Sunday, February 07, 2010
Tonight we’re gonna blog it like it’s 2666
Not tonight, actually: but sometime this week. I got Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 for Christmas, and now I’m finally getting around to reading it. As I’m sure you know, Bolaño wanted this huge novel published as five separate books—here’s the ‘Note From The Author’s Heirs’ with which the book opens:
Realizing that death might be near, Roberto left instructions for his novel 2666 to be published divided into five books corresponding to the five parts of the novel, specifying the order in which they should appear, at what intervals (one a year), and even the price to be negotiated with the publisher. With this decision, communicated days before his death by Roberto himself to Jorge Herralde, Roberto thought he was providing for his children’s future.
The note goes on to explain how blithely his executors disregarded this decision, hence the microwave-oven-proportioned book sitting on the desk in front of me. My plan is to blog my reading, book by book, as I go through it. I’ll start with book 1, ‘The Part About the Critics’, later this week. Wednesday, maybe. If you wanted to read along with me, comment and so on, that would be very nice. But I’ll understand if not. I don’t mind blogging in a vacuum. For are we not all, in an existential sense, ultimately blogging in a vacuum?
I have never previously read a Bolaño novel; but if this one’s half as good as the hype suggests, I daresay I’ll go back over his backlist. The Savage Detectives is supposed to be pretty good.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
On Meditation As A Western Practice
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
Many of the people I know, myself included, have tried meditating at some point in their lives. I know some people who have gone to meditation retreats for days or weeks. I don’t currently meditate, but I have been considering starting up again. I’m finding it hard to begin again, though, because I fundamentally don’t know what meditating means.
Now, of course, it may not be necessary to know what meditating means. It is relaxing, it is supposed to clear the mind, and that is perhaps sufficient. Yet I am uneasy about the fact that Westerners who meditate do so in a widely divergent manner, and that there is no consensus on how one should meditate or about its nature as a discipline. Furthermore, meditating is almost universally considered a healthy practice, in the same way as “getting exercise.” If I told you that I sat in a warm bath for fifteen minutes a day, you might not have much reaction at all, or you might consider me a bit self-indulgent. However, if I announce that I meditate for fifteen minutes every day, most people will act as though I’ve admitted to great willpower and good sense.
Meditation is valuable to us because of the way we moralize about thought. If I can hold one focus for fifteen minutes, I feel not only as though I’ve eliminated distracting thoughts—I feel as though I’ve achieved a victory over modern life, with its constant stream of things competing for my attention. To surrender to a flood of stimuli tends, upon reflection, to make us anxious, as though we are becoming less self-directed and more passive. We see ourselves as protagonists in a story in which we must overcome the Internet, cellphones, advertising, and the rest, in order to achieve prosperity and selfhood.
In reality, there are many situations in which we have to respond to a lot of simultaneous information, and where a “short attention span” is a necessity. A variety of professionals, including investors, sports players, press agents, and teachers, have to thrive amidst sensory overload. If “mindfulness” has any meaning for these vocations, it means adapting to the flow of information in order to act quickly and correctly. Still, this is quite different in practice from sitting down with a book, or carrying on a single conversation for hours.
We should be suspicious of a practice that has supposed benefits, but no possible downside. Even exercising, done incorrectly, can cause injury or exhaustion, a fact of which we are all aware. In truth, there are some studies of meditation that suggest it can be a negative experience for people repressing severe traumas (if they are not prepared to face repressed material), as well as for people with a weak sense of self. But these findings are rarely discussed, and they are probably just the tip of the iceberg. If meditation is really as important to our psychic lives as philosophy, shouldn’t we view it in an equally critical, questioning light? Great debates ought to arise between people who favor a mantra, and those for whom “focusing on your breathing” is the correct way to practice. The definition of mindfulness should be studied and debated. There should be substantive comparisons between Indian yoga, Transcendental Meditation, Zen meditation, and other Buddhist and non-Buddhist forms. All of us should wrestle with the relationship between meditation and everyday life. Does it reveal the emptiness of all material things, and the absurdity of attachment? Is it concentration or meta-cognition?
One can say, easily and with great shows of serenity, that it is all these things, or that it is ineffable. Neither is really an answer. For many secular people, and even for people with loose religious ties, meditation is really replacing prayer. The risk is that it becomes a stagnant practice, its victory over modern “noise” a surrender to forces driving us away from life. We ought to try to learn, from each other, where each of us goes when we enter into that stillness.
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Human Rights, Empathy, and Literature
Writing at OnFiction, Keith Oatley follows Lynn Hunt (Inventing Human Rights, 2007) in arguing that the notion of equality of rights among humans is at least partially grounded in literature:
Hunt’s finding is that invention of the idea of the equality of rights, declarations of rights, and the changes in society that have followed them, depended on two factors. One was empathy, which really is a human universal. “It depends,” says Hunt, “on a biologically based ability to understand the subjectivity of other people and to be able to imagine that their inner experiences are like one’s own” (p. 39). The other was the mobilization of this empathy towards those who were outside people’s immediate social groupings. Although Hunt does not attribute this mobilization entirely to literary art, she concludes that the novel contributed to it substantially. “Reading novels,” she says, “created a sense of equality and empathy through passionate involvement in the narrative” (p. 39). Many novels contributed. One that Hunt discusses is Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) written by a man and inviting empathetic identification with a woman of a humble social class.
Monday, February 01, 2010
eBooks, Piracy, and Stockpiling
Caleb Crain’s excellent overview of what 2010 may have in store for book sales makes a very convincing case for the significance and likely effects of Amazon’s decision this week to use a “nuclear” option on a recalcitrant publisher, Macmillan. Amazon caved sometime after Crain had post, but his analysis of the move’s importance and the background for it is very much still worth reading.
Crain argues that what is being fought over between Amazon and Macmillan is not, in fact, profits or even profitability (he says the way this particular argument is playing out is in effect a contest “to see to see who can lose more money” per book) but simply over who is controlling the “intermediary steps somewhere between the creation of a book and the reading of it,” although I would change the phrasing to “whether publishing companies can retain control over those intermediary steps, which include negotiations over royalties, price points, and the strategy of whether and how to release eBooks alongside printed books.” Crain’s phrasing makes it sound like either side could potentially lose control, but that’s not entirely accurate—Amazon has a lot to win but not much to lose; publishers could lose a whole lot, but they have very little (if anything) more they can win by facing down Amazon’s demands—even retention of what control they have now does not exactly look like a prize the way things have been going. (Crain in a way acknowledges this earlier in the post.)
Crain also discusses Amazon’s strategy for the Kindle, and does so very insightfully:
When Amazon first introduced its Kindle reading device, the reception was tepid. But Amazon improved the device in later models, and thanks to its aggressive low pricing on e-books, it now reports that the Kindle and e-books are selling briskly. In other words, with the money that it has lost by discounting e-books, Amazon has bought market share for its e-book reader and for itself as an e-book retailer. To put it still another way, Amazon sped up the American public’s adoption of e-books by unilaterally lowering the American public’s idea of what the natural price of an e-book should be.
Essentially, Amazon’s decision to convince consumers that $9.95 is the right price for an eBook has backed Amazon into a corner, but it still has the publishers as a buffer between it and the wall. Any pressure from consumers on the price point, and it will be the publishers who get squeezed.
What also gets squeezed, or I should say what gets squeezed the most, is the ability of publishers to continue printing books on paper. As Crain says, “It may not be possible for a single company to publish e-books at that price and also retain the infrastructure necessary to publish ink-on-paper books.” I added the emphasis, but I think it’s pretty obvious that it has to be there: as I noted above, one of the forms of control at stake in this haggling over price points is the publisher’s ability to determine how or even whether to release eBook versions alongside the printed product. If Amazon is committed to wresting control over price points for eBooks, it’s also exerting indirect control over what the profit margins have to be for printed books to compensate for the losses incurred over eBooks. Being print-first (organizing one’s whole production chain from acquisition to fulfillment around the print copies of a book) may end up being a luxury no publisher can afford.
That’s the supply side, more or less. Being (at this point) completely unconnected to the supply side (knowing only a couple of people well who work in publishing and virtually no authors), I’m more interested in the demand side. Here are some thoughts:
One reason to oppose increased control for Amazon/increased pressure on printed books is a preference for (or fetishism of) the printed book. I find this less than convincing, especially when I begin thinking about the carbon footprint of my library (which isn’t often, but painful when it happens).
Fetishism and environmentalism aside, though, I would imagine that a reduction in the number of books being printed each year (especially since any reductions would likely come for older, modestly selling titles rather than for new titles) will mean that used book prices will go up. (If the only way you’re going to find a printed copy of, say, David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress is in a used book store, don’t you think some used bookstores—especially the good ones—will know that?) That will be a bummer. (Okay, this is still kind of a supply issue rather than a demand issue.)
Somewhat relatedly, Crain brings up piracy, making the assumption that piracy will correlate positively with increased eBook prices: $15 books will be pirated more than $10 ones. I’m not so sure this is actually the way it works, but it’s really irrelevant if it’s the way that publishers and Amazon (and Apple and the rest) think it works, because the way they respond will, if music companies are any guide, be far more predicated on how they think piracy works and how much it’s hurting them than on how things actually function. If the perception is that piracy goes up with the price point, assuming that Amazon isn’t totally successful and fails to force everyone (all the publishers and Apple and Sony) to assent to a $9.95 price point, the incentive will be high for everyone to make sure that their product isn’t the one being pirated. This means DRM junk, much more proprietary file formats and more expensive proprietary hardware, and just many more headaches generally.
But I think it is important to be clear on what eBook piracy probably will look like, and while I had some thoughts about this beforehand, reading this interview with a “Book Pirate" essentially confirmed my speculations. Behaviorally, book pirates will proceed much like I did when I first got my Kindle: they will load their hard drives with free stuff. I found mine in the public domain, as many others seem to have, but the process is basically going to be the same.
The principal difference, it seems, between at least the public rhetoric of piracy and the actual habits of readers (or of music listeners or of film watchers—these activities are identical in this respect) is that the assumption in the first case is that books or music albums or films are acquired to be consumed, but the reality is that the majority of what is acquired is not truly consumed at all. Rather, it is stockpiled. The bookcase or stack of books with more unread than read titles on it is a familiar image to most readers, as is the CD rack stuffed mostly with albums you haven’t listened to in many years (if you ever did). Stockpiling is, consciously or not, the purpose of the vast majority of our acquisitions, whether that is buying new, buying used, receiving as a gift, borrowing from a library or friend, or downloading illegally. We acquire to store, not to use.
This is not an insignificant or idle distinction because it is stockpiling and not consumption that shapes the desires and habits of piracy. Piracy is, most simply and most frequently, accelerated stockpiling—not an attempt to avoid buying something we intend to consume (to read, watch, or listen to immediately or in the near future). As the book pirate says in the interview, “a download does not translate to a lost sale.” It may, but it often does not, and that is in large part, the media industry’s collective fault.
Mass culture hooked us on stockpiling: units cheap enough to buy without regard to need, constant advertising and prods to purchase for the sake of purchasing, a huge but barely differentiated menu of products—all these factors, the basic DNA of the culture industry in the classic sense, are now playing out under new circumstances as a desire to fill our hard drive with more music than we will ever listen to, television shows or films that we may never watch, and now with text files we’ll probably never read.
Jacques Attali’s bizarre little study Noise details some of the more abstract consequences of the economics of stockpiling (e.g.), but the concrete point that is somewhere in his analysis is that stockpiling is pleasurable in a way that even purchasing is not. The very process of searching for and acquiring difficult-to-find media—whether that is in the bowels of a used bookstore or on a bitTorrent site—is inherently pleasurable and does not diminish very much with repetition, or even with failure. You might always find it tomorrow, and if you find it today, there will be something else to find tomorrow.
Stockpiling, for better or worse, has been for some time now an independent source of pleasure, connected to but distinct from (or, one might say, in excess of) regular consumption. The convenience of downloading alongside or in conjunction with other forms of digital entertainment has only increased the pleasure of stockpiling as an activity. And the funny part of the logic here is that the efforts of companies to set obstacles toward downloading only makes the chase more interesting.
***
Before I start sounding like I’m advocating piracy, let me draw back and admit that I am not. I want to make a case, though, that the primary way we think about it—as a substitute for legal consumption—misses the point because what “legal consumption” consists of sorely needs to be re-theorized. We already stockpile ceaselessly, whether we’ve ever downloaded something illegally or not. It is a hugely significant aspect of the logic of consumerism, especially within the media and entertainment sector, and failing to differentiate it as an activity from other forms of consumption is a serious gap in our understanding of the dynamics of consumer and producer behavior.
Perhaps record and publishing companies do understand it; perhaps they realize that the behavior of their paying customers is largely about purchasing things that won’t be read, seen, or heard, or will only barely be sampled. But if they know that, then they have collectively done very little to amend their strategies to taking advantage of this hoarding, stockpiling instinct. Perhaps stockpiling is the bad conscience of the culture industry—the truth that most of it isn’t consumed in the strictest sense is the reality that most in the industry don’t want to face. Like many other things, I doubt it is a luxury many can continue to afford.
The End(s) of The Mill on the Floss
I’ve been re-reading George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss for a graduate seminar I’m offering this term (what luxury, to be reading five George Eliot novels in a row!) and I’m in love with it all over again, especially the end. Well, OK, not the very end, which is (as critics have been pointing out since 1860) jarring, confounding, and depressing. But the last several chapters thrill me--and as I read them this time, I’ve been trying to figure out why. They aren’t as beautifully written or evocative as the earlier parts of the book treating Tom and Maggie’s childhoods. There are some false notes of melodrama that betray, I think, some lingering uncertainty about authorial tone that would be resolved by the time Eliot wrote Middlemarch ("[she] glared at him like a wounded war-goddess” may be the worst of these). The machinery of the plot creaks a bit. Still, once we are launched into the turbulent seas of Maggie’s terrible dilemma, I feel that we are engaged, with her, in a struggle of genuine moral significance, a conflict over what the narrator aptly describes as “the shifting relation between passion and duty,” which, as she says, “is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it"--that is, once you recognize the complexity of the problem, its solution becomes more, rather than less, obscure. When Maggie drifts away with Stephen, she temporarily abandons “the labour of choice” that has made her life so burdensome to her so often before. What a relief, to stop deciding! “All yielding is attended with a less vivid consciousness than resistance,” the narrator observes; “it is the partial sleep of thought; it is the submergence of our own personality by another.” That soothing condition is illusory, however: “the morrow must bring back the old life of struggle.”
What follows on Maggie’s awakening is, precisely, struggle--not physical, but moral and philosophical. And here (perversely, perhaps) is where I think things get really exciting, because Eliot dares to present it to us as a debate between people with strong feelings but also strong intellects. This is not a lovers’ quarrel to be resolved by passionate embraces. Indeed, the powerful lure of passionate embraces and what other ties or values might nonetheless take precedence is precisely the issue. Even before they head out on the boat, Stephen and Maggie have argued about what one chapter title identifies as “the laws of attraction.” Stephen’s argument is that their feelings for each other are natural, that to ignore them is “unnatural” and “horrid,” that it is morally repugnant, even, for them to marry other people. In response, Maggie insists that, though love is natural, “pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too.” They reprise this argument later, Stephen proclaiming that “the feeling which draws us towards each other is too strong to be overcome: that natural law surmounts every other; we can’t help what it clashes with.” Maggie, however, remains true to her conviction that biology is not destiny, that we can choose whether to obey this “law”:
‘It is not so, Stephen--I’m quite sure that is wrong. I have tried to think it again and again; but I see, if we judged in that way, there would be a warrant for all treachery and cruelty--we should justify breaking the most sacred ties that can ever be formed on earth. If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no laws but the inclination of the moment.’"
And again,
‘We can’t choose happiness either for ourselves or for another: we can’t tell where that will lie. We can only choose whether we will indulge ourselves in the present moment, or whether we will renounce that, for the sake of obeying the divine voice within us--for the sake of being true to all the motives that sanctify our lives.’
That natural law “is not the force that ought to rule us.” Steadfast in this resistance to his ‘great temptation,’ Maggie returns home--only to find, of course, that there are no rewards for choosing what is difficult except the bittersweet satisfaction of being true to “all that [her] past life has made dear and holy to [her].”
As has often been pointed out by critics, one way of reading Maggie’s situation is in the context provided by Eliot’s essay “The Antigone and Its Moral,” as a struggle representing the “antagonism of valid principles.” Morality would be easy, and worthless (as she argues in a review of a novel by Geraldine Jewsbury) if the right way were strewn with roses, or the wrong way not worth pursuing at all. It’s when we can see good on both sides that the “labour of choice” really begins, and though Maggie’s struggle would perhaps be more dramatically satisfactory if Tom and Stephen were both more deserving of her love, her perception of the principles at stake is not any less compelling for their inadequacies. The ending of the novel can be seen as suggesting the struggle cannot be resolved, though that conclusion is due as much to Maggie’s particular personal and historical circumstances as to any larger claim about the ‘relation between duty and passion.’ What I appreciate is the emphasis throughout on difficulty, and the absence of any concession to our impatience or preference for easy or romantic resolutions. As she says in the famous ‘men of maxims’ passage, “moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot.” That’s the work she requires of us.
One of the rewards she offers, though, is time in her company--which can be as funny as it is philosophical. Here’s a bit that nicely mingles those qualities:
But you have known Maggie a long while, and need to be told, not her characteristics, but her history, which is a thing hardly to be predicted even from the completest knowledge of characteristics. For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. ‘Character,’ says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms--’character is destiny.’ But not the whole of our destiny. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence. But if his father had lived to a good old age, and his uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet’s having married Ophelia, and got through life with a reputation of sanity, notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody sarcasms towards the daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Howard Zinn: A Public Intellectual Who Mattered
A guest post by Henry Giroux
In 1977 I took my first job in higher education at Boston University. One reason I went there was because Howard Zinn was teaching there at the time. As a high school teacher, Howard’s book, “Vietnam: the Logic of Withdrawal,” published in 1968, had a profound effect on me. Not only was it infused with a passion and sense of commitment that I admired as a high school teacher and tried to internalize as part of my own pedagogy, but it captured something about the passion, sense of commitment and respect for solidarity that came out of Howard’s working-class background. It offered me a language, history and politics that allowed me to engage critically and articulate my opposition to the war that was raging at the time.
I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and rarely met or read any working-class intellectuals. After reading James Baldwin, hearing William Kunstler and Stanley Aronowitz give talks, I caught a glimpse of what it meant to occupy such a fragile, contradictory and often scorned location. But reading Howard gave me the theoretical tools to understand more clearly how the mix of biography, cultural capital and class location could be finely honed into a viable and laudable politics.
Later, as I got to know Howard personally, I was able to fill in the details about his working-class background and his intellectual development. We had grown up in similar neighborhoods, shared a similar cultural capital and we both probably learned more from the streets than we had ever learned in formal schooling. There was something about Howard’s fearlessness, his courage, his willingness to risk not just his academic position, but also his life, that marked him as special - untainted by the often corrupting privileges of class entitlement.
Before I arrived in Boston to begin teaching at Boston University, Howard was a mythic figure for me and I was anxious to meet him in real life. How I first encountered him was perfectly suited to the myth. While walking to my first class, as I was nearing the university, filled with the trepidation of teaching a classroom of students, I caught my first glimpse of Howard. He was standing on a box with a bullhorn in front of the Martin Luther King memorial giving a talk calling for opposition to Silber’s attempt to undermine any democratic or progressive function of the university. The image so perfectly matched my own understanding of Howard that I remember thinking to myself, this has to be the perfect introduction to such a heroic figure.
Soon afterwards, I wrote him a note and rather sheepishly asked if we could meet. He got back to me in a day; we went out to lunch soon afterwards, and a friendship developed that lasted over 30 years. While teaching at Boston University, I often accompanied Howard when he went to high schools to talk about his published work or his plays. I sat in on many of his lectures and even taught one of his graduate courses. He loved talking to students and they were equally attracted to him. His pedagogy was dynamic, directive, focused, laced with humor and always open to dialog and interpretation. He was a magnificent teacher, who shredded all notions of the classroom as a place that was as uninteresting as it was often irrelevant to larger social concerns. He urged his students not just to learn from history, but to use it as a resource to sharpen their intellectual prowess and hone their civic responsibilities.
Howard refused to separate what he taught in the university classroom, or any forum for that matter, from the most important problems and issues facing the larger society. But he never demanded that students follow his own actions; he simply provided a model of what a combination of knowledge, teaching and social commitment meant. Central to Howard’s pedagogy was the belief that teaching students how to critically understand a text or any other form of knowledge was not enough. They also had to engage such knowledge as part of a broader engagement with matters of civic agency and social responsibility. How they did that was up to them, but, most importantly, they had to link what they learned to a self-reflective understanding of their own responsibility as engaged individuals and social actors.
He offered students a range of options. He wasn’t interested in molding students in the manner of Pygmalion, but in giving them the widest possible set of choices and knowledge necessary for them to view what they learned as an act of freedom and empowerment. There is a certain poetry in his pedagogical style and scholarship and it is captured in his belief that one can take a position without standing still. He captured this sentiment well in a comment he made in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.” He wrote:
“From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble."
In fact, Howard was under constant attack by John Silber, then president of Boston University, because of his scholarship and teaching. One expression of that attack took the form of freezing Howard’s salary for years.
Howard loved watching independent and Hollywood films and he and I and Roz [Howard’s wife] saw many films together while I was in Boston. I remember how we quarreled over “Last Tango in Paris.” I loved the film, but he disagreed. But Howard disagreed in a way that was persuasive and instructive. He listened, stood his ground, and, if he was wrong, often said something like, “O.K., you got a point,” always accompanied by that broad and wonderful smile.
What was so moving and unmistakable about Howard was his humility, his willingness to listen, his refusal of all orthodoxies and his sense of respect for others. I remember once when he was leading a faculty strike at BU in the late 1970s and I mentioned to him that too few people had shown up. He looked at me and made it very clear that what should be acknowledged is that some people did show up and that was a beginning. He rightly put me in my place that day - a lesson I never forgot.
Howard was no soppy optimist, but someone who believed that human beings, in the face of injustice and with the necessary knowledge, were willing to resist, organize and collectively struggle. Howard led the committee organized to fight my firing by Silber. We lost that battle, but Howard was a source of deep comfort and friendship for me during a time when I had given up hope. I later learned that Silber, the notorious right-wing enemy of Howard and anyone else on the left, had included me on a top-ten list of blacklisted academics at BU. Hearing that I shared that list with Howard was a proud moment for me. But Howard occupied a special place in Silber’s list of enemies, and he once falsely accused Howard of arson, a charge he was later forced to retract once the charge was leaked to the press.
Howard was one of the few intellectuals I have met who took education seriously. He embraced it as both necessary for creating an informed citizenry and because he rightly felt it was crucial to the very nature of politics and human dignity. He was a deeply committed scholar and intellectual for whom the line between politics and life, teaching and civic commitment collapsed into each other.
Howard never allowed himself to be seduced either by threats, the seductions of fame or the need to tone down his position for the standard bearers of the new illiteracy that now populates the mainstream media. As an intellectual for the public, he was a model of dignity, engagement and civic commitment. He believed that addressing human suffering and social issues mattered, and he never flinched from that belief. His commitment to justice and the voices of those expunged from the official narratives of power are evident in such works as his monumental and best-known book, “A People’s History of the United States,” but it was also evident in many of his other works, talks, interviews and the wide scope of public interventions that marked his long and productive life. Howard provided a model of what it meant to be an engaged scholar, who was deeply committed to sustaining public values and a civic life in ways that linked theory, history and politics to the everyday needs and language that informed everyday life. He never hid behind a firewall of jargon, refused to substitute irony for civic courage and disdained the assumption that working-class and oppressed people were incapable of governing themselves.
Unlike so many public relations intellectuals today, I never heard him interview himself while talking to others. Everything he talked about often pointed to larger social issues, and all the while, he completely rejected any vestige of political and moral purity. His lack of rigidity coupled with his warmness and humor often threw people off, especially those on the left and right who seem to pride themselves on their often zombie-like stoicism. But, then again, Howard was not a child of privilege. He had a working-class sensibility, though hardly romanticized, and sympathy for the less privileged in society along with those whose voices had been kept out of the official narratives as well as a deeply felt commitment to solidarity, justice, dialogue and hope. And it was precisely this great sense of dignity and generosity in his politics and life that often moved people who shared his company privately or publicly. A few days before his death, he sent me an email commenting on something I had written for Truthout about zombie politics. (It astonishes me that this will have been the last correspondence. Even at my age, the encouragement and support of this man, this towering figure in my life, meant such a great deal.) His response captures something so enduring and moving about his spirit. He wrote:
“Henry, we are in a situation where mild rebuke, even critiques we consider ‘radical’ are not sufficient. (Frederick Douglass’ speech on the Fourth of July in 1852, thunderously angry, comes close to what is needed). Raising the temperature of our language, our indignation, is what you are doing and what is needed. I recall that Sartre, close to death, was asked: ‘What do you regret?’ He answered: ‘I wasn’t radical enough.’"
I suspect that Howard would have said the same thing about himself. And maybe no one can ever be radical enough, but Howard came close to that ideal in his work, life and politics. Howard’s death is especially poignant for me because I think the formative culture that produced intellectuals like him is gone. He leaves an enormous gap in the lives of many thousands of people who knew him and were touched by the reality of the embodied and deeply felt politics he offered to all of us. I will miss him, his emails, his work, his smile and his endearing presence. Of course, he would frown on such a sentiment, and with a smile would more than likely say, “do more than mourn, organize.” Of course, he would be right, but maybe we can do both.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global Television Network Chair in Communication Studies at McMaster University. He is on the advisory board of Truthout and the author, most recently, of Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009).
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Original Aura
This isn’t a particularly deep point. But I was struck, looking at this image of the only original manuscript copy of Paradise Lost (h/t), at how much more it affects me precisely because I’m seeing a digital reproduction of The Original:
Mainly, of course, I just wanted to share this image. But it’s a strange inversion on the vulgar Benjaminism of clearly dividing between Art and mechanical reproduction, between the initial distinction I want to draw between aura and no aura. Somehow this thing has the aura that it has (at least for me) precisely because it’s been digitally reproduced. But then, I guess Benjamin would never have written that essay before mechanical reproduction, would he?
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Should We Be Talking about Louis Menand’s New Book?
Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas has come out and is generating a fair amount of discussion online. I found the excerpt from it published in Harvard Magazine interesting, particularly his emphasis on some of the indirect costs of professionalization. But the suggestions he made there about reforming PhD programs seemed at once wildly impractical and strangely dismissive of the content of humanities research--strange, that is, from someone who seems to have a fairly strong profile as a researcher himself. I’m interested enough, I think, to read the book and see what he’s really arguing for (or against, or about). The Valve seems like a place where a lot of people hang out who might have ideas about things like ‘reform and resistance’ in the academy. Should we have an informal book event of some kind? Perhaps just setting a date by which anyone interested will read it (in a month or so, say) and then we’ll have an opening post and everyone can jump in in the comments?
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Avatar and Disability
Writing at Open Salon, Bill the Lizard (guesting for Chauncey DeVega) puts disability front-and-center in a reading of Avatar:
What many people seem to forget is that Jake Sully, the main character, is established early on in the story as being both an ostracized and emasculated character. Thus, he does not fall into the classic white privilege archetype that you see in white guilt fantasy.
Jake Sully is emasculated in a literal sense because of a combination of physical injury, financial inadequacy and family tragedy. Not only is Jake Sully a Marine who cannot walk or fight, but more tragically he knows that there is a cure for his injury, but cannot afford it. Further, Jake’s closest relative, his twin brother, has been killed in a meaningless act of violence that Jake could not prevent, and now Jake is now forced to step forward into a position that he does not feel he is smart enough to handle.
Thus, he compares Sully to Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. Bill the Lizard goes on to point that, because of his disability, he did not enter the Avatar program from a position of privilege and entitlement. He was determined to “to apply his knowledge and skills towards his own self-care and development” had is “forced to operate outside of the two dominant spheres of influence at the Hell’s Gate facility on Pandora: the soldiers and the scientists.” That is to say, he entered the program as an Other. Thus “while the scientists are slowly accepting him, it’s very apparent that Sully would rather immerse himself within the Na’vi culture through his interactions with Neytiri.”
Furthermore, by deciding to become fully Na’vi at the end of the film, Jake makes a decision that is very similar to someone who may elect to have sex reassignment surgery. He is changing his outside in order to better fit what he knows is correct for him as an individual. Many people who have gender identity issues refuse to accept what is increasingly a dated notion of “medical normality,” that those in the “trans” community have a disorder. Here, gender is a social construct that is completely unrelated to biology. Similarly, while Jake Sully may be biologically human, it does not change the fact that he knows that he belongs with Neytiri, his life-mate.
Bill the Lizard moves on to compare Sully to Hugh Thompson, Jr., the US Army helicopter pilot who attempted to stop the 1968 My Lai MAssacre. Thompson became a pariah within the military for his efforts.
In conclusion:
Ultimately, while Annalee Newitz and others may see Jake Sully as that “white guy [who] manages to get himself accepted into a closed society of people of color and eventually becomes its most awesome member,” I would argue that she is missing the mark. Jake Sully already feels that the Na’vi are his family. Given his background prior to the climax of the movie, is it all that surprising that he would fight to protect them?
When you read the whole post you should read the comments as well.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Behold The Man II
I’m thinking of writing a variant of this famous novel, with the following premise: a time traveller (an American) returns to the Holy Land c.AD33 with the following macabre mission: to shoot Jesus with a high-power, 21st-century rifle, after he has been crucified and resurrected but before he ascends to heaven. The early stages of the novel would make narrative play with the questions of who and why, teasing the reader with possible motivations—is he a radical atheist? An agent of Satan? Of a rival religion? Perhaps his intention is to prove that post-resurrection Jesus is unkillable (that, let us say, he has not simply spent three days in his tomb recovering from serious but not fatal wounds inflicted upon the cross). The later stages would pay off these questions, and reveal what happens when the ressurected Christ is shot at.
Now it seems to me that to write this (and irrespective of the particular ending I have in mind) I need to work out what is the likeliest outcome for this particular theological thought experiment. Far as I can make out, if you shot the post-resurrection, pre-ascension Christ, there are three possibles:
1. He would die, like any mortal, and then he would be dead. This is to imply the resurrection was a once-only deal: die once, come back from the dead; die twice, that’s it. As to what the implications would be for the subsequent notional development of Christianity, I’ve no idea. I don’t know (I don’t have the expertise to assess) how important the ascension into heaven is as a component of that, as opposed to the prior fact of resurrection. It seems to me from my outsider’s perspective that the ascension is not so important as the resurrection, but I could be wrong.
2. He would die, but then he would be resurrected a second time. This would be to suggest that ‘conquering death’ means the ability to repeatedly come back from the dead.
3. He would not die, no matter how many times you shot him. The idea here would be that, by resurrecting, he had become something that death could no longer touch.
I’m not including the common-or-garden atheist position—if you shoot him he would die because he is only a mortal; there never was any resurrection etc. I’m not interested in that, because it’s dramatically rather inert. Which do you think is the most likely? Or am I missing other possibilities?
Friday, January 22, 2010
Kindle or Netbook?
Ebooks are here to stay, but how will you read them?
As sales suggest, dedicated reading devices--Kindles, Nooks, etc--have begun to meet the expectations of leisure readers and business travelers. (Those expectations have been changing as well, after the socialization represented by a quarter-century of reading on screen.)
Providing fast, inexpensive and even free access to many titles, portability, adjustable type, searchable text, and a growing list of other functions, these devices meet many readers’ needs on both airplanes and nightstands.
But these dedicated devices just aren’t ready for the prime time of academic and professional use. Limitations and glitches in their annotation functions, difficulties with copying text, and even the need to mimic the paperback book experience present real issues for the scholar, student, lawyer and engineer.
Also, rather than remedy these defects: the teams developing next generations of these devices are focussed on other issues--larger screens, color display, the ability to do email, surf the web and upload other documents and media.
Where are these devices going? It seems pretty clear. Larger, a touch heavier, more functional--their competition is driving them all in the direction of becoming netbooks, the lower end of which retail in the same $200 to $300 price range that the dedicated devices are getting, but which already offer tons more functionality.
Which raises a pretty good question.
Why not just buy a netbook?
Both Amazon and Barnes and Noble offer free downloadable e-reader software that gets you access to their e-book lines, generally much lower than paperback retail. Many titles aren’t available in both--Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture isn’t offered at Barnes and Noble, for example, but Amazon doesn’t begin to match their rival’s huge line of free classic texts (all of Emile Zola!).
With the netbook you just download both free e-readers and access both lines for the price of one piece of hardware.
These e-reader programs have all the defects of the dedicated readers with respect to annotation and copying, but you can have another program running for notes (and a better keyboard).
Even for night-table reading, I find the netbook e-reader a wonderful experience: no need to disturb anyone else with a light, and supreme choice even after putting your son back to bed at 3 am. Advanced into your bifocal years? No problem--just boost that type size. Are you a speed reader? It’s easy to narrow the width of the page to accommodate those who take big gulps of text at at time. A $300 netbook has brilliantly backlit screens and lasts nine hours on one charge.
I’m not diminishing the achievements of the codex as a technology, or the marvelous production & distribution associated with these intricate arrangements of wood pulp and chemical ink. I’ve built more bookshelves than most of my colleagues in the humanities and have never sold a book--not one!-- or given one away without replacing the title. I have both e-copies and paper copies of certain books, and use the paper for the heavy-annotation work.
But if you are going to tote around a bunch of media in electronic form for professional and leisure use--and you’d prefer just one or two devices, the netbook seems a smarter addition to your phone than the Kindle or its cousins.
Another thing: academic and professional reading increasingly doesn’t need to emulate the codex experience with hypertext and embedded multimedia. The netbook works for that; Kindle doesn’t.
Of course, pretty soon the Kindle will be a brand of netbook, and this will be a moot point.
Just as with paper, the future of electronic reading will offer many options. The one I’d say is potentially the most interesting and promising of all--Plastic Logic’s one-pound, 8 1/2x11 Que, is based on a technology that could lead to computers as light and flexible as a plastic file folder.
Scheduled to ship this spring, this product is clearly at least a couple of years away from serious implementation--offers to review it didn’t get a response, even of the “we’ll get back to you in a month” variety (which tells you what kind of customer service you can expect when your piece of plastic forgets your business docs!).
x-posted: che
Monday, January 18, 2010
Don Draper is, of course, never himself.
Let me open with a quick clarification about the previous Mad Men post. As to the purview of self-fashioning, we all do it. In blog terms, you know me as this guy, i.e. the one who caught those students, made that other one extremely uncomfortable, is frequently victimized by the library, hid his cancer from his wife, etc. Those are the stories I tell about myself to explain myself to myself. To quote Gertrude Stein from Everybody’s Autobiography:
Identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself. That is really the trouble with an autobiography you do not of course really believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right. You are of course never yourself.
The phrase “of course” captures the central irony of all self-fashioning: we know, of course, that we are more than the sum total of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and yet we only understand ourselves, and can only be understood by others, through those stories. In case you ever wanted to know why narrative diversity is important, there you have it: the more narrative modes available, the more possible understandings of themselves the people who encounter them can have. This is self-fashioning at its most mundane, and in terms of Mad Men, this is why Peggy Olson becomes more modern: once she understands herself in terms of the upwardly mobile career-oriented woman, the audience understands her frustrations in terms of the conflict between that meritocratic fantasy and the realities of being a woman in a male-dominated working environment. She becomes more recognizably modern not because the world she inhabits does, but because the way she responds to that changing world elicits a chorus of “of courses.”
Neither she nor Peter Campbell become “more real” as the series progresses—fictional characters, being fictional, can only aspire to escape the fictions they inhabit—but as the stories they tell themselves about themselves in order to understand themselves come to resemble ours, they’ll seem more realistic because they’re telling themselves the same stories we tell ourselves and we, of course, live in the real world. What I meant when I wrote the following, then, is that Campbell is increasingly understanding himself in reference to the same narratives we do, whereas Don Draper is not:
Campbell is, in a sense, becoming us, and we revile his behavior to the extent that we recognize our sins in his actions. Draper, however, is becoming art, and as such we hold him as responsible for his actions as we would Emma Bovary. His self-fashioning was not merely based on literary precedent, it was an act of literature, if you will, and much of the appeal of the show is based on watching an inscrutable literary character interact with actual humans.
Draper’s self-fashioning is not remotely this mundane—it is radical. He envisions himself not in the way a person envisions his or her self, but in the way an author envisions a character, which is why Joseph Kugelmass refers to it as aesthetic self-fashioning. To a certain extent, this is how my blog functions, i.e. as a stylized version of the life I actually live and the person I actually am; but because there are stories central to my conception of myself that have not and will never make it on the blog, the person you associate with my name will always feel, to me, like a persona. If withholding certain core stories so alters the warp and woof of my persona that it aestheticizes my self-fashioning, you can imagine what would happen were I to start inventing those stories whole cloth à la Draper.
The only people who know him on the show are the dead actors in his increasingly frequent hallucinations, because only they have access to his entire allotment of self-narratives—and, of course, they only have that access because they are the stories he tells himself about himself. The audience is privy to some of them, but not the entire store, which is why Draper remains ever at a remove. To the extent that Mad Men belongs to Draper, it is a story about someone will never be able to integrate his stories with the ones he wants told about him even to himself. His hallucinations bully and hector him in order to remind him “that it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right,” because the troubled antecedent of Stein’s “it” is even more troubling when the narratives that constitute identity are the convenient inventions of an unsettled soul.
If this conception of self-fashioning seems less modern than modernist, that would be my point: the manner in which Draper is integrating his competing narratives into a semi-coherent sense of self is entirely consonant with the modernist obsession with integrating competing narratives into semi-coherent sense of self. From the unstable “I” in Samuel Beckett’s trilogy to the endless renegotiation of familial roles in Joyce’s Ulysses, literary modernists sought to explode the tidy, reducible self that had been the hallmark of literary realism. Draper is, then, something of an exploded man sifting through bits of himself in search of the core to which all these bits once belonged. However, until he accomplishes this impossibility, his self-fashioning will still be far more aesthetic than that of the other characters on Mad Men, and as such, the show’s literate audience will still be drawn to him more than them.
I keep on meaning for these Mad Men posts to move beyond Draper so I can talk about Joan or visual rhetoric, but I can’t quit Draper quite yet.
(x-posted around the block, back again, then once more for good measure.)
Saturday, January 16, 2010
I Don’t Care What The Critics Say, I Love Mad Men (and the Sopranos and the Hills)
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
I’ve just finished Scott Kaufman’s very enjoyable post, “Don Draper as an unraptured Emma Bovary,” and feel moved to respond.
Scott observes, quite insightfully, that the difference between Don Draper and other, younger characters on the show, including Pete Campbell and Peggy Olson, is that Draper is stuck in a single historical moment, that of Advertising’s Golden Age. Even as history takes place around him, ushering in a new age of research-driven ads and social upheaval, Don remains a rock. For Scott, this turns Draper into something of a fiction. Other character show a realistic tendency to move with the zeitgeist, making him less real, and in fact it is his unreality that allows us to forgive his misdeeds—unlike the sins of Pete Campbell, which we “revile” because they are all too familiar, Draper’s lapses seem to take place in an aesthetic otherworld where all is permitted. There are no sins inside the gates of Eden.
Scott has done a beautiful job pinpointing Don’s relation to “history,” as the show understands it; he has also used Draper as a convenient poster boy for a set of attitudes about aesthetic self-fashioning with which I must take issue. Pete Campbell is not more “real” than Don; on the contrary, he is far less real to us, as I will show with a little help from Entourage, The Sopranos and The Hills.
First of all, we cannot discount the role of aesthetics in our (potentially) differing attitudes toward Don and Pete. Pete utterly fails to live up to Don’s standard. He is less handsome than Don. His voice is squeaky and high. He is clumsy around women, and often gives the impression that he cannot anticipate what they are going to do. Furthermore, his wife is less pretty than Betty, but is much more impressive as a personality, with a strong sense of what she wants and of what her husband deserves. We revile Pete not because we are reminded too much of ourselves, but because he lacks backbone, polish, and verve. He also undervalues his partner. Scott implies that we have different moral standards for televised life and real life, but in my experience this is neither true, nor—were it true—would it be desirable. As it happens, lots of people (Flaubert included) judge Madame Bovary quite harshly for wrecking her life, just as there will always be people who think The Sorrows of Young Werther is about a selfish, idle young man. But more to the point, it is quite common in real life to let other people “get away” with attitudes or behaviors that we eschew, and that we (rather confusingly) also consider unethical. That is because, sadly, our sense of the “ethical” often functions partly as a justification for the dead spaces, aesthetic failures, and unresolved dreariness that infiltrate our lives.
The best argument for the reality of Don Draper is also the most transparent one: he is the most important person on the show, the absolute focus of the audience’s attention. Without Don Draper, Mad Men wouldn’t have lasted half a season. Scott believes that his stubborn recourse to an increasingly outdated subject-position makes him unreal, but I would counter that his stubbornness is, in fact, peculiarly modern. Modernity, after all, enwraps him whether he will or no: the final episode of Season 2 is entitled “Meditations in an Emergency,” a title taken from a collection of Frank O’Hara poems. In other words, Draper is already inside the O’Hara poem even though the beatnik at the bar tells Draper he probably wouldn’t enjoy O’Hara’s work. Draper’s personality is a careful fabrication, as we know from the painstaking backstory, and that is why we might meet him tomorrow on the streets of an American city, whereas meeting Peggy Olson or Pete Campbell would be a shock. We are all Don Draper, or whatever alternative to Don Draper we have fabricated instead. Meanwhile, the historical events that are determining the minor characters have now either faded into the background, or disappeared; for Peggy Olson, moving from a secretarial job onto the creative team foreshadows 60s feminism, whereas in a contemporary show like Entourage all the secretaries (male and female) in Ari Gold’s office are hoping to become agents, a fact with zero larger significance. The reason Draper dislikes free love is not because it’s ahead of his time; he dislikes it because it destabilizes the kind of structures that support an easily readable identity, such as marriage and fatherhood.
In other words, it’s not just that, by definition, Pete Campbell the fictional character cannot be inherently “realer” than Don Draper the fictional character. It’s also that Matthew Weiner cut his teeth working on The Sopranos, and Tony Soprano is a realistic character precisely because of all of his anachronisms. Draper is a symbol of what we want now. He stands for our conservatism, our hedonism, and our cynicism. On Season 5 of The Hills, the engagement between Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt becomes certain after Pratt meets Heidi’s father, who she describes as “a real cowboy.” When Bill Montag arrives, he has a Sam Elliott moustache, a cowboy hat, and (apparently) a shotgun in his car. Multiple people refer to the shotgun, Bill included, even though it will obviously never be fired and is practically a fashion accessory. Spencer and Bill get along famously, erasing the memory of Spencer’s disastrous interactions with Heidi’s fundamentalist Christian other family and friends, who he calls “aliens from another planet.” When Spencer talks about getting into a bar fight to conceal an adulterous flirtation, Bill immediately mythologizes that as something “you do to protect your family” according to the rules of “the Wild West.”
Who are the “real” people here, the ones living within historical time? The young fundamentalist Christians from Colorado, talking about St. Paul’s injunctions against “fornification”? Spencer and Heidi, referencing the Sopranos, drinking Patron Platinum, and starring on an MTV reality show? Bill with his signifying shotgun? Spencer and Bill are sitting in a diner in Los Angeles, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, when Bill launches into the ethos of the West. Spencer tells him the Wild West sounds perfect. He adds: I’d like to live there some day.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Don Draper as an unraptured Emma Bovary
(x-posted twice-over because this is the closest I’ve come to actual literary analysis, as opposed to comp-rhet material, in ages. As you might can tell, I’ve had some difficulties thinking of myself as a proper literary scholar of late, and have absented myself from these parts because of it. What can I say—other than when the profession refuses to treat you like what it trained you to be, you stop thinking of yourself in its terms. But enough of that. Here, have a post!)
As I noted in the comments to this post, it was only a matter of time before I started Mad Men; however, as I’ve studiously avoided reading about the show for the better part of two years now, I’m not sure my insights into it will be all that insightful. Still, I’ll soldier on, with the caveat that I’m about to watch the eighth episode of the most recent season and would rather not have it spoiled. Not, mind you, that I think it could be, as the one of the defining features of the show is the thundering predictability of its characters. That’s not as an indictment of Matt Weiner or his writing staff, merely an acknowledgment of the show’s central conceit: these are people who want to be left behind when the rest of the world is raptured by history—at least at first.
Don Draper and his fellows at Sterling-Cooper aggressively court their own obsolescence by cultivating an aesthetic that appeals to inhabitants of a disappearing culture. In this respect, focusing the show around the Gatsby in the gray flannel suit is an inspired decision: Draper is a man at a remove both from his own history and those of archetypes that shape his character, and as such is constitutionally belated. He does not believe in free love, like his beatnik paramour Midge Daniels, he merely lacks a convincing moral objection to committing serial adultery. His persona is a fashioned response to a vanishing culture, and it appeals—both for the clients of Sterling-Cooper and viewers of the show—to the perpetually recycled nostalgia for a time in which romantic figures of powerful genius were recognized and compensated accordingly. In the decades previous, as evidenced by an article Earnest Havemann wrote for Life in 1958, it had actually been true that
most advertising agencies were started on the strength of one man’s genius and personality. These old giants of the business had an intuitive feel for advertising. Flying strictly by the seat of their pants, they made brilliant guesses as to what would put the public in the mood to buy and planned brilliant campaigns around their hunches. Yesterday’s ad man used to take a look at the product, then go off in a corner to dream up his campaign. Today’s ad man sends for the research on what consumers are thinking about at the moment and often goes out to size up the consumer himself.
Havemann captures, in miniature, why Peter Campbell’s career will inevitably eclipse Draper’s: a person can only have hunches about cultures they know intimately, so the value of a Don Draper is inversely proportional to, for example, market penetration into urban black communities. This is not to say that Campbell’s attempt to identify the desires of black Americans at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement makes him any more sympathetic as a character, or to viewers, as his commitment to equality is as instrumental as Draper’s is to free love.
Campbell is, in a sense, becoming us, and we revile his behavior to the extent that we recognize our sins in his actions. Draper, however, is becoming art, and as such we hold him as responsible for his actions as we would Emma Bovary. His self-fashioning was not merely based on literary precedent, it was an act of literature, if you will, and much of the appeal of the show is based on watching an inscrutable literary character interact with actual humans. Not literally, of course, but as the show moves forward in time, the endgames of everyone except for Draper become increasingly recognizable to the audience as modern types. We know why the black elevator attendent is reluctant to talk to the white advertising accountant. We know why the career woman is undermining gender expectations by sleeping around. These characters are commendable or revolting according to a familiar cultural logic tempered by a little historical knowledge. We may not know precisely how the story of Peggy Olson ends, for example, but we know what will limit her ability to grow and how struggling against the stunt will deform her, because hers is the thundering predictability of unwed mothers and unfair office politics.
So Peter and Peggy are not left behind because, over the course of two seasons, they learn to love and accept modernity in their hearts. They still seek Draper’s approval, but they recognize that he’s valuable in a way the world soon stop valuing. When the rapture comes, they know Draper won’t be numbered among the chosen. They may not know why—Draper himself seems ignorant—but they know. The key item, in this regard, is the note left by the hitchhikers who dose and rob Draper:
In an act of petty kindness, almost pity, they leave him behind with the means to join them because they know he lacks the will to do so. They may not have personally witnessed his days of the locust in the second season, but like Peter and Peggy, they understand that he will not be following them into the future. Nor, for that matter, will Joan Holloway, whose related status I’ll address in a future post should you so desire.
(So long as I’m feeling semi-literary, I should add: if you want to learn why The Dark Knight is actually all about dogs, that’s my beat too.)
Adam Bede Again
Remember the good old days, when we all read Adam Bede together and fretted about realism, Hetty’s eyelashes, and whether it was immoral or inevitable to want to crush kittens? Happily, I have an excuse to work through the novel again this year in a graduate seminar I’m teaching. In last week’s discussion we spent quite a bit of time on this passage:
At this moment a smart rap, as if with a willow wand, was given at the house door, and Gyp, instead of barking, as might have been expected, gave a loud howl. Adam, very much startled, went at once to the door and opened it. Nothing was there: all was still, as when he opened it an hour before: the leaves were motionless, and the light of the stars showed the placid fields on both sides of the brook quite empty of visible life. Adam walked round the house, and still saw nothing except a rat which darted into the woodshed as he passed. He went in again, wondering; the sound was so peculiar, that, the moment he heard it, it called up the image of the willow wand striking the door. He could not help a little shudder, as he remembered how often his mother had told him of just such a sound coming as a sign when some one was dying. Adam was not a man to be gratuitously superstitious; but he had the blood of the peasant in him as well as of the artisan, and a peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when he sees a camel. Besides, he had that mental combination which is at once humble in the region of mystery and keen in the region of knowledge: it was the depth of his reverence quite as much as his hard common-sense, which gave him his disinclination to doctrinal religion, and he often checked Seth’s argumentative spiritualism by saying, ‘Eh, it’s a big mystery; thee know’st but little about it.’ And so it happened that Adam was at once penetrating and credulous. If a new building had fallen down and he had been told that this was a divine judgment, he would have said, ‘Maybe; but the bearing o’ the roof and walls wasn’t right, else it wouldn’t ha’ come down;’ yet he believed in dreams and prognostics, and you see he shuddered at the idea of the stroke with the willow wand. (from Chapter 4)
What interested us is the stress placed on this moment by the different priorities and perspectives it attempts to do justice to simultaneously. Some felt that the narrator’s commentary spoiled the affect of the scene, its mystery and suspense, by distancing us from Adam’s emotional response, blaming it, somewhat condescendingly, on his peasant blood: it’s a kind of anachronism in his mental constitution for which we are not to blame him. Yet we are not to go along with it, either: we aren’t allowed to experience what he experiences, the shudder and trembling of belief in the supernatural. “Nature has her syntax,” as we are told in another place, but we don’t understand it, not yet. The weight of the book overall, though, as of this moment, is against reading it as supernatural or revelatory. Adam’s capacity for belief in the supernatural is a relic, a tradition: he’s a man of his time. Is it George Eliot the historian, then, as much as George Eliot the philosopher, who feels the need to make sure we don’t go along with Adam too far here? If we did, the genre of the novel (its commitment to realism, as well as to a kind of scientific naturalism) would come under threat: it’s a gothic moment that’s contained, or at least inhibited, by the narrator’s cool analysis. What do we do, then, when we discover that in fact the rapping at the door does presage Thias Bede’s death? If you’re going to ruin the atmospheric spell by discrediting the magical thinking it requires, why retroactively render Adam’s fear anything but “gratuitous”?