In Evan Kindly’s “Big Criticism,” he argues that Big Theory is merely a continuation of Big Criticism’s project to justify “a set of practices (literary culture) that is perpetually and desperately in need of such justification in an era of late capitalist realism and realization” (94-5). By “unmasking” the capitalist motivations behind Big Theory, Kindly asks us as literary scholars to recognize not only that our supposedly anti-capitalist work has historically been funded by large corporate entities, but that the structure of intellectual culture as we know it was created by this exchange. As I touched upon previously, The Country of the Pointed Firs masquerades as a story about a utopian land that exists somehow apart from the bustle and noise of industrialized America, but in fact the work engages directly with the structure of the American marketplace. Jewett’s sketches present a homogeneous, familial-structured paradigm that stands in opposition to the increasingly heterogeneous reality of the nation at the latter half of the 19th century.
Last week, Kate and I investigated the larger significance Faraday’s selfishly motivated performances, carefully hidden behind a supernatural framework. In the spirit of my newly sharpened awareness of things that hide in plain sight, this week I would like to interrogate the subtly political aspects of Jewett’s utopian framework by exploring the strange mixture of storytelling and assimilation featured in the Bowden Family Reunion sketch. Kindly’s essay deals directly with the historical process of justifying the market value of literary culture and in this opening scene from the Bowden family reunion, Jewett makes a quite literal connection between reading and consumption. In describing the Bowden family feast, the narrator writes:
Beside a delightful variety of material, the decorations went beyond all my former experience; dates and names were wrought in lines of pastry and frosting on the tops. There was even more elaborate reading matter on an excellent early-apple pie which we began to share and eat, precept upon precept. Mrs. Todd helped me generously to the whole word Bowden, and consumed Reunion herself, save an indecipherable fragment; but the most renowned essay in cookery on the tables was a model of the old Bowden house made of durable gingerbread, with all the windows and doors in the right places, and sprigs of genuine lilac set at the front. (Jewett 58).
These forms of “elaborate reading matter” written in icing instead of ink, on pastry instead of paper, contrast the other oral, written, woven storytelling methods that drive the Dunnet Landing sketches. Strangely enough, this form of storytelling seems to go down easier than any of the other more traditional forms featured. If you recall, the narrator is quickly bored by Littlepage’s nautical narrative, confused by Poor Joanna’s polyphonic life story and distressed by Elijah Tilly’s tangled yarn, but “Bowden,” it seems, is quite assimilable.
In earlier posts I talked about the Bowden family as a wistful nod to antiquity and thus a symbol of doubt about the historicity of the recent past. What then does it actually mean for the narrator to literally imbibe dates, and family names that represent the history of the Bowden line? Is there a way in which this process of consumption might function as a form of ritualistic reenactment, allowing the narrator to “touch time” (in Schneider’s terms) and thus momentarily become part of this mythologized group? This moment of “reunion” in which guests literally swallow (believe) the history inscribed upon the very American “early-apple pie” suggests the desire for a “return” to an idealized (white) form of the national body. To further support this reading, we have of course the “indecipherable fragment” (culturally illegible individuals/concepts) that Mrs.Todd does not eat. This mode of forging lines of affinity through ritualistic consumption/being consumed gestures towards Kindly’s arguments about the subsidization of American literary culture. This Big Critical tradition that exists in order to continue its own existence reads very much like the assimilationist yet exclusionary family structure figured in the Bowden family sketches.
2 comments:
Sarah,
I think that your post does a great job framing your analysis of the Bowden reunion by providing an interesting metaphor with Jewett's text. Consequently, you illustrate an insightful reading of Kindley that is seemingly Marxist, criticizing the corporate, capitalist funding that supports Big Theory. Needless to say, you also have some pretty tasty puns!
It is interesting how ornamentation is something that plays a huge role in the actual marketability and production of literary objects -- the way that the "dates and names" appear on the food correlates to the enjoyment of eating, just as the presentation of names and dates on books promotes sales.
If the narrator does have an appetite for this sort of storytelling, then what is problematic about inauthentic representations of time? How does this connect specifically to matters of politicization and capitalization of "texts?" If ritualistic consumption is performative, then to what extent is the institution of cultural exchange created by that performance, which is subsidized, also conventional/ceremonial? What are the implications of Mrs. Todd's not eating - is she herself implicated as someone unwilling to reenact?
Sarah,
I really enjoyed your post. It was quite artful in its close-reading and its own delicious language regarding food. I’m rather fond of food, both materially and as a social convention. Last week, in Aaron and Megan’s post I had made mention that I wish food could be discussed more. I think this is the post where that wish was fulfilled.
In light of food, in how it is used in this post, I wonder less about food as social convention and social performativity, and more about food as consumption. Particularly, I find in thinking about food-as-consumption two extremes or purposes: food as necessary sustenance and food as commodity. While your post focuses on the act of eating as a metaphor for ingesting and assimilating a text, I was still left wondering if ingesting really touches on the notion of food as a material which either has market value (a Kindley question) and bodily nourishment (an ecological Ashley question).
To what extent does consuming food really bring forth questions of commodity? For instance—and possibly the context would either refute or support this—the passage you close read suggests that the pastries were handmade . While hipsters and the like would pay capital price for handmade goods, doesn’t the pastry in the text (and the family bonds its symbolizes) exist outside of a for-market structure? In a similar vein, how would the cake as a possibly luxurious form of sustenance (versus a loaf of bread) suggest a forging of familial ecology, since the pastry’s history about biologically related bodies is put into and becomes a part of more bodies?
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