March 17
Style Matters
Intellectual style, that is.
When, some 35 years ago, I turned toward the cognitive sciences and away from structuralism & post-structuralism, deconstruction, and the rest, the turn was driven as much by intellectual style as by epistemological conviction. No, I didn’t have much affection for the predicate calculus, which I learned in a course in symbolic logic (it fulfilled my math requirement), but I did like the intellectual style I found in linguistics books, the sense of rigor and explicit order. I also liked the diagrams. A lot.
There were large sections in my dissertation—Cognitive Science and Literary Theory—where the major burden of the argument was in the diagrams. I’d work out the diagrams first and then write prose commentary on them. That modus operandi pleases me a great deal. In the preface to Beethoven’s Anvil, which had some diagrams, but not many, I refer to my thinking in that book as speculative engineering. I like that term: speculative engineering.
There are other intellectual styles, obviously. Some very different from my diagrammatic and speculative engineering style.
Take New Historicism for instance. I’ve not read much in that vein, but I’ve read some, and some of that I’ve found quite interesting and delightful. If New Historicism is, as I’ve been told, the closest thing literary studies currently has to a dominant methodological practice, I can’t help but thinking that is as much about intellectual style as about epistemological conviction.
It is, or can be, a very writerly style. One gathers a pile of stories, vignettes, and passages from various writers, literary and not, and arranges them more according to rhythm, surprise, and repose than for logical progression and finality — though such matters come into play as well. It is a style that can be a bit like literature itself, at least prose fiction, though one can sneak in some lyrical passages here and there, and maybe even a bit of insistent rhythm.
* * * * *
I’ve got two suspicions about style matters:
1.) In anyone’s intellectual ecology, style preferences are deeper and have more inertia than explicit epistemological beliefs.
2.) Some of the pigheadedness that often crops up in discussions about humanities vs. science is grounded in stylistic preference that gets rationalized as epistemological belief.
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March 16
Higher Ed Inspires Labor “Videos of the Year”
Eric Lee’s Labour Start clearinghouse for global labor news has just announced nominees for its first-ever award, Labor Video of the Year. Two of the five finalists are inspired by working conditions in higher ed. I think both are among the three likeliest to win.
My top choice is the clever, often hilarious series of 30-second spots produced for the three-month strike by the union representing 50% of the teaching faculty at Canada’s York University, CUPE 3903.
Eventually ended by an extraordinary legislative intervention, this legal job action was strongly supported by undergraduates and tenure-stream faculty, who joined the picket lines of contingent faculty and grad students at this leading research institution.
Featuring extremely high production values and great writing, the videos use just a few frames to effectively communicate the hypocrisy of the administration, and the exploitation of contingent faculty & grad students.
A close runner-up is The Janitor, tracking the daily experiences of campus custodial staff--many of whom are also current or former students.
In my view the strongest competition to both entries is provided by a snarky Australian effort, What Have the Unions Ever Done For Us? (Answer: duh, pretty much everything you take for granted in terms of the workplace, from sick leave to the eight-hour day.)
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March 15
Steam Cleaning: The Valve Blogroll
Aaron’s recent post linked to the Arcade site at Stanford, which (my bad, no doubt) I hadn’t known about before, but which immediately struck me as something we ought to have in our blogroll here. That thought led me to take a closer look at the blogroll, and I promptly found a large number of sites that have moved or retired. We should update it! So, in the spirit of spring cleaning, I thought we could round up suggestions for other new(ish) academic / literary-critical / otherwise-Valve-appropriate sites. (Just what is “Valve-appropriate”? That’s a good question. Feel free to discuss that too. What do you come here for? What would you like to read more of? What do or should we do to keep up our own niche, whatever it is?)
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March 14
Sister Carrie and Television
A long line of novels stretching at least as far back as Mansfield Park uses a theatrical performance (typically of amateurs) as the hinge of the plot. The moment of performance, of taking on another identity, allows the characters a burst of self-understanding or permits them to see another character—usually someone with whom they are intimate—anew. In Revolutionary Road, this moment occurs at the very beginning of the novel, when Frank Wheeler sees his wife April give a stultifyingly bad performance in a local production of The Petrified Forest.1 In Sister Carrie, it is also an amateur performance—of a light melodrama, Under the Gaslight—that catalyzes Hurstwood’s desire for Carrie and creates within Carrie the woman who will ultimately conquer the New York stage.
As I was reading this section of Sister Carrie, I began to think how absolutely unlikely such a device would be in a book published and set within the last half-century or so; Revolutionary Road must be, I think, the terminus ad quem of the stage-play-as-epiphany trope. I suppose one could still get away with it in historical fiction set before 1960 or so, but I really can’t recall many examples published recently that have tried. (Suggestions?) Even in Mad Men, which is so very much about the revelation of the self through performance and is also set precisely at this time, one cannot really imagine the writers putting Don or Betsy Draper on the stage to cause an epiphany.2 Something, it seems, emerged around this time that made this device less plausible, that sapped the power of stage performance as a metaphor for the revelation/realization of the self to the extent that this trope has become unusable, obsolete.
Surely, though, one would think that this obsolescence might have come earlier than 1955 (when Revolutionary Road is set). While amateur theater continues to persist, it struck me as odd that the dividing line would fall so late in the 20th century, so long after the movies and the cinema had achieved cultural dominance. Yet then I began to think how beautifully compatible the stage and screen were during this time in a way that has largely, I think, been lost. It is not just that so many more films (especially musicals) were about the stage, or that there was a more well-trod corridor of success from Broadway to Hollywood (in terms of both personnel and product), but that Broadway and Hollywood often seemed to work together upon popular culture, an effect exemplified by Revolutionary Road‘s performance of The Petrified Forest, which was on stage in 1935 and on screen the next year.
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A Defense of Literary Studies Anyone?
During the first minute or two of the clip below, Alec Baldwin gives an impassioned brief for the fundamental importance of acting, his craft. Has any humanist recently defended the humanities this unequivocally? Has any literary scholar defended the academic study of literature with like passion and conviction? And I mean the academic study of literature, not literature itself, that’s different.
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March 13
Bad Books
My favourite line from this American Book Review piece: Michael Berubé on Lawrence’s Women In Love. ‘It’s like someone put a gun to Nietzsche’s head and made him write a Harlequin romance.’
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Disciplinary Tension? Or, Holbo Meet Hillis
We need to make every effort to defend, in changed circumstances, the tradition that makes the humanities in the university the place especially charged with the combination of Bildung and Wissenschaft, ethical education and pure knowledge.
Curiosity about a pendant one Joshua Landy hung on a 2009 post by John Holbo led me, first to Landy’s comment (about Moretti on Sherlock Holmes) and then back to Holbo’s post. And that reminded me that I had intended to bounce a post off of Holbo’s. So here it is.
John is discussing a panel discussion he’d attended once upon a time not all that long ago. He remarks:
I was struck, in particular, by one panel discussion I attended at which it was more or less agreed by various participants that scholarship and pedagogy of literary history are, at present, mutually ill-suited. . . . On the one hand, you need a set of texts that will provide you with sufficient evidence to pronounce intelligently—justifiably—on such subjects as ‘the nineteenth century American novel’. On the other hand, you need a set of texts to fill out a 12-week syllabus for an undergraduate course of that title. There isn’t any one set of texts that can do both jobs.
Of course it isn’t so surprising that the most sophisticated scholarship goes beyond what can be crammed into an undergraduate semester. But there is more to the point, it seems to me. There seems to be a tendency for good undergraduate pedagogy to recapitulate bad (as opposed to merely incomplete or preliminary) historiography. The teacher finds him or herself proceeding as if ‘the nineteenth century novel’ (pick your suitably broad subject) is the sort of thing that is at all likely to show up through the lens of, say, eight novels to be read. Reading a small number of novels and writing a few interpretive essays can be a fine and enriching way to spend a few months. But it’s not the same kind of enriching activity as studying the novel historically, with scholarly rigor. In a sense no one really thinks otherwise. So tension between pedagogy and historiography is not just tension between for-students simplification and for-scholars sophistication. It is tension between certain notions of value and certain standards of validity.
Let me offer a brief interpretive gloss on this tension between value and validity, which may only have emerged into view recently but has been latent for a somewhat longer time.
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March 12
The Valley of Elah as our Heart of Darkness
It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn’t he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn’t. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark—too dark altogether. . . .”
-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
What’s great about The Valley of Elah is what’s great about the character Tommie Lee Jones plays, that Hank Deerfield is a good man who comes to realize the terrible consequences of his actions, how misguided his most basic impulses have been, and the dark places into which they‘ve guided him and his son. Which is why little details like his subtly obsessive personal grooming habits are so important: in signifying his lifelong adherence to the work of self-fashioning as soldier (and of passing that on to his son), they place him as a man with a deep faith in a code of behavior which he has never doubted (and into which he has cast the destiny of his entire family) but which reveals the neurotic core of those beliefs. He believes in America because he can’t not, the same way he can’t be seen by a woman in his short sleeves, or get out of bed without having painstakingly tucked the sheets under the mattress in the style of a barracks bunk. He’s still at war.
It’s important that he’s sincere. Precisely because he really does believe in these things, his discovery of their hollowness produces a real crisis of faith, as when he cuts himself shaving moments before getting the devastating news of his son’s death. Something is actually at stake, even in stuff like that, and it’s on that basis that the final act of the movie is so devastating: to discover what his son has become is to discover what Hank spent a young lifetime making him, crafting his son in his own image and making him a monster. Which is why it’s just as important that this is not a movie about Iraq itself: it’s about the process of detachment from human life that can make running over an Iraqi pedestrian in the way of your humvee seem natural. Yet we see this process begin and end at home: the point of the David and Goliath story is precisely not what Hank thinks it is, precisely not that a boy can master his fear and be a man. Goliath is a humvee speeding along the roadway, and Hank’s realization is that he has no answer as to why he would send a boy—his own—out to be destroyed by it.
At one point in the movie, a soldier tells Hank that “we shouldn’t send our heroes to Iraq” because of what it does to them, something he quickly demonstrates by advocating we nuke the place and let it go back to a desert. Exterminate all the brutes, you know? And he’s right, in a certain sense; “Iraq” destroyed Hank’s son, in a way that can seem superficially similar to sentiments like this racist garbage from Thomas “suck on this” Friedman:
“…democracy was never going to have a virgin birth in a place like Iraq, which has never known any such thing. Some argue that nothing that happens in Iraq will ever justify the costs. Historians will sort that out.”
The difference is that while an insincere hack like Friedman wants to forget his own role as bloodthirsty war cheerleader back in the day (so as to pretend it was always about the highest of ideals), The Valley of Elah powerfully argues that even Hank’s best of intentions were what made Iraq the kind of place where good boys go bad in the first place. His wife is right. The character played by Charlize Theron is right.* And when the little boy asks “why would they send a boy out to fight Goliath?” he is exactly right: the moral outrage is the warmonger who sends children out to be crushed and then tries to make a glorious story out of it. The character who tries to blame Iraq for destroying “our heroes” is the one who held the knife. And Hank is the one who put it in his hand. Which is exactly the point: fetishizing “Iraq” as the cause of “our” suffering is not only to forget that “they” have endured the majority of the suffering (at “our” hands) but that it’s happened as a consequence of our ability to forget about their existence.
Which leads me to my last point: the problem with The Hurt Locker is that it poses as realism, that it pretends to portray what happens over there. But it doesn’t; like all realism, it’s a subjective fantasy clothed in the appearance of objectivity. But while The Hurt Locker performs the very same techno-philic detachment which enables a man in a humvee to run over a child, making the entire country into a bomb to be defused makes it seem as if the problem starts and originates there. They set the bombs, you see, and they are the ones who would put a child in harm’s way. And while the movie has the courage to admit that the war hasn’t gone well, this is akin to the brave honesty of admitting that the Titanic’s prospects look dim after hitting the iceberg. The Valley of Elah, on the other hand, frames the war as a reality we lack the courage to look at honestly, and in its description of the impossibility of realism is almost Conradian: the cause of what happens to Hank’s son in Iraq is to be found not there, but here. Unlike Marlowe and Friedman, Hank has the terrible courage to admit that his son became Kurtz, and that he’s the one who made it happen. Though it’s still too dark, too dark altogether…
* The most heart of darkness-y moment—which makes me wonder if they were doing it on purpose—comes when Hank self-righteously declares that a soldier would never fight seriously with buddies he lived and fought with in war. “That’s a beautiful world you live in” she says, or something similarly identical to Marlow’s statement on how “...she is out of it--completely. They--the women, I mean-- are out of it--should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse.” But of course the beautiful fantasy land of this movie is that of the men who believe in the unconditional righteousness of war.
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“what-have-you intriguing subject”
Brian Reed divines the profession’s future by reading the tea leaves of his university’s grad program applicant pool:
“Movies and TV seem to trump what we teach in the classroom when it comes to influencing future faculty. We have a sea of applicants wanting to study vampires, zombies, Harry Potter, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narnia, and Jane Austen--singly or in combination. Some of these files are absolutely first rate. Most aren’t. Moreover, you read letter after letter of recommendation praising this or that student’s marvelous facility with 17th century prosody, 18th century travel writing, contemporary Zulu praise poetry, or what-have-you intriguing subject, and then you flip to the writing sample and discover yet another Dracula-and-Twilight essay or Beowulf-and-Frodo MA thesis.”
And:
“You hear a great deal about Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Homi Bhabha, Walter Benjamin, Gloria Anzaldua, and other thinkers who were already staples of “Introductions to Literary Theory” courses back in the mid-1990s. Otherwise, the name dropping has become quite field specific…There also appears to be a truly remarkable degree of agreement concerning the Great Books of the present day: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Blood Meridian, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Thomas Pynchon, too, is cited over and over as the harbinger and presiding genius of the New Period. I’ve read these books (including all of Pynchon’s novels), but I never expected the emergence of such a matter-of-fact way of narrating the present moment in US literature, and I certainly would never have selected such a narrow, narrow cast of characters to represent the 21st century.”
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March 11
Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas
The Marketplace of Ideas is not as interesting as I thought it would be. One reason may be that it is part of a series intended, as series editor Henry Louis Gates Jr. explains, to “invite the reader to reexamine hand-me-down assumptions and to grapple with powerful trends"--that is, the books are not rigorous analyses aimed at specialists but accessible and deliberately provocative commentaries meant to bring a wider public quickly up to speed on debates about (Gates again) “ideas that matter in the new millenium.” At just over 150 small-scale, large-type pages, The Marketplace of Ideas is not anything like a comprehensive examination of the many issues it addresses, whether the rise of the modern university, the vexed history of the “liberal arts” curriculum, the changing aspect of humanities research, or the causes and consequences of the current appalling academic job market. Rather, it offers a briskly coherent account of some historical contexts of particular relevance to certain elite universities (he shows this narrowness of focus throughout, which, as other reviewers have pointed out, eventually undermines a number of his more general claims and complaints). Then he transitions quite abruptly to consider political homogeneity as a feature of the academy, and then, with another awkward transition, to offer some interesting but often idiosyncratic or, worse, facile suggestions about what ails graduate education in the humanities today and how to fix it.
Of the contextual section of Menand’s book, Anthony Grafton at The New Republic writes, fairly, I think,
Menand’s account is consistently even-tempered, and he resists all temptations to succumb to nostalgia or to launch jeremiads, even when both might be appropriate. He does not portray the university in the age of New Criticism as a paradise of Serious Reading, or denounce the new forms of scholarship that have grown up more recently as one great betrayal of truth and high standards. Instead he sings a song of sclerosis. Through all these changes, he writes, the basic system of disciplines and departments remained intact--a hard and confining carapace that proved impossible to break, however humanists squirmed and pushed.
I appreciated his discussion of the mixed blessing that is professionalism, something addressed from a more discipline-specific angle in Brian McRae’s Addison and Steele are Dead (a book I discussed here at some length). I also found his comments on the unsatisfactory realities of “interdisciplinarity” very interesting: “interdisciplinarity” is a buzzword often invoked as if it represents a panacea to whatever ails our individual, disciplinary, or institutional limitations, but Menand suggests, persuasively, that our obsession with it is a symptom of anxiety about “the formalism and methodological fetishism of the disciplines and about the danger of sliding into an aimless subjectivism or eclecticism.”
Overall, though, this “structural explanation,” as Grafton calls it, wasn’t really what I went to the book for; rather, I was hoping for an elaboration on the provocative excerpt published last fall in the Harvard Magazine, focusing on “the PhD problem.” There, he talked about the dramatic rise in the number of doctoral students even as the number of available tenure track positions (relative to the number of candidates) fell off drastically, the long time to degree for doctoral students in the humanities, and some ideas for unclogging the system by, for instance, making an article the standard for the Ph.D. rather than the book-length thesis. It turns out he gave most of the milk away for free here, and my thoughts on reading that material over in the book version were the same as what I said at the time (if he can make his writing do double-duty, I figure I can do the same with mine):
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March 10
Time’s Arrow in Literary Space
Is literary time directional? In some sense the answer, obviously, is “yes.” There is no doubt that Pride and Prejudice was written before A Passage to India. The issue, however, is whether or not Pride and Prejudice must necessarily, in some sense, have been written before A Passage to India and, if so, in what sense it must have been written first.
Stephen Greenblatt comes close to suggesting what I’m up to early in “The Cultivation of Anxiety: King Lear and His Heirs” (Learning to Curse, Routledge, 1990, pp. 80—98) which opens with a long passage from an early 19th century magazine article on the how the Reverend Francis Wayland broke the will of his 15-month old child. Greenblatt notes that “Wayland’s struggle is a strategy of intense familial love, and it is the sophisticated product of a long historical process whose roots lie at least partly in early modern England, in the England of Shakespeare’s King Lear.” To be sure, one need not read that as any more than a statement of historical contingency, that Shakespeare’s play just happened to have been written before Wayland’s article. But when one considers the larger institutional changes Greenblatt considers – from the public space of the king’s court (and Elizabethan stage) to the privacy of the bourgeois home – one may suspect that Greenblatt is tracking the directionality of literary time, that one text must necessarily have been earlier in the historical process in which both texts exist.
That directionality is what I want to look at, but not primarily on the scale of decades-to-centuries. My principle example involves three early texts by Osamu Tezuka, the great Japanese mangaka. He was born in Nov 1928, which puts him in his early 20s when these texts were written during the American occupation of Japan after World War II. The three texts have become known collectively as his SF trilogy: Lost World (1948), Metropolis (1949), and Next World (1951). Thus, they are early texts; in particular, they are before the Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) stories that became the centerpiece of his work for almost two-decades.
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Martin Amis’s Pregnant Widow
This novel is not as bad as I expected it to be. It’s bad, certainly; but not that bad. I’d say ‘it’s not as bad as Yellow Dog‘, but that would be redundant. Nothing could be as bad as Yellow Dog. Having Amis personally come to my house to administer a lava enema would hardly be as bad as that novel.
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March 09
Baddest of the Bad
What’s worse than David Horowitz’s brand of right-wing drivel giving yellow journalism a bad name? A ghost-authored Horowitz sequel, padded with over 150 witless, tendentious summaries of courses that the compilers erroneously imagine will frighten middle America into hauling the faculty up the nearest telephone pole.
The current issue of American Book Review highlights their Top 40 Bad Books. Heading the list for me is One-Party Classroom: How Radical Professors at America’s Top Colleges Indoctrinate Students and Undermine our Democracy, by David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin. Since I often can’t make time to review excellent books, I don’t usually waste pixels on bad ones. But one has to make an exception for the epic badness of Horowitz’s failed hit job.
At least the first book in this series, The Professors, gave the “101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” something to brag about in their red-diaper parent-participation preschools (whilst plotting Trotskyite mayhem from behind piled bookshelves).
This cheesy compilation is too lazy even to attack faculty scholarship. It’s little more than a list of syllabi with a shrill “I see Marxism!” appended to each--150 times. The somnolence it produces is hard to describe.
Evidently they should have credited Google as the third author.
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The “Crisis” in Literary Studies, by Mimi & Eunice
Nina Paley’s been working on a new cartoon strip, Mimi & Eunice, and posting strips on Facebook. She’s posted two that, while of general applicability, seem apt for the current situation in literary studies. Here’s what’s been going on since the French landed in Baltimore:
& that’s pretty much what I think about much of the “oh woe is us” that’s been visible here and there for the past decade, especially as many of the complaints are simply recirculations of complaints I heard back at Hopkins in the late 60s and early 70s. These aren’t complaints seeking new ways of doing things; these complaints are just seeking justification for misery.
Here’s the way out of the hole:
That’s what happened to me over thirty years ago.
Going meta: My use of Nina’s two strips exemplifies an argument Kenneth Burke made in “Literature as Equipment for Living,” Philosophy of Literary Form (UCal Press 1973), pp. 293-307.
EDIT: Nina’s now posted some strips to her blog, along with a discussion about what type of license to use when releasing them to the world-at-large. (I got the strips from Facebook, which is pretty public, but not completely so.)
Mimi & Eunice direct: http://mimiandeunice.com/
EDIT: More cartoon commentary on literary studies. (Not by Nina, but she pointed me to the site.)
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March 06
The Hurt Locker’s Addiction to Detachment, and Ours
I’m less interested in The Hurt Locker than in the kind of problem it faces: how do you make a movie about an event that we have so thoroughly forgotten, ignored, and under-articulated as the Iraq war? The important point to make about media narratives of the Iraq war is not that they are biased—though they are, naturally—but that they are disappearing, that the media isn’t talking about the war very much at all anymore. It has become, for the popular majority of Americans, less a real war about which it is possible to have a real opinion than something vaguely unspeakable and for which no narratives quite apply. Part of it is that the politics are so strange; the war’s original supporters have now mostly given up defending the original broken-kettle reasons while the president who was elected to end it, hasn’t; it is a war we are in, which no one wants us to be in, but for which no one has any idea how not to be in. And there we are, especially as it’s a war that has gone on so long as to have become normal, a permanent state of emergency that has, as such, ceased to be a state of emergency, ceasing to be anything at all.
It may be that this was what, on some level, certain people wanted, of course, but I’m less interested in the pure politics of the event than in the representational conundrum that Kathryn Bigelow’s film is stuck in. I don’t think it’s a great film, first of all; its characters are fairly tired war-movie clichés (another cowboy who gets results? really?), its ticking time-bomb scenarios are suspenseful in almost the cheapest way possible—a literal ticking time-bomb—and the dialogue ranges from the bathetic to the banal (the line “I’m too old for this shit” badly needs to be retired). The overarching plot structure is supremely meh, since it turns out that going home to his wife and kid—which the “x days left” move has given narrative centrality—is going to be boringly and conventionally emasculating; when he tries to tell his wife (described as “not dumb; just loyal”) about the awesome-ness of bomb turning-off, her narrative function is to coldly look away and maybe order him to fetch cereal or chop mushrooms because a woman just can’t understand, you see.
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