high 
     school and college teachers of writing
24)  Section on science, knowledge, and technology at the 
     Southwestern Social Science annual meetings in Austin, Texas: 
     March 27-31, 1992
25)  POSTECH: a networked discussion group on post-structuralism and 
     technology
26)  East-West Conference on Emerging Computer Technologies in 
     Education, Moscow, USSR: April 6-9, 1992
27)  Conference on Environment and the Latino Imagination, Cornell 
     University: April 30-May 2, l992
28)  SWIP-L, a networked discussion group for members of the Society  
     for Women in Philosophy and others who are interested in feminist 
     philosophy
29)  The American Folklore Society
30)  Meaning Holism: Summer Seminar at Rutgers University, June 29 - 
     August 14, 1992
31)  ADDICT-L, a networked discussion group concerning the many types 
     of addictions experienced by a large portion of society
32)  PMJL, Progressive Jewish Mailing List, a networked discussion  
     group on a  variety of Jewish concerns in the tradition of 
     %tikkun olam%
33)  BUDDHA-L, a networked discussion group on Buddhist Studies
34)  Pennsylvania State University Summer Seminar on Historicisms and 
     Cultural Critique, State College, PA: June 25-30, 1992
35)  AFRICA-L, a networked discussion group on the interests of  
     African peoples
36)  FEMREL-L, a networked discussion group concerning women & 
     religion and feminist theology.

     Network Resources:

37)  On-line catalogue of the Georgetown Center for Text and Techology
38)  ARL Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Scholarly 
     Discussion Lists (available in hard copy and via e-mail)

1)-------------------------------------------------------------------------

              Announcing SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES #55
              (Volume 18, number 3 = November 1991)

                POSTMODERNISM AND SCIENCE FICTION

Editorial Introduction: Postmodernism's SF/SF's Postmodernism (ICR)

Jean Baudrillard. Two Essays
     1. Simulations and Science Fiction  
     2. Ballard's _Crash_

In Response to Jean Baudrillard (N. Katherine Hayles, David Porush,
  Brooks Landon, Vivian Sobchack) and to the Invitation to Respond
  (J.G. Ballard)

Christopher Palmer: The Birth of the Author in Philip K. Dick's
  _Valis_

Scott Bukatman: Postcards from the Posthuman Solar System

Roger Luckhurst: Border Policing: Postmodernism and Science Fiction

David Porush: Prigogine, Chaos, and Contemporary Science Fiction

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and
  Haraway

Review Articles:

Roy Arthur Swanson. Postmodernist Criticism of Pynchon

Peter Ohlin. SF Film Criticism and the Debris of Postmodernism

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. The McCaffery Interviews
                           Chaos and Culture
                           Gane's Baudrillard

New subscribers for 1992 (## 56,57, 58) will receive #55 gratis.

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-----------------------------------------------------------------------
OCTOBER 1991             ISSUE  001               VOLUME 1   NUMBER 1
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

This is an announcement for Thinknet, an on-line magazine forum 
dedicated to thoughtfulness in the cybertime environment. Thinknet 
covers philosophy, systems theory, and meta-theoretical discussions 
within disciplines. It is your interdisciplinary window on to what 
significant information sources are available to foster thought-
provoking discussion.

*CONTENTS*

Publication Data

     Scope of newsletter.
     Rationale for newsletter.
     Subscriptions and Submittals address.
     Bulletin Boards where it may be found.
     Services offered by newsletter.
     Staff of this edition.
     Coda: call for participation.

About Thinknet

     Discussion of goals of Thinknet Newsletter.

Prospect for Philosophy and Systems Theory in Cybertime

     Is there a possibility for a renaissance for philosophy?

The Philosophy Category on GEnie

      Review by Gordon Swobe with list of topics.

Philosophy on the WELL

      Review by Jeff Dooley with list of topics.

Origin Conference on the WELL

      Review by Bruce Schuman with list of topics

Internet Philosophy Mailing Lists

      A review of all know philosophy oriented mailing lists 
      by Stephen Clark.

Books Of Note

      THE MATRIX

      !%@:: A DIRECTORY OF ELECTRONIC MAIL ADDRESSING & 
      NETWORKS

Other Publications

      BOARDWATCH MAGAZINE

      SOFTWARE ENGINEERING FOUNDATIONS [a work in progress]

Books, Electronic Newsletters, and Cyber-Artifacts Received

      ARTCOM NEWSLETTER

      FACTSHEET FIVE

Protocols for Meaningful Discussions: ARTICLE by Kent Palmer

       A consideration of how philosophy discussions might 
       be made more useful and their history accessible by 
       using a voluntary protocol.

Thoughtful Communications: EDITORIAL

    Closing remarks.

<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>
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4)------------------------------------------------------------------

                         *_differences_*

              A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

             Edited by Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Week

                        Volume 3, Number 1
Politics/Power/Culture:  Postmodernity and Feminist Political Theory
       Edited by Kathy E. Ferguson and Kirstie M. McClure

                        Volume 3, Number 2
           Queer Theory:  Lesbian and Gay Sexualities
                  Edited by Teresa de Lauretis

                        Volume 3, Number 3
      Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak:  Feminism in Colonization
                    Joan W. Scott:  Commentary
   Ann-Louise Shapiro:  Love Stories: Female Crimes of Passion 
                    in Fin-de-siecle Paris.
Mary Lydon:  Calling Yourself a Woman: Marguerite Yourcenar and Colette
 Eric O. Clarke:  Fetal Attraction: Hegel's An-aesthetics of Gender
Neil Lazarus:  Doubting the New World Order: Marxism and the Claims of
                   Postmodern Social Theory
   Interview with Antoinette Fouque, Femmes en mouvements: hier, 
                        aujourd'hui, demain

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5)---------------------------------------------------------------------

                                *%Discourse%*

                   THEORETICAL STUDIES IN MEDIA AND CULTURE

               Edited by Roswitha Mueller and Kathleen Woodward

*D I S
C O U R S E*        Volume 14, Number 1

                    *Jean-Francois Lyotard* "Voices of a Voice" 
(trans.George Van Den Abbeele)   *Meaghan Morris* "Ecstasy 
and Economics" *Kathryn Milun* "(En)countering Imperialist 
nostalgia: The Indian Reburial Issue"   *Christina von Braun* 
"Strategies of Disappearance" *Gloria-Jean Masciarotte "The 
Madonna with Child, and Another Child, and Still Another Child 
. . . : Sensationalism and the Dysfunction of Emotions"  *Tara 
McPherson and Gareth Evans* "Watch this Space: An Interivew with 
Edward Soja"

BOOK REVIEWS:  *Susan Willis* %Consumer Culture and Postmodernism% 
by MikeFeatherstone   *James Schwoch* %The Mode of Information: 
Poststructuralism and Social Context% by Mark Poster   *Tara 
McPherson* %Feminism and Youth Culture: from Jackie to Just 
Seventeen% by Angela McRobbie   *Mark Rose* %Contested Culture: 
The Image, the Voice, and the Law% by Jane Gaines  *Elizabeth 
Francis* %Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant- 
Garde% by Susan Rubin Suleiman   *Marilyn Edelstein* %Sexual 
Subversions: Three French Feminists% by Elizabeth Grosz

                    Volume 13, Number 2

*Lynne Kirby* "Gender and Advertising in American Silent
Film: From Early Cinema to the Crowd"   *Maureen Turim* "Viewing/
Reading %Born to be Sold: Martha Rosler Reads the Strange Case of
Baby S/M% or Motherhood in the Age of Technological Reproduction"
*Roswitha Mueller* "Screen Embodiments: Valie Export's %Syntagma%
*Robert J. Corber* "Reconstructuring Homosexuality: Hitchcock and
the Homoerotics of Spectatorial Pleasure"   *Virginia Carmichael*
"Death by Text: The Word on Ethel Rosenberg"   *Susan Jeffords* 
"Performative Masculinities, or 'After a Few Times You won't Be 
Afraid of Rape at All'"

BOOK REVIEWS:  *Bethany Hicok and Pamela Lougheed* %Visual and 
Other Pleasures% by Laura Mulvey   *Andrew Martin* %The 
Remasculinization of America% by Susan Jeffords   *Linda 
Mizejewski* %The Women Who Knew Too Much% by Tania Modleski  
*Robin Pickering-Iazzi* %Sexual Difference% by The Milan Women's 
Bookstore Collective   *Linda Schulte-Sasse* %Joyless Streets% by
Patrice Petro

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6)----------------------------------------------------------------

 Journal of Ideas, Vol 2 #2/3 -- contents

 Journal of Ideas - ISSN 1049-6335 is published quarterly by

 the Institute for Memetic Research, POB 16327, Panama City,
 Florida 32406-1327.

 [For more information contact E. Moritz at moritz@well.sf.ca.us]

 OF IDEAS
 John Locke

 ENERGY FLOW AND ENTROPY PRODUCTION
 IN BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS
 Brian A. Maurer
 Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84602
 Daniel R. Brooks
 University of Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1, Canada

 ON THE ROAD TO CYBERNETIC IMMORTALITY:
 A Report on the First Principia Cybernetica Workshop
 Elan Moritz
 The Institute for Memetic Research, Panama City, Florida

 THE ORIGINS OF THE CAPACITY FOR CULTURE
 Jerome H. Barkow
 Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S. B3H 1T2, Canada

 FOLK PSYCHOLOGY, FREE WILL AND EVOLUTION
 Jerome H. Barkow

7)----------------------------------------------------------------

                              BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT:

                           MUSIC AND CONNECTIONISM
                                  edited by
                       Peter M. Todd and D. Gareth Loy

MUSIC AND CONNECTIONISM is now available from MIT Press.  This 
280-pp. book contains a wide variety of recent research in the 
applications of neural networks and other connectionist methods to
the problems of musical listening and understanding, performance, 
composition, and aesthetics.  It consists of a core of articles 
that originally appeared in the Computer Music Journal, along
with several new articles by Kohonen, Mozer, Bharucha, and others, 
and new addenda to the original articles describing the authors' 
most recent work. Topics covered range from models of 
psychological processing of pitches, chords, and melodies, to 
algorithmic composition and performance factors.  A wide variety 
of connectionist models are employed as well, including back-
propagation in time, Kohonen feature maps, ART networks, and 
Jordan- and Elman-style networks.  We've also included a 
discussion generated by the Computer Music Journal articles on 
the use and place of connectionist systems in artistic endeavors.

We hope this book will be of use to a wide variety of readers, 
including neural network researchers interested in a broad, 
challenging, and fun new area of application, cognitive scientists 
and music psychologists looking for robust new models of musical 
behavior, and artists seeking to learn more about a potentially 
very useful technology.

Please drop me a line if you have any questions, and especially if 
you take up the gauntlet and pursue research or applications in 
this area!

8)-----------------------------------------------------------------


  +----------------------------------------------------------------+
  | PREMIERES FALL 1991 . . .                                      |
  |                                                                |
  |          JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL MULTIMEDIA AND HYPERMEDIA      |
  |                                                                |
  |                         Published by the                       |
  |     Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education  |
  +----------------------------------------------------------------+

Editor: David H. Jonassen (University of Colorado-Denver)
Associate Editor: Scott Grabinger (University of Colorado-Denver)

The Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia is designed to 
provide a multi-disciplinary forum and serve as a primary information 
source to present and discuss research and applications on Multimedia 
and Hypermedia in education.  The main goal of the Journal is to 
contribute to the advancement of the theory and practice of learning 
and teaching using these powerful technological tools that allow the 
integration of images, sound, text and data.

Reviewed by leaders in the field, this international quarterly 
Journal is published for researchers, developers, professors, 
teachers, teacher educators, curriculum coordinators, and all 
interested in the educational research and applications of 
Multimedia and Hypermedia at all levels.

Journal articles include any educational aspect of Multimedia and
Hypermedia and take the form of:

       o Research papers               o Case studies
       o Experimental studies          o Review papers
       o Book/courseware reviews       o Tutorials
       o Courseware experiences        o Opinions

Departments include:
-------------------
Viewpoint - examines ideas and their relationships in the field.

Multimedia Projects: Issues and Applications - discusses the 
practical and theoretical problems and issues associated with 
current state-of-the-art multimedia/hypermedia projects (Edited 
by Greg Kearsley, George Washington University)

Developers' Dialogue - examines interesting, unexplored, broad 
themes, issues and decisions faced by developers (Edited Carrie 
Heeter, Michigan State Univ.)

Educational Multimedia/Hypermedia Abstracts - abstracts 
noteworthy researchappearing in journals and databases.

Product Reviews - provides in-depth reviews with screen images of
multimedia/hypermedia products (Edited by Robert Beichner, SUNY-
Buffalo)

Book Reviews - provides critical reviews of books in the field 
Edited by Philip Barker, Teesside Polytechnic)

--------------------------------------------------------------------
To request subscription/membership information or Author Guidelines,
contact:
     AACE
     P.O. Box 2966
     Charlottesville, VA 22902 USA
     E-mail: aace@virginia.edu
     Phone: (804) 973-3987

                 ------------------------------------
The Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) 
is an international, educational organization whose purpose is to 
advance the knowledge and quality of teaching and learning at all 
levels with computing technologies through the encouragement of 
scholarly inquiry related to computing in education and the 
dissemination of research results and their applications.

AACE consists of five membership divisions.  And each division 
provides members with an annual conference and publications.  The 
following respected journals represent the topic areas of these 
divisions:

   - Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia
   - Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education
   - Journal of Computing in Childhood Education
   - Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching
   - Journal of Technology and Teacher Education (premieres Fall 
     '92)

9)-----------------------------------------------------------------

                            CLINAMENS
                
                      E.N.S. Fontenay/St Cloud
                         31 Avenue Lombart
                      92266-Fontenay-aux-Roses
                    Tel : 47-02-60-50, poste 530
                         Fax : 47-02-34-32

              L'E.N.S. annonce la creation de CLINAMENS
(CLearinghouse INterdisciplinaire `Anglicisme et Methodologie' de 
                     l'Ecole Normale Superieure)

Pourquoi "clearinghouse" ?

     Parce que l'ambition de cette structure n'est pas d'etre 
seulement un "centre de recherches", mais aussi un centre de 
rencontres, de partage, d'information et de critique constructive 
mutuelles, de mise au point et de clarification.  _Webster's_ 
partage sa definition du terme entre "le fait de clarifier" et un 
lieu de "collection, de traitement et de distribution de 
l'information"; le lieu, autrement dit, non seulement d'une 
reflexion solide et formatrice mais aussi d'une definition 
disciplinaire collective.

Pourquoi "Clinamens" ?  

     Parce que l'entreprise ne pourra, dans cette optique, avoir 
sens et valeur que si chacun accepte le detour, le "pas de cote", 
l'ecart qui, l'eloignant un peu de ses preoccupations les plus 
directes ou quotidiennes,  le rapprochera de ceux qui, dans des 
domaines adjacents, auront consenti le meme effort et renforcera 
ainsi son entreprise.
     Lucrece decrivait par le terme de "clinamen" la "legere 
deviation des atomes" qui permet leur rencontre et leur 
"accrochage".  Ce detournement de vocation, cet "ambitus", cette 
declinaison, Marx y lisait le signe d'une volonte  arrachee au 
destin, d'une liberte plus forte que les determinismes...  Faire 
travailler ensemble des "anglicistes" et les inviter a fertiliser 
mutuellement leur travail en prenant conscience des savoirs qui
les rassemblent et des interrogations qu'ils ont en commun plutot 
qu'en se renfermant sur le champ clos de leur stricte specialite 
-pratique un peu trop repandue- n'est pas une mince ambition.  
Il peut sembler qu'uelle vaille la peine de s'en donner les 
moyens.

     A terme, Clinamens organisera

          - Des seminaires de methodologie critique
          - Des seminaires de "work-in-progress"
          - Des cycles de conferences
          - Des debats contradictoires
          - Des equipes de recherches "sous-disciplinaires"
          - Une equipe de recherche theorique interdisciplinaire
          - Des colloques

     Des cette annee debutent le cycle de conferences et les 
actvites de quatre equipes de recherches.  (Voir le calendrier 
reproduit au verso.)  On se renseignera sur le detail de ces 
dernieres en prenant l'attache des responsables:

          1) "Incidences de la psychanalyse sur les etudes 
              anglicistes"  Responsable Patrick Di Mascio  
              (Tel : 43-38-56-47)
          2) "Episteme" (Epistemologie et litterature 16e-18e 
               siecles)
               Responsable Gisele Venet  (Tel : 60-46-56-63)
          3) "Telos" (Linguistique)
               Responsable Laurent Danon-Boileau  (Tel : 
               43-26-98-78)
          4) "Irlande"
               Responsable Alexandra Poulain  (Tel : 
               45-24-05-09)

     L'assistance aux conferences est libre dans la limite des 
places disponibles.  *Les specialistes d'autres disciplines 
sont les bienvenus.* La participation aux equipes de recherche 
est possible apres contact avec le responsable de l'equipe 
concernee.

     Tous renseignements complementaires (horaires, salles, 
dates ou sujets non encore determines) peuvent etre obtenus 
aupres du responsable de CLINAMENS : 

                                Marc Chenetier
                            ENS Fontenay/St. Cloud
                                  Bureau 105
                              31 Avenue Lombart
                           92266-Fontenay-aux-Roses
                            47-02-60-50, poste 530

10)--------------------------------------------------------------

00000000000000000000000000  RD: Graduate Research in the Arts
00000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000  A CALL FOR PAPERS AND READERS
00000000000000000000000000
00000000:::::::::::0000000  RD: GRADUATE RESEARCH IN THE ARTS is 
000000:       DDDDD:000000  a refereed journal dedicated to 
0000:         DDDDDDD:0000  publishing the work of graduate scholars 
000:  RRRRR   D     DD:000  in the Arts.  It provides an appropriate 
00:   R    R  D DDDD DD:00  forum for their scholarly work and a
0:    RRRRR   D DDDDD DD:0  collective voice for their issues and 
0:    R   R   D DDDDD DD:0  interests.
00:   R    R  D DDDD D:000  Papers for RD are now being solicited 
000:  R     R D     DD:000  from graduate students in the Arts, Fine 
0000:         DDDDDDD:0000  Arts, andHumanities in any of the 
00000:::      DDDD:::00000  following areas:    
0000000::::::::::::0000000      * language, literature and other        
00000000000000000000000000        artifacts/artefacts
00000000000000000000000000      * constructions of the self, gender,  
00000000000000000000000000        class and race
00000000000000000000000000      * the academy itself and its 
                                  institutional imperatives.

Multidisciplinary and collaborative work isencouraged.

Address two copies of each paper to the editors with a SASE and proof 
of current enrollment in a graduate programme (for instance, photocopy 
of a student card or letter from the programme).  Submissions can 
also be sent on disk (DOS or Macintosh format) or by e-mail.  If you 
intend to send papers by e-mail, please contact the editors to receive 
guidelines for indicating foreign or special characters and italics. 
All submissions should conform to the _MLA Style Manual_.

RD is also presently accepting applications from graduate students to 
act as readers of papers. Volunteers should include a CV, or a brief 
summary of their scholarly work and publications.

DEADLINES:

Submissions for RD 1 (Spring 1992) must be postmarked by 15 December 
1991.

Submissions for RD 2 (Fall 1992) will be accepted until 31 August 
1992.

SUBSCRIPTIONS:
                        1 Year  2 Years
Student                 $16.00  $30.00
Individual/Institution  $24.00  $44.00
Please add 7% for GST.  Made checks payable to RD.

Individuals who have access to e-mail can receive electronic versions 
of the journal free of charge by sending their name, status (student, 
faculty, other) and e-mail address to the editors.

ADDRESS:

Editors, RD
York University
c/o Graduate Programme in English
215 Stong College
4700 Keele Street
North York, Ontario
CANADA  M3J 1P3

bitnet: RD@WRITER YORKU.CA

EDITORS:
         Stephen N. Matsuba
         Rod Lohin

EDITORIAL BOARD:
         Clint Burnham
         Cecily Devereux
         Mark Dineen
         Gayle Irwin
         Sherry Rowley
         Glenn Stillar
         Scott Wright

11)------------------------------------------------------------------
                         CALL FOR PAPERS

LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE is a new international journal to be 
published by Longman U.K. in June. It brings together the work of 
those interested in the field of stylistic analysis, the elucidation 
of literary and non- literary texts and related areas.  It explores 
the connections between stylistics, critical theory, linguistics, 
literary criticism and their pedagogical applications.

Interested contributors should write to:

M.H.Short
Department of Linguistics and Modern English Language
University of Lancaster
LANCASTER
LA1 4YT
U.K.

e-mail enquiries to Tony Bex, University of Kent at Canterbury:
arb1@ukc.ac.uk

12)------------------------------------------------------------------

            *************CALL FOR PAPERS*************

                 An International Conference On
         The Sociology and Anthropology of Performance:
           Public and Private, May 29-31, 1992, Ottawa

Submissions are invited for an international symposium which
explores "performance" with reference to both public and private
domains as well as the links between the two.  Scholars with an
interest in the performing arts (e.g. dance, music, media etc.)
as well as those with interest in private performance (e.g.
ritual, meditation, shamanism etc.) are invited to attend a
three-day symposium at Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada.

With regard to public performance, our focus is on the social
science of the performing arts (i.e. demonstrative acts involving
skills).  Examples would include:

- dance choreography as a special form of communication
- theatre as a vehicle of social expression
- music and musicology as social expression or elitism
- media and performing arts
- sacred Vs. the secular in performing arts
- public ritual performance (Puja, ritual-drama etc.)

Private performance focuses on the social science of the use of
demonstrative acts in the private domain and includes:

- meditation
- sadhana, personal ritual-drama
- physical and mental yogas
- the ritual control of experience
- ritual transformation
- ritual or transpersonal epistemologies
- esoteric epistemologies

     These categories are neither mutually exclusive or
exhaustive.  You are welcome to suggest topics in relation to our
broad outline by email or snail mail.  Please include a title and
a short abstract.  We also require a brief C.V. which is needed
to bolster our funding applications.

Mail your submissions to:             Email submissions to:

                                      BRIAN_GIVEN@CARLETON.CA

V. Subramaniam                        Brian J. Given
Political Science                     Sociology and Anthropology
Carleton University                   Carleton U.
Ottawa, Ont.                          Ottawa, Ont.

13)------------------------------------------------------------------

           I'M THINKING OF SOMETHING ROUND: BEUYS' CHALKBOARDS

                       CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS

I am a San Francisco artist interested in art as experimentation. I 
am soliciting individuals who are interested in participating in a
telecommunications art experiment/project.  This project will attempt
to gather ideas from around the world.  I have created a file that
I would like to have forwarded around the world, where each individual
me,involved would add an idea to a list.  Once the file is returned to 
I will attempt to execute an idea from the list.

Those who are interested in this project, please send me your address
and I will mail you the file and detailed instructions.

Elliot Anderson
San Francisco State University
eliota@sfsuvax1.sfsu.edu

"An Equal Opportunity Artist...""

14)------------------------------------------------------------------

                               dis*Klo'zher

                              call for papers

The editorial collective of disClosure is pleased to announce that it 
is now accepting submissions for its second issue.  disClosure is a 
social theory journal edited by graduate students at the Uniersity of 
Kentucky, and is designed to provide a forum of multi-disciplinary 
dialogue between the humanities and the the social sciences. By 
exploring alternative forms of discourse, our goal is to address 
contemporary intellectual concerns through a rigorous examination 
of history, space, and representation. As our title suggests, we 
encourage fresh perspectives that trancend the strictures and 
structures set in place by traditional disciplary boundaries.
______________________________________________________________________
    Issue 2- "The Buying and Selling of Culture"
    Deadline - 1 March 1992
    Submissions for the second issue could address the following 
    issues:

Commodifactions of: PLACE, HERITAGE, PRACTICE, the IMAGE, EDUCATION,
                    IDEAS, CONTRACEPTION, RELIGION, the "SELF" &
                    "POTENTIAL",the SPECTACLE, ART
Aesthetics and:     TECHNOLOGY/RESISTANCE/COMMODIFCATION/THEORY/
                    DOMINATION
Resistance:         AVANT GARDE? POSTMODERN? GRASS ROOTS? SUICIDAL?
                    AUTONOMY?
______________________________________________________________________
We accept submissions from all theoretical perspecitves and all genres
(essay, interview, review, poetry, artwork and others), from both 
inside and outside the academy. disClosure is a refereed journal whose
selections are based solely on quality and originaltiy. Graduate
studetns, factulty and nonacademics are equally encouraged to submit
works.  Send three copies of manuscripts fromated to MLA guidlines,
double-spaced, and less than 10,000 words to:

disClosure
106 Student Center
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY  40506-0026
PHONE: 606/2572931
EMAIL: DISCLOSURE@UKCC.UKY.EDU

to order an issue, please send $5 (individual) or $10 (library) in the
form of a check or money order payable to disClosure.

15)-------------------------------------------------------------------

             NEW JOURNAL: STUDIES IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY

STUDIES IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY, a journal devoted to the study
of psychoanalysis and cultural criticism in the humanities, social
sciences, and fine arts, invites the submission of manuscripts in
either current MLA or APA style.  Psychoanalytic here is used in the
broadest sense to include Freudian, neo-Freudian, Lacanian, Jungian,

British school, ego psychology, etc., etc., perspectives.

We are also interested in locating people interested in reviewing books
for us. If you would like more information, please contact me via
e-mail at ra471av@tcuamus or via "snail mail" at

Christina Murphy, Editor
STUDIES IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY
Box 32875
Texas Christian University
Fort Worth, TX 76129
(817) 921-7221

Thanks.  I look forward to hearing from you and receiving subscriptions
and submissions.

16)--------------------------------------------------------------------

                      CALL FOR PAPERS

     *   SYMPOSIUM:  THE PRINCIPIA CYBERNETICA PROJECT       *
     *      computer-supported cooperative development       *
     *        of an evolutionary-systemic philosophy         *

                        as part of the

            13th International Congress on Cybernetics
               NAMUR (Belgium), August 24-28, 1992

After the succesful organization of a symposium on "Cybernetics and 
Human Values" at the 8th World Congress of Systems and Cybernetics 
(New York, June 1990), and of the "1st Workshop of the Principia 
Cybernetica Project" (Brussels, July 1991), the third official 
activity of the Principia Cybernetica Project will be a Symposium 
held at the 13th Int. Congress on Cybernetics. The official congress 
languages are English and French.

The informal symposium will allow researchers interested in 
collaborating in the Project to meet. The emphasis will be on 
discussion, rather than on formal presentation. Contributors are 
encouraged to read some of the available texts on the PCP in order 
to get acquainted with the main issues (Newsletter available on 
request from the Symposium Chairman).

Symposium Theme

Principia Cybernetica is a collaborative attempt to develop a 
complete and consistent cybernetic philosophy, moving towards a 
transdisciplinary unification of the domain of Systems Theory and 
Cybernetics. PCP is meta-cybernetical in that we intend to use 
cybernetic tools to develop and analyze cybernetic theory. These 
include the computer-based tools of hypertext, electronic mail, 
and knowledge structuring software.

PCP is to be developed as a dynamic, multi-dimensional conceptual 
network. The basic architecture consists of nodes, containing 
expositions of concepts using different media, connected by links, 
representing the associations that exist between the nodes. Both 
nodes and links can belong to different types expressing different 
semantic and practical categories.

PCP will focus on the clarification of fundamental concepts and 
principles of the cybernetics and systems domain. Concepts include:  
Complexity, Information, Variety, Freedom, Control, Self-
organization, Emergence, etc. Principles include the Laws of 
Requisite Variety, of Requisite Hierarchy, and of Regulatory 
Models.

The PCP philosophy is systemic and evolutionary, based on the 
spontaneous emergence of higher levels of organization or control 
(metasystem transitions) through blind variation and natural 
selection. It includes:

 a) a metaphysics, based on processes or actions as ontological 
primitives,

 b) an epistemology, which understands knowledge as constructed 
by the subject, but undergoing selection by the environment;

 c) an ethics, with the continuance of the process of evolution 
as supreme value.

Philosophy and implementation of PCP are united by their common 
framework based on cybernetic and evolutionary principles: the 
computer-support system is intended to amplify the spontaneous 
development of knowledge which forms the main theme of the 
philosophy.

Papers can be submitted on one or several of the following 
topics:

The Principia Cybernetica Project
Cybernetic Concepts and Principles
Evolutionary Philosophy
Knowledge Development
Computer-Support Systems for Collaborative Theory Building

Submission of papers

People wishing to present a paper in the Principia Cybernetica 
symposium should quickly send the application form, together 
with an abstract of max. 1 page, to the addresses of the 
Symposium chairman AND of the Congress secretariat (IAC) below. 
They will be notified about acceptance not later than 2 months 
after receipt, and will receive instructions for the 
preparation of the final text. In principle, all application 
forms should be received by December 31, 1991, but it may be 
possible to come in late. People wishing to present a paper 
in a different symposium can directly submit their abstract 
to the secretariat.

For submissions of papers to, or further information about, 
the Principia Cybernetica symposium, contact the symposium 
chairman:

Dr. Francis Heylighen
PO-PESP, Free Univ. Brussels, Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussels, 
Belgium
Phone +32 - 2 - 641 25 25   Email  fheyligh@vnet3.vub.ac.be
Fax   +32 - 2 - 641 24 89   Telex  61051 VUBCO B

For congress registration, or further information about the 
congress, contact the secretariat:

International Association for Cybernetics
Palais des Expositions, Place Ryckmans, B-5000 Namur, 
Belgium
Phone +32 - 81 - 73 52 09   Email  cyb@info.fundp.ac.be
Fax   +32 - 81 - 23 09 45

17)-------------------------------------------------------------

 PERFORATIONS, an Atlanta-based journal of language, art, and 
technology, is seeking contributors for a special issue with the 
theme: AFTER THE BOOK. This issue will be devoted to work about 
the demise of The Book As We Knew  It, the rise of hypertext, and 
the possibilities for writing in the world post-ink-and-linearity. 
We're particularly interested in in work approaching hypertext 
from film and video theory, in critical work on hyperfiction, in
hypertexts on-disk or in print extracts, and in work challenging 
our position that hypertext, in its transcendence of the 
restrictions of the paper book and the one-way movie, represents 
writing's first true step beyond Sterne/Joyce and film/video. 
Essays, print and graphic collages, fictions, or hybrids of any 
sort are welcome. No restrictions on style, no minimum or 
maximum length; we're hoping that contributors will send us 
serious and adventurous work that they might hesitate to submit 
to a more traditional journal.

 Deadline: March 15, 1992 (negotiable for authors preceding 
submissions with queries). Macintosh-readable disks preferred, 
all formats acceptable. Send queries and submissions to: 
libgess@emuvm1.bitnet/Richard Gess, Guest Editor, PERFORATIONS, 
428 Oakview Rd, Decatur, GA 30030.

   About PERFORATIONS: Atlanta's Public Domain alternative arts 
collective published the first issue of PERFORATIONS in September 
1991. PEFORATIONS is a journal where theorists, critics, and 
artists contrbute equally to examinations of current issues in 
language, art, and technology. Issues are theme-oriented: Fall 
1991 was about "The Post-mortem Condition," and Winter 1992 
(now in press) is about "Conspiracies, Esthetics and Politics," 
and features an interview with Jean-Francois Lyotard and a 
hyperfiction disk. Spring 1992, due in May, will be "After the 
Book;" issues beyond will consider "Dreams, Bodies, and 
Technologies," "Multi-, Mini-, and Quasi-Culturalisms," and 
"Virtual and Performative Architectures." PERFORATIONS is 
distributed regionally to a growing audience of working artists 
in all genres and scholars in all disciplines; publication in
PERFORATIONS is a way of communicating beyond the usually 
suspected readers for both artists and academics. For 
subscription/back issue information, contact 
libgess@emuvm1.bitnet.

18)--------------------------------------------------------------

The next issue of the CTI (Computers in Teaching Initiative) 
Centre for Textual Studies newsletter _Computers & Texts_ 
will be centred on the use of computing in the areas of 
Philosophy/Logic. This is a preliminary call for submissions 
by anyone interested in this subject. Format and deadline details
are available upon request. 

The areas we are hoping to cover in the issue are: 

        An overview of the use of computers and Philosophy 
        Electronic Texts: their availability and usefulness 
        Simulation packages 
        Review of Ethics software
        Review of Logic Software 
        Bulletin Boards, Electronic mail, and other computer
        -based resources of use to Philosophers 

Please feel free to suggest other areas which you think should 
be included. 

Thanks in advance, 

Stuart Lee 
Research Officer 
CTI Centre for Textual Studies 
Oxford University Computing Service 
13 Banbury Road 
Oxford 
OX2 6NN 
Tel:0865-273221 
Fax:0865-273275 
E-mail: STUART@UK.AC.OX.VAX 

19)------------------------------------------------------------

                          TO ALL GRADUATE STUDENTS: 

                               CALL FOR PAPERS 

The Frontenac Review 
Dept. of French Studies 
Queen's University 
Kingston, Ontario 
Canada  K7L 3N6 
Telephone: (613) 545-2090 
Fax: (613) 545-6300 

Email: warderh@qucdn.queensu.ca 

January 1992 

The Frontenac Review invites you to submit articles on The 
'Nouveau Roman'for its winter 1991 edition (number 8) and on 
Acadian literature for its Fall 1992 edition (number 9).  
Initial submissions should follow the guidelines  established 
by the M.L.A.  If your article is accepted we will ask you to 
submit the same article on diskette (IBM compatible), in 
Wordperfect 5.1 
format. 

The committee will not be responsible for returning articles.  
All candidates will be informed of the committee's decision 
within a reasonable time limit. 

The Frontenac Review is searched annually by the Bibliographie 
der Franzoesischen Literaturwissenschaft and by the MLA 
International Bibliography. 

                       DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 

         ** The Nouveau Roman (no. 8) -- January 30, 1992 ** 

           Acadian Literature (no. 9) -- September 1, 1992 

20)-------------------------------------------------------------
                          CALL FOR PAPERS

The ACH will be organising two sessions at the 1992 MLA 
Convention, to be held December 27-30, 1992, in New York City, 
around Mark Olsen's position paper proposing a new direction 
for computer-aided studies of literature (summary below).  
Please contact Paul Fortier -- FORTIER@UOFMCC.BITNET .

Deadline for submission of paper or abstract March 1, 1992 to
FORTIER@UOFMCC.BITNET.  People presenting papers at the the MLA
Convention MUST be members of the MLA.  Announcement of 
acceptance April 1, 1992.

                            ---------------

            Signs, Symbols and Discourses:  A New Direction
                 for Computer-aided Literature Studies.

                              Mark Olsen*
                         University of Chicago
                         mark@gide.uchicago.edu
Abstract

     Computer-aided Literature Studies have failed to have a
significant impact on the field as a whole.  This failure is
traced to  a  concentration  on  how  a  text  achieves  its
literary  effect  by  the  examination of subtle semantic or
grammatical structures in single texts or the works of indi-
vidual  authors.   Computer  systems  have proven to be very
poorly suited to such refined analysis of complex  language.
Adopting  such  traditional  objects  of study has tended to
discourage researchers from using the tool to ask  questions
to  which  it  is  better  adapted, the examination of large
amounts of simple linguistic features.   Theoreticians  such
as  Barthes,  Foucault  and  Halliday show the importance of
determining the lingusitic and semantic  characteristics  of
the  language  used  by  the  author  and  her/his audience.
Current technology, and databases like  the  TLG  or  ARTFL,
facilitate   such  wide-spectrum  analyses.   Computer-aided
methods are thus capable of opening up new areas  of  study,

which  can potentially transform the way in which literature
is studied.

[ ... ]

                          --------------------

[A complete version of this paper is now available through the 
HUMANIST fileserver, s.v.  OLSEN MLA92.  You may obtain a copy 
by issuing the command -- GET filename filetype HUMANIST -- 
either interactively or as a batch-job, addressed to 
ListServ@Brownvm.  Thus on a VM/CMS system, you say 
interactively:  TELL LISTSERV AT BROWNVM GET OLSEN MLA92 
HUMANIST; if you are not on a VM/CMS system, send mail to 
ListServ@Brownvm with the GET command as the first and only 
line.  For more details see the "Guide to Humanist".  Problems 
should be reported to David Sitman, A79@TAUNIVM, after you 
have consulted the Guide and tried all appropriate 
alternatives.]

21)------------------------------------------------------------

                     NEW JOURNAL FOR 1992

          COMPUTER SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK (CSCW)
                   An International Journal

Editorial Team:

LIAM BANNON                         JOHN BOWERS
Copenhagen Business School          Dept. of Psychology
Institute of Computer &         Univ. of Manchester
Systems Sciences, Denmark           U.K.

CHARLES GRANTHAM                    MIKE ROBINSON
Dept. of Organizational Studies     Centre for Innovation&
Univ. of San Francisco              Cooperative Technology
USA                                 Univ. of Amsterdam
                                    The Netherlands

KJELD SCHMIDT                       SUSAN LEIGH STAR
Cognitive Systems Group             Dept. of Sociology &
Ris~ National Laboratory            Social Anthropology
Denmark                             University of Keele
                                    U.K.

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW):  An International
Journal  will be devoted to innovative research in Computer
Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). It will provide an
interdisciplinary forum for the debate and exchange of ideas
concerning theoretical, practical, technical and social issues
in CSCW.

The journal arises as a timely response to the growing
interest in the design, implementation and use of technical
systems (including computing, information, and communications
technologies) which support people working cooperatively.
Equally, the journal is concerned with studies of the process
of cooperative work itself - studies intended to motivate the
design of new technical systems, and to develop both theory
and praxis in the field. The journal will encourage
contributions from a wide range of disciplines and
perspectives within the social, computing and allied human and
information sciences.

In general, the journal will facilitate the discussion of all
issues which arise in connection with the support requirements
of cooperative work. It is intended that the journal will be
of interest to a wide readership through its coverage of
research related to - inter alia - groupware, socio-technical
system design, theoretical models of cooperative work,
computer mediated communication, human-computer interaction,
group decision support systems (GDSS), coordination systems,
distributed systems, situated action, studies of cooperative
work and practical action, organisation theory and design, the
sociology of technology, explorations of innovative design
strategies, management and business science perspectives,
artificial intelligence and distributed AI approaches to
cooperation, library and information sciences, and all manner
of technical innovations devoted to the support of cooperative
work including electronic meeting rooms, teleconferencing
facilities, electronic mail enhancements, real-time and
asynchronous technologies, desk-top conferencing, shared
editors, video and multi-media systems. In addition, we
welcome studies of the social, cultural, moral, legal and
political implications of CSCW systems.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Manuscripts (5 Copies) relating to any of the above-mentioned
themes and topics are invited for submission. Manuscripts
should be submitted to the Journals Editorial Office at the
address below:

          Editorial Office (COSU)
          Kluwer Academic Publishers
          P.O. Box 17
          3300 AA Dordrecht
          The Netherlands

Detailed instructions for authors and other information (such
as submission via email or on disk) can be obtained from the
above address or by electronic mail on: HUSOC@KAP.NL (Please
mark your message CSCW).
______________________________________________________________

INFORMATION REQUEST FORM
Please fill in the information form and send to:

KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS
Att. M. van der Linden
P.O.Box 989
3300 AZ Dordrecht
The Netherlands
Email: husoc@kap.nl

O    Please send me a FREE SAMPLE COPY of Computer Supported
     Cooperative Work

O    Please send me your brochure listing publications in
     Cognitive Science/Artificial Intelligence

NAME:_______________________________________________________
ADDRESS:____________________________________________________
CITY:________________________________ STATE:________________
COUNTRY:____________________________________________________
POSTAL CODE:_________________________ DATE:_________________
EMAIL:______________________________________________________

            PLEASE TYPE OR PRINT IN BLOCKLETTERS

IF YOU REPLY BY EMAIL, PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR FULL NAME AND
POSTAL ADDRESS.

22)--------------------------------------------------------------

                          NC92 TELENETLINK CONGRESS
                A Collective, Ubiquitous, Congress In Progress

          Networking dialogue has been central to mail art and
telecommunication art projects.  Telecommunciation artists, for 
example, use personal computers to download work for modification, 
detournement, or appropriation into other artworks--creative 
authorship is shared.  Mail artists also share co-authorship in 
postal exchanges.  The recycled surfaces or contents of mailing 
tubes, envelopes, and parcels travel thousands of miles around 
the world as many artists alter a single item.  Gradually, a
global collage of artist postage stamps, rubber stamped images, 
cryptic messages, and slogans emerge.

          As NC92 facilitator, I have formed a "Telenetlink 
Congress" whose purpose is centered on reaching readers and the 
telematic community through magazines, bulletin board services 
like NYC's "Echo," Chicago's "Artbase" BBS, and by accessing 
internationally distributed USENET newsgroups such as alt artcom, 
and rec arts fine.  I view these collective efforts as a
ubiquitous "congress in process" extending throughout the 
1992 Networker Congress year.

          Participation may involve any form of 
telecommunication exchange, e-mail, fax, video phones, etc. Send 
your Telenetlink Congress statements and project proposals via 
(e)mail to Cathryn L. Welch@dartmouth.edu. or fax to Chuck 
Welch, Telenetlink Congress (603) 448-9998.

Participating in the NC92 Telenetlink Congress begins when 
readers send a brief one page statement about "how you envision 
your own role as a networker."  Proposals and projects that 
would interconnect the mail art and telematic communities are 
also welcome.  Periodic updates concerning telenetlink project 
initiatives will be posted over Usenet newsgroups rec. arts 
fine and alt. artcom.    All statements received from artists 
in the telematic community will be part of the NC92 "Networker 
Database Congress," a collection that will be made available 
for research at the University of Iowa's "Alternative 
Traditions in the Contemporary Arts Archive."

*Art that networks explores and expands the communication 
process as it encourages democratic access to free 
communication.  By cutting through social, cultural and 
political hierarchies, we can dissolve boundaries and discover 
corresponding worlds of mail and telecommunications art.*

# # # # *** Further information about scheduled NC92 events is 
available by writing to these facilitators:

H.R. Fricker, Buro fur kunstlerische Umtriebe, CH 9043 Trogen, 
Switzerland Peter W. Kaufmann, Bergwisenstrasse 11, 8123 
Ebmatingen, Switzerland Netlink South America: Clemente Padin, 
Casilla C. Central 1211, Montevideo,Uruguay
Netlink East: Chuck Welch, PO Box 978, Hanover, NH 03755
Netlink South: John Held Jr. 7919 Goforth, Dallas, Texas 
75238
Netlink Midwest: Mark Corroto, PO Box 1382, Youngstown, Ohio 
44501
Netlink Subspace: Steve Perkins, 221 W. Benton, Iowa City, Iowa 
52246
Netlink West: Lloyd Dunn, PO Box 162, Oakdale, Iowa  52319 *** 
# # # #

23)-------------------------------------------------------------
________________________________________________________________
|                     LITERATURE, COMPUTERS AND WRITING:       |
|                                                              |
|                   FORGING CONNECTIONS IN THE HIGH SCHOOL     |    
|                                                              |
|                      AND COLLEGE ENGLISH CLASSROOMS          |    
|                                                              |
|                                April 3, 1992                 |    
|______________________________________________________________|

    The fifth annual Computers and English Conference for high 
                                school and
                        college teachers of writing.
     Sponsored by the Program in English New York Institute of 
                            Technology

The conference has two primary themes:
     o  how computers and specifically computer networks can be 
        used to ally high school and college teachers of English, 
        and
     o  how computers are changing the way literature is created, 
        taught,understood and written about.

Possible Topics

     o  Computer access in a muliticultural environment
     o  Computers and the changing definitions of literacy
     o  Growing interest in desktop publishing for students and
        faculty
     o  Teleconferencing and distance learning
     o  Classroom uses of on-line databases and searches
     o  Classroom uses of hypertext and hypermedia
     o  Computer discussion groups for students and/or teachers
     o  Varied features of personal contact in an electronic
        environment
     o  Computers and the learning-disabled student
     o  Continuing teacher education and telecommunications
     o  Demonstrations of software programs you have designed
     o  Effects of computers on testing and assessing
        individually or collaboratively composed writing

Send requests for information to:

                            Department of English
                       New York Institute of Technology
                         Old Westbury, New York 11568
                     Att: Ann McLaughlin  (516) 686-7557.

Conference Fee:  $50.00 (prior to conference date) $35.00 for 
matriculated graduate students.  Fee includes coffee and buffet 
luncheon.  Hotel accomodations available near campus at East 
Norwich Inn (East Norwich, NY).
 ________________________________________________________________
|Pre-Registration Form                                           |
|                                                                |
|Please register me for the Fifth-Annual NYIT Computers and      |
|Writing Conference:                                             |
|                                                                |
| Name:     _________________________________________________    |
| Address:  _________________________________________________    |
|           _________________________________________________    |
|           _________________________________________________    |
| E-Mail:   _________________________________________________    |
| School:   _________________________________________________    |
| Amount Enclosed:  $ ___.___                                    |
| Mail completed form to                                         |
|  Department of English                                         |
|  New York Institute of Technology                              |
|  Old Westbury, New York 11568                                  |
|  Att: Ann McLaughlin  (516) 686-7557.                          |
|________________________________________________________________|

24)--------------------------------------------------------------- 

SECTION on SCIENCE, KNOWLEDGE, AND TECHNOLOGY at the
SOUTHWESTERN SOCIAL SCIENCE ANNUAL MEETINGS in AUSTIN, TEXAS
MARCH 27-31, 1992.

CONTACT: Raymond Eve  

****PLEASE FORWARD TO ANYONE WHO MIGHT BE INTERESTED****

     I would like to mention to you (somewhat belatedly, I
fear), the upcoming section on "Science, Knowledge, and
Technology" to be held at the Southwestern Social Science
Association Annual Meetings in Austin, Texas.  Dates for the
meeting's paper sessions will be March 27 - 31, 1992.  The
S,K, and T paper sessions will probably be scheduled on
Thursday and/or Friday of that week.
     Unfortunately, the SWSA forgot to include the listing
of the "Science, Knowledge, and Technology" section (and a
section organizer -- yours truly) in the initial call for
papers.  This was an oversight, and you may be sure that the
section will exist again in '92.
     The section has only existed for two previous years,
but the response has been truly outstanding, and
interestingly, excellent papers of common interest were
given by scholars as diverse as sociologists, arts and
literature faculty, anthropologists, and physical science
faculty.
     I would also like to take this opportunity to draw your
attention to a "Workshop for the Disciplines" session I've
been asked to organize on Friday morning at 10 a.m. of the
meetings.  It will be entitled "Postmodern Culture:
Convenient Myth or Imperative Paradigm?".  This session has
several very well known people scheduled for it, and their
disciplines include: literature, architecture, political
science, and sociology.  We should have on hand many
individuals interested in most postmodern theory and in
chaos theory, as well as many other interesting S, K, and T
topics.
     Hope we will see you in Austin in the spring!

25)-----------------------------------------------------------------

         POSTECH@WEBER.UCSD.EDU -- DISCUSSION GROUP ON 
               POST-STRUCTURALISM AND TECHNOLOGY

Phil Agre (UC San Diego) and John Bowers (Univ. of Manchester) have 
started a netmail discussion group on post-structuralism and 
technology. (You can define those terms however you like.)  To be 
added, send a  short note to postech-request@weber.ucsd.edu.  Make 
sure to include a  network address that's accessible from the 
Internet (me@here.bitnet, uucpnode!me@gateway.somewhere.edu, 
me@machine.here.ac.uk, me@ibm.com,  whatever).  We'll collect 
addresses for a month or so and then we'll  invite everyone to send 
a note to the group introducing themselves and advertising their 
work.

26)-----------------------------------------------------------------
          ****************************************************
          *                                                  *
          *               East-West Conference               *
          *  on Emerging Computer Technologies in Education  *
          *                                                  *
          *                 April 6-9, 1992                  *
          *                   Moscow, Russia                 *
          *                                                  *
          *           SECOND REVISED ANNOUNCEMENT            *
          *                                                  *
          *             CALL FOR PARTICIPATION               *
          *                                                  *
          ****************************************************

     The aims of  the  East-West  Conference  on  Emerging  Computer
Technologies in Education are to provide a forum for the exchange of
ideas between Eastern and Western scientists and to present  to  the
Soviet  educational  community  the  current state-of-the-art on the
theory and practice of using emerging computer-based  technology  in
education.   The   Technical   Programme   includes  invited  talks,
presentations  of  about  80 research/development and review papers,
posters, and demonstrations. An exhibition of  educational  hardware
and software products is also anticipated.

     The conference is designed to cover the  following  subfields  of
advanced research in the field of computers and education:

-  Artificial Intelligence and Education
-  Educational Multi-Media and Hyper-Media
-  Learning Environments, Microworlds and Simulation

     The Conference is organised and sponsored by: Association for the
Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), International Centre for
Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI), and  Soviet  Association
for Artificial Intelligence (SAAI).

     The Conference will take place in the ICSTI Building in Moscow.

Information
~~~~~~~~~~~

For further information please contact:

Conference content and program:
              Dr Peter Brusilovsky (eastwest@plb.icsti.su)
Accomodation and visa support:
              Mr Vladislav Pavlov (use the conference FAX number).

Registration: Dr Viacheslav Rykov (use the conference FAX number).

Exhibition:   Dr Jury Gornostaev  (enir@ccic.icsti.msk.su)

Conference addresses
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
East-West Conference on Emerging Computer Technologies in Education
International Centre for Scientific and Technical Information
Kuusinen str. 21b, Moscow 125252, Russia
E-mail: eastwest@plb.icsti.su or  eastwest%plb.icsti.su@ussr.eu.net
Telex: 411925 MCNTI
FAX: +7 095 943 0089

27)------------------------------------------------------------------

                ENVIRONMENT AND THE LATINO IMAGINATION
                   * * Conference announcement * *

Cornell University will host a conference on "Environment and the 
Latino Imagination" that will involve the participation of 
environmentalists, artists, poets, activists, and other invited 
speakers who will address one of the holes in mainstream environmental 
research--the persectives of U.S. Latinos and their ways of imagining 
their relationship to their environment. 

The conference will take place April 30-May 2, l992.  
Please direct inquiries to:

Debra A. Castillo                 or     Barbara Lynch
Dept. Romance Studies                    Environmental Toxicology
Goldwin Smith Hall                       Fernow Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY  14853

or bitnet to bgcy@cornella

28)------------------------------------------------------------------

                                 SWIP-L

Announcing the formation of a new e-mail list called the SWIP-L, an
information and discussion list for members of the Society for Women 
in Philosophy and others who are interested in feminist philosophy.

To subscribe to this list send the following one-line message to
LISTSERV@CFRVM or LISTSERV@CFRVM.CFR.USF.EDU

    Subscribe SWIP-L 

To post messages to the list send them to SWIP-L@CFRVM or to SWIP-L@
CFRVM.CFR.USF.EDU

   The idea of the list is to have a place to share information about 
SWIP meetings and other feminist philosophy meetings, calls for papers, 
jobs for feminist philosophers, as well as to engage in more substantive
discussion of issues related to feminist philosophy.  While it is open 
to people who are not SWIP members, this is a list meant for feminist 
philosophers; please don't subscribe unless that is a description you 
are comfortable applying to yourself.

LINDA LOPEZ McALISTER    DLLAFAA@CFRVM.CFR.USF.EDU (Internet)
Women's Studies Dept.    DLLAFAA@CFRVM_(Bitnet)
University of South Florida, Tampa 33620   (813)974-5531

29)-------------------------------------------------------------------

                   AMERICAN FOLKLORE SOCIETY

     Founded in 1888, the American Folklore Society is the
American learned and professional society for folklorists.  It
offers an intellectual and social forum for the field of
folklore through an annual meeting, publications, specialized
activities of interest-group sections, various prizes and awards,
and other services to its membership.

     The JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE is a lively forum for
recent work in this field.  Recent issues have treated such
topics as Gospel quartets, the Greenwich Village Halloween
Parade, the zombi, cowboy poetry gatherings, Latinismo and
heritage politics, nocturnal death syndrome among the Hmong,
folklore in Richard Wright's "Black Boy", and reviews of a wide
range of books, exhibitions, films, and records.

     The Annual Meeting will be held October 15-18, 1992 in
Jacksonville, Florida.  The call for papers will appear in the
February Newsletter.

           MEMBERSHIP DIRECTORY AND GUIDE TO THE FIELD

     The DIRECTORY has been compiled from members' responses and
submissions from folklore programs and organizations throughout
North America.  The DIRECTORY contains:

     *    alphabetized name and address entries for 1200
          folklorists, most of which also contain telephone and
          E-mail information and areas of interest

     *    detailed descriptive entries for academic and public
          programs in folklore

     *    indexes to the member directory entries by interest
          area and place of residence

The Directory is available for $10 to members of the American
Folklore Society, and for $15 to nonmembers, with a 10% discount
on orders of 10 copies or more.

To order the Directory:  Send a check made payable to the
American Folklore Society and marked "1992 AFS Directory" to

     Book Orders Department (EM)
     American Folklore Society,
     1703 New Hampshire Ave. NW,
     Washington, DC 20009.

-----------------------MEMBERSHIP INFORMATION--------------------

Membership in the American Folklore Society brings the following
benefits:

     *    JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE (quarterly)

     *    NEWSLETTER (bimonthly)

     *    reduced registration rates for the Annual Meeting

     *    discounted prices on volumes in the PUBLICATIONS OF THE
          AMERICAN FOLKLORE SOCIETY series; the Society's
          MEMBERSHIP DIRECTORY AND GUIDE TO THE FIELD; and the
          "Folklore" volume of the annual MLA INTERNATIONAL
          BIBLIOGRAPHY

     *    right to vote in Society's elections and to hold
          Society office

     *    right to be considered for Society prizes and awards

     *    access to various kinds of low-cost insurance offered
          to Society members by outside insurers

To become a member of the American Folklore Society:

     regular member      $50
     student member      $20
     partner member      $20 (partners of members do not receive
                              publications)
     sustaining          $75
     patron              $100
     life member         $800.

Send a check made payable to the American Folklore Society to

     Membership Department (EM)
     American Folklore Society,
     1703 New Hampshire Ave. NW,
     Washington, DC 20009.

30)------------------------------------------------------------------

                                 MEANING HOLISM
                               NEW SUMMER SEMINAR

                     Directors: JERRY FODOR & ERNIE LEPORE
                Location: Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
                 Dates: June 29 - August 14, 1992 (seven weeks)

     Holism about meaning and intention content has shaped much of 
what is most characteristic of contemporary philosophy of language and 
philosophy of mind.  The seminar is devoted to the question whether 
the individuation of the contents of thoughts and linguistic 
expressions is inherently holistic. For example, we will discuss 
arguments that are alleged to show that themeaning of a scientific 
hypothesis depends on the entire theory that entails it, or that the 
content of a concept depends on the entire belief system of
which it is a part. Implications of holistic semantics for other
philosophical issues (intentional explanation, translation Realism,
skepticism, connectionism, etc.) will also be explored. Authors to be 
read include Quine, Davidson, Lewis, Block, Field, Dummett, Dennett, 
Churchland and others. In addition, we will use Holism: a Shopper's 
Guide, Fodor, J. and E. LePore, 1992, Basil Blackwell.

     The National Endowment for the Humanities will provide a summer 
stipend of $3,600 for travel, book and living expenses, to those 
selected as participants in this seminar. Applications must be 
postmarked not later than 2 March, 1992.

For further information and for application forms, please write to:

                             Meaning Holism Seminar
                             Philosophy Department
                                 Davidson Hall
                      Douglass Campus, Rutgers University
                         New Brunswick, NJ 08903 (USA)

31)------------------------------------------------------------------

ADDICT-L is an electronic conference for mature discussion of the 
many types of addictions experienced by a large portion of society. 
The focus of this list is to provide an information exchange network 
for individuals interested in researching, educating or recovering 
from a variety of addictions.  It is not the intent of this list to 
focus on one area of addiction, but rather to discuss the phenomena 
of addiction as it relates to areas of sexual, co-dependency, eating 
addiction, etc...  Truly a list that many aspects could be discussed. 

  -- All individuals with an interest in the topic area are welcome. 
  -- Subscriptions of those interested will be added by the listowner 
  -- Subscribers should look forward to educating themselves about 
     addictions, and discussing relevant topics related to addiction 
     and recovery. 
  -- Intended as an information exchange network and discussion group 

Possible Appropriate Subjects: 

  -- Discussion of etiology of addictions 
  -- Effects of addictions 
  -- Recovery from addiction and 12 Step Programs 
  -- Recent article publications relevant to addiction literature 
  -- Networking with others having related interests 

Drug/Alcohol addiction has a way of becoming an easy topic of
discussion.  It is the intent of this list to broaden the awareness of
addictions into a variety of other areas.  There are Electronic lists
devoted to drug/alcohol use for those interested only in that area 

Subscription  Procedure: 

To subscribe from a bitnet account send an interactive or e-mail 
message addressed to LISTSERV@KENTVM.  Internet users send mail to 
LISTSERV@KENTVM.KENT.EDU (In mail, leave the subject line blank and 
make the text of your message the following: 

      SUB ADDICT-L Yourfirstname  Yourlastname 

   Questions can be addressed to listowner: 
      David Delmonico   Ddelmoni@kentvm.kent.edu 

32)----------------------------------------------------------------

PJML on LISTSERV@UTXVM.BITNET      Progressive Jewish Mailing List 
or LISTSERV@UTXVM.CC.UTEXAS.EDU 

The Progressive Jewish Mailing List (PJML) is an educational forum, 
providing accurate information on a variety of Jewish concerns in 
ways that inspire us to action.  Using electronic mail and computer 
networks, PJML connects activist Jews and our allies from across the 
globe.  We come from many traditions;  if we have differences, let us 
talk about them openly.  But let us continue in the tradition of 
_tikkun olam_, the just repair of the world. 

To subscribe to PJML, you will need an electronic mail account that 
accesses either BITNET or INTERNET.  Simply send the following 
message to either LISTSERV@UTXVM.CC.UTEXAS.EDU or 
LISTSERV@UTXVM.BITNET: 

  SUB PJML yourfirstname yourlastname 

List Moderator:     Steve Carr 
   BITNET:          RTFC507@UTXVM.BITNET 
   INTERNET:        STEVEN.CARR@UTXVM.CC.UTEXAS.EDU 
   Phone:           (512) 453-8540 (h) 
   U.S. Post:       3911-A Ave. F 
                    Austin TX  78751 

33)---------------------------------------------------------------

BUDDHA-L on LISTSERV@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU 
         or LISTSERV@ULKYVM.BITNET 

   An electronic discussion group called BUDDHA-L has recently been 
   formed towards the end of providing a means for those interested in 
   Buddhist Studies to exchange information and views.  It is hoped that 
   the group will function as an open forum for scholarly discussion of 
   topics relating to the history, literature and languages, fine arts, 
   philosophy, and institutions of all forms of Buddhism.  It may also 
   serve as a forum for discussion of issues connected to the teaching 
   of Buddhist studies at the university level, and as a place for 
   posting notices of employment opportunities. 

   The primary purpose of this list is to provide a forum for serious 
   academic discussion.  It is open to all persons inside and outside 
   the academic context who wish to engage in substantial discussion of 
   topics relating to Buddhism and Buddhist studies.  BUDDHA-L is not to 
   be used for proselytizing for or against Buddhism in general, any 
   particular form of Buddhism, or any other religion or philosophy, nor 
   is it to be used as a forum for making unsubstantiable confessions of 
   personal conviction. 

   The discussion on the list is to be moderated, not in order to 
   suppress or censor controversies on any topic, but rather to limit 
   irrelevant discussions and idle chatter, and to redirect or return 
   messages sent to the list by accident.  Content or style will never 
   be altered by the moderator, whose only responsibility will be to 
   forward all appropriate postings to the list. 

   If you wish to subscribe to BUDDHA-L, send an e-mail message to 
   LISTSERV@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU, or BITNET nodes can send to 
   LISTSERV@ULKYVM.  The message should contain only the following 
   command (ie. in the body of the mail): 

      SUBSCRIBE BUDDHA-L  

   Owner: 
      James A. Cocks 
      Senior Consultant Research/Instruction 
      University of Louisville 
        Internet:  JACOCK01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU 
          Bitnet:  JACOCK01@ULKYVM 

34)---------------------------------------------------------------------

              PENN STATE UNIVERSITY SEMINAR SERIES 
                       ISSUES IN CRITICISM 

                         Summer Seminar 

          Seminar on Historicisms and Cultural Critique 

                        June 25-30, 1992 

                   State College, Pennsylvania 

WAI-CHEE DIMOCK, Department of English, University of California, 
San Diego.  Author of Empire for Liberty: Melville and the 
Poetics of Individualism (1989) and Symbolic Equality: Political 
Theory, Law, and American Literature (forthcoming); co-editor of 
the forthcoming Class and Literary Studies.  Professor Dimock 
will focus on the shifting configurations of gender and history. 

MARJORIE LEVINSON, Department of English, University of 
Pennsylvania.  Editor of Rethinking Historicism (1989) and author 
of Keats's life of Allegory: the Origins of Style (1988) and 
other monographs treating Romantic poetry.  Professor Levinson 
will concentrate on cultural materialism. 

BROOK THOMAS, Department of English and Comparative Literature, 
University of California, Irvine.  Author of Cross-Examination of 
Law and Literature (1987) and The New Historicism and Other 
Old-Fashioned Topics (1991).  Professor Thomas's central topic 
will be the crisis of representation. 

The Penn State Seminar on Historicisms and Cultural Critique 
offers faculty members in departments of English and modern 
languages the opportunity to survey the major issues in and 
freshen their knowledge of approaches to literature that 
emphasize the relations between text and culture, including those 
presently identified under the broad label of the New 
Historicism.  Seminar participants will hear presentations by 
three well-known scholar-critics--Wai Chee Dimock, Marjorie 
Levinson, and Brook Thomas--and engage in seminar-type 
discussions organized by these leaders.  Registrants are asked to 
indicate their first and second choices for morning seminar 
groups.  The schedule and atmosphere are intended to encourage 
informal discussions among participants. 

For further information contact: 

Wendell Harris 
Department of English 
Pennsylvania State University 
University Park, Pennsylvania 16802 
Telephone: 814-863-2343 or 814-865-9243 

35)------------------------------------------------------------------------

AFRICA-L on LISTSERV@BRUFPB.BITNET    Forum Pan-Africa

   A Pan-African forum for the discussion of the interests of African
   peoples (in Africa, and expatriate), and for those with an interest
   in the African continent and her peoples.  Of special interest will
   be ways to help facilitate the flow of communications (electronic and
   other) to and from Africa.  News, light-hearted discussions, and
   cultural and educational items are welcome.

   To subscribe to AFRICA-L send the following message to
   LISTSERV@BRUFPB: (Note that this is a BITNET address)

      SUBSCRIBE AFRICA-L your name and your African interests
      SET AFRICA-L REPRO

   For example,      subscribe africa-l J. Smith  Togo
                     set africa-l repro

   To obtain a list of current subscribers, send the message "review
   africa-l" to LISTSERV@BRUFPB.BITNET .

   List Owner:   Carlos Fernando Nogueira  (CTEDTC09@BRUFPB)

36)------------------------------------------------------------------------

                      FEMREL-L on LISTSERV@UMCVMB.BITNET

   FEMREL-L is an open discussion and resource list concerning women 
   & religion and feminist theology.  Our goal is open, stimulating
   discussion on any and all issues pertaining to these topics.  All
   religions, creeds, beliefs, opinions, etc. are welcome, although we
   do ask that participants respect differences.

   To subscribe, send the following command to LISTSERV@UMCVMB via mail
   or interactive message:

      SUB FEMREL-L your_full_name

   where "your_full_name" is your name.  For example:

      SUB FEMREL-L Joan Doe

   Submissions to the list should be sent to:

      FEMREL-L@UMCVMB.BITNET

   Owners:  Cathy Quick 
            Bonnie Vegiard 

37)------------------------------------------------------------------------

AN ON-LINE CATALOGUE OF THE GEORGETOWN CENTER FOR TEXT AND TECHNOLOGY

Since April 1989, the Center for Text and Technology of the
Academic Computer Center at Georgetown University has been
compiling information about projects in electronic text in the
humanities.  Currently we have details on over 300 projects in 27
countries.

Because this information is constantly being updated, any printing
would be obsolescent.  Consequently, we have created an on-line
Catalogue that is searchable through Internet and dial-in access.
Thus far, response has been gratifying; last month we logged over
100 inquiries.

An illustrated User's Guide to the Catalogue of Projects in
Electronic Text is available free of charge through surface mail.
In addition, a public-domain version of KERMIT and a keyboard-
mapping program can be obtained through file transfer protocol
(ftp).  For further information, please contact me personally at
the address below, rather than sending to the list.

James A. Wilderotter II
Project Assistant
Center for Text and Technology
Academic Computer Center
Reiss Science Building, Room 238
Georgetown University
Washington, DC 20057
Tel. (202) 687-6096

BITNET: Wilder@Guvax
Internet: Edu%"Wilder@Guvax.Georgetown.Edu"

38)------------------------------------------------------------------------

          ARL DIRECTORY OF ELECTRONIC JOURNALS, NEWSLETTERS, 
          AND SCHOLARLY DISCUSSION LISTS  (hard copy version)

Although many journals, newsletters, and scholarly lists may be
accessed free of charge through Bitnet, Internet, and affiliated
academic networks, it is not always a simple chore to find out
what is available.  The Directory is a compilation of entries for
over 500 scholarly lists, about 30 journals, over 60 newsletters,
and 15 "other" titles including some newsletter-digests.  The
directory gives specific instructions for access to each 
publication.  The objective is to assist the user in finding
relevant publications and connecting to them quickly,  even if
not completely versed in the full range of user-access systems.

Content editor of the journals/newsletters section is Michael
Strangelove, Network Research Facilitator, University of Ottawa.
Editor of the scholarly discussion lists/interest groups is Diane
Kovacs of the Kent State University Libraries.  The printed ARL
directory is derived from widely accessible networked files
maintained by Strangelove and Kovacs.  The directory will point
to these as the principal, continuously updated, and
free-of-charge sources for accessing such materials.

Michael Strangelove's directory of electronic journals and 
newsletters  is now available from the Contex-L fileserver and 
consists of two files. These may be obtained, if you are at a 
Bitnet site, by sending the interactive commands:

Tell Listserv at UOttawa Get EJournl1 Directry
Tell Listserv at UOttawa Get EJournl2 Directry

or, from any e-mail site, by sending a mail message to 
LISTSERV@UOTTAWA.BITNET with the text:

Get EJournl1 Directry
Get EJournl2 Directry

No blank lines or other text should precede these lines, and no 
other text should follow them.  For further information, 
contact Michael Strangelove at 441495@UOTTAWA

Diane Kovacs' directory of scholarly discussion groups is 
available from LISTSERV@KENTVM and consists of eight files.  
These may be obtained, if you are at a Bitnet site, by 
sending the interactive commands:

Tell Listserv at Kentvm Get Acadlist Readme
Tell Listserv at Kentvm Get Acadlist Index
Tell Listserv at Kentvm Get Acadlist File1
Tell Listserv at Kentvm Get Acadlist File2
Tell Listserv at Kentvm Get Acadlist File3
Tell Listserv at Kentvm Get Acadlist File4
Tell Listserv at Kentvm Get Acadlist File5
Tell Listserv at Kentvm Get Acadlist File6

or, from any e-mail site, by sending a mail message to 
LISTSERV@KENTVM.BITNET with the text:

Get Acadlist Readme
Get Acadlist Index
Get Acadlist File1
Get Acadlist File2
Get Acadlist File3 
Get Acadlist File4
Get Acadlist File5
Get Acadlist File6

No blank lines or other text should precede these lines, and no 
other text should follow them.  For further information, 
contact Diane Kovacs at DKOVACS@KENTVM

Both directories are also now available in print and on 
diskette (Dos/WordPerfect and Macintosh/MacWord).  For further 
information contact:

Office of Scientific & Academic Publishing
Association of Research Libraries
1527 New Hampshire Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036    USA

or

Ann Okerson
ARLHQ@UMDC.Bitnet
(202) 232-2466 (voice)
(202) 462-7849 (fax)

     

  • Pee-Wee Herman and the Postmodern Picaresque

    Melynda Huskey

    Department of English
    North Carolina State University

     

    “Heard any good jokes lately?”

     

    –Pee-Wee at the MTV Music Awards

     

    It’s been six months since “Pee-Wee’s Big Misadventure” was released to an eager public; the July 26th arrest of Paul Reubens for indecent exposure spurred renewed interest in what had been a fading cult. Only die-hards were still taping Saturday morning “Playhouse” episodes, and “Big Top Pee-Wee” had disappointed fans hoping for another jeu d’esprit on the model of “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.” Even a blissful cameo in the otherwise pedestrian “Back to the Beach” (Pee-Wee, balanced precariously on a surfboard, was borne shoulder-high by avatars of Tito, the Playhouse’s hunky lifeguard) failed to spark real interest. According to Peter Wilkinson’s rather solemn post-mortem, “Who Killed Pee-Wee Herman?” Rolling Stone, 3 October 1991), Paul Reubens himself was weary of being Pee-Wee; he was ready to branch out. So Pee-Wee Herman is not likely to reappear except in re-runs for some time. MTV has picked up the five years’ worth of “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” episodes; both “The Pee-Wee Herman Show,” a taped version of the club act that started the Pee-Wee story, and “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” enjoy moderate rentals in video stores. But Paul Reubens is no longer the post-industrial Casabianca, standing at attention on the burning deck of “Entertainment Tonight,” and his hip-hop claque has gone home.

     

    With Pee-Wee out of the way, I can finally justify a valedictory consideration of the supreme moment in his career, “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.” There is no denying that “Big Adventure” is the zenith of the Herman oeuvre; it is the central text in Pee-Wee criticism. “Big Top Pee-Wee,” in comparison, is an embarrassment–hardly worth a mention.

     

    Of course, one does not discount the importance of “The Pee Wee Herman Show.” The nightclub act which, astonishingly, sparked the children’s television show merits some consideration. Only the reckless would dismiss without reflection the amazing hypnotism dummy, Dr. Mondo, encouraging Joan the audience volunteer to disrobe, or Jambi’s eye-rolling delight over that new Caucasian pair of hands (“There’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time”). Not to mention Pee-Wee himself, crooning his anthem, “I’m the Luckiest Boy in the World.” In this version of the Playhouse, the keynote is struck by the opening words of the theme song: “Where do I go / When I want to do / What I know I want to do? / Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.” The Playhouse draws visitors; there are no permanent residents except the furnishings–Jambi, Clockie–and Pee-Wee himself (if he does live there). Everyone else is a transient. The Playhouse is a liminal region. We see this theme taken up in the television version as well, with its elaborate closing sequence of Pee-Wee mounting his scooter for the dangerous leap onto the desert freeway. On television, though, everyone but Pee-Wee lives around or in the Playhouse. It’s still Pee-Wee’s place, but it is located firmly in the center of a neighborhood which is some distance from Pee-Wee’s primary home. In the nightclub version, all roads lead to Pee-Wee. Neighbors like Hammy are allowed to visit on sufferance, until Pee-Wee chooses to dismiss them. When Kap’n Karl and Miss Yvonne begin to like one another too much, Pee-Wee hustles them out of the Playhouse with realistic gagging gestures. But they all come back eventually. Pee-Wee is the center of this universe, the luckiest boy in this world.

     

    It is difficult to imagine that anyone who had seen the nightclub act agreed to let Pee-Wee have five years’ worth of Saturday kids’ programming. The focus of “The Pee-Wee Herman Show” is lipsmackingly infantile sexuality. Looking up skirts may be Pee-Wee’s most common behavior; in the course of one hour he uses shoe mirrors to reflect Hammy’s sister’s panties, holds Dr. Mondo (the aforementioned hypnotism dummy) under Joan’s dress before using his hypnotic powers to undress her, takes advantage of a graceful arabesque to peek up Miss Yvonne’s fluffy skirts. But the polymorphously perverse being what it is, there’s also the shyly masculine Hermit Hattie, courting Miss Yvonne with perfume and kind words, the swishily high-camp Jambi, the achingly Aryan, almost albino good looks of Mailman Mike, and M’sieur le Crocodile’s “Gator Mater Dating Service.” Without sexual attraction, there is no Playhouse; the show’s plot derives from Pee-Wee’s unselfish decision to share his wish with Miss Yvonne (that Kap’n Karl should really like her) rather than use it for himself. Not only does Pee-Wee give up his chance to fly, which he tells Pteri he’d rather do than shave, even, but he is abandoned by both Miss Yvonne and Kap’n Karl once they discover each other. The dreadful consequences of this amorous misdirection can be resolved only by Kap’n Karl admitting that he already liked Miss Yvonne. The childish sexuality which seeks pleasure not only through speculative consideration of the mysteries of sex, but also through wordplay (“I said your ear, not your rear!”) and sublimation, such as the wish to fly, is fully dramatized in the Playhouse.

     

    But for the Real Thing, the rich substance of Pee-Wee’s amorous being, we must leave the liminal world of the Playhouse and examine Pee-Wee’s everyday life, the life dramatized in “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.” In that text the obvious and playful concern over child sexuality is discarded for a much more complexly developed world of sexual behavior.

     

    I have a theory about Tim Burton. I believe that he is recreating the great works of the English Romantics in suburban (or urban) American settings. Before you laugh, I submit for your consideration: “Batman,” the post-modern “Manfred.” Instead of the Alps, we have Gotham City skyscrapers. Instead of a guilt-ridden, incestuous relationship with a dead sister, a guilt-ridden, pointless relationship with brain-dead Vicki Vale. And most important, the cape, blowing back in the obediently melodramatic wind. Bruce Wayne, a Byronic hero for our time.

     

    And what about “Edward Scissorhands,” possibly the best version of Frankenstein committed to film in the last ten years? True, the Arctic wastes over which the horrifying creation wanders are reduced to blocks of ice in the Avon Lady’s backyard, but such is the postmodern condition. “Beetlejuice”? The merging of “This Old House” and Coleridge’s visionary (and characteristically incomplete) “Christabel.”

     

    And finally, I offer you “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.” “Childe Harold” and “Don Juan” both; a Byronic double-header for the big screen–a picaresque vision of the poet-lover as outcast filmed through a screwy postmodern lens. From the moment we see Pee-Wee cast his eyes impatiently to Heaven and say, “Dottie, there are things about me you wouldn’t understand. Things you couldn’t understand. Things you shouldn’t understand. I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel,” we know that we are in the presence of Byronic greatness. And when, out of love beyond the ken of rich fat-boy Francis, Pee-Wee refuses to part with his bike–even for money–we know that tragedy must follow.

     

    Vladimir Propp offers us an elegant two-part summation of narrative: Lack, Lack Liquidated. The plot of “Big Adventure” recapitulates those terms. Pee-Wee loses his bike, goes to the Alamo to find it, and ends up in Hollywood, where he recovers it. While searching for his lost vehicle, he discovers his true place in the world through adventures with many new friends. But no summary can do justice to the picaresque sublime of the adventure. Pee-Wee travels from East to West Coast, from self satisfied isolation to integration, from wealth to poverty (and back), and from obscurity to celebrity. He is by turns a cowboy, a Hell’s Angel, a dishwasher, a hitchhiker, a hobo. He befriends a truckstop waitress with a jealous boyfriend, an escaped convict, a ghostly truck driver. And in the end, he returns triumphantly justified to his home town, with his bike, his new friends, and enlightenment. He turns his back on self aggrandizement with the words, “I don’t need to see it, Dottie. I lived it.”

     

    Like Don Juan, Pee-Wee is plagued throughout his adventures by unwelcome attentions. Dottie, the bikeshop mechanic, wants to go on a drive-in date with him. Simone-the-waitress’s jealous boyfriend Andy tries to kill him with a plaster of Paris dinosaur bone for watching the sun rise with her. The Queen of the “Satan’s Helpers” motorcycle gang wants to destroy him herself. But Pee-Wee is never moved by these desiring women–nor by the men who admire him, notably Mickey the convict and a jovial policeman who yearns for Pee-Wee in drag. He loves only his bike.

     

    The bicycle functions, in fact, as the true woman of the narrative. An object of extraordinary beauty, attended by falling cherry blossoms and ethereal music, the bike is supremely desirable. Francis, unable to obtain the bike legitimately, is forced by the excess of his need to have it stolen. But having taken it, he dares not keep it; the rest of the film is taken up with Pee-Wee’s unceasing quest for it. True love triumphs; Pee Wee’s journey is, although perilous, not fruitless. His dream visions of its destruction, his dead-end trip to the (nonexistent) basement of the Alamo at the instigation of Madame Ruby the fraudulent clairvoyant, are all submerged, in the end, in his daring rescue of the captive bike from a Hollywood studio. Reunited, Pee-Wee and bike are then revised for the big screen. The love story of a boy and his bike becomes, with only a few alterations, the love story of a top spy and his super motorcycle. Pee-Wee himself plays a bell-boy.

     

    The bike, like the vision which Shelley’s Poet follows in “Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude,” is most clearly present in its absence. It inspires, provokes, and closes the narrative without ever acting alone. It must depend entirely on the actions of others–the perfect heroine. Dottie, by contrast, is too forward: she asks Pee-Wee out. She is too active: she has a job. And she is most closely identified with Pee-Wee’s other close friend, Speck the dog. The bicycle is the Neo-Platonic ideal of womanhood, beautiful, unattainable, distant. She must be earned by a hero willing to suffer greatly in her service. Francis cannot fulfill the task; he pays a greasy j.d. to steal her. Pee-Wee is willing to dress as a nun to rescue her from a mean-spirited child star.

     

    The picaresque adventure which forces Pee-Wee into heroic stature ends with his re-integration into ordinary life. Back in his hometown, he greets all his friends at a special screening of “his” movie. He passes through the crowd dispensing largesse–a foot-long hot dog concealing a file for his friend the convict, french-fries for Simone and her French sweetheart, candy for the Satan’s Helpers to scramble for. At last, seated on his bike, he pedals silently, eloquently, across the bottom of the drive-in screen, a man at peace with himself, ready to return to the quiet life he once shared unthinkingly with his darling bike, a wiser boy. Or man. Whatever he is.

     

    “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure” articulates a central premise of post-modernism–the impassioned, erotic, inevitable love affair with technology. And it does so using an elegant pastiche of film and literary versions of the Neo-platonic, dream-visionary, questing romance–what we might call the true romance, with all that phrase’s resonance of cheap drugstore magazines as well as medieval poetry. The Playhouse offers us escape into the safe space of regression; the Big Adventure propels us–literary parachute firmly strapped on–into the strange desert freeway of the Future.

     

  • Impossible Music

    Susan Schultz

    Department of English
    University of Hawaii
    <schultz@uhccvm>

     

    Ashbery, John. Flow Chart. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

     

    Bronk, William. Living Instead. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1991.

     

    I was in a large class at USC when he [Schoenberg] said quite bluntly to all of us, ‘My purpose in teaching you is to make it impossible for you to write music,’ and when he said that I revolted.
     

    — John Cage

     

    William Bronk and John Ashbery, despite their radical stylistic differences, both face what critic John Ernest has termed “a metaphysical stalemate.” Although Ernest is writing about Bronk, his description of that poet’s paradoxical project resonates for the reader of Ashbery’s work as well: “he is passionately devoted to the belief that there are no grounds for belief, and to the conviction that all convictions are ultimately fictions” (145). Both write what one might call “postmodern spiritual autobiographies” (145), memoirs of minds that are alienated from the very divinities that they sometimes invoke. And the two poets who take so much from Wallace Stevens–Bronk a snowman, Ashbery a comedian of the letter A–share that poet’s sense that supreme fictions can only be approached, but never achieved. Even more radically than Stevens (but in accord with Emerson, who believed that poets took dictation), Bronk and Ashbery locate the wellsprings of their poetry outside themselves. Ashbery writes toward the end of Flow Chart: “I’m more someone else, taking dictation / from on high, in a purgatory of words, but I still think I shall be the same person when I get up / to leave, and then repeat the formulas that have come to use so many times / in the past[.]” Bronk’s version is more direct; when asked in a rare interview if “the poem exists outside of you and you’re transcribing it,” he responded, “Of course, where else? Do you think it’s something in your goddamned head?” (39).

     

    Bronk and Ashbery both fulfill Robert Pinsky’s injunction, in The Situation of Poetry (1976), that poetry be discursive. Yet Pinsky’s definition of discursiveness also goes to the heart of what divides them. “On the one hand,” he writes, “the word describes speech or writing which is wandering and disorganized; on the other, it can also mean explanatory–pointed, organized around a setting forth of material” (134). Bronk’s material, however spontaneously it comes to him (his notebooks are apparently clean of revision), is always organized and explanatory, written in a poetic legalese that alerts the reader more to the necessity of silence than to that of speech. Ashbery’s poetry, on the other hand, has always wandered and seemed to argue for the value of language as a fruitful noise–a field of possibility rather than a fixed matrix.

     

    Bronk’s three recent volumes, Manifest; and Furthermore (1987), Death Is the Place (1989), and Living Instead (1991), have been what the poet himself has called “freeze-dried Bronk”–his severe deconstruction of the actual demands that his language become more spare, his poems shorter than they were (and they were never epic in length or intention). Bronk’s version of poetic self-destructionism follows; here he satirizes the social world of appearances:

     

           In a presence vast beyond size, a presence that seems
       an absence, we hide and play with us as dolls.
       We give us names and addresses, dress
       us up in clothes, make loves and resumes,
       battles, furtively say where we came from
       and tell each other stories about ourselves. ("Playtime," 73)

     

    In “The Camera Doesn’t Lie” he goes further: “We are, of course, without any areness at all / and that’s the only way we are.” Thus for Bronk “there are no ideas in things,” to which he feistily adds, “Take this, William Carlos” (27). Unlike Williams and Whitman, whose poetry he does not admire, Bronk turns to Thoreau at his most ascetic and most Baudrillardian: “Whitman liked the image, and Thoreau didn’t care for the image; that’s a big difference between the two of them. Whitman’s idea was to erect a pretty picture and pretend that was reality. Which God knows is as American an idea as there is: we keep doing it over and over again” (19).

     

    Even Bronk’s favorite structure, the house, lacks the permanence readers of poetry associate with images, since “No form we make is a form we can live in long” (“Formal Declaration”). Instead, we are our own, haunted, houses: “We are like houses to live in. / It lives in us; we are the house. / We thought we were tenants. That was all wrong,” and “There aren’t any people; there are houses that house. // Tenant, I am haunted by your presences” (“Habitation”). Likewise, he demystifies the places that we have used traditionally to define ourselves:

     

           Eden too, even Eden, we
       made up.  It means we always wanted a place
       and never have one--had to make them up
       and stories about them: Troy, Jerusalem,
       old world, new world, once found, believed, then
            lost. ("Homecoming," 73)

     

    Bronk’s vision is so focused, so certain, that he writes the same poem time and again. This can be seen as a virtue, if indeed it be the truth, but the reader may grow impatient, finally, with so many approaches to the same impasse. The images provided in “Walleted” and elsewhere, which only occasionally appear in Bronk’s work, are the field in which Ashbery operates, though Ashbery’s suspicions are probably no less strong than Bronk’s–suspicions that the truth is concealed, rather than revealed, in particulars.

     

    If the obvious question about Three Poems (1972) was why they were written in prose, then it’s fair to ask of Flow Chart why Ashbery wrote it as a poem, albeit in long Whitmanic lines. (Ashbery, doubtless, prefers Whitman to Thoreau.) Ashbery told an interviewer who asked about the genre-problem in Three Poems: “I wrote in prose because my impulse was not to repeat myself” (quoted in Howard 41). This anxiety about self-repetition earlier inspired Ashbery to make his most radical experiment, the Tennis Court Oath volume. Flow Chart takes a different tack, rather like Gertrude Stein’s when she claims that she markets not in repetition but in “insistence.” Ashbery acknowledges his repetitions, but typically denies that repetition is what we think it is (I am reminded of Ashbery’s remark that his work is not private, but about everyone’s privacy). Instead, he finds novelty in what gets repeated; “one is doomed, / repeating one self, never to repeat oneself, you know what I mean?” (7). And much later, a Steinian adage: “Repetition makes reputation.” Even instances of forgetting do not faze Ashbery, for “one can lose a good idea / by not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asides / it knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiations / are terminated, speaks in the acts of that progenitor, and does / recognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier” (115). Thus one repeats even what one has forgotten.

     

    Repetition anxieties also contributed to Ashbery’s early refusals to write an autobiography; he once told an interviewer that, “My own autobiography has never interested me very much. Whenever I try to think about it, I seem to draw a complete blank” (Bellamy 10). Ashbery’s poetry has for the most part evaded his biography. What distinguishes Flow Chart from much of Ashbery’s previous work is its frank approach to the progress of Ashbery’s career.

     

    Yet Ashbery does not, finally, repeat himself in Flow Chart; if his wandering discourses bear structural similarities to previous work, then the vocabularies he uses are richer still than any to which we’ve become accustomed. Flow Chart, true to its title, includes the languages of Wall Street, guerrilla war, the wild west, big government (at times he sounds like a lyrical Alexander Haig), and sports (“If he wants to / wind up sidelined, in the dugout, that is OK with me”) (169). The final third of the poem employs archaic language, the “thee’s” and “thou’s” of Hart Crane and John Donne. In addition, Ashbery admits new situations to his poetry; one section introduces a mentally retarded woman in a hospital.

     

    The contemporary political situation also presents itself more overtly in Flow Chart than it has in Ashbery’s past work: “Each year the summer dwindles noticeably, but the Reagan / administration insists we cannot go to heaven without drinking caustic soda on the floor / of Death Valley” (175-6). So much for “morning in America.”

     

    So much, also, for Ashbery’s harshest critics, whose calls to arms Ashbery answers in Flow Chart. Frederick Pollack’s attack on Ashbery, in the New Formalist anthology of criticism, Poetry After Modernism, is typical. Pollack claims that Ashbery is “a consumer,” not an “investment broker,” like Stevens (one assumes he means a broker of taste).

     

    Endlessly eclectic, it thrives on attempts to anticipate it, and creates an atmosphere of unfocused irony which dissolves satire and corrodes values. It destroys the past by senti- mentalizing it until memory itself becomes first questionable, then laughable. Finally, when there is no value, anything can be equated with (sold for) anything. I am describing, among other things, a poetic. (24-5).

     

    If, as I am suggesting, the book is about the history of one poet’s mind, and engages almost all of the discourses of his time, these criticisms sound more hysterical than reasonable. Ashbery’s self- consciousness is ironic, but not valueless. Pollack’s uneasy conflation of “value” with “investments” is precisely the misuse of language that Ashbery habitually points to–not through polemics, but by exploding the cliches he so ably repeats.

     

    Ashbery’s promiscuities of language suggest a radical suspicion of its powers; one trades at times in things one distrusts. Yet Ashbery does not share Bronk’s repulsion to the surface languages that divert us from a silent truth; he does not blame the messenger, as several of his passages about language attest. Ashbery finds the search for the Logos as inherently doomed a project as any: “They all would like to collect it always, but since / that’s impossible, the Logos alone will have to suffice. / A pity, since no one has seen it recently” (33-4). Ashbery re-validates the image, though not as a stable construct. In a beautiful section of the poem, he writes:

     

                      You may contradict me, but I see life
      in the dead leaves beginning to blow across the carpet,
            paraffin skies, the beetle's forlorn
      wail, and all at once it recognizes me, I am valid
                                                      again,
            the chapter can close
      and later be mounted, as though on a stage or in an
                                                      album.(91)

     

    His account of his earlier days reflects his enjoyment of appearances, something I find lacking in much of Bronk’s work. He begins a section in a library, then recounts his exit, ending this cross-section of the poem with typical humor:

     

     
          Sometimes an important fact would come to light
      only to reveal itself as someone else's discovery,
            while I felt my brain getting chafed
      as everything in the reading room took on an unreal,
            somber aspect.  But outside, the streetscape
      always looked refreshingly right, as though scene-
            painters had been at work, and then,
      at such moments, it was truly a pleasure to walk along,
            surprised yet not too surprised
      by every new, dimpled vista.  People would smile at me,
            as though we shared some pleasant
      secret, or a tree would swoon into its fragrance,
            like a freshly unwrapped bouquet
      from the florist's.  I knew then that nature was my
            friend. (94)

     

    That this vision of nature includes its imitations by artists–the scene-painters of this passage–hardly matters to Ashbery, whose sense of beauty depends on accretion, not on diminution. Ashbery, unlike Bronk, absolutely revels in simulacra, the world as seen through bad movies about the world. This section ends with an encomium to the (real) real:

     

     
            I have only the world to ask for, and,
      when granted, to return to its pedestal, sealed,
            resolved, restful, a thing
      of magic enmity no longer, an object merely, but
            one that watches us
      secretly, and if necessary guides us
      through the passes, the deserts, the windswept
            tumult that is to be our home
      once we have penetrated it successfully, and all else
            has been laid to rest.(96)

     

    The poet’s prime temptation, according to Ashbery, is not language, but careerism; Ashbery is “a sophisticated and cultivated adult with a number of books / to his credit and many other projects in the works” (177). He is also a celebrated poet, one who knows the temptations of self-promotion: “All along I had known what buttons to press, but don’t / you see, I had to experiment, not that my life depended on it, / but as a corrective to taking the train to find out where it wanted to go” (123). He pokes fun at others’ impressions of him as a descendent to Whitman, with his “barbaric yawp”:

     

     
      Then when I did that anyway, I was not so much charmed
            as horrified
      by the construction put upon it by even some quite
            close friends,
      some of whom accused me of being the "leopard man" who
            had been terrorizing
      the community by making howl-like sounds at night, out
            of earshot
      of the dance floor. (123)

     

    This “old soldier” (124) confesses to the power of the critic (“an old guy”) to read his mind, a power that forces him back on himself: “you suddenly / see yourself as others see you, and it’s not such a pretty sight either, but at / least you know now, and can do something to repair the damage” (124). The creation of a reputation, with the collusion of the critics, is “a rigged deal” (125), but one that the poet earns responsibility for by “looking deeper into the mirror, more thoroughly / to evaluate the pros and cons of your success and smilingly refuse all / offers of assistance” (124).

     

    Where Bronk disdains Whitman, who markets in images, Ashbery sees himself as a less-tyrannical bard, one whose identity accrues through the voices around him, rather than one who demands that his reader share his every assumption. Continuing the train metaphor, he writes, “I see I am as ever / a terminus of sorts, that is, lots of people arrive in me and switch directions but no one / moves on any farther” (127). The poet is merely an “agent” (216), in all nuances of the word, from ticket agent to co-conspirator, who directs us to the now open bridge that ends the poem as inconclusively as Whitman did when he left his “Song of Myself” without a final period:

     

                                              We are
      merely agents, so
      that if something wants to improve on us, that's fine,
            but we are always the last
      to find out about it, and live up to that image of
            ourselves as it gets
      projected on trees and vine-coated walls and vapors in
            the night sky: a distant
      noise of celebration, forever off-limits.  By evening
            the traffic has begun
      again in earnest, color-coded.  It's open: the bridge,
            that way. (216)

     

    If Bronk maintains the Cartesian dichotomy between body and mind, with the sole proviso that the mind is not ours, then Ashbery purposefully confuses the division, acknowledging no separation between thoughts and the images that help us to think them, or that think through us. Douglas Crase is doubtless right when he claims that Ashbery’s poetry is strange to us only because it gives us back the world in which we live (30). That is also–paradoxically–why his poetry is more “habitable” than Bronk’s, which is far simpler (in the best sense of the word). Ashbery’s vision, however difficult, is inclusive, Bronk’s exclusive, swearing its audience to a silence every bit as strenuous as his own. His refusal to be shaped by that world means that he is at once less and more radical than Ashbery; that his revolution is also a reaction (as poetry approaches silence) means in a practical sense that Bronk’s career may be foreshortened in ways that Ashbery’s is not.

     

    Works Cited

     

    • Bellamy, Joe David. American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1984.
    • Crase, Douglas. “The Prophetic Ashbery.” In Beyond Amazement. New Essays on John Ashbery, Ed. David Lehman. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. 30-65.
    • Ernest, John. “William Bronk’s Religious Desire.” Sagetrieb. 7.3 (Winter 1988): 145-152.
    • Howard, Richard. “John Ashbery.” In Modern Critical Views: John Ashbery. Ed. Harold Bloom. NY: Chelsea House, 1985. 17-47.
    • Pinsky, Robert. The Situation of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and its Traditions. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976.
    • Pollack, Frederick. “Poetry and Politics.” In Poetry After Modernism. Ed. Robert McDowell. Brownville, Oregon: Story Line Press, 1991. 5-55.
    • Weinfield, Henry, ed. “A Conversation with William Bronk.” Sagetrieb. 7.3 (Winter 1988): 17-44.

     

  • Comedy/Cinema/Theory

    James Morrison

    Department of English
    North Carolina State University

     

    Comedy/Cinema/Theory. Edited by Andrew Horton. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.

     

    Comedy’s not pretty–as the title of an early-eighties Steve Martin album instructed us–and to judge from Comedy/Cinema/Theory it’s not very funny either. Peter Brunette on the Three Stooges: “In the refusal to have meaning, to make sense, the Stooges’ violence in fact constitutes an anti-narrative. It is precisely their violence, as an ‘originary’ writing, that both allows for and destroys narrative . . .” (178). Dana Polan on Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith: “Screwball comedy bears the traces of confusions and contradictions in a later moment of capital when this commodification of desire reaches new extremes” (146). Scott Bukatman on Jerry Lewis: “The feeling of entrapment and of the impossibility of action or change arises agonizingly. Within such spatiotemporal distension, the physical dominates character, as the individual is reduced to automaton . . . ” (195).

     

    Bound to become a standard in university film-comedy courses, this collection of essays eschews Lubitschean epigrams or Stoogean banana-peels in favor of Derridean stencils or Heideggerean slip-knots. The volume is necessary and useful, and some of the essays are brilliant, but the effect is at times one of unmistakable homogeneity. In his introduction, the book’s editor, Andrew Horton, makes much of the “non-essentialist . . . thus open-ended” (3) theoretical approaches the contributors favor, but by the time this panel of unreconstructed post-structuralists get through with it po-mo comedy looks a lot like any other po-mo genre (if post-modernism can be said to leave any genres in its wake, a question the contributors here never ask). It represses the feminine/maternal (as Lucy Fischer suggests); it articulates the phallocentrism of Hollywood’s unconscious (as Peter Lehman claims); its carnivalesque potential is either triumphantly realized (as in Horton’s own essay) or self-consciously stymied (as in Ruth Perlmutter’s), thereby either subverting dominant ideology (as in Stephen Mamber’s) or reproducing it (as in Dana Polan’s). Unapologetically recuperating the genre for post-structuralism (hereafter PS), the versions of comedy constructed in this volume tell as much about contemporary academic film criticism as they do about comedy itself. What the book most forcefully proves, finally, is that you can put the same top-spins on comedy that you can on, say, melodrama or horror or soap-opera–as if anyone ever doubted it.

     

    In fact, some may well have doubted it, and a book like this one is comparatively late in coming, after a line of similar anthologies dealing with less problematic genres, perhaps because of an assumption that comedy does not readily lend itself to PS analysis since, in effect, comedy beats the critic to it. Much eighties criticism of popular culture is heavily dependent on a conception of the text (and to a lesser extent of its consumer) as naive. Theories of comedy, though, tend to emphasize the selfconsciousness of the genre, claiming that comedy by its very nature draws attention to its own stylistic operations, explicitly positions its audience in relation to it, catalogues all its own intertexts–performs, that is, the very functions criticism of popular-culture ordinarily arrogates to itself. Lucy Fischer’s psychoanalytic discussion of “comedy and matricide,” “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” in itself a fine essay, also exemplifies the effect of such critical claims to apprehending the “unconscious” level of a naive text in cultural criticism. Her analysis of the Howard Hawks film His Girl Friday (1940) finds in that text a particularly striking instance, because “the humorous text does not mandate [the mother’s] presence through the exigencies of plot” (65), of the “elimination of the maternal” she sees as endemic to Hollywood comedy. The “devaluation of the maternaI” (66) emerges here as, if not exactly unconscious, at least “gratuitous” (65) in Fischer’s view. But Fischer’s argument depends on her repression of the text’s keen self-consciousness about gender in, for example, its satirical references to the historical personae of its male actors, Cary Grant and Ralph Bellamy, or–more importantly–in its overt parody of its source, Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page (1928), by switching the gender of Hildy (male in the original) and thereby commenting on the homosocial potential of the prior text. Moreover, Fischer’s survey of “gratuitous comments that malign motherhood” (66) culminates with the most literal rendering in the film of the repression of the maternal:

     

    Finally, when Hildy's mother-in-law appears on the scene, Walter orders his cronies to cart the lady away, at which point she is bodily carried from the room. These images (of kidnapping, sudden death, and hanging) are resonant metaphors for the fate of the mother in comedy itself. (66)

     

    Fischer significantly fails to mention the return of the repressed mother (in the name, of course, of the Law of the Father) to seek revenge, a turning point in the film insofar as it is the mother who transgresses the text, insistently revealing what the narrative has concealed (an escaped prisoner in a roll-top desk). My point that Fischer effaces the self-consciousness of the text itself hardly invalidates her argument or undermines its gravity. The question is whether such effacement is required of a certain mode of criticism and whether, in that case, such criticism can answer without concession the special demands of an especially self-conscious genre.

     

    Indeed, a number of the essays in this book, either explicitly or implicitly, present comedy as the decisive link between Classical Hollywood and the impulses of modernism/ post-modernism. Brian Henderson’s study of “Cartoon and Narrative in the Films of Frank Tashlin and Preston Sturges” argues that Tashlin’s cartoon-like ellipses open, on what must be seen as a most unexpected site, a “gateway to the modern cinema” (158). Henderson’s argument pivots on comedy’s presumed greater formal liberty: Initially unavailable to other genres, the adventurous, brazen ellipses or paralipses of a Tashlin or a Sturges, licensed for comic purposes by the genre itself, trickle down to those other genres or movements, gradually eroding the stodgy “classicism” of the whole tradition. One of Henderson’s examples:

     

    Tashlin condenses the journey from Chicago to Las Vegas by cutting to various background locations behind (and around) the characters . . . it recalls in this respect Chuck Jones's remarkable Duck Amuck (1953) in which the backgrounds keep changing behind an increasingly frustrated Daffy Duck. (Godard's multiple cuts to Jean Seberg against ever-changing backgrounds in a car trip across Paris in Breathless is both cartoonlike in technique and a specific evocation of Hollywood or Bust [the Tashlin film].) (160)

     

    A more obvious precursor would be Keaton’s hyper-reflexive Sherlock Jr. (1923), but in fact Henderson may be essentializing this technique in his analysis. After all, an example of the same device appears in no less a film than Casablanca (1942), a movie often cited as the key example of Hollywood’s “classicism.” In the flashback sequence of that film, the dissolves among shifting backgrounds of Paris (in a close-up of Rick and Elsa driving) similarly condense their journey–but rather than reading the shots as a modernist elision, the audience is likely to read them simply as an instance of visual shorthand. Since, then, it would seem that such a device can be accommodated by classicism, the question becomes whether the distinction between “classical” and “modern” remains a useful category for film theory. Yet it is a distinction on which Henderson, like most of the contributors to the volume, insists, contrasting Tashlin with Sturges through it, for example: “[Sturges’s] ellipses are also classical: carefully built up to and returned from, never disrupting the viewer” (161). Or again:

     

    Several Tashlin ellipses lie somewhere between the classical and the modern. As a result, like Tashlin's work generally, they can be dismissed by classicists and dogmatic champions of modernism and valued by makers of cinematic modernism (Godard) and those as much interested in the becoming of a movement as in its achievement (right-thinking critics). (157)

     

    The binarism raises another question: Is Tashlin’s work of interest chiefly as an antecedent of Godard, the High- Modernist? The implication that it may be is redolent of an ethics of modernist self-formation, along the lines of earlier studies such as those of the English music-hall tradition claiming legitimacy from T.S. Eliot’s interest in that hitherto “low” tradition.

     

    The first half of the book consists of broad surveys of issues in film comedy: Fischer’s essay; Noel Carroll’s hectic encyclopedia of the sight-gag; a catalogue by Peter Lehman of penis-jokes in movies; Stephen Mamber’s “In Search of Radical Metacinema”; and Charles Eidsvik’s survey of Eastern European comedy films. The title of Mamber’s essay indicates one of the recurrent concerns of the section, crucial to every essay but Carroll’s: Is comedy “radical,” in some way inherently subversive of an established order? In the introduction, Horton implies that the question has already been settled in his reference to “comedy’s . . . subversion of norms” (8). Yet Fischer and Lehman see comedy’s claim to subversive potential as illusory. Lehman’s thesis is that “one of the most important functions of comedy in cinema is to sneak a joke by almost unnoticed, make us laugh, and then allow us to forget that we ever thought something was funny” (58), while Fischer, as we have seen, traces the process in comedy by which “woman–once the core of the joke structure (as the target of sexual desire)–is eventually eliminated from the scene entirely and replaced by the male auditor” (62). Mamber and Eidsvik are readier to grant comedy its radical force, Eidsvik by way of the overtly political nature of Eastern European comedy and Mamber through the route of post-modern parody, finding the signifiers of Kubrick’s parodic The Shining, for example, pointing “not to a failed horror film, as so many reviews stupidly labeled it, but to a deliberately subverted one” (84).

     

    In the book’s second half, contributors focus on individual films or important comic figures. William Paul’s “Charles Chaplin and the Annals of Anality” argues that previous critics have ignored the “vulgar humor” that is “central to Chaplin’s vision” (120), failing to emphasize “the raucously insistent lover body imagery” (117) of his work. Replacing such imagery in what he takes to be its properly privileged place, Paul finds that the key questions raised by Chaplin’s work are “How can upper and lower body be made whole? How can the spiritual grace we accord the eyes be made commensurate with the other organs that bring us into contact with the outside world . . . ?” (125). Dana Polan’s “The Light Side of Genius” reads Mr. and Mrs. Smith through the paradigms of screwball comedy as much as through those of Hitchcockian authorship, concluding that “in the classical mode of Hollywood production, it may well be that too much emphasis on the singularities of a career may lead us to overvalue the individual director as someone special, a figure outside the dominant paradigms” (150). Ruth Perlmutter’s essay on Woody Allen’s Zelig sees it as an example of parody as “autocritique” (207); Bukatman’s on Lewis sees him as a key example of male hysteria; Brunette’s on the Three Stooges and Horton’s on Dusan Makavejev find varying degrees of comic subversion in these texts, while the volume is rounded out by Henderson’s fine essay on Tashlin and Sturges.

     

    It is possible to point to weaknesses in individual contributions: Carroll’s is simply inconclusive; Perlmutter’s repeats without citation much of Robert Stam’s treatment of the same film in his book on Bakhtin and cinema, Subversive Pleasures (1989); Horton’s idealizes the carnivalesque: “Makavejev shows us that innocence can be protected through knowing laughter” (232). It is more useful, however, to identify assumptions shared across the range of contributors that confer on the book, for all the varied inflections of each critic, a certain ideological sameness, even perhaps a certain intellectual complacency. Here the figure of Bakhtin emerges as crucial, for well over half the contributors draw upon Bakhtin’s ideas to illuminate film comedy. It is not surprising at this stage in the evolution of PS to find Bakhtin constructed as the touchstone for theories of the comic in popular culture: the surprise, I suppose, is that Bakhtin does not figure prominently in every essay collected here. What is striking about the use made here of Bakhtin–that enemy of the totality of genre, that celebrator of the disruptive potential of laughter–is how fully domesticated he has become in this book’s version of him. After painstaking exegeses of Bakhtin by Horton, Fischer, Paul, Brunette and others, we come to the one authentically comic moment in this volume when Perlmutter blithely introduces us at the outset of her essay to one “Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian literary theorist” (206)–which in this context falls on the ear rather like “Gustave Flaubert, the noted French author.” Reading this book, one is re-introduced to Bakhtin so many times, each time as if it were the first, that one begins to dread the inexorable approach of this wan specter with its steady tread and its joyless homilies!

     

    It’s (possibly) unfair to criticize a collection for the uniformity of its critical practices (if it’s a crime, nearly every anthology in film studies is guilty); and it’s philistine to suppose that a book about comedy should be spirited or exuberant–that it’s the task of criticism to share or even to be responsive to the superficial predispositions of its object. This book is an excellent contribution to film studies, and in pointing to its moral gravity and its analytic earnestness one risks being identified with a slob who grouses that those insufferable pointy-heads are at it again, ruining the belly-laughs for the rest of us. But the question I’m really asking is whether PS–especially given its enthusiastic valorization of carnival–is ever going to be capable of having any fun.

     

  • Sliding Signifiers and Transmedia Texts: Marsha Kinder’s Playing with Power

    Lisa M. Heilbronn

    Department of Sociology
    St. Lawrence University
    <lhei@slumus>

     

    Kinder, Marsha. Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games; From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.

     

    What are we talking about when we talk about media “effects”? This may be one of the most pressing questions to face those who want to approach the media from an interdisciplinary (and in the case of communications studies one might also say intradisciplinary) perspective. Are we addressing behavior? ideology? psychology? Playing With Power is an ambitious attempt to discuss children’s media use in the broadest possible theoretical, social and economic contexts. Marsha Kinder attempts to connect the behavior effects of these media (absorption in the video game or television program, consumption patterns, eye-hand coordination, etc.) with their ideological effects (consumerism and patriarchy chief among them) by linking both to the psychological and cognitive effects of video on developing children. She does this using an approach which combines consideration of entertainment industry policy and decision-making with the decoding of cultural texts. This is laudable, particularly when the analysis also attempts to take into account consumer interaction with the text as both commodity and symbol system.

     

    The book has five chapters and a substantial appendix detailing two field study/interview situations with children. The subject matter covered in the chapters spirals out from a core of psychoanalytic, cognitive, and cultural theory through increasingly complex media situations to break off with a consideration of global political economics. Its fundamental goal is the exploration of “how television and its narrative conventions affect the construction of the subject” (3). The structure is designed to represent the “strategy of cognitive restructuring” it studies.

     

    This is, to a degree, a personal quest. Kinder uses her son Victor’s development of narrative and involvement with interactive video as the keystone of her study, and includes his friends among her interview subjects in the appendixes. Her son and other “postmodern” children value the interactivity of Saturday morning television and video games, and the commodities associated with them and are bored by the unified subject represented by conventional film. This interests and concerns Kinder. Much of her discussion is implicitly organized around the contrast between “the unified subject, associated with modernism and cinema; and the decentered consumerist subject, associated with postmodernism and television” (40). She weighs each subject in terms of its position relative to this dichotomy. Transmedia intertextuality, for example, “valorizes superprotean flexibility as a substitute for the imaginary uniqueness of the unified subject” (120).

     

    Kinder suggests that “readers who are less interested in theory” skip over the theoretical section of the first chapter. This section is only a scant twenty-three pages as it is. This may represent a bid for a popular audience more interested in reading about the toys which fascinate their children and the industry which produces them than in the differences between Kristeva and Piaget. However, this leaves the reader with a slim foundation for much of the later analysis. For example, the theoretical section states that “intertextual relations across different narrative media” (2) are the primary focus of the book, but the reader is given only one paragraph with quotations from Bakhtin and Robert Stam on intertextuality. There is even less information provided on the meaning of signs, signifiers, and what Kinder calls “sliding signifiers.” There seems to be an implicit assumption that the reader is already familiar with such concepts, and with the work of Beverle Houston and Susan Willis which informs the discussion.

     

    More space is devoted to stitching together Piaget’s theory of genetic epistemology, (6-9) and psychoanalytic theory (9-15). However, Kinder leaves certain key questions unresolved. After pointing out that cognitive theory “does not perceive gender differentiation as the linchpin to subject formation within the patriarchal symbolic order,” and that she believes this “`naturalizes’ patriarchal assumptions” (9), Kinder states that she will “position this cognitive approach within a larger framework of post- structuralist feminism” (10). How will she do this? By appropriating “from both models . . . ideas particularly useful for theorizing this dual form of gendered spectator/player positioning at this moment in history” (10). This begs the question: Kinder makes a flurry of allusions to the work of David Bordwell, Edward Branigan, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan, but there is no sustained argument to demonstrate that her two theoretical models can be reconciled.

     

    Without a strong theoretical foundation, Kinder’s claim in Chapter Two–that Saturday morning television creates a gendered, consumerist subjectivity–becomes problematic. Her analysis of the intertextual content of shows such as “Garfield” and “Muppet Babies,” and the programming strategies behind them is very enjoyable. But does a commercial for a building set specifically for girls really imply “that all other similar toys are intended exclusively for boys,” so that “if the young female viewer already owns a set of building blocks, then, it instantly becomes inappropriate and therefore obsolete” (50-51)?

     

    Kinder also develops the concept of “animal masquerade” in which we

     

    alleviate anxiety and gain an illusory sense of empowerment by bestowing our conception of human individuality onto animals . . . by letting them substitute for missing members of the dysfunctional family

     

    and which she claims “help[s] us see beyond the waning nuclear family and the growing influence of the single mother by ‘naturalizing’ alternative models for human bonding” (73-4). The discussion as a whole is often quite compelling, but disturbingly ahistorical. What of Aesop, Winnie the Pooh, Uncle Remus, Coyote Trickster and other names associated with animal tales throughout history? How much can we hang on consumer society and postmodernism? The argument would be stronger if it differentiated between earlier types of animal masquerade and the particular type of commodified animal figure she is discussing.

     

    The strongest chapters are Three, on the Nintendo Entertainment System, and Four, which focusses on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their transmedia success. Kinder gives a lucid and gripping account of the development of the video game and particularly of Nintendo’s success in implementing “`razor marketing theory’ . . . a strategy of focusing on the development and sale of software (whether a game cartridge, a Barbie outfit, or a razor blade) that is compatible only with the company’s unique hardware” (91). The cognitive perspective works well here. Kinder’s discussion of Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development,” and her argument that video game-playing can cause cognitive acceleration, are convincing (111-119). The feminist psychoanalytic theory in the section on “Oedipalization of Home Video Games” is less convinving. Kinder jumps from the highly qualified assumption that the “marketing of video games seems to be primarily to those with, potentially, the most intense fear of castration” (102), to a unqualified assertion that video games are “oedipalized.” By this she seems to mean that their violent content appeals more to boys than girls because (although she offers no evidence) it “can help boys deal with their rebellious anger against patriarchal authority” (104). But the “oedipalization” becomes causal–it “accounts for certain choices within its system of intertextuality” (104). Although Kinder states her belief that “within our postmodernist culture and at various developmental stages of this ongoing generational struggle between parents and child, other media situated in the home such as television and video games substitute for the parents” (22) the book needs far more evidence before it can support this claim.

     

    Kinder then turns to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles supersystem, defining a supersystem as a network which

     

    must cut across several modes of image production; must appeal to diverse generations, classes, and ethnic subcultures, who in turn are targeted with diverse strategies; must foster `collectability' through a proliferation of related products; and must undergo a sudden increase in commodification, the success of which reflexively comes a `media event' that dramatically accelerates the growth curve of the system's commercial success. (123)

     

    She makes excellent use of journalistic sources, and makes the phenomena comprehensible. The gender analysis in this section–discussing male and female masquerade and the ways in which TMNT as “the ultimate sliding signifiers” (135) reveal masculinity to be culturally constructed–seems well supported.

     

    The final chapter, which discusses the growing “network of commercial intertextuality” (172) formed by CNN global news coverage, Japanese acquisition of American “software,” and HDTV was interesting. It is subtitled an afterword, and as such seems somewhat tentative and tangential to her argument. It lacks discussion of the claims that international marketing leads to a declining emphasis on dialogue and a focus on the visual and violent as the commodities reach a transnational audience with little in the way of a shared culture.

     

    Kinder includes two appendixes which cover small “empirical studies” she conducted in July of 1990. Although she states explicitly that the studies (one based on eleven interviews with children from five to nine, the other on twelve interviews with children from six to fourteen) “provide neither a solid basis for the ideas expressed in this book nor an adequate test of them” (173), she notes that they are included because they “raise new issues (such as the effect of ethnic, racial, class and gender differences on children’s entrances into supersystems like the Teenage Mutuant Ninja Turtle network)” (173). In fact, there is nothing in the interviews themselves which raises issues of ethnicity, race or class. These dimensions are raised by Kinder earlier in the book when she introduces the concern that if video games do contribute to an acceleration of certain stages of cognitive development, the middle class who are better able to afford Nintendo systems and other computer systems in the home, will be differently advantaged. I would say that, as presented, the studies supply no information on this point. (For example, there is no information on how the class status of her second group of subjects, approached at a video game arcade, was collected.) Gender differences are more apparent from the data. Were I the researcher, I believe I would have opted to omit the material.

     

    This book is extremely ambitious. It is to be commended for its open-minded approach to what some observers find the greatest item of concern regarding interactive video–the child’s absorption in the system and the commodity culture which surrounds it, and for its attention to the “latent” effects which are less commented on–reinforcement of patriarchal gender roles and global economic systems. It contains some excellent references, provocative theory, and excellent program and film analysis. It raises interesting questions, and should stimulate the reader to review and challenge the assumptions s/he holds about children and media.