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.

"Ghosts, Cowboys" and the multiphasic something.

Latino/a literary studies has long been working at the very boundaries of identity. Writers such as Arturo Islas in the 1970s and 80s described being pigeonholed by publishers, encouraged to revise their texts to be more digestibly Latino, more full of families and good food and pleasant sprinklings of Spanish, less concerned with existential rumination on identity politics. Since that time, publishers and writers, authors and theorists have been grappling with the slipperiness of what it means to be Latina or Latino, always careful not to fall into stereotype, but always conscious that the experience of being Latina or Latino in the U.S. is a particular one -- and that to acknowledge those particularities has powerful possibilities for political mobilization, affiliations, and identifications.

Claudia Milian’s piece thus bears the weight of this long-standing struggle to understand the complexity of experience. Her proposal that Latinities offers “a conceptual framework that plots other subjectivities and localities that have yet to be charted within and beyond” older, more bounded configurations makes Latinities a powerful tool for entering texts that deal in ambiguity, that are in some way “vying for our attention,” in some way indicate “a multiphasic something” beginning to emerge (2–3). It is this emphasis on the emergent that resists bounding that makes Milian versatile. She theorizes ethnoracial existence as always emergent, in-flux, and not static or easily relegated to the realm of stable “identification.” If what she calls ethnoracial “identities-in-the-making” cannot be tied to any “precise categorical beginning[s], or end[s]”, Milian’s argument forces our attention away from identity and the notions of stasis and stability that it often subsumes (3). Instead, Milian finds value in change, flux, and transition not merely as paths between opposed points or states but as modes of being or experience in and of themselves. In geometric terms, Milian values the vector over the point.

What happens, then, when we think of identifications as vectors? What happens when we toss aside the assumption that Claire’s historiographical-archival work in “Ghosts, Cowboys” is an attempt to locate some sense of self or some web of affiliation? For indeed, Claire’s work achieves the opposite: it is profoundly delocalizing and distributive in its affiliations and genealogies, not only in their networked quality, but also in their fragility. They seem to verge simultaneously on totality and collapse. We can easily read as though each displaced, tangential history Claire produces is an attempt to find “the” true or real past, but this assumes a kind of coherence and locatability that both Milian and Watkins call into question. What Claire calls “the inadequate weight of the past” need not be rendered “adequate” to become a vehicle for meaning and affiliation (177). Rather, Claire’s narratives build multiple and shifting affiliations out of multiple and shifting historical inadequacies. The text is an exercise in both self-making and self-negating as complementary processes of subject-formation.

The work Claire does may not fall strictly under the rubric of ‘Latinities,’ but the impulse she shares with Milian -- towards not who but how, the attention to the complex social dynamics that form the subject, rather than the singular, detached individual -- seems to herald what Raymond Williams has called the emergent: “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship [that] are continually being created” (123). That the emergent is often invisible to those who search for it -- and even to those engaged in it -- requires that we continually redirect and reattune our critical gaze. Perhaps Watkins is working somewhere in the same project as both Milian and Saskia Sassen by tracing a process of denationalization which captures “something that remains connected to the ‘national’ as constructed historically, and is indeed profoundly imbricated with it but is so on historically new terms of engagement” (Sassen 229, qtd. in Milian 5). In this sense, then, “Ghosts, Cowboys” is as much a story of nation-building as it is about one branch of the legacy of the Manson family, as it is about one house at 315 Lake Street.

Williams, Raymond. “Dominant, Residual, Emergent.” Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. pgs 121-135.

Aaron Bendetti
Jenny Colmenero 

(681)

The Hot Mess of Power

B.C. and Z.K.

Nancy Armstrong, in her paper “Gender Must Be Defended,” aligns the biopolitical with an external social force and the panoptic with an individually subjectified body. She writes: “Discipline persuades us that we harbor within us a form of desire that expresses itself through a body that can be governed by a mind sensitive to the dangers posed by forms of physical pleasure…Biopower asks us to think of desire as an external force that operates upon and through us on behalf of a group or species” (543). If Armstrong reads Jane Eyre solely through the lens of gender, which “makes the difference between the two forms of desire” (543) (i.e., the difference between the panopticon and the biopolitical), then she concomitantly ignores geographical displacement, race, temporality and history, class, and many other factors that are central to character-subjectivities in Brief Wondrous Life. The accumulation of these different factors generates a consciousness that is predicated both upon the experience of the individual and the social collective.

There is a process of introjection/projection that occurs continually and cyclically. Not only is this process embodied through the physical relationships amongst characters in novels, but it is also a structured logic in society. In the actions that people undertake, the mediation of this structural logic, the influences of external biopolitics and panoptic self-discipline, is inherent. It is not a matter of so simple an opposition (inside/outside), which Armstrong claims --  her simplification is problematic and impossible. Thus, if Armstrong’s formulation is untenable, we would have to ask: what is the relationship between the biopolitical and the panoptic as concepts that enforce themselves upon individuals within a greater social collective?

It is not adequate to create a binary between the panoptic and the biopolitical. Foucault himself struggles with differentiating these two concepts in “The Mesh of Power;” Indeed, it seems that the two are centrally, complexly enmeshed in one another. There is a myriad of factors at work in which the panoptic/biopolitical structure themselves and operate. There is an irreconcilability at work, which demonstrates this complicated correlation.

What is the effect of this correlation upon consciousness?  

Milian provides another variable through her reading of race in Brief Wondrous Life. She claims: “Diaz globalizes this emergent but fairly obfuscated subject adjusting its “who-ness,” ” what-ness,” and “how-ness,” but not necessarily guaranteeing a clear (read: Latino) outcome” (14). Conversely, Armstrong focuses on one category, gender, addressing the “who-ness,” but not addressing the “what-ness” or the “how-ness.” Milian claims that Diaz addresses all three without ultimately providing a “Latino” outcome to the story’s protagonist. However, we would argue that Diaz purposefully does not attempt to guarantee a Latino outcome for his characters, especially Oscar.

Instead, Oscar struggles against the societal and familial expectations for his assumption of a pure Latinity. In rebellion, he envelops himself with stereotypically “white” pastimes of which his Dominican relatives do not approve (comics, sci-fi films, Rutgers, role-playing video games, etc.). At the end of the novel, he attempts to rediscover a discrete Latinity, but his death perhaps signals his inability to ever truly have a unified identity that is purely Latin (or white, or the product of any other single category); his existence is necessarily imbricated with the various other facets of his being, which are always produced socially. This social structure, in Foucauldian terms, is represented in “Discipline and Punish” by the panopticon within the prison, as an analogy for the heterogeneous society at large. Therefore, we can see the effects upon not only women and people of color (excluding Asians) (i.e., Armstrong and Milian, respectively), but upon all members in a society, simultaneously. Identity and, therefore, our relationship to the biopolitical and the panoptic is not defined by a singular category, because we can see these concepts working not only through gender but also through race, class, socioeconomics, geographic location, etc.

Hyding in Dunnet Landing

The relationship between lost or subjugated peoples and those who attempt to retrieve or recover them is fraught with complexity. Historians, working in a culture built upon exclusionary practices, can never be "proper" to the subaltern "consciousness" they are attempting to resurrect (Spivak 16). The most they can hope to achieve or recover is a “subject-effect” -- an elusive echo of a network of “politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language and so on” (Spivak 12-13). The relationship between the historian and his/her object of study is ultimately a “complicity between subject and object of investigations" (28). This complicity is also apparent in The Country of the Pointed Firs and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We can align narrators with historians as both frame our experiences of the stories they transmit, although the comparison between the two is complicated by our cultural stereotypes that historians speak truth and narrators speak fiction. Spivak’s essay, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” reminds us of the imbalance of power between narrators and their subjects, while encouraging readers to be aware of the interpretative aspects of a narrative voice.

The protagonists of both The Country of the Pointed Firs and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde use their object of study to access or express a repressed aspect of themselves. In The Country of the Pointed Firs, the narrator occupies the position of the privileged writer who ventures into working class rural Maine as an escape from a place, most certainly urban, in which she finds herself “a foreigner” (Jewett 99). Through her narration, we learn more about her powers of interpretation than of the reality of the place she describes. She appropriates and idealizes the daily lives of Dunnet Landing locals to tell a story of the place, but instead of creating a realistic representation of their suffering, she flattens characters and brings her own loneliness to the fore. Similarly, Jekyll uses Hyde (the embodiment of bourgeois stereotypes of the lower classes) to strengthen his elite position. Hyde functions as a mask to protect Jekyll’s pristine reputation. Torn between both needing and simultaneously hating him, Jekyll constantly denigrates and dehumanizes Hyde, describing him as "not only hellish but inorganic,” in order to maintain the boundary between himself, the civilized intellectual, and his animalistic, “primitive” other (91). Moreover, Hyde is pushed even further away from the elite position of his creator by being allowed no interiority in the novel's structure; he is never the narrator, never do we see the world through his eyes. He remains a "subject-effect," a thought or terror within the other characters’ minds or experiences but with no clear subjectivity himself.

In content, both novels reveal the imbalance of power between the tellers of stories and their subjects. However, in their form, the novels also affect the reader’s relationship with the power dynamics being presented; the novels are structured as narratives traversing through time and then end with a reflective or revealing chapter that reshapes our understanding of the narrative that we have just passed through. The historians that Spivak discusses see themselves as writing the last revisionary chapter of the subjects they wish to uncover. But they, like the final chapters in our primary texts, serve to solidify their own position of power as creators of public opinion. Though we would never argue that Edward Hyde or the Dunnet Landing locals are subaltern in Spivak’s sense of the term, both of these novels and Spivak’s historians rely on the fact that their subordinate subjects will not speak back to them and reveal the fragility of narrative, both historical and fictional.

Word Count: 600. The power of collaboration...right there. 

Haertig and Emrich

Mutual Entanglements

"When people write about class, or poverty, they are writing about race, but how? When people write about gender, they are writing about race, and class, but how? When people write about sexuality, they are writing about gender, and race, and class, but how? 

I simply don’t think there is a thematic question here. There is a question about thinking mutual entanglements of problems, and thinking them outside the sets of limits offered as non-limits by the current dispensation, whether it be within or without the academy, within or without poetry communities."

I think this letter by Joshua Clover (in response to this discussion of race by Rankine/Hoagland) helps make some sense of what I was trying to get at on Monday in my critique of the totalizing politics of Armstrong's paper on gender and Milian's chapter on race.  It is an interesting, important and far-reaching conversation (that we need to be having).