Categorization and the charade of identity

In their post from last week, Bryan and Zach argue that the panoptic and the biopolitical, as the two complementary forms of power theorized by Foucault, are irreconcilably enmeshed in one another.  To me, this claim is not wildly contentious in and of itself—I’d argue that many of us, as critics, defer to Foucault on this point.  Further, though, Bryan and Zach argue against Nancy Armstrong and claim that “identity and … our relationship to the biopolitical and the panoptic” are not reducible to gender, race, class, or any other easily extricable heuristic of identification.  This may be true enough in an abstract sense—as commentators on Bryan and Zach’s post suggest, the formal constraints of chapters, articles, or blog posts are sometimes the primary or only reason (right or wrong) for isolating single vectors of identification for analysis.  But should we dismiss the notion that the “charade” of isolating identities can be critically productive?  This is a question we have grappled with previously:  what kind of longevity do fields like Chicano/a studies, African American studies, feminist and gender studies, or queer studies have (if “longevity” is an accurate barometer of critical value)?

Implicitly, Bryan and Zach raise a question that Jasbir Puar addresses within the realm of contemporary queer studies, namely, whether the stabilizing qualities of an intersectional analysis of identity (taken as a “standpoint epistemology”) preclude political and critical utility.  Of course it’s true that identities as such are capitalist-neoliberal fictions, but I would argue, alongside Puar, that there is no outside of identity (because, similarly, there is no outside of power or capital).  Our critical methods require revision when they treat identity as a means of naming difference, not when they use identity, charade though it may be, as a tool for interrogating subjection.  Puar, for example, at times advocates Deleuzean assemblage in place of intersectionality, noting that assemblage theory conceives of “[c]ategories—race, gender, sexuality— … as events, actions, and encounters between bodies, rather than as simply entities and attributes of subjects.”  These categories are constantly in flux and in re/negotiation, not in a performative sense, but in the sense that a single subject’s gendering, for instance, is neither constant nor generalizable.  The biopolitical and the panoptic may work “upon all members in a society, simultaneously,” as Zach and Bryan argue, but identity as a product of such subjection may still be singularly categorized at a particular moment, encounter, or event.

Consider Mel Chen’s “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections.”  Her discussion of the “toxic sensorium”—her own “set of states and experiences” that have been categorized as heavy metal poisoning (273)—demonstrates the fleeting or highly contextual quality of what Chen calls “individuated property-assignation” (274), a version of the categorization that Puar mentions.  This property assignation occurs, for Chen, by encounter and event.  Despite her disclaimer, Chen very self-consciously produces a narrative of herself as the “perfect” toxified subject (273) because this is the only categorized subject that can emerge from the narrative she presents.  This is not to say that her turn to the first-person is “fiction” in a derogatory sense, but only that it is one autobiographical fiction among multiple, simultaneous narratives of the categorized (identified) subject.  Consider also Claire Vaye Watkins’ performative, fictionalized self in “Ghosts, Cowboys.”  Watkins makes only allusive gestures to categorization as a form of subjection, but her production of a “fictional” self-as-narrator who, in turn, narrates simultaneous “fictional” histories of herself and her family suggests the critical necessity of fabrication.  Of course these forms of inquiry are, at some level, charades, but does this mean that they cannot participate in what Chen calls “knowledge production” (273)?

word count:  614

Move along, now.

The snake is eating its tail. I originally wanted to put Chen in dialogue with Bryan’s October 19th post, “Dead Text, Living Text.” I was going to draw some pithy connections between Colebrook and Chen, then transition into problematizing some matters of semantics -- question whether the text need be “‘dead’ in and of itself” if we might instead place it along some spectrum of Chen’s animacy, etc. Maybe remind us all of the couch image since that was rather funny and it lightens the mood a bit etc. Nice clean little blog post to wrap up the quarter and let me get back to my very messy seminar papers.

Unfortunately Bryan has beat me to it (you can’t just respond to your own post, Bryan! That was not in the prompt!) and furthermore he has opened up a can of worms (you can’t talk about how a text makes you feel, Bryan! Save all this empathy and compassion for creative writing™) so stark and scary and honest that I think I need to start digging in the dirt, too.

The reason I don’t like writing these posts about my primary text anymore (sorry John, Janie, Tea Cake) is that there is something about performing this exercise again and again (and again) that sets off that muttering, mumbling little voice about the work of writing about literature.

I’ve heard a thing or two about monotony, about stakes. Everyone in my family does that sort of endlessly repetitive labor that could prompt an existential crisis if they weren’t already so damn tired. Punching holes in course readers until computers learn to do it faster, better. Picking up heavy boxes and putting them down somewhere else. Job-not-a-career-sort-of-work. Your-labor-doesn’t-define-you-sort-of-work. Pack-up-for-the-day-go-home-and-hug-your-kids sort of work. My parents do it. Lots of people do it.

But academia is supposed to be different, right? (This is really a question). There is supposed to be something intrinsically different about knowledge production as opposed to bound course reader production or picking up heavy shit production. When I write up another nice tidy little blog post about Their Eyes Were Watching God and deconstruction I am ostensibly doing labor that is in some sense meant to be outside the production/consumption machine. I’m adding to a body of knowledge. I am contributing to a discourse. One day I will enter the classroom and facilitate the development of critical thinking.

So what is this ruddy work of teasing out arguments about literature? When I finish a seminar paper, am I practicing a craft or just producing my worth? Is it too unprofessional to say that what I find enjoyable about writing papers is the illicit, biased, subjective, creative work of taking someone else’s text and making it speak a certain way? To think alongside an author, but ultimately aim to make a “creative” work of my own, a text with some literary chops of its own?

I want to support the union. I want to understand how TAs are underpaid and adjuncts are wrenched into a broken machine like some underhanded duct tape repair job. But I’m getting paid more right now than my parents ever have to do I-don’t-even-know-what. Am I a producer, a consumer, or a fraud?

So this isn’t really about Janie or Tea Cake or Chen, Colebrook, or Bryan. I just want to know if other people are struggling with the same questions. If nobody is going to read our dissertations, why bother writing them? If the importance of reading literature has something to do with bettering ourselves as people -- getting students to think for themselves, develop empathy, carry that empathy and compassion and search for that disorienting heartfull sort of feeling that reading truly good books gives us -- then why don’t we drop the pretense and focus on teaching? (This is also really a question).

Reading Gawain and Making Manifest (A response to Kate and my last post for President Obama)

In her post “Amnesia and the Problem of ‘Invisible’ Institutions,” Kate asks:

How do conscious participation and endorsement play a role in the power of the institution? What would it mean for Big Criticism and its offshoots to forget the influence of institutions on their historical present?

In Kate’s formulation, this overlooking is “forgetting” and “an inability to see or remember one’s institutional indebtedness…causes a sort of pathological rupturing.” In my response to Kate’s post that week:  “I would argue that where your post states an ‘amnesia’ on Faraday’s part about the institutions in flux, I read a suspension of disbelief, a willing delusion that an older system to which one is complacent in, comfortable with and reverent to is actually thriving.” The question, in this formulation, is not “What would it mean for Big Criticism and its offshoots to forget the influence of institutions on their historical present?” but rather “what would it mean for Big Criticism and its offshoots to disbelieve the influence of institutions on their historical present?”

Yet in Sir Gawain, we find that the green girdle operates as a nexus of seeing, remembering and believing for Gawain and his supporting cast; even further, the green girdle is arguably where Gawain experiences his pathological rupture where discontinuity between escaping death and realizing defeat maps itself. When Gawain goes to meet the Green Knight, the latter points to the former’s girdle and says “that is my belt…I know well the tale…and it was all my scheme”  (2357-2360). In this manner, the Green Knight uses the girdle to first reveal himself and then to reveal that he cares less about Gawain and his wife and more “that [Gawain] loved [his] own life” (2367).

Just as Bertilak uses the girdle to reveal his values, so does Gawain; in these valuations we find rupture. By seeing the girdle initially as “a pearl for his plight” (1856), Gawain himself invests the girdle with his personal trepidations and the ability to solve them. Hence, when the Green Knight indicts Gawain, he reacts by grabbing his girdle and pronouncing:

Behold there my falsehood, ill hap behide it!

Your cut taught me cowardice, care for my life,

And coveting came after, contrary both

To largesse and loyalty belonging to knights. (2375-2378). 

This time, the girdle does not simply symbolize his “cowardice” and “care for [his own] life” but as proof of his “falsehood.” The change from magic to falsehood exposes Gawain’s rupture from a pre-girdle “loyalty belonging to knights” to a post-girdle greed for self-preservation. Even further, the transference of the girdle’s initial meaning as a magical object to now an object of falsehood exemplifies Gawain’s act and materials of reading. He moves from dealing with a magical/miracle tale to an object lesson. Or we could also say, more glibly, that Gawain first accepts the girdle perceptually but afterwards places faith in it didactically.

At stake in Gawain’s girdle holding two meanings is not simply what the object means but the activity of making an object mean something. In pronouncing different judgments on the girdle, Gawain engages not merely in drawing out a symbolic meaning hidden in the girdle, but in making a meaning: reifying it. The work of reifying is to believe in the abstract and to make this belief incarnate. We find that at first, Gawain values magic and his own safety. After realizing Bertliak has bested him, we find that Gawain values his fallen integrity and the desire to learn from his mistake.

What we find in moving away from the perceptual-didactic binary of belief, or even the question of whether one believes at all, is that belief permeates the very acts of making and reading significance. In order for Gawain, or the reader of Gawain, to gain access into what items, individuals or texts mean, both Gawain and we summon forth and place before us our beliefs and values. Reading, then, is always reification. But then—what does that mean for the question we started with: “what would it mean for Big Criticism and its offshoots to disbelieve the influence of institutions on their historical present?” To disbelieve our institutional indebtedness to Big Criticism and the like would be to not read it into our work as what we do. Or more simply, we will it out. In Steven Justice’s formulation: "the presence of [will as] voluntary determination distinguishes belief not only from knowledge, but also from other forms of incomplete cognitive security, like assumption and opinion. Absent evidence of the will’s operation, the discursive traces of belief will be simply indistinguishable from thought as such" (14). Believing, then, is not seeing. It is willing. And in our neat circle of terms, to will for something not to be there, is to reify its absence and to collude with our texts and our eyes to not read it into who we are.   

Cooling the Hot Mess of Power, or, What's literary about literary analysis?

In their post from last week, Zach and Bryan criticize Armstrong’s analysis of gender, discipline, and biopolitics in Jane Eyre for both “concomitantly ignor[ing] geographical displacement, race, temporality and history, class, and many other factors that are central to character-subjectivities” and for creating a “problematic and impossible” binary between the panoptic and the biopolitical. In the comments, I suggest that these two critiques derive from the same implicit question: Can we justify separating in theory categories that are inextricably enmeshed in practice? This question strikes me as astute – and incredibly frustrating.

Astute, because it latches on to the fact that analysis – despite works like Milian’s and Spillers’ that make a claim for intersectionality – is an unmarked method in literary and cultural study. “Analysis” - a term that Bryan and Zach avoid in their post - is derived from a Greek word meaning “loosen” or “dissolve,” and is defined in the OED as “the resolution or breaking up of a complex whole into its basic elements or constituent parts” (my emphasis). While analysis clearly serves a purpose in literary study, it strikes me that its utility receives few challenges or defenses. Even as intersectional work claims value based on its intersectionality, work that focuses on single constituent elements rarely seems to defend or contextualize its methodology. Why gender, but not race, class or ability? Why discipline rather than biopolitics?

Such questions are frustrating and difficult to answer. They seem, in fact, to point to something I was struggling with in pairing Armstrong with The Picture of Dorian Gray last week – namely, the fact that categories, including “gender” and the discursive categories of biopolitics, seem so inadequate for describing the actual complexity of characters. This led me to argue, weakly, that Dorian escapes the power-claims of discourse, although I now acknowledge the vast number of labels that could apply to him: drug user, debtor, sexual deviant, murderer. It’s not that Dorian can’t be categorized. It’s that no single category can represent him adequately – precisely the argument that Zach and Bryan use to challenge Armstrong’s gender-based analysis! Still, even as I acknowledge the power of Zach and Bryan’s critique, I want to stand up for the methodological utility of what Jenny elegantly calls “the charade of isolating identity vectors” by considering critically the work that results when theorists move away from analysis, towards synthesis, intersectionality, and irreducible complexity. 

In “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections,” Mel Chen theorizes toxicity across an impressive range of categories, touching on “vulnerability, safety, immunity” and how these are “racially and sexually instantiated,” moving on to a “queer analysis” of “the peculiar intimacies and alienations of heavy metal poisoning,” and ending with a theorizing of “animacy” and its effects on “subject-object dispositions” (265). While Chen’s own description makes this article appear anything but straightforwardly analytical, I would argue that analysis in fact constitutes the dominant form of the essay. Each titled section, beginning with “Lead as Toxic Asset,” focuses on a single and highly specific category or event, such as the “generalized narrative about the inherent health risk of Chinese products (to U.S. denizens)” (267). (The next section, “Tracking Lead,” focuses on the class implications of toxic toys.) 

Chen’s moments of category synthesis, such as the sentence that claims “[the white child’s] intellectual capacities must be assured to consolidate a futurity of heteronormative (white) masculinity, which is also to say that he must not be queer” (271), are the moments that struck many of us readers as difficult logical “jumps.” The largest jump is the one that instates Chen’s most powerful moment of synthesis, in which she announces her intention to “discuss toxicity as a condition, one too complex to imagine as a property of one or another individual or group” (272, my emphasis). This is the jump to the autobiographical section of the essay, the strangely literary section titled “Toxic Sensorium.” A sensorium is, according to Chen, “a complementary kind of knowledge production” (273),* one capable of depicting the combined effects of race, gender, ability, and queerness, not through analysis, but through mimetic description – through a mode, that is, that we closely align with literature rather than literary criticism.

In order to adequately depict the complex categorical intersections that we find in literature, Chen’s article suggests, we would have to create literature ourselves, or something very close to it: “a complementary kind of knowledge production,” where the knowledge being produced is not logical comprehension, but  “sympathetic ingestion” and “empathetic memory” (273). Are sympathy, ingestion, empathy and memory effects (or affects) we should work to produce through theory and criticism? Or can we defend what Bryan and Zach call the “simplicifation[s]” of analysis precisely because they are simplifications, because they aim to produce understanding and comprehension where an accurate depiction of complexity would produce only – “only” in the sense of “exclusively,” and not in the sense of “merely” – another mimetic representation of the world, another sensorium…another work of literature? 

_______

*The idea of a "sensorium" as a form of "knowledge production" meshes interestingly with the post about embodied knowledge that Aaron and I wrote a few weeks ago, and I wish I had space to dedicate to the intersection in this post!

My Play of Concerns Concerning "Play"

Jenny, in her October 19^th post, “Tea Cake and Literary Play,” presents an excellent deconstructionist reading of Tea Cake. Tea Cake, she argues, “both speaks back to a trope and denies it” and this “acknowledgment of tropes, stereotypes, and a literary tradition (and its foils)” arises from literary play. Play is “a constant questioning and substitution of one idea for another, a guiltless review of old methods and tired theory”—a place to experiment with the infinitude of meaning without adhering to “expectations for discovering a universal human truth” (Colmenero). This view of play seems so optimistic, even “joyous” as Derrida calls it; it’s a search for meaning that “is no longer turned toward the origin [and] tries to pass beyond man and humanism” (Derrida 292) It’s the view of play that Derrida wants interpreters of meaning (literary, historical, philosophical, etc.) to choose. Because the only other interpretation of interpretation, the one far more restricting and inhibitive, is one that ”dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile” (Derrida 292). But is it possible that the exile, the search for an origin outside of play, is not chosen, but forced upon a scholar because the people she is studying were stripped of their meanings in a previous forced exile, one that occurred centuries ago, but whose effects are still felt today? I ask, what is the “play” of someone in chains?

Hortense J. Spillers describes how the subjugation of the Africans by the Whites was achieved by the stripping of their figurative and actual skins. Words and paper (money, bills of credit, bills of sale, deeds of ownership) compounded with the “calculated work of iron, whips, chains, knives, the canine patrol, [and] the bullet” worked to remove and breakdown the  African “body,” the “point of convergence [where] biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and even psychological fortunes join” (Spillers 67);  Their language, family units, social structures, cultural identities, their gender, their humanness, their flesh, their personalities, even their names were taken from them, leaving a gaping hole that could only be replaced by one word—property. Once they became property, once this rupture of their signifying chain occurred, one could argue they gained infinite play but only in the hands of their masters,  because what the slaves meant, how they could signify,or how they could participate(i.e. how they were talked about) in discourse was determined solely by the men and women who owned them.

What we realize is that play is not just something people have; it’s also something that is ascribed to them. And I ask, how is this situation different than the voices that subaltern historians want to ascribe to their lost peoples? What is “play” but an elite, western, intellectual idea that makes us think we’re making something better, something unstructured and more liberated, when really “play” is the degree of manipulation or elasticity within a person, idea, or character, their infinite ability to conform and work towards the arguments for meaning that scholars, owners, rulers, dictators, writers, etc. particularly want to make. Thus, Tea Cake’s play is wonderfully expansive, but only because he can fit into and be used for so many different arguments; his versatility enables so many readings of the text. I myself made a similar argument about Hyde in my October 11^th blogpost, “Hyde. Derrida. Play. Go!” So eager was I to expound Hyde’s “joyous affirmation of ... play” that I forgot to include myself with the list of scholars who use Hyde to make a point (Derrida 292) – that I attempted to “control him through knowledge even as [I] restore[d] versions of causality and self-determination to him” (Spivak 9). Over this past quarter, as I have argued  for Hyde’s freedom and unique voice, I have also performed my ownership of him.  Perhaps this usurpation isn’t so terrifying when discussing literary characters, but what both Jenny and I failed to address is the real life consequences of “play” when applied to historical peoples. Stripped of their own culturally determined sense of meaning, all their own boundaries removed, African-American slaves could then serve whatever purpose/signify any meaning their masters chose for them. It’s easy to see why Spillers, or any African-American Studies scholar might dream of an “origin which escapes play” because such an origin would be able to escape the exploitative “play” of the African-American slave that occurred during their years of enslavement. I will not try to argue that such an origin exists, but I've tried to explore why such an origin might be desirable.

All That Seems

It occurs to me that forty could be half my life or it could be all my life. On television I am told I don’t want to look like I am forty. Forty means I might have seen something hard, something unpleasant, or something dead. I might have seen it and lived beyond it in time. Or I might have squinted my eyes too many times in order to see it, I might have turned my face to the sun in order to look away. I might have actually been alive. With injections of Botox, short for botulism toxin, it seems I can see or be seen without being seen; I can age without aging. I have the option of worrying without looking like I worry. Each day of this life I could bite or shake doubt as if to injure or kill without looking as if anything mattered to me. I could paralyze facial muscles that cause wrinkles. All those worry and frown lines would disappear. I could purchase paralysis. I could choose that. Eventually the paralysis would sink in, become a deepening personality that need not, like Enron’s “distorting factors,” distort my appearance. I could be all that seems, or rather I could be all that I am––fictional. Ultimately I could face reality undisturbed by my own mortality.  (Rankine 104)

Either you read this entire passage or you didn’t.  Either you read it quickly or you read it slowly, read some parts more than once.  Either you wondered if it was poetry or you didn’t.  Either one of these things happened or something in between them did, or something happened outside of or beyond any of these staged and motionless binaries.

Maybe, later on, you’ll be walking somewhere, or showering, paying half your attention to the news or someone talking––and some of these words from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely will come back to you (or, even better, their feeling will), and a connection will have been made: subtending a piece of poetry with something in the world. 

Or maybe that doesn’t end up happening.  There isn’t necessarily a “better” or “worse” at work here.  

Although, something is at stake.

Before I started writing these posts, I had hoped to show how important a book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is.  How beautiful a book it is––meaningfully, critically challenging.  How it’s a book likely to break one’s heart.  Make one rage against the-world-that-is.  I then worried that impulse was overly subjective or non-rigorous or unprofessional.  

Maybe what I’m writing now reads like that.  I hope not.  I hope what’s preceded and what follows doesn’t read as insincere/idealistic/confrontational/naive––but I want something to be understood (even if it is nothing more than a personal neurosis):

Ashley stated in her response to a post of mine, “I wonder if the quest for the value of applicability and the impulse of applying [any given] theory [to any given text] is not ultimately blurred by the conditions, constraints and questions we face in reading texts and theories the way we do.”

I wonder about this wondering.  I wonder about values, impulses, blurrings, conditions and constraints.  I wonder if there is a consequence entailed or a difference made in what we do, or are learning/studying/working/laboring/trying to do.  I wonder about the difference between condition and constraint, work and labor, trying and failing, reading and exploiting, writing and obscuring.  I wonder if “applicability,” the idea that we can “use” things like “tools” to do a “job,” is problematic, unsettling or troublesome.  I wonder about worrying about saying the wrong thing.  I wonder how a question about “applicability” might be rephrased best in terms of an “ethicality” that is more pertinent to a world of consequence, material, social and political conditions, etc.. I worry about a reification that inflects an over-concern with “applicability” without ethics/self-conscience/self-awareness/sensitivity/etc..

I remember one of my teachers, during my undergrad years, saying something like (as a general statement on poiesis), We can’t afford to keep anything at arm’s length, reaching her hands out, pulling a small body of air in to her chest.

There are people in this world who, after realizing it was only their couch they’d been loving, don’t renounce that love and instead remember it as something real.  Imagine a world where people are created and treated like objects (that world is this one), so that if one really could care for objects, then one could really care for an other.  Je est un autre.  

However I think or don’t think back on Colebrook’s paper, I think it wanted something similar to happen.  If it did in fact want [literary criticism] to give the text life, to give life to the text, why should we hesitate at that call to arms?  Why do we hesitate to believe that the text has something more to offer us than an interface for a study of period, or genre/gender, ‘material cultures’, etc.?  Is it that we sometimes treat literature like a natural resource, something for consumption/commodification?  If our work should be without empathy, without compassion, are we not laborers unawares?  

I’m wondering about these lines from Fred Moten:

     where the theoreticians will become senses in their practice

     where the theoreticians will not be seeing, hearing

     where the theoreticians will sear, the theoretician is a seer

     where the theoreticians will be seen and heard in their practice

     where the theoreticians will touch themselves

     where the theoreticians will become sensual in their practice

     where the reverse will always be in excess

          ––from “where the blues began”

Gender Must Be Contended: An Examination of Motherhood in Stevenson and Diaz

Lee writes in her post “Jekyll and Hyde: Past, Present, and Future?”: “Race, then, is a term that has internal and external, inclusionary and exclusionary implications—it is a mark of belonging and also of otherness.” While I agree that race has “inclusionary and exclusionary implications,” it seems that Stephen Best and Hortense Spillers both examine specifically the exclusions inherent in a slave-existence that attempts to conform to American ideals: an assuredly faulty identity that denies/excludes the power of slave women. The denunciation of slaves’ blackness, therefore, is inherent and seemingly secondary. So, if the process of racializing Hyde is, as Lee argues, representative of a “single entity” within a larger race, then one might argue, by means of reading Spillers, that the process is also fundamentally gendered. In my view, Jekyll is both mother and father -- an obfuscation of the traditional, patriarchal society of 1880s Britain. Just as the meaning of race is socially constructed, so too is the meaning of gender.

Furthermore, if one examines the existence of Jekyll/Hyde as a Hegelian dialectic, one begins to notice the implicit reliance of both consciousnesses upon one another. I would argue that an exploration of the male/female dialectic is exceptionally fruitful for Stevenson’s work. Which characters fulfill solely the role of male or female? It seems that Jekyll is oftentimes both -- he is master (father) and also creator (mother) for Hyde. He bears Hyde like a burdensome child. Nonetheless, “[Hyde] is a being of voice, will, and intent, who must subsume his freedom and individuality to the desire of a master and to the morality of a society that deems him inhuman, monstrous, and unworthy of life” (Emrich).  If Hyde is a character of “voice, will and intent,” he is probably male, in Victorian terms. However, his existence also aligns with that of woman, in that he cannot consciously separate himself from a societal construction that ranks men as foremost. (His own construction is a result of his being created by a male, after all.) Similarly, one could read the simultaneous feminization of Jekyll as a larger discussion by Stevenson on the acceptance of unconventional gender roles, a refutation of societal prejudices of and expectations for women. While I still do not agree that Stevenson categorically provides an account of a racial group’s genesis, I think that a dissolution of Victorian era patriarchy is an interesting notion. 

Lee argues that “Jekyll, a creature obsessed with Morrisonian ‘melancholic historicization,’ (460) seeks in vain to restore a past sense of his (united) self; yet even he realizes the impossibility of such a quest and eventually he gives in to the fierce life force of Hyde.” I would contend that Morrison’s Beloved, which features a strong female lead, the matriarch, parallels Jekyll’s mastership over Hyde. However, where Sethe commits infanticide to perhaps “save” her daughter from the horrors of slavery, Jekyll seemingly revels in his creation, until his poisonous concoction begins to run out and he realizes his precarious position.  Best similarly argues that “Morrison makes separation and fearful estrangement conditions of relation, so kinship appears not a given in the world but something forged” (467). The scientific forgery of Hyde also demonstrates a mothering, an artificial creation of kinship, far more than a racialization. However, Hyde rebels against his domineering mother (Jekyll), which eventually causes an eradication of Jekyll entirely. The mother is consumed by the daughter, a “loss as the property of an immediate circle of kin” (Spillers 76).

This attempted overthrowal of the mother figure closely parallels Beli and La Inca in Brief Wondrous Life. As Spillers writes: “The destructive loss of the natural mother, whose biological/genetic relationship to the child remains unique and unambiguous, opens the enslaved young to social ambiguity and chaos” (76). The mother-daughter relationship between La Inca and Beli is undeniably complicated, because Beli feels an inchoate yet fervent desire from an early age to escape the unattainable expectations of La Inca, a symbol of the likely acceptance and continuation of oppressive sexism within the DR (not quite slavery, but close). Perhaps, then, Diaz’s relegation of Beli (whose mother is killed by Trujillo) to abandon Bani and La Inca structurally expands Spillers's thesis -- the daughter abandons the mother. Another interesting connection between Spillers and Diaz is the symbolic representation of the Freudian “oceanic feeling.” Slaves in “Middle Passage” were suspended in the “oceanic” (71), just as “Beli would talk about how trapped they all felt. It was like being at the bottom of an ocean…there was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you” (Diaz 81). The existence and continuation of a familial line rests upon women; but this reductionist, sexist position is completely unsatisfactory to Beli. As a result, she feels trapped, held down and smothered by an ocean of patriarchy.

Tainted Love: Toxic Sociability in Pointed Firs

Last week, Lee and I explored the complex power relations between narrators and their subjects. As we suggested, Sarah Orne Jewett’s lonely narrator finds a sense of power, neither by trying to shape herself or her reality in terms of normative gender performance, but instead by imposing (perhaps problematically) her own desires for the world upon Dunnet Landing. In “Hypersexuality and Power,” Zack explores the continued pervasiveness of machismo identity among Latin American males through the lens of Foucault’s “mesh of power.” While I can agree with Zack’s assertion that “our favorite womanizing narrator” Junior’s obsession with Oscar’s virginity “represent[s] a perpetuation of sexuality as power,” I suggest that this obsession speaks more directly to the inherent fragility identity categories than to aftershocks of Trujillo’s sexual terrorism. Moreover, I’m curious about his final suggestion that we might read Oscar’s attempts to conform to a hypersexualized masculine ideal as a similar source of power. Can one really argue that the performance of gender, which is part and parcel an act of survival, is also a source of power for the performing subject?

Though privileged enough to travel and write, Jewett’s narrator is always on the outside, not a permanent part of the Dunnet Landing community, and, as an unmarried woman, not truly a part of her own. Even as she flattens our sense of the locals and renders their humble community strangely idyllic, her growing sense of isolation is palpable. Her desolation crystallizes at the moment she must leave Dunnet Landing and lose her secure position. She says, “my room looked empty...I and all my belongings had died out of it...So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end” (100), thus equating the loss of an inhabitable space--a clear subject position--to her own death. Thus, Jewett’s narrator exemplifies an internalized fear of the undefined: while not forced to live in the shadow of a hyper masculine ideal, she is seen as a threat to “The Angle of the House,” the 19th century feminine ideal. In some sense then we might see the narrator (and Oscar) in terms of the human “toxic assets” Mel Chen describes in “Toxic Animacies.” As Chen suggests, part of the threat of these toxic bodies lies in the fact that no attempt at segregation “perfectly succeeds even while it is believed with all effort and investment to be effective” (281). In other words, all imposed boundaries are both permeable and highly mutable.

For the narrator, Dunnet Landing represents the ideal; locals live seemingly full lives without the pressure to conform to the heteronormative ideal. The remote seaside village appears to exist outside of the “mesh of power” that Foucault articulates. It seems clear to me that Dunnet Landing is meant to be read against the highly regulated industrial version of American life. It is a land free from literal toxins like smog and city grime, but also, more importantly free from the view that unmarried men and women are themselves “toxic assets” to a capitalist regime. Following this line of logic, it seems then that the relative toxicity of a human being is dependent upon the perceived overall toxicity of their surroundings. For Jewett, the presence of “toxic others" signals a need for greater regulation; in order to allow for idiosyncratic, unregulated personal relationships, a community must feel confident in the overall racial “purity” of its members.

In creating for her readers a utopian land whose harmony is contingent upon its homogeneity, Jewett interrogates some fictions of toxicity while perpetuating others. She creates a space for her narrator by exploring modes of affiliation outside of marriage, but seals off other inhabitable spaces by whitewashing both the past and present. In order to stabilize certain identities, she must commit violence against others.

Saving Faraday from Myself: More Latourian Networks in The Little Stranger

In a number of my previous posts, I have tended to focus on the problem of Faraday and his ghost because of its theoretical and thematic trickiness. However, for this last post, I feel that it’s important to refocus on the other main characters of the novel, the Ayres family. In her post from October 26, “Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again,” Lee uses The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to question the utility of post-structuralists such as Latour. I agree with Lee that actor-network theory shows that “it is possible to view ‘other individuals’ as interior as well as exterior.” However, I think that her conclusion, that “saying a person, object, thing, idea, or word has infinite meaning [is] the same as saying it has no meaning” doesn’t give enough credit to the usefulness of Latour for literary analysis.

I have already, in an earlier post, explored the usefulness of Latour in describing the networks of influence and connection in Waters’s The Little Stranger, including non-human actors such as the house. On one level, a reading of actor-network theory onto the novel simply allows one to see the influence of Faraday and his poltergeist on the Ayres family. However, a further and more extensive application of ANT allows for, I think, a richer understanding of the novel. I think that some of my Faraday-centric posts paint him as “the bad guy,” a character so enslaved by multiple and powerful desires that he infects the “good” characters with “some dark germ” (463). I hope that this post can use Lee’s view of Latour as well as Mel Chen’s “Toxic Animacies” to, if not redeem Faraday, then to at least complicate an understanding of his character. Chen argues that the ideas of toxicity allow a revelation of “the fiction of [bodily] independence” (274). Chen’s argument calls for a way of seeing that accepts a movement away from the “presumption” of “healthy, individuated bodies, heretofore unadulterated by toxins, and cognitively clear, middle-classed young white lives, presumably floating in suspended ether above the hidden masses, classes, colors, toxins” (273). In Latourian terms, the presumably healthy, self-contained individual actor is always also a network of constructive and destructive forces, both environmental and innate.

To put both Chen and Latour to work in The Little Stranger leads me to ask the question: how healthy and sound are the Ayreses to begin with? Although Roderick is driven suicidal by the hauntings by the end of the book, we learn that even before Faraday enters the house, Roderick was traumatized by the war and came home with “nervous trouble,” a “depression,” in which he “never seemed to sleep. He’d fly into rages, or into sulks. His language was filthy” (119). His mother worries that the war “made an utter stranger of him. He seemed to hate himself, and everyone around him” (120). The mother, too, is troubled by connections other than the one she has with Faraday. The doctor realizes, after she bursts into tears once, how well she typically hides the “burdens she’d been living under for so many years: the death of a child, the death of a husband, the stresses of war, her injured son, the lost estate” (121). Faraday speculates, as the hauntings begin, that Mrs. Ayres’s mind “was vulnerable in some way” (323). Even through the somewhat dubious lens of Faraday’s narration, these moments indicate the connections that both threaten and are already a part of the Ayreses’ subjectivities. Such a reading shows not an absence of meaning, but acknowledges the complexity of the relationships at work in the novel.

wc: 600 

yesss 

Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained: Doing Milton Justice

A question I’ve been circling around throughout the quarter has been: how to make a rather polemic Milton text speak to contemporary theorists in a way more than simply representative of a historicized view? Although it’s considered an important example of the anti-censorship genre, contemporary classrooms and scholars raise a skeptical eyebrow toward the heavy, almost militant, use of Truth throughout the work, leading to a general consensus that while Milton may have been right about free speech, academic freedom, and liberal humanist education, “the poor guy was a little misled when it comes to truth [or faith].” Given that many of his claims rely on a conception of truth, national destiny, and the purpose of the individual scholar inextricable from a stated faith claim, how do we avoid falling into the trap that Steven Justice articulates of either declaring Milton to have appropriated religion in service of his point or adopting a potentially condescending stance that Milton was deceived in believing in universals, because we know better now.[1] Conversely, how can we take Milton on his own terms while still acknowledging that we operate under a much different milieu?

In an early post (October 5) on Stephen Best and relationships to the past, whose specter haunts this post as well, Aaron helpfully asked, “A question arises here, then: if we “already know” that the past is other, is there a way in which melancholic returnings are not always symptomatic of the tendency to redeem history?” I suggest that when it comes to early modern statements of certainty or faith, the tendency is not to redeem history but to explain that particular part away as, usually, the operation of a Marxist hegemony or something. I’d like to note the shades of difference between redeeming history and taking it on its own terms, and in the context of Milton and Justice, suggest that our acknowledgement of the past’s alterity need not necessarily result in an impulse to redeem it, or in Areopagitica’s case, revise it to fit our current philosophical systems.

“Doubt and controversy not only attended miracles, but were actively cultivated in defining them,” Justice writes of the medieval approach (6). In order to distinguish miracle from coincidence, the event on trial needed to be rigorously evaluated first—so veracity was never self-evident. To the medievals, and to Milton, searching was part of the definition of truth: “Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions” (371). The concept of “truth” in Milton could stand in for Justice’s “miracles” very easily—both require belief in and present a clear choice between two alternatives: something is either truth or not, either a miracle or not. But before this choice can be made, the claim must be rigorously tested, prodded, cross-examined, returned to, to use Aaron’s words. However, it is a returning without redeeming: in Justice’s model, the miracle either stands on its own or it is assigned to another epistemological category.

When reading Areopagitica in 2013, then, what might taking Milton on his own terms look like? To say “Milton believed in truth but we no longer have that assurance” is not profitable; nor is it correct to assume one approach will transfer exactly over 400 years. Perhaps, if we allow Milton his goal of eventually reuniting the pieces of Truth, a lifetime of contestation and debate does not mean that truth is nonexistent but continually taking shape. Our suspicion of much “truth,” and the reason for the scare quotes, is that it is presented as self-evident, but this was, I think, not a definition that the medievalists (according to Justice) or Milton would agree with. In an earlier post I suggested a working definition of truth as an increasingly-growing network, an image I revisit here but add that the process of debate may be necessary.




[1] I am aware that this is a persuasive essay and that Milton does many things (not all of them entirely scholarly rigorous, whatever that nebulous term may mean) in order to persuade; however, I and his corpus of works argue that expressing faith and believing in a semi-universal truth are not such moves.