When is the past never past?

In “Failing to Make the Past Present,” Stephen Best questions the supposedly “unassailable truth” of racism’s effects on current African American culture. To illustrate this “truth,” Best quotes a line from Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (462). In other words, the past is not only close and very readable to us in the present, but “the past simply is our present” and we are thus doomed to repeat it (463). For Best and his argument about African American literature, he is able to use two works by Toni Morrison to show how the past of slavery could be resolved; he argues for a reading and a reality in which slavery is a healed wound and therefore not a constant rallying force - in which slavery is truly past. 

           In many ways, Best’s affirmation of the past as past is useful for thinking about The Little Stranger. Set in 1940s England, the narrator, Dr. Faraday, is called to Hundreds Hall, the ancestral home of the Ayres family. The first chapter devotes ample time to demonstrating how Hundreds Hall’s past is over and done. Faraday, who first visited the estate when he was ten, returns thirty years later to find its beauty and family diminished. He notes, “The house was smaller than in memory, of course – not quite the mansion I’d been recalling – but I’d been expecting that. What horrified me were the signs of decay” (Waters 5). Faraday finds the Ayreses equally disappointing: only the mother, her two grown children, and one maidservant remain. Faraday’s childhood memories of the town-wide festival held at the Hall emphasize just how far the family and their home have come in the glory days of the post-World War I past.

       The novel formally manifests this interest in the past through the tropes of the ghost story. Ann Heilmann, author of one of the few critical articles on The Little Stranger, reminds us that Waters draws on a long tradition of the ghost as symbolic of the unresolved past - “the trope of the Gothic family mansion engulfed by the past and in its turn engulfing its last two generations of owners.” The potential exists, then, for a division of the novel into two: those who envision the past as past and those who constantly struggle to return to it.

       However, the novel throws the stability of these two options into question by envisioning other ways for the present and past to interact. Gyp, the Ayres family dog, comes rushing out to alert the family to Faraday’s presence. Caroline Ayres explains, “‘Little imbecile,’… tugging his ears with a look of indulgence. ‘It’s touching really. He thinks every stranger’s come to cut our throats and make off with the family silver. We haven’t the heart to tell him the silver’s all been popped’” (Waters 8). Gyp, one of the novel’s nonhuman actors, simply doesn’t see the distinction between the family’s past and its present and acts accordingly.

The ghost, another (somewhat?) nonhuman character, also problematizes the division of past and present. Throughout much of the novel, Faraday and the Ayreses believe that the ghost is the Ayres children’s younger sister, Susan, who died from diphtheria before the other two children were born. Yet the end of the novel seems to pose Faraday himself as the source of the haunting, a poltergeist. The ghost, therefore, is not the symbol of the Hall’s past, but of the family’s present. These nonhuman actors trouble a stable distinction between past and present through their distinct experiences of time.

[Heilmann, Ann. “Specters of the Victorian in the Neo-Forties Novel: Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009) and Its Intertexts.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 6.1 (2011): 38-55. Literature Online. Web. 2 Oct. 2013.]

Just kidding! New text

So, when I sat down to actually try writing this blog post earlier this week, I ran into a real block with Alice, so I decided to change my primary text to one that I haven't written on before and that I'm excited about exploring - Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger. This review from the NYT does a pretty good job of summarizing the story for those who aren't familiar. For my "blurb," I've excerpted the last paragraph here for the interesting way that it invokes reader response to the article author's analysis of the novel:

"Does a house ask to be vandalized or, indeed, taken by force? And, more to the point, do its inhabitants somehow 'ask' to be destroyed because they have become redundant in a society that needs public housing and health centers more than rich families and country piles? If death is a harsh sentence for all but the flattest fictional characters, then one is left with the uncomfortable sense that the Ayreses have been needlessly murdered by progress and social change, which doesn’t feel quite right either."

Jekyll and Hyde: Past, Present, and Future?

After being so profoundly made an example of for failing to include a discussion, nay a mention, of race, slavery, or, heaven forbid, Toni Morrison in my summary last week of Stephen Best’s article, “On Failing to Make the Past Present," I determined that my blog post would attempt (now allowing a more reasonable word count of more than 30 words) to remedy this error.

 I still maintain and argue that Best is most compelling when asking the questions that can apply to all fields of critical thought and literature—questions delving into what the nature of the ethical relationship between the past and the present should be. Yet, I again remind myself that Best’s essay is about more than just the relationship between the past and the present—it is also about slavery and race. Although my initial and still main intention and interest is to discuss how that “ethical relationship” manifests itself in my primary work, I would also like to briefly explore the possible presence or implications of race and/or slavery in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Jekyll and Hyde is a Victorian novella, written by a Scotsman, set in London, about upper class, wealthy, white, morally (f)rigid men. Though readings of psychoanalysis, sexuality, queerness, class, narrative theory, etc. abound around this text, how does the novella relate to a racialized slave past? I have found precious little scholarly work on race in Jekyll and Hyde and what I have found is usually centered about the adaptive history of the work, many noting that in subsequent adaptations, Hyde is sometimes given African-like features (See Frederic March’s transformation in the 1931 film). I wonder if this lack of critical attention stems from failure to rethink what “race” means and who or what it should apply to and in some sense define. Certainly, Best’s, Morrison’s and others use of the word seems to denote a “race” as a group of people marked by similar genotype, phenotype, culture, ethnic heritage etc. – in this case, a culture bound by a shared history of enslavement. Race, then, is a term that has internal and external, inclusionary and exclusionary implications—it is a mark of belonging and also of otherness.

Thinking of race as a “mark of otherness,” it is possible that a race need not be a group of people; a race can exist within and around a single entity. Thus, in Stevenson’s novella, I would argue that Hyde is his own, new race[1]—dangerous and gleeful. It is he who bears a mark of otherness, an “imprint of deformity and decay” and that brings a “visible misgiving of the flesh” to all who meet him; he, after all, “alone in the ranks of mankind [is] pure evil” (81). He is the “first creature of that sort that [the stars’] unsleeping vigilance ha[s] yet disclosed to them” (81).

Hyde can also be seen as a subject of slavery. He 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. Frightening and alarming to Jekyll, Hyde grows in strength throughout the narrative. Indeed, he notices that “in the beginning, the difficulty had been to throw off the body of Jekyll, it had of late, gradually but decidedly transferred itself to the other side’ (85). Hyde becomes the new, free race attempting to break from his limiting past, Jekyll.

In order for Hyde to assume an unadulterated place in the world, the identity of Jekyll must be removed and forgotten. Hyde will have no difficulty in replacing “holding with letting go, clutching with disavowal” (456). 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. But he gives a parting gift of which we would be remiss to overlook, a last testament to the discussion about the relationship between times—the voice of the past speaking, not only to the present, but to the future as well. In tones of resignation and release, regarding Hyde, he states “God knows; I am careless; this is true hour of my death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself” (93).It is clear that Jekyll sees no hold, no connection between himself (the past) and the future of the race he engendered.

Best, Stephen. “On Failing to Make the Past Present.” MLQ 73.3 (2012): 453-74

Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ed. Martin A. Danahay.    Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2005. Print.

---

[1] Some here might argue that Hyde is not really human and therefore cannot be considered a new race within humanity. Jekyll himself even makes this argument, saying “That child of Hell had nothing human” (90). Jekyll thinks of Hyde, “for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic” (91). But if we can define a human as a creature that shows signs of interiority, self-awareness, and yes, duality (As Jekyll does state, “man is not truly one, but truly two” (78-79)), then I believe an argument can be made for the humanity of Hyde, indeed my blog post assumes such a humanity, although I have not the time or space to fully make such an argument here. Nor is my description of my thoughts on race, or species, fully developed or expounded upon.

The Haunting of an Irredeemable Curse

          Junot Díaz, in his first novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), centrally ties the narrative and its characters to the past through its reflections on the tyrannical dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (El Jefe) over the Dominican Republic (r. 1942-1952). The chronology of this disjointed novel spans from 1944-1995, cycling through the experiences of three generations of the Cabral family. I want to argue that the concept of the “fukú,” a culturally driven and interminable curse for the Cabrals, is an unavoidable continuation of the past to such an extent that it drastically affects the destinies of the central characters in their present temporalities, ultimately leading to Oscar’s death. Furthermore, this curse coincides with Stephen Best’s thesis in “On Failing to Make the Past Present” (2012), in that the fukú epitomizes the inability, especially in terms of familial and racial ties, of receiving in the present some compensation for or redemption from the deleterious events of the past.
          To give a quick sketch of Trujillo’s bloody and oppressive reign, one need not look further than the Parsley Massacre (1937), in which Trujillo’s secret police murdered some 30,000 Haitians. Race (specifically blackness as undesirable), therefore, became something that permeated the social consciousness of Dominicans. Best concerns himself primarily with the rise of “the history of the black Atlantic… through loss [which] can in turn be sustained only through more tales of its loss” (458) and, moreover, the historical framework of the black Atlantic narrative that provides a progression that “forged a society from a human catastrophe” (457). Nonetheless, the historical representation of the undesirability of blackness in the Dominican Republic is a central concern in Díaz’s work, since slavery has a history outside of the Atlantic slave trade that is significant and irreconcilable. Belicia, Oscar’s mother, “was born black,” a terrible curse in its own right for Dominican children (Diaz 248) -- “and not just any kind of black. But black black... and no amount of fancy Dominican racial legerdemain was going to obscure the fact. That’s the kind of culture I belong to: people took their child’s black complexion as an ill omen” (Diaz 248). Because of her blackness, she was sold as a child menial into various abusive foster homes at an early age. As a result of this narrative, I find one of the central questions with which Best concerns himself to be especially applicable to Díaz’s novel. Best asks: “Through what process has it become possible to claim the lives and efforts of history’s defeated as ours either to redeem or to redress?” (454). The Cabrals, following “the bad thing” (Díaz 227) Abelard Cabral said about Trujillo during a drunken night at a bar with some of El Jefe’s thugs, are defeated and cursed indefinitely, leading to an irredeemable future. Interestingly, the moment that the fukú arises during Abelard’s imprisonment is the same moment that Belicia is born, further connecting blackness with accursedness.
          Conversely, Best’s claims, echoing the arguments of David Scott, that with such historically barred possibilities, “we have only our present conjuncture, only our current predicament” (Best 456), controvert the historical past (of the curse) that Oscar feels to be central to his being, which the narrator, Yunior, also slowly recognizes to be an inescapable truth. Yunior narrates: “On the outside, Oscar simply looked tired… Inside, he was in a world of hurt… He was turning into the worst kind of human on the planet… He didn’t want this future but he couldn’t see how it could be avoided, couldn’t figure his way out of it. Fukú. The Darkness.” (Díaz 268). History, then, becomes something for the Cabrals that is particularly irredeemable through accursedness, but also inextricably linked to their fate. Oscar’s sister, Lola, on one of her last intimate nights with Yunior, claims: “Ten Million Trujillos is all we are” (Díaz 324). Thus, she retroactively casts the curse not only on her immediate family, but on the diaspora of all Dominicans affected by Trujillo’s reign. In fact, in a nerdy (yet oddly applicable) reference to Tolkien, Yunior says, “Sauron’s evil was taken by ‘a great wind’ and neatly ‘blown away,’ with no lasting consequences to our heroes; but Trujillo was too powerful, too toxic a radiation to be dispelled so easily. Even after death his evil lingered” (Díaz 156). The adverse effects of Trujillo’s policies consequently amplify the results of the fukú upon the Cabrals, while simultaneously connecting the characters to their ancestral past.

Melancholy and Mourning in Jewett

Stephen Best’s essay, “On Failing to Make the Past Present,” interrogates the recent return in cultural criticism to a melancholic relationship with the past, specifically manifesting as a desire to use a shared history of slavery to provide a way of understanding present racial injustices. According to Best, the critical tendency of late has been to use historical dispossession of slavery as way to provide a sense of racial belonging, “a way of making history for those who had lost it” (459). Best urges critics to “resist the impulse to redeem the past,” to allow for mourning instead of melancholy and “rest content with the fact that our orientation toward [the past] remains forever perverse, queer, askew” (456).

Though Sarah Orne Jewett’s novel The Country of the Pointed Firs was written over a hundred years before Best’s essay, or any of the critical or literary pieces he engages with, the text addresses similar concerns. The novel presents a model of the mourning process, a means of mourning through storytelling beginning with a “return” and ending with a “backward view.” Readers are not encouraged to build a sense of attachment to any single character; characters are quickly introduced and abandoned nearly every chapter and little time is given to lamenting their loss. Even as the narrator watches Dunett disappear into the clouds behind her, “the past is there to be appreciated as a falling away” (Best 474). In the novel, characters use the act of recounting history to cement a sense of community. The unnamed narrator, a solitary writer and outsider of Dunett Landing, facilitates these communal storytelling moments with the tacit understanding that these histories are all that this sleepy New England town has left. Best sets the state of melancholy, “persistent identification with the lost object” against the act of mourning, the “repetitive divestment of what has passed”(460). He argues that the latter is actually productive in its “capacity for dawning or awakening,” which I believe is very close to the argument presented in Jewett’s novel (460).

Couched in the description of elderly melancholic characters seems to be the desire to rebuild a sense of community in America through letting go of the recent past, particularly the casualties of the Civil War. The Country of the Pointed Firs takes place at a time when the Maine was suffering the consequences; markedly, nearly all of the characters are old and the harbor is filled with “disabled schooners”(Jewett 70). As old-timer Captain Littlepage mentions, the loss of shipping in Dunett changed the character of the town. The oldest members of Dunett, relics of the town’s more prosperous past, live in a melancholic state that seems to be disrupted only by a foreign element, the presence of an outsider ready to listen. The act of telling one’s story mitigates, at least momentarily, this pervasive sense of melancholy by allowing for action, for letting go. This storytelling process allows for a community based on exchanging information instead of on silent adherence to a shared, mythologized struggle.

The narrator facilitates the mourning process for Dunett’s most melancholic characters. She allows the ancient former sea captain, Captain Littlepage, to interrupt her solitary writing practice in order to recount an “unexpectedly dull” narrative from his younger seafaring days. She says, “a sudden sense of his suffering…came to my help and I asked to hear more…”(16). Later in the novel, she plays a similar role with the old fisherman Elijah Tilly. She listens with rapt attention as he ruminates about his late wife and his life as a fisherman. As he tells his story he attempts to complete a knitting project, but keeps dropping his stitches, which I read as a mark of melancholy, an inability to finish his yarn and let go of this particular past. By the end of their exchange, Tilly has snarled the yarn into a tangled ball, but also thrown a length of it “off at arms length as though it were a cod line” (Jewett 97). Could this be his way of “casting off” his tangled past (forgive the knitting joke), moving out of melancholy and into mourning?

Milton, history, and context

Much of our discussion this week revolved around the role of historical context and the past in scholarship and interpretation. Each article pondered the relationship between current methodologies/analyses and the past—can we move beyond it, as in Best’s discussion of Morrison; does it hold any usefulness, as in Jameson and other postmodern thought; has it been appropriated to serve other ends, as Dillon suggests? And how do critical methodologies travel across genres and through time?

I’ve chosen a text that heavily relies on invocations of past practice to make an argument for current action. Milton’s rhetorical process in “Areopagitica” seems to rely on an assumption that examples or morals can be drawn from past contexts, even ones considerably different than early modern England. He seems to be doing exactly what Best and Dillon disapprove of (and what we disapproved of in Patterson and Dillon): reading the past selectively to suit his own ends. Early in the pamphlet, he returns to the greatest of authorities, ancient Greece. To defend the absence of censorship in England, he reminds the Parliament that the ancient Greeks pretty much left authors and thinkers alone, except those that were “either blasphemous or libelous” (720). In the span of two paragraphs, he cites or references 15 classical scholars. Following the appeal to ancient Greek practices comes an appeal to the ancient Romans, who also only burned blasphemy or libel, and then a brief jaunt through the Holy Roman Empire until Milton comes to the quintessential example of early modern personae non grata: the Catholic church. Essentially, he points out that many of the popes censored and restricted not only heresy, but anything they didn’t like, the logical conclusion being that if the English Parliament wishes to avoid association with popery, they will avoid licensure (724).

On one hand, this strategy represents a belief in the authority of history and a correct interpretation of that history that contemporary scholars would be aghast at; on the other hand, Milton’s grab bag of examples resembles the historical pastiche that Jameson describes as that which “can only ‘represent’ our ideas and stereotypes about the past (which thereby at once becomes ‘pop history’)” (25). The mediation of the past through time and Milton’s own interpretation has the effect of reducing his examples to a collection of pop history—at least to contemporary readers. To Milton, the past retained an authority that could be used to guide present action—the “ethical relation to the past” that Best refers to (454).

However, Milton’s text also enters the discussion of the limits of context and our relationship to the past, and he seems to be aware of the fact that contexts do matter (as per Patterson, “modern” ideas were not strictly limited to the past 200 years). One example in particular demonstrates this. Milton cites Plato’s Laws as setting out rather strict suggestions for censorship of poets and scholars. Aware of the implications of this fact, Milton quickly adds “but that Plato meant this law peculiarly to that commonwealth which he had imagined, and to no other, is evident” (731). This course of action never actually materialized, says Milton, and so here we have the past invoked but deemed irrelevant to a certain goal. Moreover, Milton seems to understand that Plato’s writings need to be understood within their context and are always partially tied to their moment. Perhaps Milton, like Patterson’s reading of Chaucer, is exploring an approach to the past that remains conscious of its existence and effects but is mindful of the presence of a barrier between our interpretations and the reality of the past.

MOOCs on the menu

Hi all!

I ran across this new iteration of a MOOC the other day, and was struck by what an odd mixture of high and low culture, fashionable and everyday, egalitarian and elitist it was. It's an interesting use of the format, and it got me thinking--what would a version of this for English literature look like?