Tuesday, March 09, 2010
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.
The Horowitz staffers tasked with compiling this stinker simply trolled online campus catalogs to yield course descriptions employing such “democracy-undermining” terms as justice, inequality, race, and feminism. Then the staffers wrote lame descriptions characterizing the syllabi as part of a plot to deprive plutocrats of their hard-earned profits.
Once I got the concept, I briefly held the flickering hope that I could read it ironically--as in, “hey, what a bunch of good classes I wish I’d been able to take in college."
Wrong. The relentless, narrow-minded prose immediately disappeared my hopes of snarky thoughtcrime.
Even if you’re sympathetic to its politics, the concrete brutalism of this compilation’s formal properties will crush your spirit in a few pages--like reading a year’s worth of your daily horoscopes straight through, or a cookbook cover to cover.
I know, I know. I’m well-known for holding such anti-democratic views as that we should all have enough to eat, health care, and free education. So don’t take my word for it. Peruse a chapter over at the Random House website. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.
x-posted: howtheuniversityworks
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.
Saturday, March 06, 2010
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.
But more than that, the movie can’t seem to decide what kind of a hero or anti-hero it wants its main character to be; is he teh awesome cowboy who gets results because he breaks the rules? Or is he a supreme asshole who puts the satisfaction of awesome bomb turning-off over the well being of his buddies and success of the mission? Manifestly, he is both, and the movie can’t decide if the young soldier’s eventual “fuck you” to him is where it wants to place its narrative emphasis or if Sanborn’s apparent acceptance of him is the endpoint of the movie’s narrative arc, the “how do you do it?” question that gets answered in the annoying because completely right “I don’t think about it.” Certainly he persists; the film ends with the bomb-turner-off in his suit and all seems to be well with his world, while both the soldier who has turned against him and the soldier who has accepted him fade away.
Like America, I think, this movie needs to have it both ways, which the penultimate man vs. woman narrative turn lets it do: it wipes the slate clean by making a movie that has been about men fighting with each other (the exact same Kirk-Spock dilemma, in fact, mediating the same Bush-Obama problem) into a narrative about a beset man’s melodrama of escape from the “encroaching, constricting, destroying society” of a particular feminine and domestic influence. The former story would bring up uncomfortable problems; the latter solves them in a comfortably Dodge-Charger-American-Man sort of way.
I haven’t gotten into what is good about the movie because I don’t really want to praise it; it isn’t a great movie is basically my bottom line. It isn’t a masterpiece of realism (as Brian Mockenhaupt points out, as Kate Hoit argues, and as Michael Kamber piles on) but I’m less interested in this as failure than as an indication of what kind of dream-work people are doing to defuse the problem of an Iraq war that can’t really be narrated, in the kind of competence that I think the movie both shows and argues to be the only way to tell this kind of story. People will and have called this the best movie about the Iraq war, but for one thing, what they really mean is that it’s the only Iraq war movie that’s even vaguely watchable, which is a very different thing: most Iraq movies suck because they try to tell an expansive story of the war and fail; the ones that succeed (say this one, or In the Loop) work because they scale down their ambitions and bracket off so much, emphasizing instead the claustrophobia of a particular tiny perspective (and then render that ultra-subjectivity as the objective realism of experience). By talking about how little you can see, they approach something like a truth, a pragmatic truth (as naming the protagonist “William James” sort of hamfistedly suggests).
Some critics view this as the movie’s success; David Denby says that “the specialized nature of the subject is part of what makes it so powerful, and perhaps American audiences worn out by the mixed emotions of frustration and repugnance inspired by the war can enjoy this film without ambivalence or guilt”; the fact that “The Hurt Locker narrows the war to the existential confrontation of man and deadly threat” is what it has going for it. I would say that this might be why audiences like it, but I’m massively less sanguine about making the Iraqi people disappear and turning a real war into a video-game battle against a robot enemy, against bombs that apparently explode themselves; allowing us to forget the royal clusterfuck that the war has represented for the massive masses of human beings that live in the country we’ve broken and bought is not, I would dare to suggest, a particularly good thing. David Edelstein notes that “The question of what the hell these good men are doing in a culture they don’t understand with a language they don’t speak surrounded by people they can’t read hangs in the air but is never actually called,” but makes the claim that this isn’t just the movie’s fantasy-land but rather that “this movie rises above its preachy counterparts [because it shows] why [the film’s protagonists] don’t call that into question themselves.” Again, color me unimpressed; the films protagonists don’t call that into question because they are too busy fighting a war, but the fact that soldiers have no opportunity to talk politics is not a reason we shouldn’t. We are not soldiers; the way movies like this one convince us to think a soldier’s perspective on war is the only real one, in fact, is the most pernicious thing about them.
What all these critics recognize, then, is the place we, as a country, are at with respect to the Iraq war: it really does exist, but its reality is a thing for which narrative is insufficient to our desire. Yet even as we turn away from that reality, we do at least recognize that we are not seeing it, and as it intrudes on our consciousness, we—narcissists all—reflect on that feeling of detachment. Which is why this is a movie about an addiction to adrenaline and closeness to the action: in noticing that feeling of distance, of detachment, of a war conducted at sniper range against absent enemies manifest only in their IED’s, The Hurt Locker fulfills a wish to be as close as possible not to the war but to that experience of detachment itself, an addiction to video games because they only feel real and, this, a cinema of truthiness.
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Academic Publishing Again (or, Still)
At Perplexed by Narrow Passages, Christopher Vilmar raises some interesting questions about scholarly monographs by way of Cathy Davidson. He quotes from a post of Davidson that points to our own lack of engagement with other academics’ books:
If we believe in what we do (and I happen to be a believer), we should be writing for readers, first of all, and, second, we should be reading one another’s work and, third, we should be teaching it. Right now, a sale of 300 or 400 copies of a monograph is a lot. That’s appalling. The result, materially, is that we do not pay our own way and certainly not that of junior members of our profession. Intellectually, our students never learn the value the genre of the monograph because we teach excerpts in our courses, even our graduate courses. We do not teach the kind of extended, nuanced thinking that goes into the genre that our very graduate students will have to produce for tenure. We say the scholarly monograph represents the epitome of our profession and a hurdle to “lifetime employment” at a research university. So we do not practice what we preach, adding to the crisis in scholarly publishing and the crisis in the profession of English in particular.
Reading both posts and trying to think my own thoughts about these issues (which turn on the problem of which readers we should be writing for and whether it really is “appalling” that highly specialized but often perversely bloated works of micro-scholarship sell “only” 300 or 400 copies), I found myself turning back to John Holbo’s initiating post for The Valve, “Form Follows the Function of the Little Magazine", which addresses a similar set of interlocking problems, including quoting from Stephen Greenblatt’s 2002 MLA Presidential Address:
the problem, according to university presses, is that we are not reading one another as much as we once did - or at least that we are not buying one another’s books and assigning them to our classes. There are, I know, economic factors here: we are reluctant to buy, let alone compel students to buy, expensive books. But judging from the fate of even modestly priced academic books in our field, the problem is not exclusively economic. Somewhere over the past decade, our interest in one another’s work - or, again, at least in owning one another’s work - seems to have declined.
People reflecting on the decline of humanities publishing sometimes say that scholars should write for a larger public. We should, the argument goes, not address other scholars alone but try to reach the mass of nonprofessional readers as well. These readers would buy our books and journals were they written more accessibly and thereby solve the economic problem faced by university presses. Though the task seems to me much more difficult than it is often imagined, I am not averse to trying to reach a larger readership. But I doubt that our specialized scholarly work can be successfully couched in a marketable form for the general reader - assuming such a reader still exists - and I doubt that in most cases we should try to do so. In our profession, as in every profession, there are many things that we should simply address to one another.
Our great failure in recent years is not that we no longer write for a general public - as if every significant literary scholar in the past had been a Lionel Trilling or an Edmund Wilson - but rather that we no longer write for one another, not well enough in any case to inspire one another to buy and assign our books.
Remember these bold declarations of a brave new bloggy future?
A simple normative principle. Every scholarly book published in the humanities should be widely read, discussed and reviewed - should have it’s own lively blog comment box, not to put too fine a point on it. Because any scholarly book incapable of rousing a modest measure of sustained, considerate, intelligent chat from a few dozen souls who specialize in that area shouldn’t have been published as a book - i.e. after several years labor and an average production cost of $25,000. Turning the point around: any book worth that time and expense, that fails to be widely read, discussed and reviewed - that is not given it’s own blog comment box - has been dramatically failed by the academic culture in which it was so unfortunate as to be born. . . .
Why is this really quite low normative standard of healthy discussion not presently met? The technological barriers are non-existent, the financial barriers negligible. It’s cultural dysfunction. Sheer institutional sclerosis.
The Real Circulation Problem - of which low book sales are a symptom - concerns ideas, not paper. The academic humanities have simply never grown hyper-efficient networks for post-publication peer review that are remotely adequate to the excessive volume of peer-reviewed scholarship generated, especially in just the last few decades. This is the real scholarly argument for moving aggressively online, although it is bolstered by many economic arguments. As I have written before, the beast has poor circulation. The only way to get the blood of ideas moving is to rub its sorry limbs vigorously with ... conversations. Intelligent, bloggy bookchat by scholars, to label this crucial ingredient as the essentially unpretentious thing it is. That isn’t scholarship; but - in a world with too much scholarship - it may be an indispensable complement to scholarship.
I guess I’m wondering: 2002, 2010—the conversation sounds about the same, except that, perhaps, the energy that went into Holbo’s visionary post has flagged (or has it?) even as blogging has become (somewhat) more mainstream. I don’t hear one administrator (or colleague) at my own university talking at all about changing the way we evaluate research productivity. If anything, the pressure is going up to generate “book projects” of the kind that can get external grants in order to raise our “research profile.” Nothing “counts” for anything unless it’s peer-reviewed (pre-publication, of course, not post-publication, and certainly not post-self-publication). Perhaps more to the point, I can count on one hand the number of people in my faculty who blog (the number who read blogs might require two hands, but not much more, I’m reasonably certain). O brave new world indeed. I’m wondering if not only do we not read each other, but really, we don’t listen to each other, or, for that matter, to the president of the MLA (it will be interesting to see what kind of leadership Michael Berube provides on this issue, given his long blogging history). But for what it’s worth, here’s another, more recent, comment once again pointing to the need for some kind of paradigm shift, this time from the winner of the 3 Quarks Daily Prize in Philosophy Blogging, Terry Tomkow:
I think competitions like this are going to become increasingly important in future years. After all, the only known defense for the absurd anachronism of hard copy academic journals is that the competition for space on their expensive printed pages is essential to maintaining academic standards. Maybe so. But hardcopy journals are soon going to disappear and, if standards are not to disappear with them, academics had better quickly figure out other ways to sort out what is worth reading.
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
Learning to Remember
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
It began with a handful of direct actions and refusals--bold occupations, sit-ins, a one-day strike and walkout, and a manifesto that fired the imaginations of students planetwide.
Today it is a mass movement, with marches and pickets across the country scheduled for Thursday’s National Day of Action. The hope and the stories will keep coming all weekend. If you jump a bus for Sacramento, you might get a seat next to Etienne Balibar. If you try to enter the UC Santa Cruz campus--the epicenter of the movement--thousands of students and workers will be picketing every gate. Over a hundred major actions are scheduled.
But Tuesday morning, March 8 will begin the next news cycle. Where will the movement be then?
It might look a little bit like this video. Give it ten seconds. I’m pretty sure you’ll watch it to the end.
While there seems to be endless conversation about the violence of smashing windows and the damage to the movement done by spontaneous action, there is a notable absence of discussion about the violence of class division in American society and its relationship with higher education.
Is the movement so fragile that a smashed window destroys it--yet broken bodies don’t bring it to boiling point? We are told that the streets must be policed in order to be safe--that no one will join us--that people who would have supported the cause are now frightened to participate. Yet what we see is laughter, dancing and a freedom that is not possible to describe in the language of everyday capitalism. How, we must ask, is a movement that collapses under the weight of overturned trash cans going to withstand the presence of millions of people challenging their relationship to the economy?
As I listened to this young voice, I could not help but think: “This is Carl Sandburg with a video camera."
I AM THE PEOPLE, THE MOB--Carl Sandburg
I AM the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is
done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
world’s food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
drops for history to remember. Then--I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
a fool--then there will be no speaker in all the world
say the name: “The People,” with any fleck of a
sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob--the crowd--the mass--will arrive then.
Flyers and posters
Pamphlets and powerpoints
Planning on getting arrested? (ACLU pdf)
California occupation movement blog
New York occupation movement blog
United States Student Association
Notes on the European occupations (pdf)
Most important conference of the decade--
on the occupation movement: Minneapolis, April 8-11
related posts
California is Burning
Occupation Movement Sweeps California
Berkeley Standoff via Microblog
Students Occupy UC President’s Office
UC Davis Occupiers Force Negotiations
Occupy the AHA!
Occupy and Escalate (AAUP)
Inside the Barricades (AAUP)
x-posted: howtheuniversityworks
Interesting Talk
I’ve been listening to Craig “Late Late Show” Ferguson on YouTube and find him quite interesting. For example, he did a great interview with Desmond Tutu. Here’s the first part of his recent conversation with Stephen Fry. They did the conversation without (benefit of) a studio audience. Whoaa!
They have an interesting opening conversation kicked off by Craig confessing (at 1:07) that, in the early days, he thought Stephen had it all together when, in fact, though Fry may have been quite successful, but he was a wreck. And so on and so forth. In the second segment there’s a throwaway reference to Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica in a conversation about Twitter. Jeeze! Sounds like these are educated people.
Principia Mathematica!?#! Late night TV in America. Can it be long before hell freezes over?
Founding the Terror State in Macondo
Years after that founding, after Macondo has become more established and more connections have been built to the outside world, Don Apolinar Moscote shows up in Macondo and declares himself to be the Magistrate—by writing it on a piece of paper—and his “first order was for all the houses to be painted blue in celebration of national independence.” When José Arcadio Buendía, the town’s historic founder and patriarch, demands to know by what right he has given this order, Moscote declares, in a wonderfully productive passive voice, that “I have been named magistrate of this town.”
I love the way you can paint a house blue in celebration of an anniversary, the way an event fixed in time—the day of independence—becomes an ongoing, never ending spectacle (the way it is always September 12th for a certain mindset in the United States). But I’m even more interested in the passive voice construction of that second declaration, the way it asserts an authority, a power to compel, based in the complete elision of that power’s origin. Who has declared him the Magistrate? If he had to say, he would limit his power, give it a temporal and spatial scope, and that kind of power is not the kind he wants. After all, it is the very basis of omnipresent terror-power that it admits no actual existence, as Kafka understood.
Buendía struggles against the establishment of this power; when an authority emerges out of nowhere attempting to enshrine an event no one remembers into the town’s official history, he struggles against the attempt to retell the town’s history—to impose the narrative of “independence from Spain” as the town’s origin story—by appealing to living memory: “In this town, we don’t give orders with a piece of paper,” he argues, and tries to give Moscote “a detailed account of how they had founded the village, of how they had distributed the land, opened the roads, and introduced the improvements that necessity required without having bothered the government and without anyone having bothered them.” Independence from Spain plays no part in this story (or the story as the novel tells it), and so he tries to re-instate Macondo’s story, as he remembers it and as he lived it, as an effort to return to the kind of history that makes sense to him. But this turns out to be no lasting answer; he wins in the short term by disarming the magistrate, but in the long term he (like living memory) ages and fades, while the Magistrate’s power stems from a different and more ageless source: as people forget the original disarmament agreement, slowly, bit by bit, Moscote’s state power worms its way into the reality of the town until Buendia is a senile old man under a chestnut tree and the Magistrate has become the only reality anyone “remembers.”
Moscote is a conservative, but as the intervening civil wars prove, the difference between the two parties is as farcically irrelevant as the difference in colors. And while all the houses in town are soon painted blue for the conservatives, when the political tides turn to put the town is under liberal rule the houses are not unpainted but rather the exact same structuration of power is put in place, just in a different color as Jose Arcadio forces everyone to wear the red ribbons of the liberals. The point is not which history wins out, then, but the victory of written history over living memory, the power of an absent power to emerge out of a passively voiced founding to institutionalize the panoptical security state.
Garcia Marquez’ fable, in this sense, is also Domingo Faustino Sarmiento‘s, who gave in 1845 this account of the concrete process of institutionalizing governmental terror in Fecund (though the colors are reversed). When Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas confronted the same problem as Moscote, Sarmiento voices his project this way:
“How does one teach the idea of personalist government to a republic which has never had a king? The red ribbon is a token of the terror which goes with you everywhere, in the street, in the bosom of the family; you must think of it when dressing and undressing. We remember things always by association; the sight of a tree in a field reminds us of what we were talking about as we walked under it ten years ago. Imagine what ideas the red ribbon brings with it by association, the indelible impressions it must have joined to the image of Rosas…”
About the ribbon and the normalization of state terror, Sarmiento notes the same origin in endless universalizing, a “systematic organized enthusiasm” that goes on and on, for years. but while “[a]ll America has scoffed at these famous celebrations of Buenos Aires and looked at them as the maximum degradation of a people,” Sarmiento argues that “ I see in them nothing but a political strategy, and an extremely effective one,” and describes how celebratory enthusiasm merges with permanent personalized terror:
“After a year and a half of celebrations, the color red emerges as the insignia of loyalty to “the cause.” The portrait of Rosas first graces church alters and then becomes part of the personal effects of each and every man who must wear it on his chest as a sign of “intense personal attachment to the Restorer.” Last, out of these celebrations comes the terrible Mazorca, the corps of amateur Federalist police, whose designated function is, first, to administer enemas of peeper and turpentine to dissenters, and then, should the phlogistic treatment prove insufficient, to slit the throat of whoever they are told.
“The story of the red ribbon is, indeed, curious. At first, it was an emblem adopted by enthusiasts. Then they ordered everyone to wear it in order “to prove the unanimity” of public opinion. People meant to obey, but frequently forgot when they changed clothes. The police helped job people’s memories. The Mazorca patrolled the streets. They stood with whips at the church door when ladies were leaving Mass and applied the lash without pity. But there was still much that needed fixing. Did someone wear his ribbon carelessly tied?-- The lash! A Unitarian!-- Was someone’s ribbon too short?-- The lash! A Unitarian!-- Someone did not wear one at all!-- Cut his throat! The reprobate!“The government’s solicitude for public education did not stop there. It was not sufficient to be Federalist, nor to wear the ribbon. It was obligatory also to wear a picture of the illustrious Restorer over one’s heart, with the slogan “Death to the Savage, Filthy Unitarians.” … If some young lady forgot to wear a red bow in her hair, the police supplied one free-- and attached it with melted tar. This is how they have created uniformity of public opinion. Search the Argentine Republic for someone who does not firmly believe and maintain that he is a Federalist!
“It has happened a thousand times: a citizen steps out his door and finds that the other side of the street has been swept. A moment later, he has had his own side swept. The man next door copies him, and in half an hour the whole street has been swept, everyone thinking it was an order from the police. A shopkeeper puts out a flag to attract people’s attention. His neighbor sees him and, fearing he will be accused of tardiness by the governor, he puts out his own. The people across the street put out a flag; everyone else on the street puts one out. Other streets follow suit; and suddenly all Buenos Aires is bedecked in flags. The police become alarmed and inquire what happy news has been received by everyone but them. And these people of Buenos Aires are the same ones who trounced eleven thousand Englishmen in the streets and then sent five armies across the American continent to hunt Spaniards!
“Terror, you see, is a disease of the spirit which can become an epidemic like cholera, measles, or scarlet fever. No one is safe, in the end, from the contagion. Though you may work ten years at inoculating, not even those already vaccinated can resist in the end. Do not laugh, nations of Spanish America, when you witness such degradation! look well, for you, too, are Spanish, and so the Inquisation taught Spain to be! This sickness we carry in our blood…”
Founding Macondo in Forgetting Rape
To continue the “big famous book Latin America” kick we’re on, I want to take us to the author Bolaño called “a man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with so many Presidents and Archbishops,” and who just generally represented so much of the literary establishment The Savage Detectives seemed, as far as I could tell, an effort to escape from underneath. Cause it turns out he’s not a bad writer. Who knew?
I’ve been teaching Cien años de soledad/One Hundred Years of Solitude and I’ve been struck this reading, for the first time, how interwoven the founding of Macondo is with a desire not only to forget, but to specifically forget the specter of rape. For example, of the original expedition to found Macondo we read that:
“In his youth, José Arcadio Buendía and his men, with wives and children, animals and all kinds of domestic implements, had crossed the mountains in search of an outlet to the sea, and after twenty-six months they gave up the expedition and founded Macondo, so they would not have to go back. It was, therefore, a route that did not interest him, for it could lead only to the past.”
Immediately before this line, it is mentioned that the ancient city of Riohacha is on the other side of some impenetrable mountains, “where, in times past—according to what had been told by the first Aureliano Buendía, his grandfather—Sir Francis Drake had gone crocodile hunting with cannons and that he repaired them and stuffed them with straw to bring to Queen Elizabeth.”
There’s a connection between these passages, though it isn‘t immediately clear what that connection will be. But about ten pages later, we’ll get a little closer when we learn that “every time Úrsula became exercised over her husband’s mad ideas, she would leap back over three hundred years of fate and curse the day that Sir Francis Drake had attacked Riohacha.”
But why Drake? After all, she’s pissed because José Arcadio Buendía has become an utterly useless husband; in the early days, he “had been a kind of youthful patriarch who would give instructions for planting and advice for the raising of children and animals, and who collaborated with everyone, even in the physical work, for the welfare of the community.” When the town was first founded, after all, leaving the old world behind and moving on to new lands was the same thing as social responsibility.
However, when the gypsies come, Melquíades brings with him all manner of inventions that exercise José Arcadio Buendía’s imagination in a way ambiguously both noble and anti-social, and which make him into a bad patriarch: “that spirit of social initiative disappeared in a short time, pulled away by the fever of the magnets, the astronomical calculations, the dreams of transmutation and the urge to discover the wonders of the world. From a clean and active man, José Arcadio Buendía changed into a man lazy in appearance, careless in his dress, with a wild beard that Úrsula managed to trim with great effort and a kitchen knife.” (That Melquíades is described as “a heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands” on the first page is not coincidence, by the way; not only do his gypsy ideas lead to the “flightiness” of the husbands, but the “taming” of José Arcadio Buendía’s beard is just as much an overdetermined symbol as the caging of birds)
These flights into fantasy are, for José Arcadio Buendía , the equivalent of a Dodge Chargercommercial. But instead of the odious fantasy of beset masculinity we get interpellated into by that dumbass commercial, Garcia Marquez shows us Jose from the perspective of his wife, looking on in horror as, scene after scene, “having completely abandoned his domestic obligations,” he does things like spending “entire nights in the courtyard watching the course of the stars…to establish an exact method to ascertain noon” and so forth, basically being so obsessed with the gypsies and the news they bring of the latest science as to be a complete absence as a father. Until about fifteen pages in, we know he has a family mainly because of his efforts to get away from them, a wife because she is always trying to rein him in, and children because he ignores them. The only room in his house we know specifics of is the one he builds to get away from his children. Like a Dodge, he only wants to charge forward.
Things come to a head, however, when he decides that Macondo is simply too much of a backwater, when he determines that “We’ll never get anywhere…We’re going to rot our lives away here without receiving the benefits of science,” and that the only thing to do is to move to a better place. Macondo is still new, of course, still a town without its first buried citizen and in that sense still temporary. But when he tries to move the town away from even the very brief past they’ve created, Úrsula turns out to be of much sturdier resolve than him. When he declares that “A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground,” she steps up and fires back “If I have to die for the rest of you to stay here, I will die”:
“Jose Arcadio had not thought his wife’s will was so firm. He tried to seduce her with the charm of his fantasy, with the promise of a prodigious world where all one had to do was sprinkle some magic liquid on the ground and the plants would bear fruit whenever a man wished.”
Insensible to his blandishments, Úrsula does not share his desire to throw “magic liquid” on the ground and let fruit grow where it may. And she’s kind of a bad-ass, not only frustrating his masturbatory Dodge Charger fantasy head on, but quietly rallying the town’s women against their husbands so as to foreclose the whole adventure before it even gets started. Faced with defeat of his plans, he has no choice but to listen when she reads him the riot act: “Instead of going around thinking about your crazy inventions, you should be worrying about your sons,” she replied, “Look at the state they’re in, running wild just like donkeys.”
He does. And as he remembers he has children, the novel’s frame widens to include them and we learn their names and histories, the memories he has, in forgetting, deprived us of until this point. Yet while his sudden resignation to his wife’s stand registers through his willingness to allow them to help him unpack all his boxes, into a house now safe from being abandoned, he has the “impression that only at that instant had they begun to exist, conceived by Úrsula Iguarán’s spell.”
José Arcadio Buendía has been beaten, and he takes responsibility of a sort for his home, but his children were not, of course, conceived by Úrsula’s spell; they were conceived in the usual way, by a man and a woman having sex. Which brings us back to Drake. After all, Drake didn’t just hunt crocodiles in Riohacha; the novel’s second chapter opens with this fascinating little story:
“When the Pirate Sir Francis Drake attacked Riohacha in the sixteenth century, Úrsula Iguarán’s great-great grandmother became so frightened with the ringing of alarm bells and the firing of cannons that she lost control of her nerves and sat down on a lighted stove. The burns changed her into a useless wife for the rest of her days. She could only sit on one side, cushioned by pillows, and something strange must have happened to her way of walking, for she never walked again in public. She gave up all kinds of social activity, obsessed with the notion that her body gave off a singed odor. Dawn would find her in the courtyard, for she did not dare fall asleep lest she dream of the English and their ferocious attack dogs as they came through the windows of her bedroom to submit her to shameful tortures with their red-hot irons.”
The euphemisms wind incredibly thick around this passage. The story we’ve gotten of Drake from José Arcadio Buendía from his grandfather is the kind of courteous courtier who would lay his cloak over a mud puddle for the queen, or some such thing, a man out in the wilderness hunting trophies for his lady. But Drake was a rapistic pirate, known as “the Dragon” by the Spanish whose cities he burned and pillaged and famous for having “singed the King’s beard” in Cadiz. And the story—older by two generations—that Úrsula Iguarán gets from her great-great-grandmother is that Drake. After all, what does it mean to have been rendered a “useless wife”? And why did she happen to “sit on a hot stove” when a pirate attacks that she (as I read it) became physically unable to bear children, became too ashamed to show herself in public, and could no longer sleep in her own bedroom because she would have dreams of pirates climbing through her “window” with red hot pokers and making her submit to “shameful tortures”?
“Drake” stands for rape, in other words, a rape that’s either been forgotten in historical memory or a fear of it that is indistinguishable (generations later) from the real thing. And just as both sides of the family seek to forget that shameful past, dream-working it into something very different, the entire flight to found Macondo is the attempt to escape from a similarly shameful secret, the rape from which the entire Buendia clan descends.
After all, Úrsula Iguarán and José Arcadio Buendía are cousins, and she fears that the incestuous product of their marriage will be born with a pig’s tail. So, for a while after the marriage, she refuses to have sex with her husband, going so far as to invent a kind of chastity belt to make sure:
“Fearing that her stout and willful husband would rape her while she slept, Úrsula, before going to bed, would put on a rudimentary kind of drawers that her mother had made out of sailcloth…That was how they lived for several months. During the day he would take care of his fighting cocks and she would do frame embroidery with her mother. At night they would wrestle for several hours in an anguished violence that seemed to be a substitute for the act of love…”
Now, the fact that the same sentence contains both a “cock fight” and the phrase “violence that seemed to be a substitute for the act of love” almost interprets itself. And when Prudencio Aguilar loses a cockfight to José Arcadio Buendía and implies that José Arcadio Buendía ’s cock can do what his cock cannot (“Maybe that rooster of yours can do your wife a favor”), José Arcadio Buendía stabs Prudencio Aguilar in the throat with his spear and then goes home to rape his wife: “Pointing the spear at her, he ordered: “Take them off”…there’ll be no more killing in this town because of you.”
The founding of Rome in Vergil’s Aeneid is described by the verb condere, appearring at both beginning and end (dum conderet urbem (1.5) and ferrum adverso sub pectore condit (12.950). But as Sharon James tells us, “these two acts are so different — the one a slow, constructive struggle to settle down and build a civilization, the other a swift, destructive act of enraged killing — that by placing them in such prominent symmetry and using the same word of them, Vergil calls attention to the relationship between them…In linking the slow founding of Rome to the swift stabbing of Turnus, Vergil suggests that the former rests on the latter. Thus he shows the violence and fury beneath the founding of Rome.” And as James goes on to note, this is a linguistic innovation of Vergil’s: while the idiom “to bury a weapon in an opponent” is common both in English and in Latin after the Aeneid, it was Virgil’s use of the two terms in deadly symmetry in the Aeneid, linking the foundation of Rome with the murderous passion that undoes it, that gives it this connotation.
The founding of Macondo, by contrast, happens when José Arcadio Buendía “buried the spear in the courtyard and, one after the other, he cut the throats of his magnificent fighting cocks,” a very different kind of burying. For while the Aeneid is worried that uncontrolled passion might sow the seeds of Rome’s fall in its founding violence, Cien Años de Soledad, I think, is much more concerned with the legacy of sexualized violence. José Arcadio Buendía moves his family to a new world to get away from the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, but this produces, in turn, an inability to settle down: seeking to forget his own children (and what they represent) he follows science as an escape, an attempt to escape from the bird-cage of domesticity he would prefer to imagine he’s cooped into, but which is—in fact—a cock-pit.
Of the original expedition to found Macondo we read that:
“In his youth, José Arcadio Buendía and his men, with wives and children, animals and all kinds of domestic implements, had crossed the mountains in search of an outlet to the sea, and after twenty-six months they gave up the expedition and founded Macondo, so they would not have to go back. It was, therefore, a route that did not interest him, for it could lead only to the past.”
Immediately before this line, it is mentioned that the ancient city of Riohacha is on the other side of some impenetrable mountains, “where, in times past—according to what had been told by the first Aureliano Buendía, his grandfather—Sir Francis Drake had gone crocodile hunting with cannons and that he repaired them and stuffed them with straw to bring to Queen Elizabeth.”
There’s a connection between these passages, though it isn‘t immediately clear what that connection will be. But about ten pages later, we’ll learn that “every time Úrsula became exercised over her husband’s mad ideas, she would leap back over three hundred years of fate and curse the day that Sir Francis Drake had attacked Riohacha.”
Now, why Drake? After all, she’s pissed because José Arcadio Buendía has become an utterly useless husband; in the early days, he “had been a kind of youthful patriarch who would give instructions for planting and advice for the raising of children and animals, and who collaborated with everyone, even in the physical work, for the welfare of the community.” When the town was first founded, after all, leaving the old world behind and moving on to new lands was the same thing as social responsibility.
But when the gypsies come, Melquíades brings with him all manner of inventions that exercise José Arcadio Buendía’s imagination in a way ambiguously both noble and anti-social, and which make him into a bad patriarch: “that spirit of social initiative disappeared in a short time, pulled away by the fever of the magnets, the astronomical calculations, the dreams of transmutation and the urge to discover the wonders of the world. From a clean and active man, José Arcadio Buendía changed into a man lazy in appearance, careless in his dress, with a wild beard that Úrsula managed to trim with great effort and a kitchen knife.” (That Melquíades is described as “a heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands” on the first page is not coincidence, by the way; not only do his gypsy ideas lead to the “flightiness” of the husbands, but the “taming” of José Arcadio Buendía’s beard is just as much an overdetermined symbol as the caging of birds)
These flights into fantasy are, for José Arcadio Buendía , the equivalent of a Dodge Chargercommercial. But instead of the odious fantasy of beset masculinity we get interpellated into by that dumbass commercial, Garcia Marquez shows us Jose from the perspective of his wife, looking on in horror as, scene after scene, “having completely abandoned his domestic obligations,” he does things like spending “entire nights in the courtyard watching the course of the stars…to establish an exact method to ascertain noon” and so forth, basically being so obsessed with the gypsies and the news they bring of the latest science as to be a complete absence as a father. Until about fifteen pages in, we know he has a family mainly because of his efforts to get away from them, a wife because she is always trying to rein him in, and children because he ignores them. The only room in his house we know specifics of is the one he builds to get away from his children. Like a Dodge, he only wants to charge forward.
Things come to a head, however, when he decides that Macondo is simply too much of a backwater, when he determines that “We’ll never get anywhere…We’re going to rot our lives away here without receiving the benefits of science,” and that the only thing to do is to move to a better place. Macondo is still new, of course, still a town without its first buried citizen and in that sense still temporary. But when he tries to move the town away from even the very brief past they’ve created, Úrsula turns out to be of much sturdier resolve than him. When he declares that “A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground,” she steps up and fires back “If I have to die for the rest of you to stay here, I will die”:
“Jose Arcadio had not thought his wife’s will was so firm. He tried to seduce her with the charm of his fantasy, with the promise of a prodigious world where all one had to do was sprinkle some magic liquid on the ground and the plants would bear fruit whenever a man wished.”
Insensible to his blandishments, Úrsula does not share his desire to throw “magic liquid” on the ground and let fruit grow where it may. And she’s kind of a bad-ass, not only frustrating his masturbatory Dodge Charger fantasy head on, but quietly rallying the town’s women against their husbands so as to foreclose the whole adventure before it even gets started. Faced with defeat of his plans, he has no choice but to listen when she reads him the riot act: “Instead of going around thinking about your crazy inventions, you should be worrying about your sons,” she replied, “Look at the state they’re in, running wild just like donkeys.”
And he does. And as he remembers he has children, the novel’s frame widens to include them and we learn their names and histories, the memories he has, in forgetting, deprived us of until this point. Yet while his sudden resignation to his wife’s stand registers through his willingness to allow them to help him unpack all his boxes, into a house now safe from being abandoned, he has the “impression that only at that instant had they begun to exist, conceived by Úrsula Iguarán’s spell.”
José Arcadio Buendía has been beaten, and he takes responsibility of a sort for his home, but his children were not, of course, conceived by Úrsula’s spell; they were conceived in the usual way, by a man and a woman having sex.
Which brings us back to Drake. After all, Drake didn’t just hunt crocodiles in Riohacha; the novel’s second chapter opens with this fascinating little story:
“When the Pirate Sir Francis Drake attacked Riohacha in the sixteenth century, Úrsula Iguarán’s great-great grandmother became so frightened with the ringing of alarm bells and the firing of cannons that she lost control of her nerves and sat down on a lighted stove. The burns changed her into a useless wife for the rest of her days. She could only sit on one side, cushioned by pillows, and something strange must have happened to her way of walking, for she never walked again in public. She gave up all kinds of social activity, obsessed with the notion that her body gave off a singed odor. Dawn would find her in the courtyard, for she did not dare fall asleep lest she dream of the English and their ferocious attack dogs as they came through the windows of her bedroom to submit her to shameful tortures with their red-hot irons.”
The euphemisms wind incredibly thick around this passage. The story we’ve gotten of Drake from José Arcadio Buendía from his grandfather is the kind of courteous courtier who would lay his cloak over a mud puddle for the queen, or some such thing, a man out in the wilderness hunting trophies for his lady. But Drake was a rapistic pirate, known as “the Dragon” by the Spanish whose cities he burned and pillaged and famous for having “singed the King’s beard” in Cadiz. And the story—older by two generations—that Úrsula Iguarán gets from her great-great-grandmother is that Drake. After all, what does it mean to have been rendered a “useless wife”? And why did she happen to “sit on a hot stove” when a pirate attacks that she (as I read it) became physically unable to bear children, became too ashamed to show herself in public, and could no longer sleep in her own bedroom because she would have dreams of pirates climbing through her “window” with red hot pokers and making her submit to “shameful tortures”?
“Drake” stands for rape, in other words, a rape that’s either been forgotten in historical memory or a fear of it that is indistinguishable (generations later) from the real thing. And just as both sides of the family seek to forget that shameful past, dream-working it into something very different, the entire flight to found Macondo is the attempt to escape from a similarly shameful secret, the rape from which the entire Buendia clan descends.
After all, Úrsula Iguarán and José Arcadio Buendía are cousins, and she fears that the incestuous product of their marriage will be born with a pig’s tail. So, for a while after the marriage, she refuses to have sex with her husband, going so far as to invent a kind of chastity belt to make sure:
“Fearing that her stout and willful husband would rape her while she slept, Úrsula, before going to bed, would put on a rudimentary kind of drawers that her mother had made out of sailcloth…That was how they lived for several months. During the day he would take care of his fighting cocks and she would do frame embroidery with her mother. At night they would wrestle for several hours in an anguished violence that seemed to be a substitute for the act of love…”
Now, the fact that the same sentence contains both a “cock fight” and the phrase “violence that seemed to be a substitute for the act of love” almost interprets itself. And when Prudencio Aguilar loses a cockfight to José Arcadio Buendía and implies that José Arcadio Buendía ’s cock can do what his cock cannot (“Maybe that rooster of yours can do your wife a favor”), José Arcadio Buendía stabs Prudencio Aguilar in the throat with his spear and then goes home to rape his wife: “Pointing the spear at her, he ordered: “Take them off”…there’ll be no more killing in this town because of you.”
The founding of Rome in Vergil’s Aeneid is described by the verb condere, appearring at both beginning and end (dum conderet urbem (1.5) and ferrum adverso sub pectore condit (12.950). But as Sharon James tells us, “these two acts are so different — the one a slow, constructive struggle to settle down and build a civilization, the other a swift, destructive act of enraged killing — that by placing them in such prominent symmetry and using the same word of them, Vergil calls attention to the relationship between them…In linking the slow founding of Rome to the swift stabbing of Turnus, Vergil suggests that the former rests on the latter. Thus he shows the violence and fury beneath the founding of Rome.” And as James goes on to note, this is a linguistic innovation of Vergil’s: while the idiom “to bury a weapon in an opponent” is common both in English and in Latin after the Aeneid, it was Virgil’s use of the two terms in deadly symmetry in the Aeneid, linking the foundation of Rome with the murderous passion that undoes it, that gives it this connotation.
The founding of Macondo, by contrast, happens when José Arcadio Buendía “buried the spear in the courtyard and, one after the other, he cut the throats of his magnificent fighting cocks,” a very different kind of burying. For while the Aeneid is worried that uncontrolled passion might sow the seeds of Rome’s fall in its founding violence, Cien Anos de Soledad is much more concerned with the legacy of sexualized violence: José Arcadio Buendía moves his family to a new world to get away from the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, but this produces, in turn, an inability to settle down, for that origin in escape from memory will haunt the town for the “hundred years” which it is doomed to live.
Monday, March 01, 2010
Wellsian Swearword Question
I’m still thinking about 2666; when my thoughts have mulched down a little more I’ll post an overview. But in the interim I’m puzzling over this: the opening paragraph of H G Wells’s Food of the Gods (1904).
In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who are very properly called, but who dislike extremely to be called--"Scientists." They dislike that word so much that from the columns of Nature, which was from the first their distinctive and characteristic paper, it is as carefully excluded as if it were--that other word which is the basis of all really bad language in this country.
I give up. What is that other word which is the basis of all really bad language in this country? Does it rhyme with ‘scientist’? Does is start with the letter? I’m sure I’m being stupidly dense here, but ... does anybody know?
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Scientific American: Academic ‘Labor Market Gone Seriously Awry’
In a draft article published to its website today, Scientific American blasts some of the junk analysis bedeviling mainstream higher ed coverage and what passes for policy “thought” about academic labor. “The real crisis in American science education,” the article concludes, “is a distorted job market’s inability to provide [young scientists] careers worthy of their abilities.” Bingo.
The piece turns around an apparent contradiction: half the policy analysis decries a “shortage” of US scientists and engineers, and the other half claims an “oversupply” of persons with doctorates in science.
That doesn’t make sense--except when you understand that both camps are wrong.
There is no shortage of US-trained scientists and engineers and there’s no oversupply of persons with doctorates in science or any other field.
What’s really happening is restructuring of the labor market from a “market in jobs” to a market in contingent appointments. Throughout the economy, we have substituted student and other temporary labor for faculty and other more secure workers.
The name for this restructuring is casualization, the making-temporary (and cheap, and controllable) of work that used to be secure (and more expensive, and more difficult to manage). This restructuring has been in place since 1970, when roughly 3/4 of faculty were tenured or in the tenure stream.
Today, 1/4 of faculty are tenured or in the tenure stream. Less if you address pervasive undercounting of nontenurable faculty, teaching by staff employees and graduate students. The trend line points steeply down.
All of the under- or un- employed scientists with doctorates could be employed overnight if more science, and more science education, was done by persons holding the PhD. Instead, we do science and science education with persons who are studying for the PhD, or who gave up on studying for the PhD simply because they can work cheaper than persons who actually hold the doctorate.
If the percentage of faculty working in the tenure stream were anywhere near what it was at the high point of US scientific and technical dominance, we’d actually have a vast, sucking undersupply of persons with the PhD. Hell, just one large state system could absorb most of the so-called surplus doctorates in a few years--and as I’ve already noted, taking students out of the workforce and working toward full employment for faculty would be an actual stimulus plan.
Junk Analysis, False Solutions
If the problem is casualization, why is all the policy noise whirling about in the"shortage/oversupply" contradiction? Why is almost 100% of the conversation invested in claims that are equally but oppositely bogus--irreconcilable yet inseparable, glued together like oppositely-charged particles?
Because both wrong answers are useful to those whose interests are served by casualization.
University managers, employers like Bill Microserfs Gates, grantwriters at the pinnacle of the winner-take-all science pyramid, politicians looking to hijack curricula and hand them to corporations--all of these constituencies and many others find that their different agendas are served by either or both of these fictions. (Correspondingly, they have a substantial interest in mystifying what’s really going on)
The Scientific American is particularly good about the first half of the equation. It targets the transparent fiction endorsed by Bill Gates that the United States doesn’t produce enough scientific, engineering and technical talent.
Gates makes that claim because he likes to hire cheaply and contingently, creating huge rewards for loyal core employees, reserving the secure jobs as golden lures to keep the temps working unpaid overtime. (Ironically he borrowed the Microserfs model for his “campus” from higher education.)
With the claim that he can’t find US talent, he wins the right to employ on H-1B visas, importing cheaper labor from offshore. Not only do the imports work more cheaply, they lower the price of non-imported labor.
Politicians support Gates because he pays them handsomely for their loyalty. Or because they support other employers who also want to import labor, or who benefit from the lowered wages that result.
Gates also gets the support of those who want to diminish further the role of teachers and faculty in curricula, and hand schools over to Wal-mart and other corporations.
The piece is less strong on the second half of the equation, the “oversupply of PhDs” fiction, largely because it is so focussed on debunking Gates that at times it uses the claims of oversupply uncritically--as a usefully clear, blunt rebuttal to him and his near-universal political support.
The usefulness of the “oversupply” claim, as I’ve made clear many times, is that it obscures restructuring: work that used to be done by persons with the PhD is now being done by students and staff and adjunct lecturers. Even undergraduates. There’s zero “undersupply” of persons with doctorates if that work is given back to them.
But the piece still makes a good start on this point. Without explicitly referencing casualization, at several points it complains about the failed structure of the science labor market--as “gone seriously awry,” failing to provide real jobs, etc.
One path forward for the article would be to address a core question such as: Well, is a PhD really only for researchers at R1 schools?
Or is a PhD for those with teaching-intensive positions as well?--as used to be the case.
The combination of speed-up of the tenured minority and casualization of the majority who teach has tended to a growing assumption that the PhD (and tenure) are really associated only with those on a major research track.
But that isn’t the case now, nor was it well back into the last century: tenure and doctoral study were also for those with teaching-intensive appointments.
Failing to address that question, the article lists some of the ineffectual junk responses to restructuring that disciplinary association staffers have been pushing for decades: oh, the excess doctorates should be trained for alternate careers! Or: they should be warned that graduate education is like trying to make a career out of acting or playing the guitar! The problem of a winner-take-all society or winner-take-all science isn’t going to be resolved, as one of their economists recommends, by making tenure function even more like a “jackpot” than it already does.
Still, a nice start.
I Haven’t Forgotten the MLA
Which reminds me: after I deal with some other obligations (reviews of recent books by Cary Nelson and David Horowitz, and covering the March 4 National Day of Action to Defend Education, etc), I’ll get back to our friends at the MLA.
As I see it, the MLA’s many stages of denial regarding the restructuring of academic labor go something like this:
There is No Problem (1989); There is A Problem But It’s Not Our Job (1995); Shut Up About the Problem!(1996-2000); There’s an Easy Solution to the Problem--Just Be A Screenwriter! (1997-present); The Problem’s Not as Bad As They Say (2007); Let’s Pray For a Literature-Lovin’ Miracle--Or Test Them For Literary Compliance (with our religious friends at the Teagle Foundation, 2008); We’ve Been Working Hard at this Problem for Three Decades, plus Cary Nelson and Marc Bousquet Don’t Exist! (2010).
But that’s kind of a personal perspective. I’ll work on it and get back to you.
Journalism Starting to Get It
The NY Times--which is profiting from the collapse of other newspapers and also trying to make money on a sleazy distance-learning scheme--continues to publish drivel about the radical transformation of the academic workforce. And the other mainstream higher-ed press (um, you know who you are) continue to give way too much space to disciplinary association staffers producing hackneyed faux analysis.
But other journalistic coverage is getting better in recent years, in part because journalists are being squeezed in the same way, as portrayed especially well by The Wire. Even Michael Connelly’s latest thriller features a one-time investigative journalist bumped from the LA Times for an intern.
Across the country media outlets and journalism programs now use undergraduates and m.a. students to replace working journalists, using an endless supply of feel-good rubrics from “reviving community reporting” and service learning to “internship opportunities."
But in reality, just like graduate student teachers, their apprenticeships are the only job in their field that most of these student journalists will ever have. When they graduate, most of the jobs they’ve trained for will already have been cannibalized into other “student learning opportunities."
Monday, February 22, 2010
Survival Stories: What Is the What, The Hurt Locker, and The Wire
In a Blographia Literaria post about The Forever War and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold which I meant to cross-post here, I promised a further exploration of what I saw as a common theme in both those texts and in Dave Eggers’s novel What Is the What. All three novels, and a number of others besides, attempt to find a way out of a dilemma posed between liberty and equality by supplying the third term of the French Revolutionary slogan: fraternité. What Is the What also makes more explicit what these other two works do to a lesser extent: fraternity is at root about survival. For fraternity is, after all, most needed and most likely to be found (at least in novels) at those moments where one is too weak to survive on one’s own.
The narrative pattern proper to the ideal of fraternity therefore will always be a survival story, a narrative reduced to an account of its own possibility, how the narrator managed to live to the point of his or her narration, if it is told in the first person (which I think is the most common), or how the protagonist manages to get from the chaotic past to a stable (and therefore narratable) present. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is just as much a survival story (and obviously just as much dependent on the {broken} ideal of fraternity) as What Is the What, and it is certainly not alone in this regard among memoirs.
The most interesting thing about the survival story, I find, is its relationship to ideology. To be very general, the attitude of the survival story is that, because it is focused almost entirely on the mundane necessities of subsistence, because it has no time for ideology, it exists in a sort of sub-ideological space, or creates for itself a space below ideology, below the arguments for or against the events that have reduced its characters to this struggle for bare existence. Its narrative expression, therefore, is supposed also to be sub-ideological (which is sometimes mistaken for being post-ideological), to be invested only in the telling of itself, existing merely to continue existing, the direct corollary of the survival experience itself. The final paragraph of What Is the What expresses this directly:
Whatever I do, however I find a way to live, I will tell these stories. I have spoken to every person who has entered this club during these awful morning hours, because to do anything else would be something less than human. I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don’t want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.
There is, to be sure, ideology working through this—the reference to God, the categorical invocation of the “human” both leave marks of a very nineteenth-century liberalism. But the stunning thing about this novel is that it actually achieves something that I feel we must recognize as a successful resolution of this project of creating a sub-ideological narrative space. While it will never not be ideological, the novel has found a strategy of non-resistance to ideology, a means of allowing any ideology—the various programs of the SPLA, global capitalism, global humanitarian efforts and NGOs, animism, tribalism, racism, militant Islam, Christianity, individualism—to wash over the subject, Valentino Achak Deng, such that he effectively sinks beneath them. These conflicting values and ideologies overdetermine his life to such an extent that he is pushed underneath their rushing and collisions, leaving him open to telling his narrative independently of them: “however I find a way to live"—seven words, already a narrative, bumping along innocently beneath the tumult of ideologies clashing, accepting the existence (and even the validity) of all possible ideological indictments of the situation, yet not yielding outright to nihilism. This last part is very important: this sub-ideological space is also a margin between a non-resistance to ideology and an ultimate refusal of nihilism.
Obviously, this strategy—this claiming a space below ideology or ideologies—is itself ineradicably political; I do not mean to argue that narrative actually can ever really occupy this position, or that this sub-ideological position could ever exist as such. What I mean to bring out or highlight by speaking of What Is the What as a “successful resolution” of this project is that it has successfully obviated the role of critique in addressing conflict by making critique antithetical to its own plan and by making the absence of critique not only go potentially unremarked but actually seem palatable, even desirable. We wouldn’t want a harangue from Deng about the rapacity of US oil interests in Sudan; an anecdote about George Bush (Sr.) discovering oil in Sudan shows that Deng is aware that it is a contributing factor, but its importance is both stated and hedged against by turning it into the story of one boy’s misfortunes: “Lino can tell you, Julian, about the role oil played in his own displacement.” Oil is, at its most significant, “the beginning of the middle of the war,” a prolonging concern, not a root cause. More importantly, it displaced Lino and his family, and the story of that event is far more significant to the book than a critique of the flow of petro-capital into Sudan could have been. And we, the readers, may even prefer this story to that critique. Eggers’s novel has certainly sold better than any non-fiction book about Sudan.
But critique is not only less significant than “story,” but I would argue that it must in fact be removed as a strategy of resistance for the narrator because maintaining the practice of critique would take attention away from the story of survival. Mere subsistence, in other words, must be the exclusive concern of the narrator and of the narrative; everything else—especially critique—must go. This structural obviation of critique may not be unprecedented (I’ll come to some other examples which are actually contemporary, but I bet I could think of some predecessors as well), but it is worth inquiring what its conditions of possibility are, because I see this strategy of “survival as sub-ideology” as very likely to be proliferated in future narratives about conflict and violence. I only want to articulate a few of these conditions because I am considering expanding on these points in another forum.
First of all, I think it is important to recognize that Eggers (and, I suppose, Deng) refuses to believe that blame or responsibility can actually be adjudicated—Omar al-Bashir is a monster, the SPLA is monstrous, the industrial Western nations are hideously cavalier about African lives, but these competing claims to responsibility for the ethnic cleansing of Southern Sudan cannot be perfectly parsed, and so Eggers does not intend to parse them. Or rather, and I think this is very important, the idea is probably not that blame or responsibility cannot be adjudicated, but that it cannot be adjudicated through narrative. There is, in fact, a suspicion of narrative that derives from the debates on (and ultimate rejection of) the idea of mimesis as something at least potentially direct and transparent. No longer is it assumed that a narrative can represent without distortion; everything is always already situated.
Secondly, I think there has been since the First World War but more particularly in the wake of the Vietnam War a preference for what might be called a “corporal’s-eye-view,” an assumption that the most objective vantage point on war or conflict in general is to be found in the enlisted infantry. There is probably a longer history of this preference or assumption, but it has never, I think, been as pronounced as it has been since the Vietnam War. One thinks here especially of Tim O’Brien’s novels and memoirs (whose quote from If I Die in a Combat Zone… sums up what I’m trying to articulate here pretty well: “Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.") but if we were to go back to WWI it could be traced back to All Quiet on the Western Front (which, like The Forever War, is about the transition from grunt to commander) and films like The Big Parade as well as the famous poems of the war (e.g. “Dulce et decorum est"). At any rate, there is a very active assumption, or maybe a hope, that the division of enlisted and officers produces something like a division between ideological and non-ideological experiences of the war.
This is an ongoing assumption and a very live project, now updated to the Iraq War, where we might take In the Loop, which (as far as I know) does not delve into the experience of foot-soldiers as exemplary of the type of narrative which takes as its subjects the ideological class of officers and politicians, and The Hurt Locker, which features officers very rarely (and then only to underline how removed they are from the “reality” of war), as exemplary of the “survival as sub-ideology” strategy. The bulky IED-defusing suit, which is the perfect icon of the film, might also be taken to be the perfect metonym of this genre: inside the suit, there is (supposedly) no ideology, only the experience of the war and the creation of a war story.
But I also think we can view The Wire as a multi-protagonist version of this genre, although it is certainly more canny about the possibilities of truly sinking beneath ideology. It has also been seen as a sort of “post-” or “non-ideological” text, and one of the remarkable things about it is how readily anyone can find their own ideology validated in it—conservatives see indictments of welfare policies as surely as liberals see indictments of the drug war. (Liberals are more right, but that’s not the point.) To return full-circle, I think it is very possible to read The Wire as the survival story par excellence of our time, and to see fraternity as its greatest ideal—again, a broken ideal, but nevertheless, the ideal and central theme of the show. And it too features a very extreme distinction between foot-soldiers and commanders, and some of its central plots are about the impossibility of moving from one position to the other. And, although, as I said, it is never innocent of the pervasiveness of ideology, one of its most straightforward points is that the “higher-ups” in the police force, the government, or the newspaper are more ideological, more given to justifying their actions through abstractions. Bullshit, in words more appropriate to the subject, always rises.
Obviously it is no great scandal to talk about the unparalleled success of The Wire in achieving its vision; I think it is also very reasonable to suggest that its success is part of a broader turn toward this particular strategy of using survival as a figure for a sub-ideological space in narrative, a margin between a non-resistance to ideology and an ultimate refusal of nihilism. I see this particular paradigm as culturally dominant in contemporary depictions of conflict and violence, and likely to become more so.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
2666 Part 5: Archimboldi
[Previously: one, two, three and four]. It ends with the fifth section: ‘the Part About Archimboldi’. And, apart from being (obviously) about Archimboldi, the reclusive German novelist who so obsessed the Critics in part one—this section not only ends the novel but is about endings, I think, although in a rather veiled way. The structure is a more-or-less straightforwardly linear narrative of Archimboldi’s life. His birth-name is Hans Reiter. The son of a one-legged First World War veteran and a one-eyed woman, he grows up near the Prussian North Sea coast. As a boy he is fascinated with the bottom of the sea; he dives repeatedly (on two occasions he comes close to drowning), reads about seaweed, daydreams about the submarine world. He grows very tall, and remains an odd, singular, friendless child. Come WWII, he is mobilized into the regular German army and fights mostly on the Eastern Front—he is even awarded the Iron Cross for bravery, although his bravery is actually a kind of passive recklessness predicated upon a state of mind that would welcome death. Although he is badly wounded, he does not die. Recuperating, he discovers the manuscript memoir of a Jewish Soviet writer called Boris Ansky—this enables Bolaño to interrupt his tale with a lengthy digression on Ansky’s revolutionary fervor and disillusionment in Moscow 1920s/30s, and in particular his friendship with Evraim Ivanov, a science fiction writer. I was very interested to read a novel about an imaginary Soviet science fiction writer. In my opinion, there should be many more novels about imaginary Soviet science fiction writer than there are. Anyhow, Ivanov falls foul of the purge, and is executed; and it’s unclear what happens to Ansky, although presumably he is killed in the war. Recovered from his wounds, Reiter is sent back to the front, and the book hurries through the rest of the war.
Afterwards, in a prison camp waiting to be processed by the victorious allies (who, of course, are sieving their captives for war criminals) Reiter befriends a soldier called Zeller. Zeller reveals that he’s adopted this name in part to put off interrogation by the Americans (who are working through the camp alphabetically). His real name is Leo Sammer, and he wasn’t a soldier at all: he was a mid-level administrator. He ran a portion of occupied Poland, and tells Reiter what happened when a trainload of 500 Greek Jews mistakenly ended up in his town rather than Auschwitz, where they were supposed to go. At first Sammer feeds them and gives them blankets, up to a point, whilst he tries to get the Nazi bureaucracy to admit and correct its mistake; but nobody wants to take responsibility, and finally he is given a verbal order to ‘dispose’ of the Jews.
‘Do you understand?’ asked the voice from Warsaw.
‘Yes I understand,’ I said.
‘Then we have a solution, don’t we?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘But I’d like to receive the order in writing,’ I added. I heard a pealing laughter at the other end of the line. It could by my son’s laugh, I thought, a laugh that conjured up country afternoons, blue rivers full of trout, and the scent of fistfuls of flowers and grasses.
‘Don’t be naïve,’ said the voice without a hint of arrogance, ‘these orders are never issued in wiritng.’[759]
Sammer then kills four-fifths of his Jews by convening work parties to march them into the woods and shoot them, a few score at a time, but it’s amateurishly and clumsily done. His work parties, including gangs of Polish children, don’t like it at all; and neither does he. As the Russians approach he vacates the town, and now in Allied custody he’s anxious that his true identity will be uncovered. But before that happens he is strangled in the camp—by Reiter.
Then the narrative follows Reiter’s postwar life; hardscrabble at first, although leavened by a relationship with the love of his life, the lovely if bonkers and tubercular Ingeborg Bauer. Reiter and Ingeborg have a lot of sex. He works at various low-grade jobs, and writes his first novel. When it comes to publication Reiter is concerned that the Allies might finger him for murdering Sammer; so he chooses a pseudonym, based on the Italian Renaissance painter Arcimboldo, whom Reiter likes. His publisher points out that ‘Benno von Archimboldi’ is a stupid name, but Reiter sticks with it.
From then on, it’s the slow burn of Reiter/Archimboldi’s career: uncommercial ‘experimental’ novels that initially do not sell, but which slowly accrue readers and, as we know from part 1, academics. I discover that somebody has made a Wikipedia page for Archimboldi, so I don’t need to list all his novels here. Though I will mention in passing that the Wikipedia page for this imaginary individual’s writing career is longer and more interesting than the pages of some actual writers. So it goes. Archimboldi, always fame-shy, becomes positively reclusive after the death of Ingeborg. The last section of Part 5, and the last of the novel as a whole, shifts attention to Archimboldi’s sister, Lotte; her postwar experiences, her marriage to an auto-shop owner, their only child Klaus, and his decision to move to the USA. This, we discover, is the same Klaus Haas imprisoned under suspicion of murdering women in Santa Teresa in Part IV: and the novel ends with the elderly, now widowed Lotte worn out by repeated visits to her son in prison, asking her brother to take over.
”And that woman was very nice,” said Lotte, “even though my son is rotting in a Mexican prison. And who will look after him? Who will remember him when I’m dead?” asked Lotte. “My son has no children, no friends, he doesn’t have anyone,” said Lotte. “Look, the sun is coming up. Would you like some tea, coffee, a glass of water?”
Archimboldi sat down and stretched his legs. The bones cracked.
“Will you take care of it all?”
“A beer,” he said.
“I don’t have beer,” said Lotte. “Will you take care of it all?” [891]
That’s everything, except for a tangential coda: Archimboldi has an ice cream on a terrace restaurant, a ‘Fürst Pückler’ (‘chocolate, vanilla and strawberry’) when he meets a descendent of the original Herr Fürst Pückler, who invented the ice cream. The ancestor was ‘an enlightened man’, a gardener and botanist, the author of notable botanical and travel books.
”No one remembers the botanist Fürst Pückler now, no one remembers the model gardner, no one has read the writer. But everyone at some moment has tasted a Fürst Pückler, which is best and most pleasant in spring and fall.”
“Why not in summer?” asked Archimboldi.
“Because in summer it can be cloying. Ices are best in summer, not ice cream.”
Suddenly the park lights came on, although there was a second of total darkness, as if someone had tossed a black blanket over parts of Hamburg.
The gentlemen sighed. He must have been about seventy, and then he said:
“A mysterious legacy, don’t you think?”
“You’re right, I do,” said Archimboldi as he got up and took his leave of the descendent of Fürst Pückler.
Soon afterward he left the park and the next morning he was on his way to Mexico. [893]
I’d say that’s how the novel ends, but in fact there’s a four-page afterword by Ignacio Echevarria, explaining the circumstances of publication and elucidating the opaque title of the whole, which in appropriate postmodern manner I take to be the actual final section of the novel. Now the number 2666 appears nowhere in the novel itself, but Echevarria tells us that it does appear in an earlier Bolaño book, Amulet (1999), in which a character describes an avenue in central Mexico City as ‘more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974, or in 1968, or in 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eye of a corpse or an unborn child.’ I’ve noticed several reviewers alluding to this without mentioning that it’s all spelled out in the book itself; as if to puff up their own implied knowledge of Bolaño’s oeuvre. Don’t be fooled by them.
*
So: ice cream? A mélange, something many would find cloying if taken at the wrong time, the mysterious legacy of an enlightened individual, something simultaneously gustible and chilling. The novel itself, clearly. Archimboldi, who worked as a gardener in the early stages of his writing career, and who is also a novelist, presumably feels some connection with Fürst Pückler (who is a real person it seems): his mysterious legacy will, I suppose, have something to do with his nephew in Mexico, and nothing to do with his esteemed novels or (doubtless) excellent gardening.
What else? Well, not-a-relation-of-mine ‘adam’, commenting on an earlier post said: ‘I thought the fifth section was filled with everything I hate about modern writing (overly pretentious, nonsensical prose), but still better than the fourth.’ There are certainly moments where I can see why he might think this, but I’d suggest the ‘This Is Modern Writing’ aspect of ‘The Part About Archimboldi’ has to do with structure rather than style; and I’d also suggest it can be justified. There is something frustratingly modish and echt-experimental about Bolaño’s refusal to tie-up the loose ends of his tale, not least because he teases the reader by offering various small developments of plotlines or characters from earlier in the novel. So whilst we learn some small things about Klaus’s family, and Archimboldi’s background, we don’t learn if the Critics ever catch up to Archimboldi; we don’t discover what happens to Amalfitano (father or daughter), or to ‘Fate’ and his female friends; and we move no closer at all to solving or even understanding the mass-killings around which the novel is built. But this ending-avoision (‘I don’t say evasion, I say avoision’) is elaborated in pretty much all the narrative strands of this section of the novel. Or perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say: narratives are set in motion, and developed, only to be abruptly truncated throughout the section—consider for example the science fiction writer Ivanov, whose career trajectory has parallels with Archimboldi’s, except that, in his prime, he is shot by the KGB. Or consider the long inset narrative about French anthropologists who discover an Edenic ‘stone-age’ tribe in Borneo, introduced as ‘a joke that Ivanov told him [Ansky] at a party’ [731]—and which we read, therefore, expecting a punchline; but which burns out into inconsequential misunderstanding between scientists and natives. Or the love-story between Archimboldi and Ingeborg, which also rather peters out. They holiday in the mountains near the Austrian border, and the dying Ingeborg disappears in the middle of the night; Archimboldi searches for her, expecting that she has done away with herself. But she hasn’t; she’s just watching the stars. Cold, they go to the border guardhouse, where they find the guards murdered—but we never discover why, or by whom. There are many other examples like this, to the point where it becomes clear that it’s a deliberate narrative strategy.
Of course, this is part of the larger Bolaño effect, and this sort of structural skewed elegance is constitutive of the Experimental Novel. It acquires added resonance here, because 2666 is so long and detailed, and has planted so many questions in the reader’s mind. Accordingly this section’s elaborate ‘you weren’t so foolish as to think you’d get answers, were you?’ feels more contrived than it might. Part of the point, presumably, is to say: answers aren’t the currency of existence. To say: life is not structured like a whodunit, with a long speech in the library near the end that explains everything. Death is always an interruption, life is always left unresolved. But part of it feels like obliqueness for the sake of obliqueness: ‘you might understand all this … if you puzzle it over until the year 2666, hah!’ Here’s Ignacio Echevarria again:
In one of his many notes for 2666, Bolaño indicates the existence in the work of a ‘hidden centre,’ concealed beneath what might be considered the work’s ‘physical centre.’ There’s reason to think that this physical centre is the city of Santa Teresa, faithful reflection of Ciudad Juarez, on the Mexican-U.S. border.
I find myself wanting to resist the idea that the whole 1000-page monsternovel is just a massive shaggy-lupine elaboration of Henry James’s ‘’Figure in the Carpet’ short story, however much Echevarria wants to push that line.
Part 5 is a much more readable section than the horrible Part 4; and finishing the novel is to have it echo weirdly in the mind. I’ll let it bounce about a little and come back to it in a little while.
Friday, February 19, 2010
“I meet them, yes. I go around.”
I found this Swahili Forum article by Uta Reuster-Jahn absolutely fascinating:
“It can be said that newspaper serials are the most popular form of Swahili literature in Tanzania at the moment. This is all the more important for the assessment of reading culture in Tanzania, as book sales via the established channels of distribution using book stores are weak, or even on decline, as in the case of Ndanda Mission Press’ entertainment books. This decrease seems to be counterbalanced by an increase in fiction published in newspapers. In addition to being read in the papers, it must be noted that a number of serials appear in the form of books after the stories have reached their end in the paper, thus contributing to the book market in Tanzania. However, they tend to be overlooked by scholars because they do not turn up in book stores. Rather, they are sold on the streets using the distribution channels of the papers...
Since the privatisation of media in the 1990s, the number of newspapers and tabloids has multiplied, and serials have become abundant...they are the most popular form of fiction at the moment in terms of quantity of readers. They are especially prevalent in the tabloids, where there often are more than three stories being serialised at a time...However, the most prominent writer specialising in newspaper serials is Eric James Shigongo, who probably is also the most prolific author of popular literature of the last decade in Tanzania altogether. In his case, novel writing has reached a new quality as a well organised, apparently successful, self-owned business. His history as a writer is inextricably connected to his activity in the publishing sector, as he serialises his stories in his own newspapers. Eric James Shigongo is owner and chief executive officer of Global Publishers & General Enterprises Ltd., located in Sinza, Dar es Salaam. Together with Abdallah Mrisho Salawi, he founded the company in 1998, and only then did he start publishing novels too.”
I bought a Shigongo novel from the window of a bus once, a little gem called (in English) The President Loves My Wife. Reuster-Jahn focuses on Shigongo in particular:
“Shigongo’s stories reach a large audience, which, as Shigongo himself is aware, is mainly comprised of women. This was confirmed by sellers of newspapers in the streets whom I asked. They told me that they have female customers who are especially interested in the stories, and buy the newspapers exactly out of this reason....The author’s serials are not only published in Global Publishers’ printed newspapers, but also on their web-site, which was established in July 2007 (Salawi in Bongo Celebrity 08-072008). According to Salawi, the wish of readers to read sequels they might have missed was a major reason to set up the web-site, which within one year had almost two million visitors (Salawi in Bongo Celebrity 08-07-2008). Each sequel on the web-site is provided with a link to maoni (comments), where readers can and do react and comment on the developments of the stories. There they comment on the behaviour or fate of protagonists, but they also evaluate the story by saying whether they like it or not, and what they think of its author. As Shigongo said in the interview, the readers’ comments sometimes can even change the dénouement of the stories. Moreover, according to Shigongo there is also a direct exchange between the writer and his readers, as he receives their emails and even meets them personally. According to information from several Tanzanian writers, this is something that generally marks popular writing in newspapers and fiction books sold in the streets, and it is almost a rule that writers provide their contact details like mobile phone number, or email address, in order to facilitate communication with their readers. It may happen that readers demand a certain story development or complain about a bad treatment of a certain character. This can even lead to a change in the writer’s original plan, as the newspaper serials are often produced more or less simultaneously with publishing, on the basis of a pre-existing draft.
This part of the interview elaborates :
URJ: Do you communicate with the readers? You do not put your telephone number in the newspapers.
ESh: Emails. Ya, they write. I meet them.
URJ: You meet them?
ESh: I meet them, yes. I go around.
URJ: Does that communication contribute to your writing of stories and novels?
ESh: Ya. They will tell you the truth.
URJ: Do you sometimes also get complaints?
ESh: Mhm. A lot. A lot, a lot.
URJ: May you even change the development of the story because of the communication with readers?
ESh: Very much so.
URJ: Isn’t it that when you start publishing a novel in a newspaper, you have already written it from the start to the end?
ESh: No. I write every day.
URJ: Every day for the next issue?
ESh: Mhm. But I know everything. Because everything is in my head. I just put it on the paper.
URJ: But when you get the comments of the readers you may consider them?
ESh: Ya.
URJ: And you aim at what kind of people as your readers?
ESh: All people, but my readers are especially women, and, you know, people from the middle class and below. But it is especially women who read. And the women make other people read too.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Avatar Rooted in Cameron’s Childhood Experiences in the Canadian Woods
Cameron talks to Charlie Rose:
Cameron had to fight the studios to play the environmental and spiritual so prominently in Avatar.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
2666 Part 4: Crimes
[Previously: part 1; part 2; part 3] And so we come to it, the notorious fourth section: ‘The Part About the Crimes’. It is, as people warned, a thoroughly grueling read: 300 pages mostly filled with detailed quasi-forensic descriptions of the bodies of many many raped and murdered women.
Here’s one from early on:
The next month, in May, a dead woman was found in a dump between Colonia Las Flores and the General Sepú industrial park. In the complex stood the buildings of four maquiladoras where household appliances were assembled. The electric towers that supplied power to the maquiladoras were new and painted silver. Next to them, amid some low hills, were the roofs of shacks that had been built a little before the arrival of the maquiladoras, stretching all the way to the train tracks and across, along the edge of Colonial La Preciada. … In the dump where the dead woman was found, the trash of the slum dwellers piled up along with the waste of the maquiladoras. The call informing the authorities of the discovery of the dead woman came from the manager of one of the plants, Multizone-West, a subsidiary of a multinational that manufactured TVs. The policeman who came to get her found three executives from the maquiladora waiting for them at the dump. Two were Mexican and the other was American. One of the Mexicans said they hoped the body would be removed as soon as possible. One of the policemen asked where the body was, while his partner called an ambulance. The three executives accompanied the policeman into the dump. The four of them held their noses, but when the American stopped holding his nose the Mexicans followed his example. The dead woman had dark skin and straight black hair past her shoulders. She was wearing a black sweatshirt and shorts … The dead woman spent that night in a refrigerated compartment in the Santa Teresa hospital and the next day one of the medical examiner’s assistants performed the autopsy. She had been strangled. She had been raped. Vaginally and anally, noted the medical examiner’s assistant. And she was five-months pregnant. [358-9]
And here’s one, several score similar victims later, from the end of the section:
On November 16 the body of another woman was found on the back lot of the Kusai maquiladora, in Colonia San Bartolomé. According to the initial examination, the victim was between eighteen and twenty-two and the cause of death, according to the forensic report, was asphyxiation due to strangulation. She was completely naked and her clothes were found five yards away, hidden in the bushes. Actually, not all of her clothes were found, just a pair of black leggings and red panties. Two days later, she was identified by her parents as Rosario Marquina, nineteen, who disappeared on November 12 while she was out dancing at Salon Montana on Avenida Carranza, not far from Colonia Veracruz, where they lived. It just so happened that both the victim and her parents worked at the Kusai maquiladora. According to the medical examiners the victim was raped several times before she died. [603-4]
On and on it goes, from the start of the section to the end of it: near-enough 300 pages of women raped and murdered, all reported in this horribly depersonalized manner. Not all the murdered women are the victims of the serial killer, or killers; some are killed in more conventional mode by jealous boyfriends or husbands. The police even manage to apprehend some of these. But the majority are killed and dumped anonymously, and the police no sooner turn up the crimescene than they shelve the case forever as unsolvable. In all instances, Bolaño provides a knot of circumstantial details, and he reports in a leisurely, neutral tone the precise nature of the sexual violations, mutilations and manner of death of the victim. It makes for a horrible read, although the sheer number of instances means—I suppose deliberately, (although it’s not a complicated trick, technically speaking, for a writer to pull off)—that the reader feels much less visceral horror at the reports of the later victims than s/he did at the early. One’s sensibilities get bludgeoned.
Interleaved with these multiplied accounts of raped and murdered women are a handful of other storylines. One concerns a weirdo, dubbed by the newspapers ‘The Penitent’, who loiters in Santa Teresa’s various churches moaning loudly and pissing prodigious quantities of urine over the floor. Sometimes he smashes up statues and assaults the church staff. Bolaño also gives us half-formed narratives of some of the policemen investigating the crimes (one interviews, and then has an affair with, the female director of a local insane asylum; another narrative line follows a young lad called Lalo Cura, who starts out as a bodyguard before being recruited by the police, working as a flatfoot for several years). There are a few other significant characters: a TV psychic who claims to have supernatural insight into the crimes; a powerful female politician whose close female friend (possibly lover; I wasn’t sure) has disappeared and may be one of the victims. The police arrest a young German-born Mexican-American citizen called Klaus Haas, a store-owner with spooky eyes. They are convinced that he is the killer; and although there’s no evidence he is incarcerated without trial. The murders continue, but that doesn’t shake the police’s sense that they have their man. All these developments are related as interspersed bulletins inserted into the relentless thud-thud-thud of ‘the body exhibited stab wounds, most of them very deep, to the neck, chest and abdomen. In the forensic examination a significant sampling of semen was found in the vagina’ [409] and ‘early in September the body of a girl later identified as Marisa Hernández Silva appeared. She was seventeen and had vanished at the beginning of July on her way to the Vasconcelos Preparatory School in Colonia Reforma. According to the forensic report she had been raped and strangled’ [464] and ‘four days later the mutilated corpse of Beatriz Concepción Roldán appeared by the side of Santa Teresa-Cananea highway’ [494].
Having read this part, the decision of Bolaño’s estate not to issue 2666 as five separate novels makes a little more sense to me. Published as a standalone ‘The Part About the Crimes’ would make a very unappetizing novel—not only because it is so monotonously intense and repetitive, and on such a horrible subject, but because the material that isn’t simply an account of these crimes is tenuously and sometimes inconsequentially developed.
What to say about all this grim stuff? It makes for onerous, painful reading: a fictional experiment taken to relentless and indeed remorseless lengths. As I writer I suppose I have a (as the phrase puts it) grudging respect for Bolaño and the persistence with which he worked this portion of his book. It is unpleasant to read; it must have been deeply unpleasant to write.
One thought that occurred to me was that Bolaño offers this section almost as a dare to the reader. I don’t mean in a ‘I dare you to finish reading this!’ sense, although perhaps there’s something in that. I mean in the sense that he dares his reader to make something of this mass of posthumous horribleness. The mass murder of women becomes, clearly, the lens through which a whole society is seen, and we are challenged to agree, or disagree, that this in turn illuminates something appallingly true about the world at large. Mostly Bolaño pursues his theme by refusing editorial comment, and (mostly) keeping his thumb out of the balance; but occasionally he fills in some of the non-murderous context of masculine Mexican society’s default misogyny. Here, for instance:
Cops at the end of their shifts met for breakfast at Trejo’s, a long coffee shop like a coffin, with a few windows. There they drank coffee and ate huevos rancheros or eggs and bacon or scrambled eggs, And they told jokes. Sometimes there were monographic, the jokes. And many of them were about women. For example, one cop would say: what’s the perfect woman? Pues, she’s two feet tall, big ears, flat head, no teeth and hideously ugly. Why? Pues two feet tall so she comes right up to your waist, big ears so you can steer her, a flat head so you have a place to set your beer, no teeth so she can’t bite your dick, and hideously ugly so no bastard steals her away. Some laughed. Others kept eating their eggs and drinking their coffee. And the teller of the first joke continued. He asked: why don’t women know how to ski? Silence. Pues because it never snows in the kitchen. Some didn’t get it. Most of the cops had never skied in their lives. Where do you ski in the middle of the desert? But some laughed. And the joke teller said: all right, friends, what’s the definition of a woman? Silence. And the answer: pues a vagina surrounded by more or less organized bunch of cells. And then someone laughed, an inspector, good one, González, a bunch of cells, yes, sir. And another one, international this time: why is the Statue of Liberty a woman? Because they needed an empty head for the observation deck. And another: how many parts is a woman’s brain divided into? Pues that depends, valedores! Depends on what, González? Depends how hard you hit her. And on a roll now: why can’t women count to seventy? Because by the time they get to sixty-nine their mouths are full. [552]
There are pages of this, literally dozens of women-hating jokes (‘why don’t men lend their cars to women? Because there’s no road from the bedroom to the kitchen. … How do you give a woman more freedom? Get her a bigger kitchen’) at which most, though not all, these policemen laugh heartily. I wonder whether the repetitiveness here, as (on a larger scale) the repetitiveness of Bolaño’s accounts of the murders, isn’t designed to say something about men—Mexican men, or possibly men more generally. The point is not just that they so often relate to women only in terms of sexualized aggression and hostility; but more precisely that there is something mechanical, a structuring monotonous repetition, about that violence. Men are like jack-hammers, banging away over and over and over (banging in a sexual sense; banging in a discursive sense—banging, in this man’s novel at this point, in a textual sense); and it is women who find themselves underneath the hammerhead. This vision, that the world is always and everywhere horribly the same dominates the section, and justifies its experimental form. There are some passages that challenge it, although they are rather drowned out by the hammering of the main theme. So, for instance; here is the TV psychic Florita Almada and her youth:
Then they moved, for reasons not worth discussing to Villa Pesqueria, where her mother died and where she, eight months later, married a man she barley knew, a hardworking and honorable man, who treated her with respect, someone quite a bit older than she was, incidentally, thirty-eight to her seventeen … Sometimes she went with him on his [business] trips … It was a unique opportunity to see the world. To get a glimpse of other landscapes which though they might seem familiar, when you looked at them carefully were very different from the landscapes of Villa Pesqueira. Every hundred feet the world changes, said Flora Almada. The idea that some places are the same as other places is a lie. The world is a kind of tremor. [429-30]
Those last three sentences speak to something important, I think; but that point of view is almost drowned out by the bellowing counter-proposition: the masculine vision that everything is everywhere remorselessly the same; and that sameness is the repetitive monotony of male sexual violence, of hatred and suffering inflicted and death.
It’s not to deny the validity of that apperception to note that Bolaño’s representation of it here is, ultimately, wearying. I can’t say I enjoyed reading Part 4. But having come this far, I’ll see what Part 5 has to offer.